nations.
Few notables ever accepted such invitations. Most were downright afraid of putting their fates in the hands of China’s communist government. Others were more afraid of how such a trip would be perceived in their home countries. Trudeau and Hébert had no such fears. Both men were experienced travellers who had already journeyed behind the Iron Curtain. For their foreign excursions, broad political sympathies and their domestic activism, both had already prompted the ire of the extremely conservative Quebec establishment. Both were already labelled as troublemakers and outcasts. A six-week trip to Red China wouldn’t change much.
The two men were also curious. They were hungry for knowledge about this mysterious behemoth of a country and were open to considering other models of society and government. They were fond of discovering foreign innovations and habits and loved sampling strange new dishes. They also had a message to communicate to their brethren back in Quebec and were eager to provoke and belittle the province’s authoritarian and reactionary government. In this sense their book was very much an extension of Trudeau’s and Hébert’s polemical writing of the 1950s. Their “innocence” was a political message, a symbol of their indecent freedom. As much as possible, they would flaunt that freedom and use it to breach the dank walls of the cave in which Maurice Duplessis kept Quebec, flooding it with sunlight. An innocent travelogue through Red China was a perfect device for provocation.
China was not only scandalous because it was red. Trudeau and Hébert also point out that in the popular ethos of the time, China’s redness was just one among a whole litany of other outrages. In the book’s preamble they describe “the picture of China preserved in [the] subconscious: a land swarming with a multitude of little yellow men, famished, crafty, and (more often than they had any right to be) sinister.” China was the enemy, the cultural, biological as well as political enemy. Going there was a faint form of treason.
But by 1960, things were already changing in Quebec. Duplessis had died in 1959, and the Great Darkness of the Duplessis years finally came to a close with the election of Jean Lesage’s Liberal government in 1960. Quebec society was beginning to emerge from beneath the heavy mantle of the Catholic Church and its backward political patriarchy.
Of course, Lesage’s election slogan—“Maîtres chez nous”—had a nationalistic flavour to it. But it also carried an undertone of popular empowerment. The Liberals were urging the masses of Quebec to finally take responsibility for their institutions, to wrest control of their province from the narrow elites that had governed them since conquest. And these elites, though dominated by the Anglo and Scottish families of Montreal, were not entirely monoethnic.
On the periphery of the Anglo banking and industrial families of Montreal, a small French-Canadian bourgeoisie held sway over the liberal professions and the provincial political apparatus. The bastions and training grounds of this francophone elite were les collèges classiques, the rigorous institutions that the clergy used to indoctrinate sons of privilege. Virtually all Quebec premiers then and now have emerged from these schools.
Hébert and Trudeau were both from the privileged bourgeoisie of Montreal, both children of the rarefied urbane elites who had made most of the collective decisions for the French Canadians of Quebec for centuries. Both had studied at les collèges classiques. Both had also broken, at least superficially, with these elites.
Hébert, the rebellious son of a family doctor, became famous in the late 1940s for his weekly travelogues. For months on end he toured remote regions of Africa and South America, sending in colourful and humorous dispatches that made him a household name. At that time, apart from missionaries, Quebec could count very few world travellers among its own. Hébert not only travelled the world but also made it accessible. His accounts provided a unique window out of often dreary and insular French-Canadian society.
In the fifties Hébert became the editor of the hard-hitting weekly Vrai. In its pages he led spirited attacks against the Duplessis establishment and constantly berated it for its contempt for social justice and progressive values. In 1958 he founded the publishing house that issued the original edition of Deux Innocents en Chine rouge, Les Editions de l’Homme. For his part, Trudeau co-founded Cité Libre, a monthly magazine, in 1950. Through the next decade, it too would gain renown for its biting social criticism.
Hébert and Trudeau had become deeply suspicious of the concentration and corruption of power in Quebec and argued that a healthy society could only stem from a responsible and engaged citizenry. In their own lives, both men had already shown deeply adventurous and individualistic spirits. Both had forged their identities abroad as much as at home, and both were calling for greater freedom in Quebec. But neither saw freedom and empowerment as things to be taken by force from the hands of a corrupt elite. They had already developed a fair belief in the Canadian system’s inherent capacity for freedom. Yet each and every individual still had to find his or her own freedom, within him- or herself. An individual free of the shackles of habit and blind obedience could not be bent to the will of the exploiter.
Hébert and Trudeau had both flirted with socialism, and both had been involved in labour movements. But ultimately, their socialist leanings were not Marxist but humanist and, in Trudeau’s case, Christian. The model that they sought was that of a society of free men and women bound together by common responsibility. The narrative that they promoted was one not of class liberation, but of the awakening of the individual.
Although they were fierce in blaming Duplessis and his cronies for Quebec’s repressive regime, Hébert and Trudeau were equally vociferous in criticizing their fellow citizens for accepting (and voting for) this regime. Freedom was a mere matter of choice. They also sensed the longing building in their fellow Quebecers for a more open and progressive society. For them, the only real obstacle to achieving that society was the immobility of the people. They called on their peers to stop putting their faith in their political and clerical leaders and to take responsibility for their own fates.
In this sense, Red China was a symbol. Unlike many of the student activists of the late sixties, Trudeau and Hébert had no intention of proposing a Maoist system to their peers. What they proposed instead was a rational and responsible society without idols or taboos, one that could open itself to the whole world. Their journey to Red China represented the freedom to contemplate and reach out to even the most remote and maligned foreign entities.
MY FATHER RETIRED from politics with the explicit goal of spending more time with us, his children. He wanted us to go to school in Montreal, his hometown. He also wanted to show us the world in its varied shapes and colours. Through the late eighties and early nineties, my father, my brothers and I embarked upon a series of family trips to the “great nations of the world.” We completed these trips over the course of a few summers at a time when my brothers and I were still too young to be out travelling on our own but were old enough to comprehend a little of what we saw.
The time for these journeys was limited. So my father decided that our destinations would be constrained by the Cold War definition of the great powers: the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In the summer of 1984, we thus made our first journey through the Soviet Union, a mere six years before the waning empire began to break apart. We meandered our way south from Moscow to the Caucasus Mountains and as far east as the Amur River deep in Eastern Siberia. In the years that followed we made trips to France and the United Kingdom, the lands of our ancestors. In rented cars, we criss-crossed these old nations, staying at bed-and-breakfasts and budget inns.
In the winter of 1988–89, we decided that the coming summer’s trip should be to China. That spring, however, a dramatic protest began to brew in Beijing’s central and most important public space, Tiananmen Square. After the death of a beloved and open-minded Communist Party leader, Beijing’s university students began congregating in the square in ever greater numbers, demanding political change and democracy. They set up tents and camped out for weeks. Little by little, they were joined by more and more students from the provinces, and by intellectuals and academics. Eventually even some influential Communist Party members began turning out to the Square in support of the youth.
Like the whole world, my family watched these events on television with great interest. A month before the protests began, my