Quote:
Originally Posted by MolsonExport
I could make a contrarian case.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Cit%C3%A9_Libre%2C_janvier_1965%2C_couverture.jpg)
wikipedia
Cité Libre was not exactly the haunt of anglos.
Cosmopolitans like PET are always the target of nationalists. Even when they conveniently overlook the cosmopolitanism of the arch-anglophile, Jacques Parizeau.
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As you know, PET was a highly complex individual. Among other things he flirted with Nazism in his 20s and rode around Montreal and Quebec on a motorcycle with a German military helmet because he thought WW2 was Britain's war and not ours.
I actually think this unfortunate episode eventually scared him a bit and he began to see his French Canadian side as something dangerous - both for him personally and for Quebec society.
Yes he agitated for change on what was an ebullient French Canadian "side" (in opposition to anglo power) at the time but this was very much in accordance with his own my-way-or-the-highway views of how things should be. They were not always in tune with the majority of Québécois. Or at least, there were various
courants emerging in Quebec at the time. Fitting the personage, he had his own which was almost a cult of personality. A lot of Québécois bought into the PET vision as well, but as time wore on the shine came off it and his nemesis Lévesque's alternate view of things (even if not going as far as everyone embracing independence) became the dominant
tendance.
Trudeau's mistrust of French Canadian impulses is quite evident in this famous essay of his, and if you read between the lines this almost sets the stage for his constitutional machinations several decades later:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/138618?seq=1
French Canadians need anglophones to keep them in line. Anglophones need French Canadians for... well... something. I dunno, maybe to make their country stand apart from the US?