This book shines a light of devastating clarity on French-Canadian society in the 1930s and 1940s, when young elites were raised to be pro-fascist, and democratic and liberal were terms of criticism. The model leaders to be admired were good Catholic dictators like Mussolini, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain, and especially Pétain, collaborator with the Nazis in Vichy France. There were even demonstrations against Jews who were demonstrating against the Nazis' actions in Germany. Trudeau, far from being the rebel that other biographers have claimed, embraced this ideology. At his elite school, Brébeuf, he was a model student, the editor of the school magazine, and admired by the staff and his fellow students. But the fascist ideas and the people he admired—even when the war was going on, as late as 1944—included extremists so terrible that at the war’s end they were shot. And then there’s his manifesto and his plan to stage a revolution against les Anglais . This is astonishing material—and it’s all demonstrably true—based on Trudeau's personal papers that the authors were allowed to access after his death. What they have found has astounded and distressed them, but they both agree that the truth must be published. Translated by William Johnson, this explosive book is a key part of Canadian political history.

This groundbreaking biography continues the story begun in Young Trudeau, taking Canada's legendary Prime Minister from his pro-fascist youth all the way to his entry into federal politics as a crusading Liberal democrat. When he went to Harvard in 1944, Pierre Trudeau was twenty-five, a recent graduate of the University of Montreal Law School; true to his elite Catholic-French education, he had been till recently pro-fascist, and he disliked democracy. Years of graduate study at Harvard, then the Sorbonne, then the London School of Economics exposed him to new ideas, as did his hitchhiking travels around the world. Returned to Quebec as a new man, he engaged in educating workers and other jobs that made him a famous defender of federal democracy. He entered Parliament in 1965, within three years of rocketing, Obama-like, to the very top.