Lavertu sheds light on Quebec’s Grande noirceur
Yves Lavertu has made a career of digging up episodes in Quebec history he believes some people would prefer to keep buried.
Those include support for France’s collaborationist Vichy regime in Second World War-era Quebec, and efforts by prominent politicians and intellectuals to protect a notorious war criminal who took refuge in the province from 1948 to 1951.
Now, the independent historian and journalist is back with a fifth book, L’Affaire Hébert: Chronique d’un scandale dans le Québec de Duplessis (Yves Lavertu éditeur, $24.95). It recounts the early life of journalist and future Liberal senator Jacques Hébert, culminating in a controversy over Hébert’s trip to Communist Poland in 1955.
In the book, Lavertu challenges recent efforts by nationalist historians to rehabilitate the image of Maurice Duplessis, who ruled Quebec from 1936 to 1939 and 1944 to 1959.
The Duplessis regime — marked by virulent anti-communism, an alliance with the Catholic hierarchy, battles for provincial autonomy, investment in rural infrastructure, patronage, corruption and human-rights abuses — is often referred to as La Grande noirceur (great darkness).
But in recent years, revisionists have challenged the depiction of the Duplessis era as a 20th-century Dark Ages that only ended with the sweeping reforms of the 1960s known as the Quiet Revolution.
In a book published last year by Éditions Québec Amérique, former Parti Québécois MNA and Montreal city councillor Martin Lemay claims that Duplessis, revered by many nationalists for adopting the province’s fleur-delis flag, has been unjustly maligned.
“Maurice Duplessis was the greatest premier in the history of Quebec,” Lemay writes in the opening line of À la défense de Maurice Duplessis.
In his introduction, nationalist commentator Mathieu Bock-Côté hails the book as “an important milestone in the destruction of the poisoned and toxic myth of the Grande noirceur.”
But the Grande noirceur is no myth, insists Lavertu, who has explored Duplessis-era censorship and muzzling of freedom of speech through the struggles of maverick journalists like Hébert and JeanCharles Harvey, editor of Le Jour, a Montreal weekly that spoke out against the rise of fascism in Europe and fascist sympathies in Quebec.
“I decided that the best way to gain insights into the past is through the life of a dissident or someone with dissonant views,” he said in an interview.
“Jean-Charles Harvey was the archetype of the dissident intellectual. Through him, you discover a version of the history of the Second World War that is still kept under wraps in Quebec.”
Lavertu, 57, the former editor of a French-language weekly in Alberta and journalist for trade publications, isn’t afraid to invite comparisons between his work and that of Esther Delisle, who caused a storm of controversy with her book The Traitor and the Jew: Anti-Semitism and the Delirium of Extremist Right-Wing Nationalism in French Canada From 19291939, published in French in 1992 and in English the following year.
The book, exposing anti-Semitism and pro-fascist views among Quebec intellectuals of that era, was widely panned in Quebec, where critics accused Delisle of sloppy scholarship.
“I don’t endorse the line that, ‘Oh, you know, Esther Delisle, her methodology is poor,’ ” Lavertu said.
“The heart of the matter is that she touched a sore point: the anti-Semitism of (Catholic cleric and nationalist historian) Lionel Groulx, whom people want to protect. The mistakes are just an excuse.”
Lavertu published his first book, L’Affaire Bernonville: Le Québec face à Pétain et à la collaboration (1948-1951) in 1994.
It recounts the efforts of highranking Quebecers to prevent Canada from deporting Jacques de Bernonville, the right-hand man of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, who had fled to Quebec with the help of supporters in the province.
Among those who supported de Bernonville’s bid to stay in Canada were Montreal Mayor Camillien Houde, politician René Chaloult, the father of the Quebec flag, and future Parti Québécois cabinet ministers Camille Laurin and Denis Lazure.
Convicted in absentia of war crimes and sentenced to death, de Bernonville fled to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he was murdered in 1972.
Lavertu wrote the book after stumbling on the papers of rightwing Quebec historian Robert Rumilly in the Quebec provincial archives. It was published in English in 1995 as The Bernonville Affair: A French war criminal in Post-WWII Québec, and was recently reissued in French with additional illustrations and supporting documents.
Lavertu’s Jean-Charles Harvey: Le combattant (Les Éditions du Boréale, 2000) recounts the struggles of Harvey, who was fired as editor-in-chief of Le Soleil newspaper in 1934 for writing a novel, Les demi-civilisés (translated as Fear’s Folly), that criticized the Catholic Church.
In 1937, he founded Le Jour, a weekly that challenged the stand taken by many in Quebec’s intelligentsia in favour of General Francisco Franco’s overthrow of the Spanish republic and of the regimes of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Portuguese strongman Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.
Harvey, whose newspaper exposed Nazi atrocities before many other media, supported the Yes side in a plebiscite on conscription in the Second World War. However, 71 per cent of Quebecers voted No, while 80 per cent of voters in English Canada voted Yes.
The fact that few people have ever heard of Hébert, while Groulx has a métro station, streets, university buildings and a CEGEP named after him, shows that Quebec has yet to break with its reactionary past, Lavertu says.
“Here you have an anti-Semite, a person sympathetic to fascism, who has so many places named after him, while his alter ego, a man who was a forerunner in the liberation of France, who was an anti-fascist and denounced fascists before the war, is totally unknown and unrecognized,” he said.
Harvey’s support for Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces — the 1941 liberation of Saint-Pierre-etMiquelon was planned in Le Jour’s newsroom — has never received the recognition it deserves, Lavertu noted.
Le Jour folded in 1946, leaving Harvey a broken man, he said.
In his latest book, L’Affaire Hébert, Lavertu reveals that by the mid-1950s, cracks were already showing in the powerful political-religious coalition that held Duplessis’s regime together.
“The Grand noirceur, that alliance between Premier Duplessis and the powerful Catholic clergy, is perfectly reflected in the Hébert affair,” he said.
Hébert, the son of a Montreal doctor, is best remembered as a close friend of late Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and founder of the Katimavik youth program and Canada World Youth.
He is also known for claiming the innocence of Wilbert Coffin, a Gaspé prospector hanged in 1956 for the murder of three U.S. tourists.
But Lavertu brings to life a younger Hébert, who made his début in journalism as a travel writer who toured the world on a shoestring, penning vivid accounts of daily life among ordinary people.
In 1954, back in Montreal, the 31-year-old Hébert, whose travel writing had made him a celebrity, founded a weekly, Vrai. Like the journal Cité libre, founded earlier by Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier and others, Vrai questioned prevailing political orthodoxies.
The next year, Hébert accepted a free trip to Poland from that country’s Communist government.
On his return, in a 1956 TV interview with a 33-year-old journalist called René Lévesque, Hébert downplayed the suppression of the Catholic Church by the Polish regime.
This was a touchy subject in Quebec, where Duplessis had spirited away Polish national treasures that had been stored in Ottawa for safekeeping during the war, to prevent that country’s Communist government from getting its hands on them.
Hébert echoed the Polish government’s view that it might be time to give the treasures back.
His statements brought down a hail of criticism that resulted in Radio-Canada broadcasting another segment on Hébert’s trip, in which leading journalists denounced Hébert’s position.
“Hébert found himself almost alone in trying to defend himself. He said, ‘I’m defending myself with a slingshot while my enemies are using heavy artillery,’ ” Lavertu said.
L’Affaire Hébert reveals that the loose coalition opposing Duplessis in the 1950s included both federalists like Trudeau and Hébert, and future sovereignists like Lévesque.
“All of these people, who will emerge during the Quiet Revolution, (union leader) Michel Chartrand, (journalist and future federal cabinet minister) Gérard Pelletier, Jacques Hébert, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, (future Parti Québécois premier) René Lévesque, and many others, this whole, effervescent group is working together in the struggle against Duplessisism, everyone in their own way, and later they will all find themselves in the forefront of the Quiet Revolution. The (federalistsovereignist) split will come later,” Lavertu said.
As for the Polish treasures, the Quebec government finally handed them over in 1961.
Nationalists often refer to history, like Quebecers’ past struggles against clerical control, to justify such policies as the PQ’s controversial proposed Charter of Values, which sought to ban religious garb like the hijab, kippa or turban for public-sector employees.
“But it’s a history they pick and choose,” Lavertu said.
The courageous few who actually fought for individual freedoms, like Harvey, are “completely absent from the public debate,” he said.
“How can you claim to know your history when its only function is to endorse a charter that stirs up xenophobia?” he said.
It’s hard not to see a parallel between Lavertu himself and the protagonists whose lives he has chosen to chronicle. Like them, he feels somewhat marginalized for exposing uncomfortable truths.
“I don’t pretend to have the courage of those great champions,” he said.
“But there is a combat through my writings, a struggle for justice and truth, that I hope will contribute to strengthening democracy in Quebec society.”