Maurice Duplessis: Powerbroker, Politician

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Such notables as Pierre Laporte and Conrad Black have written
biographies of Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec from 1936 until 1939
and again from 1944 to 1959. Now Marguerite Paulin offers an
interpretation for young-adult readers, which is entertaining rather
than scholarly.

The author uses many direct quotations, words that the various
characters are supposed to have spoken to each other. Admittedly they
might have said something like what appears in these pages, but there is
no indication that someone was transcribing each conversation,
especially in the years before Duplessis became premier. There are
certainly no footnotes or endnotes, and the bibliography lists no
primary sources.

Before the election of 1936, Paulin indicates that Duplessis favoured
the nationalization of Quebec’s electrical companies. Perhaps he did,
but the nationalization did not happen until 1963, four years and two
provincial elections after his death. Paulin suggests that Duplessis had
spent much of his life before becoming premier as a lawyer for
Shawinigan, one of the largest electrical companies in the province. She
also suggests that Shawinigan might have donated generously to the Union
Nationale, Duplessis’s political party, but she offers no evidence
that it actually did so. Nevertheless, she does include interesting
information about Duplessis’s childhood, his personality (including a
battle with alcohol), his relations with the Roman Catholic Church, and
his belief that Hitler posed no threat to Quebec.

All in all, Paulin has provided a light, breezy biography reflecting
the spirit of Duplessis’s era that young-adult readers can enjoy.
Recommended.