Pierre Trudeau pictured on the right of the image, serving as Canadian Prime Minister in 1975, when the picture was taken. Wikimedia Commons (Rob Mieremet / Anefo)

Written by: Ellie Wong

"In the war’s first years Trudeau swam ever more vigorously in nationalist streams, opposing conscription, defending Vichy and Marshall Petain, equating Hitler’s Reich with British policy towards Quebec, and even contemplating and plotting Quebec independence", said John English, a professor at the University of Waterloo in the Department of History and MP for Kitchener from 1993 to 1997.

Pierre Trudeau & His Circles Supported Marshal Petain’s Vichy France

The first French statute to restrict and punish Jews in October 1940 was made worse by Marshal Petain, the Nazi occupation “puppet” leader. Petain was admired and not criticized by French intellectuals in Quebec, including Pierre Trudeau.

The original plan to protect "descendants of Jews born French or naturalised before 1860" is scribbled over in the handwriting of the fascist sympathizer Petain. Serge Klarsfeld, lawyer and historian, presented proof, when interviewed on French radio.

"The statute on Jews was a statute that was adopted without pressure from the Germans, without the request of the Germans: an indigenous statute. And now we have decisive evidence that it was the desire of Marshal Pétain himself. The main argument of Pétain's defenders was to say that he protected French Jews. This argument has now fallen.”

In October 1940, the first Law on the Status of the Jews defined who was Jewish and removed Jews from civil and military service and from education, media, and cinema professions. Financial robbery on a grand scale followed, “Aryanization,” with the confiscation of Jewish‑owned assets.

By February 1941, French law allowed temporary administrators to sell firms without the permission of the Jewish owners. A further decree in April 1941 agreed upon by both Germans and French denied professional freedom in trade and banking. More restrictions followed in unoccupied parts of France. Pétain, a veteran of the first world war, was tried by Charles de Gaulle's provisional post-war government. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. An alarming number of men liked by the young Pierre Trudeau were tried as traitors at the close of World War II.

Alexis Carrel, Vichy France, Eugenicist & Rockefeller Institute

Alexis Carrel was born in Lyon, France, who was a star at the Rockefeller Institute in New York at the start of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for major achievements in vascular surgery and transplantation in 1912. But he would later be connected with the drive to push fascism and eugenics in the Thirties.

His eccentric plan was to conquer death. Carrel thought that immortality should only be accessible to carefully selected people. His ego schemed to create varying biological human classes, by initiating a dystopian world of enforced eugenics ruled by an intellectual elite.

In 1906, Carrel was engaged by the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. Young Pierre Trudeau would respond favorably to Carrel.

“The democratic principle has contributed to the undermining of civilization by impeding the development of the elite,” Pierre Trudeau wrote these words as a student after finishing Carrel’s famous book, L’homme, Cet Inconnu, 1935. Carrel was already famous as a eugenicist who blatantly advocated euthanasia in the same book.

Pierre Trudeau wrote of democracy as a political system, in his own notes as a student of constitutional law in the early 1940s: “Ignorance, credulity, intolerance, hatred for superiority, the cult of incompetence, an excess of equality, versatility, the passions of the crowd, the envy of individuals.”

Carrel himself returned to France in 1941 where he became the Director of the Carrel Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, organized by the Vichy government. He was suspended from his role after the liberation of Paris in August 1944, for being a Nazi collaborator. His death was timely for him, avoiding a treason trial for his loyalties to the Vichy regime.

Mayor Camillien Houde, Friend of Charlie Trudeau, Pierre’s Father

1939: “French Canadians are fascists.”

Former Mayor of Montreal Camillien Houde said this in 1939 as a compliment, explaining that his preference in war would be to side with Italy against Britain.

“OTTAWA, Ont., Feb. 8. 1939 The New York Times, A statement last night by Mayor Camillien Houde of Montreal before an English Canadian audience that French Canadians were Fascist by blood if not by name and would sympathize with Italy is an Anglo-Italian war, stirred up a warm controversy throughout Canada today.”

Adrien Arcand, Canada’s Nazi Leader During WWII: Friends in High Places

Adrien Arcand is not directly linked with Pierre Trudeau.

Yet in 1948, when the events of the Holocaust were well known at the end World War II, Trudeau lamented in anger that the most prominent Nazi leader in Canada, Arcand, had his freedoms restricted during the war, by being placed in a camp, with his free speech limited. (The Canadian Fuhrer, Jean-Francois Nadeau, Lorimer, 2011)

Considering that Trudeau would later invoke the War Measures Act after the FLQ kidnapped a cabinet minister in Quebec, there is much hypocrisy.

Arcand had friends in high places in Canada throughout WWII.

In 1940, Canadian boys and men were already called to die for the country that also mingled freely with the swastika-wearing Hitler-supporting group, The Blue Shirts, led by Arcand. Yet he had powerful friendships with top Ottawa government officials. How high were those government officials?

The Hon. Samuel Gobeil, M.P., member of the Ottawa Federal cabinet under R.
B. Bennett (1930-35) wrote an anti-Communist and anti-Semitic pamphlet which was printed by the Arcand’s group, swastika cover and all.
Senator P. E. Blondin, Speaker of the Ottawa Senate
Bennett, was frequently seen at Arcand's home in Montreal and Bennett
often received him at his Ottawa residence.
Premier Maurice Duplessis of Quebec. Arcand's was placed in
charge of their federal Conservative publicity for the Province of Quebec during the
election of 1935. As editor of the Montreal daily Illustration Nouvelle,
semi-official organ of former Premier Maurice Duplessis, Arcand was an important player in provincial politics. He ran in Quebec elections in 1949 and 1953, finishing second both times with 29 and 39 per cent of the vote.
Prime Minister Bennett. He financed Adrien Arcand’s first antisemitic and racist newspapers, “In the hope that Arcand…would support him and help him elect enough Conservative candidates in Québec for him to form the government in Ottawa. It worked.”

Two years after WWII’s end, the antisemitic anti-Communist Adrien Arcand wanted to move huge populations of Jewish people to Madagascar. Source: Down With Hate, Adrien Arcand,

Arcand also hated black people, which he referred to as a “problem” to be solved in the post-war years. Source: The Canadian Fuhrer, The Life of Adrien Arcand, Jean Francois Nadeau, 2011.

In 1947 a TIME magazine article on Adrien Arcand, notorious leader of the ‘National Unity Party’, openly stated his political views, not only antisemitic, but anti-black, and seeking media curbs on “poisonous ideologies.”

“N.U.P. folded when its leader, Adrien Arcand, was interned during the war. But N.U.P. is not dead; recently some 850 members held a rally in Montreal.” The National Unity Party as a name sounds more pleasant than ‘Canadian Nazi Party’, which we sometimes remember it as. Because its leader was Adrien Arcand, famous both nationally and internationally as Canada’s most prominent Nazi.

This fascist leader wanted to determine for Canada what poisonous ideologies are. Arcand said: "Within the century there will be 120 million Negroes in the U.S. What will happen to the white man?" Of course, Arcand did not see his own poisonous ideologies. In the Time interview, he blames Jews for both world wars. “The Jews he blames for all the world's ills, says that they started both World Wars.” Source: Time Magazine, Interview at Lanoraie, December 8, 1947

The TIME reporter said: “I asked him, before I left, why reporters were given the bounce at the party's most recent meeting. He said: "Because it was private." If he ever came to power in Canada, he said, there would be special laws designed to curb the press. "We have sanitary health laws to guard against food poisoning. Why not a law against . . . poisonous ideologies?"

In 1948, Pierre Trudeau himself wrote in a conservative newspaper called Notre Temps that Adrien Arcand suffered great injustice in the area of free speech during the war years, which saw him sent to an internment camp.

Jean-Francois Nadeau, discussing his book, “Le Führer Canadien/The Canadian Fuhrer”, referring to the defense of Arcand by Pierre Trudeau, in a July 2016 Facebook post, said:

Jean-Louis Roux, Trudeau Friend, Swastika Wearing, 1942

Almost all of Pierre Trudeau’s former fascism-supporting individuals mentioned deny they retained their beliefs later on, as they acquired prominent political positions issued from Pierre Trudeau’s rise in Ottawa. Jean-Louis Roux, a former Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, had to resign the aforementioned post, after admitting to wearing a swastika in the war years in Quebec.

Roux’s actions didn’t end with wearing a swastika. He was part of a large protest against Canada’s fighting with the Allied powers in WWII, in 1942. As a French youth from Quebec, he supported avoiding military service on behalf of the British Empire.

“Anti-Conscription Riots

In Montreal

MONTREAL, March 25. 1942

AAP

A youthful crowd, shouting, "Down with conscription!" blocked the traffic and smashed tram and store windows following an anti-conscription mass meeting. The police prevented groups who attempted to parade, resulting in a flurry of street fighting, in which one youth was slightly injured. Eight demonstrators were arrested.”

A Global News article notes: “What sparked Roux’s resignation was his admission in a magazine interview he had drawn a swastika on his lab coat in 1942 when he was a pre-medical student. He also said he participated as a 19-year-old in an anti-conscription protest which degenerated into vandalism against shops believed to be owned by Jews. Roux said he was not among those who smashed the windows.”

This author is not unsympathetic to anti-war movements in general; but is firmly against the support for fascism in Europe.

Andre Laurendeau, Pierre Trudeau Friend, Founds Eugenics-Related Society 1937

"Fundamentally, Trudeau was very much reflecting the mood of those days, very anti-conscription, and he teamed up with André Laurendeau and Jean Drapeau to fight against conscription. They had a very elitist conception of society… it makes you smile at the naiveté of it, but it was also frightening.": Marc Lalonde, friend of Pierre Trudeau, in the Globe and Mail (2006).

Andre Laurendeau was interested in eugenics, with its use of the chilling phrase, “undesirable aliens.”. In a review of Esther Delisle’s book The Traitor and The Jew, critic Donald A. Wright comments, “Inspired by the Fascist aesthetic, Laurendeau dreamt of a day when “Doctors, dentists and gymnasts will help build a strong, chaste race of handsome young men and beautiful young girls”.

He founded a eugenics-related society in 1937, called Société Croix de Feu, along with Lionel Groulx and Jean Drapeau. The society advocated expansion of eugenics laws to "undesirable aliens".

In her controversial work about antisemitism in Quebec, “The Traitor and The Jew”, Esther Delisle also writes of the editors of L’Action Nationale, including Andre Laurendeau, as criticizing pogroms of Jewish as not being workable, rather than being an unacceptable act. This would mean that they had considered them, or why would they need to present alternatives?

They suggested that "government measures" were required. Delisle continues that "government measures" meant ghettos, quotas at universities, deportations, and identification cards.

Andre Laurendeau & Henri Bourassa & Mayor Houde, Bloc Populaire Canadien

Andre Laurendeau was the founder of Bloc Populaire Canadien, created on September 8, 1942, by opponents of conscription.

They were all for Vichy France, in that they wanted to be on the same side as the Nazi puppet government in France, in World War II.

Of course, there are people who object to war on religious grounds, who will offer or be obligated to do service in other ways. This author does not criticize those people.

The party was inspired by the ideas of Henri Bourassa and supported by Montreal mayor Camillien Houde, Jean Drapeau and Pierre Elliot Trudeau were members in their youth.” Mayor Houde would become the patron of the Nazi war criminal: Count Jacques de Bernonville.

Mayor Camillien Houde, Montreal & Count Jacques de Bernonville, War Criminal

Count Jacques Dugé de Bernonville was a commander of the Milice, the French partners to the German Gestapo, and the right-hand man to Klaus Barbie. This count specifically targeted Jews for killing, also killing French men and women who were leaders in wanting the Nazi occupiers removed from their nation. Resistance leaders of all ethnicities, races and religions were killed, these brave citizens on the Allied side.

Count de Bernonville killed his own French people, to serve the Germans. He was a highest-ranking officer of the Milice, planning, supervising, and executing their war crimes. The French feared these police more than the Gestapo, because there was no cultural gap to hide within. The French Milice were partners with the German Gestapo.

At least 25 000 of these police hunted the heroes and heroines of Free France. Despite this, at the end of the war, millions of French welcomed the Allies entry into France stormed and ransacked the Milice offices. The upper-class aristocrat, Count de Bernonville, had deported his own French people to the Drancy camp, the first stage on the route to Auschwitz and other German death camps.

The count was helped by many in Canada to escape France in 1946, eluding justice. The count went from New York City and then to Quebec. He was warmly welcomed by a shocking number of politicians, government officials, and religious leaders. Yves Lavertu, in his book L’Affaire Hebert, digs deeply into fascist sympathies among higher social classes. A book review and interview by Marian Scott, in the Montreal Gazette, September 26, 2017, mentions Maurice Duplessis, and several church leaders:

“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.”

This book review refers to an earlier book by Yves Lavertu, with overlapping material and characters, more appropriate to our study of fascism. L’Affaire Bernonville: Le Québec face à Pétain et à la collaboration (1948-1951) was published in 1994. The names in this book should be carefully studied as fascism resurges in Canada. The Count Jacques de Bernonville attracted support from Montreal Mayor Camillien Houde, politician René Chaloult, the father of the Quebec flag, and future Parti Québécois cabinet ministers Camille Laurin and Denis Lazure.

He was wanted in France for treason, and Quebec government officials knew he had killed and tortured many. There was a TIME Magazine cover story in 1948. He was wanted by the government of France for treason, and Canada had been informed.

“In the St. Lawrence the 1,445-ton French frigate, L'Aventure, had been idling for days awaiting an important passenger: Count Jacques Juge de Bernonville, 50. A wartime collaborator, he had been sentenced to death in France for "violence, treason, arson and looting." As soon as Canada handed him over, L'Aventure would rush him home. But L'Aventure would not sail right away. De Bernonville was in the middle of a political row between Quebec nationalists and the federal government.”

Source: TIME Magazine, Canada: QUEBEC: Houde's Hero, Monday, Sept. 20, 1948

Mayor Camillien Houde of Montreal, a friend of Charlie Trudeau, father of Pierre Trudeau, moved immediately to help and protect Count de Bernonville, the war criminal. The count entered using a forged passport in the name of Jacques Benoit, sneaking in from the U.S., living in Côte des Neiges, Montreal, soon joined by his wife and three daughters. The count worked at a Montreal dairy and later at a Sherbrooke Street store.

Early in 1948, with much local support, Count de Bernonville attempted to become a permanent resident of Canada. Former members of the French Resistance, now seeking refuge in Montreal, told the authorities that as a Vichy collaborator, he betrayed French patriots to the Gestapo during the German military occupation:

“During the war Jacques de Bernonville was propaganda director under Marshal Henri Pétain and a director of operations against the French underground. Furthermore, the French police reported, he had caused the deaths of Frenchmen and other Allied soldiers "probably including Canadians from the Royal Canadian Air Force." *

In 1948, Mayor Houde went to the Montreal offices of the British United Press, full of lies about Ottawa's treatment of De Bernonville. "A crying injustice," charged Houde. Gustave Jobidon, a notary, said: "French Canada is scandalized . . . Vive Pétain. Vive De Bernonville." Some Parti Canadien backers called De Bernonville "a hero of epic and legendary stature."

In 1949, Canadian Press reported that Count Jacques Duge de Bernonville “won his fight to remain in Canada as a political refugee.” The French people would be denied justice. Quebec’s government would afterwards proceed, along with Canada’s then-Prime Minister, to help the count escape once again.

Canada’s Prime Minister, Louis Saint-Laurent, told Archbishop Maurice Roy of Quebec, "your friends brought him in here, your friends will bring him out" and helped the war criminal flee again. On August 17, 1951, a four-engine plane not permitted a stopover in the United States flew de Bernonville to Brazil.

Unlike millions arriving from war-torn Europe, the count had his wife, children, lawyer, friends, and even journalists waiting for him at the airport, along with the Brazilian Consul to Canada. This was planned from Quebec as well as Brazil.

Legacies made in the past, dangers existing in the present

Pierre Trudeau and many of his social circles rose to prominence as both federal and provincial leaders or figures in high places. They did speak with mild regrets of their flirtations with fascism for the years of World War II. Yet the time period covered extends long before and sometime after the war. Some Canadians including this author forgave them, as we had sympathy for the suffering of the francophone people of Quebec, patronized, condescended to, and worse than that.

It is this one last man, the Count de Bernonville, whose story of miraculous escapes, rests like a claw upon this author’s moral consciousness. He killed the French resistance fighters, who were on our side, during World War II. For certain, thousands of them. He was wanted for treason by the federal government of France in post-war years, but the Canadian government ignored that, until 1951, when Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent turned his head aside, allowing a safe escape to Brazil.

What did we fight in the war for? To come to this, being on the brink of world war again, with countries like China and Russia (the successor state to the USSR) who were once our allies?

Editor’s note: Introducing Operation 135, The Canada Files’ campaign to go from 65 to 200 consistent financial supporters. The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.

Please consider joining 81 consistent financial supporters, in setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.

More Articles

Featured