Memoirs

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at Ryerson University in
Toronto.

At age 80, when her son had already been Premier of Quebec two years, René Lévesque’s mother told him, “Poor little boy, I feel sorry for you. Politics is so cruel and uncertain. Ah! If you’d only finished your law school.”

René Lévesque’s Memoirs show us how right she was about the cruelty and uncertainty; as for her son’s choice of career, let the reader judge. One thing is certain: not since the Conquest has Quebec seen a period as significant to its evolution as the quarter-century beginning in 1960, and of all its public figures in that time, none was so central as Lévesque.

In Memoirs we first see this ninth-generation Quebecker as a wild little boy tied to the porch of his house in an anglophone village of the Gaspé. Soon he is a seminarian intoxicated with books, then a law student thrown out of class for smoking. And during World War Two he is a reporter for Radio-Canada, riding in tanks, witnessing the surrender of Hermann Goering, and entering Dachau with the liberating troops. In Korea with the Van Doos, he notes with satisfaction how joual (the working-class dialect of East-End Montreal) forms a code never broken by the enemy. And finally, the advent of television transforms this internationally experienced radio reporter into one of Quebec’s best-known public figures: a fearless broadcaster so involved in the issues of his time that his friend André Laurendeau, editor of Le Devoir, said, “Listening to you I have the impression you’re heading straight for politics.”

He was right. Lévesque gives us the whole story of the so-called “Quiet” Revolution: the Lesage Liberals coming to power in 1960; the creation of Hydro-Québec with cabinet minister Lévesque in charge; the passing of power in education from the Church to the newly-created Ministry of Education; the creation of the Hospital Insurance Plan — in effect, “the spring-cleaning of the century.” A province long held in chains by English-Canadian corporations, the Catholic Church, and the archconservative premier Maurice Duplessis was passing swiftly into “democratization” and “decolonization” — towards being “Maitres chez nous.”

The interlude of a last Union Nationale government follows, during which Lévesque quits the Liberal Party, and by the time the Bourassa Liberals win the province in 1970 Lévesque has become a separatist who reacts with profound skepticism to the tactics of the Bourassa and Trudeau governments during the October Crisis.

Space permits little more than a listing of this book’s contents. Lévesque’s Parti Québécois wins the province in 1976: “decolonization” and a campaign for honest government continue apace, but the exhilaration of his first term collapses when the party’s stand on “sovereignty-association” is defeated in the Referendum of 1980. And the way Trudeau rides roughshod over Quebec in “bringing home” the Constitution provokes “fury” and “humiliation” among Quebec nationalists. Economic recession and labour unrest in Quebec follow, until finally René Lévesque, the once energetic reformer, resigns from public life.

This is a full book — a vivid, frank, and of course partisan view of Quebec since Duplessis and of the Canada in which it must exist. Lévesque makes metaphors fly: Ottawa is “a lay Vatican, the seat of the most arrogant false infallibilities.” Richard Hatfield is “a ventriloquist’s dummy,” Gerald Bouey “a spider in his web,” and Claude Ryan a “sadist.” But Lévesque’s strongest words are reserved for Pierre Trudeau, the elegant and persuasive Quebecker who, in the name of national unity, seemed to turn his back on his own people.

Translator Philip Stratford notes that Lévesque could have written the English version of this book himself. Perhaps he should have. Though Stratford’s literary translations are consistently among the nation’s best, here he seems careless — often letting pass such Gallicisms as “formation” for “training,” “souvenirs” for “memories,” and “deceptions” for “disappointments.” This is one book that will certainly read better in the original.