The Hand of God: Claude Ryan and the Fate of Canadian Liberalism, 1925-1971 9780773551862

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T h e H a n d o f God

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237 An Undisciplined Economist Robert G. Evans on Health Economics, Health Care Policy, and Population Health Edited by Morris L. Barer, Greg L. Stoddart, Kimberlyn M. McGrail, and Chris B. McLeod 238 Wildlife, Land, and People A Century of Change in Prairie Canada Donald G. Wetherell 239 Filling the Ranks Manpower in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918 Richard Holt 240 Tax, Order, and Good Government A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 E.A. Heaman 241 Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide Cooking with a Canadian Classic Edited by Nathalie Cooke and Fiona Lucas 242 Tug of War Surveillance Capitalism, Military Contracting, and the Rise of the Security State Jocelyn Wills 243 The Hand of God Claude Ryan and the Fate of Canadian Liberalism, 1925–1971 Michael Gauvreau

The Hand of God Claude Ryan and the Fate of Canadian Liberalism, 1925–1971

M i c h a e l G au v r eau

Carleton Library Series 243

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 ISBN 978-0-7735-5129-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5186-2 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-7735-5187-9 (eP UB) Legal deposit third quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Gauvreau, Michael, 1956–, author The hand of God: Claude Ryan and the fate of Canadian liberalism, 1925–1971 / Michael Gauvreau. (Carleton library series; 243) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISB N 978-0-7735-5129-9 (cloth). – IS BN 978-0-7735-5186-2 (eP D F ). – ISB N 978-0-7735-5187-9 (eP UB) 1. Ryan, Claude, 1925–2004.  2. Intellectuals – Québec (Province) – Biography.  3. Québec (Province) – Biography.  4. Biographies.  I. Title. II. Series: Carleton library series; 243. FC 2925.1.R 9G 38 2017

971.4'04092

C 2017-902927-4 C 2017-902928-2

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

To Nancy Christie, the better craftsman

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii Illustrations xv

Introduction: Becoming a Public Intellectual in Postwar Quebec  3

  1 The New Christendom: A Poor Knight’s Quest, 1925–1945  12   2 The Bishops’ Man: Forging a Nation of Youth and Taming Action catholique, 1945–1951  60   3 “I Must See Rome Also,” 1951–1952  107   4 Diagnosing French Canada’s “Spiritual Schizophrenia”: The Travails of a Catholic Intellectual in “Late Christendom,” 1952–1958 131   5 “Are We Pagans?”: Coping with French Canada’s Religious Crisis, 1958–1962 174   6 “Deus Quod Operatus in Claudio Ryan”: Springtime in Church and State, 1962–1964  219   7 “The Dawn of a New Political Spring”: Biculturalism and the New Spirit of Federalism  266   8 Between Christendom and the “New Gods”: The Search for a Stable Society, 1964–1966  304   9 “We Choose the Canadian Hypothesis”: Defining the Ethics of Federalism, 1964  342

viii Contents

10 “There Have Always Been Some Bridge-men”: Navigating the Shoals of Federalism and Nationalism, 1964–1967  383 11 “Anger Rumbles over the City”: The Unravelling of the Quiet Revolution, 1967–1969  431 12 “This Bewildering Ambivalence”: The Dissolution of French Canada, 1967–1969  471 13 “The Prophetic Charisma of the Christian Journalist”: Disclosing the Meanings of the October Crisis  513 Epilogue 548 Notes 551 Index 667

Acknowledgments

This project of an intellectual biography of Claude Ryan is one that has gestated for nearly two decades. It began as a conversation in the Montreal V IA station with my good friend Ollivier Hubert in 1998, as we talked about what we considered English Canada’s mistaken rejection of the Meech Lake Accord. And, while researching an earlier book on the intersection of Catholicism and cultural modernity in Quebec, I had occasion to encounter many of Claude Ryan’s writings and interventions during the late 1940s and 1950s. However, it was not until the spring of 2006, when Daniel Cere, then director of McGill University’s Newman Centre, invited me to speak, that the focus on a biography of Ryan crystallized. Dan was a most engaging host, arranging not only a talk about my book on Quebec Catholicism, but a stimulating conversation the following day about Ryan’s intellectual contribution to the Newman Centre after he left the political scene in 1994, and his place within post–Vatican II Catholic intellectual life. Dan put me in touch with members of Claude Ryan’s family, and I owe a particular debt of thanks to his sons, André, Patrice, and Pierre, who urged me to undertake this project, answered my initial questions, and, during an event held in early 2014 to mark the tenth anniversary of their father’s death, shared vital material concerning the life of Claude’s mother and his brothers during the 1930s. This volume, however, is in no way an “official” biography: members of the Ryan family have read none of the chapters prior to publication, but it is my earnest hope that these pages will provide a likeness they will recognize. My research benefited greatly from the interest and support of archivists. In particular, I would like to thank Normand Charbonneau and Estelle Brisson of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal, who indicated their interest in the project and, most importantly, helped

x Acknowledgments

me to navigate the labyrinth of access regulations that now surround the lives of political figures. I salute Estelle Brisson’s efforts in ensuring that I was the first researcher to obtain access to Ryan’s valuable correspondence as editor of Le Devoir, which has immensely enriched this study. During my many research trips to Quebec between 2007 and 2011, the support and interest of friends both old and new greatly assisted my labours. La famille L’Heureux-Hubert always provided a warm welcome and stimulating conversation when I was away from home; and I was blessed to secure the friendship of Michel Brûlé and the late Hélène Brûlé, who shared their reminiscences of Quebec political figures, life during the Quiet Revolution, and, to provide me with relief from Ryan’s puritanical spirit, taught me how to mix a proper martini! Monique Bruneau generously allowed me permission to reproduce a remarkable photograph of Claude Ryan from her personal collection. At a rather critical juncture, when I was on the verge of abandoning my enthusiasm for the project, Dr Cal Gutkin prodded me to think again about the importance of the values of social liberalism in Canadian life. In January 2013, I was fortunate to have a moment for lunch with Louis Rousseau, whose stimulating conversation urged me to think about Ryan’s place in a long theological tradition of Catholic “reformers,” which immeasurably strengthened chapter 3. At an early stage of the project, Professor Robert Gagnon of Université du Québec à Montréal, invited me to present an overview of Ryan’s relationship to nationalist and Catholic currents in postwar Quebec; and Jean-Philippe Warren, whose own work has done so much to set a new standard and trajectory for intellectual ­historians in Quebec, asked me twice to contribute articles on Ryan’s engagement with postwar North American social science and his attempts to build a network of Catholic intellectuals. I thank audiences at McGill University’s Newman Centre and the Harvard University Conference on Public Intellectuals for their interest and questions about Ryan’s position in a Canadian trajectory of public intellectuals. Robert Di Pede and Linda Diez of McGill University’s Newman Centre graciously allowed me to include photographs from the centre’s collection relating to Claude Ryan’s personal life and career. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friend and colleague Lucia Ferretti. Although Ryan’s political convictions were diametrically opposed to her own, she generously read a large swathe of the manuscript and perceptively alerted me to the need to think more carefully about the tensions between nationalism and individual rights. She represents the epitome of Quebec’s welcoming and engaged scholarship.

Acknowledgments xi

As the book has moved towards publication, I am particularly grateful to Philip Cercone, executive director of McGill-Queen’s University Press, who expressed strong interest in publishing a substantial work on Claude Ryan. Barbara Tessman undertook the heroic task of copyediting an enormous manuscript with vigour and a fine eye for clarity and style, which has immensely improved the book. Ryan Van Huijstee, the managing editor at McGill-Queen’s, has enhanced the press’s reputation for superior book-production standards and was responsible for ensuring a splendid cover for the book. It is, as always, a pleasure to work with Philip and the group at McGill-Queen’s, who take the scholarly endeavour seriously and have provided sound advice during the publication process. I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for supporting the research upon which this book is based, and the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for assisting with a grant-in-aid of publication. My greatest debt, both personal and intellectual, is to Nancy Christie. She has, over the course of three decades, daily provided me with a model of fearless, engaged scholarship and has supported and encouraged the expression and development of my ideas. In particular, she insisted that I find ways of ensuring that Claude Ryan was not presented to readers as an intellectual bore. I hope that I have at least partly succeeded in this effort. With her critical and unflinching eye, she has consistently made my thinking and writing, and the scholarship of many Canadian academics, far better. To her this book is dedicated.

Abbreviations

A C C A C JC

Action catholique canadienne Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne-française A LN Action libérale nationale B & B Commission Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Laurendeau-Dunton Commission) B N A Act British North America Act C C C Canadian Catholic Conference C C C Y G Co-ordinating Committee of Canadian Youth Groups C C F Co-operative Commonwealth Federation Comité national d’Action catholique C N A C C P Canadian Press C SN Confédération des syndicats nationaux C TC C Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada C Y C Canadian Youth Commission FLQ Front de libération du Québec FMJQ Fédération des mouvements de jeunesse du Québec FR A P Front d’action politique des salariés IC EA Institut canadien de l’éducation des adultes J A C Jeunesse agricole catholique J EC Jeunesse étudiante catholique J IC Jeunesse indépendante catholique J Ic F Jeunesse indépendante catholique féminine J OC Jeunesse ouvrière catholique MIS Mouvement pour l’intégration scolaire

xiv Abbreviations

MLF MSA N DP N FLY PC R IN RN S C EA WA Y WFDY WMA

Mouvement laïque de langue française Mouvement souverainté-association New Democratic Party National Federation of Labour Youth Progressive Conservative Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale Ralliement national Société canadienne d’éducation des adultes World Assembly of Youth World Federation of Democratic Youth War Measures Act

Discarding his usual image of intensity, Ryan often generated ideas for editorials in more relaxed moments. Photo by permission of the Newman Centre, McGill University.

Upon completion of his college course, Ryan deliberately avoided the conventional middle-class professions of clergy, medicine, or law, preferring to identify himself with new currents of social activism.

Ryan spent the winter of 1951–52 at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, a turning point in his vocation as a public intellectual. Ryan is in the back row, second from right. Photo by permission of the Newman Centre, McGill University

As national secretary of Action Catholique Canadienne, Ryan was the linchpin between Quebec’s episcopal hierarchy and lay activists. Photo by permission of the Newman Centre, McGill University

Claude Ryan, who was the confidant of bishops, is shown here in discussions with Cardinal Léger.

Quebec’s man of ideas. When he assumed the directorship of Le Devoir in 1964, Ryan became Quebec’s leading public intellectual. Photo by permission of the Newman Centre, McGill University

Ryan was more than a professional newspaperman. He was frequently called upon to address francophone religious, educational, and community groups, and between 1964 and 1978 gave more than one hundred speeches per year to these organizations. Here he is shown in the mid-1960s presenting an award to Monique Bruneau. Photo courtesy of Monique Bruneau

A rare moment of solidarity between the two principal exponents of the rival currents within Canadian liberalism. Photo by permission of the Newman Centre, McGill University

T h e H a n d o f God

In calmer times, moderation is a convenient and facile virtue, and is too frequently used by the weak as a screen to circulate adroitly from one milieu to another, to pull their chestnuts out of the fire without jeopardizing themselves. But, in the circumstances in which we are now living, moderation becomes, unwillingly, a veritable sword. Everything carries minds along to seek refuge in one or the other of the extreme paths that present themselves to them; these have the advantage of clarity and strength. If the struggle seems to be engaged between the two camps, a blind dynamism lures each one to side with one or the other camp, to vomit out the lukewarm, who are generously characterized as the soft, the undecided, and the accomplices of evil. He who, in such a context, absolutely wants to preserve his critical reflexes and to seek moderation in spite of everything, suddenly takes on the complexion of the radical, of the declared adversary of power, the ally of the forces of contestation, and much else besides. Above all, he risks being stranded between the extremes. Claude Ryan, “Les fruits indirects de la crise” (1970) From a cultural point of view, I am one of those somewhat hybrid beings … who finds it difficult to situate myself completely either on one side or the other. Claude Ryan, “Regards sur l’Eglise du Canada” (1954)

Introduct ion Becoming a Public Intellectual in Postwar Quebec The political freedom of French Canadians: social justice, the restoration of public morality, the primacy of moral values: support for the intermediate ­bodies brought forth by the free will of citizens: the search for a more ­authentic democracy, economic liberation of French Canadians. Claude Ryan, “Le Devoir après soixante ans” (1970)

At the end of the tumultuous year 1970, Claude Ryan, the director of the  Montreal daily Le Devoir, reaffirmed the principles enunciated in 1910 by his predecessor Henri Bourassa, the paper’s founder. Ryan had no hesitation in asserting that the primacy of moral values and a public sphere shaped by moral standards were necessary for the ongoing quest for democracy and social justice. Although admitting that these were not fixed formulae, and that perception of the truth was subject to progress, there was no doubt in his mind that morality – by which he meant ethical standards explicitly derived from Christian faith – was chief among the “permanent values” that guided him in his almost daily dialogue with Le Devoir’s readership of university professors, public servants, union leaders, teachers, directors of social movements, self-educated citizens, and, above all, the political leaders of Quebec, who frequently sought his advice.1 Ryan reiterated the paper’s creed at the end of a decade when Catholicism had abruptly ceased to provide the source of consensual public and private values in his society, when social contestation, at times descending into extremist violence, had exposed serious fissures between traditional and modern values, and when a politicized nationalist movement had starkly confronted Quebeckers with the diametrically opposed options of federalism or independent sovereign nationhood. That he could refurbish Bourassa’s socio-political maxims as a template for his

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The Hand of God

society’s political conscience opens a window into the interplay between ideas and intellectual authority in mid-twentieth-century Quebec and calls into question the current dichotomies and trajectories that have organized the subdiscipline of intellectual history. The choice of Claude Ryan as the subject of a biography is not an obvious one. In both Quebec and English Canada, he is remembered as a federalist voice whose views on the Quebec-Canada relationship offered a kind of ambiguous “third way” between Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s classic and uncompromising statement of federalism, which aimed to muzzle expressions of nationalism at all costs in order to keep Quebec in Canada, and René Lévesque’s urgent call for Quebec to realize its destiny as an independent nation. Part of the obscurity into which Ryan has been cast is due to the fact that, although he became a politician in 1978 at age fifty-three, he was, by contrast with his two more celebrated contemporaries, a political outsider who espoused an intermediate form of federalism, which he sought to reconcile with Quebec nationalism; moreover, because of his supposed lack of clarity, he was unable to lead the Quebec Liberal Party back from the political wilderness. Largely due to their electoral successes, Trudeau and Lévesque have come to be viewed as archetypes of the dichotomous currents of federalism and nationalism that vied for the allegiance of francophone Quebeckers, thus occluding other voices that may not have framed this dichotomy in such stark terms. Because they are regarded as the principal exponents of these two conflicting positions, now considered monolithic ideological identities, both men have received substantial biographies – indeed, Trudeau has generated an ongoing biographical industry.2 Lévesque and Trudeau can be understood as politicians first and foremost, but party politics was not Ryan’s main vocation. Much of his life was directed towards shaping the political conscience and values of his contemporaries; for this reason, Ryan requires a different dimension of understanding, as principally an “intellectual,” a foundation to which the political element of his life was always harnessed. Since his death in 2004, Ryan has received some attention from Quebec scholars, largely devoted to analyzing elements of the corpus of the nearly 3,000 editorials he wrote during his sixteen-year career at Le Devoir between 1962 and 1978. The best of these studies, Olivier Marcil’s La raison et l’équilibre, focuses on Ryan’s political commentary to elucidate his thinking on federalism, constitutional issues, and the language question, while Pierre Pagé’s Claude Ryan: un éditorialiste dans le débat social expands the range of Ryan’s concerns to freedom of the press, religious



Becoming a Public Intellectual in Postwar Quebec 5

news, and labour conflict to define his mission as a social activist. Guy Lachapelle has offered a more specific lens on Ryan’s journalistic activities and democratic commitments during the October Crisis.3 However, all these works, in addition to leaving aside substantial swathes of Ryan’s published writing, entirely omit his formative years, and especially the centrality of his commitment to, and position in, a particular activist strand of Catholicism that continued to indelibly mark both his social and political thinking. No one has yet tackled a full biography of Claude Ryan, at least partly because the very size and scope of his personal and public archive would intimidate many researchers. Located in both Montreal and Quebec City, they are double the size of those of René Lévesque, Robert Bourassa, and Jean Lesage combined, and this does not fully account for the massive body of published writing in Le Devoir. The archival record reinforces the conventional image of Ryan as an ascetic, humourless, obsessive workaholic, and, by contrast with the Trudeau and Lévesque collections, its contents, almost entirely devoted to the framing of public debate, will disappoint the would-be biographer looking for insights into the intimate recesses of Ryan’s personality. Unlike Trudeau, Ryan was not given to womanizing or even serial monogamy, and there is no revealing correspondence with family members. Nor did he write or perform anti-Semitic plays in college or belong to secret fascistic cells during the Second World War; indeed, both these activities would have merited Ryan’s unmitigated scorn. What we do have are materials for the biography of a public personality, one certainly given to archiving every facet of his thinking and public activity, because, from a very early stage in his career, he was highly conscious of the nature of his vocation and his status among francophone Quebec intellectuals. Thus, we can use his thought, writing, and political action as a prism through which to illuminate the social and cultural transformations of French Canada and Quebec between the Depression and the turn of the twentyfirst century, especially the complex intersections between the themes of religious values and political ideas, the nature of dechristianization, and the tensions within liberalism, federalism, and nationalism. For Ryan, all of these ultimately involved the question of the relationship between Catholicism and public values in Quebec. Ryan’s insistence on the primacy of moral values in framing both democracy and the political identity of French Canadians, and his abiding search for underlying elements of consensus among the increasingly divergent options of the francophone intellectual communities and the cultural currents of a Quebec in the throes of modernity, affords an

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important clue to his self-identity. There is no better term than the ­American expression “public intellectual” to describe a figure of Ryan’s commitments and activities. This term is of relatively recent vintage, coined by Russell Jacoby in 1987 in his famous study, The Last Intellectuals, lamenting the decline of a group of New York intellectuals who wrote political and cultural commentary for a broad, generalist audience, and their replacement by professional academic specialists located in universities.4 Richard Posner severs the term from its overly specific identification with the New York cultural scene by arguing that “public intellectual” is interchangeable with “political intellectual” or “social critic,” in pertaining to someone who writes about or comments on public affairs. Such intellectuals, he maintains, may or may not be affiliated with universities, may be full- or part-time academics, may be journalists or publishers, writers or artists, politicians or officials, or work as experts for think tanks.5 Ryan ticked many of these boxes during his career: although lacking a university degree or certified advanced professional training, he worked as a social and cultural activist between 1945 and 1962, seeking to posit new modes of democratic citizenship; he was, arguably, Quebec’s most influential journalist between 1962 and 1978; he sought, though ultimately failed, to forge a trajectory of the “intellectual in politics” between 1978 and 1983 as leader of the Quebec Liberal Party; he was, in the administration of Robert Bourassa between 1985 and 1994, a kind of Liberal Party “house intellectual”; and he served as minister of education, which placed him at the apex of the administration of Quebec’s intellectual institutions. After his political career, Ryan briefly entered the university system, as a part-time lecturer at McGill University. Arguably, he even meets Posner’s criteria for a “media celebrity,” although on a more restricted Canadian scale: in addition to the written journalistic enterprise, and the hundreds of speeches and public appearances, we also have to take into account his participation in 468 Frenchlanguage radio and television broadcasts with Radio-Canada, and 69 appearances on the English-language CBC!6 The location of Ryan as a public intellectual – with its concern for tracking the interplay between the content and the communication of ideas, the relationships that arise and develop between the producers of ideas, and the shifting cultural authority of these individuals within a given society – provides the historian with a set of questions and tools that serve to broaden the scope of the subdiscipline of intellectual history, which has fallen on hard times in both English Canada and Quebec since the 1980s.7 Both English-Canadian and Quebec historians have shied



Becoming a Public Intellectual in Postwar Quebec 7

away from the term “public intellectual,” preferring to implicitly privilege (and thereby celebrate) one of the central conventions of the master narrative of modernization, that intellectuals are destined to work as specialized professionals within universities, or to put their knowledge to use as technocratic advisers to governments.8 Persons or trajectories of ideas standing outside this teleology are deemed anti-modern or traditional – more romantically referred to by Yvan Lamonde as belonging to the “age of the maverick” – terms describing the identity of intellectuals in an era preceding the social authority of universities, which occurred in Quebec only after 1930.9 This characterization and the teleology that underpins it fail to take account of Ryan’s specific stance within the constellation of francophone Quebec intellectuals, in which, during the postwar period, there was no single dominant model or form of socialization or engagement. Indeed, historians need to reflect further on a culture in which men such as Ryan or his close contemporary, that resolute modernist Gérard Pelletier, could succeed in becoming intellectuals in the years after the Second World War through a commitment to social and cultural activism, and not because of the possession of specialized academic credentials. This was an environment in which even those, like the young Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who did possess university credentials adopted the posture of the turn-of-the-century “maverick” journalists and social critics in order to secure a public. And in this critical respect, they followed the path beaten by Quebec’s two most celebrated postwar intellectuals, the slightly older Gérard Filion, director of Le Devoir, and André Laurendeau, perhaps the most central figure in the nationalist movements of the 1940s and 1950s, both of whom operated as journalists outside of university and government. Ryan, Pelletier, and Trudeau succeeded in acquiring the prestige of older figures such as Abbé Lionel Groulx and Esdras Minville, who are usually derided as “traditionalists.” Yet, we would, if we followed the conventional typology of intellectuals, have to reckon both Groulx and Minville as more “modern” than their younger counterparts, because they were trained professionally within the disciplines of history and political economy, derived their authority from this specialized knowledge, and held positions within universities. In order to make sense of this rather fluid status of intellectuals in Quebec, we need to carefully position their world between two divergent national historiographies, which correspond to methodological choices. English-speaking historians emphasize “intellectual history,” in contrast to their French-speaking counterparts, who write of the “history of intellectuals,” the latter phrase implying a socio-behavioural element more

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The Hand of God

attentive to the various contexts in which intellectuals work and form their identities.10 Historians of France claim a “universal” significance for the “politicized” model of intellectual that developed in that country after the trauma of the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s;11 the British trope is to posit, either positively or negatively, the “absence” of intellectuals as a way of celebrating or lamenting their “exceptional” position vis-à-vis Europe (read, France);12 Americans write about the “decline” of the intellectual as a defender of a highbrow, humanistic culture in the face of mass culture, media celebrity, and the institutional pressures of academic specialization.13 There is, I would argue, throughout these historiographies a tacit acceptance of the French model of the identity of intellectuals as politicized figures, centred around engagement with “universal” questions such as “the rights of man,” carving out an emphatically secular identity as the key to their degree of autonomy in their respective societies. To be a “real” intellectual, one has to eschew theology and liberate oneself from denominational forms of religion, in order to achieve the ability to communicate with a wider public. Quebec historians have been more interested than their English-Canadian counterparts in pursuing the “history of intellectuals” model, largely because of the perceived “secularist” element of the identity of the intellectual. In a society whose key forms of public communication were long dominated by Catholic institutions and modes of discourse, the emergence of the figure of the “intellectual” (which some posit as beginning in the 1930s but more definitively so after 1945) is viewed as coextensive with the emergent modernity of Quebec culture and society and with the roots of a supposed “new” type of nationalism that has fostered the current political fissures between federalism and sovereignty.14 In situating both Claude Ryan and his fellow intellectuals who contributed so much to the cultural ferment of Quebec’s postwar years, it is  important to appreciate that, despite the cultural and linguistic ties between Quebec and France, the central difference between the two societies was in the forceful institutional and intellectual presence of the Catholic Church. Indeed, the most significant element for undertaking a “history of intellectuals” in Quebec during the first four decades of the twentieth century was the high degree of success enjoyed by the Church in fostering the emergence of a group of both clerical and lay intellectuals, active in both university departments and social movements around a type of social science devoted to discussing and solving the “social question” through a synthesis of Catholic doctrine and new sociological knowledge. The overriding



Becoming a Public Intellectual in Postwar Quebec 9

question that preoccupied intellectuals throughout these decades was how French Canada, as a Catholic nation, would navigate the challenges of urban-industrial society, much of whose trajectory was controlled by foreign capital, while being increasingly subjected to the inroads of Protestant individualism and Anglo-American civilization.15 They were relatively untroubled by the French debate over the oxymoronic nature of the term “Catholic intellectual,” given the classic definition of the intellectual as requiring autonomy as key to self-identity,16 as there was no identifiable group of “secularist” intellectuals in early twentieth-century Quebec, and arguably not until the 1960s. It should be said, however, that lay intellectuals confined themselves to exploring the realms of sociology and economics and did not seek to pronounce on theological matters or the internal governance of the Church, a sphere that was explicitly off-limits to anyone outside of the Church hierarchy. If anything, the dominant presence of the Church gave a somewhat “British” inflection to Quebec intellectuals, in that their educational formation was highly structured by the Greek and Roman humanism taught in the classical colleges. Their attention to the “social question” made them, as Stefan Collini has observed of their British counterparts, more interested in local, historical, and qualitative concerns, rather than in the programmatic cosmopolitan and philosophical agendas of French intellectuals.17 We can use this insight to appreciate that the dominant interwar model of a French-Canadian intellectual was Abbé Lionel Groulx, the priesthistorian who did much to launch the professionalization of the historical discipline in his own society and was a leading voice in explicating a nationalist synthesis of Catholicism and French-Canadian identity. More tellingly, the explicit adherence to Catholic social doctrines displayed by both lay and clerical intellectuals anchored them even more solidly in the orbit of altruism and idealism than were the British “public moralists” so well evoked by Collini. And it was the figure of the intellectual as “public moralist” that Claude Ryan self-consciously strove to emulate and refurbish within a francophone society that, between 1945 and 1970, was in the throes of social, cultural, and political modernity. The title of this book, The Hand of God, refers to a celebrated 1978 misquotation of an interview Ryan gave at the moment of his decision to leave journalism and enter politics as leader of the Quebec Liberal Party. Widely derided for his arrogance in believing that all his decisions were directly guided by divine intervention, Ryan explained that, while he was convinced of “divine guidance” behind his choice of a political vocation, he was explicit that “I don’t

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The Hand of God

think God is carrying me by the hand all the time … but I think his will is manifest in several imperceptible manners that become clearer only if you have in your self the quietness, the calm that is required.” What he actually meant, he continued, was that he had tried to make major decisions in his life from the larger perspective of “the Christian mystery of vocation.”18 His explanation admirably captures his own view of his intellectual and political role, as mediating sacred and secular imperatives for his contemporaries. In so doing, Ryan believed that he exercised a type of “moral magistracy” from which he could judge, critique, and guide the elected leaders of a modern democracy. Indeed, the sacrosanct position of moralists was, in his eyes, essential to the functioning of a healthy democracy. His life as both a social activist and journalist was lived under the fundamental conviction that Catholicism could at once be the stabilizing element of public consensus in French-Canadian society in Quebec and express and encompass the democratic values to which it aspired. Although he always eschewed the designation of “nationalist,” he articulated the hopes of many of his contemporaries that a modern nationalism, shorn of its tendencies towards ethnic exclusivism, was not incompatible with a socially conscious liberalism, and that Canada’s survival depended, not on eradicating nationalism from the political state, but in seeking to accommodate the national aspirations of English Canada and Quebec in a federal polity whose ethic was a commitment to dialogue. In this respect, he incarnated an outlook that stood outside what has become, since the advent of Pierre Trudeau in federal politics, the conventional historiographic shorthand, that modern liberalism and nationalism are irreconcilable polar opposites.19 Viewed from this perspective, Ryan’s career as a major exponent of mid-twentieth-century social liberalism’s struggles against a resurgent hyper-individualist brand represented by Pierre Trudeau places him at odds with a recent Canadian historiography that has defined liberalism in monolithic, hegemonic terms as a “totalizing philosophy” founded on a “hierarchy of principles, with formal equality at the bottom and property at the top.”20 Standing within a fertile current of liberal ideas anchored in transatlantic progressivism, Ryan would have most emphatically not subscribed to such static definitions, preferring to see liberalism – or liberalisms – as a movement or energy galvanizing central concepts of liberty, rationality, progress, individuality, sociability, a common good, and limited and responsible power. In particular, liberals like Ryan believed that the claims of individual rights were always embedded in, and responsible to, a set of organic communities culminating in the



Becoming a Public Intellectual in Postwar Quebec 11

state.21 And he most certainly subscribed to an important subset of liberal thinking, popular among social thinkers between the Second World War and the 1970s, that imagined the future of Western societies not in capitalist terms but as undergoing social and economic developments that would lead humanity beyond capitalism.22 Ryan would have stood bemused by key tenets of recent Canadian historical discussion surrounding liberalism, most notably the contention that “Catholic Quebec” was “distanced” from liberalism “by reason of nationality and religion,” and that the period following the 1940s was one of “passive revolution,” in which Canadian liberalism vanquished its internal and external enemies.23 Indeed, his education and vocation as a social activist would have made him acutely aware of that Canadian particularity in the transatlantic world of social reform: in both English Canada and Quebec, the current of progressive liberalism to which he subscribed found its most welcoming home in Protestant and Catholic religious institutions that forged influential expressions of social analysis and endeavour, and in Quebec this encounter was seamlessly imbricated in the passionate debates about the future of the French-Canadian nationality in North America.24 What many historians have largely written off as an intellectually sterile era of liberal “hegemony” after 1940, passing over in silence the very existence of a rich seam of liberal progressivism or social liberalism, Ryan experienced as a time of both intense exaltation and bitter ideological confrontation. The exultation arose as Quebec, in the throes of the Quiet Revolution, emerged as one of the major North American citadels of social liberalism; the confrontation, as a liberal creed dedicated to the harmony of individualist and communitarian impulses was assailed by a rival brand of liberalism dedicated to the supremacy of the individual, incarnated in the person of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. This was a struggle whose significance far outweighed the acrimonious public debate between federalists and partisans of Quebec sovereignty. Surely Ryan’s career provides an invitation to historians of Canada and Quebec to take ideas seriously, to heed the injunction of C.A. Bayly, the eminent historian of India, that liberalism is something more than “a discourse masking the exercise of social and political power,”25 and to begin a serious excavation of the diversities, tensions, and ambiguities that existed within postwar liberalisms.

1 The New Christendom A Poor Knight’s Quest, 1925–1945 There is nothing that man desires more than a heroic life. Jacques Maritain, Humanisme intégral Let us not fool ourselves, Catholicism is not that temperate religion that has been presented to us; it is not only made up of little compartments and of formulas; it does not wholly dwell in narrow practices, in the playthings of old maids, in all that sanctimoniousness … It is raised up and made pure by other means; but we must enter into its burning zone, we must find it in the mystique … that is the soul of the Church itself. Joris-Karl Huysmans, En route

The first of May was moving day in Montreal in 1937. The sidewalks of the working-class neighbourhoods of Saint-Henri and the East End were jammed with tables, stacked chairs, and armoires, while women filled basins with clothing. In this city, where renters greatly outnumbered homeowners and where the Great Depression had ravaged the employment prospects and the meagre savings of many ordinary Montrealers, moving day occasioned considerable anxiety. Many families lacked the means to pay the rent and were forced either to move to cheaper accommodations or to take refuge temporarily with neighbours. The proliferation of slum conditions, with several families occupying one dwelling, added to the misery and indicated that many families had slipped downwards to the status of proletarians.1 Further west, in the suburb of VilleÉmard, the Ryan family waited excitedly with their household effects stacked in the doorway of their rented house on Boulevard Monk. Blandine Dorion-Ryan, the head of the family, was a single mother who had struggled resolutely, ever since she and her three sons, Gérald, now



A Poor Knight’s Quest, 1925–1945 13

fourteen, Claude, twelve, and Yves, aged nine, had arrived in Montreal in 1931, to stave off the inevitable downward slide into the ranks of the urban underclass as a result of the abandonment of the family by her husband, Henri-Albert Ryan. This resourceful woman had not only kept her family together but had kept the family’s fortunes above water, largely in the absence of assistance from relatives and neighbours. Indeed, 1937 was the first year that the Ryans had moved since they had arrived in Montreal, and it was impelled neither by penury nor debt. Through her devout piety, manifested during the winter of 1937 as she and her sons trudged miles from Ville-Émard to the Oratoire Saint-Joseph on the north slope of Mount Royal to attend the funeral of Frère André, and her assiduous attention to members of the clergy, Blandine had somehow secured coveted places for Gérald and Claude at the new Externat Classique Sainte-Croix, a classical college recently opened by the Pères de SainteCroix to serve the culturally disadvantaged East End. Admission to the classical college was the passport not only into the service of the Roman Catholic Church, which offered sons of modest families a wide array of opportunities for a prestigious career in the priesthood, but also into the ranks of Quebec’s francophone professional bourgeoisie, whose stately homes graced the leafy streets of Outremont, far to the north on the other side of Mount Royal. For Blandine, higher education was the means by which the Ryan family could escape the everpresent threat of descent into a working-class existence. However, the college, whose new building opened in 1934 on Rue Sherbrooke in the suburb of Maisonneuve, was a day school rather than a boarding school and was located far from Ville-Émard. Because its intense academic and religious activities required the boys to attend six days a week, the Ryan family would have to move closer to it. So it was with the anticipation of a new beginning, rather than with resignation, that the Ryan family spent moving day in Montreal. They could finally afford such optimism, especially when, to the great astonishment of their neighbours on Rue Monk, a truck from the city public works department came to convey the Ryans and their household goods to their new home on Rue de Chambly in Hochelaga, a scant two blocks from Externat Sainte-Croix.2

“Our poverty was discreet and dignified”3 Blandine’s life prior to 1937 was one of both downward mobility and unceasing struggle, through hard work and educational achievement, to

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set her family apart from the surrounding working-class morass. Born in 1899 into a prosperous family of Lachute, a town in the county of Argenteuil, northwest of Montreal, her own family circumstances were upper middle class. Her father, J.-M. Dorion, was a businessman and real estate agent, fluently bilingual, who clearly recognized the advantage of a higher education, even for young women. Although the sudden death of her mother, Augustine, under tragic circumstances of childbirth in 1903, compelled Blandine to live with her grandparents between 1903 and 1910, her father recognized her intelligence and talent, as he took the unusual step of preparing her to study law. He placed her at the convent of the Soeurs de Sainte-Croix, and later at the Soeurs Notre-Dame in Ottawa, where Blandine not only perfected her proficiency in English but learned music and the full curriculum of the classical humanities, essential to any further professional education. She balked, however, at attending the ubiquitous sewing classes.4 Blandine’s education was extraordinary for a young woman of the francophone middle classes before the First World War and could have been obtained only in Ontario, as classical colleges for women were, at this time, recent innovations and were not well established in Quebec until the late 1920s.5 By all accounts, she was a stellar student, and in 1917 her father bought her a car as a reward for coming first in her class, a further illustration of the family’s status and prosperity.6 Then, disaster struck, with the sudden death of her father in 1917. Her hopes of becoming a lawyer were dashed, as Blandine received nothing from the estate, and creditors seized what was left, including her prized automobile. She was forced to go to work. Assisted by an uncle, she obtained a position as a clerk in Montreal at the National Breweries Company, where he was the general manager. These adverse circumstances did not stifle her urge to self-improvement through education, and she used part of her salary to take evening courses in literature at the Université de Montréal, then located in the downtown’s Quartier Latin. Sometime in 1919, she met a young man, Henri-Albert Ryan, who was, like Blandine, an office clerk, and they were soon married. Little is known of Henri-Albert, beyond the fact that he was always referred to as “an Irishman,” although his mother was French Canadian, and his use of the French form of his name indicates that he considered himself part of Montreal’s francophone community. Indeed, of the two, Blandine appears to have been the most “anglophone,” in both upbringing and culture. Apparently, Henri-Albert’s personal qualities left much to be desired, as Blandine and her sons remembered him as “hardly a model” parent, with



A Poor Knight’s Quest, 1925–1945 15

a fondness for the bottle and outings with male friends that frittered away much of his salary.7 The combination of Blandine’s intense yearnings for superior cultural attainments and Henri-Albert’s improvident bonhomie was not a good one, and a rocky marriage was subject to further tensions with the arrival of three sons in less than five years – Gérald, born in 1923, Claude in 1925, and Yves in 1928. Undoubtedly, Blandine heartily resented the downward mobility the marriage seemed to have saddled her with, as Henri-Albert moved the family far from Montreal in order to take office jobs: in 1926, they moved to Port-Alfred on the Saguenay; in 1928, further inland to Dolbeau, upriver from Lac SaintJean, which in the 1920s was the northern frontier of Quebec. So straitened were the Ryans’ circumstances that Blandine, unable to afford new clothes for her growing sons, had to spend the better part of her day behind a much-detested sewing machine to repair and remake clothes for them, and as a source of income to supplement the family budget.8 The year 1931 saw the Ryans back in Montreal, living on Boulevard Monk in Ville-Émard, but it was apparent that Henri-Albert was no longer living with the family. He had, in fact, ceased to support them in 1928. What effect did this marital disharmony and his father’s abandonment of the family have on Claude? Any retrospective psychologizing would be hazardous, as there is so little personal recollection about Henri-Albert and no description of activities that he undertook with his sons. We have only Claude’s disparaging reference to his father as a “prince charming,” a man with very little substance or sense of application, but this might also be read as a criticism of his mother, who was taken in by the first man who paid attention to her.9 Whatever HenriAlbert’s shortcomings, it is evident that Claude and his brothers wanted their father to return to the family household. Many years later, he stated at his mother’s funeral that he had desired a reconciliation between his parents, but that Henri-Albert’s death had occurred before he and his brothers were old enough to exert any effort in this direction.10 It would seem that the Ryan brothers’ wish to reunite their parents was not simply wishful thinking, as they knew where their father was living. He continued to live in northeastern Quebec and, at the time of his death in 1938, was serving in the respectable position of town clerk of Sept-Iles.11 Blandine never remarried, preferring to raise her sons through her own efforts. More tellingly, the marital and economic woes of his parents contributed in the mid-1940s to Claude’s choice of a career as a social worker specializing in fostering greater skills and cultural opportunities among male youth aged fifteen to twenty-four. The peripatetic life of declining

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The Hand of God

opportunities led by his parents in the 1920s, and his mother’s heroic efforts to provide during the Great Depression, made him acutely aware of the uncertain future faced by young men of the francophone lower middle classes who, lacking advanced professional or technical training beyond superior primary school or the occasional course at a business college, were compelled to become ill-paid clerks, married too early, and teetered on the brink of a working-class condition because they were unable to acquire the educational opportunities for advancement into the ranks of the middle class. This, in turn, had a deleterious impact on their own sons, who were forced to replicate this precarious pattern of existence because lower-middle-class fathers were unable to provide sufficiently for their children’s professional advancement to a more stable career. Was it entirely coincidental that Pierre Elliott Trudeau, René Lévesque, and Claude Ryan, the three great protagonists in the struggle that unfolded from 1967 to 1982 between Canadian federalism and the sovereigntist aspirations of Quebec – and the lesser-known, but equally significant, conflict that divided Quebec federalists – all lost their fathers during the 1930s?12 It would be far-fetched to suggest that each man sought to compensate for the absence of his father by aspiring to become a great leader, a “father of his people,”13 as this ignores the role of contingency and the fact that, of the three, only Trudeau had aspirations as a youth for political leadership.14 Indeed, Ryan, Lévesque, and Trudeau spent a large part of their adult lives as resolutely anti-political figures with a healthy scepticism of partisan politics, choosing careers in cultural and social activism. Each man came from quite different social backgrounds – Trudeau, the son of a successful businessman, was clearly the most comfortable and was able to afford an international education following the Second World War. Lévesque’s father, a lawyer from the Gaspé, clearly belonged to the professional middle class. Ryan was the most disadvantaged of the three, his family occupying a social penumbra between lower middle and working class. It is fair to say that the dereliction of his father and life in a household controlled by his mother left Claude with a compelling and permanent interest in the problem of authority and, in particular, the need to articulate and enhance the authority and dignity of men in the family, which in turn underpinned the institutional and cultural authority of both the church and the state in modern society. He expressed neither in the form of a rebellious anti-authoritarianism, nor, like some of his contemporaries – including the young Pierre Elliott Trudeau – did he admire European dictators. In contrast to Trudeau, Ryan entertained no youthful fantasies of making himself into an authoritarian leader



A Poor Knight’s Quest, 1925–1945 17

modelled on the fascist examples of Charles Maurras, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, or Belgium’s Léon Degrelle.15 Rather, in all the institutional settings in which Ryan was involved – youth movements, the Roman Catholic Church, a modern independent daily newspaper, and the relationship between the Quebec and Canadian states – his concern was with carefully defining a relationship and equilibrium between, and in fostering respect for the boundaries demarking, legitimate, “constitutional” authority and the twentieth-­century imperatives of individualism, the rights of conscience, and mass democracy. The Ryan family’s early years in Montreal were clearly difficult ones. In 1933, it was estimated that, in Canada’s largest city, 30 per cent of the population (approximately 250,000) people were living on direct assistance from the municipal government, and Blandine found herself among the more than 60,000 unemployed. While the cost of rent and food certainly declined between 1929 and 1933, direct assistance provided only $10.50 per month towards rent, $5.05 in winter for food for a family of five, $1.35 for heat, $.75 for clothing, and $.90 for electricity.16 Ryan remembered that, from the first, his mother instilled in her sons “a concern for the meticulous use of hard-earned money” and that she kept an account-book of the daily expenses of the household, motivated by a horror of indebtedness to family and neighbours.17 Apart from direct relief administered by the municipality, neither the federal nor provincial governments offered any schemes of social security prior to 1938, when, as a widow, Blandine would have received a mothers’ pension, one of the few reformist measures instituted by the government of Premier Maurice Duplessis and the Union nationale.18 Yet, she was bereft neither of skills nor connections in Montreal. Fluently bilingual, Blandine had friends in both francophone and anglophone communities in the city and quickly established herself as a reliable and indispensable adjunct to lawyers, doctors, and corner grocers who needed business letters and legal documents composed and translated.19 If the Ryan family experienced economic penury during these years, Blandine ensured that her sons would not experience any cultural deprivation. The family home, Claude recalled, was always “maintained in a personal, proper, and orderly manner,” and, at school, the boys always wore clean clothes, either sewn by hand or acquired in the bargain section of Eaton’s department store.20 By all accounts, Claude’s mother was a demanding taskmaster, intent that her sons should, from a very early age, be proficient in the correct forms of written and oral French. Claude was more precocious than his brothers, evincing an early interest in

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reading, an ability he acquired at age four by watching Gérald do his homework. When enrolled at Saint-Jean-de-Matha, the local primary school, he was immediately promoted from Kindergarten to Grade  1 when the principal, Antoine Maltais, realized that he could read. By Easter 1931, Claude, age six, was placed in Grade 2, nearly catching up to his brother.21 Claude’s reading and verbal skills were further honed by the fact that, despite the family’s precarious finances, Blandine subscribed to a newspaper, which the boys learned to read at an early age, the news forming the subject of daily discussion at the family dinner table. The family had a radio, and Blandine insisted that her sons spend Sunday afternoons “in utter silence,” listening to the Metropolitan Opera performances broadcast on Radio-Canada. On holidays, she would take her sons to Montreal’s historic landmarks like the Chateau Ramezay or on promenades to the quiet, leafy upper-class neighbourhoods of Westmount and Outremont, the zenith of the stable, professional life she had mapped out for her sons. Then, there was the Roman Catholic Church, one of Quebec’s most powerful social institutions but also, more significantly, a source of spiritual comfort and guidance to thousands of ordinary people confronted with the loss of jobs, family tensions, and the daily difficulties of providing for their families. Reflecting on the values that his mother cultivated and inculcated, Claude emphatically stated that “in the first rank of these, she placed the religious principles taught by the Roman Catholic Church.” Prayer occupied a central place in this austere home, and the family recited the rosary every evening. It is also evident that Claude and his brothers felt an imperative towards involvement with the local parish church beyond simple attendance at Sunday Mass, and they could always be relied on to serve as altar boys when other parish youth failed to show up. During the 1930s, such service was not an obligation to be taken lightly, as it involved fasting from Saturday evening until after Sunday morning Mass.22 While, at one level, the Great Depression gave rise to a powerful modernist current of intellectual, institutional, and social experimentation in both international Catholicism and among francophone Catholics in Quebec – a current that Claude encountered when he entered college in 1937 – his initial experience of Catholicism was a far more traditionalist popular piety espoused by the lower middle and working classes. As promoted by preachers, religious tracts produced for the mass market, and radio broadcasts, this was a Catholicism that proclaimed the necessity of a return to God’s law as the only way to escape the social and economic



A Poor Knight’s Quest, 1925–1945 19

morass of the Depression. This form of piety denounced social vices and immorality in clothing, blasphemy, profanation of the Sabbath, conjugal unfaithfulness, and the importation of a scandalous American youth culture into Quebec. Its conservative social message rested upon the elucidation of close links between individual and collective sinfulness, and it counselled humility, obedience, and resignation as antidotes to social upheaval.23 However, Blandine’s commitment to equity and social justice as fundamental principles in human relationships gave a different inflection to the traditionalist impulses of popular piety. She considered her personal devotion to the Oratoire Saint-Joseph, where “the humble personage” of Frère André – the uneducated college porter at Collège NotreDame – had already established a reputation for miraculous healing, an expression of her conviction that Catholicism must strive to overcome social differences.24 Another, more calculative, aspect to Blandine’s piety existed alongside what was undoubtedly a sincere and intense commitment to the faith. The Church, through its network of thirty classical colleges managed by religious orders, directly controlled access to the professional middle classes. For families, like the Ryans, who lacked the means to pay the school fees, only the prospect that members of the clergy or Catholic organizations dedicated to encouraging religious vocations would assist financially offered the guarantee of escape from their lower-middle-class existence. This assistance with college fees depended, obviously, on scholastic achievement, the fruit of intense work and study, coupled with Blandine’s careful and ongoing maintenance of contacts with priests and religious in the parish and at the oratoire to bring her sons’ abilities to the attention of the clergy. In addition, there was undoubtedly the reciprocal expectation that, in exchange for a scholarship, one, or more, of her boys would become diocesan priests or enter one of the rapidly expanding religious orders.25 Given Claude’s mother’s constant struggle to maintain the cultural standards of the middle class as a bulwark against the everpresent threat of slipping downwards on the social scale, her engagement with a particularly pious form of Catholicism was also a line of demarcation by which she sought to distinguish herself and her family from her working-class neighbours. Like the middle-class lawyers and doctors from whom she earned an income composing letters and translating, priests and religious were part of a network of contacts and connections upon whom she relied in her campaign to ensure that her sons became educated, professional men, a fact directly alluded to by Claude in his eulogy to his mother.26 There is no doubt that, in terms of religion,

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The Hand of God

culture, and morality, Blandine saw herself and her sons as superior to those she would have considered proletarians. Consequently, Gérald, Claude, and Yves had few friends among the local boys of Ville-Émard, who undoubtedly would have resented the eager-beaver Ryans showing up their absenteeism as altar boys and would have scoffed at their pretensions to listen silently to opera rather than cheer for les Canadiens or engage in a good old-fashioned game of shinny. Conflict was inevitable. It came to a head when some local youths had the effrontery to pull down Blandine’s clothesline and to bully her sons as they made their way to school. Unhesitatingly, she turned to her connections in the legal profession, approaching a local police captain, who at first refused to get involved. The matter was resolved when Blandine, undoubtedly assisted by one of the lawyers for whom she worked, threatened to call on the chief of police. Three days later, a carload of police arrived at the Ryan residence to escort the boys to school. Crowed Blandine, “We were left in peace after that.”27 If Blandine could call out the Montreal police to defend her family against the depredations of proletarian youth, it should come as no surprise that a city public works truck arrived to ensure that the Ryans moved smoothly across town. Her resourcefulness secured a similar degree of success with the Church. We can certainly wonder whether her walk from Ville-Émard to the Oratoire Saint-Joseph to attend the funeral of Frère André in the depths of winter in 1937 was entirely motivated by pious zeal. Was it purely coincidental that the Pères de Sainte-Croix, responsible for building and maintaining the shrine at the oratoire,28 had admitted Gérald and Claude to the new externat in the East End in the fall of 1937? An intense Catholic piety, a commitment to intellectual success, austere self-discipline, and an aspiration to universal high culture: these were the values instilled in Claude Ryan and his brothers under Blandine’s tutelage. However, if the traditionalist Catholicism of the Depression preached resignation and the folly of seeking political solutions to social disorder, Blandine did not heed this message. She was a ferocious Liberal partisan and activist, a devotee of the orthodox party line of Premier LouisAlexandre Taschereau, the successor of a long series of provincial Liberal administrations stretching back to 1897, and to the federal party led by Mackenzie King, even though it was out of office in Ottawa between 1930 and 1935. Claude remembered that his mother had a keen interest in politics and public debate, and “from our earliest childhood, we accompanied her to political meetings.”29 Significantly, the one happy story that remains from Blandine’s marriage to Henri-Albert involved



A Poor Knight’s Quest, 1925–1945 21

her  political activism. During the 1927 provincial election, when the Ryan family was living in the Saguenay area, a neighbour, a Conservative Party worker disgruntled by Blandine’s excessive partisanship, took Henri-Albert aside and threatened to burn an effigy outside the Ryan home because “your wife made my candidate lose the election.” Claude’s father advised him to “settle things with her, it doesn’t bother me. She also lost me my vote, but I am able to accept the fact that our candidate lost.”30 While this political partisanship may have contributed to the Ryans’ marital woes, Blandine certainly turned it to her advantage when Henri-Albert abandoned the family, as she was able to add to the family’s income by working at the poll on election day.31 The rock-solid Quebec Liberal edifice was gravely shaken by the Great Depression. The province’s serious economic and social troubles mobilized a new breed of populist Conservative politicians such as Camillien Houde and Maurice Duplessis, who reached out to unemployed urban elements and lambasted the courtly Premier Taschereau as a pliant tool of the federal Liberals and of anglophone corporate big business. These populist politicians also attracted the financial backing of francophone nouveau-riche businessmen such as Charles Trudeau, the father of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who saw in their authoritarian style of leadership the antidote to the social disorder caused by democratic politics.32 Worse was to come for Liberal loyalists like Blandine Ryan. The provincial Liberals were themselves at odds over how to deal with the economic crisis. They were split between Taschereau and his circle, who favoured the liberal free-enterprise orthodoxy of fiscal rectitude and balanced budgets, and a younger faction of progressive reformists, clustered around Paul Gouin, the son of Lomer Gouin, Taschereau’s predecessor as  premier, who advocated a more aggressive approach. These young reformers were inspired by new social thinking within the Roman Catholic Church, which, in the papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, proclaimed the bankruptcy of economic liberalism and urged Catholics to avoid any compromise with the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and communism. The Church’s remedy lay in the promotion of the doctrines of social corporatism, which offered a sophisticated intellectual alternative to the dominant liberal orthodoxy, incipient social democratic political currents, and authoritarian ideologies of the far right. Despite the evocation of a certain nostalgia for the Middle Ages, corporatism was not simply a backward-looking traditionalism. It was an emphatically modern socio-political ideology designed to address the ills of Quebec’s urban civilization. Nor was it a state corporatism of the

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type practised in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, because it sought its dynamic of social organization, not in totalitarian state compulsion and control, but in a system of voluntary groupings – family, trade unions, professional organizations – that mediated between the individual and the anonymity of modern industrial civilization. Social corporatism was a communitarian and hierarchical vision of society. It promised to restore order by substituting social harmony for the anarchy of competitive capitalism or class conflict and espoused a system of decentralized authorities capped by the state, which was identified, not as the tool of the partisan wrangling of bourgeois democracy, but as an impartial umpire devoted to the common good, resolving conflicts among groups and factions, and devolving many of its powers to organized groups. In this context, corporatism was a compelling blend of localized consultation and decision making that, despite its hierarchical character, was actually an attempt to democratize economic and political life.33 Social corporatism rapidly gained ground in the francophone intellectual community, in large part because it combined a commitment to social reform with the nationalist imperative of enabling French Canadians to contest the control of AngloAmerican capital over Quebec’s economy.34 In 1934, critical of Taschereau’s immobilism and inspired by the social corporatism of the Programme de restauration sociale, Paul Gouin and his young Liberal reformists launched Action libérale as an ideological pressure group within the Quebec Liberal Party. During 1934–35, these progressives made common cause with a group of vocal critics of the  hydroelectric “trust” in Quebec City in seeking to reduce FrenchCanadian dependence on “foreign” economic control by nationalizing the power companies. In early 1935, both these political groups combined to form Action libérale nationale (AL N ), whose pledge to dispute Anglo-American “mastery” won the enthusiastic support of young college activists such as Camille Laurin but caused intense anguish to Liberal loyalists such as the Gaspé lawyer Dominique Lévesque, father of René Lévesque, who considered the Taschereau regime corrupt but could not break with the party of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.35 In the provincial election in the fall of that year, the A L N formed an electoral alliance with the provincial Conservative Party, a new political formation known as the Union nationale, led by Maurice Duplessis, a defection that brought to an end nearly forty years of unbroken Liberal rule.36 The Ryan household eagerly followed these political upheavals, but, despite their intense Catholicism, they were not attracted to nationalist social corporatism or persuaded to stray from Liberal Party orthodoxy.



A Poor Knight’s Quest, 1925–1945 23

Their newspaper of choice was the daily Le Canada, the Montreal organ of the Liberal Party. Between 1930 and 1934, the paper was guided by the formidable intellectual presence of Olivar Asselin, whom Blandine would have approved of, not only because he was a key intellectual expositor of the party creed, but because of her commitment to teaching her sons correct forms of written French expression. Of the latter, Asselin was an unrivalled master. He was a complex figure who can best be described as a “liberal” nationalist. Like Henri Bourassa, he had initially moved within the orbit of a “pan-Canadian” nationalism that preached bilingualism and recognition of the educational rights of francophone and Catholic minorities outside Quebec.37 But, after the First World War, while Bourassa distanced himself from nationalist causes in the name of a universal Catholicism, Asselin’s nationalism began to resemble that of Abbé Lionel Groulx, taking on more affirmedly “French-Canadian” overtones in envisioning a society centred on the St Lawrence Valley. Yet, unlike Groulx, and despite his admiration for the “combative” journalism of Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet, leading figures of the Paris Action française, Asselin was neither a social conservative nor a defender of clericalism, and he strove to seek the unity of all nationalist tendencies within French Canada. His views reflected the community of interests that had grown up between provincial Liberals and nationalists during the 1920s: a firm commitment to provincial autonomy, promotion of compulsory education, measures to improve the teaching of business and industrial trades in French, a program of agricultural modernization and mechanization, a full amnesty for those who had resisted conscription, and the effort to found an independent university in Montreal.38 In 1930, Asselin’s journalistic talents were sought out by Liberal Party patrons worried about the rising influence of Camillien Houde’s populist brand of Conservatism, and they placed him at the helm of Le ­Canada. Asselin transformed what had been a rather shoddy, boring partisan rag into an intellectual presence on the Montreal scene, instituting regular outstanding columns of literary criticism that sought to engage with French avant-garde novels and philosophy. More significantly, Asselin was a firm advocate of free enterprise individualism and, on a regular basis, mercilessly flayed the Catholic social encyclicals in his editorials, especially the vogue of social corporatism, which he dismissed as “the clerical wing of communism.” Unlike Lionel Groulx and many of his former nationalist associates, Asselin vociferously denounced anti-­Semitism and deplored the rise of European fascism. Such opinions not only indicated Asselin’s allegiance to party orthodoxy but also

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illustrated his fundamentally “liberal” and even “libertarian” individualism. Upon leaving the desk of Le Canada in 1934, Asselin launched two other journalistic ventures, the weekly reviews L’Ordre and La Renaissance, which adopted an even more sharply honed critique of clericalism. While he praised Catholicism as a non-violent means for blocking the spread of revolutionary ideas (which he profoundly feared) and for preventing French-Canadian assimilation into Anglo-Saxon civilization, he deplored the clergy’s stranglehold on teaching positions in secondary and university education.39 In this respect, he was a key spokesman for the social and professional aspirations of the francophone middle classes, and his constant attempts to affirm his independence both of party and of the Church earned him the admiration of Claude Ryan,40 who always mentioned Asselin’s Liberal / liberal journalism as one of the key influences on his developing convictions. Ryan would absorb a great deal of Catholic social thought and its corporatist emphasis after 1937, but Asselin’s emphatic rejection of such ideas as a solution for the Great Depression furnished him with a pluralist, democratic view that shifted such thought more emphatically towards a progressive, social liberal creed.

“Each one is at once the sculptor and the marble, where he must chisel his own flesh”41 The Externat Sainte-Croix was a large new building located in the East End of Montreal on Rue Sherbrooke, occupying an entire city block between Avenue Bourbonnière on the east and Rue Nicolet on the west. Its opening in 1930 was a “major event,” as it was the first classical college established east of Rue St-Laurent, in a disadvantaged district dominated by the Angus Railway Shops of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Macdonald Tobacco, and a number of petrochemical industries. This classical college, operated by the congregation of the Pères de Sainte-Croix, was an educational experiment designed to serve the needs of working-class and lowermiddle-class parents who wished to furnish their sons with an education in the classical humanities but who could not pay the fees of a boarding school. The externat was a day school that offered the eight-year humanistic curriculum at the cost of ten dollars per month,42 a program trumpeted by the Pères de Sainte-Croix as “dispensing a moral and intellectual education like a university in a large city.”43 This program included an intense initiation to the preeminence of the Latin and Greek classics, to the glories of the French language and literature, to the idea of history – a



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subject referred to as the “mistress of life” – and to scholastic philosophy, this last discipline authoritatively interpreting the principles of Christian doctrine with “austere orthodoxy.” Together, these elements were, in the words of their promoters, intended to uphold the national identity of French Canadians in Anglo-Saxon North America, providing them with the intellectual and spiritual resources to enable them to “react against the assimilative enterprises of the conqueror and against the utilitarian education of our neighbours.”44 When Claude and Gérald arrived at the college in the fall of 1937, they joined twenty-five other boys drawn mainly from the humbler classes of Montreal, sons of workers, small shopkeepers, teachers, civil servants, and transport employees. Their very admission to the college, despite the fact that it did not have the social prestige of its arch rival, Collège Sainte-Marie, the Jesuit institution in downtown Montreal, placed the Ryan boys among the ranks of the francophone elite of Quebec. In 1939, the thirty classical colleges in the province taught 9,000 students, about 1/300 of the total population.45 Blandine’s insistence on self-disciplined study had prepared them well, as teachers deemed them so proficient in the rudiments of Latin that they were immediately placed in “syntaxe spéciale,” essentially allowing them to skip a grade. Although the externat’s pedagogical approach was novel in that it did not remove students from their familial surroundings, the intensity of its academic and religious demands ensured that students were in fact removed culturally and intellectually from their social environments. The regimen was severe: students were expected to attend classes from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Saturday, with half-holidays on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Religious exercises were frequent and obligatory, ranging from daily prayers before and after each class, recital of the rosary in study hall at the beginning of the afternoon, a visit to chapel following afternoon recess, high mass on Sundays, with its compulsory communion, from which students were excused only if coming from a long distance, and an annual three-day retreat at the beginning of the school year. This, of course, did not include special events such as the annual pilgrimage to the Oratoire Saint-Joseph, with its special devotion to the person of Frère André, or the regular individual consultation with a spiritual director who, ever alert to signs of an incipient vocation to the priesthood, carefully monitored religious progress or backsliding in his charges.46 Between 1937 and 1942, Claude developed such familiarity with the structure of both written and spoken Latin and Greek that he could eventually write with fluidity in the classical languages. The first three years

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drilled him and his classmates in translation. To be promoted to belleslettres (year 5), a student had to know all the rules of Latin prosody, “to write Latin with elegance … easily explain authors analogous to Virgil or Titus Livy, master the elements of Greek, to have assimilated at least twothirds of a vast program of Greek roots, explain The Retreat of the Ten Thousand,” and to have acquired a sound knowledge of history and algebra. In belles-lettres, teachers ratcheted up the expectations, requiring that their students have the skills to translate one hundred pages of Virgil’s Narratives, three books of the Aeneid, and three songs from the Iliad or the Odyssey, all this to prepare them to write a Latin poem on a given subject. Then they were introduced to that mainstay of French classicism, Nicolas Boileau’s Art poétique, as well as Cicero and Tacitus, training them to compose speeches in both Latin and French on a given subject.47 Diagnosed with a heart valve condition that exempted him from vigorous school sports, and, by his own admission, uninterested in either the cinema (a frequent subject of critique and commentary in the college newspaper, the Trait d’union) or “worldly activities,” Claude poured himself into his studies, easily topping his class in each of his seven years at the externat. He achieved this academic rank without any undue subservience to college authorities or by alienating his classmates. The picture is of a student who was well-respected by both his teachers and peers, and who was always ready to discuss politics during school breaks, to mentor his fellow students having difficulty with their studies, and even to bring his knowledge of Greek to the assistance of priest-teachers whose own knowledge of the nuances of translation had grown rusty since their own days at college. It was apparent that this adolescent “with an electric brain” was not going to be pushed around intellectually even by those wearing the clerical collar. The animated classroom jousts he frequently engaged in with teachers always ended with Claude stating: “Father, you think this way, I think otherwise, and I have as many grounds for my opinion as you do.”48 There is evidence, however, that the college authorities were suspicious of his individualist temperament and that considerable tensions between Claude and his teachers lurked below the surface. When the Pères de Sainte-Croix wanted him to compete for the Prix Collin in Greek, he refused, declaring, “If you think that I am going to win this for you after all the trouble you have given me, you are mistaken.” His refusal to complete the translation that would have been submitted to the competition cost him his standing in Greek that year, and he had to settle for second place, rather than his usual first.49



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We can trace a good part of this adolescent truculence to the fact that the classical courses did not seriously challenge Claude’s intellectual abilities. In contrast to his classmates, who arrived at the college each morning frantically trying to finish translations at the last minute, he would breezily walk in with a newspaper under his arm, undoubtedly either Le Canada or, as a deliberate provocation to the college authorities, JeanCharles Harvey’s overtly anti-clerical weekly Le Jour.50 Invariably the teacher began by asking him if he had done his homework, and he always replied no, but was always able to complete it before the end of afternoon study period. This performance went on, morning after morning, for seven years, and explains Ryan’s oblique reference to being constantly given a hard time by his teachers Ryan remembered the college teaching as somewhat second-rate, probably an accurate assessment, given that the Pères de Sainte-Croix preferred to assign their best faculty to their flagship institution, Collège Saint-Laurent, a more traditional boardingschool, rather than to the education of the sons of workers and clerks of the East End. Still, he recalled some remarkable instructors, such as Latin teacher Father Clément Cormier, an Acadian priest who later became a key figure in the cultural resurgence of his people in New Brunswick, and especially Father Paul-Émile Guillotte, a sympathetic yet shy man, “but very studious and having great literary finesse,” who taught history inspired by the lectures Lionel Groulx was giving at the Université de Montréal. Ryan praised his lectures on the Patriotes of 1837 as “a model of rigour and balance.”51 If the classical curriculum’s ceaseless regimen of translation provided him with little stimulation, it is clear that the externat’s location on Rue Sherbrooke, an easy tram ride from the Quartier Latin around the intersection with Rue Saint-Denis, where a number of faculties of the Université de Montréal were then located, offered far more possibilities to attract an adolescent with intellectual aspirations. On half-holidays, Claude could be found visiting booksellers in Rue Saint-Denis or poring over books in the municipal library on Rue Sherbrooke or in the Bibliothèque SaintSulpice. Despite its supposed second-rate quality, the college itself was not entirely devoid of extracurricular activities: on 25 November 1938, a French Franciscan came to speak about “the French spirit at the present hour,” which afforded students “some understanding of contemporary movements in France”; in February 1939, Father Sauvé, an Oblate priest, recounted his journey to Franco’s Spain, accompanied by “a film with sound.” Other events included rousing college debates on weighty themes such as “should Quebec separate itself from Confederation”; a return

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visit by Father Sauvé, to present a film warning of worldwide communist atrocities;52 and, perhaps less appreciated by the students, a visit from Father Henri Saey, a famous preacher, who warned smokers and time wasters who preferred ping pong to chapel that they were on the road to eternal damnation. Happily, the teachers at the externat seemed to have held a more “moderate” attitude towards these vices.53 Claude Ryan’s college years exhibit one puzzling gap. For someone who was to become Quebec’s leading journalist and a major public intellectual, he evinced very little interest in the college newspaper, the Trait d’union. During his seven years at college, he authored only two articles, both of which appeared before his completion of the first six-year cycle of study in 1942, with nothing from his final years in philosophy, when it might have been expected that, as a senior student, he would have taken a more visible role in writing about his ideas. Indeed, there is no record of Ryan joining any student club or activity after 1939, beyond an account of a visit to the vacation colony at Sorel, where he seems to have managed the servery as “chief refectioner,” praised for the “mastery and devotion” with which he saw to the efficient distribution of food and his ability to “calm the most turbulent.”54 Ryan’s near-total journalistic silence during these years stands in direct contrast to the activities of those with whom he would later engage in the political arena. His federalist counterparts Pierre Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier, for example, both served as editors of their respective college newspapers, with Pelletier also editing the national newspaper of the Jeunesse étudiante catholique in the 1940s. Among his sovereigntist rivals, Camille Laurin edited the prestigious Université de Montréal’s student newspaper, the Quartier latin, Fernand Dumont regularly contributed poetry and philosophical and literary criticism to the newspaper of the Petit Séminaire at Quebec, and even René Lévesque proclaimed his early allegiance to the nationalist credo in the newspaper of the distant Séminaire de Rimouski.55 Thus, Ryan’s reticence requires some explanation. One element is his intense individualism, which made him something of a loner: college journalism required not only teamwork but also a willingness on the part of juniors to take menial jobs on the paper and defer to senior students, some of whom Ryan would have certainly considered his intellectual inferiors. Then, there was his tense relationship with the college authorities, who no doubt worried lest Ryan, a “tête forte,” manifest some of the same anticlerical proclivities as Jean-Charles Harvey. However, perhaps the most significant factor was that Ryan, as a “poor boy” on scholarship, was required by both his mother and his sponsors to direct his energies



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towards a priestly vocation. His studies were therefore an all-absorbing priority, leaving very little time for extra-curricular activities such as college journalism. In other respects, it would be difficult to avoid the conclusion that, despite his reservations about the calibre of his intellectual formation, the externat did broaden Ryan’s horizons in a number of significant ways. As a community of boys governed by male clergy, it offered a powerful alternative model of authority to the female-dominated family that he went home to every evening, and demonstrated to him that, in contrast to the improvident father who had abandoned his family, there were men with the capacity to exercise responsible leadership. It is against this background that we should read his first contribution to the Trait d’union, written in 1940, describing the return of classes after the Christmas holidays. The Father Superior, according to Ryan, assembled the entire school to award the first-term prizes for academic excellence, prizes that he had, like a good family head, provided out of his own pocket, generosity that the fifteen-year-old Ryan believed would make “our big family” even more attached to both the Reverend Father Superior and the college. “Our hearts,” Claude wrote, “must vibrate in unison with that of Our Father. The president of the graduating class made himself the interpreter for all of us, in presenting the Reverend Father with the homage of our best wishes and our respect.” Thanking the student body, Father Superior, “like a father to his children, gave us his benediction. A very familial scene that stirs the most slender fibres of our heart!”56 The elision he made between worshipping God (Our Father) and the homage given to the college superior evoked the interlocking concepts of warm paternal love and generosity (both spiritual and temporal) and the authority that men must earn by responsibly exercising spiritual headship in their families (here, in carrying out the benediction). Such ideas carried enormous emotional resonance for the fatherless Claude. That the authority of men in the family – as both a reliable and generous economic provider and as a spiritual leader who linked the family group to God – should be the subject of his first published piece of writing indicates that private experience and the sense of a public vocation had begun to converge. During the late 1930s, the externat contained a second, more embryonic strand of masculinity that was to have enormous implications for the development both of Ryan’s ideas and his eventual choice of career. André Picard, a persistent senior student, succeeded, in the face of considerable opposition from the college authorities, in establishing a Boy Scout troop, to which Claude belonged in 1937, 1938, and 1939. The

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objections of the clerical teaching staff involved two major concerns: first, despite the blessing given to its philosophy by no less a figure than Cardinal Villeneuve in 1935, Scouting was Anglo-Protestant in inspiration; second, because its activities were practical rather than spiritual and emphasized a balance between physical culture and intellect, they considered the Scouts a contradiction, in certain key respects, to the model of Christian humanism that governed the college.57 Underlying these concerns was the suspicion that the “Catholicizing” of the Scouts would legitimize a type of Christian holiness that elevated the status of laymen. And they were not entirely wrong in this assessment. The externat’s Scouts, drawing upon a powerful impulse to emulate the Middle Ages that was so influential internationally in the interwar Catholic world, eagerly seized hold of the figure of the knight, a warrior in the secular realm whose moral uprightness, evident in the fact that he was “a clean type of guy who would never have recourse to disloyal methods or belowthe-belt tactics,” was coupled with an intensive spiritual conditioning, the imperative to seek “a state of grace.”58 The message was that a life devoted to Christ need not be spent as a cleric in the spiritual realm, but could also be pursued by an active citizen concerned with Christianizing the temporal order.59 That aspirations to knighthood were central to the activities of the college troop was evident in the description of the Scout camp at Lac Corbeau in 1938, in which Ryan participated: Night has fallen. Like the day that has just died in a wondrous ­spectacle, we sit by a slowly fading open fire where a few embers are still burning. Around it are seated twenty-five knights listening in contemplative silence to the words of their chaplain (R.P. Gérard Leblanc, c.s.c.) who closes this marvellous watch-night. A most ­moving spectacle, a truly formative movement. To you, young knights, all our admiration and encouragement.60 The watch-night was the moment of promise, in which the Scout, “the modern knight,” continued the medieval tradition of kneeling before the altar and asking for the necessary strength to be faithful to God’s law and his principles, consecrating his arms to the defence and extension of God’s Kingdom on earth, Christendom. For adolescents like Claude Ryan, this was the moment in which “they could realize their childhood dream, to be a knight,” by swearing fealty to God, the Church, and their country.61 The Scouts were also the most “Canadian” of all the youth associations that proliferated in Quebec during the 1930s, and it is of



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some significance that Ryan was drawn to this movement, rather than to nationalist youth groups such as the Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne or the Jeunesses patriotes. The Scouts never attained the stature of a mass movement in the 1930s, with a total membership that barely surpassed 2,000 in 1940, but their “Canadian” and even somewhat pro-British orientation was clear in the promise of the Catholic Scouts to serve God, King, and Canada.62 Here, the Ryan family’s staunchly pro-federalist Liberal allegiance was clearly a factor. Through the Scouts, Claude Ryan began his initiation into one of the most significant cultural movements in the history of modern Quebec, a movement in which he was to become one of the key figures in the years after the Second World War: the revalorization of the moral and intellectual competence of the laity. To be sure, the Catholic clergy exerted considerable control over the Scouts, providing chaplains for all the local troops, but, although clearly “Catholic” in orientation, the movement was characterized by a lack of religious formalism, a more “interior” style of piety that emphasized familiarity with the Gospels, and considerable freedom to innovate in liturgical matters, such as open-air Masses while the Scouts were in camp. At least in theory, leaders and chaplains were supposed to adhere to a religious pedagogy that focused on “explanation” rather than imposition.63 The consequence of this more activist and practical approach to religion was a decline in the social and cultural authority of the clergy, a reordering of priorities in a society in which the institutional face of Catholicism, and the pre-eminence of the clergy in the social sphere, was regarded as one of the constituent elements of the French-Canadian nation. After the mid-1930s, francophone Catholics in Quebec felt the backwash of the pope’s fateful decision in 1926 to formally condemn Charles Maurras and his extreme brand of right-wing French nationalism, the Action française, on the grounds that Maurras, in his campaign to destroy the French Republic, had not only subordinated the universal tenets of Catholic doctrine to nationalism, but, more subtly, had attempted to weaken the ideal of a Christian social and political order by advancing the anti-Christian notion that one could, in fact, separate political activism, which could be governed by entirely secular criteria or ideologies, from Christian belief.64 Papal apologists, such as Jacques Maritain, an erstwhile disciple of Maurras’s, leapt into the fray with works such as Primauté du spirituel (1927), which asserted that Christianity could not be separated from the socio-political sphere, but that Christian doctrine must always take precedence over secular ideologies such as nationalism.

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While it would be tempting to view this moment as a “desolidarization” of religion and politics,65 such was not the case. It was certainly a caution to Catholics that their beliefs could not be read as synonymous with nationalist particularisms – and, in this sense there was a definite uncoupling of Catholicism and nationalism – but, as we shall see, there was far more to “politics” than nationalism. During the 1930s, Maritain was most certainly the prophet of a “new Christendom,” a Christian socio-political order founded on the values of pluralism and democratic fraternity in which the institutional Church did not “manage” the social directly but left this task to competent laypeople. As a defender of a Christendom ruled by “universal” spiritual criteria, Maritain emerged as the undoubted cultural hero of the Catholic world during the 1930s, and, with his frequent visits to North America, his views had wide currency among French-Canadian Catholics. At one level, the pope’s 1926 decision should have aroused little soulsearching among Quebec’s Catholic intellectuals, for whom there was no nationalist movement analogous to Action française. Even the nationalist circle around Abbé Lionel Groulx never believed in the primacy of politics over the spiritual and would have always placed allegiance to the tenets of Catholicism above the ideology of nationalism.66 Yet, this decision did inject a note of caution into the strategies of French-Canadian intellectuals, who felt that they were not as free to call upon the institutional Church to uphold their nationalist position, which suggested at one level the necessity of a de facto division of activity between clergy and laity, the one managing the spiritual realm, the other, the temporal. This constituted the initial but key fissure in the ultramontane idea of an omnicompetent clergy.67 In French Canada, the Great Depression was viewed by intellectuals, and particularly by Catholic youth, as not merely an economic crisis, but also a cultural and spiritual one necessitating a “revolution” – at its most intense, a complete rupture between past and present that would bring to an end the failure of liberal-bourgeois society and usher in a “new order” based upon the primacy of spiritual values in politics and society. Ranging from the new specialized Action catholique youth movements, which were imported to Quebec following the papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931,68 to the young nationalists clustered around Gérard Filion and André Laurendeau in Jeune-Canada, and from the progressives who promoted social corporatism to the quasifascist advocates of an independent Quebec such as Paul Bouchard,69 all subscribed to a new vision of the conjunction between Catholicism and the social order that would at once “save” the human person from the



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anonymity of modern industrial civilization and affirm the distinctiveness of French Canada in Anglo-Saxon North America. Nationalism was strangely revived during this decade of crisis in liberalism and the capitalist order and was given a new lease on life through the connections forged by its advocates with social corporatism. Young nationalist Catholic intellectuals raised the possibility of a radically different type of public life than that hitherto defined by the gyrations of discredited parliamentary politicians.70 However, the return of nationalism did not provide a source of cohesion among Quebec francophone elites. The confusions and tergiversations of the decade-long attempt by the Catholic hierarchy to find an organizational formula that would somehow combine “Catholic” action and “national” action involved a struggle that pitted the nationalist icon Abbé Lionel Groulx against the young Dominican Georges-Henri Lévesque, a rising star of the new Catholic social thought.71 The protagonists in the debate all remained “nationalists,” in the sense that they would have all subscribed to the importance of defending FrenchCanadian cultural and political rights within both Confederation and Anglo-Saxon North America. Two key questions were at stake: Should Catholicism itself become politicized in the defence of French Canada? Or, should its values serve a higher “political” purpose, the promotion of universal human values that transcended any particular nation? Debates on these questions ensured that the Quebec intellectual community was dominated throughout the 1930s, and well into the postwar period, by the central question of the frontier between the religious sphere and the political realm, and by the constant preoccupation to minutely elucidate the distinctions between spiritual and temporal.72 And in this bewildering hodge-podge of movements and ideological currents, young men like Claude Ryan found both their traditional Catholic piety and the intimate conjunction between Catholicism and French-Canadian nationalism at once challenged and modified by personalism. This new complex of values called them to a life of activity, a “realism” that aspired to transform the inequity and spiritual emptiness of mass society into a more solidaristic community, a modern Christendom. The young men and women of Ryan’s generation did not encounter personalism first and foremost in the classrooms of their colleges, dominated as they were by the ancients and by the French classicism of the seventeenth century. Personalism constituted an emphatically modern, even “modernist,” set of intellectual and moral imperatives that radically transformed Catholicism in both Europe and North America between

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1910 and 1960. It acted as a cultural solvent of the alliance of Catholicism not only with the classical humanities but also with the universe of fixed hierarchies defended by the tenets of social corporatism. Personalism was neither a philosophy nor an ideology: rather, as Martin Meunier and Jean-Philippe Warren have effectively reminded us, it was first and foremost an “ethic” that insisted upon the dignity of the human person, and was therefore compatible with a wide spectrum of ideological allegiances. Personalism was the conjunction of three key sensibilities: first, a realism that accentuated the importance of apprehending the needs and aspirations of humans in their concrete situations; second, a radical antideterminism, which was subversive of arguments from authority in all spheres of thought; and, third, a hope – based on the view of the individual as standing in a system of dynamic relationships with other persons and institutions – of defining a new communitarian society oriented to the spiritual fulfilment of humanity (in contrast to the strictly materialist criteria of socialist communitarianism).73 The emphasis on the transcendent dignity of the human person constituted a radical critique of Catholic doctrines of human sinfulness, which had held sway since the Counter-Reformation, and introduced the criterion of history to judge the authenticity of theology and doctrine. Such a criterion transformed the perception of theology and doctrine as eternal and immutable, their interpretation closed to all but specialist clergy, to one of disciplines in dynamic conversation with modern philosophical, psychological, and social scientific discoveries. And, in so doing, personalism advanced the possibility that Catholic laypeople engaged in building a new society that both respected the dignity and sought to enhance the human person might be more authentic exponents of the Catholic religion than were the clergy. By elevating the social as the key interface between God and humans, personalism proclaimed an end to the spiritual monopoly and the omnicompetence hitherto claimed by the Catholic clergy.74 During the 1930s, young French Canadians did not encounter these ideas in the first instance by reading philosophy or theology. Rather, the medium for the transmission of personalism throughout the transatlantic francophone world was literature, and, in particular, the novels and writings of a remarkable group of turn-of-the-century French writers whose work, written largely before 1914, can be dubbed a “Catholic revival.”75 Assiduously frequenting the booksellers and libraries clustered around the Quartier Latin, Ryan mentioned reading the novels and writings of all the central figures of this revival: Barbey d’Aurevilly, Ernest Psichari, Léon Bloy, Charles Péguy, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Georges Bernanos.



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The literary pages of Asselin’s Le Canada first brought these works to his attention. Reading them in their entirety during college years, he remembered, “brought home to me the fiery image of a Christianity whose love sought to consume the entire earth.”76 More significantly, this school of French writers presented a young man like Ryan with a powerful cultural alternative to the equation between Catholicism and the classical humanities, or the identification of Catholicism with “tradition,” projects that enlisted the allegiance of older nationalists such as Esdras Minville and Abbé Groulx, and that ultimately served to sustain the dominance of the clergy. All of these writers were laymen who claimed the right to advance their own interpretations of Catholic doctrine, some of which were at odds with the institutional Church. While frequently identified with the political “Right,” some of these writers, including Bloy and Péguy, abhorred the anti-Semitism of Charles Maurras and often espoused aspects of the socialist critique of capitalism and liberal democracy.77 Another unifying feature of this powerful literary current is that most of the major figures were converts to Catholicism, an aspect seized upon by Ryan, who declared that, “ever since my college years I was obsessed by the problem of the return of modern man to the Church.” These major talents of the French literary pantheon, and especially their concern to place spiritual realities at the centre of their narratives, played a key role in disabusing him of the idea that modernity was anti- or non-religious, that “intelligence seemed to have passed into the opposite camp or had become indifferent to the Church.”78 Collectively, the impact of this French Catholic literary revival, when coupled with their exposure to the philosophical works of Jacques Maritain, whose impact on the Catholic world was felt largely in the interwar period, was to convince young people of Ryan’s generation that not only was Catholicism compatible with elements of modernity, but that it was itself the supreme form of modernity, a dynamic ultramodern creed that could give modern humans access to both the eternal and avant-garde cultural transformations.79 In the novels and writings of these French authors, personalism was not presented as a coherent philosophical system. Indeed, one of the central leitmotivs of the Catholic revival was a mysticism that expressed contempt for all forms of rationalism, well captured by Charles Péguy’s detestation of university credentials as a modern evil, the product of an intellectual aristocracy that had cut itself off from the common people.80 However, elements of personalism were present among all these writers, especially because they all gravitated towards a “neo-realist” style. “Realism” did not simply mean preoccupation with the temporal or

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material realities of human life, but rather a wider preoccupation with presenting the mystical and the miraculous as genuine components of human experience. The visit of the dramatist Henri Ghéon to Montreal in 1939 elicited the supreme praise from students at the Externat SainteCroix that his “Christians, his saints, are so anchored in the real that at times, through their mediation, divine grace touches the soul of the actor.”81 Indeed, in reacting against the sentimentalism of many nineteenth-century religious writers, these authors insisted upon the harsh, austere, and demanding elements of Christian faith and life.82 And, significantly, none of these writers spared their fellow Catholics, pungently denouncing the sentimental, routine religious lives of the majority of “pious” believers, the mediocrity of the clergy, and the excrescences of baroque religious art and ritual as stifling an authentic life of faith. Charles Péguy, perhaps the most widely read member of this literary constellation among young Quebec Catholics of the 1930s and 1940s,83 was a disciple of the French philosopher Henri Bergson and was consequently the most “personalist” in his insistence upon human liberty as the most fundamental of all mysteries. Like Bergson, he identified habit and routine as the source of all evil and degradation; these vices, he believed, were created by institutions, which were webs of habit and authority that ultimately constrained human freedom. Freedom of human persons could be achieved only through the irruption of charismatic individuals – prophets, who were frequently intellectuals (though preferably intellectuals who worked outside institutional systems), and who would provide their fellow human beings with a “mystique,” defined by Péguy as a dynamism or impulsion to action. However, the authenticity of the “mystique” was always imperiled by “politique”84 – not to be confused with political action itself, as Péguy did not believe in apoliticism or quiescence in the name of preserving the purity of one’s ideals. Rather, “politique” represented empty words, sloganeering, ready-made solutions, a lack of ideals, and a search for peace and quiet that robbed Christianity of its authenticity.85 What is telling is that Péguy did not exempt the Roman Catholic Church from his ferocious anti-institutional critique: it was this aspect of personalism that, arguably, had the most powerful impact on Catholicism in North America and western Europe between 1920 and 1960, by positioning all institutions, even religious ones, as somehow inauthentic and, further, by subverting the authority of the class of those designated to serve the institution, the clergy, by questioning their moral fitness to rule. The personalist aesthetic that Ryan encountered in the novels and writings of the early twentieth-century Catholic revival was a harsh and



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demanding one. His literary predilections kept the heroic figure of the soldier-saint constantly before him.86 This strenuous ideal encouraged young people to consider that activism seeking to transform the world constituted a holiness equivalent to or greater than the clerical spirituality that had been elevated as the norm; it also induced young men of Ryan’s generation to emphatically demarcate their spirituality from that of many of their fellow Catholics, whom they usually saw as pious women or the older generation. This distancing was best expressed in 1939 by one of Ryan’s classmates during a three-day retreat to the Trappist monastery at Oka. Identifying this “vocation to holiness” as a central vector of an emerging generational divide in French-Canadian society, Omer Bergeron maintained that it was above all “a call to hearts young and generous enough who want to accomplish all that Christ has assigned to them.” Bergeron drew a clear distinction between the all-consuming holiness of his own generation and the facile moralizing of its elders, rejecting “the egoistic conception that many hold regarding their Faith; of that category of Catholics who are nonetheless very assured of their salvation, who waste their lives in a soft quietude, undoubted enemies of evil, but friends to pleasure, such that these baptized people imagine that the mere observance of a virtuous moral code exhausts their duty to God.”87 It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, for Ryan, this Catholic literature was a powerful source of masculine values, offering an active, “realistic” type of holiness that challenged both the moralistic, classical model prescribed by the clergy and the more traditional piety of his mother. Summing up his experience, Ryan used the strongly masculinist terms of “spiritual vigour” and “religious robustness” to describe the overall impact of the Catholic novelists.88 In this respect, the cultural horizons of young French-Canadian males of Ryan’s generation were very distinct from those of their EnglishCanadian Protestant counterparts. The prolonged Depression centred Anglo-Canadian models of masculinity on the figure of the economic provider;89 however, French Catholic personalism pushed this even further, defining a hyper-masculinity that sought to affirm male superiority in the religious and cultural realm by creating dichotomous categories of religious behaviour that were highly gendered. Ryan particularly enjoyed the works of Joris-Karl Huysmans, a former disciple of the “naturalist” tradition in the style of Émile Zola, who turned his talents in the early twentieth century to writing a number of novels of conversion, such as En route and La cathédrale. What was ­significant about Huysmans, according to Ryan, was his presentation of the dilemma of the unbeliever who “discovered the historical, doctrinal, and spiritual splendours of Christianity through the study of art and

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resurrection” but, at the same time, was “repulsed by all the ugliness and mediocrity that concrete Catholicism carries with it.”90 Indeed, Huysmans summed up for Ryan the central spiritual and cultural divide faced by the men of his generation, torn between the desire of their elders to “live in an easy mediocrity that protects them against damnation” or “a total abandonment” to Christ’s call to holiness.91 Ryan drew from Huysmans a number of key elements that were to mark his religious thinking and social analysis during the postwar period: first, an accent on the spiritual unworthiness of Catholics themselves, with special scorn for the mediocre calibre of the clergy; second, a verbal violence that played on dichotomous spiritual states and that was deployed to radically juxtapose authentic Christian holiness with mere religiosity; and, third, the insistence that Christianity was a “hard” religion, evident in the name of Huysmans’s hero, “Durtal.” Perhaps most troubling to contemporary moderns was that Huysmans’s supreme ideal was that of vicarious suffering – the notion that, of one’s own free will, the true Christian could, by voluntarily engaging in prayer or physical or moral suffering, offer reparation to God on behalf of the entire collectivity.92 Under the impress of Cardinal Newman’s writings, Ryan reworked this latter element in the 1950s into an injunction constantly warning believers not to trust too much in Catholicism’s worldly success, that the efforts of Christian activists, though they must keep striving to realize Christ’s Kingdom, were in fact destined for suffering and failure. However, such thinking lay in the future. As Ryan experienced it in the 1930s, personalism was both a spiritual ethic and an aesthetic, one that enabled him, through a language both “realistic” and “heroic,” to appropriate the central and distinctive criterion of the modernist temper then penetrating Catholic Quebec. This modernism enunciated that the central fissure in his society no longer lay along lines of economic function or class (the consideration uniting socialists, communists, liberals, and Catholic social corporatists), but was cultural and spiritual and was expressed in the radically clashing spiritual styles within Catholicism itself, characterized by those of older versus younger generations, of women versus men, of a privileged clerical class versus heroic laymen.

“The poignant drama of Christian intellectuals”93 Personalism was a sharp, austere set of intellectual priorities that inspired Claude Ryan and others of his generation with the ambition not only to



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chisel away the spiritual, moral, and cultural excrescences in their own souls, but also to sculpt French Canada into a Christendom, a sociopolitical order that would conform to their aspirations to transcend both the pusillanimity of liberal capitalism and the nightmare of modern totalitarian systems. In this quest, Ryan’s attempt to bring developments in the Catholic intellectual firmament to bear upon the transformation of his society gravitated between two men he regarded as spiritual mentors: the priest-historian Abbé Lionel Groulx, who was involved with nearly every expression of nationalism and youth activism that arose in Quebec during the 1930s, and the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, an international cultural hero who was the inspiration and model for an entire generation of Catholic intellectuals. Maritain stood at the vanguard of attempts to enunciate a new universal Christian humanism that would supplant the static mental categories of the classical curriculum, and whose ambition lay in redefining the relationship of Catholicism, nationalism, and the political order. Ryan directly encountered the thinking of both men, not only through their writings, but also through their frequent lectures delivered in Montreal in the late 1930s and 1940s, events that the Pères de Sainte-Croix encouraged their students to attend.94 Ryan was always willing in later life to claim an intellectual filiation with Maritain. He identified him as foremost among the French personalists in influencing him, during his college years and in the 1940s, to adopt, under Maritain’s influence, a more “universalist” reading of the conjunction of Catholicism and nationalism. Looking back, he stated that, in 1945, “I was for democracy, I had serious reservations about nationalism because we had just emerged from a war and had seen what ravages nationalism had caused in Europe.”95 Although he noted that the intellectual atmosphere of the college had been highly impregnated with Groulx’s influence, with star students like himself frequently “inheriting innumerable numbers of some of the works of the national historian”96 as prizes, Ryan was more circumspect about his debt to the abbé. A large part of the explanation for his reticence lies in the fact that, as he outlined in “Le père spirituel du Québec moderne,” the obituary he wrote while editor of Le Devoir on the occasion of Groulx’s death in 1967, Groulx had frequently uttered complaints regarding what he termed “the Action catholique generation,” critiquing their leaders for “choosing to opt for the universal by inconsiderately jumping over the national.”97 As one of the leading figures in postwar Action catholique, Ryan would have personally borne the brunt of this critique, but, by 1967, he had to some extent stepped back from the old

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quarrel between Catholic action and national action. Groulx, the title of the article forcefully reminded its readers, was the “spiritual father” of modern Quebec, whose work had done so much to reveal the FrenchCanadian people to themselves, “to make us conscious of our tragic situation and of our original destiny, to inspire us with confidence in the creative value of its [i.e., the French-Canadian people’s] own genius.”98 And significantly, in published articles and private correspondence, Ryan never denied Groulx’s spiritual paternity for his own convictions. Even though he was clearly troubled by revelations that emerged during the 1990s that Groulx’s brand of nationalism had been heavily impregnated by pro-fascist and anti-Semitic convictions, he emphatically stated that “I still believe that Groulx was a sincere and loving priest whose aims were the inculcation of Catholic principles in young people and the ­economic and political liberation of his people.”99 But Ryan was explicit that Groulx’s influence on the men and women of his generation lay not in the realm of Catholicism, but of economic and political action. In a letter written shortly before Groulx’s death commenting on a study of his religious thought, he mused over the ambiguity of a thinker whose Catholicism remained circumscribed by the horizons of ultramontanism, but whose political thought “was modern and remains current.” Ryan commended the author for putting to rest the “legend,” propagated by Graham Fraser, Mason Wade, and Esther Delisle, that Groulx’s thinking had been infected with the biological-racialist ideas of Comte de Gobineau. Indeed, when it came to Groulx, he always emphatically rejected any imputation of racism, declaring in 1964 that “it never occurred to me that this priest could have been a racist.”100 Ryan wondered if it was not time for historians to redress the balance, to explore the paradox between Groulx’s evident anti-Semitism and the analogies he drew between the divine destinies of the Jews and the French-Canadian people.101 Ryan credited Groulx, “a professor of national energy,” as the principal artisan of “a new political culture under which Quebec would, henceforth, beginning with the Quiet Revolution, perceive and affirm itself as the primary site of its own development, the link with Canada passing into second place even for many federalists.”102 Still, despite his respect for Groulx, Ryan maintained, “I was not one of his disciples.”103 At one level, Ryan was being truthful. Politically, he, his mother, and brothers were political Liberals whose reading of Jean-Charles Harvey’s nonconformist anti-nationalist weekly, Le Jour, during the Second World War would have dosed them with at least a healthy scepticism towards Groulx’s conservative, messianic nationalism. Promoting the vision of a



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bilingual, multi-ethnic Canadian nation that sought to minimize ethnic nationalisms, Harvey republished with great gusto anti-fascist articles penned by Jacques Maritain and Georges Bernanos, two of Claude’s favourite writers, and frontally attacked the anti-Semitism evident in many quarters of Quebec’s francophone intellectual community.104 In terms of their attitude towards French-Canadian participation in the war effort, in contrast to the overt pro-Vichy and anti-conscriptionist sentiments of many of their contemporaries, including Pierre Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier,105 the Ryans seem to have been staunchly Canadian in their orientation and supportive of the war effort. Claude’s heart condition would have disqualified him from active service, but Gérald, who left the Externat Sainte-Croix without completing his classical course, volunteered for the Canadian Army in 1943.106 There is no evidence that Blandine or any of the Ryan brothers, in stark contrast to most members of the young intellectual elite who were to make such a mark on postwar Quebec, had any truck with the anti-war sentiment typical of the extreme nationalist movements of the period.107 But if Claude Ryan’s political Liberalism placed him outside the profascist, anti-Semitic orbit typical of a large section of the French-Canadian intelligentsia, there is strong evidence to suggest that, in a broader sense, his views on the forces shaping Quebec’s past and the place of French Canada within Confederation were strongly marked by the ideas of Lionel Groulx. This was not surprising, for he recalled that, in college, he read at least a dozen of the priest-historian’s works.108 He rather cryptically acknowledged this in his 1967 obituary of Groulx, significantly calling him a “hyphen” (trait d’union) between three generations of Quebec intellectuals.109 It was not simple coincidence that Trait d’union was the title of the student newspaper at the Externat Sainte-Croix. Much has been made about Groulx’s reworking of nationalism in a more narrow, ethnically defined sense during the 1920s and 1930s and his focus on Quebec’s achievement of greater autonomy within Confederation as a precursor to contemporary movements of political sovereignty in that province. However, the Groulx that Ryan encountered was a thinker whose concept of nation was “essential” rather than “territorial,” one that viewed “French Canada” as not coextensive with the political state or territory of Quebec, but as a moral, cultural, and spiritual phenomenon encompassing the dispersed communities of Catholic francophones elsewhere in Canada and the United States. This conviction marked Groulx as a staunch federalist dedicated to the defence of the 1867 constitutional compact, which, he believed, was founded upon the ­

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recognition of two equal nations within the territory of Canada.110 However, his federalism ran in a rather strict constructionist sense, as he was always vigilant to assert provincial autonomy and to counter any unwarranted attempts at centralization by the federal government, believing that any attempt to create a unified “Canadian nation” would entail linguistic and cultural homogeneity and the loss of French Canada.111 Groulx was an old-style Catholic conservative who viewed with distaste the irruption of Charles Maurras’s primacy of politics, which threatened a desacralization of French-Canadian national identity. The nation, for Groulx, was a cultural, voluntarist project and not a biological reality, and he considered it an entity distinct from the state, which distinguished him fundamentally from the totalitarian currents of the Right fashionable during the 1930s. As well, his conservatism, which identified authority as divine and providential in origin, ensured that he would not support a project for a rupture of Confederation leading to an independent French state based on popular sovereignty.112 Groulx’s ­messianism, which emphasized the providential survival of the FrenchCanadian nation, was always balanced by a second “myth” – that the  equality of French and English “founding peoples” enshrined in Confederation could be achieved through the eradication of mutual ignorance.113 Although, during the Second World War, Groulx certainly made public his moments of deep pessimism regarding the possibility of attaining a Confederation based on the full recognition of two founding peoples, it would be fair to say that he never forsook his belief in the “faithful execution” of the federal pact of 1867, by which he meant that French Canadians must be treated, from coast to coast, “as brothers” enjoying equal rights. Even though Ottawa, through its encroachments on provincial jurisdictions, no longer respected the basic principles of Confederation, he urged his audiences that Confederation itself must not be abandoned, as it was “the final consecration of the French fact,” “the legal expression of a true collaboration, collaboration between races, between provinces.”114 In this sense, the young men and women of Ryan’s generation, except for a separatist fringe, viewed French-Canadian nationalism as intimately linked to the Canadian Confederation itself. As understood by Ryan, Groulx desired “a strong French-Canadian people in their homeland in Quebec, a people accepted throughout Canada and whose ­culture would radiate throughout North America.”115 While Groulx himself could not envision Canadian nationality as anything more than a political construct or arrangement between the “ethnic” nationalisms



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of English and French, others, such as Ryan’s near-contemporary Guy Rocher, took a wider view, interpreting their nationalism not as narrow or ethnocentric, but as a vital element in forging an idea of Canada as a “project, a project of a society, of a country, of a nation other than what it appeared to us to be, dominated by the English and by the Englishlanguage majority.” For Rocher (and for a liberal-nationalist like Ryan), French-Canadian nationalism, with its claim to the recognition of two founding peoples, was a creative, progressive catalyst in this project, as it was working to move Canada away from the empire, towards independence, to foster a sense of a nation whose self-definition would be bilingual and bicultural.116 During his classical course, Ryan published only one lengthy article in  Trait d’union, significantly entitled “Famille chrétienne en 1760 et en 1941.” He began with an invocation of the providentialist dynamic of  French-Canadian history, learned undoubtedly from the classroom teaching of Father Guillotte and from attending the public lectures of the master himself, stating emphatically that the family was the key to explaining “what is, in my opinion, the complex miracle of our survival,” a primary cause around which others gravitated.117 However, it would be incorrect to read Ryan’s lovingly etched portrait of the inner spiritual life of the rural family as a simple parroting of Groulx. Though in some ways he was inspired by a lecture Groulx delivered in 1923,118 there were significant differences in tone and content. It is of some significance that Ryan did not exalt the role of institutional Catholicism and its clergy, who scarcely appear in his article; indeed, attendance at Mass comes across as something of an auxiliary appurtenance to the inner core of the family’s Catholicism, which was worked out in the dynamic of daily relationships among laypeople, husbands, wives, and their children. Here, the intersection between Catholicism and society rested on a kind of “personalist” core, in which institutions played a secondary role to human relationships in educating people to their faith. For Ryan, Catholicism was most emphatically something “lived” by ordinary men and women rather than contained in ritual, ceremonial, or moral injunctions administered by the clergy. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, for Ryan, the family, not politics or the institutional Church, was the key to the resistance and survival of both Catholicism and French Canada, providing the cultural resources enabling them to resist “the invasion of the Anglo-Protestant spirit.”119 The key element in both this miraculous cultural transmission of Catholicism and the survival of French Canada as a nation was the

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male figure of the father as spiritual leader, affectionately evoked, as in Ryan’s first piece of college writing, with the image of him blessing his children on New Year’s Day, the symbol of “paternal dignity that inspired in his children a respect that encounters its natural expression.” So powerful was this paternal authority, derived from the father’s spiritual competence, that it commanded “an innate model obedience” from his children, “which permitted no disagreement nor back-talk.” However, where Groulx and earlier nationalists placed sole emphasis on the father’s headship, Ryan’s idealized view of family life was considerably more egalitarian, demonstrating that, in a more general sense, the father’s authority in both spiritual and temporal realms depended upon “a close communion of feeling” between husband and wife, who jointly “ruled as masters over the hearts and will of their children.” Ryan’s Conquest-era family was also strangely modern in that it was emphatically nuclear – his portrait contained no reference to non-familial household dependants or extended kin. This portrait was an implicit acknowledgment of the new priorities emerging in the late 1930s and early 1940s among groups of reformist Quebec Catholics for whom the spiritual and emotional maturity of parents, and the achievement of these desiderata by children and adolescents, could be accomplished only in the context of a strictly nuclear family, one dedicated to the gradual achievement of “liberty” through education in both family and school.120 In one sense, this portrait of a French-Canadian family marked by warm affection, a protective male headship, and a cheerful obedience testified to a sixteen-year-old adolescent’s frustration that his own parents had been unable to find this type of peace and concord in their own marital life. However, it should also be read as the first articulation of an assertion that the nation’s past and future rested not on the grandeur of the external framework of institutional Catholicism – indeed, it is the father, a layman, around whom the religious life of the household centres, not the parish priest – but on a more “democratic” quality of the sturdiness of the religious lives of ordinary men and women exercised in their daily relationships and occupations. And, in the second half of the article, we encounter the glimmerings of a vocation that was to turn Ryan towards secular endeavour – the path of the knight active in defending and extending Christendom – rather than towards the more closed spiritual life of the clergy. The contrast between 1760 and 1941 was indeed a brusque one: the attractions of city life and industrial employment had induced many sons of rural families to leave the land, “and they quickly allowed themselves to be swallowed up in a wave of



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materialism, which has dragged them towards moral ruin.”121 In large cities like Montreal, French-Canadian working-class families were brought face to face with “a cosmopolitan population of shameless customs,” whose dedication to “a wave of pleasure” had turned them away from the duties of yesteryear.122 Here was the type of standard boilerplate conservative nationalist denunciation of the evils of urban life, immigrants – particularly Jews from eastern Europe – and the moral decay caused by North American individualism. But Ryan’s analysis was more subtle and less focused on the corruption of French Canada by the encounter with other ethnic groups. Indeed, he did not identify the presence of Anglo-Saxons or Jews as the cause of French Canada’s downfall; rather, he traced the corrosive inroads of modern individualism not to outsiders but to the moral choices made by Catholic parents to abandon their spiritual mastership, the key to the close family life of old, and remove themselves to cinemas and clubs, a path then followed by the children who, “ill brought up, take refuge in the street, a useful extension of the home for parents lacking a conscience.” Gloomily, he observed that “everyone pretends to be the master of the house, where in reality, no one is,” a state of social anarchy where “general licence has replaced the Gospel of Christ.”123 This anarchic individualism within the family, and the abandonment of the lived “democratic” or popular Catholicism of everyday life, had deleterious effects on the public life of the nation, beginning with the abandonment of public worship. The dynamic of this implicit theory of dechristianization rested not, in the first instance, on the relationship between individual faith and the institutional Church, but on the erosion of family relationships – the lines of authority that rested on lived religion – from within by ambient individualism and materialism, which then drew people away from formal public worship.124 The end point of the process of dechristianization was forcefully illustrated in Ryan’s image of an empty church, where the believer finds himself “in a vast solitude where a God, misunderstood and abandoned, weeps in this silence over the infidelity of those to whom he gave so much, but who wish to give him nothing in return.”125 Here, a human, feeling God lamented the loss not only of the vibrant rural family of old, but also of an entire people to Christianity, as individualism was corrupting French-Canadian nationalism itself, pushing it politically into deviant paths such as “racism” – by which he meant fascism and anti-Semitism – or communism.126 Here was the closest he came to an outright denunciation of the ideological choices made by many of his contemporaries, seduced by their yearnings

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for authoritarian leadership and a political order radically separated from Christian imperatives. In conclusion, Ryan exhorted his classmates to recoil from this doom, exhorting them to “pray God to grant us the grace to recover our vanishing faith, because a people without faith is a people without glory, and a people without God is a conquered people that has lost all hope of survival.”127 To be a French Canadian was, in the final analysis, to be a Catholic, and to be a Catholic was inseparable from the intimate and sentimental bonds of the nuclear family. For all its conservatism of tone, exaltation of a messianic destiny for French Canada, and glorification of the rural Catholic family, Ryan’s article marked, on two levels, a key stage in his intellectual formation. First, the line of transmission of religious values, beginning with family relationships themselves, and working outwards to institutional Catholicism, reveals a young man already questioning a vocation to the priesthood by clearly establishing laypeople as the key element in the survival and extension of Christianity in modern society. Second, the causal hierarchy he established – a Christian faith deeply rooted in the emotional lives and relationships of the family, which then determined the presence and authority of the institutional church as a public institution, and finally the seamless equation between Catholicism and French Canada – revealed where he stood on the central questions that divided young intellectuals in his society during the 1930s: Was religion superior to politics as a ­compelling form of action to transform the decadent liberal bourgeois order? Did the “universal” values of Catholicism trump the “ethnic” values of nationalism in ultimately determining the outlines of a “new Christendom,” that complex of institutions, values, and ideologies that incarnated Christianity in a transformed social order, so eagerly sought by Ryan and many of his contemporaries? Significantly, Ryan’s article was entitled “Famille chrétienne” rather than “Famille catholique,” an indicator that, while the qualities of male spiritual authority and the affectionate communion of spouses – the “mastery” directed to the education of children – incidentally served the ends of affirming FrenchCanadian national identity, they were above all universal, part of a moral universe of inherited Christian values transcending time and place, which must be reinvigorated in order to heal and regenerate modern industrial society from the cancer of individualism. Here we can discern the impress of the young Ryan’s second spiritual guide, Jacques Maritain. Ryan encountered Maritain’s work sometime after 1937, probably in the pages of La Relève,128 one of the proliferating small intellectual journals dedicated to rethinking the relationship between Catholicism,



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political action, and French-Canadian nationhood. Ryan’s ongoing immersion in the aesthetic of personalism within the Catholic literary revival certainly predisposed him to the more intellectualist bent of La Relève, which published articles by the luminaries of the interwar French Catholic intellectual scene such as Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and Henri-Daniel Rops. Over the next five years, the pages of La Relève transmitted a philosophical personalism to Quebec, in which the human person was posited as the solution to the evils of communism, nationalism, and the impersonality of majoritarian democracy. The journal served as the fulcrum of a new positioning of French-Canadian intellectuals towards nation and nationality, adopting a hierarchy of values, with the universal beliefs of Christianity at the summit, a careful distinction between state and nation, and a new importance attached to creativity and works of art. First and foremost, the young men who contributed to the review subscribed to Maritain’s call for Christian action in the social and cultural spheres, rather than around the false gods of politics or nationalism.129 Maritain’s works were considered positively dangerous by more conservative intellectuals such as Lionel Groulx, who objected to his call for the separation of “Catholic action” and “national action” as too otherworldly, producing “mutilated, degenerate Catholics” under what he considered the spurious pretext that groups dedicated to Catholic action, because they were “purer,” had to remain separate from nationalist causes. Maritain’s error, in the eyes of Abbé Groulx, was that he eviscerated the realm of the profane, “urging us either not to be French-Canadian or to be it as little as possible.”130 However, it was difficult for Quebec’s ecclesiastical authorities to object to Maritain, because he had championed the Vatican’s position in condemning the French Action française, and, as an intellectual and philosopher, he wrote within the “official” Catholic philosophy of Thomism. The philosophical system of St Thomas Aquinas had been accorded the status of intellectual orthodoxy within the Catholic Church in 1879. The study of his writings formed the capstone of the classical college curriculum, particularly in the final two years designated “Philosophy-Science,” which were dedicated to logic and natural philosophy (including cosmology and psychology); metaphysics; and moral philosophy (including individual morality, the family, and society).131 However, students did not encounter St Thomas’s thought directly but, rather, through the standard text, Father Stanislas Lortie’s Elementa philosophiae, christianae ad mentem sanctae Thomae aquinitatis exposita, which was published between 1910 and 1911 and was still

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in use at the colleges operated by the Pères de Sainte-Croix in 1947.132 While “modern” in the sense that Lortie, as a major turn-of-the-century contributor to the development of social thought in Quebec, paid considerable attention to the question of social structure, the labour problem, and, in particular, the 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, his Thomism was an articulation and defence of hierarchical order and obedience. This more “fixist” Thomism was characteristic of pre-1920 Catholic philosophy and conceived of society as a gigantic organism held together functionally by a precise system of rights and duties, one in which hierarchy and obligation took precedence over individual self-assertion.133 Lortie stressed the divine origins of authority, the consequent superiority of the Church to civil society, the priority of the family over the individual in the constitution of civil society, and the anti-Christian character of modern liberalism in its claims for religious freedom.134 Ryan remembered this social teaching as being at least a generation behind developments in the social and human sciences, and, while his teachers certainly sought to make their students aware of the social and economic challenges of the Great Depression, he characterized their teaching as circumscribed by a “moralizing mode” that failed to draw concrete links between the teaching of the popes and the concrete realities of economics and politics.135 Was Ryan’s critique entirely fair? In the first instance, the Pères de Sainte-Croix seem to have permitted some questioning of the fixist type of Thomism taught in the textbook, claiming that their approach was to encourage students not simply to parrot Lortie, but to deepen its insights in the light of more modern commentators.136 It is evident from the pages of the Trait d’union that the works of Maritain and Étienne Gilson on medieval philosophy were well known and widely discussed at the Externat Sainte-Croix by both students and faculty.137 Second, the more dynamic social and political implications of Maritain’s work do seem to have made an impact on thinking at the externat, as Théophile Bertrand’s 1939 reflections attest. In his piece, Bertrand urged philosophers to avoid cloudy metaphysics and empty verbalism, which signified a desire simply to evade the central question of how to concretize the coming of “an acceptable social order.” In this task of clarification, Maritain’s work held pride of place, because he firmly held before the Christian intellectual the key issue: “the refraction of the truths of the Gospel in the realm of the social” – in other words, the problem of poverty and the poor.138 In this way, Maritain’s great work of the 1930s, Humanisme intégral, forcefully presented to Ryan’s generation the compelling drama of how, in the face of the appeal of the totalitarian alternatives of



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communism and fascism, Christianity could act as the dynamic inspiration and core of a modern social order founded to transcend the failed liberal-­bourgeois regime of competitive capitalism. From his opening call ­summoning Christian elites to work for “a new order of civilization characterized by a true humanism, inaugurating a new Christendom that is no longer holy, but secular and profane,”139 Maritain, though a Thomist, was anything but a conservative. Young men like Ryan, already feeling the ethical imperative of personalism, would have rejoiced at his bold call for the “liquidation of bourgeois man,”140 although, unlike Marxists, he meant this in a spiritual and cultural sense. Although his work evoked the ideal “Christendom” of the Middle Ages, where Western civilization was characterized by uniformity of religious belief and a common heritage of political and social ethics, Maritain always insisted on the “analogical” rather than the “literal” character of Thomistic philosophy, where the “substance,” or the underlying, deepest reality, might be eternal but manifested in diverse forms according to historical and cultural circumstances.141 In contrast to interpreters such as Lortie and a number of the social corporatists of the 1930s, whose fixist type of Thomism advocated the literal re-creation of medieval forms of hierarchical social organization as the key to the solution of modern social problems, Maritain’s neo-Thomism was far more personalist and dynamic in its socio-political underpinnings. The French philosopher argued that his new Christendom was not a return to medieval times in terms of social and political structures, because modern society did not possess the same high degree of religious unity as the Middle Ages, nor did its authority flow from top to bottom. This, then, necessitated a careful rethinking of the relationship between spiritual and temporal realms. First, Maritain broke with the older insistence of the superiority of the spiritual to the temporal, the Church to the state and civil society, asserting that each was ordained to different ends in the scheme of salvation, with the temporal defined as critically important to human life, an ambivalent zone contested by both God and Satan.142 This stance was not a call to quiescence or retreat. Maritain was emphatic that Christians must wage war against the forces of evil active in the world, but this temporal activity could not, in the end, make the world the Kingdom of God in the perfect sense. At best, Christian activists could build a temporary “Christendom” where conditions for a full and dignified human life could be attained and where social structures were characterized by a high degree of justice and respect for the human person. This, he declared, “prepares the way for the advent of the Kingdom of God in a filial, but not a servile way.”143 This

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“Christendom” was never a final or fixed form, but a task that called for constant re-engagement in light of modern social structures and intellectual advances. At another level, Maritain’s careful redefinition of the scope of spiritual and temporal spheres provided an enormous fillip for the claims of Catholic laity to act autonomously from the clergy, a philosophical development that had enormous resonance in a Catholic society like Quebec, which was far more clericalized than Maritain’s France. In working this distinction, Maritain was concerned to free the Church from earthly entanglements, especially with ultra-conservative political ideologies, and from the direct management of the temporal sphere and its institutions, which, although having a Christian purpose, were “profane” in the sense that their priority was to secure the common good of justice and human dignity, rather than the salvation of souls. Christians active in the temporal now acted less as “members of the Church than as Christian members of the commonwealth, conscious of the task incumbent upon them to work for the inauguration of a new temporal order of the world.”144 It was the Christian laity whom Maritain summoned forth as modern knights or shock troops to accomplish a spiritual and social revolution that would differ fundamentally from the transformations imagined by secular ideologies. A young man like Claude Ryan, already predisposed by family political allegiance to look sceptically upon the hierarchical social corporatism proposed by French-Canadian conservative nationalist intellectuals, eagerly read further in Maritain’s book to discover that corporatism was not the key to the new Christendom. In keeping with his analogical form of reasoning, Maritain discouraged this as too literal an imitation of the social organization of the Middle Ages. What should be retained was the spirit of medieval civilization’s characteristic juridical pluralism: this, Maritain postulated, would be given a modern expression in a pluralist commonwealth, which would bring together in an organic unity a diversity of groups and social structures, a civil society not organized around the sovereignty of the autonomous individual, as was liberal democracy, but around freely organized groups and communities.145 The result, Maritain stated, would be a “personalist democracy”146 whose guiding institutions were not mathematical majoritarian rule or parliamentary gamesmanship, but a legislature directly expressing the will of the citizens; an executive branch emanating from the people but completely devoted to the common good; and what he termed the “extraterritoriality” of the human person in the face of political and temporal means – what in contemporary parlance would be



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a charter of inalienable human rights. This new political order, in contrast with its liberal predecessor, was not dedicated to freedom of choice or to individualism, but to a higher end – the evangelical message that insisted upon the autonomy and spiritual perfection of human persons.147 In the final analysis, this “democracy” was communitarian, linking individuals through an ascending series of civic, professional, and labour organizations whose more collectivist ethos would provide the necessary counterweight to the impulses of unrestrained individualism. This new political order would be founded on a post-capitalist economy characterized by both abundance, in terms of equitable distribution of material necessities, and poverty, in the sense that no one would have excessive wealth. In that sense, all would share a common condition. And the order would avoid the pitfalls of state totalitarianism by decentralizing its distributive functions to organic communities, beginning with the family.148 Only through this personalist political expression could the supremely important ethical and affective meanings of democracy be saved from the nightmare of dictatorship. Although this new commonwealth would not be characterized by religious unity or uniformity, it could be termed a type of “Christendom” because Christianity would play a fundamental role of unifying society, not through compulsion or repression of heretics, but through systems of civic education. Supplying this civic, moral sense would be the particular task of Christian laypeople, who, Maritain stated, could play a role analogous to the medieval Christian prince, inaugurating and inspiring the new order. Maritain quoted Sidney Webb’s phrase “vocation of leadership,” thus implying that these cives praeclari149 – excellent citizens – were in fact modern knights, no longer dressed in armour and brandishing swords, but wielding the weapons of intellectual competence in the solution of social problems and, in this way, resisting the descent into totalitarian tyranny through their dedication to restoring human dignity to a world that seemingly had abandoned all human values. The key figure in Maritain’s compelling vision was the Christian layman, usually an intellectual-militant, educated in the modern social sciences but thoroughly engaged in applying his knowledge to the betterment of the commonwealth. These men would be organized into “temporal fraternities,”150 somewhat reminiscent of the medieval orders of knightmonks, which would develop forms of Christian-inspired political action to compete with the cells of the Communist Party for influence over the masses. Maritain concluded his appeal by stating that Christian social action had to become more intelligently conceived and organized. He

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distinguished between types of action. The first type involved the Church (en tant que chrétien), which, given the clearer distinction between spiritual and temporal zones, would be more infrequent in modern societies. The second was a type that engaged only the individual (en chrétien), in  which Christians would operate with members of other faiths and political creeds in pluralist, “secular” institutions and structures. While Maritain is usually remembered for this dualism, it is sometimes forgotten that his typology also posited a third type of action, one exercised in an intermediate zone that was “spiritual” – though that term did not refer strictly to the Church – but also connected with the temporal sphere, an area encompassing a wide range of human activity involving family life, education, and questions of civic morality.151 In this area, the laity was involved in the creation and management of a more flexible set of organizations devoted to the direct infusion of Christian priorities into the social order. This was the world of Action catholique, a loosely organized group of movements that were generated by the social crisis and that, after the mid-1930s, enlisted the enthusiasm and engagement of many of Ryan’s contemporaries.

“Idealists and dreamers”152 In the spring of 1944, Claude Ryan graduated with his baccalaureate from the Externat Sainte-Croix. To the surprise of everyone at the annual ceremony of the “prise du ruban,” in which the young men graduating from philosophy chose a coloured ribbon indicating their choice of future career, he rejected the priesthood. Because he was the top student in his college, many religious communities had been vying to recruit him, and Blandine powerfully reinforced such pressure. No doubt he felt the pull of obligation: an organization whose aim was to foster vocations to the priesthood had paid for some of his college education, with the rest paid by Blandine herself, who, at the outbreak of the Second World War, took a job in the federal civil service and directed much of her income towards Claude’s monthly school fees. However, after a two-week retreat at the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, he irrevocably decided that his vocation would be a secular one.153 In the fall, he entered the new École de Relations Industrielles at the Université de Montréal, a choice that would hardly be considered prestigious vis-à-vis the established professions of law, medicine, and the Church. Was this a sudden reversal? Was Ryan ever serious about a religious vocation? On balance, given the



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prominence of the “knighthood” model of masculinity promoted at the externat through the Scouts and Jacques Maritain’s powerful revaluation of the intellectual and social role of the Christian lay “intellectual-­ militant,” this was a decision that Ryan had been percolating for a long time. More pragmatically, the fact that Blandine was now the principal contributor to his education freed him, in fact, from a sense of obligation to external Catholic religious agencies. The only person truly disappointed by the decision was Blandine herself, although that emotion was perhaps mitigated somewhat by the fact that Claude had spent two weeks wrestling with the final decision. External factors at work in Quebec society during the Second World War would have made the social role of an industrial relations expert look like an attractive career choice. For a young man of Liberal political allegiance and a growing interest, derived from Maritain’s personalist Thomism, in a regenerated social order, the years 1943–44 were particularly exciting ones. As a family devoted to political discussion and the federalist Liberals, the Ryans would not have been immune to the tidal wave of public opinion in favour of a comprehensive scheme of social security as the keystone of plans for a democratic postwar order that washed over Canada in late 1942, in the wake of the British welfare expert Sir William Beveridge’s celebrated Report on Social Security and its Canadian derivative produced by Leonard Marsh. Ryan’s own allegiances placed him clearly on the side of a more activist state in the sphere of social welfare. In a talk delivered to the École de Service Social of the Université de Montréal in 1946, he approvingly cited Beveridge’s dictum, “A revolutionary movement in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, and not for patching.”154 The provincial Liberal administration of Adélard Godbout, facing an election in 1944 against the stiff opposition of the resurgent conservatism of Maurice Duplessis’s Union nationale and the young nationalists of the Bloc populaire under their new leader, André Laurendeau, launched an ambitious program of reformist legislation that seemed to move the Quebec state decisively into spheres once reserved for the Catholic Church and private initiative. Beginning with the granting of the provincial franchise to women in 1940, these measures included the institution of compulsory schooling to age fourteen, enacted in 1943, a measure that pleased both big business and many of Quebec’s bishops by both moving to modernize the province’s economy and improving the caliber of rural schooling.155 In 1944, Godbout continued his program, remodelling the province’s labour legislation and establishing a Commission of Labour Relations; founding Hydro-Québec

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by nationalizing a number of private power companies; establishing commissions to study the implementation of a provincial system of family allowances and health insurance; and inaugurating the Conseil d’Orientation Économique, designed to formulate a postwar workforce strategy to secure a high level of employment and, thus, economic stabilization. Finally, the Commission Garneau, established by the premier, recommended in 1944 the establishment of a provincial department of social welfare, the enhanced education of “technicians in social assistance,” and generous subsidies for university faculties of social science.156 These achievements would undoubtedly have excited Claude Ryan, not only from the perspective of his own employment, given Godbout’s commitment to a more active presence of the state in managing relations between labour and business, but from the evident reformist imperative, directed towards improving the lives of the urban masses, which seemed to promise the dawn of a progressive “new Christendom” founded on an alliance between Liberals and Catholic social reformers. The new École des Relations Industrielles, and its counterpart, the École de Service Social, were housed in the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, located on Rue Viger at the southern edge of the Quartier Latin, now becoming denuded of students as the Université de Montréal was beginning to migrate to its new campus on the northern slope of Mont-Royal.157 The industrial relations program was presided over by its formidable founder, the Jesuit priest Father Émile Bouvier, whose 1942 appeal to French-Canadian youth to throw themselves into the task of postwar social reconstruction had undoubtedly helped inspire Ryan’s choice of a career in secular social reform. Bouvier’s call, delivered in a series of three addresses, appealed to Ryan at one level because he argued that the French-Canadian family was the pivot around which all reformist efforts must coalesce. However, his political opinions were diametrically opposed to those of Ryan, as they paid obeisance to figures of the Catholic reaction against the French Revolution, such as Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortès, in positing an irreconcilable opposition between Catholic and Protestant philosophies of life. Citing with approval conservative nationalists such as Lionel Groulx and Esdras Minville, he exhorted his audience not to follow Anglo-Canadians down a path of reform that would lead to state centralization of charity and social welfare, errors that he traced to the Protestant Reformation, but rather to reinforce French-Canadian traditions of individual self-reliance and family solidarity through dedication to fostering corporatism and cooperation and strengthening private industry.158 Bouvier represented a



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new type of clergyman, eager to defend clericalism not through mere appeals to authority, but through possession of a professional competence out of the reach of most laymen, as he held a doctorate in economics from Harvard, where he had studied with the celebrated conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter.159 Ryan found his lectures quite stimulating, remembering him as defending with “conviction and great energy” economic doctrines that were ultra–free enterprise, preaching the ruin that would result from a centralized welfare state, and positing that the only remedy to economic depression was to increase productivity.160 Shortly after joining the École des Relations Industrielles, Ryan became a card-carrying member of the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (C C F ), whose political fortunes nationally appeared to be on the rise as the Canadian public’s preoccupation shifted from military concerns to the task of postwar reconstruction. This was an astounding choice in 1944 for a young French-Canadian Catholic of nineteen, especially given the lingering allegiances among some of his contemporaries to right-wing authoritarian political doctrines.161 Indeed, it bordered on the outrageous because, since the inception of the CCF , Catholics had been warned by their bishops against its tendency towards doctrines of “materialist” socialism, which were contrary to Catholic teaching. While English Canada’s bishops had lifted the prohibition against Catholics belonging to the C C F as early as 1934, Quebec’s bishops retained it until 1943, when the Assembly of Canadian Bishops finally issued a declaration that the faithful were free to adhere to any political party, so long as it upheld “Christian principles which are traditional in Canada” and sought, in the economic and social sphere, the reforms insisted upon in the papal encyclicals. In clarifying this document, Mgr Desranleau, Archbishop of Sherbrooke, explained that “socialization” of property was not intrinsically evil and should be condemned only if it sought to destroy private property or restrict personal freedoms,162 extreme doctrines to which the CCF did not subscribe. Claude Ryan was probably one of the first Quebec Catholics to adhere to the C C F after the prohibition against it was lifted, joining it even before Thérèse Casgrain, the prominent feminist advocate who eventually led the Quebec branch of the party. He claimed that his initial interest in democratic socialism developed because Father Bouvier spent much ­lecture time inveighing against it, but his choice to move rather far to the left of his inherited family liberalism can also be read as a corollary to his  rejection of the vocation of the priesthood and as part of a revolt against Blandine’s overweening authority. Intrigued, Ryan and two of his

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classmates attended the national C C F convention held in Montreal in 1944, and was “enchanted” by a party in which he, a young university student, sat at a round table with the Saskatchewan minister of finance and Ontario’s leader of the official opposition, contrasting this unfavourably with the more staid politics of Quebec, where “a student couldn’t even get close to a politician of the first rank.” These young men were quite serious converts to the C C F ’s brand of socialism; following the convention, they requested an interview with André Laurendeau, leader of the Bloc populaire, to try to convince him to adopt “democratic socialism” as his new party’s creed.163 Laurendeau listened politely, holding a wide-ranging conversation for three hours with the young men, but did not commit his nationalist party to C CF doctrine. However, this failure did not deter Ryan, as he canvassed door-to-door for the CCF in the riding of Sainte-Anne in the 1945 election.164 Ryan sensed that his conversion to social democracy had probably blotted his copybook with Bouvier, and he consequently transferred into the École de Service Social, with the aim of becoming a social worker. This program had been established in 1939–40 at the prompting of Archbishop Gauthier of Montreal. He recruited Father Desmarais, who held a master’s diploma in social work from the Catholic University of America, to establish the school, which offered a two-year curriculum in collaboration with the Institut de Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Conseil, headed by Soeur Marie Gérin-Lajoie, with lectures provided by major social thinkers such as Esdras Minville, Léon Gérin, Father Irénée Lussier, and Father Gonzalve Poulin.165 Like its industrial relations counterpart, the École de Service Social was based on a blend of theoretical and practical education, the latter requiring an internship that would prepare students for careers in the burgeoning wartime welfare sector of Montreal, where charity was organized on a confessional basis. The underlying philosophy of the school combined Catholic doctrine and modern social work techniques, with the overarching aim of demonstrating that “when ­carried out by sound Catholics, social work can effectively contribute to the rechristianization of the family, to the maintenance of its best traditions, and to its conquest of economic independence.”166 Ryan, of course, would have heartily approved of such a goal, as he had already, in his 1941 article, canvased the priority of the family in securing the future of religious beliefs and values. He was also thoroughly familiar with the doctrinal foundations of the discipline, as students, many of whom were priests or nuns, were reintroduced to Thomist social philosophy and urged by their professors to view themselves as “social apostles,”167



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placing the traditions of Catholicism above the “scientific” requirements of the discipline. Even in social work, however, Bouvier’s heavy hand was apparent, especially after the triumphant return of Maurice Duplessis to power in  Quebec in 1944, which squelched the hopes of progressive young Catholics like Ryan. Bouvier’s dire warnings against the importation of Anglo-American social philosophy, and especially the mentality of the English Poor Law – the fruit of the Protestant Reformation, in which he discerned the seeds of materialism, individualism, and state centralization168 – seemed to Ryan the complete antithesis of Maritain’s personalist Thomism, which hopefully sought a pluralist conjunction of Catholic doctrine and modern techniques of social assistance. Ryan’s few extant writings from 1944–45 suggest that he fought assiduously against the encroachment of this climate of social conservatism in the school, attacking one of Bouvier’s key implications: if “Catholic tradition” was to hold pride of place over technical competence, it would place priests and religious permanently in charge of social assistance, marginalizing professional laymen, and reducing them to the status of the female assistants whose training entitled them to visit individual families as “auxiliaries” to the clergy, rather than actually manage social agencies or elaborate social policies. To this implicit clericalist agenda, Ryan retorted that professionally trained male social workers had a commitment to their discipline and to the regeneration of society that made them the equals of priests: “we must give of ourselves without measure, as the priest gives himself to God.”169 He developed his critique of Bouvier and conservative socio-political tendencies in French-Canadian Catholicism further in his 1945 analysis of the English Poor Law. In his estimation, this legislation established a key foundation of modern social work, that “those who collect and dispense charity should be remunerated for their services.” He then praised the continuities between the Beveridge Report, one of Bouvier’s centralist and secularist bugaboos, and the Poor Law of 1601. “Four centuries later,” Ryan concluded, “the Poor Law contains so much good sense that we find it unsurpassed.”170 He pointed to the fact that new currents in Canadian welfare policy, evident in the RowellSirois Report and continuing in some of the more “universalist” wartime policies of social security, preserved the Poor Law’s distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor and continued to uphold the principle of work and self-reliance,171 priorities also advocated by Bouvier. Ryan’s piece artfully turned most of Bouvier’s arguments against him, showing that this creation of the Protestant Reformation enshrined most

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of the same principles of individual responsibility, local administration, and the small state, as well as the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, as did “traditional” doctrines of Catholicism. More importantly, for Ryan, the English Poor Law and its modern derivatives were simple matters of common sense. “When a problem is so extensive that it calls for a solution that surpasses the capacities of private initiative,” Ryan stated, “it is the responsibility of the public authorities to intervene. This is always true.”172 Here, he was simply aligning the rather limited provisions of the modern new social security state with Thomist doctrines of subsidiarity, which argued for the legitimacy of state intervention in the event of the incapacity of private charity, to show the ­distance between a proper understanding of Catholicism and the freeenterprise regime postulated by Bouvier and his Union nationale allies.173 It also revealed that there were other voices in social work education, principally the Dominican Father André Guillemette, director of the Conseil des oeuvres of the Fédération des oeuvres de charité canadiennefrançaise of Montreal, and Father Gonzalve Poulin, who taught at the social work school. Guillemette, heavily influenced by personalism, supported gradual deconfessionalization of Quebec’s social services and greater state control in this field, arguing in favour of a declericalization of this sector. Poulin called for a far more activist presence of the state in the field of family legislation in order to establish a more balanced society and economy.174 It was to their ideas, which stood at odds with those of the nationalist social corporatists such as Esdras Minville, that Ryan turned when he concluded that Quebec needed to follow the Poor Law’s “revolution”: “we need to have the State enter into the problem of misery.” What Quebec Catholics needed to discard was a knee-jerk tendency to automatically equate state intervention with socialism and, in a direct attack on Bouvier, “to indiscriminately cry ruin and the destruction of the human person.”175 In the spring of 1945, Claude Ryan left the École de Service Social without completing the thesis necessary for obtaining his degree. He told his younger brother, Yves, in Péguyesque terms that “I don’t need a diploma to hang on my wall.”176 It is fair to say that he was sorely disappointed by the political and ideological turn of events in Quebec. The C C F’s surge had been stymied federally, the party not obtaining even a single seat in Quebec. Maurice Duplessis, returned to power in the fall of 1944 despite losing the popular vote to Godbout’s Liberals, now seemed intent on rescinding much of the former premier’s social and labour legislation in the name of Catholicism, a defence of provincial autonomy, and



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tradition, which seemed to seal the persistence of clericalism at the core of Quebec’s social philosophy. Father Bouvier’s hard-line free enterprise ideology and closed French-Canadian ethnic nationalism seemed vindicated. For one of Jacques Maritain’s aspiring young intellectual knightmilitants, the future indeed looked bleak. These postwar political troubles mirrored the uncertainty that gripped the once-hopeful Ryan family. Viewed from Blandine’s perspective, all the effort she had expended to ensure that her sons became comfortable, middle-class professionals seemed for naught: Claude, the most intellectually gifted, had refused his destiny as a priest, opting for the dubious status of an ill-paid, lowermiddle-class social worker, and had apparently failed even at this; Gérald had abandoned his classical studies to work as a clerk at the Canadian National Railways before volunteering for the army in 1943; and Yves, like his eldest brother, abandoned his college studies to join the navy and become a salesman for Libby’s.177 Despite all the hard work, self-­ discipline, and exposure to opera, the brothers had not escaped the possibility of a decline into working-class misery. Had the spectre of their improvident father reasserted itself?

2 The Bishops’ Man Forging a Nation of Youth and Taming Action catholique, 1945–1951 In the summer of 1945, the state and the postwar prospects of FrenchCanadian youth were causing serious worries for a number of senior Catholic clerics. Beginning in the early 1930s, the Catholic Church had increasingly tied its vision of a new Christendom – a rechristianized social and political order – to the aspirations of modern youth who hoped, through new institutional expressions of a collective generational identity, to realize a spiritual revolution transcending both the failure of ­liberal capitalism and the monstrous assaults on human freedom represented by totalitarian regimes. What developed among young francophone Catholics in Quebec was a welter of movements under the direct sponsorship of the diocesan hierarchy and nestled under the general umbrella designation “Action catholique spécialisée.” They represented a radically new organizational formula, as these religious movements were framed in terms of larger, more “modern” identities of diocese and nation, rather than parish. They also bypassed the old hierarchies of age and rank that animated older models of Catholic associational life. More significantly, they were “horizontal” and “democratic” and were led, in most cases, by young people who suddenly found themselves, along with young activist clergy sympathetic to projects of social reform, in an entirely novel situation of spiritual responsibility and leadership.1 In the context of a highly structured institutional Catholicism whose cardinal values were hierarchy and obedience, the mere presence of the Jeunesse ouvrière catholique (J OC ), the Jeunesse étudiante catholique (J E C), the Jeunesse indépendante catholique (JI C), and the Jeunesse agricole catholique (JA C ) caused considerable cultural and social turbulence. Most bishops, with the exception of the extremely conservative Mgr Georges Courchesne, Archbishop of Rimouski, welcomed this new



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style of Christian social action into their dioceses, but many remained concerned by what they viewed as an appalling lack of central coordination and control. From the mid-1930s, they had struggled to find a formula by which to unite all French-Canadian youth movements, those dedicated to patriotic “national” as well as “Catholic” action, under one national coordinating body through which they could exercise more effective supervision. However, all these attempts had failed, with the result that, by 1942, Action catholique spécialisée was quite simply in a state of anarchy, an uncontrolled proliferation of movements, each comprising male and female sections, diocesan committees, periodicals, and services offering employment assistance, marriage preparation, and summer camps. Yet some vital sectors – such as, ironically, the Catholic universities of Laval and Montreal – remained entirely untouched by this impulsive youth Catholicism.2 In 1943, two factors converged to induce Quebec’s Catholic bishops to finally bring these movements to heel. The enthusiastic conversion of Canadian public opinion to the idea of ­planning for a postwar democratic society impelled the creation of the Canadian Youth Commission (C Y C ). Between 1943 and 1948, this body, sponsored by the Anglo-Protestant Y MCA, produced a number of wideranging studies designed to serve as the basis for a new series of initiatives in the field of youth education and training. While a number of prominent French-Canadian social thinkers, such as Father Georges-Henri Lévesque of Université Laval, and youth educators participated in the C Y C ’s deliberations, the francophones were largely an afterthought on the part of C Y C promoters.3 Quebec’s Catholic leaders clearly felt their lack of a unified position, and they feared that, in the absence of a single body reflecting their perspective, the C YC might become a pressure group inducing the federal government to formulate cultural and educational policies at odds with the spiritual priorities of Catholicism and Quebec, a fear hardly assuaged by the fact that none of the CYC’s studies were translated into French. However, in one critical respect, some Church leaders, particularly the  key figures of Cardinal Rodrigue Villeneuve of Quebec City and Archbishop Joseph Charbonneau of Montreal, agreed with the more “pan-Canadian” and federalist orientation of the CYC, a position that befitted a group that – unlike many lower clergy and Catholic laypeople – had tended, by and large, to support the war effort.4 While the CYC subscribed to the rhetoric that modern youth were a force for renewal whose energies should be harnessed to ensure that a democratic “way of life” would define cultural and social relations in the postwar world, it

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vehemently rejected notions of generational identity, that youth constituted a separate “class” in modern society, distinct from the world of adults. To accept such an idea would expose young people, and, in a larger sense, Canadian society, to the intrusion of totalitarian ideologies that, many believed, had made headway in Europe by appealing to the discontent of young people and their desire for a status and responsibilities separate from those of adults. The CYC’s plan for a stable, democratic postwar future was to build bridges between youth and adults and to ensure responsible adult leadership and supervision of youth movements. It targeted young men in particular, with the aim of teaching them to assume their civic responsibilities of finding productive employment and forming stable, monogamous families.5 This “Canadian” vision dovetailed perfectly with the Quebec bishops’ priority of centralizing and disciplining the fissiparous tendencies of Action catholique, thus ensuring clerical supervision of the laity’s claims to independent action in the social sphere. In this respect, a number of influential French-Canadian Catholic leaders fully shared the vision of a “culture of reconstruction” characterized by a new concern for planning and coordination, thinly disguised codewords for the exertion of elite authority and discipline.6 In April 1945, Quebec’s bishops, most of whom were fiercely jealous of their diocesan fiefdoms, finally reached a consensus around a new formula for coordinating Action catholique. They established an umbrella organization, Action catholique canadienne (ACC), headed by an executive committee, the Comité national d’Action catholique (CN AC),7 on which the heads of the “national” specialized movements and their chaplains would be represented, but which, for the first time, had several permanent officials: a president, Dr J.-A. Vidal, the personal physician of Premier Maurice Duplessis; two vice-presidents, the lawyers Lucien Darveau, a confidant of Archbishop Charbonneau, and Daniel Johnson, a young lawyer; a national chaplain, Mgr Laurent Morin; and an executive secretary. By the late summer of 1945, it was obvious that Johnson, who had been active in Catholic student associations such as Pax Romana, clearly felt the attractions of a political career,8 and that the real work of coordination would be done by the executive secretary. At a meeting held at a private club north of Montreal, Mgr Morin informed his colleagues that he knew of a promising young man, barely twenty years old, who had recently completed an internship at the ACC offices as part of his social work studies.9 Claude Ryan, whose impulsive decision in the summer of 1945 not to finish his university degree caused considerable anxiety for his family, was now the bishops’ man.



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“To bridge the gap”10 The choice of Claude Ryan as national secretary of the ACC came as a shock to the leaders of the specialized movements, not least because he had not been a member of the Jeunesse étudiante catholique while in classical college. Pierre Juneau, a national director of the J E C between 1942 and 1947, stated that no one in the Action catholique movements knew Ryan.11 This observation bears some further explanation, because the Pères de Sainte-Croix had pioneered the J E C formula in Quebec, providing the chaplains and spiritual guidance to the movement. Although the JEC had existed in Quebec since 1935, it was not until 1942 that Gérald Bélair, an older schoolmate of Claude Ryan’s, attempted to establish a J E C cell at the Externat Sainte-Croix. This endeavour proved unsuccessful, due to the fact that the allegiance of many students continued to lie with the patriotic Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne-­française (A C J C ), a more nationalist organization that had existed in classical colleges for over four decades.12 As well, the J E C formula, according to one of its leading figures, Gérard Pelletier, seemed better adapted to the more closed boarding school environments where movement leaders encountered fewer distractions and did not have to compete with parish and home in awakening and sustaining spiritual intensity and engagement.13 The difference in educational contexts goes far to explain why Claude Ryan’s older contemporary, Guy Rocher of Collège Assomption, became an eager J E C recruit in 1939 and served on the national executive of the movement between 1943 and 1947. In Ryan’s case, however, there was a further telling obstacle. For an assertive and highly individualistic young man, Action catholique appeared as a refuge for overly feminized “goody-two-shoes” Christians, an impression compounded by the wartime J E C , which was dominated by a cadre of prominent and vocal female leaders, Jeanne Benoît (who later married Maurice Sauvé), Alexandrine Leduc (who later married Gérard Pelletier), and Simonne Monet (who later married Michel Chartrand). The presence of such women saddled the J E C with the “stigma” of being a “feminist movement.”14 For a young man already contesting the authority of his mother over both the household and his future vocation, such a movement would have exerted little attraction for Claude Ryan. In a number of significant respects, Ryan’s nomination as the key executive officer of the A C C made perfect sense to his ecclesiastical superiors. First, they recognized that a major postwar priority lay in defining a Catholic and French-Canadian attitude to the new youth initiatives

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emanating from Ottawa, and the fluently bilingual Ryan was the perfect interlocutor for discussions with Anglo-Canadian youth leaders and spokesmen. Second, his credentials were eminently “Canadian” rather than narrowly nationalist, which stood in stark contrast to those of Gérard Pelletier, a former national president of the J E C and probably the most prominent Action catholique youth leader of the period. Although a more experienced figure than Ryan, Pelletier had blotted his copybook with the bishops by criticizing the war effort (and, implicitly, the bishops themselves).15 Despite the fact that he was a card-carrying member of the somewhat suspect C C F , Ryan was deemed more acceptable because he had made no such oppositional pronouncements. Further, his family had proven their Canadian allegiance, symbolized by his elder brother Gérald’s vountary enlistment in the army. Finally, although Ryan never completed his social work degree, his papers contain a document filed as “Ryan’s Thesis,” a study of the “rational organization of youth leisure activities,” which, he declared, “must occupy the first rank in the conduct of a modern society.”16 Ryan was already theorizing the place of youth in modern society, and his approach and conclusions would have certainly appealed to Catholic clergy, who, like other elites, were preoccupied with the spectre of unsupervised urban male youth, the potential “juvenile delinquent”17 that worried many authorities across North America as the war wound down. Ryan’s study, based on contact with five groups of young people, recognized that modern youth would not accept constraint by tradition and adult authority, but rather insisted on dealing directly with their own affairs. The key to preventing juvenile delinquency was properly organizing the hours between the end of the school day and going to bed; here, Ryan implicitly endorsed the Action catholique formula of organizing leisure activities for youth according to their social milieu and of building on “natural” lines and patterns of association, in which youth “gangs” could contribute to the stability and homogeneity of collective life. On one level, Ryan’s prescription appeared and, indeed, was fairly radical, in so far as it fully acknowledged an independent sphere of youth aspirations. But Ryan’s belief that students must continue to be guided from above by adults would have made him a more than acceptable choice to the relatively conservative Catholic clergy. More significantly, Ryan’s prescriptions for youth firmly underscored the “Thomistic conception of man” he learned in classical college and at the École de Service Social, positioning work with modern youth as a careful navigation between the encouragement of individual aspirations and the channelling of these through appropriate institutions, which



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prominently included both state and church. However, he also vigorously eschewed the idea of direct state initiatives in the field of youth policy, for he believed that any state initiatives should ideally be mediated through voluntary federations of youth groups. Organized youth groups, he concluded, must not act as clients of public authorities by awaiting handouts, but must be furnished with opportunities that would enhance their own resources and cooperative efforts.18 Here was a sound course of action for postwar Catholic leaders anxious at the prospect of federal intervention through the medium of the C Y C , which they believed forced Catholic youth groups in Quebec to “submit themselves to a plan of study prepared by the Anglo-Saxon element.”19 Rumblings from Quebec City that Maurice Duplessis was contemplating instituting a Ministry of Youth also caused considerable trepidation among Catholic leaders, who were chary even of provincial initiatives as they feared that these signalled an increased intervention of the state, which had already introduced reforms of public education in 1943, in yet another field that had hitherto been the exclusive preserve of the Catholic Church. Rebuilding postwar Action catholique rested on a resolute course for recruitment that would reignite the social activism that so animated the youth movements of the 1930s. As the new chief coordinator of Action catholique, Ryan faced two challenges. Not only did he have to seek to preserve the energetic enthusiasm build up over the past two decades, but he had to ensure a more careful and responsible supervision to eliminate the possibility of any generational opposition that would lead to forms of social and political instability. Ryan tended to lean towards the more conservative aim of stability, for he believed that one of the defining features of the postwar scene was the accession of youth to the full range of adult responsibilities, meaning that all efforts should be bent towards steering them away from political radicalism and resistance to the established order. According to Ryan, vertical barriers of age and wealth that kept young people in a state of tutelage had tumbled: citing examples ranging from the entry into the Quebec labour market of nearly 23,000 adolescents aged fourteen and fifteen to policies in Allied countries that allowed the enlistment of seventeen-year-olds (with Nazi Germany enlisting boys aged thirteen and fourteen), Ryan concluded that such trends marked the irruption of “a phenomenon of unprecedented scope: the new and irresistible importance of youth in the modern commonwealth.”20 Those advocating a return to the past he abruptly dismissed as unrealistic, preferring to address those of “audacious and realistic spirit who are aware that the facts are irreversible.” In his view,

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the situation required a fundamental “rethinking of our conception of education and youth training.”21 But what did Ryan mean by calling for such a rethinking? Was he really endorsing the “revolutionary” language of generational identity that had done so much to inspire the pioneers of Action catholique during the 1930s, or was his concern the elaboration of a formula that would stabilize the climate of generational relations during postwar reconstruction  by establishing new lines of influence, communication, and authority between “youth” and adults? On the one hand, Ryan was, like many postwar commentators and youth activists, adamant that young people must be consulted regarding government initiatives that affected their lives. He was critical of those who invoked the principle that “young people don’t really know what is their real good” to impose solutions that were ready made by adults. Appeals to the wisdom and prestige of those older and more experienced could no longer answer society’s need for precise, rational, and scientific knowledge of situations that needed change, and in this key respect, “young people themselves know best what pertains to their status, conditions, and problems. They must be given the opportunity to speak, to express themselves, to communicate their impressions.”22 However, beneath this optimistic evocation lurked a set of limits expressing a far more conservative social philosophy, one that effectively broke with the older culture of specialized Action catholique and those activists like Gérard Pelletier who hoped to incarnate the “revolutionary” impulses of the 1930s in an adversarial set of new relationships and social practices affirming the independence of youth. Writing in 1945, Ryan proclaimed, “Just as youth found its place in a totalitarian social order, it must find it in a Christian society.”23 His mention of “totalitarianism” and “Christianity” in the same breath spoke to his emphatic rejection of the view, popular in Action catholique circles in the 1930s, that youth and adults were irrevocably opposed. In Ryan’s view, this oppositional dynamic had been cynically employed by totalitarian regimes to ride to power through “adulation” of youth, placing an excessive trust in the organizations that youth had established to separate themselves from the authority and experience of adults.24 Above all, Ryan declared, the Church must avoid any suggestion that it was giving any countenance to the notion that youth constituted a distinct social group, or that its organizations formed “a State within a State.”25 Ryan’s opinions on this question reflected a growing consensus among a number of social activists in both Quebec and English Canada that the future of the democratic community depended, not on a prolongation of youth and the infusion of



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youth spontaneity into adult culture, but upon the rapid progress of the individual through the stage of adolescence, a goal achieved through the creation of institutions and social mechanisms that would integrate youth into adult responsibilities, duties, and lifestyles. This process implied the reconnection of young people and their parents, and a forceful reassertion of adult leadership and supervision of youth movements – in other words, a reassertion of intergenerational solidarity as the foundation of a reconstructed democratic order. The commitment of the senior clergy and the new leaders of Action catholique to taming the oppositional potential of postwar youth was underscored by Ryan’s acceptance of the Canadian Youth Commission’s definition of “youth” as encompassing the years fifteen to twenty-four, a broad age category that lumped together adolescents and young adults. Writing in 1949, he observed that modern young people faced a particularly difficult stage of transition, the eight to ten years that lay between leaving school (as early as age fourteen in Quebec after 1943) and assuming the responsibilities of marriage and family formation, a period that needed to be organized in such a way as to allow young French Canadians to perfect their education so as to “confront life’s struggles.”26 In this key respect, Ryan’s social democratic ethos stood closer to mainstream Anglo-American strands of reformism that exalted the productive male citizen, rather than harkening back to the original oppositional dynamic that had spawned Action catholique in the early 1930s. Above all, Ryan refused to countenance “utopian” methods that would “push young people to attempt to create a separate youth polity, based upon distinct organizations, structures, and institutions,”27 as this would “accentuate the divorce between generations, and … build an artificial ‘commonwealth of youth’ with its own techniques, hymns, symbols, and hermeticism.”28 Hence, while deploying the discourse of “youth” as the repository of the values of spontaneity and renewal essential for the reconstruction of postwar society, Ryan emphatically discarded the corollary, so much a feature of interwar Action catholique, that such values established the spiritual and moral superiority of young people over their elders. Young people, in his estimation, required the presence and close involvement of adult “experts” – social activists, priests, educators – in their lives to ensure a harmonious passage to career, marriage, and family. “It seems to us,” he declared in 1948, “that it is not up to youth to determine whether Latin is or is not obsolete in our colleges, if History is taught better or worse in our universities, or whether the teachers in our schools hold all the necessary credentials to hold their position. Such judgments imply an

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experience of life and of things and a knowledge of human history that someone aged twenty simply does not have.”29 Because he believed in the imperative need for the presence of adult authority in youth organizations in order to ensure the transmission of desirable cultural and spiritual values, he was critical of Catholic priests who did not wish to devote their energies to providing a “friendly presence” in groups of young men aged seventeen to twenty-five, preferring to work with young women or parish charitable organizations. Such neglect would, in the long run, reduce Catholicism to the status of “a religion of women”30 – the first mention of what would become a near-obsession for Ryan during the late 1940s and 1950s. The new importance of youth, he realized, required a recalibration of the equilibrium that must be maintained between freedom and responsibility, especially as those older traditional educative institutions of family, parish, and school had seemingly lost much of their influence, replaced by the milieus of work, leisure, the peer group of friends, money, and dating.31 Rather than lamenting the fact that, as early as ages fourteen and fifteen, “today’s young people have a much better knowledge than previous generations of the mysteries of sexual life,” Ryan squarely endorsed the new climate of cultural democracy, characterized by modern philosophies of education that “sought to give as much freedom as possible to the responsible subject,” an outlook that had wide currency among groups of reformist Catholics in the immediate postwar period. However, this new freedom was not an invitation to an unbridled individualism, which he dismissed as both a psychological and social “disorder,”32 but rather to an awakening to a more profound sense of responsibility to one’s community and of the need for more effective means of “spiritual communication” to build links of discussion and exchange with one’s comrades.33 The desideratum was that, through education and adult leadership, modern youth, and especially male youth, would become active citizens of an orderly democracy, the only bulwark against dictatorship. Here, Ryan’s prescription for postwar youth converged with the C Y C ’s definition of young people as “citizensin-training.” He pointed with alarm to the prevailing climate of apathy, in which French-Canadian youth preferred the seductions of the cinema and commercialized sport, the nightlife of cafés, grills, taverns, and billiard halls, and a sensational diet of detective novels, radio soap operas, and illustrated comic strips to the acquisition of professional skills or  involvement with voluntary organizations, those vital nurseries of democratic attitudes. Such wallowing in mass culture, Ryan feared,



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would lead young men towards sexual obsessions and an attitude of unconsciousness towards compelling social issues34 and would sunder young French Canadians from their allegiance to the Catholic Church, thus making them ripe for the blandishments of authoritarian and secularist leaders. Any political leftist leanings Ryan may have once countenanced during his affiliation with the C C F had largely evaporated when the need to conform to the new priorities of the Catholic leadership took priority, and Ryan saw his position as national secretary of Action catholique as a vehicle for career advancement. From being a youth who consistently followed his own individualistic path in resisting the voices of authority, including those of his mother and his teachers at the classical college, by the late 1940s he seems to have thoroughly imbibed his own prescriptions that argued that young men must follow the natural leadership of adults in order to secure gainful employment and achieve the dividends of masculinity – namely, the ability to marry and support family dependants. The new presence of Claude Ryan as the leading figure in the ACC and his firm endorsement of an “integrationist” model of the relationship of youth to modern society testified to a power struggle occurring within the ranks of reformist Catholics during the late 1940s. What at first sight seemed to be a somewhat arcane internal conflict between two rival cultural models of youth actually involved a major shift in theological and philosophical allegiances within the French-Canadian intellectual community, one with far-reaching implications for the future of Catholicism and for Quebec’s place within the Canadian Confederation. Ryan’s emergence from nowhere to the position of the most prominent layman within Action catholique had not pleased a powerful coterie within Jeunesse étudiante catholique, the largest, most vocal, and most independent of all the specialized Catholic movements. These young men and women, including Gérard Pelletier, Jeanne Benoît, Simonne Monet, Pierre Juneau, Alexandrine Leduc, and Guy Rocher, actually lived at the movement’s central offices, with male and female directors frequently marrying one another, and thus forming a tight-knit group largely impervious to ecclesiastical direction.35 These jécistes resented the formation of a new central body and having to account to an unknown young man, who had not attended one of the “good” boarding-schools, in a supervisory capacity above them. Further fuelling these incipent personal animosities was the fact that Pelletier, Juneau, and Rocher were the chief propagandists in Quebec for a definition of the relationship between youth and modern society that

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was at odds with the “integrationist” model championed by the Catholic hierarchy and Claude Ryan. What shaped their concept was their allegiance to the “oppositional” model of early Action catholique, reinforced by their contacts in the immediate postwar period with European youth leaders who promulgated the idea that “youth” constituted an independent and universal class, culturally and socially distinct from adults. What they meant by this was that their Catholic groups had as much cultural authority in society as the traditional Catholic clergy. Such a perspective not only amplified the power of youth, but, in particular, it automatically gave greater credence to the ideas of young Catholic women. For them, the representative “type” of the modern youth was not Ryan’s citizenin-training, reliant on the educational and spiritual expertise of adults, but the university student, one critical of established authorities in church, society, and state, an “intellectual worker” who stood uncomfortably close to Marxist ideological currents, able to promote solidarity with the  working class and other oppressed peoples.36 Gérard Pelletier defended this emphatically modernist engagement in a series of attacks on the Canadian Youth Commission, an organization that, he charged in Péguyesque language, existed simply to serve the need of the elder ­generation to constrain the spiritual dynamism of youth in a series of impersonal, bureaucratic structures dedicated to the political imperatives of compromise. His colleague Pierre Juneau went even further in denouncing the C Y C as an oppressive structure, designed to shore up the “static character, authoritarianism, and individualism of the family and school.”37 In this context, individualism meant the stultifying primacy of “bourgeois” cultural and spiritual values, which seemed to extoll conformity and political quiescence. As if these rather overt criticisms of the Church hierarchy and Claude Ryan, its chosen man, were not enough, Pelletier had the effrontery in 1946 to publish an article in Cahiers d’Action catholique, a magazine directed to chaplains, movement directors, and well-established militants, brutally excoriating the entire system of religious education in French Canada. In this article, written ostensibly from Vienna, where he was engaged in assisting refugee student youth,38 Pelletier pilloried the “religious sentimentalism” with which, in his estimation, the entire education system of Quebec was besotted. Believing that he already possessed “a simple, stripped-down spirituality reduced to its essentials and adapted to action,” Pelletier was discomfited to find the conventions of  his piety brutally laid bare by his encounter with those who had lived under tyrannical regimes, finding it “inflated with sentimentality,”



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“blundering, clumsy, obese, and embarrassed.”39 What was most disturbing, however, was Pelletier’s implication – thinly veiled as a commentary on young Hungarians, Poles, Yugoslavs, “out-and-out nationalists” who practised “the religion of their fathers” – that French Canadians practised their religion for secondary “cultural” motives, and that the conflation of Catholicism and national identity, such as characterized the teaching in French Canada’s classical colleges, merely perpetuated and fuelled ethnic hatreds. In a conclusion unlikely to endear himself to Quebec’s Catholic authorities, he painted the Red Army in benign terms as restoring calm and stability to Vienna, and claimed that the overly sentimental – read feminized – education he had received in college disqualified him from offering any judgment on Marxism, because his teachers, all of whom were clergy, had “fabricated a psychosis” that operated at the level of emotion, rather than reason.40 There exists in Ryan’s papers an unpublished reply to Pelletier’s article, though it is uncertain if it was written at the request of his ecclesiastical superiors who wanted ammunition with which to refute the former jéciste. Pelletier, in Ryan’s view, was guilty of a serious and dangerous error of perspective, by maintaining that humans could rid themselves entirely of religious sentimentality in the present condition of their existence. Invoking his Thomistic training, Ryan reminded Pelletier that people attained knowledge of God only through analogies with sensible forms, and not through some existential unburdening of previous ­cultural baggage that would give them instantaneous access to spiritual illumination. Obviously, there were excesses to be avoided, but nowhere, Ryan noted, had his adversary spoken of moderation or proper balance; he thus had completely discarded the stages necessary to progress towards spiritual perfection. From the standpoint of Action catholique’s new insistence on upholding the authority of adults, Pelletier was at fault for blaming his teachers with “bitter resentment,” an offence aggravated by the fact that Pelletier had accused the clergy of foisting religious sentimentalism on young men and women desperate for spiritual reality. Ryan invoked the new postwar priority on order and stability to undermine Pelletier’s authority, stating that to sacrifice one’s freedom was as important as freedom itself. “I can easily understand,” Ryan primly concluded regarding Pelletier’s offending article, “why those highly placed have manifested a good deal of impatience.”41 The issues at stake in this conflict were far broader and more fundamental than an internecine quarrel pitting the Catholic Church hierarchy and their new point man, Claude Ryan, against disgruntled jécistes like

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Pelletier. The rival definitions of “youth” espoused by each side were, in fact, a shorthand for a profound shift in philosophical allegiances occurring in the community of Quebec Catholic intellectuals between 1945 and 1950. In a talk delivered to a group of seminarians in 1947, Ryan discerned a group of Catholics characterized by “an attitude of blind acceptance,” for whom “progress was a myth, who are ready to jump on board with any adventure so long as progress counts for something.”42 The principal “myth” that Ryan had to combat in his role as national secretary of A C C was the quasi-Marxist idea that youth constituted a new social class, a view he identified with the work of the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier.43 Mounier, a leading figure in interwar personalism and editor of the influential intellectual journal Esprit, was not an unknown figure in French Canada in the 1930s, but he was clearly eclipsed by the popularity and familiarity of the work of Jacques Maritain. Among Quebec intellectuals, only André Laurendeau, who had met Mounier during a stay in France in 1936–37, could claim to be directly influenced by Mounier.44 While both French philosophers can be placed under the “personalist” rubric,45 there were substantial and irreconcilable differences between them. Maritain gave a personalist inflection to traditional Catholic Thomism, arguing for a renegotiation of the frontiers of spiritual and temporal realms in order to foster the emergence of a new Christian socio-political order, albeit one ruled by a democracy of laymen. Human freedom, while a fundamental value for Maritain, was a function of participation in and allegiance to institutional structures and their values, external “authorities” that still held considerable purchase over the individual conscience. More significantly, authority in Maritain’s philosophical system was of divine origin. By contrast, Mounier was most emphatically an existentialist, deeply suspicious of all institutional expressions, even those of Christianity, as ultimately inhibiting the authenticity and self-realization of the human person. His was a thoroughgoing critique of established authorities and structures in both church and state; it postulated an ideal of human freedom that dispensed with all external constraints, founded as it was on a dialogue with those ideas and forces that called upon humans to surpass themselves.46 This was a radical and corrosive dynamism. In the immediate postwar period, Mounier’s works achieved almost cult status among young Catholics, especially among a select group of young men who after 1945 studied in France, where they imbibed the heady atmosphere of “left Catholicism” that swirled around Mounier.47 Marxism dominated the political and philosophical conversation of this



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period, and it had acquired an overwhelming intellectual prestige as a result of the struggle against fascism. The purpose of Mounier’s later philosophical writings was to attempt a synthesis between Christianity and Marxism, and his bitter polemics against liberal ideology and the United States sought to show young Catholics that they and their Marxist counterparts “were linked one to another, like Jacob with the angel,” because they shared a common commitment to “mystery, that central force which establishes its power in the hearts of men.”48 A virulently anticlerical tone marked Mounier’s later work, as he established a fundamental distinction between “Christianity” as a belief and “Christendom,” the complex of institutions, politics, and authority that he increasingly believed stood in the way of human self-realization to be achieved through the triumph of progressive forces in history.49 Gérard Pelletier’s admiration for Mounier’s left Catholicism verged on the slavish, and his implicit praise of Marxists in his 1946 article definitely reflected his exposure to the “progressive Christian” ethos of postwar Paris.50 Furthermore, his years working within the J E C had turned him into a resolute anticlerical, suspicious of the tendency of Quebec’s clergy to take charge of spheres of authority that were clearly “secular” and within the competence of the laity, convictions that Mounier’s existential personalism burnished with a philosophical veneer.51 Ryan could not follow Pelletier and his older contemporary, André Laurendeau, down this particular path. He was emphatically a disciple of Jacques Maritain, still anchored in a Thomist universe that stressed the constant relationship of freedom to precise hierarchies and systems of authority, and he believed that Mounier’s arraignment of “Christendom” went too far. “My mentality,” he later recalled, “was more institutional.” Neither his position, which dictated that he work closely with the clergy, nor his fundamental beliefs about the Church would allow him to participate in Pelletier’s fashionable anticlericalism. Writing in 1947, Ryan cited Maritain’s Humanisme intégral in answer to Mounier’s left Catholicism, which in his estimation conceded too much to Marxian determinism. Whatever truth Marxism expressed was already contained in Thomism, which regarded humankind as linked to matter: for Christians, freedom and determinism existed in a delicate equilibrium, and thus philosophically did not require the assistance of Marxist ideologies. He vigorously eschewed Pelletier’s brand of anticlericalism, arguing instead for a “style of society that is at once Christian and modern,” an ideal to be realized through a more precise categorization of institutions rather than a simple banishing of the clergy from all temporal responsibilities. He considered

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that those institutions whose ends were merely temporal needed to be liberated, not from the influence of “the supernatural spirit,” but from “the control of the spiritual power” in order to become truly “modern.”52 However, Maritain also believed that there was no simple division of institutions into “profane” and “spiritual”: Humanisme intégral had emphatically spoken of a set of educational, social, and moral institutions that were temporal but designed to accomplish spiritual ends. Could this hybridity be resolved simply by removing the presence of the clergy? Ryan’s close contacts, as coordinator of the ACC, with the clergy inoculated him against any blanket condemnations of their presence in French-Canadian society. “I found,” Ryan declared, “that the parish priests were not as oppressive, if we take into account the general climate prevailing at that time. If the clergy had not been there to get a lot of people out of difficult situations, perhaps Quebeckers would not have been as ready to undertake what we were able to achieve in the 1960s.”53 If Ryan saw the focal point of his postwar mission as the bridging of the gap between the spontaneity of youth and the need for the authority and expertise of adults, he was likewise equally concerned to employ the new organizational machinery of the ACC to build bridges within the field of youth activism itself. Indeed, apart from a failed campaign in 1945–46 to promote morality, which seems to have been undertaken largely at the behest of Archbishop Charbonneau of Montreal,54 Ryan’s functions as national secretary were directed mainly to elaborating new structures of coordination and representation for French-Canadian Catholic youth at the provincial, national, and international levels, and in ensuring that youth organizations maintained an “apolitical” stance, thus ensuring their independence from the state, as well as enabling them to avoid the encroachments of communism. “A modern institution,” Ryan emphatically declared, “must either directly or indirectly issue forth on the international scene.”55 Much of his activity between 1945 and 1950 was at the level of bureaucracy, ensuring that the A C C would play an effective representative role for the Catholic youth of French Canada, but underlying this was the larger purpose of deploying the new machinery of a national Catholic federation to collaborate with his Anglo-Canadian counterparts. Given his belief in the vitality of the “integrationist” model for infusing youth culture with democratic values, he placed a high value on the elaboration of permanent institutional arrangements to ensure a Christian Canadian presence at international youth congresses as a way of thwarting tendencies towards the “confrontationist” model of youth as a separate class.



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Ryan’s task was complicated by the jécistes and their proclivities for accepting Mounier’s vision of communism as a mystique or religion, which would allow for “dialogue” with Marxists in the name of an international solidarity of young people. In 1947, without consulting Ryan or the church hierarchy, the J E C sent two of its directors, Pierre Juneau and Guy Rocher, as delegates to the World Festival of Youth in Prague, organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (W F D Y ). Rocher, clearly impressed by the Marxist critique of capitalism, uttered a scathing critique of the Church in the J E C newspaper, Vie étudiante: “The greatest scandal of our century lies in the fact that pagans were the first to dream of effectively relieving the misery of the proletariat. This situation must be laid at the door of the cowardice of Christians and the deficiency of the Church.”56 At Prague, they and delegates of other Christian youth organizations found themselves outflanked by communists and their sympathizers, barred from representation on the WFDY’s main executive and forced to adhere to a declaration of principles critical of Western democracies.57 Ryan was forced to spend the next few years trying to repair the damage of this ill-advised “politique de présence” in what turned out to be a communist front organization. The jécistes’ mistake, he reckoned, not only forced Christian youth to play the game by rules already established by the better-organized communists, but risked opening an avenue by which communists could infiltrate French-Canadian youth.58 Ryan deployed his efforts on two fronts. First, he strongly endorsed the action taken by Christian youth organizations of France, Great Britain, and Belgium to boycott any further WF DY congresses, and to establish their own international youth central, the World Assembly of Youth (W AY). He set about collaborating with a group of Anglo-Canadian youth leaders, including Ted Nichols and Ernest McEwen of the Student Christian Movement, “who have the same philosophy as we do.”59 Ryan had established close contact with these men during the meetings of the Canadian Youth Commission, and turned to them in order to ensure a meaningful Canadian participation in the new international youth federation. In August 1947, Ryan met Nichols in Toronto, bringing with him a young man whom he hoped to recruit to the cause of Action catholique. He was newly returned from his studies at Harvard and working his way intellectually from the extreme Right towards liberal democracy. This was Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who recalled that the meeting was marked with a lively discussion about the possibility of reconciling the democratic way of life with communism. However, it was an indicator of Trudeau’s

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own conservatism that he described Nichols as “a Protestant and a Communist,”60 although Nichols undoubtedly stood closer to Ryan’s brand of social democracy than to actual communism. Ryan led the Canadian delegation to the 1948 World Assembly of Youth meeting in London, England (in which Quebec secured eight of the twenty delegate slots allotted to Canada), his travel financed by Quebec’s Ministry of Youth.61 Given the constraints of his position as ACC national secretary, Ryan could go overseas only infrequently, and he therefore worked through Maurice Sauvé, who had gone to London to study political economy and served as a delegate on W AY’s provisional council. In  Ryan’s eyes, Sauvé had the advantage of not having been a jéciste, although he had married Jeanne Benoît, a former national president of the female branch of the J E C . Ryan adroitly moved to ensure that Jeanne Sauvé and the jécistes would have no influence in W AY. First, he ensured that Maurice would be the president of the Canadian delegation, thus ensuring that he could not insist on Jeanne’s nomination as a delegate. To seal the matter, Ryan informed him that it would be bad form, in a delegation limited to four persons, “who are supposed to in every sense represent the entire country, to have two representatives of the same spiritual family as well as the same biological family.” And if this reasoning proved insufficient, Ryan summarily informed Maurice that his English-Canadian counterparts would have objected, creating a “useless dead-lock” that could have only hampered further efforts at collaboration.62 Ryan urged Maurice Sauvé to carefully cultivate British and Belgian Catholic youth leaders, as he saw “a natural solidarity and sympathy” between these countries and Canada, due to “the practice of democracy and a moderate and restrained frequentation of high intellectual spheres.” England, in particular, Ryan viewed as “the world centre of ‘common sense,’” and his own proclivities drew him strongly towards London, rather than Rome or Paris, as a pole of intellectual inspiration.63 The disparaging references to Mounier and the misguided left Catholics could not be more obvious. While France remained, in his estimation, “a kind of intellectual and spiritual laboratory” that would remain a source of inspiration for the world, it was “a country definitely on the downward slope of decadence,” its intellectual and spiritual elites “impotent” in dealing with concrete problems.64 With the jécistes’ admiration for Parisian intellectual fashions clearly in mind, Ryan urged Canadian Catholic youth must be wary of blindly hitching themselves to this former metropolis.



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A second strategy in circumventing the influence of the JEC and to make WAY an effective body was coordination among English- and FrenchCanadian youth movements in order to design a national body that would represent all Canadian youth and thus offer a viable alternative to the “politique de présence” and its “open hand of welcome to Communists.”65 Along with his English-Canadian counterparts Nichol and McEwen, Ryan played a leading part in organizing the Co-ordinating Committee of Canadian Youth Groups (CCCYG). Ryan believed that only by forging a federative arrangement and a collaborative strategy among Quebec youth organizations themselves, thus enabling them to speak with a single voice, could the CCCYG be truly “national” and representative. At a meeting held at Trinity College of the University of Toronto in March 1946, Ryan informed his Anglo-Canadian counterparts that “it was the feeling of the French Canadians that the main implementation measures would have to be taken at the provincial level and that the first consideration was the forming of some type of federation of the various youth movements and organizations within the province.”66 The first such attempt at such a federation occurred with the establishment of the Fédération des mouvements de jeunesse du Québec (F M J Q ) in late 1947. At all costs, Ryan had wished to avoid the formula by which the new organization would be a federation of youth itself, rather than a federation of movements. The latter approach, in his estimation, would make it more difficult for the communists to gain influence, as they would have to infiltrate the individual constituent movements themselves, but it only enjoined the need for greater vigilance against the entry of “phantom movements” that could serve as Trojan horses for communist militants.67 He ensured that the F MJ Q would have only a limited mandate of discussing social and economic questions, leaving aside more contentious issues of education, politics, and religion, which might have exposed the Catholic institutional network to critical scrutiny. Ryan worried constantly over what he viewed as the complaisant attitude of “liberal Protestants” like Nichols who were too willing, in the name of democracy, to admit communist or communist-front groups into the C c C Y G .68 As the direct spokesman for the Catholic hierarchy on youth matters, Ryan’s views on communism were far more hard-line than those of many of his contemporaries. Although he urged Catholic youth to obtain a deeper knowledge of communism as a social system and as a philosophy, and urged them to cultivate contacts with communist militants as a way of understanding the human dimension of that ideology,69

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he had no doubt that the solution to postwar economic, social, and political inequalities rested firmly within Christianity itself. The best answer to communism lay in measures to unite all “free people” in movements to build a better world,70 an injunction that contained a darker side, as his personal notebooks record attending a speech on the communist threat given by an American F B I operative who had infiltrated the Communist Party.71 Unfortunately, a tactical error on the part of Ryan and his anti-­ communist allies allowed the National Federation of Labour Youth (N FLY ), an organization sympathetic to communism, to affiliate with both the Cc C Y G and the F MJ Q. The result was that, despite strong support for WA Y among French-speaking organizations, the N F L Y was able to torpedo the proposal to affiliate with that international group.72 Ryan’s vengeance was swift. On 23 March 1949, he met with Sergeant Barrette of the R C M P , a meeting that Ryan described as a routine encounter between the R C MP and directors of “responsible and trustworthy organizations” on how to counter communist infiltration. Barrette informed him that Renée Morin, a noted figure in Quebec’s adult education movement, was a “Communist militant,” having been a member of the N F L Y . Here was the perfect opportunity to embarrass an organization that had been a constant thorn in his side. In his capacity as director of the Société canadienne d’éducation postscolaire (one of the plural posts he began to occupy during these years), Ryan launched a letter-writing campaign to ensure that Morin, who had been chosen as a delegate to a UN E SC O education conference, would be dropped from the Canadian delegation. The fact that Morin was a woman also played into Ryan’s animus against her, given his masculinist agenda of ensuring that women would have very little influence over the ideological direction of postwar youth. Morin countered with an accusation of malicious libel, and sued Ryan in Superior Court, calling on a heavy-weight legal battery in the person of F.R. Scott, the noted civil liberties lawyer. Morin lost the first round, as the Superior Court in 1953 found that Ryan’s letters were the subject of a “qualified privilege,” in which, as the director of a movement in which Morin was active, he had not only the right but the duty to ensure that her credentials were appropriate. Morin then took her case to the Quebec Court of Appeals, which, in 1956, reversed the initial judgment, Mr Justice Hyde declaring that the “defendant’s talebearing was of a damaging and serious nature … In a country which takes pride in its democratic institutions, this sort of ‘witch hunting’ must be discouraged particularly when it is engaged in by a person such as the defendant.”73



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Ryan had committed two serious errors: first, he was wrong in accusing Morin of being a “Communist militant,” as she had never been a member of the Communist Party or of the National Federation of Labour Youth, though she had addressed the latter on several occasions in 1943 and 1944 and, by her own admission, had been welcomed there by a young woman who became the wife of Guy Caron, the provincial leader of the Labour-Progressive Party.74 “Communist sympathizer” was probably closer to the truth, but those were not the words Ryan used. Second, Ryan had overstepped in his letter-writing campaign, as the appeals court found that his claim of “qualified privilege” was vitiated by the fact that he had no position in UNE SC O itself and was usurping an authority that properly belonged to the Government of Canada in determining the composition of the Canadian delegation. His letters had not only gone to Canadian UNE S C O officials like Eugène Bussières, but to unconnected persons such as Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, Gérard Lemieux, Pierre Juneau, Évariste Choquette, and Colonel Wilfrid Bovey, in an effort to smear Morin’s reputation with present and prospective employers. Lévesque and Bovey were directors of the Canadian Institute for Adult Education, and Lemieux headed the Extension Service of the Université de Montreal. This, in the court’s judgment, coupled with the quantity of repetition, constituted malice. Ryan was ordered to pay $500 and Morin’s court costs, a not inconsiderable sum.75

“To lead them to grasp what is their autonomy is in fact their destruction”76 If anti-communism was a key facet in the campaign to project FrenchCanadian youth on the international scene, its obverse was Ryan’s attempt to use the new platform afforded by Action catholique canadienne to refurbish Catholicism as a fulcrum of unity among the postwar intellectual elites of French Canada. The Church hierarchy’s decision in 1945 to create the A C C was ostensibly to solve the overriding problem that had plagued French-Canadian intellectuals and youth organizations since the early 1930s: determining a visible and unmistakeable division between what was “Catholic” and what was “national” action. This decision, which gave pride of place to the “universal” and “spiritual” values of Catholicism over the “ethnic” values of French-Canadian identity, troubled older “traditional” nationalists such as Abbé Groulx and Esdras Minville, who had always maintained that the seamless equation

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of being a Catholic and being a French Canadian was essential for the survival and projection of French Canada in North America. The corollary to this older synthesis of Catholicism and nationalism was that French Canada’s intellectual community had to speak with a unified voice and, above all, manifest an internal self-discipline, avoiding rancorous internecine conflicts and the divisions of party politics.77 Indeed, the decision to form the A C C must be viewed as a major public expression of the travails of the postwar French-Canadian intellectual community, which found itself rapidly fissured into opposing camps of “traditionalists” and “progressives.”78 The first of these fractures occurred on philosophical lines with the importation of American models of social analysis by sociologists associated with the Laval School, which challenged the social corporatist doctrines that had held sway during the Great Depression. American sociology was a powerful countervailing current legitimating the views of those who sought at least a partial deconfessionalization and declericalization of Quebec society.79 The second was more ideological, involving a rising commitment to the tenets of “progressive Christianity,” which pitted those Catholic intellectuals open to currents of social democracy against those who, faithful to the hierarchical values of social corporatism, turned increasingly towards Maurice Duplessis’s brand of conservative liberalism to resist what they believed was a dangerous overture to the political Left.80 Nationalism now seemed irrevocably imprisoned by the conflictual logic of increasingly noisy partisan political disputes. Because of his position at the head of the new ACC, Claude Ryan was ostensibly at the cutting edge of this fragmentation of the FrenchCanadian intellectual community and one of the primary proponents of the uncoupling of Catholicism and nationalism. However, in 1947 he responded to a request by André Laurendeau, the editor of the journal Action nationale and one of the leading figures interested in renovating French-Canadian nationalism through engagement with social questions,81 to assess the state of national sentiment among the urban FrenchCanadian working class. Ryan opened with the assertion, familiar to all neo-Thomist disciples of Jacques Maritain, that “I am personally convinced that, among human beings, the national as a spiritual value is not a need in the first instance, a fundamental and instinctive need that should and must be accepted a priori, without preliminary conditions.”82 His subordination of the particular values of nationalism to the universal, spiritual imperatives of Catholicism would, at first sight, not have endeared him to the readers of Action nationale. However, despite the



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fact that his article insisted on the imperative need of the urban working classes for greater social security, he noted with anxiety, much as he had done in his 1941 treatment of the Christian family in French Canada, that the urban proletariat, in particular, working-class youth, was the principal conduit for  social values hostile to the maintenance of both Christianity and French-Canadian nationality. National values had been proudly preserved among “our peasants,” but these had little resonance in the daily lives of the “working masses,”83 The behaviour of the urban underclasses, Ryan feared, expressed what he termed “an insidious form of internationalism which is called A M E R I C A N I Z A T I O N .”84 His anxiety was that “Americanization” was synonymous with dechristianization, and was powerful because it began almost imperceptibly to transform young people “at the level of personal life and every-day habits” but eventually would extend to the realm of ideology, destroying in the process all that was culturally distinctive about being French Canadian. Such a trend was already evident in many sectors of urban life, where Ryan lamented  that youth exhibited “a marked indifference to religious and national matters.”85 Ryan’s belief that the conjugation of the “religious and national” incarnated positive social and cultural values that should be preserved marked him off decisively from Gérard Pelletier and many jécistes, who viewed nationalism in highly pejorative terms, as a force from the past, incarnating old ethnic hatreds, that stood in polar opposition to the universalism taught by the Catholic faith. However, Ryan’s continued allegiance to a relationship between Catholic values and national values also compels us to question the harsh assessment, set forth by Abbé Groulx and some “traditionalist” nationalists, of Action catholique as a divisive force. Indeed, Ryan’s activities in recasting a synthesis between Catholicism and nationalism indicate that the influential interpretation based on a teleology resting on a dualistic typology of opposition between “neo-nationalists” and “citélibristes,” corresponding to the contemporary allegiances of federalists and sovereigntists, needs considerable refinement. This typology has been read even further back by Yvan Lamonde, who traced the origins of later political division to the unravelling of the links between Catholicism and nationalism in Quebec in the 1930s and argued that the formation of Action catholique spécialisée constituted a major signpost in this process.86 Lamonde’s view that there was an inexorable movement towards separating Catholicism and nationalism is not entirely borne out by the experience of the participants. Ryan, who  was not part of a  “traditionalist” current, certainly resisted the

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uncoupling of nationalism and Catholicism, and, under his leadership, Action catholique played a far more ambiguous role than has been previously assumed, because, at least until the Asbestos strike, Ryan was still attempting to find a formula to preserve relations between these two value systems. Although the Catholic hierarchy had worked what it believed was an organizational separation of “Catholic” and “national” action, with Ryan ostensibly heading movements rigorously dedicated to eschewing what was “national,” such a compartmentalization was not easily achieved. Ryan recalled that, although the struggles of the 1930s were over, with groups like the Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne-française and the Jeunes laurentiens not included in the ACC, there lingered many bad memories and a good deal of distrust. Ryan had links of personal friendship with many nationalist youth activists such as Rosaire Morin of the Jeunes laurentiens and J.-Z.-Léon Patenaude of the A C J C .87 While his friendship did not extend to tolerating overt racialism, as when he rebuked Patenaude for allowing an article to appear in Chantiers, the A C J C journal, that sought to whip up fears of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy against Catholicism,88 he was active in trying to find organizational forms in which young men from all segments of the Catholic ideological spectrum might find a terrain for collaboration. This search explains Ryan’s decision to accumulate executive positions, the first being president of the Montreal diocesan branch of the Jeunesse indépendante catholique. The J I C, the Action catholique spécialisée movement dedicated to middle-class youth, was the smallest and least successful of the specialized organizations, and indeed, by the end of the Second World War, it was numerically moribund.89 However, because it had the reputation of being the most “nationalist” of the specialized movements (chaplained by the more conservative Jesuits), Ryan considered it a convenient shell within which, under the nomenclature of Action catholique, he could launch a series of groupings and publications that sought to reunify and reconnect younger French-Canadian intellectuals in such a way as to soften the unfortunate division that he saw emerging between religion and nation. Between 1945 and 1950, Ryan launched three endeavours designed to  reaffirm the connection between the values of Catholicism and the French-Canadian nation and to fulfil his goal of supplying postwar youth with adult leadership. In addressing the latter goal, what could be better than finding institutional means for harnessing the energies and creativity of the former militants of the 1930s and the wartime years who had



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slipped into marriage and professional lives? The first of these was “Présence,” a group of about fifty young men, journalists, labour leaders, lawyers, students, and social workers, all former members of Action catholique, who met regularly at Corzo Pizzina, a Montreal restaurant. There, they discussed pressing issues of the day, such as the future of Canadian Confederation, the idea of federalism, the development of new methods of popular education, social security, “co-management” by workers as a solution to labour strife, the relationship between the free world and communism, and Gérard Pelletier’s shocking revelations concerning “religious communities and handicapped children in Quebec.”90 Présence drew largely from the “progressive” side of the Catholic spectrum and included the student leader Camille Laurin; Fernand Cadieux, a rising star in the J E C ; Gérard Pelletier; the forceful young labour leader Jean Marchand of the Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada; the psychologist Claude Mailhiot; Gérard Lemieux of the École de Service Social of the Université de Montréal; Guy Cormier; and Guy Beaugrand-Champagne. Several of these individuals (Pelletier and Cormier in particular) were later active in founding Cité libre, but the presence of Roger Varin of the Jeunes laurentiens, certainly a more “nationalist” voice, reveals Ryan’s commitment to ideological inclusivity. Présence was complemented by the monthly magazine Jeunesse canadienne, published between 1946 and 1949. Ryan’s circular launching this publication aimed it directly at former Action catholique militants, who craved “a sense of team-work and solidarity” and who felt isolated in their professional and married lives.91 The third endeavour, and the most revealing of Ryan’s postwar mindset, was the “Écoles civiques d’été,” summer camps held annually between 1947 and 1950, which Ryan designed explicitly to bring together young men representing all the shades of nationalist opinion and activity in Quebec. The roster of invitees as guest lecturers included Maurice Bouchard, Benoît Baril, Guy Cormier, Réginald Boisvert, Jean Dostaler, Gérard Pelletier, Roger Mathieu, Guy Rocher, Alfred Rouleau, Maurice Tremblay, Léo-Paul Turcotte, and Roger Varin, individuals representing labour activism, journalism, academe, and the cooperative movement, ranging from avowed anti-nationalists like Pelletier to partisans of an independent Quebec like Varin and Dostaler.92 The full extent of Ryan’s hopes for this program was elaborated in a 1947 circular. “I see a team such as this one,” he declared, “called upon to play among us, but following a Catholic line less mixed up with nationalism, an identical role played by the nationalist team of 1910 and that which is still played

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by  the old Jeune-Canada group (Filion, Laurendeau, Charbonneau, Perreault, etc.).”93 What is striking is the sheer ambition, bordering on arrogance, of a young man barely twenty-three, to claim the mantle of the great nationalist champion Henri Bourassa, and to dare to elevate himself as the equal of Gérard Filion, the great propagandist of the cooperative movement who had recently become director of the Montreal daily Le Devoir, and of André Laurendeau, the leader of the Bloc populaire and perhaps the most significant figure in the constellation of French Canada’s nationalist intellectuals during the postwar years. Ryan’s statement bears scrutiny on other grounds as well. First, it is significant that the national secretary of Action catholique in no way accepted the divorce or disconnection of Catholicism and nationalism; rather, where older nationalists might have begun from the premise of an almost synonymous equation of being a Catholic and being a French Canadian, what Ryan discerned as the future was a set of mutual or reciprocal relationships emerging, where discussions between proponents of Catholic values and national values might gravitate around the problem of “a Christian renewal,” which Quebec desperately required. Indeed, Ryan believed that the program enunciated in Maritain’s Humanisme intégral furnished an excellent point of departure for a “recasting of structures,”94 urgent social reforms needed by both Quebec and Canada. The precondition was not more nationalist discourse, but “an internal reaction” that took as its priority the bedrock of the nation itself – its religious faith. “Catholicism,” Ryan proclaimed in holding out an olive branch to Pelletier and “left Catholic” disciples of Mounier, “is first a spirit,” but he immediately balanced this statement by reverting to Maritain’s conviction (and that of the Church hierarchy) that Catholicism was also “a social institution.”95 What now confronted French Canada as a nation – the same problem that Ryan’s youthful mentor, the liberal nationalist Olivar Asselin had discerned in the 1930 – was that, over the course of three centuries, Catholicism had become an institution much like “our old Civil Code,” a synonym for the security of routine, which threatened to “immobilize” the spirit in structures that no longer resonated in French Canada’s new urban civilization.96 The urgent task for Ryan’s new team was not, as Mounier would have it, the consignment of Christian institutions – Christendom – to obsolescence, but the freeing of the Christian spirit from outmoded structures in order to seek new institutional incarnations more in keeping with the needs of modern men. There is another significant clue that testifies to Ryan’s emphatic belief in the continued close relationship, if not identity, between Catholicism



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and the French-Canadian nation. The list of instructors for the 1950 summer school included a bibliography, at the head of which stood, as the central text, Esdras Minville’s Le citoyen canadien-français, along with the Jesuit father Richard Arès’s Notre question nationale, and Jacques Maritain’s Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle. More eclectic, perhaps, was Mohandas Gandhi’s La jeune Inde, works on Christian marriage, and Luther Cushing’s Manual of Parliamentary Procedure.97 Minville was a prominent economist, a front-ranking nationalist intellectual who had forcefully championed the doctrines of social corporatism during the 1930s and had directed the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Montreal. During the postwar period, he centred a group of intellectuals who carried forward Lionel Groulx’s “traditional” nationalism, which sought a way to maintain and expand the traditional values of French-Canadian culture by preserving the symbiosis between Catholicism and the nation.98 This stood in contrast to the emerging “neo-nationalism” of André Laurendeau and Gérard Filion, which viewed the social problems thrown up by the new industrial and urban era as so intractable that the traditional institutions of family, school, and church were powerless to address them. The corollary was that any lasting solution to these problems, and the continued authority of the nationalist ideology itself, required a degree of secularization, in which the progress of the nation was identified with the achievement of greater economic security for the French-Canadian working masses. This project required a much stronger intervention by the state and the evisceration of the corporatist doctrines that had hedged its activity.99 This secularization of nationalism, and the incipient statism that it entailed, was a course that Minville and his “traditionalist” allies were unwilling to countenance, as their priority lay in maintaining French Canada as a Catholic civilization. Ryan was undoubtedly aware of these emerging differences, but in 1947 they had not developed to the point where Minville’s text on the civic sense in French Canada would not have secured broad agreement among the young men attending l’École civique d’été.100 However, Ryan’s shift from Groulx to Minville requires some explanation. Despite attempts by present-day historians to refurbish Groulx’s reputation by demonstrating the continued centrality – read “modernity” – of his historical outlook after 1945,101 the group of postwar young men to which Ryan belonged would have regarded his brand of nationalism as somewhat passé. By contrast, Minville was a political economist well versed in Catholic sociology, and his credentials therefore appeared more

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impeccably “modern” than the literary and historical engagement of Groulx. Further, the young middle-class professionals to whom Ryan appealed included men knowledgeable about economics and experienced with the business of cooperatives; thus, the emphasis on Minville was a strategic one in building bridges among reformist Catholics of a variety of political sympathies. Finally, the usefulness of Minville lay in the fact that he was a layman and thus provided a different model of a Catholic intellectual.102 Although Minville certainly continued the line of Lionel Groulx’s thinking about French Canada and its place in Confederation, he was, in light of the work of Jacques Maritain and others, concerned to draw a  more careful distinction between “nation,” “church,” and “state.” Distinguishing these, however, did not mean separating them, but rather clarifying the purpose for which each stood. The nation, for Minville, was “a living organism” carrying within itself the principle of its conservation and renewal, which was “the ethnic milieu.” Nations constituted a centre where culture, language, laws, and customs moulded individuals from one generation to the next and where those from outside would find themselves obliged to adapt. Minville did not believe that there was any necessary identity between state and nation;103 in this respect, he followed the dictum of the Dominican father J.-T. Delos, a world-renowned specialist in international law who had spent the years of the Second World War teaching at Université Laval.104 Minville defined the state as a political and territorial construct, charged with watching over the common good, one key aspect of which was “the homogeneity of the indigenous population” of its territory. In the specific context of French Canada, however, state and nation flowed seamlessly together in one’s “country,” an entity at once territorial and cultural, which synthesized “the entire human condition, with its cultural and moral attainments, with the land and history.”105 Because French Canada was a nation that also possessed a state, it constituted a “patrie.” While a majority group must respect the cultural rights of minorities, it could, by invoking the common good, require the state to adhere to a general policy “which conforms to its spirit and to its conception of order.”106 In the late 1940s, Ryan was clearly indebted to Minville’s definition, offered as early as 1943, that French Canadians were “a Catholic people” and that it was impossible to envision a nation living “in rupture with its traditional Catholicism and still persisting in its French culture.”107 Ryan most emphatically agreed with Minville’s characterization that the cultural originality of French Canada lay in its Catholicism, which had



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transmitted a heritage of “spiritualist, personalist, qualitative and communitarian” values that demarcated it from the ambient materialism and individualism of Anglo-Saxon North America.108 The survival and expansion of the “French fact” in Canada, Ryan maintained, was necessary to the “spiritual equilibrium” of the country and especially to the future of Catholicism in Canada. Writing in 1951, Ryan dwelt upon the imperative of the continued bond between Catholicism and Frenchness, “not because it is French (which is of itself spiritually indifferent) but because it is, in Canada, the social product of three centuries of of collective life, marked in its whole by the sign of Christianity and that, maintained in its essential elements, this fact of culture promises, more than any abandonment, to serve the Christian cause in the future.”109 While Minville was careful to indicate that “French Canadian” and “Catholic” were not identical, all nationalists admitted that the Catholic Church had profoundly impregnated the French-Canadian national personality and had become “one of the master values of our national heritage.” Consequently, for Minville, the French-Canadian citizen was Catholic, who, in turn, was enjoined to work for “a Christian social and political order” that resisted liberalism, socialism, communism, and totalitarianism.110 As a social democrat, Ryan would have dissented from Minville’s continued defence of social corporatism and his characterization of forms of liberalism and socialism as anti-Christian, but he would have certainly endorsed his plea for “a unity of thought” on social and national questions among members of French Canada’s elite,111 a goal that Ryan hoped to realize through the machinery of Action catholique. Throughout the late 1940s, Ryan’s writings testified to the intellectual tumult occurring in nationalist circles. Unlike the anti-nationalist Gérard Pelletier or the neo-nationalist André Laurendeau, he never counselled an  abandonment of the imperatives of “traditional” French-Canadian nationalism. Rather, to the disunity in nationalist ranks, he counterposed a shift in focus, away from the immediate “political” machinery of legislatures and party politics, and anti-English rhetoric, and towards the cultural and educative terrain where French Canada’s Catholic elites could renew their connection with the working classes. Here was a strategy that could restore harmony between “traditional” nationalists and their more socially conscious counterparts, because it took as its focus the lives of the urban lower classes, and aimed directly to restore the prestige of the synthesis of nationalism and Catholicism among this social group. The matter was urgent: Ryan’s investigations as an apprentice social worker and his early contacts with working-class branches of Action catholique

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convinced him that many working-class people were on the verge of abandoning their Catholic identity because the way in which religion had been presented by the clergy and nationalist elites tended to devalue its relevance to modern urban life. Thus, it had degenerated into “a reality that is more or less dead, without importance, a reality of pure appearance, which is hauled up to the mast-head on days of celebration, but which is left in a trunk in ordinary times.” The fault lay squarely with his society’s elites. The Catholic values that underpinned the nation, he contended, “must be explained and interpreted through a work of education that is intelligent, adapted, and sustained.”112 Ryan evinced nothing but disdain for patriotic groups, like the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, that remained mired in a “mystique of protests, parades, and decorations” that bore no relationship to the everyday lives of the urban working masses. He exhorted promoters of nationalism to undertake, as a preliminary, surveys that would measure the “foreign infiltration on our ethnic group” and, above all, to avoid internecine squabbles, noisy polemics full of empty rhetoric, and political partisanship that could only inhibit the search for a new consensus on French Canada’s fundamental values. “Please,” implored Ryan, “so long as we have not achieved a certain unanimity” on how to manage our relations with other groups in Canada, “let us keep silence.” Otherwise, nationalism would be degraded by its very advocates who “tear away the sacred character of nationalism in the eyes of the people.” Such action made nationalism “a question of debate, a question of opinions, and soon, there will be nothing left but a mere travesty of a collective will to live.” Worse, lack of consensus among the elites would soon lead to a fateful oscillation between political extremes and a turn to authoritarian leaders that would destroy the synthesis of Christianity and democracy.113 As a disciple of Olivar Asselin, who elaborated a more “liberal” inflection within the intellectual strand represented by Abbé Groulx, Ryan could, at one level, concur with Minville’s forceful articulation of provincial autonomy for Quebec. Minville’s “strict constructionist” version of federalism was founded on Quebec’s status as the one jurisdiction in North America where “Catholics enjoy as a matter of fact and of right a situation where they can achieve, through their own efforts, an integrally Christian social order.”114 Where Catholics formed the majority, concluded Minville, the state must be inspired by Catholic doctrine in both the elaboration of its laws and the exercise of its authority. Consequently, provincial autonomy was a vital necessity both for the conservation of Quebec’s Catholic identity and in order to resist “the disaggregating



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influences emanating from the central government and from the surrounding human masses.” Thus, the duty of the Quebec government was to “oppose federal centralization” for the same reasons that a “sovereign State” would have to resist the encroachments of other countries.115 However, Minville’s patriotism was not an argument for an independent Quebec: like Abbé Groulx and the “traditional” nationalist succession from Henri Bourassa, for Minville, the socio-political project of affirming Catholicism as the bedrock for Quebec’s claim for greater autonomy was “to reach, through French Canada, Canada as a whole as the final goal of our patriotic duty.”116 Significantly, Ryan’s greatest debt to Minville and the older strand of French-Canadian nationalism was evident in his quest to design representative machinery for youth movements. Writing in 1946, Ryan praised the “federal formula” as adopted by the Fathers of Confederation in 1867, “whose chief aim was to protect the legitimate rights of the ethnic groups that then existed in the country. These groups still exist today, with the slight difference that their personalities have become more precise and refined. We believe that their problems must be solved in the same spirit as in 1867, but not always with the same techniques.”117 Here was the theory that Confederation constituted a “compact” between the  two founding peoples, an idea that was the bedrock of Abbé Groulx’s writings on French-Canadian history and Minville’s rearticulation of provincial autonomy and the preservation of Catholic civilization. However, Ryan’s experiences as a national youth leader were compelling him to question some of the rigidities of the “traditional” nationalist conception of federalism. He had further occasion to develop his “federalist” style of thinking in the ongoing (and ultimately unsatisfactory) effort undertaken by Action catholique to create structures that would at once protect the autonomy of the specialized movements while at the same time ensuring adequate coordination from the national office. In 1948, he declared that, while the fundamental principle of Action catholique was the autonomy or “the sovereignty” of the individual movements and diocesan units, the national federations and the national central itself were called upon to play a dynamic and positive role in the direction of the movement. He urged Catholic youth leaders to overcome parochialism and defensiveness and to work towards a “reasonable federalism, according to which no sovereignty is absolute.”118 Further, he ascribed a second characteristic to Action catholique, the devotion to the principle of “intermediate bodies” – an evocation of neo-Thomism that opened a terrain of collaboration between French Canadians and

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representatives of other Canadian ethnic groups. These bodies, conceived by Ryan as civic federations, educational associations, youth movements, labour unions, and cooperatives, were fundamental to his political thinking, as they enabled the human person to overcome the tendency of modern structures to divorce various levels of activity from one another. Forging a democratic culture of intermediate groups, in turn, entailed a precise program of cultural and moral action, to “furnish to the masses a conscience, to transform them into a people.”119 It was here that Ryan parted company with all schools of FrenchCanadian nationalism. He judged Minville’s postwar reflections on Catholicism and nationalism useful for arousing discussions among younger intellectuals on the need to create a new civic consciousness. Moreover, as Ryan was an official of the Church charged with the articulation and promotion of Catholic social philosophy, his thought generally insisted on the importance of “intermediate bodies,” rather than the machinery of the state itself or the play of electoral politics, to ensuring a healthy civic order.120 Writing in 1951 in L’Action nationale, Ryan quoted Pope Pius XII to justify state intervention only in those circumstances where it would secure “a higher unity,” arguing that it must never trench upon the inviolable rights of individuals and families and urging strong collective action by Catholic laity to purify the spheres of private life, and those belonging to “the direct initiative from the citizen,” from the influence of politics.121 Such action, he maintained, was necessary to affirm a social equilibrium to preserve the health of democracies, which in the postwar period had witnessed a great expansion of state responsibility. As a disciple of Maritain who viewed political society as of supreme importance to ensuring a temporal common good, a goal that held profound spiritual implications as well, Ryan never urged his contemporaries to simply abandon attempts to transform the political order. However, in common with Groulx and Minville (and even Pierre Elliott Trudeau),122 he was acutely aware of the propensity of partisan politics to generate the empty rhetoric and rigid thinking that divided and discredited the FrenchCanadian intellectual community. In his estimation, the young men of his generation should avoid party politics as “a vitiated milieu” and instead devote their energies to a far wider conception of the sphere of politics, the creation of a conscious and enlightened public opinion – what he glowingly defined as “the profound and organic expression of the most solid and rich elements of culture and the popular spirit. It must have attained a degree of stability which will shelter it from the violent but superficial shocks of history and possess a flexibility that renders it



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capable of surpassing rigid sentimentalism to accept the language of facts.”123 This shift in focus would work a profound transformation in the state, but it would be an indirect one, as it would entail the development and organization of a moral consciousness outside the technical sphere of politics and government institutions themselves. Here, the model was Britain rather than English Canada, France, or the United States. It, among all Western democracies, possessed the most highly developed collective civic consciousness. Always the former CCF militant, Ryan attributed the success of the British Labour Party to a longstanding and far-reaching education of public opinion, which he contrasted favourably with Canada, where, among both English and French Canadians, political campaigns were waged around “phantoms or subjects of collective fears.”124 It is fair to say that Ryan fully accepted Minville’s synonymity of Catholic and French-Canadian citizens. However, where Minville viewed the resulting quest for a Christian socio-political order in light of the doctrines of social corporatism, which he had resolutely defended since the 1930s, and sought as a priority to warn his contemporaries against the encroachments of the “materialist” state in the form of a paternalistic system of social security that would ultimately abridge individual freedoms,125 Ryan’s support of a political culture based on “intermediate structures that would bridge the gap between those who govern and those who are governed” bore a social democratic impress.126 His “apolitical,” though hardly “anti-political,” stance was in many ways conditioned by his position: although an enthusiastic CCF activist in 1944–45, he had to avoid any overt partisanship once he became national secretary of Action catholique. Still, his public statements and writings between 1945 and 1950 left little doubt as to his allegiances, which can best be described as a socially conscious democratic credo that floated somewhere between the Liberal Party and the CCF . One of his first forays as A C C national secretary was to attend a meeting of fifty people called by Archbishop Charbonneau at the archdiocese offices to discuss the question of family allowances and, specifically, whether benefits should be paid to the father or the mother. Ryan recalled a spirited debate between the Jesuits of the École sociale populaire (Fathers J.-P. Archambault and Émile Bouvier), who supported paternal rights, and Thérèse Casgrain and the Dominican priest André Guillemette, who headed the administration of Catholic charity in the Montreal diocese, who urged support for payments to women. Ryan did not speak at this meeting, but he was very impressed by Casgrain and emphatically supported both the

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principle of family allowances and her struggle to ensure that women secured the benefits of this program.127 This one breach in Ryan’s commitment to a hyper-masculine public sphere can be attributed to both his personal experience of growing up in a single-parent family living on the edge of poverty and his early training as a social worker, where he would have witnessed the ravages caused by wartime dislocations. This initial bias would have been reinforced by the fact that he was firmly committed to the principle of federal initiatives in social security and by his persistent animus against Father Bouvier and the social corporatists. He must have relished the opportunity, through backroom discussions with Archbishop Charbonneau, to sabotage the designs of his former mentor. Between 1947 and 1950, Action catholique militants and chaplains were part of a reformist vanguard, centred in the Catholic trade unions, dedicated to achieving a working social democracy in Quebec, based on the implementation of worker comanagement of industries, a position that they believed was legitimated by the social teachings of the Church. In the North American context, this was the most radical expression of social democracy, which went far beyond the American labour movement’s demand for full employment or its English-Canadian counterpart’s attempt to secure a system of industrial legality and representation, initiatives that remained firmly in a reformist “liberal” orbit.128 Although Ryan never referred directly to the struggle between these social democrats and the regime of Maurice Duplessis, which enlisted the support of employers, conservative clergy, and social corporatists like Bouvier and Minville in resisting the attempt to transform capitalism from inside the profit structure, he was active in attempting to move the Church as a whole towards an acceptance of these social democratic currents. However, his efforts in this direction were judged too timid by his friend Louis Beaupré, a social worker whom he had recruited to the cause of Christian civic action. Writing to Ryan in 1947, Beaupré exhorted him to attempt to transform the “latent Christianity” of many young French Canadians by emphasizing practical Christian social action. Such action would energize many of those involved in Action catholique, because its emphasis on modern social work principles would give greater scope to lay professionals within the movement, with the added benefit of enabling them to challenge the “obsession with chastity among our spiritual leaders (who are too often repressed individuals).” “Dear Claude,” implored Beaupré, “think of your own personal situation. As much as you have told me that your Christianity derives from contact with the truths of religion, I am more or less convinced that



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your own profound convictions have progressed since you have known human misery and decided to relieve it.”129 Moved by this appeal to his social conscience, Ryan delivered an important address in June 1947 to a group of seminarians. Taking his friend’s advice, Ryan urged them first and foremost to recognize the new importance of social classes and to “get rid of our social conservatism” in all matters pertaining to Christian social action. He aimed to foster among younger clergy a new mentality that would banish once and for all the “disincarnated Christianity that fears the terrestrial power of man and his collective destiny, that is unwilling to follow the movements of history.” In other words, he pointed to the necessity for dialogue and interactions between Christian beliefs and institutions and currents of social and economic democracy that were sweeping through Western societies.130 While never mentioning Duplessis and the Union nationale government, Ryan mercilessly exposed them as Catholics evincing “a systematic attitude of R E F USA L .” By resisting legitimate demands for liberation in the profane realm, not in the name of Catholic philosophy, but in accordance with “a false social conservatism according to which that which was good in the 17th or 18th century is supposed to hold true today,”131 they would cause incalculable harm to Catholicism. His reflections on French-Canadian nationalism, written to André Laurendeau, also date from this period. His appeal for unity among Catholic intellectuals in such writings must be read less as an endorsement of political moderation than as an invitation to collaborate in a program of opening up and democratizing the basic social institutions of French Canada, based on a creative effort waged at the level of institutions, to secure economic, professional, and social liberation for the working classes, an engagement enlisting cooperatives, trade unions, and the state, and involving fundamental reforms of higher education, the establishment of adult education institutes, the fostering of scientific research, and a creative legislative effort aimed at providing Quebec with a system of social legislation and security in conformity with its “philosophy of life.”132 In a set of priorities that was to remain constant throughout the vicissitudes of the Duplessis era, he urged the establishment of a network of institutions to protect the “spirit of the people” against the inroads of materialism. In the religious sphere, he envisioned Action catholique as creating apostolic movements for adults to complement the existing youth organizations, to “rejuvenate our faith and to free it from its defensive complex,” thus incarnating a modern consciousness in Catholicism that would motivate the development of cooperatives in the economic sphere,

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the expansion of a network of public institutions that would defend the family, and the consolidation and adaptation of Quebec’s educational system,133 a long-standing concern inherited from his liberal-nationalist mentor, Olivar Asselin. Though ostensibly “apolitical,” such a call for action stood considerably to the left of any of Quebec’s mainstream political formations in the postwar period. Ryan’s personal involvement in this “social democratic moment” in his society’s history also ensured that his views on the proper relationship between Quebec and Canada would undergo considerable metamorphosis in the period 1945–50, a development that drew him decisively away from the three major currents then vying for supremacy among French-Canadian intellectuals: the anti-nationalist engagement of young men such as Gérard Pelletier, who urgently sought an “internationalist” dimension open to democratic currents of the European Left; the emerging “neo-nationalism” of André Laurendeau and Gérard Filion of Le Devoir, which preached abandonment of older Catholic social doctrines in the name of a socially reformist state as the only way to restore the prestige of nationalism in the context of an urban-­ industrial civilization; and the “traditional” nationalism of Minville, with its reinforcement of the tight bond between Catholicism and FrenchCanadian civilization to resist the encroachments of Anglo-Canadian values. What emerged in Ryan’s thinking was an overt expression of a “Canadian” nationalism dedicated to the moral and cultural project of building a Christian nation. Founded upon Jacques Maritain’s personalist neo-Thomism, this was a project founded on a vision of political pluralism, one that enlisted the allegiance of Catholic and Protestant elites. As a Catholic whose views were powerfully shaped by the neo-Thomist vision of a democratic order that drew its legitimacy from individuals linked to the state through participation in intermediate bodies, Ryan held a definition of “a people” that did not, first and foremost, refer to French Canadians, but to the wider group of “Canadians” more generally. Minville had uttered dire warnings concerning what he saw as the “weakening” of the intimate association between religion and nation. He ascribed such weakening to the impact of “a decadent Protestantism more and more mired in materialism” – a religious liberalism underlying the political and economic liberalism of English Canada.134 This religious decadence was, for Minville, the bogeyman animating the project of federal centralization since the mid-1930s; consequently, the idea of a “Canadian nation” was a false and dangerous delusion. While there existed a Canadian “state” composed of two nationalities, he saw no way



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of building a unified nation within Canada except through the surrender of Quebec’s provincial autonomy and French Canada’s distinctive Catholic civilization, a uniformity that he feared would lead to totalitarianism.135 While Minville recognized the need for elites of both “nations” to collaborate to ensure a certain common good, he insisted that any union of the two cultures would always remain “a marriage of reason,” conducted through a rational calculus of the respective interests of both sides.136 Both intellectually and from personal experience, Ryan could not accept the core of the nationalist definition of “state” and “nation.” He thoroughly imbibed the optimistic climate that dominated the Canadian Youth Commission in the postwar period, in which the positive spiritual and moral qualities ascribed to youth were invested with particular potency for a renewal that “promised Canada an extraordinary destiny in all domains.”137 Ryan’s rhetoric with respect to the future and possibilities of Canada could engage in the flights of hyperbole typical of many of his English-Canadian counterparts in the era of postwar reconstruction. At the 1947 École civique d’été held at Lac Stukely, near Sherbrooke, he waxed lyrical about “Canada, a young country … rich in possibilities. Its immense territory, its forests and its water resources allow us to predict a marvellous future for our country.” The elision between a civically minded postwar youth and a young country was unmistakable, and Ryan unhesitatingly placed Canadians among the “rising” peoples of the world. French Canadians “have passed beyond self-questioning regarding their survival, and are now asking how to increase their contribution to their country.”138 Here, in the identification of Canada as the country or “patrie” of French Canadians, Ryan finally stood opposed to the old nationalist current represented by Groulx and Minville. This enthusiasm, conditioned by the events of war and reconstruction, was confirmed by his Thomist frame of reference, which seems to have led him in the direction of a more optimistic strand of thinking on questions of nationalism and federalism, one that was represented in Quebec by Father Jean-Thomas Delos, whose position at Université Laval during the Second World War ensured a familiarity with his works among French-Canadian intellectuals. In a number of key respects, Delos was considerably more “liberal” than Minville and the “traditional” nationalists, especially in the area of human rights. Delos drew a careful distinction between the “natural” rights pertaining to humans, which were universal and must be safeguarded by the state as part of its divine mission to advance the common good, and the “historic” rights pertaining to

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nations – the maintenance of language, cultural, and educational institutions – which, while real, were relative and of a secondary order.139 However, it would be inaccurate to view Delos as the progenitor of a hyper-modern liberalism that posited a conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of collectivities. From the perspective of the late 1940s, the language of human rights was a new phenomenon that had a strong affinity with Catholicism and conservative attempts to overcome totalitarianism. Particularly in Europe, this new concern for a type of supra-political “human dignity” was imbricated with personalism, a strongly anti-liberal ethic that in fact equated the preservation of these rights with the protection of the rights of religious communities. “Modern” human rights, in their inception, thus provided a strong connection to notions of community and collectivity. In the case of Delos, human rights developed explicitly out of Thomistic natural law traditions, a view in which “historic” or collective rights could not be separated from “natural” rights, which were universal.140 What particularly worried Delos was the confusion between state and nation that had occurred in many Western societies during the twentieth century and that had led to totalitarian excesses destructive of Christianity. For Delos, the state must not serve any one ethnic group in particular, but the common good of all its citizens, by securing the rule of law anchored on the preservation and extension of “natural” human rights.141 While his overriding concern was to assert the bond between Christianity, which was the property of no human group in particular, and the defence of universal rights pertaining to the human person, which would act as a powerful spiritual ferment in each national or ethnic group,142 Delos was lavish in his praise of “the federal idea,” which he defined as “a constant law in the evolution of societies” and which he believed effectively reconciled the imperatives of both nation and state.143 By dividing the sovereignty of the state, federalism softened the weight of the central government while preserving the imperative of unity that was fundamental to the common good. The federal principle harmonized “the need for self-government, which is a condition of progress, of the free development of ethnic genius or particularities,” with the priority, so dear to neo-Thomists of “hierarchy, authority … but these are consented to and organized, with the aim of procuring the respect of that wider solidarity that peacefully unites those collectivities in permanent contact with one another.”144 In this respect, the Canadian “state” was not simply a potentially alien superstructure of political machinery, but a moral entity serving the Christian imperative of solidarity and



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peace, a community whose authority was essential to the preservation and flourishing of French Canada’s distinctive national character. In later years, during the torment of Quebec’s debate on language during the late 1960s and 1970s, Ryan would rely heavily on Delos to clarify his thinking and that of his compatriots about the respective rights of majorities and minorities. But in the context of 1947, Delos provided precious advice about navigating the various competing streams of nationalism vying for the allegiance of young Catholics. It enabled Ryan to outline his own nationalist credo, which diverged emphatically from both Minville and the “neo-nationalists.” Ryan declared his allegiance as a convinced partisan “of the survival of our ethnic group in America, but I am not in favour of it remaining French in a timid or servile manner.” “But this conviction,” he concluded, “does not prevent me from accepting intellectually, with all its consequences, the fact of a Canada extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”145 Here, “Canada” was not simply the political construct defined by Minville, but itself a moral, cultural, and spiritual community, an entity that had attained the highest temporal ­dignity of joining together “state” and “nation” in a way that was not alien to French-Canadian Catholics. Ryan spoke emphatically of the need for intellectuals of both French and English Canada to join in working towards “a Canadian common good.” These were no mere catchwords: for a Catholic disciple of Maritain, the “common good” was the highest spiritual goal that could be promoted by merely human organizations or institutions, and Ryan specifically declared that this “common good” was not simply material, it was “spiritual because it affects men.”146 In the postwar climate of tension and simmering conflict between the rival ideological blocs of capitalism and communism, Canada’s purpose was, for Ryan, an emphatically Christian one, that of “disinterested mediator and an interpreter of good will in the service of peace and order understood in the Christian sense.” However, Canada’s success as a nation was conditional on defining “a certain community of objectives” among its citizens, which would preserve the distinctive characteristics of the major cultures of the country and build a broader climate of rapprochement and mutual understanding among these cultural groups. In working towards these national goals, Canada was itself becoming a Christian nation, which Ryan proclaimed as his credo in “the spiritual significance of the Canadian political fact.”147 He delineated a series of national goals that would both guide the actions of the young enlighted Christian citizens he expected his civic initiatives to produce and forge definite “national characteristics” in a country where these were still

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sadly lacking. This program, in which he summoned youth to work towards “national unity,” “an equal distribution of economic goods,” the creation of “an enlightened public opinion,” and “devotion to our federal regime,”148 was the clearest articulation of Ryan’s belief in a Canadian nationalism founded on social democratic tenets. Missing from this was any commitment to the idea of French Canada as a “nation” – it had been relegated to the status of one among several “cultures.” Ryan’s pole of identity had shifted emphatically: he now conceived of Canada as one nation, and this political and moral entity had become his primary frame of reference, elevated to a quasi-religious status approaching that of the Catholic Church itself. Through the establishment of coordinating structures for Action catholique, the creation of new provincial, national, and international representative bodies for youth, and the forging of a civic consciousness anchored on the Catholic theory of intermediate bodies, Ryan pursued one overriding goal. This was the forging of a new nationalism, one that was “Canadian” rather than “French Canadian” and that was Christian in its sense of dedication to a moral community founded both domestically and internationally on the promotion of good will and understanding. He was quite precise on the foundations of this Canadian national community, and, in some significant respects, the “new” Canadian nationalism bore a striking resemblance to some central canons of the “old” French-Canadian nationalism. Writing in 1950, Ryan emphatically stated that any attempt to articulate a Canadian nationalism must start from the premise of “t h e p r i n c i p l e o f t h e pa ra l lelism of t he t wo gr e at c ult u re s ,” a rule of action that would enshrine “the distinct and autonomous character of the two great cultures that are at the foundation of the Canadian fact” and would thus promote “the integral development of the two cultures.”149 Cultural dualism, Ryan never tired of explaining, was the fundamental fact of Canadian life and had to be recognized in any movement of national or international significance.150 Recognition of this “parallelism” as foundational to the Canadian nation would, in turn, establish Canada as an original and autonomous nation on the world stage. Above all, for young men like Ryan who had imbibed a suspicion towards the British Empire and all its works during their college days, the new nationalism of the postwar period held forth the opportunity to finally declare Canadian autonomy from the empire, a long-standing desideratum of old-school French-Canadian nationalists. His conviction about the possibility of autonomy was reflected in his dealings with youth organizations: he



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pressed Maurice Sauvé, the Canadian delegate to W AY, to stand firm against schemes launched in London by YM CA representatives who “want to believe that such a thing as solidarity around the concept of Empire still exists among young people.”151 It was also evident when he exhorted Canadians to avoid overdependence on American and British markets and to support “firmly Canadian attitudes in international affairs,” by which he meant keeping a studious distance from entanglements involving the British Commonwealth, which, in his estimation, would only reawaken old ethnic nationalisms.152 In late 1949, Ryan contacted a young Montreal psychiatrist who was fresh from a career as a student leader at the Université de Montréal and asked him to interview prominent French-Canadian intellectuals about the relationship that had developed between Catholicism, French Canada, and the Canadian nation over the past fifty years and write a report on the response. Ryan’s aim was to accent “Canadianism” in an attempt to broaden the mandate of the A C C beyond the frontiers of Quebec and to suggest ways in which Action catholique could be adapted to “the needs and realities of our country.”153 The writer was Camille Laurin, who, as a leading member of the first Parti québécois government between 1976 and 1985, was to become one of Ryan’s most determined adversaries over the question of Quebec sovereignty and language. Yet, in 1949, Laurin stood squarely behind Ryan’s vision of Canadian nationalism, producing a report that pointed optimistically to the trajectory followed by French Canada, underscoring the attenuation of old antagonisms between French- and Anglo-Canadian nationalisms, and that praised the social security initiatives introduced by the federal government since the war.154 Lest we be tempted, however, to think that the Canadian nationalism of Ryan and Laurin was simply an updated version of bonne ententisme, both men were adamant that the new commitment to Canada depended on greater power and recognition accorded to French Canadians in the federal government and its institutions. At a minimum, any “moral rapprochement” anchoring a Canadian national community entailed “integral bilingualism” and that central desideratum of the old French-Canadian nationalist credo, the same treatment and guarantees given to francophone minorities throughout Canada as were accorded to the English-speaking minority in Quebec.155 “We are entitled,” Ryan informed Laurin, “to an increased number of key positions” because “we have become the principal partners on the Canadian scene.”156 The commitment that a number of young men evinced towards the vision of a Canadian nation rested on a growing sense of French

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Canada’s power on the national scene. Ryan discerned a gradual but palpable developing awareness in all sections of the country regarding “the bi-cultural character of our country,”157 but further he, like others, was aware that the Second World War had fundamentally altered the demographic nature of immigration to Canada, which in time would decisively tip the ethnic balance of the population away from British stock, leaving French Canadians, with their historically higher birth rate, as the dominant group in Canada, thus entitling them to a greater share of political power. Of equal significance, the contacts he made in the international realm of Catholic social activism persuaded him that French Canada was destined to become the “hinge of world Catholicism,” as it stood between Latin, Irish-Anglo-Saxon, and northern European forms of Catholicism.158 Ryan’s Canadian nationalism, like that of Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, who had also worked closely in adult education movements and with the Canadian Youth Commission, insisted on the unbreakable ties between language, culture (meaning Catholicism and Christian values and institutions), and the French-Canadian collectivity. Their Canadian nationalism was based on a collaboration between French and English Canadians, but it preserved at its core the “compact theory” of Confederation by insisting on “the free affirmation and the full respect of the personality of each of the partners,” and it would not countenance any dilution of these national personalities.159 It was with these considerations in mind that Ryan and Action ­catholique articulated a position that in many respects broke with both “traditional” and “neo-” nationalists during the hearings of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences (the Massey Commission) during the years 1949–51. The latter two groups viewed the commission as an unwarranted federal intrusion into domains of education and culture, which they believed were reserved to the provinces, and thus had to be resisted at all costs. In contrast, Ryan followed the lead of Father Lévesque, a member of the commission, in urging French Canadians to support the development of a Canadian culture through federal initiatives. In a 1951 article discussing the National Film Board (NF B ), Ryan stated that the time was past when French Canadians should “sulkily” avoid such federal institutions. The N F B, he categorically stated, “belongs to us as it does to all other Canadians.”160 However, in his support for the Massey Commission, he was careful to urge greater clarity in that body’s mandate, arguing that provincial responsibility for education was one of the cornerstones of Confederation. In his opinion, much grief could have been avoided if, from the outset, the



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federal government had drawn a careful distinction between “education” and “culture.” Because radio and communications involved contact between all ethnic groups, and thus affected all Canadians, there was a strong case to be made, according to Ryan, for a greater federal presence in these fields. However, any federal action had to work from the premise of “the parallelism of the two great cultures, and present itself to each according to proper and distinct modalities,” respect the principle of bilingualism, and take its inspiration from “the Christian principles that have so strongly marked our country and still form the basis of our civilization.”161

“The progressive asphyxiation of Action catholique was one of the greatest disappointments of my life”162 Between the summer of 1949 and the end of January 1950, the vision of a Christian social democracy that had fired Claude Ryan and so many young French-Canadian Catholics abruptly receded, as the forces of reaction in both church and state combined to destroy the alliance between groups of socially conscious Catholic clergy and laity and the Quebec labour movement. The Asbestos strike, waged in the spring and summer of 1949, mobilized a powerful group of conservatives in the Catholic Church, clustered around Archbishop Courchesne of Rimouski, who feared the consequences of a social democratic interpretation of papal social teachings that, in their estimation, were being falsely used to justify demands for co-management of enterprises by workers. Encouraged by the 1949 decree of the Holy Office in Rome condemning any form of collaboration between Christians and Marxists, Quebec’s Catholic conservatives could call upon influential connections in the provincial government of Maurice Duplessis, which, in 1948, had resoundingly won re-election with an increased majority, and, more signficantly, in the Vatican bureaucracy.163 Their first target was Archbishop Joseph Charbonneau of Montreal, the reformist prelate who had done much to promote Action catholique, and with whom Ryan was particularly close. Charbonneau had spoken out in favour of the Asbestos strikers, who were all members of Catholic trade unions, but what seems to have tipped the scales against him was not his pro-labour advocacy (after all, a number of other senior clergy, such as Mgr Desranleau, Archbishop of Sherbrooke, had also supported the strikers) but the perception in the  Vatican that he was causing needless friction with the political

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authorities of the province, a message reinforced by Duplessis in sending two of his ministers to speak to Pope Pius XII and several key figures among the Roman clergy. They skilfully propagated the idea, that through ill-advised statements, Charbonneau was giving an opening to communists to infiltrate the labour movement. The kiss of death for Charbonneau was the opinion of Mgr Antoniutti, the papal delegate, that he was highhanded and insouciant and was unable to deal constructively with any of his fellow bishops. In addition, Charbonneau had imprudently appointed an English Canadian, Mgr Whelan, to the position of auxiliary bishop, which caused mutterings among more nationalist clergy.164 The pope was persuaded to remove Charbonneau, effective 30 January 1950, and replaced him with the head of the Canadian College in Rome, his personal friend Paul-Émile Léger.165 One result of this action was the weakening of progressive forces among the clergy and the Catholic labour movement. Léger moved immediately to clamp down on Action catholique, ordering activists in the Jeunesse ouvrière catholique to refrain from advocating the reform of economic and political structures and to focus on individual moral purity, with a priority on prayer and private charity. He also acted to scotch what he considered “deviations” that had crept into Action catholique, especially the idea, widely propagated in the J O C’s highly popular marriage-preparation movement, that, through the sacrament of marriage, laypeople could attain a level of sanctity surpassing that of celibate clergy.166 The rather tepid collective pastoral letter of 1950 issued by the Quebec bishops backed decisively away from any linkage between the social teachings of the Church and support for worker co-management, a course that disappointed many lay militants, who began to rethink their commitment to a “Christendom” that had dashed their hopes of a regenerated social order.167 The consequences of this decision were enormous, not least in that it irretrievably shattered Claude Ryan’s vision of a French-Canadian intellectual community of Catholic young men of all ideological stripes united around a vision of civic progress. The École civique d’été was held in June 1949, in the midst of the Asbestos strike, and it featured as one of the keynote speakers Ryan’s friend Pierre Elliott Trudeau,168 who joined the sessions from the picket lines at Asbestos to impart some of what he had learned from his journey around the world. Since 1946, Ryan had been trying to persuade Trudeau to take an active part in Action catholique, and he was full of praise for his talk, which fascinated the audience “both by the quality of its content and by the mystery which he allowed to surround his person.” While



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Ryan recognized in Trudeau a profoundly religious being, he also assessed his Catholicism as being quite removed from the temper required for militancy in the specialized movements, which stressed teamwork and collaboration.169 In an address entitled “Où va le monde!,” Trudeau stood at one remove from both a defence of Western democracies and an endorsement of Marxism, arguing that neither of these ideological power blocs was truly democratic. He argued that the only way to a truly democratic order lay in a personalist form of Christianity that linked the realization of the individual to the welfare of the community,170 an implicit endorsement of the social democratic ethos then powerful within Action catholique. Though in general agreement with Trudeau’s arguments, Ryan was mindful of the brewing ideological clash between Catholic progressives and conservatives, and he was especially aware that many bishops viewed the Action catholique movements as nurseries of leftists. He therefore endeavoured in the next day’s session to offer a terrain of reconciliation, one that looked to Catholic social teaching in affirming the existence of classes in modern society but also insisting on their fundamental interdependence. Above all, FrenchCanadian youth must avoid the “bellicist conception of Karl Marx,” as this would end in a dictatorship “a hundred times worse than that which it seeks to correct.” “Capitalism,” stated Ryan, “is not worthy of condemnation in and of itself as an economic regime, but it becomes so if it is based on a sense of exploitation and the lack of a civic sense.” He injected a new note of caution, calling upon the young Christians of his generation to realize that “all society must be organized on a basis of authority,” a message that was directed at the audience, the higher clergy, and the strikers at Asbestos.171 Ryan’s attempt to rekindle loyalty to Catholic sociology and commitment to the institutional Church as the springboard for reform fell increasingly on deaf ears. Already, promising young men such as Camille Laurin were deciding not to commit to Action catholique, a blow to Ryan’s efforts to anchor the movement in Quebec’s universities.172 Worse was to come. In the summer of 1950, Gérard Pelletier asked to meet with Ryan at a “horrible” little Italian restaurant in Montreal (probably the Corso Pizzina, where the Présence group had held their assemblies) to inform him, “while savouring a plate of thirty-five-cent spaghetti,” of a new journal he proposed to found, along with Pierre Elliott Trudeau and some of his former jéciste comrades. Pelletier recalled that Ryan’s reception of the idea “was even more lukewarm than the spaghetti,” telling him without looking up from his plate that “it looks like an ugly rash of

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writing of which you, in particular, should beware.”173 The journal was, of course, Cité libre,174 but was Pelletier’s retelling of the encounter, with the portrait of the crotchety Ryan, entirely accurate? There are two matters to consider. First, when the magazine and its editorial team aroused Archbishop Léger’s suspicions in 1951, Ryan used his position of trust as national secretary of Action catholique to defend them, firmly declaring that not only were Pelletier and Trudeau his friends, but that they were devout Christians and their intentions were sound.175 Despite his intellectual opposition to Pelletier, there was no doubt of Ryan’s personal sympathies with Cité libre’s plea for a more socially conscious Catholicism oriented to the progressive side of the political spectrum. However, Pelletier was correct in assuming that Ryan would not have been pleased by Cité libre’s foundation. It provided an intellectual c­ entre for the very group of young men that Ryan had so assiduously attempted to interest in civic action under the auspices furnished by Action catholique and the institutional church, and it rendered nugatory his efforts such as Présence and the Écoles civiques to use Catholicism as a pole around which to articulate an ideological consensus among FrenchCanadian intellectuals. More significantly, the new magazine gave substantial form to the ugly spectre of jécisme, the genie that Ryan had laboured so hard to contain within the structures of Action c­ atholique. With adulation of Mounier’s anti-institutional brand of Christianity providing its guiding ideological core, Cité libre signalled the rising prestige of existential personalism, freed from any clerical constraints, among Quebec’s Catholic intellectuals. This movement would displace Jacques Maritain’s neo-Thomism during the course of the 1950s among a rising fraction of Quebec intellectuals and, in so doing, undermine the cultural authority of institutional Catholicism. Then there was the increasingly conservative climate in the Church itself. As national secretary of Action catholique, Ryan had considerable scope for his own initiatives, but he was ultimately accountable to the bishops who employed him. And, despite all his successes and high position as a trusted Catholic operative, he was still a young man without professional credentials. The growing conservatism of the years 1949–51 compelled him to execute new priorities, which included admonishing militants, especially working-class young men and women in the J O C, to “avoid engaging in actions that are purely social and economic.”176 Ryan organized a final École civique d’été in the summer of 1950 in a considerably chillier political climate. His keynote address, “Gravité du problème de la liberté,” while dwelling on the frustrations and violations of



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freedom that occurred in Christian civilizations, firmly toed the line articulated in Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis in barring the way to any dialogue with Marxism as a dangerous “neo-modernist” deviation.177 It reminded activists that what Quebec society needed was balance between “external” and “interior” forms of freedom.178 Here, Ryan enjoined his audience not to express their desire for freedom in the conflictual sphere of politics, but rather in the cultivation of a spirituality that would be personally liberating. Viewed from this standpoint, there was a darker side to Ryan’s 1951 polemic against partisan politics, which, in light of the post-Asbestos crackdown, seemed designed to persuade reform-minded young men not to translate their anti-Duplessis sentiments into left-wing political action. Ryan’s ecclesiastical superiors compelled him to spend much of his time during 1950 and 1951 devising a new constitution for the ACC, a document that firmly bore the impress of the episcopacy’s new conservative turn and especially reflected the influence of the national chaplain, Mgr Laurent Morin, an influential figure in the shadowy struggle by proDuplessis forces to remove Archbishop Charbonneau. The bishops decided to curb the drift of the specialized youth movements towards the Catholic Left by creating an “Action catholique générale,” composed of pious and devotional societies such as the Ligues du Sacré-Cœur and the Dames de Sainte-Anne, which enlisted the energies of many traditional Catholics, and joining this to the youth movements under the ACC rubric. This attempt to join social militancy and personal piety not only proved organizationally unwieldy, but it aroused the vociferous opposition of pro-labour militants within Action catholique, who resented their loss of autonomy.179 The conservative turn in Quebec Catholicism compelled the idealistic C C F militant of 1945 to become a man of moderation, seemingly bereft of the idealism that had sustained his vision of a new Christendom. He must have contemplated his journey to Europe in the fall of 1951 with a certain foreboding. As one who had laboured both at home and internationally to elaborate a generous and forward-looking postwar vision of youth – a social democratic order in a Christian Canada – he was acutely aware that this ideal had foundered in the climate of repression launched by the twin assaults of Duplessis and the conservative bishops. In his personal life, Ryan was twenty-six, still unmarried, and older than the twenty-five-year threshold that, according to the postwar ideology to which he subscribed, marked the entry of young males to full adult responsibilities. Reporting to Esdras Minville concerning the international meeting of the Chrétienté en Marche (Christendom in

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Movement) congress held at Berndorf, Germany, which Ryan attended in the fall of 1951, Ryan expressed his fears in what purported to be a commentary on a panel entitled the “Sexual Experience of Single Laypeople.” He fully recognized the dangers of the prolongation of the unmarried state: “an anxiety that can extend to pain and even to neurosis, or an ‘establishment’ in the life of a single person, stunted, slow, regular, crystallized and comfortable. The virgin becomes an old maid, the single man becomes an old bachelor, with everything pejorative that this word connotes.”180 But did Ryan foresee the debilitating effects of a repressive Catholicism on his own personal destiny, or was this a prognostication of the relationship now developing between Quebec society and traditional Catholic values?

3 “I Must See Rome Also,” 1951–1952 Servants or prophets of the people are not – not necessarily – elected representatives of the people. Their mission starts in their own hearts and consciousness. In this sense they are self-appointed prophets. They are needed in the normal functioning of a democratic society. They are needed especially in the periods of crisis, birth, or basic renewal of a democratic society. Jacques Maritain, Man and the State

The spring of 1952 found Claude Ryan in Rome, his thoughts turning towards his return to Montreal. From his room at the Palazzo Salviati, located in the Piazza della Rovere near Vatican City, he wrote to his friend Gérard Lemieux, secretary of the Faculté de Sciences Sociales at the Université de Montréal, detailing his year of study at the Pontifical Gregorian University. Ryan had rigorously pursued what amounted to a crash course in the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition. This involved a course of reading over the winter, during which he spent seven or eight hours a day in the close study of church history, Catholic theology, and analysis of papal encyclicals, painstakingly accumulating, he proudly reported, eight hundred pages of hand-written notes. Apart from a surprise visit from his friend Pierre Trudeau in the fall of 1951, which elicited wry bemusement at the shifting guises of Trudeau’s self-presentation, with one evening spent slumming by sleeping under one of the Tiber bridges and the next lounging in the lobby of one of the city’s most luxurious hotels, Ryan’s daily existence was semi-monastic, “a life of retreats and studies” in which he went out for “an evening once in three months.”1 By April, even Ryan’s iron self-discipline was wearing thin under this regimen, and he looked forward to the arrival of Canadian friends Mario Dumesnil, his wife, Jacques Betz, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and the young economist André Raynauld, who had all promised him a visit in Rome after Easter, to awaken “an old bear from his winter hibernation.”2

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Still, despite the loneliness and fatigue, he could proudly claim both intellectual and spiritual progress. “It has been a wonderful year,” he wrote with satisfaction. “I will return from Rome with my spirits renewed. I frequently felt the presence of the Holy Spirit helping and encouraging my work” with excellent advisers such as Father Fortin, his spiritual director in Rome, “who has helped me along the path of a more conscious and more demanding spiritual life.”3 Claude Ryan’s sojourn in Rome completed his education that, as we have seen, had begun in the interwar years through a fusion of the nationalist teachings of Lionel Groulx, the spiritual mentor of a generation of young French-Canadian college students, and an encounter with a French personalist mystical literature of Christian heroism, capped by Jacques Maritain’s mid-1930s call to young Catholics to a life of social engagement and militancy. His wartime studies at the École de Relations Industrielles and the École de Service Social at the Université de Montréal had honed a sociological awareness and a professional identity anchored on a synthesis of Catholic doctrinal sociology and American casework practice. But throughout the late 1940s, despite being catapulted to the top executive position in Action catholique canadienne – which gave him a definite technique of social analysis and action, a regular hearing in front of powerful Quebec bishops, and frequent European and North American trips to international youth and apostolic congresses – Ryan persistently confronted what he considered a personal failing, a sense of “the fragility, the inarticulate character, the vagueness of our religious culture,” especially when he had to meet Protestant, agnostic, or communist counterparts and account for the intellectual consistency of his beliefs. For him, the breaking point came in 1950, when visiting his friend Rev. Ted Nichols, a United Church minister in Toronto. Nichols’s wife had recently given birth to a little girl, whom the couple had named Deborah. Ryan had the gaucherie to inquire whether she had been named for the English actress Deborah Kerr, which compelled his flustered hosts to inform him that it was a biblical name drawn from the Book of Judges. “I realized in this difficult moment,” he later recalled, “the totally inadequate nature of my own religious culture. I was twenty-five years old, I had graduated several years ago from college and University, but I had never read the Bible cover to cover.”4 This sense of second-rate spiritual formation converged with a profound awareness of his intellectual inferiority, reinforced constantly by the spectacle of contemporaries such as Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier, Maurice Sauvé, Guy Rocher, Léon Dion, and Fernand Dumont parading



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to first-rate international universities like Oxford, London, Cambridge, Paris, and Harvard for advanced degrees and a passport to the coveted status of public intellectual upon their return. His own failure to complete his professional training as a social worker and obtain university credentials disqualified him from obtaining a scholarship offered by the Canadian or Quebec governments that would have opened to him a prestigious career as a university academic. Still a bachelor at age twenty-six, Ryan could not even envision forming a family, the touchstone of both the new spirituality of lay competence proclaimed by Action catholique and the cult of male citizenship he had laboured assiduously to promote during the years of postwar reconstruction. Worse, for a young man fired by visions of spiritual knighthood, it seemed that he could look forward to only the rather mournful and lonely existence of a bureaucrat in the Action catholique movement, a fussy confidant of bishops and priests dutifully stifling his social democratic beliefs while carrying out the orders of his ecclesiastical superiors, a role that required him, in the name of conservative reaction, to purge the vestiges of reformist engagement and youthful excitement that had once aspired to remake Catholic Quebec into a new Christendom. Such depressing reflections hounded Ryan all the way to the First Apostolic Congress in Rome in October 1951, reaching their most despairing in a plaintive letter, written to Esdras Minville from Berndorf, West Germany, that darkly hinted at his unfulfilled future as a bachelor. However, the events of the seven-day congress fully restored his spirits, awakening him to new intellectual and cultural forces bubbling beneath the surface of the Catholic world, both reaffirming and subtly redirecting his vocation. For a young man like Ryan, whose horizons, despite his extensive international contacts, were largely bounded by the intimate connection between religion and nation that characterized Quebec’s ­particular brand of Catholic culture, the congress was a transformative experience. First, there was the sheer visual power of the full Roman panoply; the spectacle of Pope Pius XII, who addressed the delegates in person; the Roman officials, cardinals, and bishops, who participated in the daily study sessions; and the magic of the closing banquet in the illuminated setting of the fortress of the Castel Sant’Angelo, which would have forcefully impressed a Canadian visitor. But more significantly, the congress marked an important step in the transformation of postwar Roman Catholicism, as it was the first major international occasion that both celebrated and sought to enhance the role of the laity in the Church. At one level, the overriding message was a conservative one: in

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his opening address, Pius XII presented the delegates with a stark choice, evoking the image of “two parties for or against God” vying for men’s souls. Mindful of the potential for unauthorized tendencies within the Catholic Action movement, the pope sought a new definition that would clearly subordinate it to the hierarchy while decreeing that it should not have a monopoly over forms of lay apostolate. However, it was clear also that the pontiff was endeavouring to formulate a theological justification for a more prominent role for laypeople in the Church. Caught between a willingness to admit that the Church, in the final analysis, was animated by the apostolic zeal of the laity and the need to preserve sacerdotal supremacy, he defined laypeople as apostolic by necessity, not by essence, while opening the door to future renegotiation of these terms by recognizing different forms of engagement. Joseph Folliet, a leading FrenchCatholic social thinker, interpreted this most optimistically as marking the end of the idea of the laity as an auxiliary militia of the Church. The most striking element of the congress was the presence of one thousand delegates from seventy-four countries, a forceful indicator that the essence of Catholicism was its universality, a quality transcending any expression of national particularism. This was a theme dear to the heart of the pope, who urgently sought to enlarge the traditional bases of Catholicism beyond the Latin-speaking countries of Europe. Sessions dealt with issues such as the potential relationship between decolonization and dechristianization in new nations, the imperative need to aggressively pursue the Christianization of working-class milieus in industrial nations, and the hope, tantalizingly indicated by the success of Christian democracy in France, Italy, and West Germany, of a “new Christendom” that might form a “third way” between the worlds of capitalism and communism. From such sessions as well as from his fellow delegates, Ryan learned that Catholicism, far from standing for immobilism or political and social reaction, was a dynamic institution standing at the intersection of global forces and movements.5 At the conclusion of the congress, Ryan negotiated a year-long sabbatical with Mgr Laurent Morin, the national chaplain of the Comité national d’Action catholique, which paid his salary and expenses.6 This, in Morin’s eyes, was a mutually beneficial arrangement. First, Action catholique canadienne, the umbrella body established by the Council of Canadian Bishops in 1945 to coordinate a proliferating welter of specialized Action catholique youth movements, owed a considerable debt to Ryan. For several years, he had, in effect, been the “point-man” of the Quebec bishops, whose consistent aim, as we have seen, was to reduce



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the autonomy of the movements and keep in check socially reformist tendencies among “specialized” movements such as the Jeunesse ouvrière catholique (JO C ) and the Jeunesse étudiante catholique (J E C), which, on a number of occasions, had evinced a worrisome tendency to push the Church into a compromising sympathy with the political Left. By 1951, in the aftermath of the Asbestos strike, Ryan had succeeded in affirming some kind of episcopal control, with the assistance of clerics such as Morin and Mgr Gérard Coderre. He had enlisted their participation in drafting a new constitution carefully crafted to constrain the autonomy of the specialized movements, with greater accountability to the Church hierarchy, and in anchoring Action catholique more firmly at the diocesan level.7 But beyond a reward for good service, there was much more to Ryan’s presence in Rome at this particular juncture. Morin was one of the key members of a powerful conservative faction within the senior ranks of Quebec’s Roman Catholic clergy, a “secret committee” whose behindthe-scenes interventions with Roman authorities during the Asbestos strike had secured the removal of a noted foe of Premier Maurice Duplessis – Archbishop Joseph Charbonneau of Montreal, who had openly sympathized with the Asbestos strikers. Morin was also instrumental in defeating a progressive Catholic current, evident among labour union and Action catholique chaplains and a wide range of students and socially conscious elements, that sought a thorough-going reconstruction of the capitalist order by applying papal teachings regarding profit-sharing and worker co-management.8 The victory of conservative Catholic elements in Quebec was but a local manifestation of a wider Vatican crackdown on whatever smacked of openness to the Left: the 1950 papal encyclical Humani generis imposed a firm negative on what the pope termed “neo-modernist” theology, denounced any collaboration between Christians and Marxists, and caused a sensation in France in 1954 by abruptly ending the social experiment launched by the worker-priest movement, a decision that caused considerable anguish to Ryan’s younger contemporary Fernand Dumont, then in Paris pursuing graduate studies in sociology.9 Ryan’s sabbatical was part of a Vatican “freeze” calculated to reaffirm theological orthodoxy among lay militants: the spiritual direction and the courses at Gregorian University, regarded as the most ­conservative Catholic institution in Europe outside Franco’s Spain, were intended to inoculate young Catholic militants like Ryan against any hankerings towards the structural reform of capitalism. Without doubt, the aim was to draw Ryan to the conservative side, thereby using him to

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eviscerate left-wing sympathies from Action catholique and to turn it  towards what the new Archbishop of Montreal, Paul-Émile Léger, vaunted as a more inward-looking, personal, spiritual culture that accented the value of apostolic witness over social activism.10 At one level, Ryan’s exposure to Roman orthodoxy did not disappoint his conservative sponsors. Like many postwar visitors, he was an uncritical devotee of the cult surrounding Pius XII, writing in his obituary tribute in 1958 that the pontiff’s “angelic face continues to illuminate our existence.” The Church, in Ryan’s estimation, had benefited immensely from his papacy, through his ability to appeal to nonCatholics. In a statement supremely devoid of irony, Ryan maintained that, for those Catholics who valued freedom, the pope’s interventions had fostered a  more expansive climate.11 In the ensuing years, Ryan’s personal allegiance to the Vatican’s authority was never in question. There is no doubt that the young Canadian fell thoroughly under the spell of the Eternal City and, in future years, lavished extravagant praise on “Rome, the spiritual homeland of humanity, Rome, incarnation of the historical character of the Christian religion.” Speaking to a group of Boy Scouts in 1959, Ryan proclaimed: My faith is of Roman origin and nourishment. It is frequently said that when one comes back from Rome, you either have more faith or none at all. I had the great advantage of seeing the mysteries of Rome up close, and have always been struck by the realism of the Roman spirit, which accepts human weakness, accepts the difficult conditions in which the Church moves … but works with determination both in spite of these weaknesses and with them to achieve the Work which Christ has given to His Church. There are many who hold an over-idealized, overly pure, overly ethereal vision of this task.12 Ryan’s juxtaposition of Roman “realism” and what he characterized as intellectual tendencies that over-emphasized idealism and purity – codewords for his youthful interwar encounter with French personalism and the conjunction of French-Canadian nationalism and Roman Catholicism to which he had been exposed during college – indicated that his Roman studies had filtered, refracted, and corrected these tendencies. What his ecclesiastical superiors may not have realized at the time was that his religious allegiance was “Roman” rather than “ultramontane,” a  designation that involved far more than a restatement of clerical



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supremacy. As a result of his sabbatical, Ryan acquired, as a layman, mastery of a theological tradition that claimed universal authority and whose modern exemplars, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Yves de Montcheuil, Karl Adam, and John Henry Newman, “held forth the Church in its true image as the Bride of Jesus Christ, as Christ’s Mystical Body.”13 This new-found authority gave him the self-confidence to become a public intellectual, ultimately possessing a wider audience and more prestige than any of his ecclesiastical superiors in the Quebec church hierarchy, with the possible exception of Cardinal Léger. It enabled him to self-confidently diagnose the cultural and spiritual dilemmas of his own society in the 1950s and to firmly articulate, in the face of a number of competing alternatives, a compelling synthesis of Catholic theology and North American social scientific analysis that promised to restore the shattered unity of both the French-Canadian intellectual community and the spiritual and cultural wholeness of a Quebec society confronting the tensions of an accelerated modernity. The road home from Rome to Montreal took Ryan on a three-month tour through the heart of Catholic Europe. Always frugal, he carefully noted expenses: leaving Rome with $863, he spent only small amounts on personal indulgences: $3 for cigars, $12.50 for a Kodak camera, and $13.50 for a raincoat. His first stop was at Freiburg (Switzerland) to consult the Dominican priest Father Meerschmann, an expert on medieval church history who had agreed to “go over his life’s work in three days with me,” followed by an excursion to Spain, where, with irritation, he noted losing sixty dollars.14 Returning to France, he spent ten days in Lyon to meet with Joseph Folliet, the great French-Catholic social activist, followed by a busy round of contacts in Paris. There, he was introduced to Abbé Daniel, co-author of the celebrated La France, Pays de Mission?, a volume that had awakened the postwar French church to the ravages of urban dechristianization.15 He then moved on to northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the heartland of Catholic experiments with the “social question,” where in early July he attended the International Congress of Christian Trade Unions at The Hague. There, he gave vent to his social democratic allegiances, sarcastically noting the contrast between the professions of “Catholic” governments like those of Francisco Franco and Latin American dictators to follow papal social teachings while imprisoning trade union activists as suspected communists. Such practices, he confided to his journal, “are refrains familiar to Quebec readers,” an obvious jibe at the anti-labour policies of Maurice Duplessis. Despite these lingering sympathies for social democracy, he

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praised this congress’s temperate stand on worker co-management, which carefully navigated between endorsing Pius XII’s injunction that this was not a “natural right” (thought nothing prevented workers from acquiring such rights “in all justice”) and positioning Catholic social teaching in more overt confrontation with capitalism. Ryan discerned hope for labour peace and the allegiance of Quebec workers to Catholic social doctrine in the congress’s call for new forms of enterprise allowing workers to play an active role, but without imperilling the rights of management. He praised the pope for trying to defuse tensions by deflecting attention from the divisive issue of the right to co-management to the question of unemployment. The best strategy for Catholic militants to adopt in the face of such social questions, he concluded, was not to take hard-and-fast “progressive” or “reactionary” positions, but to manifest a spirit of objectivity, allowing them to more closely assess criteria of goodness, justice, and efficacy.16 Following the stop in The Hague, it was on to London to renew old friendships made during the youth congresses of the 1940s, and a side trip to Europe’s periphery, Ireland, where, as he told Gérard Lemieux, “religious matters have much to interest a FrenchCanadian who bears the name of R Y AN .” Then it was back to Rome to pack his belongings and a journey to Liverpool, where he embarked for Canada on 19 August 1952, arriving in Montreal a week later, just in time to attend the Congress of the Pax Romana, an international Catholic student organization.17 This year of complete immersion in Catholic theology and history and of exposure to the intellectual currents and practices of European Catholic Action must be reckoned as the major turning point of Ryan’s life. Prior to his Roman sojourn, he had certainly established his reputation as an effective lay functionary of the Quebec Church and as a FrenchCanadian nationalist committed to a type of federalism that sought to promote Quebec’s interests by pursuing the cultural opportunities offered by a wider Canadian identity.18 It would not be an exaggeration to apply the overused term “conversion experience” to the impact that Rome had on all aspects of his subsequent thinking, whether religious, cultural, or political. Yet, since Ryan already counted himself a Catholic believer, this raises the question: conversion to what? The beginnings of an answer lie in his own statement, made in the 1980s to Father Ambroise Lafortune, that the key to his spirituality lay less in a contemplation of Christ or God himself, but in his discovery that the Church was “a place where humanity gathers.”19 By this, Ryan did not imply that his emphasis on the Church was an invitation to a life of external social action that



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downplayed inner piety or spiritual contemplation; rather it expressed his profound conviction that a Catholic could arrive at a more intense and effective experience of Christ and God only through knowledge of the Church. His European stay drastically altered the place religious devotion occupied in his personal life. He returned from Rome with a more firmly alimented spiritual regimen, one anchored by daily prayer, meditation on the spiritual classics of the Catholic tradition, and regular participation in the sacraments of the Church. However, there is no doubt that intellectual and doctrinal considerations formed the most significant feature of his “conversion.” His encounter with a well-formulated ecclesiology provided him with a framework and organizing principle, not simply for thinking about the internal dynamics of Catholicism, but also for reflecting on the nature of modern social relationships and the character of democracy, political obligation, and the federal principle. At the heart of this ecclesiology was a refurbished Augustinian theology that vigorously upheld a vision of the Church as a spiritual society whose presence unlocked the key to human history. Ryan’s reading during the long Roman winter of 1951–52 included a group of French theologians whose works had contributed to a renewal of thinking about the Church. This group comprised two currents, one deriving from the revival of neo-Thomism that affected the Catholic world on both sides of the Atlantic,20 and the other from a more nebulous accent on a subjective theology of action. Both currents eschewed “modernist” labels and disclaimed any theological innovation, studiously avoiding condemnation by a Vatican bureaucracy ever suspicious of innovation by claiming that their work simply returned to the “sources,” namely, the Bible and the Church fathers. Their avowed aim was to renew the Church’s pastoral action by providing Catholics with the intellectual resources to enter into an effective dialogue with their contemporaries: non-Catholic Christians, believers of other religions, Marxists, agnostics, and even convinced atheists.21 A leading proponent of this approach, the Dominican Yves Congar, termed it “a Christianity of impact.”22 The injection of a historical perspective into the structure of Catholic theology, which had always been regarded as a fixed system of eternal truths, meant that the role of theology was no longer as a guardian of an immobile, eternal orthodoxy, but rather as the guarantor of the authenticity of tradition, far more open to revision in the light of human reason and experience. And with this seemingly subtle shift, it was theology – rather than the literature or philosophy that had held pride of place in interwar Catholicism – that became the principal vehicle for the

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diffusion of a “personalist ethic” through European and North American Catholicism during the period 1945–60. This ethic affirmed a more optimistic humanism at whose core lay a priority on authenticity that was at odds with several centuries of subjection to external norms enforced by the clergy. Historical study of the Bible and Church dogma also undermined the clergy’s claims to be the guardians and interpreters of an order that was natural and immutable, and, in recovering the vitality of the intellectual life of the early Church, these new theologians furnished effective justification for a revalorization of the activity and responsibility of laypeople.23 While not dispensing with the older notion of the Church as a hierarchical institution, these theologians balanced it by positing an ecclesiology based on the idea of “community” or “people of God,” in which the Church was no longer viewed as an undifferentiated mass of disfranchised laypeople regimented by the clergy and hierarchy, but as possessing an organic structure in which each of its members was called upon to play a conscious and decisive role.24 Beginning his course of reading, Ryan would have taken confidence and inspiration from Henri de Lubac’s Le drame de l’humanisme athée (The drama of atheist humanism) published during the Second World War. Here, he found an effective answer to the critiques of the “Catholic left” – Emmanuel Mounier and, in Quebec, his disciples clustered around Cité libre – that sought to sever Christian belief from “Christendom” by linking the latter with obsolete bourgeois forms and calling for a radical new engagement incorporating Marxian categories into Christian thought. Invoking Augustine’s familiar dynamic of the “two cities” – that is, the City of God and the Earthly City in perpetual opposition – as the key to understanding human history, de Lubac insisted that the fundamental conflict of the twentieth century lay between Christianity and a radical “atheist humanism,” a positive, organic, and systematic denial of God.25 Like Mounier and the radical personalists, de Lubac did not exempt Christians and their institutions from “insipidness” and “sclerosis,” remarking on “a weak, ineffectual religion of ceremonies and devotions, of ornament and vulgar consolation” marked by “formalism and routine,” which reflected a quest for “intimate comfort and social conformity” among the mass of believers. These flaws rebuffed modern Christians from a constructive engagement with the faith.26 Yet, however pointed his criticisms of the ills of Christian churches, his diagnosis differed markedly from that of Mounier. The latter, he believed, had fallen into the temptation of longing to imitate the “new paganism’s” apparent dynamism and strength, and of slipping into a critique, not of the faults



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of contemporary Christianity, but of Christianity itself. The remedy, according to de Lubac, was not to lose confidence in the Christian heritage but rather to seek more deeply in its history for an authenticity that would enable believers to “live their Christianity in a more virile, effective, forceful and heroic way,” thus giving them the resources to resist the inroads of neo-paganism and enter into a meaningful intellectual dialogue with others.27 Through de Lubac, Ryan encountered the works of a less-familiar figure, the Jesuit Yves de Montcheuil, who was perhaps the most overt French exponent of the new Augustinianism. Ryan returned to his essays frequently during the 1950s. Montcheuil’s key contribution lay in his insistence on the collective character of Christian witness and, following from this, the necessity of Catholic pastoral strategies aimed less at the individual than at the “creation of Christian lifestyles” that would address all the situations in which contemporary men and women found themselves. Christian apostles, he argued, must demonstrate absolute respect for the freedom of those they sought to convert; from this, he drew the corollary that Christian institutions must have a radically reduced role, their principal function being to support and express a Christian life. Thus, while Christianity must be present in the social at all times, he advanced the Augustinian doctrine that Christianity must be radically independent of all institutions, even those created to achieve its requirements, and “it is the prisoner of none of these temporal realizations that it promises.” Christianity had the power, he maintained, to “always inspire a new solution, and be the principle of a new progress.”28 However, from a Catholic perspective, the difficulty associated with Augustine was that his theological trajectory had, throughout the life of the Western Church, inspired heresy and schism; indeed, he was regarded with some considerable suspicion as the major influence on Martin Luther and a whole regiment of suspect tendencies branching out from the Reformation. In the postwar period, Augustine was linked to major Protestant thinkers such as Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, exponents of a “neo-­orthodoxy” whose outlook seemed to radically separate the Church, the expression of the “City of God,” from the world, which they regarded in bleak terms as the “Earthly City” entirely dominated by human sinfulness and lust for power. For young socially conscious Catholics like Claude Ryan, the key lay in excising the Protestantizing implications from the conversionist message of Augustine in order to avoid irretrievably weakening the institutional cohesion of the Church.

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During his stay in Rome, Ryan found the outlines of a Catholicized Augustinianism in Yves Congar’s celebrated book, Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église. He had met Congar during the lectures and study sessions of the Apostolic Congress,29 and the Roman winter afforded him the opportunity to more thoroughly assimilate his thought. Written in 1950, the work of this French Dominican was framed as a response to what he termed a climate of evangelical ferment in the French Church in 1947– 48, when lay personalist thinkers such as Emmanuel Mounier sought to inject Christianity with “a bit of Marxist virus”30 in hope of defining a vital Christianity that could detach itself from a western “Christendom” that they believed to be hopelessly corrupted by bourgeois political and cultural values. Such thinking strongly influenced some young Canadians, including Gérard Pelletier, Fernand Dumont, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who regarded Paris as their spiritual home. Congar located the sources of this ferment in a yearning for authenticity, a desire “to find, as quickly as possible, the pure evangelical attitudes and the authenticity of Christian beliefs in all spheres.” He judged that such authenticity was frequently obscured by “an invasion of the spirit of embodiment,” those encrustations of institutional routine, the pressures of conformity, and an unfortunate habit of the clerical apparatus to seize hold of institutions that more properly belonged in the temporal realm31 and that these tendencies drove modern Christians away from the Church. It was in the name of this evangelical purity, a desire to return to the sources, that men he termed “reformers” or “minor prophets” had arisen throughout the history of the Church, and he reckoned that the Church was always in the act of reforming itself. The postwar Church did not require, according to Congar, a reform of abuses, as these did not exist, nor did it need a doctrinal reformation. Rather, what was necessary was an innovation in terms of new pastoral strategies and mental structures that, while taking the tradition of the Church as its starting point, would bring the inner dynamic of the Church into closer correspondence with the forces of human history. Congar observed that this “reformist” spirit, based on a conversionist metaphysic that sought to “bring us from the image of things to their true reality, from the outer to the inner,” traced its intellectual lineage to the Hebrew prophets and, since the fifth century, to Saint Augustine, whose influence Congar traced as far as early twentiethcentury French personalists. The constant theme was that the liturgy, sacraments, and the Church must find their reality in the life of the human soul.32 Reformers and prophets, asserted Congar, were highly necessary to the life of the Church, but they must remember that their role was



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confined to initiation, not innovation. The error of Protestants and “doctrinal revolutionaries” like Luther, he argued, was to erect Augustinianism as a system detached from contact with the rest of the Catholic theological tradition, forgetting, in particular, that the Church, in addition to being the community of the faithful, was a hierarchical society that must be embodied in human history and that its leaders had a divine commission to safeguard the deposit of faith.33 In light of these considerations, Catholic reformers must act always with a sense of being in communion with all other Catholics, “to lead them without losing contact with others … in preserving an active insertion in the concrete life of the Church.”34 What Ryan took from this was that, while the Church did need the salutary effects of public opinion on those issues left by the pope to free discussion, the overriding priority was the unity of the Church as a visible, “political” community whose overriding values were fidelity and consensus. The airing of conflicting opinions, while healthy, could not be prolonged to the point of dissension that divided the community of the faithful and ultimately produced schism, the rupturing of the Church and the destruction of human societies. Having acquired from Congar a perspective that “catholicized” Augustine’s thought, Ryan was ready to confront the works of that great Church father. It should be remembered that, prior to 1951, Ryan’s intellectual universe had been strongly impregnated by Thomism, a complete philosophical system formulated during the thirteenth century and refined by twentieth-century exponents such as Jacques Maritain during the 1920s and 1930s. Following in the spirit of the French “nouvelle théologie,” he would have viewed Augustine, who lived during the fifth century, as standing closer in time to the “authentic” sources of Christian tradition and belief. What occurred in Ryan’s intellectual framework was not something as simplistic as a displacement of Saint Thomas by Saint Augustine but, rather, a more subtle transformation of his intellectual emphases, such that Augustine’s more “stripped down” theology of history allowed him to formulate a new rationale for political and cultural action that, in effect, corrected some of the overcompartmentalized Thomistic formulations regarding the relationship between church and state. If anything, Augustine somewhat surprisingly furnished him with a model for political leadership and action that exalted his own stature as a lay activist in the Church and, in so doing, allowed him to assert himself as a superior kind of public intellectual, his status linked, not to the frail trappings of academic credentials, the caprices of public opinion, or the shifting sands of media celebrity, but to his contact with an institution

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and a body of thought that derived its authority from its “universal” character. In this respect, Ryan’s shift of intellectual axis from the Thomist philosophy of Maritain to an Augustinian ecclesiology and theology of history gave him a firmer grounding than many of his Quebec ­contemporaries, including Pelletier, Dumont, Trudeau, and Pierre Vadeboncoeur, who, by the early 1950s, were abandoning the “fixist,” essentialized structure of authority offered by Thomism in favour of a less tethered personalism that promised a nebulous “refoundation” of authority on the basis of the self-realization of the human person.35 This verged dangerously close to grounding all authority purely and simply on the sovereign individual conscience, which, in turn, would land both individual and society in the morass of moral relativism, a tendency that was well underway among a number of mainstream Protestant Christian churches during this period.36 From this point onwards, Ryan’s intellectual and personal spirit­ ual development followed an Augustinian, or conversionist, trajectory. Augustine’s writings were, however, filtered through a more modern lens. One frequently recurring name in the writings of the French theologians was that of Cardinal John Henry Newman, identified as both a Catholic Augustinian and as a precursor of personalism, and perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century convert from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.37 During his visit to London in the summer of 1952, Ryan headed to Foyle’s Bookshop in Charing Cross Road, where he purchased Augustine’s Confessions and City of God; that classic of medieval mysticism, The Imitation of Christ; and Newman’s The Idea of a University. Although references to Newman do not appear frequently in Ryan’s journals or writings until 1957, there is no doubt that his essays and spiritual writings, especially the several volumes of Parochial and Plain Sermons that he returned to regularly, transformed Ryan’s personal spirituality. Notes in his journal regarding his own spiritual state during the 1950s testify to Newman’s influence in their far more strenuous tone, emphasizing the necessity of choice and struggle to “cross the threshold of spiritual maturity.” Spiritually conscious Christians, Ryan believed, could never relax and consider maturity a steady state or permanent condition; rather, its very nature involved a consciousness of “a limit, an opening, an expectation.”38 In this vein, in 1958 he recorded in his journal a selfadmonition: “above all, we should never give in to the belief that we have attained a summit. We must continue to search, and thus progress even though unconscious of it.”39 Reflecting in 1960 on his own spiritual development, he asserted that any personal spiritual progress was



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always balanced by “an unceasing struggle against sin,” which involved its share of “defeats” and “bitter realizations.”40 Near the end of his life, he declared that he could not have sustained such a struggle without the assistance of a spiritual guide, “to prevent you from flitting about in many directions at once. But your guide must be adapted to who you are and to who you want to become spiritually … It is not easy to find such a guide … but [Newman] provided me with the example of a rare harmony between the life of the intellect and the life of the spirit.”41 He was vividly aware of the affinities of Newman and Augustine. He particularly embraced Newman’s emphasis on the freedom of the human intellect and valued his balancing of conscience, reason, and experience against the deductive method of traditional Catholic theology and, in particular, “the exaggerated cult of authority” to which some Catholics were prone.42 What impressed him most about Newman was that his writings began from the starting point of human existence and not from the deductions of theology but from meticulous observations of facts, “the studious and docile frequentation of the Bible,” and the “auscultation of the human heart.”43 A spirituality so anchored in experience would have appealed to someone like Ryan, whose own priority in Action catholique had followed the inductive approach of the modern social sciences. Indeed, the Parochial and Plain Sermons, which he read systematically every day before attending Mass – except, as he told his interviewer, when he was in politics, when his contact with Newman dropped off to once a week on Sundays44 – have, as Newman’s biographer attests, a peculiarly humdrum quality because the Englishman believed that the Holy Spirit did not work through spectacular conversions, but though normal human channels, such as conscience, reason, and feelings.45 Ryan was, from the early 1950s onwards, motivated by a very powerful belief “that God accompanies us throughout the events in our lives and that it therefore incumbent upon us to seek to discern His will through the different elements he places along our way.”46 He did not take this belief as an invitation to spiritual self-satisfaction or quiescence. God’s will, according to  Ryan, “rarely manifests itself to us in a direct and explicit manner. However, it is most frequently indicated to us through the circumstances in which we are called upon to make a decision.”47 Such a stance implied a constant and painstaking process of self-questioning. All Christians, Ryan maintained, should be wary of “sudden conversions and temporary enthusiasms,” as Christ desired that people could choose calmly. Above all, Newman exhorted believers to beware of the “dangers of ostentation and individualism in the exercise of Christian witness.”48 The attainment

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of knowledge of God was a slow process, but it was one that was incumbent on all believers, for a central condition of their religious life was to pass from a state of spiritual childhood to one of adulthood.49 And it was precisely here that Ryan discerned the centrality of Newman’s message for laypeople engaged in worldly tasks. Though Newman was not a “social” thinker in the modern sense, the substance of his preaching was directed to persuading Christians to seek salvation, not through withdrawal from the world, but through the exercise of their responsibilities in “family life, the sciences, the arts, economics, politics, communications, and other worldly activities, as well as by taking an active part in the life and prayer of the Church.”50 Here were the very spheres in which, since the 1930s, Catholic militants like Ryan had been urging the independent action of laypeople as the prelude to the reconquest of these areas by the Church. While Newman placed enormous emphasis upon the response of the human conscience, reason, and experience to God, ecclesiology formed the central element of his teaching and preaching. The Christian believer could not be construed apart from the Church as a visible institution. Here, Ryan found a convincing Catholic response to the anti-­authoritarian divagations of many of his contemporaries on the subject of authority. As Ryan explained, religious truth, for Newman, rested upon three pillars, conscience, scripture, and the tradition of the church, none of which ultimately conflicted. Though conscience held the primary position, it could effectively encounter God’s will only through the mediations of scripture and tradition, which meant that, in matters of faith, fidelity to the continuity of the collective Catholic tradition, not the originality of individual interpretation, was the main criterion. Although justifiable on rational grounds, faith was not a creation of human reason. It was, Ryan emphatically stated, “a gift from God, a sacred deposit,” one that connected all believers to the Church, a “treasure” that all members of the Church, including the laity, were responsible for preserving and transmitting.51 Ryan tended to give Newman’s thinking an even more “corporatist” and “institutional” reading when it came to the question of salvation. As a convert whose origins lay in the Protestant evangelical movement, Newman would naturally have accented a more “individualist” trajectory, but Ryan emphatically stated, near the end of his own life, that only the “people of God” – that is, the Church – had received any definite assurance of salvation from Christ. “No one,” he maintained, “has received this promise in his capacity as an individual. Even those who try to live according to Christ’s teachings are not certain that they



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will not be cast aside at the Last Judgment.”52 This corporate and institutional dynamic of salvation imposed a definite code of conduct on Christian believers when it came to matters of authority. Both Newman and Ryan were consistent in prioritizing the overriding imperative of Christian unity and the authority of the Church hierarchy as the hallmarks of good citizenship in the Church: Subject to the authority of the Church in matters of faith, Newman firmly maintained his right to exercise his freedom to research and judge in other matters. However, he did not conceive this liberty in the manner of a sharpshooter free to fire off in all circumstances and in all directions. On the contrary, he had a concern for the unity of the Church and a finely honed pastoral sense. As well, he made it his duty to avoid, as far as possible, public interventions likely to sow division or to trouble the peace of the community of the faithful. All the while preserving his internal liberty, he often accepted to submit to a decision that he did not approve of. For him, obedience was a way of life he loyally accepted. But it was never the abdication of intelligence.53 As Ryan developed greater awareness of Newman’s writings throughout the 1950s, it is apparent that the cardinal’s ecclesiology would have appealed to him, complementing his studies of church history by validating the continuity of Roman Catholicism through the ages with the primitive Church of Christ and the Apostles.54 Another “political” aspect to Newman’s thinking exerted a profound attraction on Ryan: the central injunction that the test of a Christian believer was “the duty of bearing witness through the word”55 – testifying publicly in all of life’s situations to one’s convictions – which in turn imposed the austere duty of intellectual competence and accountability upon the devout layperson. This constant concern for public witness emphatically distinguished Ryan from other putative disciples of Newman, such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau.56 For someone like Ryan, who considered himself both an activist intellectual and, following his nationalist mentors Lionel Groulx and Esdras Minville, a federalist devoted to constitutional equilibrium, Newman’s conception of the Church, though giving due weight to the pope’s primacy and infallibility, was eminently “constitutional.” He believed that the Church comprised three “offices” that must respect their separate provinces and maintain an  orderly balance: the prophetic, which embraced all philosophical,

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intellectual, and theological aspects of faith; the regal, administrative, and governmental function; and the priestly function of prayer, worship, and spirituality. Newman’s view of the development of Christian doctrine seemed to suggest that some competition and conflict between these elements was actually healthy for the life of the Church. But there is ­further evidence to suggest that Newman believed that the prophetic, or theological, office was the fundamental one, the regulating principle of the whole Church, whose special function was both a dynamic and a conserving one: to keep the political and priestly aspects of the institution within legitimate bounds and to initiate the development of doctrine.57 Here was a validation of the special mission of Catholic intellectuals, both clerical and lay, to both preserve and reform the Church through the salutary injection of reason into what might otherwise become an absolute monarchy or a routinized structure of religious life. If, from the early 1950s onwards, Newman was the primary intellectual nourishment for Ryan’s personal religious life as a Catholic believer, his ideas concerning the role of the Church as a factor in human history and society profoundly bore the direct impress of his reading of Saint Augustine. As early as the summer of 1951, just before going to Rome, Ryan read Christopher Dawson’s influential article, “The Christian View of History,” which expounded a Catholic interpretation of Augustine’s theology of history. It is clear that Dawson’s belief that Christianity was the key to the history of human civilization directly inspired Ryan. Writing to Gérard Lemieux near the end of his Roman stay, Ryan traced the overall architecture of his reading, which was to “undertake in depth a study of the relationship between the history of religion and the history of civilization – both at the level of facts and of principles (S. Augustine’s ‘City of God’).”58 If his massive reading list convinced him of one thing, it was that “from the fourth century to the nineteenth century, the history of the Church is profoundly linked to that of civilization.”59 In one sense, Ryan’s engagement with Augustine was quite typical of postwar intellectuals, particularly in North America, who viewed this great Church father, whose life encompassed the waning days of the Roman Empire and the dawn of a “dark ages,” as an archetype for their own era, an “age of anxiety” when Western civilization, much of it ruined by the barbarism of the Second World War, seemed on the verge of collapse, threatened by the advance of communism and the possibility of the unleashing of a new barbarism of nuclear war. During these difficult years, to many intellectuals in the United States, only a return to the canons of orthodox Christian belief seemed to offer hope for the survival of civilized values.60



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For Ryan, the disconnection between the Church and human history that seemed to mark the twentieth century was something to be deplored, a deficiency that lay at the root of wars, violence, and social injustice, and that had to be urgently remedied by a generation of Christian militant intellectuals. In the Anglo-American world after 1945, there was a contest between Protestant and Catholic thinkers to appropriate the theological legacy of  Augustine in order to restore the sundered connection between Christianity and civilization. “Neo-orthodoxy,” the dominant current of Protestant theology, marked by the achievements of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, took direct inspiration from what they interpreted as the radical disjuncture between Augustine’s two cities: the City of God, interpreted as a spiritual society standing outside human institutions and achievements, and the Earthly City, the scene of human sinfulness and the lust for domination and power.61 Indeed, the “spin” given to Augustine’s thinking by neo-orthodoxy insisted on the limited and historically conditioned nature of all earthly institutions, so that even the Church and its theology came to be regarded as “false absolutes,” which obscured humanity’s access to the transcendent God.62 According to this account, inspired by a German Protestant hermeneutic that enjoyed wide currency during the early part of the twentieth century, Augustine has been conventionally regarded as an apolitical and even an “anti-political” thinker who radically rejected any possibility that humans could find salvation in the political order. This tended to place the “City of God,” the fully realized heavenly commonwealth, in a purely eschatological realm divorced from the realm of sinful humanity on earth. According to this interpretation, Augustine was a bleak pessimist who denied that true justice – the fundamental organizing principle of the Roman Republic and Empire – could be achieved in the temporal sphere, only in the heavenly city, and that states and governments were, at best, but remedies for human sinfulness, whose ultimate affinities lay with bands of robbers or pirates.63 Small wonder that Augustine came to be regarded, in some circles, as an apologist for absolutist and tyrannical forms of government. However, there was a second, “Catholic” interpretation of Augustine, represented by both John Henry Newman and the new French ecclesiology of Congar and Yves de Montcheuil. Their disagreement with the Protestant interpretation lay in precisely where to place human institutions in the titanic cosmic struggle between the two cities. Ryan certainly shared many of the anxieties of the Anglo-American intellectual community, seeing contemporary history as characterized by “vast

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phenomena of break-up,” as manifested by religious divisions in the Western world, the failure of secular thought, the powerlessness of liberal capitalism to provide a decent standard of living for the working masses, and the powerlessness of Western regimes to establish a viable peace.64 Some of his statements during the 1950s warned Catholic militants that they stood on the verge of “a dark age.”65 However, it would be fair to say that, on two counts, Ryan’s interpretation of Augustine dissented significantly from the Protestant position, although he fully accepted the core of the Augustinian position that human history was characterized by perpetual warfare between the City of God and the Earthly City. First, where neo-orthodox theologians were inclined, due to their profound scepticism regarding human institutions, to deny that the visible Church could be regarded in any sense as the City of God, which they considered largely invisible and inscrutable, Ryan’s intensive study of Church history persuaded him that, while the church was a profound universal mystery transcending time and space, it was also a visible society incarnated in precise historical, geographical, political, and cultural contexts, which communicated and transmitted the values and principles of the City of God – peace, justice, and unity – to human societies. This, indeed, accords with a more contemporary reading of Augustine, which maintains that the City of God was an actually existing society of true believers on earth. Ryan, in common with a number of Catholic thinkers, emphasized that the Church was itself a “political” society, a form of mediation between the individual and the world.66 In his estimation, Augustine was, of all Christian thinkers, the one who put the most emphasis on the “S O CI AL character of the Christian doctrine of salvation,” which in turn valorized the hierarchy, teaching, sacraments, and rituals of the corporate church institution in leading human beings to the Kingdom of God. Citing Newman, Ryan considered “erroneous” and “dangerous” the Protestant notion that there was both a “visible” and “invisible” church, each with its own complement of members.67 Second, it is evident that Ryan regarded human institutions in more “hybrid” terms, as containing elements of both cities, and thus permeable to the transformative power of Christian action. Here, Ryan’s notes on Christopher Dawson provide a significant clue. While observing that Augustine’s judgment of secular history was undoubtedly pessimistic, one that saw earthly societies as founded in injustice and extending their dominion through war and oppression, Ryan did not subscribe to the neo-orthodox identification of the state with the Earthly City, nor did he believe that the City of God was a purely spiritual utopia that lay beyond



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time, irrupting occasionally into human history. Indeed, he believed that, while the forces of self-love and division were constantly at work, so was the unifying and creative power of divine love, the fundamental principle of the City of God, active through time, a dynamic element in human society that sought to create a human fellowship “progressively realized in the course of the ages.” Augustine, he maintained, “does not identify the State as such with the ‘civitas terrena’ [Earthly City] … On the contrary, he shows that its true end – the maintenance of temporal peace – is a good which is in agreement with the higher good of the City of God.”68 In Ryan’s view, there was something in Augustine’s thought that placed the political order – the state – closer to the City of God, with the potential to be an active agent in the drama of human salvation, for its function was less to express self-will and domination than to stand as a barrier defending human society against these destructive forces. “It is only,” Ryan concluded, “when war and not peace is made the end of the state that it becomes identified with the civitas terrena in the bad sense of the  word.”69 Referring back to Yves de Montcheuil’s observation that Christian believers live both in the Kingdom of God and in time, Ryan stated in 1963 that Augustine never simply conflated the temporal order with the Earthly City: the former could be considered “a kind of ambivalent entity which the members of the Heavenly City and the Earthly City grapple onto, although for very different reasons.”70 The City of God and the earthly republic were not, as many Protestants viewed them, completely disconnected entities, locked in perpetual conflict. Rather, while earthly states were most certainly imperfect, they took the Heavenly City as their archetype or paradigm, whose glory they reflected to greater or lesser degrees.71 Ryan derived several key corollaries from this “Catholic” interpretation of Augustine. He discerned, in the writings of this Church father, a number of messages concerning the character of political leadership that shaped his own emerging vocation. Far from viewing politics as a realm of damnation, Augustine was quite precise about its nature, which he considered both “natural” to the essence of humans and absolutely critical to their education. Leaders, according to Augustine, conformed to three types: founders, like Moses, Romulus, and Christ; “stabilizing leaders,” like David, charged with the daunting task of maintaining peace and stability in an already existing polity; and, perhaps most importantly, “magisters,” political educators whose role was to act as intermediaries to remind both the people and their leaders of the nature of their origins and recall them to their mutual commitments.72 Here were the “minor

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prophets” and “reformers” evoked by Congar in his commentary, and the archetype of the “public intellectual,” foreshadowed by Augustine himself, towards which Ryan aspired. More importantly for Ryan’s own sense of mission, Augustine’s writings, composed centuries before the Thomist categories of “spiritual” and “temporal” were fully articulated,73 contained the suggestion that true “priests” existed outside the sacerdotal order, as laymen who acted to spiritualize the realm of politics. There is no doubt that Ryan considered himself one of these “priests” and saw his mission as prophetic and extraordinary and therefore superior to that of the sacerdotal cadre charged with the routine administration of the sacraments. If Augustine assigned a significant valence to the political realm, how, then, did he characterize the state, and what were the qualities its rulers must possess? Here, Ryan was forced to strip away a good deal of Thomist baggage. Until the thirteenth century, Western political theory did not elaborate a doctrine of the state emphatically located in the temporal sphere, and one of the great achievements of Thomism and its philosophical successors was to create specialized compartments that which demarcated the church, as an agency preoccupied with the spiritual realm of human salvation, from the state, an agency explicitly devoted to the “­natural” questions of human temporal welfare.74 Such distinctions, which in the hands of Thomists tended to become essentialized categories, would have made little sense to Augustine, who would have seen state and church less as separate, well-defined institutional forms than as “tendencies,” both imbricated in the realm of the “political,” each possessing both spiritual and temporal responsibilities, though with the church somewhat more inflected towards the City of God. Though an acerbic critic of the failings of the Roman state, Augustine did not believe that politics should be abandoned to the caprices of tyrannical rulers. It is evident that his preference was for a decentralized form of polity, which would minimize the temptations of the lust for domination characteristic of human egotism. His model of rulership, while not coextensive with modern democracy, revolved around the Latin term consulere, enjoining upon the ruler a duty of constant communication and consultation with both the governed and the repositories of truth, which he emphatically located in the Christian tradition.75 The latter obligation was even more imperative as, for Augustine, the basis of human society was not justice itself, as this was only a by-product of something more fundamental: a “concord” or strong solidarity within the society marked by an agreement between citizens over objects of love or desire. This meant that the



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ruler must be an educator, a person willing to engage citizens in an ongoing dialogue in order to continuously study, debate, and redefine those basic elements of consensus around which social life would cohere. And here, we return to Newman’s insistence on constant engagement with communicating God’s word as defining the mission of the Christian political intellectual. The primacy of the political for Augustine meant that Church and state must serve as mutually reinforcing models of virtue for each other. While, in the final analysis, only the Church could administer the sacraments, which alone could ensure human salvation, politics and the state could most assuredly cultivate human virtuousness, which would prepare humans for receiving the sacraments.76 Church and state were ultimately interdependent entities whose respective boundaries could not be fixed once and for all, but would be open to perpetual reconsideration and renegotiation. The Augustinian inflection is evident, in the years after 1952, in Ryan’s attempt to constantly rethink and reopen the respective boundaries and functions of the spiritual and the temporal and to define the relationship between the forms of spiritual citizenship in the Church and of political citizenship in civil society. Here, Ryan discerned two profound implications for the future of French-Canadian society. The first was that the perpetual opposition of the two cities meant that the ideal of a Christian social order – the pillar of Thomism that formed the basis of “traditional” nationalism – could never be perfectly realized in human society. His reading of Church history awakened in him a Catholic universalism that led him to exclaim that the expression “national Church” was false,77 meaning that the profound truths of Catholicism could never be entirely incarnated in or encompassed by the contingencies of human temporal achievements. This lesson, in turn, led Ryan to abandon precise analogies between Church, society, and the human body taught by both the old social doctrine of the Church and the French-Canadian nationalist tradition. Second, Augustine’s theology appeared as an effective description of the modern world, with its convergence of ideas, its vast movement of peoples, its pluralism, and its hybrid character. Summing up his reading of Augustine, Ryan declared, “There are not two categories of citizen, those belonging to the State and those belonging to the Church.”78 In this way, he sought to evoke the complexity of French-Canadian society. In the early 1950s, it was characterized by the powerful presence of the Church and the still-vital overlap of the identities of “Catholic” and “citizen,” but, for Ryan, there was another significant consideration. Augustinian theology (like Newman’s “constitutionalist” definition of

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authority in the Church) contained the germ of a flexible and dynamic theory of federalism that expressed Ryan’s growing affinity for contact and dialogue.79 Ryan took the notion of reciprocal and mutual citizenship deployed by Augustine to describe the terrestrial pilgrimage of the Christian and transposed it to the social plane to signify the dynamic way  in which the citizenship of French Canadians could belong both to  Canada and to Quebec – a relationship that could mean constant and simultaneous opposition, cooperation, interaction, and intersection. Here was an intermingling of identities that rendered obsolete the rigidities of the earlier “social federalism,” the political product of a more rigid, older Thomist universe directed to the achievement of a Catholic social order as the expression of a French-Canadian ethnic nation.80 Such views underwrote fixist and overly compartmentalized definitions of provincial autonomy, to which Ryan had been exposed through his contacts with Groulx and Minville, and whose vision of politics remained mired in the otiose dialectic of a reflexive autonomism arrayed against an aggressive Anglo-Canadian centralism. For Ryan, the future of FrenchCanadian Christendom depended less on the authority of the Catholic Church derived from the influence of its clergy and institutional armature, and more on the efforts of a new breed of Catholic public intellectual, of which Ryan was the exemplar, to conjugate Catholic theology with the forces of cultural modernity.

4 Diagnosing French Canada’s “Spiritual Schizophrenia” The Travails of a Catholic Intellectual in “Late Christendom,” 1952–1958 The enmity which once existed between the world and the Church, is now transferred into the Church itelf. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons

Both in Quebec and English Canada, there exists a powerful and longstanding historical trope regarding the nature of the society that Claude Ryan encountered on his return to Montreal. In this trope, 1950s Quebec is painted in sombre hues, as a society dominated by corrupt networks of collusion between old-fashioned nationalist politicians and a clerical elite intent on preserving its hold over a comprehensive network of educational institutions and mechanisms of social assistance, a monolithic and immobilist Catholic social ideology, and, undergirding it all, a “traditional” nationalism whose tenets proclaimed a systematic refusal of state action to correct the ills of industrial, urban civilization.1 The central premise of this vision is that the infusion of Catholicism into Quebec’s ideologies and institutions rendered the society somehow “backward” and “clericalist,” and thus different from other Western democracies. To single out the peculiarity of Quebec’s institutional arrangements with Catholicism as constituting a barrier to democracy and modern ideologies is an untenable reading of history, especially in light of the postwar imbrication of all Western societies with Christianity in a wide variety of institutional and political arrangements.2 Yet, if the conventional liberal version of postwar Quebec history does not carry weight as social description, it does contain a kernel of truth,

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if  we view it as a cultural artifact, a kind of shorthand that affords us  a  discursive clue to the acrimonious postwar divisions within the French-Canadian intellectual community. This fragmentation, which became visible in the years between 1948 and 1950, sundered the unity of a small group of intellectuals around three intractable issues: the relationship of Catholicism to nationalism, the relationship of nationalism to the desirable “modern” characteristics of Quebec, and the role of intellectuals in the public sphere. When Claude Ryan returned to Montreal in  the fall of 1952, this fracturing – pitting “traditional” against “neo-nationalist” factions, with these in turn challenged by the anti-­nationalists of Cité libre – was of comparatively recent vintage.3 Significantly, the one issue that united these increasingly combative French-Canadian intellectuals in the early 1950s was that of the centrality of Catholicism and Catholic values to the future of their society’s identity in English-speaking North America. However, their responses to this concern frequently marked them as critics of the institutional church and some of the activities of the clergy in the temporal sphere.4 It was precisely in this continued allegiance to Catholicism as a value system that Claude Ryan saw not only the future possibilities for Action catholique as a rallying point for intellectuals of all political stripes, but the key to his own personal identity as a significant intellectual and cultural mediator. Indeed, the fact that Catholicism provided a terrain of continued dialogue and possible engagement for intellectuals served to distinguish Quebec from English Canada, while drawing it into a closer cultural relationship with the United States. The situation of FrenchCanadian Catholic intellectuals closely paralleled that of many of their American counterparts who, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, advanced a type of social criticism and cultural commentary that envisioned the possibility of a “spiritual politics” in which religion would remain an integral part of the cultural system and act as a spiritually inclusive “national faith,” a consensus that might override the growing tensions thrown up by the postwar acceleration of modernity.5 The project of defining and promoting Catholicism as a “spiritual politics” both unifying and regenerating French-Canadian society was one that undergirded all Ryan’s activities during the 1950s and guided his political choices and allegiances throughout the Quiet Revolution. The project of elaborating such a Catholicism was both a logical ­consequence of Ryan’s “discovery” of the universal Church and a more pragmatic strategy of how, as national secretary, to position Action



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catholique within a new, post-Asbestos climate in which the church hierarchy looked with severe disfavour on the expression of any overt sympathy on the part of Catholic militants for the progressive Left. On an intellectual level, Ryan’s recent exposure to Augustinian theology convinced him that a philosophy of history constructed by the canons of secular reason (read, optimistic prewar liberalism or Marxism) was an impossibility. He was emphatic that human destiny could be accessed only through the eyes of faith, and the record of past civilizations and the recent trials experienced by North America and western Europe disclosed the close affinities between Christianity and the vitality of Western civilization. “Catholicism,” he emphatically reminded a group of students at the Université de Montréal in the fall of 1952, “remains the first – and perhaps the only and last – hope of Europe.”6 This theology of history was reaffirmed by his reading of the celebrated postwar metahistories produced by the eminent English Christian scholars Arnold Toynbee and Christopher Dawson. Together, these works confirmed, through the techniques of modern scholarship, the Augustinian conviction that history was “the masterful and progressive execution … of a divine plan … which transcends our human powers of vision and understanding in every dimension,” and that modern men and women were living through a titanic spiritual conflict of a most acute kind. The problem was acute for Western intellectual elites, especially for the middle classes of industrial democracies, that “creative minority” whose efforts “created the modern world,” and failure to resolve the conflict would inevitably cause the disintegration of Western civilization.7 This cultural leadership, according to Dawson, was increasingly compromised by what he termed a “social schizophrenia,” a growing divorce between an increasingly amoral scientific world-view and a system of religious and moral convictions that had little purchase on human existence. Dawson’s was not a call for a new religion, but to an effort at spiritual reintegration, the restoration of a “vital relationship” between religion and modern culture.8 Ryan’s reading of Toynbee and Dawson, coupled with his conversion to a conflictual theology of history, was significant because it fostered in his mind the germ of a new mission for Action catholique, one that would shift its central axis away from the “social question” – that is, the project of an age of industrial modernity that sought to forge a new Christendom out of the structural reform of capitalist society – to a “high modernist” orientation preoccupied with refurbishing aesthetic and cultural standards. Within the latter, the concern lay less with reforming the

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relations between the classes than with enhancing the quality of the inner life of the middle classes. In this complicated task, Ryan believed he could at once accomplish the mandate of the episcopal hierarchy, that of firmly depoliticizing Action catholique, while at the same time infusing it with a cultural and spiritual mission more appropriate for its place in a North American civilization increasingly defined by the cultural attributes of prosperity. Prior to 1950, the dominant ethos in Action catholique, emerging from the Second World War, revolved around the “labour question” and rested on the conviction that the best way to combat communism both at home and abroad was to encourage young French-Canadian Catholics to engage with social issues.9 In addition, the specialized movements that had arisen during the Depression era, directed to working-class young people, students, and rural youth, continued to articulate the imperative of their origins, that youth in modern society constituted an underclass in need of special institutions and structures to compensate for their social and cultural disadvantages. Ryan returned from Rome to take up the task of somehow coordinating a luxuriant undergrowth of movements and agencies, encompassing everything from media and press services, newspapers, and magazines to summer camps, youth social clubs, employment agencies, a flourishing marriage-preparation movement, and housing cooperatives. This type of Catholic “parallel society” would immediately strike the modern reader as dissonant, but it had arisen, first, as the laity’s response to the call of the Church during the 1930s to effectively incarnate its social doctrines in modern society and, second, as a series of popular initiatives on the part of lower-middle-class and working-class people to provide themselves with social services in the absence of an activist state. It can also be argued that it constituted a kind of ongoing experiment in social and civic democracy and was especially attuned to the social and cultural priorities of young people and women. However, from the perspective of the church hierarchy, after the turning point of the 1949 Asbestos strike, these Catholic social initiatives stood in radical need of greater ecclesiastical discipline and far more clearly defined objectives. There was always the disturbing potential for the importation of social radicalism (read, Marxist ideas) into the Church through the activities of some of these movements, and the clergy and a number of lay leaders were becoming increasingly aware, as the 1950s dawned, that French-Canadian Catholic youth, like young people elsewhere in North America, no longer constituted a disadvantaged segment of society. During the late 1940s, the figure of the student (both university



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and secondary) displaced that of the dedicated young worker as the cultural type of the modern young person, a development that associated young people with access to professional opportunity and the consumption of material goods and leisure.10 For Catholic militants like Ryan, it also raised the spectre that, through the agency of middle-class young people, an individualism oriented solely to material values would simply wash over French-Canadian civilization, and that spiritual values would, in future, have little purchase. From 1953 onwards, a new urgency characterized Ryan’s speeches and addresses, one that expressed his awareness of the need to shift Action catholique away from its over-identification with the progressive politics of the Left, which was marked by a concern to transform the structural relations of class and workplace hierarchies. He used the occasion of his first published article in the Montreal daily Le Devoir, ostensibly written to introduce a lecture by the paper’s director, Gérard Filion, who had recently returned from a trip to Communist China, to canvass the changes that had occurred in the French-Canadian milieu since 1945. The key issue that henceforth had to preoccupy intellectuals, he maintained, was less the changing balance of external and internal political forces, or the fact that French Canada had decisively become an urban civilization, but “the changes in the equilibrium of our religious life,” especially the awakening of the laity to a real consciousness of religious realities.11 Speaking to the national council of the Jeunesse ouvrière catholique in 1953, Ryan sought to woo these working-class Catholic activists away from radical political engagement by evoking the watchwords of authority and obedience, both to himself as national secretary and to the bishops: “Authority is first and foremost a service, obedience is a superior form of self-fulfilment, and detachment is the most active and effective form of presence.”12 Although Ryan’s speeches and addresses to Catholic militants from this period were replete with exhortations to cultivate “a more intense interiorization” of the Christian message and “a more authentic communitarian experience” of the faith, this was not an invitation to quiescence or an old-style piety.13 To those critics both inside and outside Action catholique who complained that the Church was “sliding into a reactionary and conservative phase,” he replied that the movement was traversing a laborious but necessary phase of adjustment, in which laity would be invited to cultivate “autonomy for responsibility.”14 This phase was a corrective to an older approach to Action catholique, which had sought to infuse Catholic values into modern society by recruiting the faithful into structured movements, in which, according

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to the prevailing analogies within Catholic social thought to the human body, the laity acted as a kind of external “limb” that would carry out the orders given by the clerical “brain.” This, Ryan scathingly described as “gross clericalism,” noting that it was, thankfully, becoming obsolete.15 The new phase indicated a seismic shift in Action catholique, away from the uplift of the working classes in favour of a cultural mission designed to summon the French-Canadian middle classes – in particular, those in the new professions of teaching, nursing, journalism, media, and civil service – to a more vigorous spiritual existence. In accomplishing such a task, Ryan realized that the strategies of ­yesteryear – such as that suggested by the Jesuit father Joseph-Papin Archambault, the founder of the École sociale populaire, who sought to recover Catholic influence in modern society through moral crusades – would exert little appeal on those with secondary school, university, or advanced professional training. Writing to Archambault in 1953, Ryan emphatically refused to engage Action catholique in a campaign against the ubiquitous presence of Santa Claus, which tended to shift the meaning of Christmas away from Christ. Ryan argued that it was the policy of the organization to avoid both involvement in launching mass campaigns on morality and the creation of specialized services that would entail the commitment of financial resources.16 The new French-Canadian professionals, whose ethos was framed by education and expertise and who were now positioned as the key constituency within Action catholique, could simply not be reached by approaches characterized by heavyhanded direction. “The world of science and technique,” Ryan stated, “must be transformed from the inside. It is impossible to Christianize these spheres without competence and expertise.”17 Further, the older working-class bias expressed in Action catholique’s impulse to substitute itself for the state and civic sphere, though once a necessary strategy, was also obsolete. The movement must, he concluded, “always come back to its proper terrain, which is that of the sanctification of the transmission of the divine life.” Its activity on the terrain of the social had to continue, but it had to be “indirect and non-calculative, it must spring from the temporal action of laity who are elevated by Action catholique to an integral sense of their responsibilities.”18 But how to make Action catholique attractive to these new, increasingly well-educated professional groups? The watchword that characterized Ryan’s attempt to remake Action catholique in the years immediately following his return from Rome was “realism,” a word that in the postwar climate resonated instinctively with professionals. His notebooks,



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which recorded meetings and conversations with clergy and lay directors, warned again and again against the temptation to measure spiritual vitality through the recruitment of numbers,19 which, he concluded, relied too heavily on emotion and enthusiasm rather than analysis. It was important, in his estimation, for the introduction of a climate within the movement that would foster an enhanced sense of responsibility by providing laypeople with a sense of expertise in theology and religious matters, which would, in turn, enable them to elaborate a personal synthesis of action and contemplation.20 Two dangers, however, beset this cultural overture to the middle classes. First, in his estimation, Action catholique had done a poor job in offering modern educated men an attractive intellectual climate, which prevented people such as Gérard Pelletier, Pierre Juneau, and Fernand Cadieux from feeling truly at home as militants. Ryan explained his own situation as the exception that proved the rule, occasioned by the fact that his life was characterized by “certain ambiguities” that his episcopal superiors had only dimly considered: he was still unmarried, and his family circumstances had allowed him an excellent rapport with the clergy.21 Perhaps, under the circumstances, the best that could be hoped for was his sense that Action catholique was moving towards a stage of “enlightened clericalism,” reflecting the fact that the leadership cadre of laypeople in the national and diocesan central offices would have to rely upon the authority of competent clergy while awaiting the accession of laypeople to spiritual adulthood.22 The second danger he recognized as flowing from a tension between the structure of Action catholique and the lives of modern people working in increasingly anonymous organizations. How could structured movements, the product of a top-heavy institutional church, minister convincingly to people’s spiritual lives by transcending the depersonalization and alienation they experienced in their daily working lives? Ryan returned often to the sayings of one of his interwar mentors, the French personalist writer Charles Péguy, recasting his famous dictum regarding the tendency of movements that began with a powerful spiritualistic impulse to degenerate, with political slogans and pragmatic compromises, into a more neo-Weberian denunciation of the rigidities of bureaucracy and the small scope given to intellectual life: “Ce qui commence en mystique finit en administration.” Everywhere in the orrery of Action catholique, he discerned the symptoms of “devitalized institutionalism”: leaders were unrepresentative of their social milieu; leaders were cut off from the members they should ostensibly be serving; chaplains and leaders were imposed from above and tended to remain in office for too long;

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there existed alarming tendencies towards monopoly, evident in the desire of some movements seeking incorporation from the state; and attention to questions of spirituality was largely absent. But unlike the pessimistic German sociologist, who saw no way for modern humanity to transcend the iron law of bureaucracy, which was constitutive of the modern condition, Péguy and Ryan saw the remedy for the “embourgeoisement” of the Church and its organizations in the charismatic personality of the intellectual, itself an expression of modernity, whose authentic engagement with faith could communicate the dynamism of “mystique” to overcome the institutional pressures of modern life to habit and routine.23

Secularization as Aesthetic: Ryan and French Canada’s Spiritual Drama With the explicit assertion of the intellectual as the conduit for the dynamism of authentic religion, we reach the core of Ryan’s cultural project: the delineation of a new fault line in French-Canadian society, one that  eschewed the older valency of class, which had animated Action catholique from its inception during the Great Depression, in favour of an aesthetic and psychological fissure between two spiritual tendencies. Here, Ryan was fully in tune with one of the central dynamics of postwar American society, a movement that encompassed conservative, liberal, and radical intellectuals, including figures such as the sociologist Daniel Bell, whose influential The End of Ideology (1962) signalled the end of his journey from Marxism to liberalism. Bell’s celebrated text appeared to serve as a statement for the depoliticization of intellectual life, celebrating the elaboration of a “postprogressive” social theory that drifted away from a critique of the inequities of capitalism towards an anxiety about the homogenizing tendencies of mass culture. This ideological shift marked one of the major signposts in the movement from an earlier phase of industrial modernity to one of high modernity, a phase in which the central fault lines in North America would revolve around cultural rather than social issues. In particular, intellectuals of this stripe eschewed political critique, adopting, rather, a posture that oscillated between estrangement from and reconciliation with their society. Their status was validated by the belief that, under the conditions of high modernity, the only route to avoiding the dehumanizing imperative of conformity, with its potential to produce authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, lay in the



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perceptual acuity possessed by public intellectuals, animated by a modernist aesthetic provided by high culture.24 For Ryan, the categories of “high” and “mass” culture also explicitly denoted rival religious sensibilities traversing contemporary Roman Catholicism. What distinguished such polemics in Quebec from their American analogues was that, in French Canada, religion became the terrain upon which the dichotomy of tradition and modernity was played out in the 1950s. What also distinguished Ryan from his American counterparts was his discovery, within Catholicism, of a “mass culture” and his identification of this entity with tradition and immobilism. It was not class specific but was, rather, a socio-psychological state, producing a religious temperament oriented to routine, an infantile anti-intellectualism, and a premodern adherence to the materialistic, external trappings of religion. The “modernist” high cultural style within Catholicism, which Ryan linked to the personalist quest of the “nouvelle théologie” to lay bare the historical and biblical roots of Christian faith, stood most emphatically on the side of progress. It incarnated the values of an adult spiritual engagement around an authentic faith that was based on the canons of modern theological knowledge and was coupled with an appreciation for competence. This “spiritual drama,” which involved the new middle classes as the central protagonist, encompassed the tensions of both gender and generation, as well as the modernist cultural hierarchies of elite and mass within French-Canadian society. To Action catholique, and to Catholic intellectuals like Ryan, devolved the all-important task of finding a unifying principle that would restore the shattered unity of French-Canadian intellectuals, thus qualifying them to lead their society into spiritual maturity, by “incorporat[ing] … the drama that is actually playing out in the conscience of the milieu that is being worked by an historical evolution.”25 Such a principle would stand above the facile and obsolete solutions offered by “conservative” or “progressive” ideologies that had been forged in an earlier age of industrial modernity and that no longer resonated. If there was one central leitmotif that oriented Ryan’s thinking regarding the relationship of Catholicism to French-Canadian society during the middle years of the 1950s, it was the constant restatement, to audiences both inside and outside the precincts of Action catholique, that his society was traversing a “crisis” that had both spiritual and cultural ramifications. Yet, we should be wary about drawing the conclusion that Ryan was pessimistic regarding the future of Catholicism as a central constitutive element of French-Canadian identity. Writing in 1953, he recalled discussing the problems encountered by the Quebec Church “brother to

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brother” with the United Church minister Ted Nichols, his EnglishCanadian friend. Nichols told him not to be embarrassed by the internal conflicts within the Church, as these were signs of health and a positive contrast to the somnolent intellectual life of the Canadian Protestant churches.26 In the context of Ryan’s own thinking, the term “crisis,” at least until the early 1960s, had a largely positive connotation, because it evoked, at the level of the entire society, the struggle waged by individual adolescents as they acceded to emotional and intellectual adulthood. To his wide range of reading in Catholic theology and history, Ryan harnessed American psychology and a more “realist” liberal analysis whose central concerns during the 1950s projected individual biology and the quest for psychological maturity onto the wider nature of American political culture and Western civilization itself.27 At a popular level, this liberalism was understood in almost exclusively psychoanalytic terms during this decade. In the United States, the popularity of works such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd persuaded a variety of social critics and cultural commentators to read problems of national character and identity in terms of individual psychological pathology. This psychology, it should be observed, was founded upon a system of polarized dichotomies. They most common pitted masculine against feminine traits, with the former considered “rational” and normative, but they also contrasted traditional with modern, and individualism with conformity.28 In the case of French Canada, what was significant for Ryan was that Catholicism itself was the ground upon which these tensions of personal, national, and civilizational psychology occurred. This situation was amplified by the apparently high levels of affinity that existed between institutional religious norms and the lived religious experience of most French Canadians. However, for an Augustinian like Ryan, who was fond of paradoxes and dualisms, the Church irrevocably contained within itself two cultural systems, one oriented to the past and incarnating tradition, and the other representing an engagement with the future and modernity. And in this respect, Ryan’s thinking was not at odds with the more anticlerical diagnoses of the citélibristes, the rising stars of the Laval sociological tradition, or the neo-nationalists clustered around Le Devoir. All these groups shared the conviction that Catholicism remained fundamental to the cultural identity of French Canada, and that Catholicism had to be conjugated with the values of modernity – openness, scientific competence, and universality – rather than anchoring a closed system of ethnic national values. For Quebec society to successfully traverse the crisis, the formulation of a new synthesis was required



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between Catholicism and culture that would engage people who lived in a regime of high modernity and whose lives were framed by intense levels of urbanization and forms of mass civilization. For Ryan, this approach was the only way by which French Canada could arrive at a stage of social and cultural adulthood, by which he meant the preeminence of universal standards of culture over “backward” particularistic and regional forms. And these “standards of culture” were exactly those advocated by a host of North American intellectuals who maintained that liberal values were manifest in a set of normative social and political structures co-extensive with progressive modernity, in which individual psychological maturity exactly mirrored a progressive political consensus, enshrined in Keynesianism and the New Deal, oriented to the rational management of industrial civilization.29 Ryan’s first systematic effort to diagnose this “crisis” occurred in early 1955 in a speech to members of the university and college student press, delivered in Maurice Duplessis’s political fiefdom of Trois-Rivières. It is worth close attention because his identification of the chief symptoms, their etiology, and the analysis – the latter the process by which French Canada could secure its spiritual and cultural wholeness – varied little during the rest of the decade. His ideas cannot be credited with any great originality, because they were cobbled together from an amalgam of themes familiar to readers of French personalist literature, postwar Catholic theology, and the contemporary argot of American social science. Their significance lies in the fact that they were articulated by one who was, in essence, the right-hand man of Quebec’s Catholic hierarchy and their chief lay specialist on social questions, and not by the intellectuals of Cité libre, who had already gained a dubious reputation among the clergy and devout Catholics for their anticlerical diatribes. It is evident, however, that Ryan’s views already held considerable currency among French-Canadian intellectuals.30 Even the title of his talk, “La rencontre de deux mondes,” was an explicit reference to the work of the celebrated American sociologist Everett C. Hughes, whose work French Canada in Transition, which was published in 1943, had, along with that of his colleague Horace Miner, helped launch the program in social research at the Faculté des Sciences Sociales at Université Laval. Their positing of a conflict between the values and practices of a traditional “folk society” and those of an “urban society” characterized by the social relations typical of industrial civilization inspired the researches of younger intellectuals such as Jean-Charles Falardeau and Fernand Dumont and led directly to the conviction that postwar French Canada

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was suffering from a “cultural lag.” This view was, by the mid-1950s, given more strident expression in the work of the “Montreal School” of historians, who ascribed to French Canada the attribute of “backwardness” and persistent economic inferiority vis-à-vis English-speaking North America because of the overweening prominence of Catholic ­values and institutions.31 Ryan began his speech with the bald assertion that the “FrenchCanadian people are traversing a crisis of consciousness that affects all spheres of their life: cultural, economic, national, religious, and political. This crisis possesses a factual reality.” In his estimation, intellectuals should be troubled by this crisis because French Canada was divided within itself, and none of the traditional utopias proffered by clericalism, political parties, or private enterprise could inspire a social or cultural project that would heal this fragmented condition. “We must,” he exhorted his audience, “find this inspiration in a renewed vision.”32 Given his strong commitment to a Catholic theology of history, and because he viewed religion as both the fountainhead and the inspiration of civilization, the factor of overriding concern in this general crisis was, for Ryan, the religious one. In a shaft directed at both Duplessis and his citélibriste critics, he scathingly reminded his audience that, “in spite of what those who uphold the liberal philosophy may think … religion is not simply a  by-product of civilization.”33 The religious aspects of the crisis, he believed, were evident in the sudden appearance of negative critiques of Catholicism and the “crumbling of structures” as the institutional church experienced difficulties in ministering to a mushrooming urban population. From his perspective, the most serious dichotomy affecting FrenchCanadian society was “a disconnect between religion and life that is at work at the ground level of the daily existence of ordinary people who seem to be giving in to diverse manifestations of a decadent civilization.”34 This disconnect, for Ryan, reflected a potentially dangerous state of “spiritual schizophrenia,” in which people compartmentalized their values, continuing to practise their Catholicism by attending Sunday Mass and taking the sacraments, but giving Catholic values little purchase in their lives in the workplace and family and in their leisure activities. “People will not begin,” stated Ryan, “by protesting against Sunday Mass, they will not start by abstaining from all participation in religious ceremonies … They will begin by betraying their Catholicism at the level of personal life, in their most intimate acts where they think that others will not see them.” In his estimation, “This is exactly what constitutes the secularization of life … In what we call French Canada this fact is already a profound reality in popular life.”35



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A second dichotomy, evident in the rise of a new style of Catholicism characteristic of people born after 1925, was a “spiritual drama,” a pronounced divorce that separated the older generation from the younger one.36 While Ryan conceded that the religious values of each group exhibited positive qualities, the danger for the achievement of social and cultural maturity lay in the fact that each group tended to be prisoners of certain “myths” that they propagated about one another: that the older generation’s recourse to immutable doctrines was equated with outmoded creeds and the preeminence of nationalist stereotypes and a clericalist type of religion; and that the younger generation, by advocating progress at all costs, would eradicate the religious basis of human society. Although he described the “traditional” Catholicism of the older generation in the same pejorative terms as those who subscribed to the “folk society” metaphor, he dissented from the overall conclusions of social scientists such as Falardeau, Dumont, and Guy Rocher in that he maintained that French-Canadian religion was “authentically Catholic and Roman” and not “a vague, primitive religion rescued by Christianity, nor an adulterated or degenerate form of Catholicism.”37 However, Ryan’s assessment of “tradition” and the older generation was far harsher than his view of the yearnings of the rising generation. His own sympathies, evident in his youthful reading of the novelists of the pre-1914 Catholic revival in France, and certainly reinforced during his travels through Catholic Europe in the summer of 1952, clearly lay with a “hard” Christianity, an austere modern religious aesthetic that aggressively sought to demarcate itself from the baroque execrescences of post-Tridentine piety and religious art. He commented favourably on the new liturgical experiments he observed in parishes in France and England, stating that these were “the living expression of the feelings of a Community that is but a pilgrimage on earth and whose real home is in heaven.”38 The solution to the conflict was the cultivation of a climate of spiritual “adulthood” founded on “an aptitude for communion.” This phrase, common among those influenced by personalism, conveyed a sense of disgust with older devotional practices, quantitative forms of piety that obscured the Christian message through an overemphasis on a purely individual salvation rather than linking the believer with the corporate life of the Church.39 The clear message was that only young people who had acquired the type of spirituality promoted by Action catholique had the potential to attain this type of maturity, and that the older generation were destined to remain mired in a kind of religious infantilism. The only way to restore a sense of fellowship and spiritual purpose to

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French-Canadian society was for the older generation to relinquish its old-style nationalism and for French Canada to “dissociate itself definitively from the equation of religion and nation.” Rather than constituting a barrier of spiritual protectionism, Catholicism must be the conduit of universal values that opened Quebec society to broader ideological and social realities.40 The overriding cultural and psychological dichotomy that lay at the root of Ryan’s fears regarding the future of the link between Catholicism and French-Canadian civilization was the sharp contrast between two aesthetics of religion. The first pole, the negative, described as “sociological Catholicism,” defined the world of mass sacramental religious practice, the still-vibrant popular devotions and pilgrimages, and a type of quantitative religious piety designed to secure individual salvation. The second, positive, pole was the style of personalist spirituality founded on the study of modern Catholic theology and the history of the Church. Ryan, like many observers in the 1950s, viewed the religious regime of mass ritual practice as part of “tradition” and interpreted it as a survival of the post-Tridentine church of the early modern era. However, he was quite mistaken: as Quebec religious historians writing since the 1980s have discerned, such mass religious practice was of comparatively recent vintage, was coextensive with a “liberal” regime of modernity, and characterized the religious landscape of French Canada only after the 1880s.41 However, viewed through the lens of the sociology and psychology popular in 1950s Quebec, “sociological religion” was an amalgam of popular folk practices, survivals of old European rural cultures that, in a colonial environment, had been translated into an unthinking reflex of conformity to a series of devotional acts and to the authority of a local clergy who were both “embourgeoisé” and of mediocre intellectual calibre, by which Ryan meant out of touch with modern cultural currents such as debates on the social question, the promotion of the laity, and the internationalization of human life.42 The existence of such a powerfully entrenched sociological Catholicism in the modern age was not simply a harmless historical curiosity. In order to account for Ryan’s strident tone regarding these religious practices, it is important to realize that his anxieties went beyond an aversion to outmoded religious styles and sheer bad taste, and to situate him within wider currents of thinking about secularization that came to dominate the horizons of postwar intellectuals. The rising prestige of sociology in western Europe and North America meant that, during the 1950s, there was for the first time a public discourse dominated by the concept of



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secularization as the only legitimate point of interface between the churches and intellectuals. Clergymen, social scientists, and a wide variety of cultural commentators stood in fundamental agreement that religion must be defined in social terms, a view that tended to conceptualize religious belief and its institutional forms as rather passive entities being “acted upon” rather than as dynamic agents initiating forces of modernization. This perspective, according to the German scholar Lucian Hölscher, induced intellectuals to posit two potential futures for religion under conditions of modernity: its traditional standards of church attendance, social significance, and adherence to Christian beliefs and values – and consequently, its social and cultural authority – would simply decline under the corrosiveness of industrialization and urbanization; or, more optimistically, church institutions would open themselves to the universalizing currents of social transformation – principally the assumption of their responsibilities as part of a new democratic order and way of life – so that the great desideratum of social modernization would be coextensive with the achievement of God’s Kingdom on earth.43 The latter would maintain Christianity in the vanguard of progress, but the criteria of progress would be those determined as desirable by socialscientific theory. Catholics like Ryan maintained that the Church was a supra-temporal entity, and, as an Augustinian and a devotee of Newman’s writings, he remained sceptical about the actual realization of God’s Kingdom on earth. However, as a public intellectual whose sense of purpose lay in popularizing the “new theology,” with its emphasis on the Church as subject to the dynamics of history, and engaging in a fruitful dialogue with modern currents, he certainly operated within the ambit of many of the central conventions of this public discourse of postwar intellectuals. From this standpoint, the mass religious practice characteristic of most French-Canadian Catholics constituted a grave danger because it operated as a powerful negative dynamic of secularization by persuading people that they were being religious when, in fact, their lives had been compartmentalized into an external religiosity and a system of private social relationships that no longer reflected the impress of Christian values and practices on their daily comportment. Here, Ryan stood outside the conceptual framework of many modern theorists of secularization whose theoretical framework employs the British religious trajectory as a template. Their guiding assumption considers the decline of external religious practice as merely reflective of the loss of personal conviction, which occurred as an epiphenomenon of the processes of industrialization and

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urbanization, and orbited around the central axis of class difference. As the British historian S.J.D. Green so aptly put it, this logic rests upon the notion that “people stop going because they stop believing.”44 Nor, despite his contacts with French social Catholics, did Ryan entirely subscribe to their assessment that Christian adherence inevitably weakened in working-class zones of modern industrial cities.45 Indeed, because he lived in a society where adherence to Catholicism and religious practice was ubiquitous, he did not believe that class difference formed the major current of secularization. He maintained that the central vector of secularization was occurring within the institutional church itself and was less a consequence of the church being acted upon by outside processes.46 Ryan’s analysis flowed from his Augustinian personalism, which rested on the notion that the visible Church contained those who were destined for salvation and those destined for damnation, and also from his location in a postwar North American environment experiencing a period of religious revival, church building, and overall cultural prestige for the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” Like a host of critical analyses, ranging from the American sociologist Will Herberg’s classic Protestant, Catholic, and Jew (1955) to Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew (1965), Ryan worried that behind this success story lay the reality of superficial religious commitment, conformity to social expectations, and a religion of personal comfort and individual satisfaction.47 Ten years before Berton’s more celebrated critique of middle-class Canadian churchgoers, Ryan sounded the same worried note that the close ties that had developed in the postwar period between religion, business civilization, and suburbia had made the institutional churches mere expressions of the ambient materialism and philistinism, made of up of nominal Christians whose “indoctrination” in Christian theology was woefully feeble.48 Behind the robust attendance at Mass and sacraments, Ryan discerned a far more insidious and dishonest type of secularization, suggesting that greater conformity to the outward prescriptions of religion was entirely compatible with a deficient personal Christian belief, a process that would, in the final analysis, eviscerate the Church from modern culture by compromising its authenticity. To one persuaded by Newman’s symbiotic relationship between conscience and intellect in the formulation of religious truth, this type of religiosity could have no spiritual value. In Ryan’s thought, then, sociological Catholicism was always contrasted with the second, positive, pole – that is, the style of personalist spirituality, learned in the modern theology and history of the Church, and thus accentuating the collective



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liturgical practices advancing the “modern” idea of salvation as a ­communitarian act. But there was something even more fundamental in the nature of this dichotomy, something that reflected the influence of a  powerful set of gendered messages on French-Canadian Catholic intellectuals in the 1950s. Ryan’s personal experience of growing up in a female-headed household, with his mother’s overweening prominence in the religious upbringing of her sons, and his position at the head of Action catholique movements, whose membership was from two-thirds to three-quarters female, gave the influence of gender on religion a particular significance and urgency.49 Writing in 1959, Ryan summed up the cultural climate of the Catholic milieu as one characterized by a “devirilized religion,” one in which he unhesitatingly identified the undesirable qualities of conformity, authoritarianism, individualism, habit, and routine with the fact that Catholicism tended to appeal to women more than to men.50 As he pithily stated the matter in 1954, much of devotional Catholicism reminded him of a visit to a funeral parlour. It remained centred on secondary and artificial emotions (a clear reference to the influence of women), and, while he did not publicly question its sincerity, “it was neither virile nor adult.”51 The sociological Catholicism typical of French Canada was but the religious expression of a North American mass culture, to which a host of social scientists and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic had already assigned “female” qualities, reflecting a highly gendered cultural hierarchy that exalted the position of male intellectuals as cultural arbiters. A fundamental paradox lay in the fact that most of these men considered themselves liberal or even radical social critics, but they evinced an extreme cultural conservatism in defence of these cultural boundaries.52 There is little doubt that Ryan shared the substance of these views. His self-definition as “man of action” and “intellectual worker” spoke to the ongoing attempt by North American public intellectuals to assert the fundamental “virility” of high cultural endeavours,53 and one of his main critiques of sociological Catholicism was that it “devirilized” FrenchCanadian culture in two important respects: first, in its emphasis on quantitative piety, it constructed religion as female space where men could not feel comfortable; second, by resting its social and cultural claims on a structure of exaggerated clerical authority, it devalued the critical life of the mind. It was therefore unable to speak to the rising middle-class elites of French Canada, who were overwhelmingly male. These individuals – whom Ryan dubbed the “living  elites,” located in what contemporary analysis would call the “knowledge sector” – were

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secondary school teachers, university professors, journalists, artists, popular educators, and the directors of Action catholique movements.54 It was the existence of these gendered religious mentalities within Catholicism that posed the greatest threat both to the future of Catholicism as the central element in French-Canadian society and to the achievement of a modern democracy in Quebec. Particular devotions, habitual practices, and routine conformity – the “female” traits of Catholicism – were not in themselves evil, but, when placed at the centre of religion, as they were in “traditional” Quebec Catholicism, they had the unfortunate propensity to lead to cultural degeneration. With this gloomy prognosis, Ryan warned that the predominance of the “female element” would ultimately banish religion from public life, as something that energetic and active – read, male – elites regarded as obsolete and unnecessary.55 This development would drag Catholicism back towards the terrain of tradition, thus precluding the desired conjunction between the dynamic elements in religion and the forces of political and cultural democracy that Ryan hoped would maintain Catholicism at the centre of FrenchCanadian life. Such gendered expressions of religious mentality constituted the chief vector of secularization traversing Quebec during the 1950s. Significantly, Ryan’s views anticipated the analysis of Callum Brown’s influential The Death of Christian Britain, which ascribed the catastrophic collapse of long-standing patterns of religious adherence in the 1960s to the decision of women to leave the universe of organized Christianity.56 For Ryan, the problem of religious decline was gendered in reverse and was masculine in nature, revolving around the revulsion that activist professional men would feel for a feminized and conformist mass Catholicism. Indeed, it is  difficult to escape the conclusion that, during the mid-1950s, Ryan regarded the “religious crisis,” in its most acute form, as expressive of the tensions that he believed had developed between the Church and this new intellectual class of men. Speaking at a symposium aptly entitled “Crise de conscience des intellectuels canadiens-français” in early 1956, he described how, during the past fifteen years, he had followed the birth and rise to prominence of a new generation of intellectuals. These men were demarcated by both competence – the possession of a “scientific spirit” – and a higher spiritual purpose “to transcend regionalism in order to enter into communion with a universal culture.” This was Ryan’s shorthand to indicate that most of these intellectuals had abandoned the traditional synthesis of ethnic nationalism and Catholicism characteristic of the interwar period in order to assert the priority of universal human



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values of Western civilization. The vast majority, he noted, considered themselves Catholic, but this was, in Ryan’s opinion, no source for selfcongratulation on the part of the Church. Deploying the fashionable diagnosis of postwar psychoanalysis, Ryan reckoned that members of this generation, then in their thirties and forties, had reached the point of adolescence, where tensions between their universalist and scientific spirit and their Catholic values were becoming acute, and their collective psyche could, he maintained, be summarized as “a state of generalized malaise; this malaise involves not their relationship with God, but with the Church.”57 However, he was careful to qualify this “crisis” as one of “culture,” which, because Catholicism was integral and even central to the French-Canadian identity, profoundly implicated religion.58 Symptoms of this mood were visible in the confused reactions of French-Canadian male intellectuals to the Church. On the one hand, they were “wounded” by the clergy’s lack of scientific competence, not simply in questions related to the temporal realm, but even in matters relating to theology and liturgy. On the other, they themselves displayed a religious culture that had remained at “an adolescent or regionalist stage” of development and was woefully weak on matters touching upon church, history, the liturgy, the Bible, and the relationship between the church hierarchy and the laity, which meant that they were not yet equipped to be responsible adults exercising authority in the Church. More personally troubling for Ryan was that most remained entirely ignorant of the “mystery of Rome.”59 These men had not yet attained spiritual adulthood, a state that Ryan defined as a balanced development of all faculties, a fully developed intellectual, spiritual, and social life, and “an aptitude to act upon reality” – qualities that entitled them to exercise responsibility in both society and Church.60 The prolongation of such a divided psyche prompted Ryan to exclaim in an article intended for a French readership that “French Canadians have remained big adolescents.”61 And, as he warned, the modern world was “without pity for spiritual children and adolescents; it will devour them and drown them in its myths.”62 The close analogy he drew between individual and social psychology reflected, at a certain level, not only an appropriation of the postwar liberal “realist” discourse, but his own personal forebodings about his continued failure to achieve normal adulthood by settling down to a stable marriage and family life. However, during the 1950s Ryan remained hopeful that FrenchCanadian intellectuals could resolve their crisis of adolescence and negotiate a transition to mature adulthood for themselves as individuals, for

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their collective identity as intellectuals, and for their society as a whole. Adulthood was a state that would maintain the primacy of Catholicism in his society’s cultural life, while making religion synonymous with competence, rationality, and the supremacy of universal human values. Crisis, he believed, was not a time for alarmist or pessimistic generalizations, for it was a period in the life of both individuals and societies where it was possible to pose “F UNDA ME NT A L questions.”63 But for Ryan, the achievement of adulthood involved the integration of Catholic belief – defined not as piety and religious enthusiasm, or the creation of more and more institutions to compensate for the lacunae of temporal society, but as a synthesis of theological learning and conscience – and the modern values of the new intellectual community. This, he hoped, would confer upon male intellectuals a new sense of purpose and heal the increasingly acrimonious divisions to which they had fallen prey. The aim was to reconnect the Church and the intellectuals into a unitive cultural element that would synthesize, through conversation, the values of both past and future and thus serve as the bedrock of French-Canadian identity. Here was the Augustinian imperative to seek fundamental agreement, or social concord, through an ongoing process of communication and dialogue. Only thus could French Canada truly aspire to be a civilization and avoid the debilitating consequences of a “universalization from below” being wreaked on other Western societies by the nightmare of mass culture.64 Failure to so reconnect with the Church would consign the FrenchCanadian man to the infantile, debilitated condition of “spiritual schizophrenic,”65 the prelude to dechristianization and cultural death. From the outset, Ryan’s strategy of linking the new intellectuals with the Church faced a seemingly insurmountable difficulty. As he frequently remarked, the values of twentieth-century humanity were founded on a democratic ethos, one that valued openness of spirit, objectivity, scientific rationality, intellectual integrity, a commitment to competence and teamwork, and a profound yearning for authenticity and justice. Consequently, the modern intellectual temper had little patience for arguments from authority, and severely judged “pharisees, posers and moralizers.”66 Not even the French personalist theology that Ryan so avidly read suggested that the Church was, or should be, a democratic organization in the political sense understood by moderns. The French Dominican Yves Congar, whose views on the role of the laity were extremely influential during the debates of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, treated the question most fully in a massive volume written in 1952. While arguing for a new sense of the laity’s historical and



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theological importance in the Church, and critical of the clergy’s propensity to “confiscate” wide swathes of the temporal sphere, Congar was equally concerned with validating the hierarchical principle. The Church differed from any other earthly society and was not merely the expression or voluntary association of the faithful, which would have conceded too much authority to laypeople; rather, because it was divinely commissioned, its existence preceded and in fact constituted the members, and the hierarchy of pope, bishops, and priests were the legitimate guardians of “the spiritual principle of order.”67 Ryan certainly shared the substance of this “Roman” ecclesiology, remarking as late as 1961, when winds of change had reached even the precincts of the Vatican, that the Church was a “divine society,” perfect and sovereign, and not dependent on models provided by civil society for its existence or action. Further, the behaviour of its members could be understood and judged only from the perspective of its own internal structure and laws, not by the norms set forth by civil society. “It would be dangerous and even heretical,” Ryan intoned in 1961, “to wish to reduce the power of the hierarchy to matters of doctrine and the sacraments. The jurisdiction of the hierarchy encompasses the life of the Church itself.”68 However, this view left him vulnerable to Harold Laski’s brutal judgment, pronounced in The American Democracy, that the Catholic Church was simply an authoritarian, medieval monarchy that, by excluding its members from effective participation in decision making, rendered Catholics spiritually unfit for democratic citizenship and therefore less than modern.69 How, then, to convincingly assert that Catholicism was not only compatible with, but necessary to, the building of a democratic civilization? Here, Ryan had to move outside Roman ecclesiology to his two favourite Catholic mentors, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain and Cardinal Newman. In an influential work written in English in 1951 for a North American audience, Maritain defended the Church as a sovereign spiritual society but argued that, while the internal constitution of the Church was not democratic in the political sense, the overriding universal human values for which the Church stood were fundamental for the “moral charter,” or civic secular faith that underpinned Western democracies.70 Newman took a somewhat different tack, one that focused on the Church’s internal constitution and the proper relationship that should prevail between hierarchy and laity. Remember that, in Catholic terms, Newman was a “constitutionalist” opposed to overweening assertions of papal power. One of his great discoveries in terms of ecclesiology was the sense that, at all times, the laity had acted as a responsible, restraining

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element in the elaboration of doctrine in the face of the hierarchy’s occasional propensities to flirt with heretical innovations. Consequently, he believed that a key element that must be added to the current political culture of Roman Catholicism was an ongoing “consultation” of the laity by the hierarchy. He deliberately did not define the scope of such consultation, but the notion held forth considerable potential for greater lay initiative. Paraphrasing Newman in his assertion that “at all times the laity has been the measure of the spirit of the Church,” Ryan pushed back against what he criticized as a climate of “unconscious authoritarianism” characterized by lack of dialogue and a reliance on decisions from on high, a mentality that afflicted both French-Canadian clergy and laity,71 and argued vigorously for the necessity of integrating the democratic culture of North America into French Canada’s vision of Catholicism.72 The stakes here were very high, involving nothing less than the future of Action catholique itself. Would it exist as an appendage that would merely execute the decisions of the hierarchy, thus disabling it from becoming an organizing centre for Catholic intellectuals in a democratic society, or could it become a space for frank and critical research and dialogue into fundamental questions touching on all questions where the cross-fertilization of the life of the Church and the history of profane society occurred,73 a sphere where intellectuals, both clerical and lay, could become, as Newman had hoped, the most dynamic force for the development of the Church? For Ryan, the future of the relationship between Catholicism and French-Canadian male intellectuals rested on a single fundamental premise: that freedom was a spiritual, as well as a temporal, good, and that one could not be an advocate for liberty on one level while opposing it on another, except in upholding male prerogatives in society.74 Given the constraints of Ryan’s ecclesiology, with its strong accent on the authority of the hierarchy, freedom within the Church was a highly nuanced concept, one that bore little relation to “modern” liberal concepts of majority rule and popular sovereignty. At the outset, Ryan carefully hedged the monarchical “political” structure of the Church with a number of considerations. First, the pope’s authority could not be assimilated to arbitrary, feudal, or absolute forms, as these were derived from the temporal realm. His power was strictly ­limited by the constitutional structure and laws of the Church and was balanced by the fact that the Church was a spiritual society whose membership comprised voluntary believers. Second, beyond conserving the integrity of the faith, the “infallible” pope had no personal authority over doctrine, which led Ryan to conclude that “he is a servant, not a



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tyrant,” and thus an example that the rulers of secular society should emulate. Many of the historic abuses of papal authority had occurred, not because of defects in the spiritual constitution of the Catholic Church, but because of overly close relationships that had occurred in particular contexts between its temporal and spiritual power. In the modern age, the boundaries of each realm were more clearly defined and would therefore prevent such abuses. In addition, the laity were protected against clerical arrogance by “sanctions of common opinion.” Moreover, as a final court of appeal that superseded all visible authorities, “the witness and voice of conscience interpreted as the will of the Lord in the life of each believer.”75 This argument was vintage Newman, one that fully accepted the idea that the Church was a living, developing body, not only of institutions, but of doctrines whose final form had not yet been fixed, an outlook that placed a great premium on creative research and free discussion, a process that invited the participation of both clergy and laity. But how to foster and direct this dialogue in an “adult” way that would obviate the infantile disorders of a knee-jerk anticlericalism among lay intellectuals that would trigger an over-reliance on magisterial authority on the part of the clergy? Certain ground rules were necessary. In keeping the authority of the hierarchy within bounds, it was important for laypeople to cultivate within themselves “a superior calm that is characteristic of adult Christians,” thus enabling them to maintain a great respect for persons consecrated to be clergy but to avoid servility by tempering this respect with a recognition that the clergy were servants of God, not themselves the objects of worship.76 Above all, laypeople had to realize that, in order to participate in the exercise of authority within the Church, they would have to internalize a type of freedom that was superior to that found in political society, one that rested, in the final analysis, on a sense of adult responsibility characterized by calm and reflectiveness, rather than emotion, in religious matters. Ryan looked forward to the creation of institutional frameworks – along the lines of that quintessentially “British” expedient, the royal commission – that would express a responsible public opinion within the Church, based on free discussion among groups who cherished Catholicism.77 This would avoid the temptation of modern intellectuals to import the political enthusiasms and hostilities of “left” and “right” into the Church.78 Such a temptation had to be avoided at all costs, as it would irretrievably weaken French Canada’s fragile engagement with modernity by violating the universal character of Catholicism upon which its its destiny was to be founded.

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A Mission to the Middle Class: Constituting a “Vital Centre” for “Hybrid Beings” During the mid-1950s, Ryan’s thinking and plans for the reform of Action catholique revolved around a complex system of cultural and psychological dichotomies that he believed traversed French-Canadian society. At one level, he considered these polarizations markers of a necessary process of transition from adolescence to adulthood; yet, on another, he remained obsessed by the fear that French Canada’s Catholic identity might prove too fragile to sustain the weight of a struggle between the forces of authentic Christian spirituality and North American materialism. The only sure path he discerned through the troubled era of the Cold War was for the Church, and Action catholique itself, to insist on a spirituality based on realism and to “incorporate within themselves the spiritual and cultural D R A MA ” that French Canada was experiencing,79 thus acting as a mediating centre around which a mature intellectual and cultural life could coalesce. In this respect, Ryan’s thinking was a Catholic variant of a North American current in liberal political and social thinking particular to the early years of the Cold War. It serves as the most compelling testimony to the impact of his Augustinian ecclesiology on his social and political thinking. For Ryan, Augustine’s account of human civilization was a never-ending attempt to secure social peace by resolving opposition and discord; but, because the same citizens inhabited both the City of God and the Earthly City, Ryan did not regard this simply as a struggle between good and evil. In this process, Christianity constituted “the principal meeting place, the principal force for unity and communication among men,” and the fundamental task of both the Church and the Catholic intellectual was to “establish a genuine and enduring dialogue between men,” to serve as a bridge between contradictory ideologies and mentalities.80 In positioning Christianity – and by extension, Action catholique and Catholic intellectuals – as the unifying elements in modern culture, Ryan’s thought also displayed considerable familiarity with the remarkable cross-fertilization of ideas that had occurred between a group of American Jewish intellectuals and those influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr’s Protestant Augustinian neo-orthodoxy. Its principal political text was the historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr’s The Vital Center, published in 1949. Schlesinger spoke for a number of disenchanted intellectuals whose youthful commitments had originated with the Marxist left. With the onset of the Cold War in 1947, they began to gravitate towards liberalism



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but manifested considerable disgust with what they derided as the intellectually barren free-market ideology and the sentimentality, lack of political realism, and softness on communism displayed by liberal holdovers from the New Deal era. Both positions, in Schlesinger’s estimation, relied on enthusiasm and sentiment but lacked the “realism” necessary to confront communism and design a vigorous liberal creed that would meet the postwar challenges. Such a new liberalism, purged of its temptations towards radical or conservative excesses, would anchor America in a new, unifying public consensus that synthesized spiritual purpose and rational expertise. Its contrast of “sentimental” and “realist” styles exerted a powerful attraction on male intellectuals throughout the 1950s and early 1960s,81 and especially confirmed the sense of men like Ryan that Catholicism urgently needed to shift its centre of gravity from Europe to North America82 to avoid being caught in the destructive mutual hostilities of “left” and “right.” Ryan’s own attempt to define a “vital centre” mirrored the American version, in that it emphasized the agency of male intellectuals, but it defined a model of a “public intellectual” that differed in some significant ways from the postwar model in the Anglo-American world. American public intellectuals of the 1950s, it has been generally understood, were “generalists” who eschewed academic specialization to communicate with a broader educated public and were – despite the exceptional presence of Christian intellectuals such as the eminent Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, who sought to enunciate a capacious public theology or civil religion – resolutely “secular” in outlook. Indeed, from the 1850s onwards in both Britain and America, arguments to ground the authority of intellectuals in society were explicitly anti-theological and linked theology with sectarian and clerical interests that were positioned as being at odds with the posture of “impartiality” advanced by those who claimed the mantle of “public intellectual.”83 Drawn generally from a left-liberal political allegiance, they vaunted their independence, proclaiming a cult of objectivity drawn from their ability to both appropriate and explain social scientific knowledge. But they were also moralists, proclaiming a creed shaped by the high modernism of literature and art, which sought to safeguard democracy by defending a rigid cultural hierarchy against the corrosive influences of “middlebrow” and “low” mass culture and an ethos of unbridled consumption.84 In twentieth-century Britain, several generations of intellectuals, in addition to bemoaning the “absence” of intellectuals in the public life of their society, remained tied to promoting a bond between

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intellectual life and English/British national identity that revolved around the primacy of politics.85 Ryan’s assertion of his status as a public intellectual flowed not from a standpoint located within high cultural production or the academy. Rather, as a layman who worked within the organizations of the Catholic Church but whose expertise lay in both ecclesiology and modern social science, he considered himself ideally placed to “mediate” between rival assertions of authority advanced, on the one hand, by a new generation of lay professionals, who claimed to possess competence to manage the spheres of education and social service based on social scientific expertise, and, on the other, by clergy, many of whom could claim the same professional credentials but who also brandished the added sanction of a divinely ordained institutional mission. He thus vaunted his status as the ultimate “generalist,” as his claim to intellectual authority did not flow from his position in a university or from manipulation of specialized knowledge. During the 1950s, the marginalization of priest-intellectuals like Lionel Groulx and Georges-Henri Lévesque86 created a kind of vacuum into which a qualified layman like Ryan could confidently move. Moreover, although considerable fragmentation had occurred by 1955 among intellectuals over the question of nationalism, Ryan could assert a kind of “impartial” position above the fray, because he had cultivated and maintained friendly relationships among the “neo-nationalists” clustered around Le Devoir, their citélibriste critics, and even the “traditional” nationalists both groups scorned. Ryan discerned an opportunity in the fact that all these groups still posited Catholicism, although with different inflections and tone, as central to their definition of being a French Canadian. Because he believed that Catholicism was the essential element of both tradition and modernity in French Canada, Ryan believed that religion, and not culture or politics, was the key terrain that the public intellectual must master in order to engage the educated elements of his society in constructive dialogue. A common faith, if presented in a way that would appeal to modern men, could provide the grounds for a renewed public consensus, one that would exalt not only Ryan’s own position, but that of intellectuals, in a society in the throes of modernity. And, because of the nearly all-encompassing overlap between Catholic and citizen, Catholicism could not function simply as a civil religion: for one like Ryan, the tone of civic life stood in direct relation to the quality of openly professed and practised individual and collective belief. Significantly, his allegiance to the moral project of high culture so typical of American postwar intellectuals was tenuous at best. His principal



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endeavour during the 1950s was to resist Americanization by conjugating the dynamic, “virile” Catholicism he espoused with a project of civic democracy, to be carried out through a vast program of adult education, which would graft an “organic democracy” onto French-Canadian society. In this key respect, he drew far more upon Catholic social theory and his admiration for British experiments in creating a civic democracy. Ryan’s aspiration to foster civic democracy required a far more “middlebrow” approach to the question of cultural hierarchy than that common within the American cult of intellectual elitism. This commitment led him towards a highly sympathetic engagement with his social roots in the French-Canadian lower middle classes. Coupled with the nationalist imperative of defining and defending a French-Canadian culture in opposition to the homogenizing tendencies of the United States, these concerns placed Ryan on an emphatically Canadian trajectory within North America.87 Ryan’s attempt to position himself as a mediator spoke most emphatically to French Canadians living through the Duplessis era, in that it firmly eschewed political partisanship. In this respect, he adhered firmly to his 1951 article in Action nationale advising intellectuals to engage in cultural activism, with the elaboration of democratic values taking precedence over premature electioneering.88 In addition, Ryan’s version of the “vital centre” drew not from the secular language of politics but from the Christian theology of history. The categories he employed owed their nomenclature to Arnold Toynbee, whose Civilization on Trial (1948) was, like Schlesinger’s work, a classic of early Cold War public discourse. Toynbee’s writings were obsessed with elucidating the disintegrative or unitive tendencies common to all civilizations, and he located these in  two contradictory enthusiasms, labelled the “Herodian” and the “Zealotist,” terms describing the Jewish attitude to Rome and its civilization at the time of Christ.89 For Ryan, these were particularly apt  descriptions of the psychological attitudes and divisions within the  French-Canadian intellectual community of the early 1950s. The Herodians could be described as “those who accept everything with eyes closed in the name of the advantages to be derived,” while the Zealots “can see only evil and danger in what comes from outside.” Ryan frequently used these categories during the 1970s to describe the political choices facing Quebec, but it is evident that he originally assigned them a cultural and religious meaning. He first evoked them in 1953, in a letter written to Léopold Richer, the “traditional” nationalist editor of Notre temps, who had published an article excoriating Ryan’s French Catholic

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mentors Jacques Maritain, Paul Claudel, and Joseph Folliet. Though Ryan never sent the letter to Richer,90 it is apparent that, for him, these three French intellectuals, whose work had so inspired Action catholique, represented an attempt to define a “vital centre” for French-Canadian intellectual life. At this centre, Catholicism (and the Catholic intellectual) mediated, through its commitment to a spiritual and social realism, between the culturally disintegrative tendencies represented by Herodianism and Zealotry, a bland acquiescence in North American civilization, and a defensive, reactionary nationalism that would isolate French Canada from universal values. From 1953 to his departure from Action catholique in 1962, Ryan waged a struggle on two cultural fronts to make that organization into a vital centre between the Herodian and Zealotist tendencies he discerned in his society. The first involved an effort to find some principle of unity that would bring together in a constructive dialogue the increasingly ­discordant intellectual communities of French Canada. In 1954, Ryan was one of the major forces behind a series of commissions that sought to interest Montreal intellectuals in studying all facets of the relationship of Catholicism to social and cultural life. It is apparent that Ryan conscientiously tried to engage the leading voices from all ideological camps: neo-nationalists such as Jacques Perreault, Gérard Filion and André Laurendeau; the prominent citélibristes Gérard Pelletier and Pierre Elliott Trudeau; “traditional” nationalists such as Maximilien Caron, Esdras Minville, and Léopold Richer; his Action catholique colleagues Marc Lalonde and Fernand Cadieux; leading Dominican and Jesuit intellectuals Louis-F. Régis, o.p. and Richard Arès, s.j.; and leaders of organized labour Gérard Picard and Claude Jodoin.91 However, efforts to regroup these divergent currents into a viable “Centre catholique des intellectuels canadiens” had foundered by 1957.92 This failure prompted Ryan to castigate university intellectuals for “their fear of the militant spirit” and to despair about their real commitment to human freedom.93 During the bitterly contested provincial election of 1956, which resulted in the reelection of Maurice Duplessis for a fourth term, Robert Rumilly, a “­traditional” nationalist and publicist for Duplessis’s Union nationale published an angry pamphlet entitled L’infiltration gauchiste au Canada français. This tract accused neo-nationalist and citélibriste opponents of the premier of constituting a crypto-communist conspiracy and, for good measure, lumped in the “progressive” French Catholics clustered around the journal Esprit.94 This right-wing assault on themselves and their cultural idols was the final straw for neo-nationalists and citélibristes,



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although both groups had, up to this point, actually given qualified support to Duplessis in his efforts to defend Quebec’s provincial powers from federal encroachments. Many progressive intellectuals began to rethink their commitment to non-partisan forms of democratic action, and some, like Ryan’s old friend Maurice Sauvé, who had collaborated with his anti-communist strategies at youth congresses in the late 1940s, openly adhered to the Liberal Party. Sauvé elicited Ryan’s scorn as someone “very anxious to grab the bag for themselves – power-sickness coupled with impatience.”95 If the growing breach between the French-Canadian intellectual community and Duplessis complicated Ryan’s task of constituting Action catholique as a vital centre for both “progressive” and “traditional” elements, it did not impair action on a second, more broad-ranging cultural front. This was a comprehensive cultural, spiritual, and psychological mission to an emerging French-Canadian middle class, a program that lay at the root of the transformation that Ryan wished to engineer within Action catholique to shift the centre of gravity from the social question – the focus on the working-class and the structural reform of capitalism – to a preoccupation with defining a coherent, spiritually aware, and democratic set of commitments that would define a modern middle-class identity. It is interesting that two apparently contrasting approaches strongly influenced Ryan’s mission to the French-Canadian middle classes. The first was a preoccupation of “traditional” nationalists such as Esdras Minville, Lionel Groulx, and Victor Barbeau, who, in 1939, had participated in a series of lectures sponsored by Jeunesse indépendante catholique that explicitly linked the fate of the francophone bourgeoisie to that of the French-Canadian society and nation.96 The second, from a far more politically and socially radical perspective, reflected the influential work of the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), which deployed the insights of social psychology to advance a strikingly similar conclusion by claiming that one could understand modern society as a whole, and especially the future destiny of American democracy, through study of the new middle class employed in the corporate and government organizations typical of modern capitalism.97 In bringing together the preoccupations of prewar French-Canadian nationalists and the most modern American social psychology, Ryan returned to his own social roots in 1930s Montreal, where most of his schoolmates at college had been sons of the lower bourgeoisie, and to one of his abiding, but lesser-known commitments within Action catholique. Throughout the 1940s, Ryan had

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coupled his role of national secretary of Action catholique with the presidency of the Montreal branch of Jeunesse indépendante catholique, an organization devoted to the spiritual and cultural advancement of young middle-class men, most of whom were office workers and lowlevel professionals. His long-standing interaction with this group made him aware that many of these young men, because of the more marginal economic circumstances of their families, had been unable to acquire professional credentials or attend university: they had had to either abandon their studies at the classical colleges or opt for an education at the écoles primaires supérieures that did not lead to higher degrees or certification. Because of the lack of opportunities for adult or continuing education, they were unable to improve their qualifications, thus remaining at the level of low-level corporate functionaries.98 Worse, these men had to suffer the indignity of being looked down on by the elite of classical college graduates, which fostered in them pathetic, “monkey-like”99 attempts to acquire a hide-bound bookish culture whose value was, at best, counterfeit. One of Ryan’s most significant publications during the mid-1950s was a pamphlet summing up the results of an inquiry into the composition, inner psychology, and destiny of the postwar French-Canadian middle class. From the outset, he rigorously departed from any Marxian or structural view of class, outlining his program in the following terms: “Describe the factors and influences that dominate in the creation and diffusion of styles of thought and behaviour in the milieu of the middle classes. Try to bring to the fore the principal elements of the ‘interior world’ in which middle class people live today.”100 The emphasis on “styles,” “behaviour,” and especially the evocation of the “interior world” signalled a firm abjuring of the pre-1949 social conscience of the Catholic movements and testified to his concern for the middle class as a cultural space for the production of modern individuality, a view confirmed by his reference to the insight offered by the work of the American sociologists C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth that modern institutions – which framed the lives of most middle-class men – were complex organizations of roles.101 These initial parameters placed Ryan squarely within a convergence between the traditions of prewar Catholic social doctrine and postwar North American social thought. Throughout his pamphlet, published in 1954 as Les classes moyennes au Canada français, the plural form “middle classes” was always used, to characterize all those social groups that performed what he termed “intermediate” functions in modern society. It is critical to note whom he included and



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excluded in the definition: teachers, lower civil servants, shopkeepers, managers, clerks, accountants and secretaries, salesmen, technicians, and owners of small and medium enterprises and those performing “a spiritual or intellectual service” such as journalists all made the list, while French-Canadian lay professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and university professors were excluded.102 Ryan’s internal categorization undoubtedly drew upon Mills’s influential White Collar (1951), but most important to his portrait was not occupational criteria, but cultural, spiritual, and psychological ones. “The middle classes,” he stated, “are a sort of crossroads where the transition from one class to another either begins or is affirmed. The more a society is open and anchored on democratic principles and traditions, the easier and more frequent the passage from one class to another.”103 In keeping with a long tradition of European Catholic sociology, Ryan considered the middle classes an element of spiritual stability in modern industrial society, counterbalancing the tendencies of the upper classes and the working classes to organize society according to merely material divisions, and thus a key element in that Augustinian desideratum, social peace and concord. Though their lifestyles evinced conservatism and traditionalism, these were not entirely negative qualities, because they demonstrated a healthy respect for family spirit and parental authority. “We are convinced,” he concluded, “that in our cities, the middle classes will be the last ones to abandon religious practice.”104 It was clear that Ryan had decisively abandoned Action catholique’s mission to the proletariat: he judged this social formation “unprepared psychologically, politically, and spiritually to be the reliable guardians of values transmitted to a people from the past – in particular those pertaining to its religious and national culture.” By contrast, he reckoned that the middle classes were generally committed to these values, and that, in the French-Canadian milieu, these were of such overriding importance that Action catholique needed to strategically concentrate on giving full scope to the development of the middle classes.105 However, on the negative side of the ledger, Ryan noted that their conservatism ensured that the French-Canadian middle classes did not possess an integrated personality, and this had deleterious ramifications both for individuals and for the society. Ryan’s indictment echoed some of the major tropes of postwar American sociology, including that of the negative impact of the family unit on the development of the individual – read, male – personality, which was frequently stunted by a “paternal authority or more frequently by an exaggerated maternal solicitude.” This was the “momism” so

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deplored by postwar North American social commentators.106 Female dominance of family life was, in Ryan’s estimation, most evident in an imitative “snobbism,” an “inferiority complex” produced by a “timid conformism” whose sole aim was to replicate the lives and values of those higher on the social pyramid.107 Was this a none-too-veiled criticism of Blandine Ryan’s insistence that her sons listen to opera as an attempt to absorb the cultural style of the upper middle classes? At any rate, this type of conformity exercised by the middle-class family not only diminished the individual’s achievement of maturity, but it also had serious ramifications for the culture of the middle classes as a whole and, by implication, for the entire French-Canadian society. Ryan estimated that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the “culture” of the middle classes – a phrase encompassing technical training, religious knowledge and commitment, and access to the products of universal culture – was “truncated and incomplete.”108 Both middle-class individuals, and the FrenchCanadian middle classes as a whole, were at this stage unfit to assume their role as the vital centre of a modern Christian society, because they were “hybrid,” “rootless” entities, who lacked the “interior unity of the nineteenth-century peasant.”109 Ryan was quite preoccupied with issues of cultural and psychological hybridity. His own self-presentation in the mid-1950s was as a “hybrid being” possessing a French and Irish background, which he jokingly told a student audience endowed him with superior intelligence and the ability to succeed in both French and English Canada.110 However, hybridity also carried rather negative connotations. While for an Augustinian like Ryan, the temporal world might constitute a “hybrid” zone between the City of God and the Earthly City, the Christian male could not himself be a “hybrid” being, which connoted the undesirable “feminine” qualities of passivity, conformity, and self-absorption, dangers attached to the lifestyle and psychological characteristics of the new postwar middle classes. According to Ryan, this group lived in a cultural vacuum, content with the empty shell of intellectual conformity, an “excessive and ridiculous orthodoxy” on social and political questions, “and a pronounced infantilism in religious and cultural matters.”111 The failure to graft the strenuous new Catholicism onto the mentality of the middle classes as a new principle of cultural unity haunted Ryan, and he yearned for a transcendent moment such as the Asbestos strike, which would enable them to forge a sense of cohesion. Ultimately, those exercising intermediate functions in modern society might be dragged down to the level of mere workers, which would, in his estimation, open the door to



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a Marxist-style revolution that would destroy the synthesis between Catholicism and French-Canadian identity.112 One French-Canadian institution, the classical college, had long been identified with the education and promotion of middle-class professionals. Claude Ryan was himself a product of this system, having completed a seven-year curriculum, only to turn his back on the “traditional” careers of the priesthood, law, or medicine, opting instead for the emphatically “white-collar” world of social work and service in the Church bureaucracy. His long acquaintance with the intermediate milieu of the North American “organization man” left him with a profoundly sceptical attitude towards the professional bourgeoisie, and it is of note that he hived them off conceptually from his study of the French-Canadian middle classes. This was no simple omission. Like a number of other intellectuals, Ryan had, by the late 1950s, come to the conclusion that the colleges, which epitomized the alliance of Catholicism with the preservation of French culture, had become the repositories of a “false humanism” whose products, he scathingly declared, could not even carry on a dialogue on serious subjects. He dismissed “the average French Canadian” as someone incapable of free and substantive exchanges with others, despite what he noticed as a love of truth, an openness of heart, a capacity for admiration, and a simple and spontaneous desire to learn.113 For him, the solution to the vacuous cultural life of the middle classes did not lie in democratizing access to the classical colleges. Writing in the prestigious fiftieth anniversary issue of Le Devoir, Ryan flayed the graduates of the classical colleges, those destined for prominence in the leading professions and university teaching. These men should have ideally constituted a “cultivated class” but, on the religious level, they were at “an underdeveloped state” and their discussions of religious matters remained inflected by “an emotionalism” conditioned by “bad adolescent memories.”114 Historically, the classical education system had rested on a feeling of cordiality between the clergy and the lay leaders of society, but, to date, this had not resulted in “a tradition of Christian thinking and politics and of a civic morality worthy of a Christian people.”115 Worse still, this adolescent emotionalism in religious matters lay at the root of a palpable impatience and dissatisfaction with the institutional Church, one that Ryan feared would, by generating a confrontational form of secularization, derail his long-range plan for a peaceful and gradual readjustment of the frontiers between spiritual and temporal spheres in French Canada.116 The chief culprits in this climate of incipient polarization were the clergy and religious orders who directed the colleges.

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They had inculcated a type of humanism that was too individualist117 and had produced graduates lacking a communitarian consciousness. The major problem was that the clergy, mainly interested in securing recruits for their profession, did not teach a type of spirituality that would encourage young men, in particular, to envision religious experience in other than monastic terms. In Ryan’s estimation, 80 to 90 per cent of college graduates were in a state of religious crisis because of an overly clericalized and conformist religious education. The remedy lay in exposing male youth to a more “virile” religious literature, such as he had ingested on his own during the interwar period.118 Indeed, like other educational activists who participated in the wide-ranging discussions at Université Laval in 1958 on the future of the arts curriculum, he came close to suggesting that these religiously dominated institutions were conduits for dechristianization, because they had not instilled the hunger for spiritual quest in their students, who exhibited all the symptoms of passive, conformist North American “organization men” whose greatest desire was for comfort, respectability, and social promotion.119 The Catholicism they learned in college was the perfect expression of this ethos: abstract and speculative, a religion of fear unrelated to human realities, it was conventional and passive, intellectually servile, a system of “tearful and sentimental mumblings that emanate from these supposedly learned heads.”120 It was this “feminized” system of Catholic values that would, in the long run, lead to a critical situation in which middleclass men would simply turn away from religion because it did not incarnate the male ethos of competence and rationality. In the absence of a “middle-class Asbestos,” a definitive moment of consciousness, cultural activists like Ryan had to turn to a much more gradualist strategy oriented to education and uplift in order to transform the middle classes of French Canada. In the conclusion of his study, he stressed the urgency of dissipating the common impression that the middle classes formed a backwater of conservatism and mediocrity, and he suggested concerted action to improve the prestige of the intermediate functions. The key to improving the psychological self-worth of middleclass males, the key to their achievement of individuality in modern society, was to supply them with “a method of intellectual work” that would elevate their jobs, which generally involved routine, anonymous tasks within corporations and bureaucracies, into real professions, thus giving them access to a social status and culture commensurate with that enjoyed by members of the liberal professions. Such a project would necessitate concerted action on the part of employers and the state to give members



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of this large “white-collar” group access to a more sustained and demanding technical and general culture, a work of education that would produce a “certain unity and legitimate class consciousness” among them.121 It is necessary at this juncture to focus more closely on the meaning Ryan attached to “class consciousness.” Clearly, given his belief that the middle classes were the key to the achievement of concord in modern societies, he did not mean this in the sense of narrow pursuit of economic self-interest; rather, “class consciousness” was a shorthand for a sense of wider social and civic responsibility for the collective good. But more significantly, in a society where a large proportion of the white-collar segment worked for institutions of education and social assistance managed by the Catholic Church, the attainment of professional status would, Ryan hoped, open the middle class to a wider and more modern sense of the meaning of the Church, where, as individuals and as members of professions, they both internalized and communicated the sense of the Church as a living mother, a family, and a people.122 Each profession, he proclaimed, had “its special and unique reasons for feeling responsible for the whole,” but what had to animate the life of each of these groups was “a Catholic attitude,” which he summed up as “love and mutual respect in a unifying fervor in the service of the cause one has accepted to serve.”123 Ryan’s idea was to awaken, through the inculcation of a professional conscience, communitarian imperatives to balance the impulse to individual self-promotion. This project applied a Christian veneer to Talcott Parsons’s attempt to elaborate the conditions of a new social economy that would move modern society to a transcendence of the regime of acquisitive capitalism. Like Parsons, Ryan hoped to build a pluralist democratic culture anchored in a network of institutions across an intermediate realm of civil society, and, in common with the American sociologist, his hopes centred in the modern professions, which would contribute a key dynamic of social solidarity: while they would regulate human behaviour, they would achieve this by enlisting moral commitment rather than through self-interest.124 More tellingly, the movement of the professional institution and ethos to the centre of modern social relations enabled postwar liberal social thinkers like Ryan to posit civil society, rather than the state, as the locus of reformist energy, and allowed them to envision a planned society and economy that relied less on state control, and more upon the moral, intellectual, and spiritual energies contributed by a variety of organized groups. Ryan’s great cultural project during the 1950s was exactly an elaboration of what he had set forth in his 1951 article published in Action

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nationale, the erection of a series of non-partisan, and essentially nonpolitical (though not apolitical) institutions oriented to anchoring democratic values in French-Canadian society. His aim was the achievement of a “pluralist political order” founded on a cultural-­psychological definition of democracy, one that drew its sources both from his reading in personalist social thought and in working out the social implications of his Augustinian ecclesiology. And here also lay his “mission” to the new white-collar class: first, to provide facilities enabling them to complete their truncated educations, thus giving them the means to constitute themselves into viable professionals; and second, to diffuse, especially among the middle classes, a democratic “way of life.” This he believed would provide them with the political awareness and self-­ confidence to finally overcome the fate that had befallen all twentieth-­ century attempts to conjugate social reform and nationalism in Quebec, the dissipation of their vitality in the adulation of designing political leaders like Maurice Duplessis. In achieving these goals, Ryan’s organizational engagement moved beyond the precincts of Action catholique, which, as a movement, never successfully found a formula to enlist the adherence of white-collar or professional people. In 1947, he became executive director of the Société canadienne d’éducation des adultes, the Quebec branch of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, succeeding Father Georges-Henri Lévesque as president in 1951, and labouring intensively to shift its mandate towards what he termed “popular education.”125 After careful study of British initiatives in this field, which affirmed the close link between enhanced education and democracy, he altered the name in 1956 to Institut canadien d’éducation des adultes (I CE A), which not only marked it off from other associations in the field but explicitly advocated closer involvement of university extension services such as that provided by the Université de Montréal and Laval.126 The watchword of the I CE A was “development through participation,” which emphatically rejected both didactic educational methods and the idea of self-promotion. Rather, the focus was on democratic education, with attention to the improvement of society viewed as a community. There is no doubt that Ryan considered this program, like Action catholique itself, one that “affects the advancement of Christianity in our milieu,” one that would lead those participating in the movement to “a profound sense of attachment to the person of Christ and to his Church.”127 Adult education, he stated in 1956, was destined for



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a double mission, one situated on the religious terrain, accomplished principally by Action catholique, itself a form of adult education, which involves a gradual maturation of the spiritual conscience of our people, aiming to make them leave their state of childhood in which they find themselves to lead them to a more adult religion. The second is situated in the civic and political spheres, and aims at the transformation of the political climate of the province of Quebec, and is based on a real work of education. This task will be accomplished by truly popular and democratic organizations (worker and rural unions, cooperatives) that we have among us.128 In the final analysis, Action catholique’s program of promoting an adult spirituality was inseparably linked to the achievement of a truly democratic culture. A healthy public life could not exist apart from a vigorous Catholicism. Ryan’s attempt to root democratic values in French-Canadian civic mores sprang from a profound disillusionment with the calibre of public life and the quality of those men attracted into public service. Writing in 1957 for the newspaper of Jeunesse étudiante catholique, Ryan excoriated the “French-Canadian public man” as little better than a parasite, a “party man” obsessed with electoral struggles and the exercise of power. Usually a lawyer, this contemptible figure displayed an exaggerated solicitude for technicalities, engaged in abuses of eloquence and rhetoric to the detriment of “real thought,” and favoured the concentration of political decision making in the hands of a small number of persons. Such politicians were “good average men” who were usually devoid of their own ideas, who lacked general culture, whose horizons were generally bounded by the local, and who usually kept their religion and their politics in separate compartments. They were, he lamented, perfect “yesmen.”129 French Canadians periodically lashed out against this stereotype and turned to men who paraded their moral virtue as “independents,” but Ryan considered this an ineffectual remedy, one that carried little weight in modern society. The term “independence,” he declared, while a synonym for nationalist, also telegraphed that such men could not work as part of a team, which meant a permanent exclusion from government. Such “personal vocations” might convey a sense of moral superiority, but, in terms of meaningful action, independence, as an obsolete form of individualism, constituted a dead end.130

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Democracy, for Ryan, had to constitute the cultural and moral antithesis of the mores of this parasitical political class. Because of its wellsprings in a mature spiritual life, it had little to do with mathematical considerations of majoritarian government or the sovereignty of a popular mass. The rule of the majority was, in his view, not a fundamental principle, but rather an instrument of political life that derived its validity from the nature of citizens to seek equality with others. “In the case of a Christian society,” he informed a group of municipal civil servants in 1957, “the notion of virtue is very noble and very demanding. However, when applied to the mass of the people, it involves a certain reduction to the lowest common denominator, which must not be too theoretical.”131 In both religion and politics, quantity was a false ideal. It was more important, in Ryan’s estimation, to help people understand why they voted and participated in religious exercises, and, in so doing, to awaken them to the deeper realities at work in their society.132 This implied the criterion of an enlightened citizenship, a variant of the notion of rule by “excellent citizens” advanced in 1936 by Ryan’s mentor Jacques Maritain in Humanisme intégral.133 Along with fellow cultural militants such as Abbé Gérard Dion, a professor of industrial relations at Université Laval, and Fernand Jolicoeur, the director of education for the Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada, Ryan laboured to create a type of political thinking among French Canadians that was “truly rooted in Catholicism” and respectful of its goals, which were universalist and communitarian.134 Ryan’s methods did not mean that he saw an automatic equivalence between religious doctrines and political forms or theories. However, French Canada, with its long history of collaboration between church and state, provided the classic case study of Augustine’s notion of the Christian’s dual citizenship in the City of God and the Earthly City, a coexistence that made it impossible to sever membership in the Church from citizenship in the political state.135 Ryan could also draw upon a long tradition of Catholic political thought stretching back to Thomas Aquinas, and modernized in the interwar years by his philosophical mentor Jacques Maritain, which viewed the institutional church and the machinery of the state as “specialized” agencies ministering to the spiritual and temporal well-being of both individual and society. From this standpoint, Catholic political thinking posited the body politic as divinely ordained to ensure the common good in the temporal order, with the state, as the machinery charged with administering and regulating the common good, as possessing a particular dignity.136 Following this logic, Ryan saw religion as having closer affinities with constitutional forms of



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government than with economic systems, which rested on entirely “secular foundations.” Defining democracy around what Maritain would have termed a “moral charter” enabled Ryan to decisively refute the idea that there was any opposition between the democratic order and Catholicism, as both shared a concern with the preservation and extension of the rights of the human person.137 Democracy, then, signified first and foremost “an attitude of the spirit” based on the fundamental values of understanding; tolerance, by which he emphatically meant not indifference or scepticism, but a consideration for persons; collaboration, which encompassed the virtues of responsibility and initiative, “a mentality that allows the citizen to become associated with the work of government”; and a sincerity towards institutions. These values would foster a political regime in which citizens had the right to participate in the exercise of power, and in which public authorities respected the fundamental rights of the human person – in short, “a regime centred in the human person.”138 However, the democratic mentality and way of life upon which a healthy political order depended could not be effectively generated from within the machinery of the state. Here, Ryan again turned to Maritain for a broader definition of the “body politic,” which encompassed a pluralistic terrain of voluntary, civic organizations such as trade unions, cooperatives, educational associations, and organized professions, the expression of civic initiative in modern society, whose role was to give democracy an “organic” character by elaborating, expressing, and transmitting the democratic values essential to defining a healthy relationship between the individual citizen and the state. Development of the civic sense – meaning “the virtue of social justice,” which sprang from human nature itself – was the only sure foundation of democratic life because it took its orientation from moral conduct. Ryan was extremely emphatic on this point, writing in 1954 that “political society emerges from human nature, which is essentially Christian.” In this calculus, the “democratic spirit was but the ‘colour’ that the civic sense assumed in a democratic political regime.”139 The critical institution, then, was not the elected parliament or the machinery of government itself, but the nature and healthy composition of a wide range of “intermediate bodies” that expressed and channelled the civic sense and mediated between the individual, a variety of communities, and the state. This type of thinking, though rooted in a strand of Catholic social tradition that could loosely be described as “corporatist,” was undergoing considerable revision in Action catholique circles by the mid-1950s. Although a favourite of some conservative bishops, Ryan shared the outlook of a number of

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“progressive” French-Canadian intellectuals who had become particularly uncomfortable with this label. In the aftermath of the Asbestos strike, “corporatism,” which had once seemed to promise a wide-ranging structural reform of capitalism, had become a by-word for a reactionary approach to labour relations. Writing in 1954, Ryan stated that, if corporatism referred simply to the “organic unity of life,” he favoured it, but if it meant a system of organization for economic and social life, he was adamantly opposed.140 Ryan’s personalist horror of bureaucracy as “stifling” human life and creativity ensured that he would locate the source of democratic values in the civic or intermediate sphere.141 Following both Maritain and especially Newman’s insistence on the preeminence of the individual conscience, Ryan located the fundamental principle of authority in modern society not in the state, but in “the sovereignty of the educated person,” which in no way implied an atomized individualism. By its very nature, the civic sphere was social and communitarian, part of “a general impulse propelling humanity towards a transformation of social structures.”142 In this key respect, Ryan’s thinking was completely imbricated in an international current of thinking that sought to elucidate a non-Marxist, culturalist lineage for the middle classes that, in the process, would universalize their identity and experience. To some extent, his conclusions anticipated those of the German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, whose classic The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was not published until 1962, but who posited a similar trajectory of the emergence of a rational public sphere out of the “private” sphere of the intimacy of the conjugal family,143 a view with which Ryan would not have dissented. Like Habermas, Ryan wrote from the perspective of a society in which intellectuals viewed themselves as increasingly at odds with a conservative state, and, like the West German thinker, he faced a similar problem of explaining the relative novelty of middle-class cultural sensibilities in the history of the French-Canadian nation. But above all, he wanted at all costs to preserve the autonomy of the public from political interference, and therefore he dubbed this sphere “the private” in an influential series of articles he wrote on the subject of education in Le Devoir in 1956. This term referred to a structure of values and institutions that was concerned principally with moral and spiritual issues. For Ryan, it was imperative that the private express the values of freedom and responsibility: it was through this realm that the transmission of social values into the political order was accomplished. “The grandeur of the private,” he intoned, “lies in its intimate junction with the person, with



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the profound aspirations and the many daily conflicts experienced by the citizen.” Private, voluntary organizations were afflicted by particular vices, which Ryan singled out as particularism and mediocrity. To overcome these, a vigorous private sector needed to be balanced by and made accountable to what he denominated “the public,” which was coextensive with the state. Like many of his counterparts in the FrenchCanadian intellectual community whose ideas of reforming Quebec’s educational system involved an expansion of the role of the state, Ryan believed that education in future had to become much more of a public service. The “public” or state was essential, because it possessed a certain vision of the broader needs of citizens and was concerned to foster the accessibility of knowledge and elements of culture. But citizens had to be vigilant as regards the state, because, especially in the field of education, “there is a real danger of militant neutrality, a disingenuous standardization, an elegant and dissimulated sectarianism whenever the state oversteps its bounds.”144 The question of the commitment to democracy among FrenchCanadian Catholics emerged as a particularly explosive issue following the 1956 Quebec provincial election. Two priests, Fathers Gérard Dion and Louis O’Neill, published a shocking indictment of political immorality during that election in the review Ad Usum Sacerdotum, a periodical intended only for a clerical readership. Their revelations, which constituted a thinly veiled attack on Maurice Duplessis and his Union nationale, were taken up and given wide currency in the Montreal daily Le Devoir.145 With most of the neo-nationalist and citélibriste intellectuals denouncing Duplessis as an anti-democratic dictator, Ryan had to be particularly circumspect in his pronouncements, even though he shared their belief that French Canada did indeed suffer from a democratic deficit. His position in Action catholique, as an arm of the Quebec Catholic hierarchy, enjoined a rigid non-partisanship. However, there is another reason why Ryan did not participate in the intellectual community’s demonization of Duplessis. This was a consequence of his strong North American cultural identification, which placed him somewhat at odds with prominent contemporaries such as Gérard Pelletier and André Laurendeau. During the 1950s, Ryan had become an avid reader of the celebrated American columnist Walter Lippmann, whom, though they never met, he came to regard as a “brother in arms.” From Lippmann, Ryan learned a “realistic” perspective on Cold War political leadership and the necessity of expounding a public philosophy based on a strong executive and a limitation on sovereignty derived from a commitment to

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natural law, which would at once restore a climate of civility to political discussion and break the stranglehold of special interest groups. This induced him to situate leaders like Duplessis in a much broader intellectual framework of Western conservatism.146 Writing to the French journalist Jean-Pierre Dubois-Dumée just after Duplessis’s death in 1959, he chided him for a grossly exaggerated portrait of the evils of “Duplessisme.” The late premier, Ryan stated, was a pragmatic, not an ideological, conservative; in this respect, he was no different from a range of Western political leaders, including Harold Macmillan in Britain, Dwight D. Eisenhower in the United States, and, closer to home, Alberta’s Ernest Manning and Ontario’s Leslie Frost.147 That said, he did not spare Duplessis and his business allies from the charge of fostering an anti-democratic climate and an unworkable system of labour relations. Ryan’s objection to Duplessis and his system was, in certain respects, more thoroughgoing than that of his contemporaries because it was formulated within a framework of Catholic reasoning regarding leadership and authority. Contrasting French-Canadian and Anglo-American styles of decision making, he considered that his fellow Quebeckers were too reliant on authority figures and, like the “organization men” in William Whyte’s celebrated study, too inclined to rely on group opinion. The consequence of this was to trust overly powerful leaders like Duplessis with almost unchecked moral and executive authority, forgetting that the leader was “a servant charged with promoting unity.”148 This reasoning was based on the conservative principle that Duplessis, through his contemptuous treatment of union leaders as children unfit to exercise responsibility, was bringing all forms of authority, including that of the state, into disrepute. The Catholic Church, Ryan declared, needed to manifest a great deal of detachment and objectivity about a style of political leadership that had become frozen in social arrangements from thirty years earlier.149 Echoing authorities no less than Pius XII, Jacques Maritain, and Walter Lippmann, Ryan arraigned Duplessis as one of a long line of French-Canadian politicians who devalued the political order and the common good by elevating the subjective, particularist shibboleths of ethnicity, social class, and party above the dictates of natural law, a serious deviation from Catholic teachings regarding sovereignty and power. This brought in its wake a “S P I RI T U AL C R ISIS OF P UB L I C L I F E ,”150 which, like that of the conformist, spiritually inert religion that had produced it, imperilled the future of FrenchCanadian civilization in North America.



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Speaking in 1954, Ryan recounted the influence of Action catholique on his intellectual journey. In college, his interest in the development of the working class distinguished him from his classmates, who regarded him as something of a revolutionary. His encounter with a Catholic universalism in Rome, and his mission to the emerging white-collar class of his own society had, by his own affirmation, turned him into “a conservative.”151 We must, however, beware this self-description, as it was proclaimed at the height of the reaction in Quebec’s Catholic Church against the Asbestos strike and reflects Ryan’s desire to position Action catholique as a unifying force in a fractured intellectual community. Situating him on the political spectrum is far more complicated, but there is no doubting his liberal allegiance. Writing to the youth wing of the Quebec Liberal Party in 2002, he stated, “I consider myself neither a libertarian liberal nor a communitarian liberal, but my bias inclines me to the latter category. I wonder, however, if this form of liberalism gives sufficient scope to the values of initiative and competitiveness that must take a large place in any society that calls itself democratic and liberal … I do, however, like the expression ‘social liberalism’ … as conveying what the Quebec Liberal Party wished to be during its most productive years in the modern period.”152 The phrase “social liberalism” is significant, because it conveys Ryan’s postwar intellectual journey, not towards conservatism, but towards a “broad church” form of Western liberal thinking that grouped a variety of radical and reformist social thinkers who sought to gradually transcend capitalism. This was to be achieved less through the manipulation of economic structures and state planning than through the replacement of an individualistic and acquisitive morality by values expressing sociability and community.153 These values, drawn from a voluntaristic, plural civic order that mediated between the individual and the state were, in the final analysis, those of the Catholic Church. Social liberalism, an ideological current with deep roots in transatlantic progressive thought stretching back to the turn of the twentieth century, conveys Ryan’s desire at once to anchor French Canada at the heart of North American urban modernity and to resist the alienating and spiritually barren elements of that civilization by deploying the intellectual resources of a vigorous, personalist Catholicism dedicated to the socialization of all aspects of human life. In the summer of 1958, the outcome of this titanic cultural struggle still hung in the balance, but Ryan was optimistic that the forces of renewal at work in church, state, and among the new white-collar intellectuals would triumph.

5 “Are We Pagans?” Coping with French Canada’s Religious Crisis, 1958–1962 Men do not talk about their health when their health is strongest; a nation does not talk about its religion when its religion is still flourishing. Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics

In March 1953, Ryan found himself on the wrong end of an intellectual dressing-down after a speech to a group of Action catholique militants in Joliette. His antagonist was not a bishop or an overly punctilious cleric, but a young woman named Madeleine Guay, a graduate of the Sherbrooke normal school. Drawn into Action catholique through the wartime example of dynamic female leaders, Guay had stayed on and joined the leadership cadre of Action catholique because the movement provided opportunities for women’s leadership, offering a junction between Catholic belief and a type of feminist aspiration for greater individual self-assertion and equality. Her engagement in Action catholique predated Claude Ryan’s own, and, at the age of twenty-eight, she was an important figure, president of Jeunesse indépendante catholique féminine (J Ic F) in the diocese of Quebec.1 Ryan had gone to Joliette to deliver what was, in effect, the initial exposition of his line of thinking about the gendered nature of secularization at work in French-Canadian society, which was provocatively entitled “The Dangerous Predominance of the Feminine Element in Action catholique.” Taking as his starting point the fact that two-thirds of the militants in Action catholique were women, he declared that this posed a serious threat to the “real progress” of religion. Women’s influence, in his estimation, had become preponderant in all that pertained to the daily practice of religion, and this, he feared, would in the long run repel men from the Church, thus inevitably leading to a



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secularization of those spheres of life that were masculine domains – politics, labour, and business. Quebec Catholicism suffered from a high degree of feminization, which “expressed and incarnated a conception of Christianity that does not tend to form Christians who are responsible and adult in their attitudes.” The overweening presence of women was an “emasculating” one because it served ultimately to uphold the preeminence of the clergy, ensuring that the educated professional laymen whom he hoped to attract into Action catholique could not use the institutional church as an avenue of social and cultural promotion, relegating them to the status of “minors.”2 Guay was disturbed by this misogynistic postwar psychobabble, which, in her view, amounted to little else than the “momism” fashionable in North American intellectual circles. She spoke for a large cohort of female activists for whom Action catholique was not simply a vehicle for the ambitions of bright young men like Claude Ryan, but a terrain for female ambition and authority, one that provided them with the spiritual resources to achieve, in a conservative society that afforded women precious few opportunities, their own quest for adulthood and responsibility. Here was a group of young women who were not prepared to shoulder the blame for the immaturity and lack of purpose of their male colleagues. While her initial missive to Ryan no longer exists, he wrote her in June 1953, first to apologize for speaking off the cuff without a written text and then to provide an amended written discussion of the problem of what he now termed “that delicate subject of feminine influence in religious life.” Guay’s influence on his thinking was evident in a somewhat more eirenic and collaborative tone. Ryan refrained from positing the divisive and negative impact of women on religion and urged men to get beyond external appearances and discover in both the Church and Action catholique the possibilities of commitment that fully responded to their needs. Still, he mused, did not the predominance of women constitute a  long-term problem for Action catholique, especially given women’s psychology, which tended, more than that of men, to reflect prevailing social conventions and to subscribe too easily to moralistic solutions to complicated problems? Women, in his estimation, tended to become attached to exterior forms rather than engaging in a deeper search for causes and more profound solutions. The very dynamism of the organization depended, he suggested, upon balancing these traits with the more “rational” male psychology. This enabled Ryan to reiterate his earlier argument, that women should feel responsible if “Action catholique does not always possess the virile character that it should.” However, in what

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he hoped would mollify Guay’s outrage, he concluded that such a problem could not be solved “without the close cooperation of both sexes.”3 Ryan survived this exchange because, by the early 1950s, the postwar infusion of the concept of complementary male and female psychologies had already tempered the spiritualistic feminism of Action catholique and provided legitimacy to his appeal to harmony that he hoped would close the issue. Although Guay was reputed to be a woman of “exquisite shyness,” her forceful intervention on behalf of her colleagues had elevated her to the national presidency of the J I CF in 1953, earning her a seat on the executive of Action catholique canadienne (ACC), as well as recognition as a Canadian delegate to the prestigious Second World Congress of the Lay Apostolate in Rome in 1957. In these positions, she earned high praise for her warmth and ability to establish fruitful and enduring contacts with people in all walks of life. Guay’s transfer to the national office entailed a move to Montreal, where in 1957, Ryan invited her to collaborate on the committee studying the life of the FrenchCanadian middle classes.4 Sometime during this year, a mutual attraction between the two activists developed and, although at age thirty-three, Claude, in the opinion of many of his friends, seemed resigned to bachelorhood, he summoned the nerve over dinner at a restaurant one evening to ask Madeleine to go out with him.5 Falling in love was a new experience for Claude Ryan, one that injected a new element that induced him to think more deeply about his faith and its demands. He told Madeleine that he knew he was in love with her when “I decided to put your name at the top of the list of those dear to me whom I name in the prayers for the living at Mass. Before this, my mother had always occupied this place.” He felt God to be intimately involved with “this mystery” of love “that I feel growing within myself.”6 However, his views on love and marriage emphatically distanced him from the values of modern individualism, in which love established a purely private world of intimacy between the two partners, disconnected from wider relationships. He certainly subscribed to the ethos surrounding marriage that prevailed in the postwar Action catholique movements, and fully expected that he and Madeleine would live up to the injunction that both spouses should speak fully and frankly on all subjects of their lives, including holding prayers in common, sexual matters, and the family budget. His notebooks reveal an organizational mania for the couple’s household religious life that bordered on the frantic, based on both spouses reading “works on lay and conjugal spirituality” for one or two hours a week.7 What lay behind this, however, was his vision of



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marriage as an intellectual partnership, one involving the constant communication of discoveries and experiences of persons they met, new ideas they heard, books they read, and the work that animated their professional lives.8 Given that both Claude and Madeleine, as leading militants in Action catholique, felt the call of a profound engagement to serve God in the world, they conceived of marriage as expressing a higher love that joined them to God. Claude captured this sense by writing that “love was a sacred reality that does not belong to us alone.” In his estimation, the love he bore for Madeleine “was a new proof of the presence of the Lord in our lives. If our love is to be true, we must continue to love the Lord as we have hitherto done, and we will love one another in Him. In this way, the love for one another that we allow to grow within ourselves will be truly rooted in the Love that is its source and its destiny.”9 And in light of the communitarian imperatives of Action catholique, the indissoluble nature of the couple’s mutual love as “the image of the union of Christ and his Church”10 meant that the mutual intimacy achieved within marriage was a precondition to “a fruitful public life,”11 thus calling both spouses to a life of wider engagement and professional service. Claude and Madeleine were married on 21 July 1958, at the parish church of Saint-Louis-de-France in Montreal at a mass celebrated by Cardinal Léger,12 with whom, after a period of initial tension, Ryan had become increasingly close. Five children, Paul, Monique, Thérèse, Patrice, and André, followed in rapid succession, all born between 1960 and 1966, each named for the saint nearest their date of birth.13 Like many married women of the period, Madeleine did not work following ­marriage, but she remained involved in community, church, and international activities, later serving as a member of Quebec’s Conseil supérieur d’éducation, chairing its committees responsible for adult education and secondary schooling.14 Her role in Claude’s life was crucial, providing a source of “inner peace” amidst the rough-and-tumble of journalism and politics, and ensuring, through her “affable” nature, that the Ryan household remained open and welcoming to both ordinary and illustrious visitors on a footing of absolute equality, though her husband ruefully commented that “it took me many years to convince Madeleine that in the city, one is supposed to lock the front door at night.”15 More significantly, however, she was clearly Claude’s intellectual equal, consulted on the subjects of all his newspaper editorials and writings, and he considered Madeleine responsible for fostering “a spirit of openness to the outside world” that enabled him to engage fully and freely with his professional life and to view it as the extension of, rather than the competitor

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to, his family life.16 Madeleine’s cultural tastes were more avant-garde than his own: she was “interested in all forms of expression, including some that were more modern.” Like him, she held the written word in high esteem as the most meaningful and durable cultural form. After her death, he fondly recalled “those wonderful Sunday afternoons we spent immersed in reading” in “an almost religious silence.” These, he reckoned, were both soothing for the spirit and enriching sources of future conversations.17 For Claude Ryan, marriage marked a new stage in his personal life, allowing him to achieve the full state of male citizenship as head of a  family. As a Christian believer, a devotee of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s ideal of holiness who was convinced that a personal God, a “Providence,” was present in all his daily actions, he viewed his newfound happiness as a recognition for his years of faithful service, the “mysterious and difficult work” accomplished in the advancement of Christ’s Church. In this regard, Ryan likened himself to St Joseph, renowned for his self-effacing manner and thankless attention to duty, whom the Lord had rewarded for his fidelity, “making him the master of the house and the steward of all his goods.”18 Ryan’s conflation of marriage, holiness, and male authority was not coincidental. St Joseph, Christ’s adopted, “earthly” father, was the archetype for the new selfconfident adult Catholic laymen that Ryan hoped would be the product of a new, more aggressively evangelistic orientation he urgently wished to impart to Action catholique, one that would radically reverse the age-old model of authority in the Catholic Church by balancing the power of the clerical hierarchy with a more horizontal, democratic fraternity of laymen. This, he believed, would be achieved by engaging laymen in a task that only they could accomplish: consecrating the world to Christ. Action catholique had been launched during the 1930s around the spiritual energies of youthful, unmarried men and women, but Ryan’s new direction emphatically rejected these adolescent impulses. The new course for the movement rested on a vision of psychological, social, and political maturity, one calibrated on the appeal of a religion that integrated personal, family, and civic relations into a harmonious whole, aimed at enlisting married adults into a new, communitarian vision of holiness. This new type of sainthood, Ryan observed, worked outward from the intimacy established by the married couple in their own relationship. Writing in 1959 in a publication intended for Catholic militants, Ryan argued that marital intimacy opened the individual to contact, “the normal expansion of being” inherent in the ordinary manifestations of daily



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life. This expansion signalled the full achievement of adulthood, enabling a person to transcend that “modern dichotomy” that sundered private and public life, a division that had made much of North America a wasteland of “ennui and spiritual solitude.” Reflecting on his own personal experience as a husband, he declared that marriage made private life social, with the family home open to the world. Prayer, study, and reading were no longer oriented to individual fulfilment, but to a communitarian enrichment of social relations. Conversation, in particular, was “a real and living communication.”19 By rooting this type of holiness into the very tissue of personal and social relations, Ryan believed that, through an evangelistic type of Catholicism, French Canada could experience a modernity that would enable it to avoid the descent into the spiritually vacuous cultural landscape of North American individualism. Was Ryan’s optimism concerning the potentialities of Quebec’s Catholic laity simply misplaced? At one level, his new tone mirrored key developments within international Catholicism. In 1957, he attended the Second World Congress of the Lay Apostolate in Rome, where Pius XII, in a major clarification and development of his 1951 appeal, placed a new value on the laity by outlining a specific sacerdotal mission for laypeople, assigning to them, and them alone, the task of “consecration of the world.” No longer were they mere auxiliaries of the clergy and church hierarchy; rather, the pontiff’s remarks, characterized as the “Magna Charta” of the lay apostolate, implicitly seemed to turn the clergy into a group of mere technically skilled ecclesiastical functionaries, charged with the subordinate function of serving the spiritual needs of the laity in order to enable them to exercise their mission. Ryan waged a quiet but consistent campaign to assert the rights of the laity in the inner councils of the Church: in 1959, he introduced a Canadian motion to transform the Comité permanent des congrès internationaux pour l’apostolat des laïcs from a simple secretariat to a fully representative body of ten members, providing ongoing liaison between world Catholic laity involved in apostolic action, and he subsequently served on the first executive committee of this body.20 In Quebec itself, his patient work of adult and civic education had borne fruit, and he was now recognized as one of the major figures among the younger group of intellectuals. No longer did he have to apologize to those, like the citélibristes, who privately derided him as “cut off from reality” because he chose to serve the Church, rather than “the social revolution.”21 He derived considerable satisfaction from the publication of a special issue on the spiritual life of French Canada, published in 1957

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in the prestigious progressive French Catholic journal, Chronique sociale de France. He had initially broached the idea during his Roman sabbatical in 1951, but he and his collaborators found themselves trumped by the appearance of the 1952 special issue of Esprit, a citélibriste project featuring major statements on Quebec Catholicism by Jean-Charles Falardeau and Gérard Pelletier. Ryan’s project was held in abeyance for several years, so as not to appear to be in competition with the Esprit group.22 However, the 1957 special issue earned high marks from André Laurendeau, the influential editor-in-chief of Le Devoir, who devoted an editorial to praising the essays as a whole for blending “audacity” with a more measured tone of analysis, particularly commending Ryan’s own contribution for his sophisticated treatment of those forces of “universalization” that were at work in French-Canadian society. This publication, Laurendeau concluded, was superior to the earlier citélibriste effort, which was marred by a “veiled hostility” and a tone of “indictment and lyrical pleading.”23 However much Ryan might revel in his new intellectual stature and his new-found personal happiness in marriage, events during the summer of 1958 injected a disturbing new element, one which forced him into an urgent confrontation between the new spirit of Catholic evangelism and the secularizing pressures of North American individualism.

The Wedding Guest Amid the bevy of Catholic militants and clerical acquaintances who attended the Ryans’ wedding was Claude’s friend Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fresh from writing a remarkable series of articles on democracy and politics during the winter and spring of 1958 for the weekly newspaper Vrai. Ryan read these articles with avid interest, which was not surprising given his own passionate commitment to infusing a culture of civic democracy into Quebec’s public mores, and a more general preoccupation among a wide swathe of the province’s intellectuals in the late 1950s with the absence of political morality. “Democracy” emerged as the watchword around which a coalition of disparate elements sought to rally opposition to the government of Maurice Duplessis.24 However, Trudeau’s sallies into political theory revealed that the type of liberalindividualist democracy he so forcefully advocated, far from securing the approbation of fellow democrats like Claude Ryan, actually constituted a fundamental fault line among Quebec’s progressive intellectuals. Nor



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can this division be summed up by recourse to a simple traditionalist/ modernist or pro-/anti-democratic dichotomy. Rather, it represented a conflict between two competing visions of democracy, one far more profound than the conventional federalist/sovereigntist divide, and one that was to frame the issues of the bitter intellectual, personal, and political struggle that Ryan and Trudeau waged for over thirty years. The one democratic current to which Ryan subscribed drew upon a more “organicist” ethos, balancing the quest for individual self-affirmation with the imperatives of historic, communal, and more collectivist bonds. This was a type of democratic thinking somewhat sceptical of liberalism, with ties to older traditions of Catholic socio-political thought and to turn-ofthe-century currents of progressivism. The other type, for which Trudeau stood, was an extreme form of modernism that rejected the bonds of ­history and community in favour of an unconstrained and abstracted individualism, one that sought to radically separate the sphere of politics from any organic connection to religion. Trudeau’s polemic was ostensibly directed against Duplessis, but someone like Ryan would have immediately noted other, far more troubling implications. It began with a sarcastic send-up of Catholic political theology. Although Trudeau believed that this theology preached respect for the person and the inviolability of conscience, he argued that, by anchoring these to an order of “intermediate” bodies and associations, such as the family, the Church, and labour unions, it had failed its devotees lamentably by failing to consider the overweening power of the state. The root of this error, he maintained, was the Catholic fixation with the notion that authority and sovereignty came from God and that human governments were ultimately accountable to a body of natural law, the basis of a centuries-old tradition of Catholic moral and political philosophy.25 “It is men,” bluntly declared Trudeau, “who are in the final analysis responsible for making decisions, and not God, Providence, or Nature. Any given political authority exists only because men accept to obey it. In this sense, it is not so much authority that exists, but obedience.”26 This was provocative. Trudeau, according to his biographers, had always professed to be a disciple of Jacques Maritain. However, Maritain’s political thought, based on that of St Thomas Aquinas, rested on the fundamental premise of divine sovereignty and authority as the source of human government. Thus, while Maritain professed inviolable respect for the human person and conscience, he never abstracted these from the web of “natural,” communitarian associations so dear to organicist thinking.27 Indeed, these associations were essential to mediating between

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the individual and the state, protecting and enhancing the personality of the individual in the face of an entity whose totalitarian proclivities required firm limits. Ryan would have been revolted by Trudeau’s stripping the individual naked in a solitary confrontation with the state. If anything, Trudeau’s 1958 articles reveal both his true intellectual allegiance to his English mentor Harold Laski, who stood in a Hobbesian tradition of political thinking, and his experience as an adviser to the Fédération des unions industrielles du Québec, in which he sought to wean labour groups away from ideas of class struggle and towards a reformist liberal democracy.28 The only valid criterion for determining the proper balance between freedom and justice was, in his estimation, a purely utilitarian one, a social order whose frame of reference was not external to itself but that proclaimed as its mission the achievement of the greatest good for the greatest number. In this way, Trudeau somewhat cavalierly excised many centuries of Catholic political theology, returning to a Hobbesian universe in which humans needed to find ways of restraining the oppressive proclivities of a Leviathan-state.29 In resolving the problem of restraining the state, Trudeau advanced a fundamentally “anti-Catholic” interpretation of politics, but one that he cleverly linked to an anti-Thomist strand of thinking he traced to French Jesuits. Unlike Maritain – and Claude Ryan – he stood in a Rousseauian current of democracy, locating sovereignty in the people and, more ­fundamentally, in an abstract, “free” individual conscience that had to be protected at all costs. Indeed, for Trudeau, the only barrier against the encroachment of the state was an overt constitutional recognition of the rights of the individual. Absent from his interpretation of politics was the whole rich tradition of Catholic “organicism” and intermediate bodies, in favour of a unitary “will.” Here, Trudeau revealed his true colours, that of a continued intellectual allegiance to Charles Maurras’s totalitarianism,30 but with a liberal twist, derived from his reading of Laski.31 He replaced the Maurrassian notion that sovereignty was exercised on behalf of the nation by an authoritarian leader with the idea that the individual was now the repository of a totalitarian sovereignty that claimed to sweep all before it. His conclusion, nightmarish to those Catholics like Ryan who took their inspiration from Maritain’s interwar opposition to Maurras, was that, once the people had secured guarantees of individual rights from the state, the task of the latter was to free the modern individual from the tyranny of history, that is, the very network of social, economic, and administrative bodies that “bound him” in a complex web.32 The kernel of Trudeau’s political intent was revealed in an oblique



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reference to Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, when he stated that “political authority is derived from God in the same sense that the authority of the queen in the beehive is derived from God.”33 Mandeville was notorious for his compartmentalization of public and private morality, for his overt views that Christian ethics were psychologically implausible and that Christian moral philosophy merely masked the self-regarding sources of human desire.34 He is remembered for his famous assertion that private immorality could actually serve the public good. But further, Mandeville equated economic behaviour with virtue, enabling Trudeau to posit “liberal man” as a creature of economic appetites. “Society” – the crucible that joined the individual to a culture of civic and intermediate bodies that, both in Catholic moral philosophy and in varieties of “new liberal” thinking popular in both Britain and North America since the 1890s,35 had assured a democratic order founded on the connection between private and public – was positioned in Trudeau’s thinking as the antithesis of the individual. The freedoms of the latter were no longer guaranteed by an active, participatory citizenship in these associations, but by the state, which affirmed the sanctity of the “private” individual conscience and made no distinction as to whether it operated in moral or immoral ways. Its rights, in Trudeau’s modernist utilitarianism, were superior and prior to the claims of the nation, the church, or the trade union, which, being historic, were at a stroke denied true legitimacy as public actors. Ryan was unimpressed by this abrupt evacuation of Catholic political theory from modern society, and he pithily observed that Trudeau’s articles evinced “a certain non-familiarity with the re catholica.”36 However, this response should not be taken to mean that Ryan’s thinking was somehow less “democratic” than Trudeau’s. Trudeau’s distinctiveness, in the context of late 1950s Quebec, was that, unlike Ryan or other democratic activists such as Fathers Gérard Dion and Louis O’Neill, whose famous anti-Duplessis tract in the wake of the 1956 elections acted as a rallying cry to democratize politics, he did not found his defence of democracy on Catholic thought.37 Although Ryan, like his mentor Jacques Maritain, firmly rejected the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people (and consequently the sovereignty of both nations and states), he was a staunch democrat in that he adamantly believed that divine sovereignty was compatible with the democratic order. Moreover, because such sovereignty guaranteed the capacity of the people to choose their rulers, it stood as a barrier against totalitarian interpretations of doctrines of earthly sovereignty, such as those espoused by Trudeau. Indeed, Ryan’s

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can be regarded as a more “realistic” position, in that the focal point of his democratic thinking lay not in the formulation of an abstracted individual conscience – the “isolated individual” – as the repository of political judgment but in the way in which that conscience was dynamically connected to the state through “public opinion,” a mediating civic terrain identified by no less a figure than Pope Pius XII. The cultivation of public opinion engaged the participation of citizens in voluntary and educational associations, and the ongoing efforts to balance the respective claims of these institutions not only fostered a pluralistic democracy but also ensured that private and public morality could not be severed. Ryan’s defence of democracy took as its starting point the key distinction drawn by modern Catholic social teaching, first promulgated by Pope Leo XIII, that there was “a critical distinction between economic society and the political order.”38 In contrast to Trudeau, for whom intermediate groups both oppressed the individual and corrupted the political order, and thus needed to be short circuited by elevating the individual conscience as the supreme standard of sovereignty, Ryan believed that these groups were not simply appendages of individuals or states but that, through their relative independence, they played a vital role in ensuring both individual freedom and a pluralistic political order. Indeed, men like Ryan and Abbé Dion, perhaps the most famous figure in the democratic struggle of the 1950s in Quebec,39 concurred in the view that democracy was not restricted to the individual, but depended on the actions “of a multitude of groups within society.” 40 The excesses of individualism, in any democratic society, always had to be mitigated by these more communal imperatives to social cohesion. In this respect, Ryan’s thinking bore a close resemblance to that of Walter Lippmann, one of the great North American progressive intellectuals, whose Essays in the Public Philosophy (1955) sounded the alarm at a growing disconnection between private and public morality, which had produced the massification and paralysis of modern politics. Against Laski and Trudeau, Lippmann argued that the principles of the good society were not invented and chosen but that they lay in the realm of natural law, outside human society itself. The foundation of a revitalized democracy, in his view, lay in a continued inseparability of spiritual and temporal realms, the only barrier that lay between civility and “Jacobin ideology.”41 Perhaps the most troubling element of Trudeau’s polemical essays lay in his Mandevillian moral calculus. Ryan judged this compartmentalization harshly, in light of his Augustinian political convictions, as



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ultimately overprivileging the private, anchoring all morality in an agreement among consenting agents to simply follow their consciences and act as they please in private. This would not produce public virtue as a by-product, as Mandeville believed. Rather, it would have the opposite effect, because it implicitly removed the acts of society’s strongest individuals from public sanction and, thus hidden from moral scrutiny, such individuals would be so enabled to coordinate private wickedness that the separation of private and public morality would engender a monstrous and all-encompassing systematic public vice.42 In the context of Quebec, Ryan excoriated Trudeau for ironically advocating a type of politics counterproductive to the end they both hoped to secure – the removal of Duplessis from office by democratic means. Writing in 1959, Ryan emphatically stated that “the personal lives of public men must become a true open book for the people.” Any derogation from a single standard of private and public morality would mean that the actions of public men would become “the mechanical repetition of slogans calculated by self-interest or a concern for success.” Ryan could hold up the example of Quebec politics to remind Trudeau of the democratic defects in the moral calculus of individual sovereignty. Duplessis might claim to be a pious Catholic in his private life, but the amorality of his political practice effected “a breach … between public life and the soul of the people” because citizens had become revolted by a constant parade of “scandals and lies”43 and had consequently abandoned meaningful political engagement. What troubled Ryan even more deeply about Trudeau’s radically secularist interpretation of politics was that its evisceration of theological considerations threatened to cut the ground out from under the vision of a new Christendom that had inspired Catholics like Ryan since the 1930s. The articulation and maintenance of such a reformed Christendom depended, in the final analysis, on the constant reciprocal infusion of private and public Christian belief, which would produce a moral and religious sanction for civic action. In keeping with Ryan’s highly gendered version of the secularization theory, this continued relationship would confirm and enhance allegiance to religious institutions among adult men; of equal significance, it would ensure the centrality of the group of lay Catholic male intellectuals he hoped would be the conduits in the creative interplay of theology and politics. Any attempt to sever the two would imperil the public action of Catholic institutions and therefore the type of Catholic citizenship that Ryan had laboriously struggled to define throughout the postwar period. Trudeau’s elevation of the

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individual conscience was in Ryan’s view an intellectual symptom of a more disturbing cultural climate that appeared to be gaining ground in French Canada and more generally in all Western democracies in the late 1950s. This atmosphere was the consequence of a new prosperity and its ethos of seemingly unconstrained consumption that marked the years after 1955.44 In 1961, Ryan faced the imperatives of this new consumer culture directly when he was called upon to adjudicate an internal dispute within Action catholique. Working-class youth involved with the Jeunesse ouvrière catholique daringly concluded some of their meetings with rock ’n’ roll tunes, provoking the ire of some conservative elements who, as Ryan phrased it, looked upon this music as “noise emanating from hell itself” and evidence of “the satanic character of modern culture.”45 He used this incident as an opportunity to admonish both sides for having missed the essential point, and to air his anxieties about a more profound evil he saw at work in modern society. Catholics, and especially militants in the Action catholique movements, had, at best, a superficial knowledge of the nature of evil, for they identified it simply with those actions that were prohibited by moral law. While such individuals might, in his estimation, possess an extremely refined sensibility as to this type of sin, they erred in believing that actions that did not fall within the strict purview of the moral code were permitted. These Catholics, according to Ryan, lived their lives “in a kind of gilded mediocrity which, in many respects, is Satan’s greatest triumph.”46 His memorandum pointed to a new and highly disturbing aspect of modernity, one at which his postwar theological training had hinted in its denunciations of an intellectually flaccid and overly individualized religion of quantitative devotions, but which, under the impact of a universalizing culture of prosperity, now took on extremely dangerous proportions. This new spirit was at work as a solvent, producing “a facile, impersonal, lukewarm religion, stripped of any hard content,” that was subverting the very basis of Christian societies from inside the structure of religious values and practices. Evil was no longer conceived as “a person continually at work in history” but a series of actions to be avoided to secure a quiescent conscience, the expression of a hedonistic outlook that reduced spiritual problems to questions of “moral hygiene.” Modern Christians, Ryan declared, must be aware of evil as “a personal reality, one that is living and dynamic,” a spiritual force, acting constantly, that was nothing other than “a living person, Satan, who is engaged in an infinite struggle against the Lord and his Church.”47



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Both Ryan’s own contemporaries and twenty-first-century observers have found this language, with its overt and personal references to Satan, extremely jarring. Among the clergy of the mainstream churches, references to the devil as a living person had, by the 1950s, fallen out of favour, and would have been familiar only to members of fundamentalist sects. How could an ostensibly well-educated man, trained in both modern theology and the social sciences, one who, by his own admission, belonged to the “progressive” wing of Catholicism, evoke the existence of a personal devil? Was he simply drawing on a long-obsolete, earlymodern theology of fear to induce a backsliding French-Canadian society into panicked return to the verities of old-time integral Catholicism? In answering these questions, we must probe more deeply into what meaning Ryan attached to “evil” and who, exactly, he regarded as the “devils” who were tempting modern people. It would be all too easy and superficial to conclude that he identified the source of modern evil with the freer attitudes to sexuality that were emerging in both French Canada and most other Western societies by the end of the 1950s and that signalled the end of a long period of postwar “moral austerity.” While conventionally linked with the “youth revolt” of the post-1963 period, and particularly with single young women, many of these attitudes were first evident among married people, and were particularly evident in more positive attitudes towards birth control. This new moral climate was becoming more pronounced even in sections of Action catholique.48 This was certainly, in Ryan’s estimation, one aspect of the problem, as he was not an advocate for looser attitudes towards sexuality, but there was something more fundamental in his view of modern evil, one consistent with Augustine’s theology of the unceasing struggle between the City of God and the Earthly City that formed the underlying secret of human history. Writing in 1959, Ryan darkly warned that the Christian world was “heading towards an age … where people, free of the sociological pressures of yesteryear, are increasingly showing themselves under their true guise.” This new age, he emphatically stated, was “fundamentally irreligious” and would be characterized by “the progressive disappearance of faith.”49 In the late 1950s, Ryan had become acquainted with a pessimistic strain within modern Catholic theology, one that held out little hope for the refurbishing of a “golden age” of Christendom. He encountered works by the French philosopher Jean Guitton and the Italo-German theologian Romano Guardini, both of whom, like Ryan, were inspired by Cardinal Newman’s image of the Church’s “second spring,” which,

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though prophesying a new age of Christian vitality, was adamant that this would not occur under the current forms of Christendom, and would certainly not furnish the Church with guarantees of worldly success.50 From Guitton, Ryan began to think again about the problem of the loss of faith, and began to realize that the theological paradigm of the interwar and immediate postwar years, as represented by Jacques Maritain, which posited a modern Christendom founded upon a reworking of the boundaries of spiritual and temporal, might not be adequate. The central problem, for Guitton, was that modern humanity had given in to the search for a hedonistic self-realization in the world of visible things. The problem of the historical person of Jesus, which had once animated a common conversation between believers, doubters, and atheists, was now simply irrelevant, as there seemed to be a growing disconnect between Western culture and the historical, reflected in the belief that the quest for individual self-realization could be pursued without reference to external agencies or traditions. Such a sensibility underpinned an agreement between modern people simply to “put all this in parentheses” – that is, to banish religious belief to the realm of private conscience, where it could have no influence on human action.51 Guardini, whose mentors included Augustine, Newman, and much of the personalist trajectory assimilated by Ryan,52 advanced an even more pessimistic theology, insisting that, in a world of “non-human men,” Christian faith could no longer depend on the ethical structures that had sustained the project of Western civilization. He simply wrote off the modern era, and the various Christendoms that had survived within it, as characterized by a hypocritical assertion of the commonalities between Christian faith and idealistic moral systems founded upon “secularized facets of Christianity.” This age was now at its end, and was being replaced by a “non-Christian ethics” or “a new paganism” that posed a most radical challenge to faith. Guardini verged on a type of postmodernism that asserted a radical disenchantment with the Enlightenment project, which enjoined the necessity of severing Christianity from its synonymity with European and North American cultures. Ryan would not have concurred in this extreme rejection of the Western heritage and Guardini’s pessimism regarding the possibilities of linking Catholic theology to dynamic developments of modern thought. But he would have found resonance in Guardini’s prescription for a Christian faith founded on a new “decisiveness,” an uncompromising resistance to secularism, and the cultivation of the virtues of earnestness – a spiritual gravity that he equated with personal courage – and asceticism.53



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The more pessimistic analyses of Guitton and Guardini so impressed Ryan that they induced him, for the first time, to voice his dissent from his old mentor Jacques Maritain, who in 1958 had written an affectionate and admiring appraisal of American civilization. While he concurred with Maritain in rejecting a facile anti-Americanism then current in “progressive” Catholic intellectual circles, he was nonetheless highly sceptical of the French philosopher’s contention that the United States constituted the ideal of a “profane Christian” society announced over two decades earlier in Humanisme intégral. American civilization, Ryan stated, was so riven by the cultural tensions attendant on an enormous system of psychological illusions caused by a misguided belief that it had somehow transcended original sin that it could not serve Christian activists as a model for the erection of a new Christendom.54 For all the technical ability of North American civilization to create prosperity, it did not foster peace, sympathy, and security. He seized upon a growing laxness in attitudes towards divorce to illustrate the “agnosticism” attendant upon high levels of material prosperity, revealing that modern culture was, at best, “a huge spiritual void.”55 When Ryan referred to “Satan,” what he had in mind was the “new paganism” identified by Guardini and encompassed in the modern attitude described by Guitton that religious belief was becoming a relative matter whose public claims should not disturb the individual conscience’s quest to found its authority in a progressive and all-consuming self-­ realization. The modern disposition, he noted in 1960, was to deny any overt opposition to religion, and even to accept it as a fundamental human right, but only as “a P R I V A T E right.” This gave rise to a tendency towards a highly individualized religiosity, one that was relativistic in placing all religions on a footing of equality, and expressive of considerable impatience with “the doctrinal rigidity of Catholicism.”56 The growing propensity in postwar society to separate private and public was the “devil” that lay at the root of this new relativism, one that, by de-­ emphasizing the supernatural content of religion, was elaborating a new modern entity he labelled “invisible religion.”57 He discerned alarming symptoms of this ethos at work in all contemporary Western democracies. These ranged from the abandonment of puritan moral fibre in England, as demonstrated by the blasé attitude towards a divorced Anthony Eden elevated to the prime ministership in 1955, which provided Ryan with the spectacle of a Christian nation “abandoning religious practice and sliding rapidly towards agnosticism,”58 to the debates in the United Church of Canada over the legitimacy of divorce, which

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tended to privilege the individual conscience, especially in sexual matters, over external moral law and, in so doing, demarcated marriage and the family as an essentially private terrain removed from the moral jurisdiction of both church and state.59 As an activist working at the interface of religion and modern culture, Ryan was acutely attuned to the inroads of this new “permissiveness” that had made significant inroads in North America by the late 1950s. It was this existence and a growing cultural centrality of a climate that justified defection from the moral law in the name of individual conscience that lay behind his 1958 exclamation that “the fact that we confound fulness of life with youth is one of the most disquieting aspects of our time.”60 Beginning in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the new legitimacy accorded to the primacy of the individual conscience and human self-realization powerfully influenced most aspects of American culture, producing what one historian has termed a “subversive consensus” in which even social and cultural conservatives accepted many of the presuppositions of this new and apparently unrestrained individualism.61 What most troubled him was that the separation between private and public appeared to be underwriting a hyper-modern version of liberalism based upon new criteria of male citizenship. The increasing fit between permissive morality and widespread mass consumption seemed to be inducing North American men to seek a type of hedonistic personal fulfilment in the satisfactions of the private sphere. The private realm, once open to the jurisdiction of the moral canons of the churches, was now, under the exhortations of new prophets such as Hugh Hefner, with his highly visible Playboy media empire, identified as the sphere where, protected from the scrutiny of what seemed an  increasingly fusty and irrelevant moral code, the impulses of an uninhibited sexual pleasure and a limitless appetite for consumer goods – impulses that he defined as the essence of the individual modern male personality – could be fulfilled. The upper-middle-class bachelor lifestyle assiduously propagated by Hefner seduced even married male citizens with its trappings, leading to a spiritual if not physical flight from both family and moral responsibility.62 The problem with such male citizens was that, in Ryan’s estimation, while they might be extremely active in pursuing individual pleasure, they were reduced to ineffectual passivity as their conscience had no firm link to a wider public purpose. And this rampant individualism would simply hasten secularization, for it would provoke an irreconcilable psychological tension in these individuals between their undirected conscience and the Church. The cultural



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“schizophrenia” that Ryan so feared would become moral and religious, and would irrevocably weaken the institutional Church itself, as the inner life of conscience, directed to self-realization through pleasure, would be sundered from outward religious practice, which would be regarded as a burdensome system of empty prescriptions and obligations. The latter, as a mere demographic measurement, would in consequence fall rapidly into decay, and French Canada would bear all the marks of a dechristianized society. For a moralist like Ryan, Hefner’s identification of the private realm as the haven of male freedom to consume both sex and the luxurious trappings of the upper middle class, constituted simply the other side of the coin of Trudeau’s radically secularist system of political reason. Was it any coincidence that Trudeau, in his private life, seemed to epitomize the model of Hefner’s “swinging” bachelor lifestyle, complete with its globetrotting, bevy of girlfriends, and luxury sportscars? Both shared a common ethos, based on a denial of the interpenetration and reciprocal dynamic between private and public, and both underscored and legitimated a liberalism that triumphantly scorned the sanction of external authority. It was this permissive liberalism that stood, in Ryan’s view, as the greatest of the modern “devils” Christians were called upon to confront because it was a universalizing force that produced that most potent dechristianization of all, the compartmentalization of human existence between psyche and outward comportment.

“Traditional theses on the sacred union between the Catholic religion and French culture are noisily called into question”63 Ryan returned frequently to this psycho-cultural character of dechristianization in his analyses of French-Canadian Catholicism during the late 1950s. Writing for a special issue on French Canada for the prestigious Chronique sociale de France in 1957, he observed a new propensity among the educated elements in Quebec to adopt the language of crisis in referring to the relationship between Catholicism and their society. He portrayed a society still characterized by outward levels of religious practice that European Christians would envy, but one in the throes of “universalizing … in the sense of Americanization and practical agnosticism,” a state of affairs in which “real life is more and more secularized and areligious.” Torn between the rival universal claims of Catholicism and the pressures of modern mass consumer society towards a regime of

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permissiveness that would sweep all traditions before it, French Canada was traversing “a serious crisis of spiritual and moral schizophrenia.”64 While Catholicism in French Canada was not confronted with overtly secularist intellectual or political movements, the universalizing imperatives of North American culture, associated in the minds of many with English-speaking civilization, put Catholicism in an extremely difficult position, with a highly complicated prognosis. On the one hand, Action catholique militants like Ryan had always asserted the universality of the Church as overriding any claims of national particularism; but on the other, the Church had historically been a central element in the articulation and survival of French Canadians as a particular people in North America, to the point where, even in the late 1950s, Catholicism and French Canada were indissoluble and synonymous. Viewed through the light of contemporary social science, highly inflected with Parsonian social psychology, the institutional networks and collective practices elaborated over the course of three centuries by the Church defined the French-Canadian social and cultural personality. For Ryan, although no devotee of nationalism, attempts to dislodge the Church from its temporal responsibilities in education and social assistance that did not consider all the ramifications of the complexity of the Church’s close relation to French-Canadian civilization would imperil the distinctive character of the latter. How, he wondered, could French Canada be the crucible of a reformed Christendom, one in which the Church preserved its freedom of action in face of the temporal power of the state in these spheres of authority and at the same time acted in a manner appropriate to its mission and traditions, all the while reconciling these with the “legitimate aspirations of laymen engaged in these same spheres?”65 Ryan’s diagnosis of the troubled interface of Catholicism and FrenchCanadian culture was written at a critical juncture, at a moment in the 1950s when the key elements of the leadership of the Church in Quebec were converted to the idea that a real “dechristianization” was occurring among wide swathes of the French-Canadian population, even among those faithful in their adherence to Catholic religious practices. These leaders, who included a number of influential bishops and senior clergy, believed that the maintenance of their institution’s authority depended upon finding a radically new and global strategy that would urgently infuse the masses with an “evangelical” type of Catholicism. This, in turn, would entail a relative de-emphasis on the old paradigms of the Church as a salvation machine and social saviour – the extension and multiplication of parishes, religious communities, and Christian institutions of



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education and social assistance – that had sustained Catholic strategies since the turn of the century.66 These modernizing Catholic elites drew upon and combined two particularly influential strands of social analysis. The first, the product of the French religious demography of Gabriel LeBras, posited as universal sociological law the inevitable dechristianization of the urban masses, as the “traditional” devotional Catholicism, with its emphasis on mass performance of religious duties, was a kind of semi-pagan product of a rural environment, ill-adapted to the mentality of the working classes.67 The conclusion, drawn by Fathers Henri Godin and Yves Daniel in their classic 1943 text, was that many parts of France had become “pays de mission,” where Christian vestiges were so weak as to require a completely new presentation of the Christian message, one that needed to be separated from its rural or bourgeois encumbrances.68 The second, intimated in Godin and Daniel’s book, was a more pervasive current of social psychology that located the roots of dechristianization in the phenomenon of “uprooting,”69 the loss, on a massive scale, of older religious and cultural mentalities, entailed by the shift from rural to urban settings and ways of life. Because, according to this type of sociology, the  milieu powerfully and decisively shaped individual mentalities, this loss of moorings, it was believed, caused the fissure observed between outward conformity to the Church’s teachings, which had come to be viewed pejoratively as a kind of vacuous “sociological Catholicism,” and daily life, which was increasingly ruled by largely areligious imperatives.70 At one level, the anxieties of reformist Catholics might have appeared ridiculous in a society where average measures of church attendance and popular participations in Catholic sacraments hovered around 85 per cent. By any demographic benchmark, French Canada’s Christendom was in robust health: it could claim a “democratic” character in a postwar world that placed a talismanic value on democracy. Some observers hinted darkly that these measurements masked considerable defections in urban areas, with estimates ranging from 40 to 50 per cent of the population absenting themselves from Sunday Mass.71 However, viewed from the perspective of the modern, and therefore irrefutable, laws of modern social psychology that underpinned the secularization thesis, the apparently massive outward conformity to Catholic prescriptions simply “masked the profound corrosion of the religious life of our faithful”; sooner or later, the gap between this “sociological Catholicism” and daily life would cause religious practice to become “foreign to the new frameworks of human existence.”72 Demographic Catholicism, that product of one of the most effective “salvation machines” ever devised in Western

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society,73 carried within it the seeds of its own destruction, and would, as a consequence, simply fall into obsolescence, with the identity of French Canadians as a Catholic people but a memory. As the key figure in Action catholique, Ryan had played a major role in disseminating the idea that modern French Canada was riven by clashing “traditionalist” and “modernist” religious aesthetics and in promoting the concept of dechristianization as the product of psychological disconnection.74 However, his role as a militant was to transform the priorities of the organization so as to make it an effective crucible for forging the new “modernist” religious ethos that, he believed, would enable his society to preserve its Catholic and therefore “exceptional” character in the Western world. He could be utterly scathing regarding the “sleepy and somnolent” character of popular religious practices and devotions, especially as these tended to be “traditionalist, routine and not always very reflective.”75 The tendency to assert Catholicism’s robustness through measurements of quantitative piety was, Ryan maintained, misguided, and worse still, it tended to valorize those more traditionalist aspects of Catholicism.76 But because his position placed him in close daily contact with both parish clergy and ordinary Catholic believers, he refused to follow to its logical conclusion the analysis of younger intellectuals such as Fernand Dumont that French-Canadian popular Catholicism constituted a quasi-pagan “folk religion” that had to be either brushed aside or brutally transformed so that French Canada could overcome its backwardness and enter the modern age.77 Ryan was acutely aware of the growing authority of this social diagnosis among Catholic intellectuals, especially given the new prestige attached to the discipline of sociology and to a more radical current of personalism that consigned such devotions to the realm of the inauthentic and implicated those who sponsored them in an institutional “bad faith” that saddled Catholicism with the stigma of oppressive authority. He observed in his piece in the Chronique sociale de France that many believed that the time had come “to stop forming sociological Catholics”; “we must also form adult Catholics; rather than preaching a religion of negative morality, let us envision a missionary Catholicism.”78 Dumont’s claims sounded too extreme to one, like Ryan, whose perspective on French-Canadian Catholicism was informed less by sociological fashion than by close acquaintance with theology and church history. His position as a layman within the structures of the institutional Church made him acutely aware of how intensely imbricated the Church and its institutions were with the idea of “being a French Canadian,” so



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much so that he rejected the imputation of the “traditional” or sociological Catholicism of the masses as survivals of a folk society that held no meaning for French Canada’s destiny as a modern “global” society. Writing in 1960, he eloquently declared that “a certain French-Canadian culture did indeed exist. This culture was real and noble in terms of what it contained by way of fidelity and profound adhesion to Catholicism; in this, it was truly universal … at the level of ordinary life and of the great verities of common sense and religion, this culture knew how to conserve … a certain warmth, a certain intimacy that made it engaging.”79 Although Ryan agreed that this “culture” remained inferior and underdeveloped, and therefore incapable of great or original intellectual achievements, his retort to commentators such as Gérard Pelletier and Dumont was that, in their haste to apply their philosophico-sociological conclusions, they did not bear “the same risks as pastors. The pastoral anxiety of the hierarchy, familiar with the history of the human heart, will not be satisfied with cut-and-dried solutions. Its desire is for a religion that both reaches the entire population and forms adult Christians.”80 Though he clearly sympathized with these younger intellectuals, he urged them, first, to consider that French Canada’s Catholicism had succeeded in becoming the religion of the people without the aid of refinements such as “religious existentialism.” His patient regime of reading in Cardinal Newman’s works also introduced him to the view that, in the life of the Church, even the so-called execrescences of popular practice “lay at the origin of substantial doctrinal development.” Such a realization should teach Christian intellectuals that “they should not only not hold popular practice in contempt, but that they should even love and venerate it despite its imperfections, because it expresses the belief of the people of God.”81 He argued that French Canada faced no imminent danger of dechristianization: for “an indefinite time,” Catholicism would remain the religion of the immense majority, and he urged critics to remember that “we are dealing not with a religion for intellectuals or for an elite, but with a religion that is first and foremost a popular one, and which in consequence can assume no other shape than that of a popular religion.” Far better, in his estimation, to adhere to the ancient wisdom of the Church, which, in the name of preserving contact with ordinary people, “always preferred popular devotions to the refinements and chapels of pure intellectuals.”82 If the institutional Church could preserve its solid footing in the piety of ordinary men and women, French Canadians would remain a Catholic people. The acceleration of North American life in the postwar world did indeed, in Ryan’s estimation, cause a number of serious dilemmas for the

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Church that had seriously disrupted its internal equilibrium. In particular, the clergy and religious communities had assumed burdens in the spheres of education and social assistance that were far too heavy and no  longer justified, given the maturity of the state and civil society. Confessionality, he emphatically declared, was “a contingent problem that was a response to the characteristics of a certain moment of our history,” but the Church would have to learn to adopt more indirect strategies of influence, which involved sharing responsibilty with public opinion and civil society.83 If he saw dechristianization at work, Ryan agreed with Father Gaston Morrissette’s assessment that, despite the prestige of French pastoral sociology, dechristianization in urban French Canada was a “process” rather than “a fully constituted phenomenon” and was at a stage where it could still be countered and resisted.84 Like Morrissette, Ryan sensed that because French-Canadian Catholicism was itself the product of a North American environment, it might actually be exempt from the seemingly ironclad laws that saw in urban mentalities and ways of life the crucibles of dechristianization, and preserve its vigour and cultural centrality under the impact of modernity. In the early 1960s, Ryan was encouraged in this view by two significant pieces of sociological research. The first, a long-term study of Detroit by the American sociologist Gerhard Lenski, concluded that religion continued to influence the daily lives of the masses in large modern urban settings and that even “traditional” religious groups (read, Catholicism) were particularly vigorous and viable in these conditions. Churches and religious groups were vital actors in the process of Americanization, replacing the old ethnic subcultures as anchorages for individual identity in the modern world.85 Significantly, Lenski concluded that urban Catholicism had not been weakened by the growth of the middle classes or the permeation of middle-class values into the working class: indeed, he rated Catholicism the “success story” of Americanization and urbanization.86 Here was music to Ryan’s ears, who took from Lenski’s book the message that the supposedly “rural” and “folk” Catholic Church could be highly successful in urban centres. Further, the “progressive” Catholicism espoused by Action catholique seemed validated by sociology, in that Catholics were more involved than their Protestant counterparts in unions, collective action, and a search for social justice. Here was confirmation that the pluralism of big-city life need not be a vector of dechristianization. Ryan optimistically concluded that “the American city of today and tomorrow will be both religious and pluralist.”87 Closer to home, in 1961, the sociologist Father Norbert Lacoste undertook what



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was the largest religious survey ever done in Canada, sending over 800,000 questionnaires to Catholics in the archdiocese of Montreal. Although the conclusions were not officially published until 1966, they were widely known to officials in the Archdiocese of Montreal, Ryan included. Overall, the average church attendance for the entire metropolitan area stood at an apparently robust 61 per cent. While this might have been read as cause for alarm, since levels of the province as a whole were considerably higher, observers could also draw comfort from the fact that attendance at Sunday Mass and rates of communion were higher in new and rapidly expanding suburban areas, where they stood in the high 70 to 80 per cent range. In North American terms, this meant that Catholicism was “future oriented,” as it was not losing adherents among the rapidly developing middle classes and, in fact, had successfully navigated the postwar demographic challenge. The lowest rates of church attendance were in poorer inner-city areas like Saint-Henri and Mile-End; these, however, could be blamed on the presence of a shifting and transient population.88 If dechristianization need not be French Canada’s inevitable fate, there remained the problem of the gap between “sociological Catholicism” and the lives of a rapidly urbanizing population intensively experiencing the cultural influences of North America. Ryan estimated that the Church, in attempting to close this fissure, would have to engage in sustained effort, lasting from ten to fifteen years, “to make of this faithful but amorphous mass a people that are truly conscious, of this docile but unformed flock a living and responsible community.”89 In making a new generation of “adult” Christians, he strongly backed a new Catholic strategy, one premised not upon the “old” modernist project of rechristianizing society by adjusting the relations of labour and capital, but on a “high” modernist imperative of “evangelization.” In this context, reformers like Ryan attached a very particular significance to “evangelization,” one at odds with the ambient North American culture of religious revival. It meant a particularly intellectualist form of Catholicism, one anchored not on ­ritualism or moral injunctions, but on the sources of Christianity in the Bible and in the writings of the Church fathers. It held forth the promise of a more educated form of spiritual life,90 one that would discover and apply a more collectivist social ethic and, as a new religious way of life, would forcefully, through a massive conversion of social mentalities, indicate French Canada’s emergence into cultural maturity. Evangelization would, in Ryan’s estimation, serve as both a religious and a social project. After all, he had, since the early 1950s, been urging Action catholique to

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provoke this very type of “spiritual drama,” which would finally transform “sociological Catholicism,” that amalgam of individualist, quantitative religious practices, into a Christian engagement that could transform family, social, civic, and political life. The chosen instrument of this new strategy was the grande mission, first pioneered in France, which involved a mobilization and coordination of spiritual forces on a diocesan scale, buttressed by modern social-scientific analysis of the different milieus in which ordinary Christians lived and worked. The goal was not, in the first instance, to raise levels of religious practice, but to ensure the permeation of Christian convictions into all sectors of human life.91 The first of these grandes missions was held in the diocese of St-Jérôme, north of Montreal, in 1956, and was followed by similar endeavours in  Montreal and Saint-Jean (1960), Chicoutimi and Saint-Anne-de-laPocatière in 1962, and in Quebec City in 1963.92 As a prominent figure in Action catholique, Ryan was personally engaged in elaborating and promoting the new Catholic evangelical style as the counterweight to dechristianization. He was adamant, however, that it was not a FrenchCanadian version of North American religious revivalism, with its concern for simply increasing church attendance. Such approaches, practised with great success by Protestant exponents such as Rev. Billy Graham and his Canadian associate Charles Templeton,93 were vitiated by an overattention to external formalities and by rigidities in the communication of doctrine, which tended to fixate too narrowly on individual moral failings, and to put in abeyance the social and political implications of the gospel.94 Ryan viewed evangelization as the supernaturalization of human life, a process that centred on the transformation of knowledge itself and transcended the intellect to reach the level of practical daily living in all its facets, a transformation that he considered necessary in order to restore fulness to human existence.95 As national president of the Jeunesse indépendante catholique, he was particularly implicated in introducing the new evangelical Catholicism in middle-class milieus in Montreal and participated actively in the 1960 grande mission in the Archdiocese of Montreal, spending several days during the exciting dawn of the Quiet Revolution “speaking of God, rather than of social questions or freedom of the press” to office workers at city hall, groups of teachers, and civil servants. What struck Ryan most about these encounters was that even middle-class people, the ostensible beneficiaries of the great wave of North American prosperity, “had a desire for fulness that was not fulfilled in their lives.”96 This reaffirmed his conviction that a new religious consciousness was necessary, to be fostered through contact and



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communication. And this realization led him, in turn, to a period of reconsideration regarding the status of laypeople in Action catholique and the role of this movement in French-Canadian society, one from which he was to emerge with a new vocation and a wider sphere of action.

“Horse sense not enough”97 The term “adult Christian” peppered Ryan’s speeches and writings between 1958 and 1962 as the great desideratum of a new era of intensive evangelization. Here was a forceful indicator that, although Ryan was a leading figure in promulgating a discourse of religious crisis, he did not automatically draw the corollary of religious decline from the secularization of French-Canadian life. Rather, because his thinking moved within the matrix of postwar social psychology, he viewed these developments optimistically. Were not the cultural travails of French Canada and Catholicism but a normal process of maturation from the mental state of adolescence to full adulthood? And did this not contain considerable potential for shifting and transforming Action catholique from its roots in the interwar period as a crucible of youthful but immature heroic aspiration to a movement that incarnated the aspirations of a fully conscious and adult Catholic laity for greater responsibility in both the Church and the institutions of education and social assistance hitherto dominated by  an omnicompetent clergy? And, Ryan wondered, could not Action catholique, armed with a new sense of purpose, become what he had long intended, a channel for communicating and infusing the priorities of the new Catholic evangelism, especially to society’s new middle classes, and a forum for articulating and expressing a thoughtful “public opinion” that would rally a group of new activist intellectuals to assert a new and creative dynamic between religious conviction and the reform of state and society, one that directly incarnated the aspirations of Catholic laity rather than the clergy. In this way, Ryan sought to heal what he considered the most troubling aspect of the new secularization, the breach between popular Catholicism and the life of the mind in French Canada. Ryan’s sense of the new age was acutely expressed in a 1961 article where he extracted the meaning of Cardinal Newman’s famous metaphor of the “second spring” of the Church. By that point, preparations were well underway in Rome for a universal council, arousing great expectations of reform among both clergy and laity, but he cautioned his readers that there were many signs of aging and death in the Church.

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“Many of us,” he declared, “see nothing on the horizon, and are reassured by the multiplication of temples, colleges, and hospitals.” He characterized these individuals as “hiding under a blanket of spiritual wool,” believing that “institutional Great Walls of China” would preserve Catholic orthodoxy and the morals of Christian people. These faithful were frightened by the penetration of “the spirit of revolt about which Albert Camus spoke” and sought refuge in immobilism. What most troubled him was that even in “traditionally Catholic countries like ours … the Church is abandoned by many of its most educated and cultivated sons.” Newman, however, taught that such events were but “the progressive action that is the process of the death of everything of a human character in the Church,” those rituals, values, and political arrangements that were “external, obsolete, and perishable events” in the life of the Church.98 Ryan read these symptoms of decay in light of a deeper theology of history in which, he reckoned, the Church grew with human civilizations and borrowed a great deal from these. These “borrowings,” he stated, were “mortal” and thus experienced “a certain decline” at each critical stage of human civilization. However, he concluded, “such declines are always, for the Church, an opportunity for a new birth, a new start, a new spring.” This moment was not the re-presentation of an unchanging beauty, but rather, the revelation of “a mysterious power by virtue of which the Church understands how to take root and prosper in  each civilization, each culture, in each people.”99 In applying these insights to his own culture and the people of French Canada, Ryan indicated that a new synthesis of Catholicism and an urban culture of high modernity was possible, but that “the Church must count less on the structuring force of its social institutions, and more on the spiritual personality and the depth of engagement of her sons. In those moments of glory, the witness of the Church rests largely on large assemblies and prestigious institutions, on illustrious names. In darker times, the witness of the humble anonymous Christian, strong in his faith, open with men of all faiths, is the key to everything.”100 And it was most emphatically laymen, rather than priests or religious, who were the representative Christian figures whose faith would animate the Church and communicate its message to modern people. It would not be an exaggeration to state that Ryan envisioned the institutional difficulties of Catholicism in French Canada as a moment to articulate a new religious equilibrium, one decisively inflected towards the priorities of the laity. Theologically, he believed his position was buttressed by Pius XII’s 1957 elevation of the Catholic laity as having a



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definite responsibility for “consecrating” the world. Because all forms of human life could be forms of witness, laymen who lived their faith through their daily activities in family, work, civil society, and politics were truly “an elect” and had equal status with the hierarchy and priests for “conserving the deposit of faith.”101 Theirs, however, was a more truly apostolic vocation closer to the spirit of the primitive Church because, unlike the clergy, who were most explicitly functionaries of the visible institution, it fell to the laity to “descend into the arena in the manner of those virile athletes of which Saint Paul speaks”102 and communicate the spirit of the gospels to the world. However, this “collegial” vision of the Church called the layman to a life of austere engagement and enormous effort, beginning with “actively associating himself with the actions and celebrations of the Church as a community.”103 Viewed from the perspective of the Catholicism of his time, this constituted an injunction to reposition the axis of devotion away from the welter of “individualistic” practices characteristic of French-Canadian popular Catholicism, towards a ­concentration on the Holy Mass, which, as the symbol of the Church as “‘one great family,’ whose members all love one another, understand one another, and help one another,”104 would instil a much-needed collectivist consciousness into modern Catholics. This, in turn, would provide a new and firmer religious basis for the political and social reforms his society needed. But for Ryan, the new lay religious consciousness imposed even more demands upon its devotees. Because he maintained that modern Catholicism had to rely less on the power of its institutions in aligning human civilization with Christendom, the presence of the Church in society and culture had to be assured by “personal influence.” Such influence could operate effectively only if the layman could understand and communicate the tenets of Christian theology, in “adherence to the precise truths taught by Revelation,”105 an achievement that required the marriage of intellectual competence with conviction. A good deal of Ryan’s urgency to carve out a new mission for Action catholique involved an assertion of the equality of laity in the Church that at times flirted with anticlericalism. In a series of articles written between 1958 and 1959, he proclaimed that the laity were “direct and official collaborators in the work entrusted to the Apostles and [were] their legitimate successors,” whose vocation was not subordinate or auxiliary to that of priests, but was universal and existed to serve the entire Church. Action catholique militants possessed “a type of public vocation in the Church”106 that rendered them accountable only to the church hierarchy, and not to parish priests or chaplains. He clearly envisioned

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the new lay apostolate as a multiform kind of engagement, one that, while linked to the church hierarchy, expressed itself in forms appropriate to the lives of laypeople and was not organized according to clerical models or priorities. Writing to Mgr Raymond Lavoie of the Montreal Action catholique diocésaine in 1963, Ryan declared that “the proper mission for Action catholique is to concern itself with problems directly regarding the Christian laity, under the jurisdiction and authority of the hierarchy and in collaboration with the latter. However, if we want to ensure that Action catholique does not become an extension of the bishopric or the diocesan chancellery, we have to recognize that it has its own vocation.”107 In a society where, at the end of the 1950s, the Catholic clergy and religious orders not only enjoyed a high level of social prestige but directed and to a considerable extent staffed most of francophone Quebec’s institutions of higher and secondary education, its hospitals, and its social assistance network, voicing these ideas exposed Ryan to considerable hostility from the clergy, especially as he advocated the absolute necessity of qualified Catholic laity directing classical colleges, hospitals, and social agencies, with priests increasingly limited to providing spiritual guidance.108 What gave force to these criticisms was that they were not cast, in the first instance, as a reflexive anticlericalism but seemed to echo the theological currents of the universal Church. Indeed, he gave voice to Pius XII’s proclamation that, if the laity were the key to the extension of Catholicism in the modern world, then the clergy must assume the more modest role of being spiritual resource persons for laypeople so that they could accomplish their mission of being Christian witnesses in their personal, family, and professional lives. In this respect, he found the clergy’s intellectual mediocrity and lack of technical competence unacceptable, summed up in the pithy phrase “horse sense not enough” after a meeting with priests in the diocese of Chicoutimi.109 He found many priests overly concerned with organizational formulae and recruitment of numbers, rather than with animating the interior lives of laypeople, a complaint that he voiced in 1958 to Mgr Lionel Audet, the auxiliary bishop of Quebec.110 But what particularly exercised him was that the clergy, in forming and educating Christian men and women, had lost sight of the fact that most laypeople were not destined for the religious life. Madeleine and Claude Ryan delivered a joint talk in 1962 to the Équipes des foyers, in which they castigated a mentality current among priests for not fully assuming their status as unmarried Christians, which made them ill at ease and unhelpful in their dealings with married couples. Many clergy,



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in their estimation, judged men and women in terms of their own lives, consigning them to a “vicarial lay existence,” by which they were turned into a deviant kind of “spiritual hybrid,” the mark of a debased vocation that stunted lay spirituality by closing it off from the influence of the external world and the “wider calls and needs of the community.” More significantly, clergymen had forgotten that the Church’s ideal of marriage explicitly valorized the mutual perfection of spouses and not simply the procreation of children.111 In an undoubted reference both to his own rejection of a clerical vocation and to what he perceived as a growing hostility to the presence of the Church among educated French Canadians, he severely admonished the clergy, stating that “when the clergy teaches the humanities with a view to producing priests, in the long run, they are contributing to the devaluation of these disciplines and … of religion itself.”112 But if Ryan was critical of the clergy’s reliance on an outmoded “horse sense” in their dealings with the laity, Catholic laypeople themselves were to be faulted for failing to generate an intellectually demanding and vibrant religious culture in French Canada. At the beginning of 1960, while thinking about an article he was writing for Le Devoir about the future of the Church in French Canada, he lamented the fact that “‘the spiritual soil’ of French Canada is not as rich as that of Italy, Spain, or France. We frequently hear it asked: ‘when will we have lay theologians, our Maritains?’” For Ryan, the answer lay in Catholicism’s paradoxical presence in his society’s public life: on the one hand, it had an overwhelming public presence in ritual and devotion; on the other, it was vitiated by “the weak presence of the Christian spirit in temporal matters, especially in the spheres of political and economic activity,”113 and thus did not resonate with a rising class of new professionals trained in the social sciences. He located this weakness most explicitly in the almost complete “absence of lay theology” and the lack of any internal structures to express the “public opinion” of Catholic believers, because this was “neither esteemed nor desired by church leaders.”114 Once again, he turned to Cardinal Newman for theological justification for the concept of a “public opinion” as a mediating entity, whose presence in a hierarchical church institution was an absolute necessity to ensure theological equilibrium between those competing “Herodian” and “Zealotist” currents of progressivism at all costs and immobilism. Writing in 1959, he estimated that, while remaining perfectly faithful to the hierarchical principle that assured continuity in the Church, “it is possible, and even necessary, to promote in the Church a healthy climate of discussion on all

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subjects that the magisterium leaves to the free exploration of the faithful.” Echoing Newman, Ryan explicitly maintained that this freedom should be broadly interpreted, and he castigated those traditionalist elements in the Church who “under the pretext of fidelity, inordinately extend the sphere of those questions deemed necessary or obligatory.”115 In the Catholic Church, as in democratic polity, the all-important element to ensure its health was not an electoral popular sovereignty but the existence of an organic, participatory civil society that expressed a responsible, consensual “public opinion,”116 ensuring an ongoing constructive dialogue between rulers and ruled on the fundamental underpinnings – what Augustine would have termed the “loves” or “desires” of the society. It was this realization that impelled Ryan’s attempt, against great odds, to reorient Action catholique between 1958 and 1962. “I think it is very dangerous,” Ryan told the Congress on the Lay Apostolate in 1963, “to get laymen involved in their apostolic preoccupations or activities if at the same time we do not get them used to stronger intellectual and spiritual truths. I think they are going to make fools of themselves.” To obviate this danger, he urged the laity to greater contact with and study of “the most virile religious literature that can be put at their disposal.” Militant laymen, in his estimation, were the key to the communication and infusion of the new evangelistic temper within Catholicism, because it was they who “bring life to the research work of the Catholic scholars.”117 Such remarks, which prioritized a new intellectual style for Catholic militants, were in keeping with the particular definition Catholics like Ryan accorded the term “evangelism” in the early 1960s, one that sought to shift the Church’s priorities away from conversion and institution building and towards “an education in depth,” an “obscure effort to form an authentic sense of responsibility from within.” The Church’s most important task was to pursue the edification of Catholics,118 which, in Ryan’s view, had serious implications for the future of Action catholique in French Canada. He characterized the apostolic vision currently dominant in Action catholique as truncated and incomplete, because by its orientation towards adolescents, it placed an overweening insistence on training the will, which translated in turn into an overemphasis on moral obligation, especially obedience. Other consequences of this mentality were a fixation with quantitative measurements of success – rallies, the enrolment of Catholics into leagues, and the production of zeal and enthusiasm. The danger here, according to Ryan, was that such approaches fostered a situation where Catholics sought to avoid contact with non-Catholics, creating institutional “ghettos” where



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their faith might be protected from outside influences, but with the consequence that they were cut off from modern intellectual developments and remained at a secondary and derivative level of culture. More tellingly, this situation created a persistent tendency “to confound legitimate apostolic goals with political objectives that have nothing to do with the mission of the Church.”119 What Ryan feared was that if Action catholique continued along the course that it had pursued from its inception, it would become culturally irrelevant in a society in flux and would, in effect, box itself into a defence of the Church’s confessional institutional empire. In so doing, it would contribute to the rise and installation of rigid “parties” within the Church, the politicization of differences between “traditionalists” and “modernists,” which would not only make Catholicism tributary to the state but would render it ineffective as a rallying point for the articulation of a new public consensus he deemed so necessary to French-Canada’s equilibrium. A new type of Catholic militant was urgently required, one who was not the archetypical figure of the interwar years – the spiritually anxious adolescent ever ready to embark on the heroic cause of rechristianization – but a more mature and reflective type, a man fully accepting of the pluralistic nature of modern society and committed to assuming his responsibilities of leadership within his family, his profession, and as a democratic citizen. Ryan was conscious that one of the great lacunae of Action catholique in French Canada was that it had never developed movements that would appeal to adults, and especially to “the mentality and needs of professionals.”120 Writing in 1959, he described this type as “a lay militant with the aptitude to live creatively in the midst of a pluralistic world where people of all tendencies and cultures encounter one another,” one able to collaborate “to ensure the development of profane life and to give in and through his action a concrete witness of the fruitfulness of Christianity in today’s world.”121 If a central part of Ryan’s appeal was towards what might be termed a greater “interiority” and attention to the intellectual and theological side of Christian piety, these qualities had a most emphatic public and social purpose, and were not an invitation to withdraw into an individualistic state of spiritual contemplation. The mark of the true apostle lay in a willingness to imitate and continue “the public career of Jesus.” To this end, he sought people who would be fully integrated into their milieus of life; who possessed a well-developed capacity for attention and reflection; who could, through their intellectual and spiritual pre-eminence, exercise a natural leadership role among their colleagues and associates; and who, above all, would be inclined towards action.122

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It was in Ryan’s attempt to elucidate the proper equilibrium between “contemplation and action” that we can discern the underlying intent that lay behind his strategic reorientation of Action catholique.123 He certainly wanted a more “intellectual” kind of Action catholique, but at the same time, he did not want the movement to become a closed circle of intellectuals. In this respect, he envisioned Action catholique much as he did the “middle classes” in his mid-1950s survey, as a group that both balanced and ensured the reciprocal communication of values and ideas between the professional elites and working-class people. Action catholique could, in his view, accomplish this task because, at a critical juncture in French Canada’s history, it represented a kind of intellectual and spiritual crossroads in which a new spiritual awareness could emerge, enabling French Canada to successfully navigate its “crisis of development.”124 In fostering a new Christian spirit among the middling sorts – teachers, civil servants, social scientists, journalists, social workers, and nurses – Action catholique’s model was the type of civic action incarnated in the adult education movement. Although Ryan was certainly aware that “we don’t often meet people in Action catholique with university training,”125 he was adamant that the purpose of the movement was not to produce “‘educated’ people” in the conventional sense, people who could reel off quotations from Augustine, Aquinas, or Newman, or recite the papal encyclicals chapter and verse. He wanted to cultivate in the new militant “a spirit that is alert and trained to respond to certain expectations, to pierce through to deeper realities with a penetrating eye, to bring to bear a certain type of judgment, and to conceive an action and to carry it through without flinching.”126 And it was especially imperative that the institutional Church find “a satisfactory place” for this lucid, fervent, and “adult laity” within its decision-making structures in order to overcome the tensions developing between Catholicism and an increasing number of well-educated French Canadians.127 It is clear that Ryan expected these militants, with their balance between learning and public action, to be the spearhead for the development of his great desideratum, an informed and responsible public opinion acting within the Church. One area that increasingly intrigued him as a terrain appropriate for the new Action catholique was in combining “the techniques of broadcasting and of freedom” in order to counter what he considered a modern illusion, the belief that access to information and greater knowledge led to action. Unless balanced by the realization that modern media called for a greater sense of responsibility and moral commitment, which ultimately drew their sources from Catholicism, it would



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be impossible to put these techniques at the service of human struggles for freedom, justice, and peace.128 During a visit to the National Catholic Welfare Conference in Washington, D C , he praised his American counterparts for “a modern style, a democratic approach and a sense of efficiency” that could benefit “those, like ourselves, who inhabit older Christendoms and are more European in our approaches.” The American Catholic temper had been honed by many years of dialogue with other religious groups in a pluralistic environment, and he was especially impressed with well-organized media strategies to enable Catholics to both follow and influence public affairs.129 In the early 1960s, Ryan viewed the prospect of a separation between organized religion and modern currents of democracy and social reform as the most alarming cultural tendency at work in French Canada. This, he believed, resulted from the complete absence of the voice of the laity within the Church. Although laymen certainly pronounced on religious matters, they could do so only in publications and institutions that were beyond the control of the Church. “There is,” he concluded, “no opportunity to speak from inside, and if there is, the layman must, in order to be heard, borrow the unctuous modulations of an ecclesiastical style that is seriously out of tune in today’s world.” Action catholique’s new task was not simply to educate and intellectually prepare a new breed of adult militants, but to “give back to the laity organic channels of expression in the Church.”130 Particularly after the election of a reformist Liberal government in Quebec in 1960, Ryan preached the urgent necessity for modes of articulating and communicating a responsible public opinion in the Church. His anxieties stemmed from the fact that, in his estimation, the Church had entered a period of transition where certain modes of claiming and exercising authority would no longer have the same effectiveness; he was particularly concerned that “awakened spirits” would become impatient with the slow pace of change. He sensed “a climate of hostility” in which there was considerable danger that a growing number of educated professionals would “blame the Church for certain facts,” such as the supposed “intellectual poverty” of French Canada, “whose causes need to be explored with considerably greater nuance.”131 But a more insidious peril lurked in this situation, one particular to a society that was homogeneously Catholic. This was the possibility that, given the growing cultural prestige of ideas about democracy and especially individual freedom, secular ideologies would seep into the Church, divide educated Catholics into warring camps, and invalidate the Church as a repository of social cohesion – the fundamental Augustinian “concord” of French-Canadian

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society. A public spectacle of Catholic divisiveness would, in Ryan’s estimation, simply accelerate the growth of “a kind of relativism in our spirits as regards the fundamental values of life and religion.”132 To counter these developments, Ryan believed that a new generation of Catholic laymen had to take the lead in pushing the Church to redefine modes of authority and freedom consistent with the immutable principles of Catholicism. However, throughout this process, the Catholic laity must especially beware of “purely intellectual syntheses and aesthetic visions.”133 Action catholique, if it could develop along the lines that he envisioned, would play a key role in carving out a mediating intellectual position combining respect for the Church and engagement with the achievements of modern civilization that would counteract what he believed was an extremely pernicious tendency among FrenchCanadian intellectuals. Speaking to a group of educators at the Maison Montmorency in early 1959, Ryan painted an unflattering portrait of the immature and superficial religious culture of contemporary intellectuals, which he believed would give rise to “a sort of liberal Catholicism that would not be worth much in the advancement of religion.”134 There was no doubt that his target was the citélibriste group clustered around Gérard Pelletier and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Although Ryan never openly named them or their magazine in his speeches and writings, his portrait of a “new elite” whose “excessively bitter” expressions regarding Catholicism emanated not from any real knowledge of developments within the Church, but from “ill-digested memories of their youth and adolescence”135 was an barb undoubtedly aimed personally at Pelletier. Ryan considered the Cité libre circle quite competent to analyze literature, art, and the social sciences but felt that their knowledge of religion was rudimentary and underdeveloped. Such shortcomings did not prevent them from pronouncing on theological matters with “a stunning cheekiness.” There was no doubt that, throughout the 1950s, Ryan was personally offended by the “snobbery” with which this self-constituted intellectual gentry regarded the “constructive work” undertaken by the Action catholique movements, but his gravest concerns were intellectual and spiritual. Stated simply, the citélibriste importation of a “political liberalism”136 into the Catholic Church would, he feared, sow confusion within the institution and the wider society. Working from the premise that “political maxims do not constitute spiritual principles,” Ryan maintained that the goal of the citélibriste lay in aligning Catholicism with an ideology of secular progressivism whose criteria were drawn from philosophy or human ideologies like Marxism or liberalism, rather than from



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Catholic theology or the Church’s traditions. In so doing, these young “Herodians,” whose overriding commitment lay in making the Church conform to the modern world, would simply play into the hands of their adversaries, producing an opposing “Zealotist” or integralist reaction among their opponents,137 thus polarizing the Church and incapacitating it from serving as a source of public social consensus. Worse, from his perspective, the citélibriste strategy of anticlerical propaganda, masked behind a lofty claim that “they want to serve Christ rather than serving the Church,” and proclaiming that “we are Catholics but not clericalists,” was intellectually spurious and doing enormous damage because, in the long run, it brought the Church itself into disrepute.138 But there was a deeper realization at the heart of Ryan’s send-up of the citélibriste mentality, something that went far beyond personal considerations. He dimly sensed this during the early 1950s but became increasingly aware of the religious implications of citélibrisme, especially after the publication of Trudeau’s secularist approach to politics in 1958. Men like Pelletier and Trudeau discoursed eloquently on the need to separate the spiritual and the temporal in the name of advancing both individual freedom and the interests of the universal Church, but their immature incomprehension of Catholicism unmasked them, in Ryan’s mind, as neo-pagans whose politics would totally subject the individual to the state. By wishing to apply to the Church the political ideas and standards of secular society, these men were, according to Ryan, “returning more or less consciously to the state of things that existed before Christianity.” Their thinking gave rise not only to “a pure and simple confusion of the spiritual and the temporal” but also to “a more or less overt domination of the spiritual by the temporal.”139 Only the institutional articulation of mature, reflective Catholic public opinion through the mechanism of Action catholique could stand as a barrier to this radical separation of religion and politics. The years between 1958 and 1961 proved a bitter disappointment to Ryan in his efforts to deploy the discourse of “religious crisis” in order to fundamentally reorient Action catholique. Although he continued to insist that there was “a fairly serious crisis” occurring among the Catholic laity, and called urgently for Action catholique to establish “bridges between those who feel that there is, within themselves, a growing disaffection from the Church and those who in the eyes of public opinion represent the Church,”140 it was quite clear that the Church hierarchy did not feel the imperative need to entrust the laity with any decision-making authority. Indeed, his notebooks that recorded his meetings with bishops contained a sense that these senior clerics either considered Action

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catholique as something of a failure or continued to regard it as an institution that they could mould to their own priorities with little regard for the needs of modern laity. Writing in 1959 during a visit to Rome, Ryan stated that the biggest problem facing Action catholique was the nature of the relationship between the laity and the hierarchy, and his dealings with Cardinal Léger, the Archbishop of Montreal, did little to reassure him. Stung by the critiques of the Church’s role in education by Frère Untel, which were published in Le Devoir despite his behind-the-scenes protests, Léger critiqued Action catholique in 1961 for “having failed to produce a single person who could respond to attacks directed against the Church.”141 On this score, Léger was wrong: there was one person, Claude Ryan himself, but his comment indicated that he conceived of the lay apostle as essentially an old-fashioned, dogmatic apologist rather than someone able to engage in constructive dialogue in a pluralistic environment. Léger’s commitment to Action catholique seemed to Ryan increasingly slippery and contradictory, and, despite Ryan’s accession in  1961 to the presidency of the Action catholique diocésaine of the Archdiocese of Montreal – in essence, the cardinal’s lay adviser – Léger admonished the movement for not manifesting itself more strongly in social affairs and intimated that it should no longer count upon strong financial support from the Quebec bishops. Ryan tried to make the Cardinal more media-savvy, encouraging him to avoid reactive and illconsidered pronouncements on major issues, and to meet more frequently with leaders of opinion, academics, and union leaders. However, Ryan realized that, ultimately, Léger’s concept of the Church involved an ­old-fashioned emphasis on sacerdotal authority. To the consternation of Ryan and many Action catholique militants, the cardinal’s November 1961 address implied that “Church” and “laity” were two separate entities,142 compelling Ryan to a painful realization that much of his patient work to explain the new theology of the laity had been for nought. His archepiscopal counterpart, Mgr Roy of Quebec, was scarcely more reassuring, as he frequently measured Action catholique in the light of his experience as an army chaplain during the Second World War, cavalierly dismissing difficulties with the phrase “the needs of our guys were simple and concrete,”143 hardly answering the intellectual requirements of Ryan’s constituency of an educated Catholic laity. Ryan was up against the inability of his ecclesiastical superiors to decide what exactly, constituted Action catholique or the principle of lay responsibility. Would the presence of Catholicism in public life be assured



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by “a massive organization” or by “a pedagogy of engagement” involving smaller numbers of more intellectually aware people? Could a single organization effectively combine adults and youth, a traditional devotional culture typical of a closed confessional environment, represented by the Ligues du Sacré-Coeur and the Dames de Sainte-Anne, and the structures of a more modern pluralistic public opinion desired by Ryan?144 These issues came to a head in 1961, when a long-simmering crisis at the central offices of the Jeunesse étudiante catholique (J E C) erupted, causing the bishops to suspend the movement’s national executive and appoint Ryan as a trustee to resolve the problems. Given the growing restiveness of French-Canadian youth and the growing lure of  secular political activism, which were evident even in the church-­ controlled collèges classiques, these difficulties were probably insuperable. In 1958, Ryan had pronounced in favour of “a more autonomous student consciousness,” but his role required him to be an ecclesiastical functionary, warning that adult authority in the educational sphere was severely compromised by the fact that “the social milieu exercises a greater influence than the school.” As a result, there was too much “intellectualism” – a codeword for the perils of the importation of political ideology – and too little religion being promulgated in the JEC. His proposed remedy, greater adult supervision, was designed to ensure that apostolic and educative organizations would not be subverted from their purpose by those who wished to turn Action catholique youth movements into representational forums that might degenerate into political activism.145 Ryan’s observations in his notebooks reflect a good deal of impatience with this ecclesiastical tergiversation and back biting, and, for the first time, he began to have his own doubts about the kind of internal sea change he believed was necessary to infuse the Church with the temper of the modern laity. Writing to Father Hozaël Aganier, the national chaplain of the A C C in 1960, he lamented, “As far as the ecclesiastical authorities are concerned, we have now entered once again into a long period of hesitation and obscurity.” While he might console himself with the reassurance that, because the progress of Action catholique was linked to the growth of the entire Church, he could, in some respects, be patient about the time and effort it would take to form the kind of self-aware, conscious laypeople who would be the future of the Church.146 But, given what he sensed about the accelerating pace of cultural and political change in French Canada by 1961, would he be willing to gamble his future on the willingness and ability of the Church hierarchy to deliver

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meaningful change? Could the forging of a new synthesis between Catholic conviction and democratic public opinon be best accomplished through channels outside the institutional Church?

“Welcoming me like a brother”147 Adding to Ryan’s mood of impatience with the ambiguity of his situation was his reading of new currents in Catholic theology. One German author, Karl Rahner, “scandalized” him with the pointed observation that those men and women who were permanent officials of Action catholique “were perhaps not laymen in the full meaning of the term.” While he believed that Rahner was wrong in principle148 – there are enough hints from Ryan’s speeches and writings that by attempting to defend committed laypeople from the imputation of being debased clerics – he acknowledged the validity of this critique of Action catholique. A meeting in 1961 with Gérard Filion, the director of Le Devoir, ratcheted up the uncertainty to a higher level. Acting on a suggestion from Father Ambroise Lafortune, who knew of Ryan’s desire to open effective channels between Catholicism and modern media, Filion asked Ryan to join the editorial team of the newspaper, prefacing his offer by vaunting the superior status of journalism: “You can’t spend the rest of your life in the secretariat of Action catholique. These are the kinds of jobs that you do for a few years, but after that, you have to get out of it.”149 He had to consider Filion’s offer seriously. Ryan had a growing family, and, given the financial uncertainties that loomed over Action catholique, he needed the reassurance of a more regular source of income, a fact that Filion, a former Catholic militant in the Union catholique des cultivateurs, deftly knew how to play upon. More significantly, Ryan had, during the late 1950s, branched out from his work in adult education to develop a great interest in modern media and forms of broadcasting. One of his hobby horses was to attempt to secure episcopal backing to launch a Catholic press service in order to infuse Catholic perspectives into the shaping of public opinion.150 There was, however, one even more compelling reason for listening to Filion’s overtures. Le Devoir, an independent Catholic daily newspaper, was the preeminent voice of French Canada’s intellectual community, the “mirror and conscience”151 of that society, and joining the editorial team would automatically elevate Ryan to the status of a public intellectual, giving him something of the prestige enjoyed by the American journalist Walter Lippmann, whose influential columns secured



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him an entrée as a confidential adviser to several presidents. His position at Action catholique involved him in a great deal of obscure and unrecognized organizational work that did not allow him the time or perspective for more reflective commentary. More tellingly, he realized that being the confidant of bishops did not confer upon him the “objectivity” – that essential quality of the public intellectual – that would allow him to speak with authority to the new class of professionals whose attitudes, needs, and desires would determine French Canada’s future. This thinking should not be read as the beginning of a personal journey from a religious frame of mind to one dominated by secular categories. Ryan remained firm that being an intellectual was a sacred calling, a form of Christian vocation. Writing in 1959, he declared that Christ elevated “the word to the dignity of a true sacred ministry. He established an essential relationship between his mission and the word.” Indeed, communicating the word was the preeminent form of action by which the laity performed their task of consecrating the world, because it activated a dynamic relationship between Christianity and civilization, enabling it to contribute to “the refinement of culture, the progress of social and political institutions, and the building of peace.”152 The journalist-­intellectual dedicated to the constant task of communication and persuasion was, in his eyes, the ultimate Christian lay figure, the modern equivalent of the knight, at work realizing Maritain’s vision of a new, pluralistic, Christianinspired civilization. By synthesizing theology with knowledge of modern political and social realities, such individuals could “revive in the people the often unconscious Christian feelings and moral structures, embodied in the history of nations born out of old Christendom, and to persuade people, of the truth of the Christian faith, or at least of the validity of the Christian social and political philosophy.”153 In short, the public intellectual was a modern Christian prophet. But in 1961, Ryan was not yet ready to take the plunge. He had just been appointed one of the chief advisers to Cardinal Léger, and he needed to resolve the difficulties at the national headquarters of the J E C before he could consider leaving Action catholique. So he temporized, telling Filion of his interest in the position, but asking him to approach him again in another year. What lay behind the urgency of the director of Le Devoir to secure Ryan for the newspaper’s editorial team? In many respects, Ryan was ideologically out of tune with the paper, which had been led since 1947 by Filion as director and André Laurendeau as editor-in-chief. Under their leadership, Le Devoir had established itself as a stalwart opponent of Maurice Duplessis and as the exponent of a neo-nationalist outlook

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that, like that of their old mentor Abbé Groulx, viewed the Canadian federation as a compact between two nations, while acknowledging that, within the federal system, French Canadians experienced such a level of economic and social inferiority that they urgently required the intervention of a socially reformist “state of Quebec,” the organ of a modern French-Canadian identity, to redress the imbalance. Unlike Ryan’s, the Catholicism of both men was filtered through a nationalist lens, viewing it as a key constitutive element of French-Canadian identity. Certainly after his stay in Rome in 1951–52, Ryan was far more inclined to accentuate the “universal” and “international” qualities of Catholicism, and on several occasions in speeches to lay activists and clergy insisted on the need to “free ourselves from nationalist myths … and to accomplish in our thinking a definitive dissociation of the marriage of religion and nation that we have learned to venerate like a dogma.”154 Although influenced by Groulx, Ryan was not a neo-nationalist, because his vision was of Canada as one nation with a “bi-cultural” character. Culture, not ethnic nationality, lay at the base of social and political organization, and Ryan was adamant that “bi-culturalism” set “a distinctive philosophy at the base of Canadian culture.”155 Writing to the French journalist JeanPierre Dubois-Dumée in 1959, Ryan was emphatic that the “two nations” theory was an exaggeration of reality. Those like himself, whose sympathies lay with the progressive and realist side of the equation, were more drawn to the idea that Canada constituted one people, composed of different ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups.156 He strongly favoured an open and understanding climate towards postwar migrants, arguing in 1960 that the presence of one million new Catholics in Canada, whose roots were neither English nor French, had injected “a powerful element of universality in to the life of the Church in this country,” and calling for a progressive integration of peoples.157 As late as 1959, Ryan had irked Filion for loudly condemning Raymond Barbeau, the leader of the separatist Alliance laurentienne, in front of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste for advancing the idea of a French-Canadian nation-state. Filion’s view was that Ryan proceeded from “an extreme hypothesis” in supposing that French-Canadians wanted to turn Quebec into an exclusivist ethnic nation-state and “dispense with all other racial groups.” Filion was concerned that, in his haste to refute Barbeau, Ryan had lumped all neonationalists behind this extremist caricature, something that the director of Le Devoir could not accept.158 These differences aside, Ryan had always preserved cordial relationships with members of Le Devoir and the neo-nationalist circle and was personally closer to them than to the citélibristes, preserving contacts



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established in 1945 with André Laurendeau by offering a few articles to L’Action nationale, stoutly defending Filion’s editorship against his conservative nationalist detractors after a trip to communist China in 1953,159 and submitting occasional articles to Le Devoir on religious and educational subjects. With the death of Duplessis in 1959 and the advent of a more reformist political climate in Quebec City, Filion and Laurendeau were faced with the need to reorient the newspaper, to transform its reputation for combativeness towards a more reflective and analytical style of journalism. Laurendeau invited Ryan to contribute a memorandum dissecting Le Devoir’s status as a Catholic newspaper. Distinguishing between a Catholic newspaper “in the broadest sense” and “a militant Catholic newspaper,” Ryan placed Le Devoir in the latter category, arguing that its distinctive intellectual quality stemmed from the fact that it was the only privately owned militant Catholic newspaper in North America that was in no way supported by the institutional church. This, in his estimation, was a great strength, conferring intellectual independence and the ability to influence a pluralist North American cultural environment, but it was also a source of grave temptation, as it might, in the desire to be “avant-garde for the pleasure and snobbery of being so,” leading the paper to adopt a “worldly spirit” rather than “spiritual motives.” As he concluded, “many are on the Left because that appears to be good, and many are on the Right because it pays to be so.” Evoking the pitfalls of both citélibrisme and a conservative nationalism that had sold its soul to Duplessis, Ryan implicitly praised Le Devoir for adhering to a sensible middle course. But the only way to preserve the integrity of its mission was to bring a knowledge of Catholic values more directly into the daily operation of the paper, to ensure that the editorial team be composed of “real militant Catholics … who adhere heart and spirit to the mystery of the Church as the centre of all human history, who espouse the profound struggle of the Church against the forces of evil; who possess a real religious culture, and in particular, a deep knowledge of these issues according to the teaching of the Church, who have an immediate link to the realities of the temporal order.”160 That this sounded like a job description or a letter of application outlining his own credentials was not coincidental. Ryan believed that Le Devoir’s high calling was to play a mediating role between left and right tendencies in French-Canadian society, and he was convinced that Catholicism alone possessed the intellectual vitality to articulate such a consensus in a modern environment. There remained the divergences over nationalism. Although dissenting from the “two nations” theory, there is considerable evidence that, by the late 1950s, Ryan had accepted one of the other major articles of the

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neo-nationalist creed, the social and economic inferiority of the FrenchCanadian group. This position required careful navigation between Catholic social philosophy, which reprobated the idea that the state could be the exclusive organ of a particular ethnic group, and the idea that the “national problem” could coincide with social justice, in the case of French Canada. The Church, stated Ryan in 1959, had always recognized the right of ethnic and cultural groups “to a distinctive culture and character,” and, because this was a natural right, it followed that appropriate means should be placed at the disposal of a people for their selfrealization according to this character. While the state of Quebec, like the federal state, must serve the common good above all, French Canadians were, indeed, subject to injustices within Confederation. These, however, had to be addressed not by appeals to nationalist slogans, but by “universal” means of redress, such as unions, cooperatives, and professional organizations,161 the type of “organic democracy” for which he had assiduously worked during the 1950s. He was still more inclined to accentuate the “social” rather than the “national” in the creation of a modern French Canada. Paradoxically, however, Ryan’s Roman connections made him aware of developments in the “universal” Catholic community, and these seem to have tilted his thinking towards greater sympathy with nationalism. A close observer of the decolonization struggles in Africa and Asia, he favourably noted the emergence of a “ferment of liberation and independence” traversing these continents in the early 1960s, which occasioned unfamiliar and troubling situations for indigenous Catholics in these new nations. It was important, Ryan believed, that Catholics not use their religion as a pretext to cut themselves off from “the national culture and the popular spirit.” Noting that the Church must act as an agent to accomplish “a resurrection of national culture that will anticipate political independence,” Ryan praised the desire of Catholics to collaborate with their fellow citizens in “the sacred cause of national unity,” so long as the “cult of national unity” was not detrimental to “the worship that is due to God.” In particular, promotion of national unity should never result in the exaltation of the state in a way that would imperil the rights of the Church but should aim at participation in a universal community of peoples.162 This perspective encapsulated Ryan’s hopes and fears for Quebec Catholicism at the dawn of a new age of political and social reform in the province. He earnestly desired that Catholicism remain the vanguard and inspirer of progress, preserving an organic link with nationalism, one that would allow reciprocal communication between religious and national values and



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identities, but with the Church preserving an independence from temporal ideologies and institutions. For Filion, the financial stability of Le Devoir and his own future plans made it imperative that he “capture” Ryan for the editorial room. By 1962, Filion was only a part-time director, splitting the rest of his time between Premier Jean Lesage’s Conseil d’orientation économique, the Royal Commission on Education (Parent Commission), and the vicepresidency of the Canada Council. He also desired to retire permanently from Le Devoir in order to enter the world of big business, having spent most of his life in positions that offered little in the way of financial security.163 This left only Laurendeau, the editor-in-chief, and Paul Sauriol as regular members of the editorial team. Complicating matters was that the absence of Filion from the helm had landed the paper in serious difficulties with the Catholic Church in 1961. André Laurendeau, whose religious views had, during the 1950s, developed quietly in an agnostic direction, had had the audacity to publish, in serialized form, the letters of Frère Pierre-Jérôme (Jean-Paul Desbiens), a Marist teaching brother who had acerbically criticized the teaching of the French language and humanities in the church-run collèges classiques. Laurendeau had taken this decision over the explicit protests of Cardinal Léger, who had wished to suppress “Frère Untel” (Pierre-Jérôme’s pseudonym) and spirit him off to Rome to be disciplined by his order. More galling to the cardinal was the fact that, when Frère Untel reprinted his letters in what became a best-selling volume, he had the effrontery to dedicate them to Laurendeau, who contributed a signed foreword.164 Readers would naturally conclude that Le Devoir was an official mouthpiece of the emergent critique of confessional education and the Church’s presence in directing FrenchCanada’s educational and social institutions. In addition, the religious authorities and many within Action catholique feared that, in the debate on public education that was galvanizing Quebec, Laurendeau’s sympathies lay with the secularization of the confessional school system and the removal of the Church from any decision-making influence.165 While Laurendeau could pose as the “white knight” of religious freedom, his decisions left Filion facing a financial mess. While Filion had succeeded in rescuing Le Devoir from its near-moribund condition in the late 1940s, he had not restored financial stability. Despite increasing circulation, the paper faced a deficit of $200,000. Of its 33,000 subscribers, some estimated that 16,000 were members of the clergy and religious orders. Publication of Untel’s polemics had irritated these individuals to the point where many were considering ending their subscriptions. Filion

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combatively claimed that clerical subscribers totalled only 4,000 or 5,000 thousand,166 but this was whistling in the dark because the clergy was a constituency that Le Devoir simply could not afford to lose. What better tactic, then, than to appoint as editor a man like Claude Ryan, a Catholic militant whose allegiance to the Church was beyond reproach, who was the confidant of Cardinal Léger and had close and friendly contacts with the group of subscribers most alienated by Laurendeau’s anticlerical antics? When Filion renewed his offer to Ryan in April 1962, they quickly came to an agreement, despite their clear differences over nationalism. Ryan was not going to concede that a Quebec-centred nationalism took priority over his own primary allegiance to Canada, but it seemed that the two men accepted to work within their differences. Filion told him: “You have many things to teach us about the religious point of view, and, from the perspective of Quebec, you can perhaps learn from us. We will try to educate you about Quebec, and you can educate us about religion.”167 The die was cast: Ryan would leave the direct service of the institutional Church to serve the wider cause of Catholicism as a public intellectual engaged in interpreting temporal reality. He moved from the deferential world of bishops and clergy to the far more rough-and-­ tumble, bustling immediacy of the newsroom on Rue Notre-Dame, where, as he wrote in his opening editorial on 5 June 1962, “the director, the editor-in-chief, and the other collaborators” of the paper “welcomed me like a brother.”168

6 “Deus Quod Operatus in Claudio Ryan” Springtime in Church and State, 1962–1964 Who is this Irishman who has become a nationalist? T.R. Gérard-Marie Coderre, Bishop of Saint-Jean

Claude Ryan’s entry to Le Devoir was not on the ground floor, as a lowly news reporter scuffling for stories, but was marked by an immediate ascension to the prominence of the editorial desk. The fraternal welcome accorded him by Gérard Filion and André Laurendeau, the chief intellectual celebrities of postwar French Canada, was, in Ryan’s own eyes, a testimony to his own stature as a public intellectual that equalled their own, a recognition for his many years of service in the cause of promoting a Catholic civic democracy in French Canada. Such recognition added to his obvious delight at realizing his ambition of uniting Catholic conviction with modern media. However, his departure from Action catholique after a prominent career lasting seventeen years required some public explanation, not least because a number of leading militants profoundly regretted his departure. In the words of one, he left the movement without a firm guiding hand, exposing it to being torn between “sentimental flights” and “minds that are more opportunist than profound.”1 His opening editorial on 5 June 1962, significantly entitled “Premier contact,” reassured his former constituency that he regarded his new vocation as but a prolongation of his work in Action catholique. Indeed, “contact” had been one of the watchwords of his efforts in the late 1950s to create a new group of self-confident lay militants, and it resonated with his twin emphases on the interiority of intense spiritual cultivation and the linking of religious imperatives to a renewed sense of public engagement and purpose as the foundation of modern democracy. Yet, what journalism offered was “immediacy,” a “quickness of adaptation” in

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the face of “the scope and rhythm of current events,” qualities that Action catholique had lacked because it was, after all, part of the institutional Church. This did not mean that he ceased to be a spiritual militant whose aim was to transform French Canada into a new Christendom. Journalism, he maintained, offered merely a different emphasis: those who continued under the rubric of Action catholique would continue to work “in depth,” while those like himself would “work extensively, unceasingly patrolling the world scene, in order to understand and to orient its movement.”2 Ryan adduced another, more compelling public motive that lay behind his career change. This was his desire to play the role of linch-pin and interpreter in the encounter between Catholicism and the forces of secularization. The latter were most evident in a rising tide of state-centred nationalism among the political classes and intellectuals of Quebec, and his arrival at Le Devoir occurred at the precise moment of the political intensification of the Quiet Revolution. During the summer of 1962, the cabinet of the Liberal government of Jean Lesage, pushed by the charismatic minister of natural resources, René Lévesque, was engaged in an internecine feud over a proposal to undertake a daring program of nationalization of private hydroelectric power companies.3 More troubling for Catholics like Ryan, an ongoing royal commission investigating education, chaired by Mgr Alphonse Parent, provided opportunities for opponents of confessional education to voice and secure public credence for their criticisms of the Church. Secularism could no longer be marginalized as an “alien” ideology confined to a few psychologically disturbed malcontents. As expressed by movements like the Mouvement laïque de langue française, which included a number of progressive Catholics, it had become open and increasingly respectable, so much so that some intellectuals were questioning the automatic equation between “French Canadian” and “Catholic.”4 The language of religious crisis, which in the 1950s was a discourse confined to the ranks of the clergy and Action catholique militants, had a far broader currency by 1962, with the risk that the place of Catholicism in French-Canadian society would become a source of political tension and that the unity of the Church itself might be sundered by secular ideologies. It was not surprising, therefore, that Ryan opened his editorial career by invoking Cardinal Léger’s characterization of “our religious crisis” that had transformed the French-Canadian milieu over the past several years. Given the divisions Ryan discerned within the intellectual community about the interface between Catholicism and francophone Quebec’s educational and social institutions, he warned his readers that



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it would be impossible for a society to traverse such a crisis by relying upon ready-made, authoritative answers such as those that old-time schoolmasters proffered in response to awkward queries from their pupils. What was required, in his estimation, was the intervention of a new type of journalist-intellectual, one who exercised a “moral magistracy” over the opinions and behaviour of his contemporaries, a status that henceforth carried with it “greater influence than that of traditional magistracies, that of the clergy included.”5 Ryan was, in fact, outlining a new source of authority in his society, in which public intellectuals commanding a media platform would supplant even the most senior clergyman in providing guidance for the moral dilemmas of their contemporaries, especially in the nebulous borderland between politics and religion. Leaving Action catholique for journalism was, for Ryan, not an admission of failure to transform Catholicism from within but a triumphant vindication of the status of the Catholic layman, and the affirmation that, henceforth, his own public influence would trump that of any cleric, his old master Cardinal Léger included. As a new breed of Catholic journalist-intellectual, he was subject to the strictures of Christian conviction, one that enjoined as its primary virtue an attitude of “spiritual openness and detachment” that fostered “an openness to men and events.” Echoing the motto of Action catholique “Voir-Juger-Agir” (See, Judge, Act), Ryan advanced a journalistic credo that accentuated the arts of observation, listening, and exchange with others before pronouncing judgment. The key, in his estimation, was an orientation “towards dialogue, towards the search for truth in charity. Anything that closes [a journalist] off from dialogue is a refusal of the sweetness of the Gospel … and is not even effectual on the human level. By closing one’s eyes to reality, one is unable to ‘grasp the problems,’ to see them in their fundamental reality.”6 Le Devoir, the newspaper that, as an adolescent in college, he had contemptuously disdained to read because he considered it the “obligatory reading for the simple souls of that era,” was now, as he had become more and more engaged with studying the problems of French-Canadian life, the privileged vehicle for launching and sustaining this dialogue. The paper he loftily proclaimed “a guide of our collective conscience” because of its independence from business, the institutional Church, and political interests. This quality made Le Devoir the “lodestar” of the Canadian press, renowned for welcoming diverse opinions to its columns and editorials, accompanied by a seriousness of purpose and stylistic vigour. More important, its independent status allowed its journalists the detachment necessary to navigate the cultural crisis of French Canada. The

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paper survived, proclaimed Ryan, “only because of the lively support of the most responsible elements of the French-Canadian community.”7 But from the outset, he was conscious that he brought a new and potentially disturbing element to the editorial page, one that more “secular” figures like Filion and Laurendeau did not entirely share. This perspective derived from his intimate acquaintance with Catholic theology as a foundational intellectual discipline, one that went beyond private conviction or, as was the case with his editorial colleagues, a commitment to Catholic values as an anchor of the national “heritage” in an environment characterized by rapid change. For Ryan, because Christianity was a dynamic element in all human cultures, Catholicism, while incarnating the values of French Canada’s past, emphatically oriented Quebec society to the present and future. Theology allowed him to discern and communicate to his contemporaries the deeper connections that he believed existed between religious belief, as the primary vector, and socio-political ideologies, especially those of federalism and social democracy. This particular orientation was encapsulated in his promise of a double fidelity. The first was to the “‘modern’ tradition” of Le Devoir, as articulated by Filion and Laurendeau, in which nationalist aspirations were embodied, for Ryan, first and foremost in a spirit of an organic social democracy, rather than in merely increasing the power of the state. The second was to the counsel of “a venerated spiritual leader,” Cardinal Léger, reflected in a commitment to explicate and promote, to his contemporaries, the universal values of Catholicism,8 which underpinned, informed, and corrected the tendencies of all secular ideologies.

“A guide of our collective conscience”9 Ryan missed the excitement of the 14 November 1962 provincial election, which triumphantly endorsed the Liberal government’s nationalization of a number of private hydroelectric companies and thus shifted French-Canadian society in a more decisively statist direction. He was in Rome, covering an event of global proportions that trumped politics at home, one that not only profoundly affected the Roman Catholic Church but also dramatically influenced the entire Christian world. This was the opening of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) by Pope John XXIII, whose desire to open a dialogue between the Church and certain aspects of modernity had, since his accession in 1958, given scope to a nebulous but exceedingly powerful climate of hope for immediate and profound



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spiritual transformation and institutional renewal among Catholics. This climate of expectation was furthered by the pope’s own pronouncements, which deployed images of “spring” and a “new Pentecost” to trumpet his new initiative.10 In French Canada, the impact of this moment in the history of Roman Catholicism was felt in a more significant way than in any other society in the Christian West, because of the particular vision, forged by intellectuals like Ryan during the 1950s, that Quebec society could be both homogeneously and integrally Catholic and at the cutting edge of modern ideological and cultural developments. As a result of this pre-existing intellectual and cultural dynamic, Vatican II and the cultural, social, and political experiments that conjugated democracy, nationalism, and social reform associated with the Quiet Revolution were more than simply coincidental. Between 1962 and 1964, they mutually drew upon, reinforced, and amplified one another to create a bewildering climate in which religion and politics, rather than moving apart into their conventional “modern” compartments, operated in a context in which the boundaries between the two were quite porous. Both articulated utopian ethics that enabled their devotees to tack back and forth between Catholicism and “secular” ideologies like nationalism, federalism, and social democracy in a way that frequently blurred their respective meanings and greatly complicated the ways in which francophone Catholics in Quebec conceived and lived the experience of secularization. Viewed from this perspective, Ryan’s recruitment as a member of Le Devoir’s editorial team was highly prescient on Gérard Filion’s part. Not only had Ryan laboured to redefine Action catholique as the crossroads between religion and modernity in his society, but he was one of the few laymen in French Canada who could legitimately claim to be a Vatican “insider,”able, through his personal access to both Quebec bishops and papal officials, to decode the often byzantine machinations of Roman ecclesiastical politics while maintaining the impartial and detached demeanour necessary to the discourse of modern journalism. Of perhaps greater significance, Ryan also possessed an intimate grasp of the key issues that were on the agenda of Vatican II, because, as president of Action catholique for the Archdiocese of Montreal, he had been closely involved with a spate of pre-conciliar background studies and consultations – a dialogue between clergy and laity – a process ongoing in Quebec since 1959, the most far-reaching and comprehensive of such preparations undertaken anywhere in the Catholic world.11 Indeed, Ryan had edited a volume of these discussions, soliciting a heavyweight roster of contributors, including Cardinal Léger and, from Italy, Cardinal

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Giovanni Battista Montini, who, in 1963, was to succeed Pope John XXIII as Pope Paul VI.12 A major side effect of these preparations was the sheer multiplication of religious information, with an unceasing stream of pastoral letters, public declarations by bishops, and articles in diocesan newspapers and religious periodicals. Once a firm date for the inauguration of Vatican II was announced, the Canadian Catholic Conference (CCC), the umbrella organization of anglophone and francophone bishops, whose members would all be in attendance in Rome, faced the critical difficulty of both regularly communicating with the faithful back home and ensuring reliable coverage of the council amid the horde of global media that had descended on Rome in eager anticipation that sensational news might transpire. Convinced that the council would be of brief duration, the Canadian bishops had brought with them neither theological experts nor a secretariat. Initially, their arrangements for reliable media coverage were quite rudimentary, limited to Father Émile Legault, the accredited correspondent of the C C C , and Radio-Canada’s Gérard Lemieux, responsible for occasional radio commentary on the council’s deliberations. By late July 1962, as the date for the opening of Vatican II drew closer, the C C C recognized the need for more effective arrangements and decided to collaborate with the Canadian Press (C P ) news agency to provide information to Canadian dailies. At this point, only Montreal’s La Presse, French Canada’s largest newspaper, had the financial means to have its own correspondent in Rome.13 Fearing that lack of ability to manage the news would force them to rely on American, British, or French news agencies – thus marginalizing their own contributions – a group of bishops asked Mgr Gérard-Marie Coderre, bishop of the suburban diocese of Saint-Jean, who had worked closely with Ryan in Action catholique during the 1950s, to contact Gérard Filion requesting him to send Ryan to Rome as a correspondent under the auspices of CP . After some financial bargaining, Filion agreed to a joint arrangement in which the CCC would pay Ryan’s full travel expenses and pick up half his salary of $158 per week, and Ryan would provide the bishops and CP with the news articles they required. However, Filion insisted that, once a week, Ryan be allowed to submit one exclusive article to Le Devoir.14 According to Réjean Plamondon, the C C C ’s director of social communications who replaced Ryan for the second and subsequent sessions of the council, Ryan’s nomination was both good and bad – good because of his intimate contacts with the inner Vatican world and the trust in which French Canada’s bishops held him, but bad because of the intense competition



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among Quebec’s francophone dailies, which ensured that major newspapers such as La Presse refused to publish Ryan’s contributions in their columns, seeing him as merely a “special envoy” of Le Devoir. For his part, Ryan was not above using his own close connections with the bishops to “scoop” his rival, Marcel Adam, the correspondent of La Presse, who complained frequently about these underhanded practices.15 Read closely, Ryan’s commentaries on the events unfolding in Rome were somewhat paradoxical. His intimate knowledge of the history and theology of the Church and, in particular, his close acquaintance with Cardinal Newman’s organicist theories regarding the development of doctrine induced him, on the one hand, to puncture overly celebratory views, what he termed “the angelic vision” that world Catholicism was in good health. Only 16 per cent of humanity claimed allegiance to the Church, and of these, many were “Catholics in name only.” The principal challenge facing modern Catholics, Ryan maintained, was an intellectual one, in which the Church had to communicate its message in the face of “a curtain of resistance” that operated even within the Catholic community, an indication that “the development of human history now seems to take the bulk of its inspiration from sources external to the Church.”16 However, in his assessment that the key issue facing the council was “the achievement of an effective rapprochement between Christianity and modern man,” there was no doubt that his sympathies lay with the emerging “progressive” element within the leadership of the institutional Church. Based on his network of contacts within the Church hierarchy and Roman officialdom, he quickly discerned the emerging lineaments of two “spiritual families”: a “traditional wing” and a “moving wing.” The former, representing those who viewed the modern world as filled with “evils, errors, and pitfalls,” sought, by reaffirming the transcendence and rights of the Church, to keep doctrinal orthodoxy intact as a means of resisting and openly combatting modern ideologies; the latter group evinced greater confidence in modernity. For the proponents of “motion,” the cultures and ideologies of the modern world were not antireligious. Rather, in them, they discerned “a profound anxiety and an immense goodwill,” symptoms of “an authentic yearning for the infinite, a desire for justice, of freedom and truth.” For them, and for Ryan, it was incumbent on the Church to present “a humble and fraternal face,” a strategy that afforded the opportunity to “renew those aspects of the Church that modern men viewed as old and obsolete,” thus enabling Catholicism to “welcome all the germs of truth and goodness that the modern world contains.”17

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Although Ryan was quick to remind his readers that the differences between the two tendencies within Catholicism were often ones of emphasis rather than expressions of fundamental disagreement over doctrine, there was no doubt that he was a partisan of far-reaching change within the Church. He was too much a disciple of Newman to expect the complete triumph of one party over another, but he was adamant that many of the difficulties confronting modern Catholicism were rooted in the fact that, in the official spheres of the Church, the “traditionalist” party had held exclusive sway for over a century. The emerging conflict, due to the rise of a “more ‘liberal’ current” over the past generation, should not be read as a sign of weakness, but rather, the marker of “health and as the promise of renewed vigour.” Given his commitment to dialogue as the way to achieve concord in both the Church and society, he expected the council to thrash out critical differences and make difficult choices over the formation of priests, the style of authority to be exercised in the Church, the reform of finances and administration, the orientation of preaching, the place and role of the Church in civil society, and, most crucially, the insertion of the gospel message into modern social structures. The council’s significance would lie “not in the artificial extinction of divergent points of view, but in their loyal confrontation.” But there is no doubt that he shared, to a considerable degree, the high expectations of his contemporaries that this was a moment of significant transformation for Catholicism, in which it would reacquire the power to dynamically influence human life, “to precede man rather than waiting in sterile hope for his return to religion.”18 Writing from his official correspondent’s perch in Rome, Ryan occasionally reminded his readers that the history of the Church demonstrated the wisdom of caution: the orientation of Church councils was frequently sidetracked by unpredictable historical circumstances, and the fact that three-quarters of the 3,000 prelates attending Vatican II belonged to the traditionalist faction would ensure that there would be no revolutionary transformations for which the Church was not ripe.19 There would, he reminded his readers, be no final triumph of either progressive or traditionalist factions at the council. Liberal and conservative tendencies were both necessary to the health of the institution – the latter, Ryan believed, were not “stupidly reactionary” because these ideas, by insisting upon the essential role of fidelity as an element of “indispensable continuity with the past,” could ensure the unity of the Church at a critical moment. However, he was adamant that, at this juncture, giving scope to liberal elements through a process of dialogue lay at the core of



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“a mysterious osmosis that will finally touch all aspects of the life of the Church, and by which new ideas will make their way in the Church.”20 He quickly ingested the euphoric atmosphere that prevailed in the early sessions of Vatican II, a “dramatic element” that led him to shed any impulses towards caution, fully imbibing the “springtime” rhetoric that surrounded the council.21 Not for the first time, he fell under the spell of the papacy. He read in symbolic events, like the welcome Italian political leaders accorded John XXIII when he ventured outside the Vatican, “the sign of a definitive thaw,” – the triumph of an inexorable “desire for encounter and dialogue”22 that he believed would take on transformative global proportions. The Catholic world seemed to be on the cusp of a vast “process of internal democratization,”23 one, to be sure, defined not by liberal political notions of electoral democracy, but by a concern for collegiality, a spirit of dialogue, a commitment to pastoral efficiency, all of which would inaugurate “a new climate of searching involving the entire community within the Church.”24 Given his progressive sympathies, Ryan expected that John XXIII’s call for aggiornamento would translate into not a few tepid reforms but “a virile adaptation” of Catholicism, enabling it to fully engage with modern intellectual life.25 But what, exactly, did this adaptation entail? Remember that Ryan’s thinking about the Church was profoundly marked by his encounter with Cardinal Newman, an organicist thinker who saw progress not as revolutionary transformation, or as the victory of liberals over conservatives, but as a process of the rediscovery and refurbishing of practices and institutional strategies already present in the Church but buried or forgotten over the course of time. Ryan’s great hope, then, lay not in mere innovation, but in the renewal of certain elements that had been obscured, especially since the Reformation. Given his experience in Action catholique, he applauded initiatives, such as use of the vernacular, to the elaboration of “a dynamic liturgical life at the popular level.”26 His central concern was the nature and exercise of authority in the Church, how to somehow reconcile the imperatives of universalism and unitary government, incarnated in papal monarchy, with the recognition of diversity and the legitimate expression of divergent opinions. Here, Ryan had to navigate the potential pitfalls of the old nineteenth-century battles fought between Gallicans and Ultramontanes and find a formula that would assert the universal nature of a religious institution incarnated in local and national settings. He was aware that, for the past ­century, centralizing imperatives had been dominant within the Church, with decentralized modes of authority associated with merely “national”

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or “regional” concerns, and with the voice of the laity, and therefore derogatory of the universal claims of the Church.27 Here, his exposure in the early 1950s to the “nouvelle théologie” provided an answer, enabling him to turn to “the great conciliar tradition that had never been lost, but often interrupted” in the history of the Church,28 which led him to support initiatives to rearticulate and strengthen the “collegial” responsibility and authority of both Pope and bishops, which he believed stood closer to the ancient traditions of Christianity, rather than the traditionalist insistence on a papal monarchy. In practical terms, this meant downgrading the significance of the Roman Curia and its bureaucratic tentacles, and the creation of an apostolic college, a kind of “permanent Council” whose sittings would give practical expression to the aspirations of bishops to be jointly responsible for the universal church, and the institutionalization of permanent regional or national councils of bishops to serve as conduits of formation and expression of a legitimate public opinion within the Church.29 These, in Ryan’s estimation, were no less “universal” than papal monarchy, because they had actually existed in the Church of the apostolic age. More tellingly, Ryan evoked, and applied to the divine society of the institutional Church itself, the long Catholic tradition of social thought that accentuated the centrality of “intermediate” organic structures of authority that organized, in a concerted fashion, human economic, civic, and political activity.30 This, he believed, would ensure the constant reciprocal infusion of a religiously based democratic ethos into both Church institutions and political society. In this respect, his views certainly adhered to the “Roman” trajectory of maintaining a separation between the institutional Church and the state – and therefore the primacy of the pope as a spiritual sovereign – but it actually tilted towards a more “Gallican” imperative, which insisted on a common citizenship of Catholics in both Church and state, thus maintaining Catholicism at the heart of the political life of the nation.31 Despite such fully developed ideas, it is fair to say that Ryan had but inferior talents as a reporter of world events. His articles from Rome were dense, thoughtful, analytical, and filled with a wealth of historical allusion drawn from an intimate knowledge of the obscure byways of the Vatican and the long history of the Church. These earned him the plaudits of the Canadian church hierarchy, as expressed by Réjean Plamondon, who liked that they displayed “solidity, both on the level of history and the mystery of the Church, without ignoring the greatness and weakness of the Church,” the mark of an “honesty and respect that allows us to share your love of the Church.” In those instances when his articles



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adopted a more provocative tone, the upper clergy praised Ryan for his “reasonable and mature” restraint.32 Officials of Canadian Press (CP ), mindful of the views of ordinary readers, viewed Ryan’s contributions in a more negative light. His articles were deemed too intellectual, too long, and incomprehensible to ordinary people, and he was seen as perhaps too close to the Canadian bishops to be truly critical of their activities. For example, neither he nor his anglophone colleague, Bernard Daly, exposed the ­serious differences of opinion that existed between Cardinal Léger and other members of the Quebec hierarchy.33 In the end, Ryan did not return to Rome after the first session of Vatican II in the fall of 1962. As the most junior member of Le Devoir’s editorial team, he felt that the precariousness of his new position did not allow him the luxury of prolonged absences from Montreal,34 and perhaps he himself recognized that his real vocation as a journalist lay in the more cerebral realm of analysis, rather than in reporting the news. The core of Ryan’s editorial enterprise in the heady years between 1962 and 1964 was to first discern, and then persuade his readers, that this was an era of global aggiornamento in which a similar process of democratization and internal reform governed the life of both the Church and modern states. Democracy, however, had a particular meaning for Ryan. It was not, first and foremost, an abstract set of individual rights, a mathematical equality among citizens, nor was it a mere function of the electoral process itself. As a Catholic firmly committed to a long tradition of political theology, he reconciled Catholicism and democracy by separating the origin of authority from its mode of exercise. Sovereignty was located in God, and therefore Ryan rejected theories of sovereignty founded in human consent. In his political thinking, divine authority stood as the fountainhead of democracy, because its supra-temporal character provided, in his estimation, a more secure legitimation of the right of people to choose their rulers.35 If anything, Ryan’s concept of democracy during the early 1960s tilted towards the “organic,” collectivist interpretations of this doctrine, which stressed the quality of the relationship of the citizen to voluntary associations and the state rather than the affirmation of individual rights. Such relationships operated seamlessly in local, provincial, national, and international spheres, and Ryan believed that the forging of these “organic links” was the fruit of a spirit of “overall planning” that would integrally develop the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of human societies by transcending the “dirigisme” of elites in favour of a broad-based consultation and participation by citizens.36

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Because democracy involved a complex, reciprocal, and ever-mutating relationship between the rights of the individual citizen, the participation of those citizens in a constellation of intermediate, voluntary associations, and, through these activities, the formation of a viable public opinion that would impart a dynamism to the state, then it followed that a sound democracy rested on the nature of the dialogue among individuals, organized groups, and the state. Politics, Ryan maintained in 1964, “depends far more on ideas than on interests,” and he exhorted North American political parties to transcend their overweening commitment to pragmatism, which he excoriated as the characteristic of an era in which “only the comfortable classes participated in political life.”37 The public sphere was the forum for “dignified, free, and extensive debate, in which the best intellects and the most important organizations of our society” participated.38 In the final analysis, Ryan applied Cardinal Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine in the Catholic Church to modern politics. Britain, in Ryan’s estimation, was a society that incarnated the highest level of political maturity because both Labour and Conservative parties valued “public and open” discussion of policy alternatives, thus fostering a climate in which, “within each of the two great parties, it is only progressively, through resistances that are freely and publicly expressed by members, that dominant policy positions take form.”39 He deemed this approach superior to Canadian and Quebec party practices, which sought to hide legitimate differences behind myths of monolithic unity that swept minority opinion under the carpet and, in the name of party discipline, shackled the freedom of expression of energetic and intelligent young parliamentarians such as John Turner and Ryan’s old friend Maurice Sauvé, infusions of new blood into the federal Liberal caucus from Quebec, turning these men into “screens for regimes that will soon not deserve to be considered democratic.”40 Worse still, the North American party system fostered the appearance of an external conformity to democracy while denying its substance or spirit. This was a consequence of a degenerate “hybrid democracy” in which parties were controlled by small groups and hidden interests, a situation that compromised the freedom of the people. And in Ryan’s lexicon, “hybridism” always meant the unsustainable psycho-spiritual disjuncture that occurred when external practices did not reflect the inner engagement of both individuals and groups, a tension that inevitably led to the loss of true freedom. The British political system had happily obviated this dichotomy through a commitment to intra-party freedom of dialogue, thus enabling each political formation to present “clear, pertinent,



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plausible arguments” to which the party leadership was firmly committed.41 This allowed the electorate to make an informed choice as to the future of their nation. British parties incarnated Walter Lippmann’s desideratum of a clear separation of responsibilities between government and people, preserving executive government from “Jacobin” innovations such as referenda, which confused the roles of rulers and ruled. In Ryan’s estimation, while a referendum might offer the illusion of democratic consultation, it was, in fact, an abdication of the responsibility of government that “altered the rules of the game” by radically oversimplifying complex problems.42 The chief corollary to his vision of “politics as dialogue” was a definition of political leadership in a democracy as primarily a moral and intellectual enterprise, rather than one of administration or rhetoric. Here, Ryan stood emphatically within the Augustinian concept of rule as “consulere,” the ongoing consultation and discussion that must occur between governors and governed to secure a stable and viable political order. First and foremost, elected officials were “political educators” of their constituents,43 an ongoing task that involved a gruelling round of meetings, exchange of information, and discussion that had to constantly animate both local and national political life in the interests of building an informed and active citizenry. Second, Ryan maintained that the capacity to educate, and thus lead, was a function of a seamless equation between private and public morality. Given the more relaxed climate surrounding moral lapses by politicians in the early 1960s, his commentary on Britain’s Profumo Affair – in which the Conservative minister of defence was forced to resign after allegations surrounding an affair with a prostitute who had links to the Soviet espionage services – was revealing. He emphatically dissented from the view that the only issue in the matter was one of national security, calling this hypocritical. The problem was, at root, one of “moral order,” and he sententiously quoted the New Statesman’s dictum that “we cannot in the long run divorce public morality from private morality. If you degrade one, you will end by degrading the other.” Political leaders had to possess a lively sense of responsibility, what Ryan termed “a sixth sense” in maintaining a high standard of moral conduct in their party members.44 Soon after his arrival at Le Devoir’s editorial desk, he wrote an evenhanded evaluation of Premier Jean Lesage, praising his administrative leadership but outlining a number of glaring deficiencies. The position of government leader was, he argued, primarily one of “moral influence on the community,” and in this respect, Lesage had serious shortcomings,

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especially because he had failed to surround himself with “disinterested advisers of high intellectual caliber” and had yet to advance “a coherent social philosophy”45 that could guide Quebec during an era of rapid and  fundamental transformation. In other words, despite his considerable rhetorical abilities, Lesage was an ineffective political educator because he possessed no coherent vision of Quebec society and politics through which he could enlist the energies of citizens. Judged from the standpoint of these criteria, political leadership in Canada and Quebec during the early 1960s was in a sorry state, characterized in 1962–63 by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s “lack of clearness of spirit and courage,” which had led to months of crisis and indecision within his own Progressive Conservative Party.46 He hoped for better things from the Liberal minority government that came into office in the spring of 1963, especially because the new prime minister, Lester Pearson, was highly regarded for his intellectual abilities. Despite the fact that Pearson had committed more “fumbles” during the election campaign than any of the other leaders, Ryan looked hopefully towards his “democratic spirit” and his commitment to “take decisions in light of a loyal confrontation between different points of view” presented by his cabinet.47 Pearson’s new team included prominent reform-minded Liberals such as Finance Minister Walter Gordon. Ryan might have viewed Gordon in a positive light, but his disastrous first budget, drawn up by outside experts rather than his own civil servants, earned Ryan’s opprobrium because of his seriously misconceived ideas of the relationship between Parliament and the executive, which Ryan scornfully attributed to “his nostalgic memories of the wartime one-dollar-a-year-men.”48 What political leaders did meet Ryan’s exacting standards of moral rectitude, intellectual ability, and commitment to a constant educational regime of popular consultation? Two figures stand out in Ryan’s editorials. The first was Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the British Labour Party until his untimely death in 1963, whom he held in high esteem because he was able to transcend his early image as the “glamour boy” of British politics and his roots in a narrow leadership class of intellectuals. Writing on the occasion of his death, Ryan observed that Gaitskell had differed “from most of these intellectuals through his profound and concrete love of those with whom he came into contact. He was a fundamentally good man, possessing nothing of that blind and dangerously logical sectarianism that sometimes leads intellectuals into gross errors.” His ascendancy within his party was achieved, not through compromise, but through the same method advocated by Action catholique, “intellectual integrity and



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courage,” his willingness to state his own convictions formed in the light of “an objective examination of the problem” rather than to engage in “clumsy compromises.” Although Gaitskell’s positions were frequently defeated at party congresses, his blend of intellect and moral purpose garnered him immense affection and respect, and his colleagues frequently found themselves adopting his policies after more extensive reflection.49 Then there was the American president, John F. Kennedy, with whom Ryan frequently disagreed on foreign policy issues, but whose decision to finally overcome his party’s long-standing “morbid wait-and-see” attitude to civil rights, and to propose “radical measures” to Congress, earned unalloyed praise.50 Kennedy’s assassination gave Ryan the opportunity to reflect on his legacy as a political leader, and the portrait that emerged was of a man who “knew how to trust intelligence. He surrounded himself with advisers recruited from teams within the most prestigious universities. He told American diplomats to spend less time frequenting salons and to get closer to the real problems of the world’s peoples. To the leaders of other countries, he spoke firmly but in a language stamped with deep sentiments of solidarity.”51 In Ryan’s eyes, Kennedy’s true stature as a leader was a function of his preoccupation with “the great questions of peace and freedom,” issues which he courageously confronted within his own country as well as seeking a resolution on a global scale. In this way, he was able to revitalize America, to make it a more youthful and dynamic presence in the world by breaking with the “rigidity” and “laissez-faire” orientation of the years of Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles.52 A great political leader, in Ryan’s estimation, had to not only represent the highest moral and intellectual standards, but possess an organic relationship to his own society through an ongoing commitment to a consultative form of education. This “organic” quality of Ryan’s thought was evident in wider dimensions of his thinking about democracy during the early 1960s. He drew a number of important analogies and parallels between the spirit animating Vatican II and the cultural forces driving the Quiet Revolution. As we have seen, this did not mean turning the Catholic Church from a papal monarchy into a mass democracy, but he discerned in the search, both in church and state, for new consultative structures that would connect rulers and ruled through public opinion a universal impetus towards democratization. This was an idea that he believed would renovate not only the divine institution of the Church but also the public institutions of Quebec and articulate new forms for the Canadian federation as a whole. Here, for Ryan and many of his readers, the

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renewal of the Church and the remaking of Quebec society were two sides of the same coin. More significantly, he believed that a series of reformist measures then underway in Quebec made French-Canadian society the most important site, and therefore the leader within the Canadian federation, for the full flowering of a social democratic order. However, unlike many of his colleagues at Le Devoir, Ryan read this historical conjuncture explicitly through the lens of Catholic social thought. These new initiatives in state intervention, he believed, particularly the nationalization of public enterprises and experiments in social legislation, would not be achieved through a top-down execution of blueprints produced by technocratic elites; rather, they would be the expression of an organic public opinion actively engaged in planning and effectively organized in new structures of consultation, thus giving institutional form to a new type of politics and style of political leadership. Because, in Ryan’s estimation, social democracy ultimately derived its legitimacy from Catholic social teaching, social democracy would offer Quebec – and by extension Canada – a new basis of social cohesion and authority, thus incarnating his old dream of a new Christendom. Since the election of a Liberal government in Quebec City in June 1960, Le Devoir had largely shed the combative style that had characterized its years of vocal opposition to the policies of Maurice Duplessis. While not uncritical of some of Premier Lesage’s initiatives, its editorial team generally supported the reformist measures of his government, particularly as Filion and Laurendeau had themselves advocated some of these policies during the 1950s. However, as a Catholic newspaper, Le Devoir found itself in a situation that, on the surface, appeared ambiguous – giving support to new forms of state intervention and expansion of the capacities of the provincial government while still cultivating a clerical constituency that ostensibly adhered to the tradition of Catholic social thought that, since Pope Leo XIII, had enunciated a limited role for the state, assigning it a “subsidiary” role in modern economic and social life. In 1962, with the government under considerable pressure to nationalize private hydroelectric companies, there was concern in the editorial room that opposition elements, and especially the new leader of the Union nationale, Daniel Johnson, might employ the conservative implications of Catholic social thought to galvanize resistance to more aggressive forms of state intervention. Claude Ryan was Le Devoir’s secret weapon – someone intimately familiar with the twentieth-century developments in Catholic social thought who could both refute Johnson and ensure the alliance of Catholicism with the cause of progressive reform. His first sally into this



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potential minefield was a 30 August 1962 editorial commenting on a Johnson speech at Louiseville, where the leader of the Union nationale had evoked Catholic social theory to inveigh against state intrusions such as hospital insurance and free tuition in colleges and universities. Johnson argued that the state had but an “auxiliary” role, confined to “filling the holes” left by private enterprise.53 Ryan heaped unmitigated scorn on what he dismissed as half-baked notions, forcefully declaring that the Catholic doctrine of “subsidiarity” of the state could not be used as an excuse for inactivity by the public authorities. Indeed, he told his readers that the measures that Johnson opposed were not “socialist invasions” but “could easily … be viewed as an aspect of a search for justice inspired by Christian thought. They are nothing more than mechanisms, invented by modern administrators and governments, aimed at assuring to all citizens, under the most worthy forms possible, a perfect equality of opportunity in the fields of health, welfare and education.”54 Fresh from a long career of interpreting Catholic social teaching to audiences throughout Quebec, Ryan was, of course, acutely aware that this was not a static body of precepts, but one that had undergone significant, if subtle, change. He was a close reader of a study written by two French priests, Fathers Jean-Yves Calvez and Jacques Perrin, that examined the trajectory of papal social teaching from Leo XIII to the end of the 1950s. Calvez and Perrin were quite explicit that the Church had to ensure that, while economic life was subject to moral law – which distinguished between economic societies, such as business enterprises and unions, and political society, the state – it was also concerned with the temporal prosperity and social welfare of people. National economies, they believed, were not simply subject to the workings of impersonal economic forces, and “free competition” was not an effective principle of either national or international economic organization. In their estimation, the state had a critical role in maintaining a balance between these forces and in ensuring social justice for all citizens. Thus, the Catholic principle of “subsidiarity,” while still applicable in describing the organic relationship between the state, the individual, the family, and economic and social organizations, was not to be interpreted to mean that the state should intervene as little as possible. Indeed, the expansion, throughout the twentieth century, of notions of what constituted the common good and social justice also implied an expanded role for the state. In the final analysis, Calvez and Perrin were adamant that “subsidiary” did not mean “secondary,” as this term referred only to the relationship between the state and other societies, not to the nature of the state itself.55 Progressive

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Catholics like Ryan were further encouraged by Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical, Mater et Magistra, which did not alter any essential elements of Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum novarum, but recognized the differences that had emerged between forms of state intervention driven by ideology and those that were practically motivated. Socialism now ran the gamut from Marxism to pragmatic democrats such as Willy Brandt, Pierre Mendès-France, Tommy Douglas, Jawaharlal Nehru, and members of the British Labour Party, and the pontiff recognized the importance of distinguishing between these various forms. The pope coined the term “socialization,” a recognition of the interdependence of human forms of economic and social activity, to proclaim that, in recognition of the fact that “there is a close solidarity linking together all sectors of the economy,” new forms of state intervention were warranted by the conditions of modern life. This view apparently moved the Church’s economic teachings closer to the kind of reformist social liberalism then current in most Western democracies, in which the expansion of the state was viewed more pragmatically, as a legitimate way to meet the Church’s imperative of social justice and human needs for better health, education, and social welfare.56 Speaking in 1963 on the occasion of a new papal encyclical, John XXIII’s Pacem in terris, Ryan urged Catholic citizens to avoid “an attitude of systematic withdrawal” in the face of new forms of state intervention, but rather to fully engage with “historical movements whose goals are temporal,” such as democratic socialism. Here we see at work Ryan’s commitment to the seamless equation of Catholicism and democratic citizenship. While the “primitive socialism” of class struggle, rejection of private property, and a materialist vision of the world remained unacceptable to the Church, he reminded his listeners that socialist ideology rarely existed in its pure state. It was important to heed the pontiff’s message that, because many forms of socialism had either shed their anti-Christian tenets or actually took their inspiration from Christian doctrine, there were types of “social democracy that present no serious difficulty for open-minded Christian thinking.” Only the active presence of Catholics in these political and economic movements could ensure their alignment with Christian moral and social imperatives. However, in Ryan’s view, these more flexible social teachings did not invalidate the principle of subsidiarity: it remained true that those functions that individuals and inferior groups could accomplish for themselves should not be transferred to superior bodies or to the state.57 Thus, his definition of social democracy remained inflected with the



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“organicism” of older Catholic theories of politics and society: he described the equilibrium between state and voluntary associations in organicist evolutionary language, as “a constant adaptation to new forms of life and civilization that succeed one another.”58 In the early 1960s, his analysis of the situation faced by both Canada and Quebec indicated a commitment to a form of organic democracy that placed far more stress on the prerogatives of the state and the need to expand the scope of public authority. Like his editorial colleagues, Ryan urged patience with the string of budgetary deficits contracted by the Lesage government, as these underwrote a marked expansion of the capacity and infrastructure of the provincial state. “To increase the debt in exchange for lasting improvements in our social equipment,” he wrote in 1964, “is to practise the only type of politics that is appropriate to a modern government.”59 Shortly after his arrival at Le Devoir, he wrote a thoughtful editorial about the conflicts over the introduction of a provincial medicare scheme in Saskatchewan, which had pitted an organized profession, the doctors, against the authority of the state. He was critical of the social democratic N D P government for trying to curb the autonomy of the medical association, which he considered the legitimate voice of the doctors, and therefore, according to Catholic social theory, one deserving of representation and consultation. He declared that a key characteristic of “a realistic and democratic legislation is the respect that it shows for intermediate organizations, which, standing between the State and the citizen, can generally assure more effectively the solution of certain problems.” However, he was adamant that the government was correct in insisting on a universal scheme that would abolish the means test, and that its struggle to achieve this goal had rendered a service to the entire country: The position of the government on this crucial point has happily been upheld. It is the explicit recognition of illness as a social fact. This premise leads inevitably to the abolition of the “means test”… the recognition of the fundamental equality of all citizens in the face of illness. The position of the doctors is the equivalent … of considering illness first and foremost an individual fact, in which the state should merely correct certain causes or consequences pertaining to the social order.60 He also championed state involvement in the cultural realm. From the perspective of a cultural activist concerned to maintain both Canada’s

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independence and a visible entity that championed French-Canadian ­culture in North America, he looked with disfavour on underhanded attempts to nibble away at Radio-Canada’s priority in the fields of radio and television and was especially exercised by federal government schemes to institutionalize competition between public and private telecommunications enterprises. This not only worked against the interests of a number of regions in Quebec that, in the early 1960s, as yet had no access to television services from Radio-Canada, but also mistakenly failed to recognize that “Radio-Canada plays a role of ‘leadership’ and general inspiration on the national level, and private stations complete this necessary role by meeting local needs.”61 Ryan feared that the degradation of the role of the state in this field was not an isolated incident, but was indicative of a more insidious social philosophy, in which “the philosophy of private enterprise can be purely and simply transposed into government administration.”62 His collectivist convictions were also apparent in a 1963 editorial written on the arcane subject of taxation reform, which he elevated to the level of “a philosophy that must animate the individual and social life of a people,” proclaiming that fiscal policy must be founded on “a precise concept of man,” one that, in the modern era, must move beyond the liberal shibboleth of treating the individual as an autonomous unit.63 Ryan’s political lexicon owed more to a Catholic inflection of a diffuse “social-liberal” ethic than to actual incarnations of social democracy. This was a surprising turn, given his youthful militancy in the CCF in the  1940s and the excitement of the launch of its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP ). However, he remained somewhat sceptical of this new political formation. He opined that, unlike its predecessors, the C C F and its Quebec wing, the Parti social démocrate, it had a real opportunity to make electoral gains among French Canadians. Yet, it did not seem to reach beyond “the ‘new’ middle classes” of intellectuals, directors of social agencies and movements, teachers, white-collar workers, public servants, and students, and despite the warm support of labour leaders such as Jean Marchand, the secretary-general of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (C SN), actual workers appeared to be unresponsive to its message. He praised the realism, incisiveness, and vigour of the party’s new leader, Tommy Douglas, but viewed its importation of “American and western Canadian electoral customs,” which enlisted marching bands of teenagers and performances by musical celebrities, to be unpersuasive and lacking in serious purpose.64 Ryan’s concern was that, with the NDP positioning itself to address a middle-class constituency, Quebec’s working



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classes were far more likely to support that advocate for the “French Canadian ‘underdog,’” the Social Credit Party, which surpassed the N DP in terms of seats from Quebec in the federal elections of 1962, 1963, and 1965, and garnered nearly a third of the popular vote in Quebec.65 Ultimately, while praising the significance of the Saskatchewan experiment with socialism, Ryan considered social democratic parties a thing of the past, wondering whether “a labourist type of socialism has any future in North America.”66 Ryan’s social-liberal creed did not require the existence of an actual socialist party, as the Liberal Party of Quebec seemed poised to carry out those measures of state intervention and the reorganization of society on democratic lines that promised intellectuals of his stamp the possibility of transcending capitalist social arrangements. In the early 1960s, “planning” was the watchword of the reformist political classes and intellectuals of Quebec. Application of the French model of a planned economy was an expression of nationalism, the key to both the province’s future prosperity and the recovery by French Canadians of key sectors of economic life that were under the control of Anglo-Canadian or American business. Between 1960 and 1964, the Lesage government undertook a number of initiatives – such as the revival of the Conseil d’orientation économique and the creation of the Société générale de financement and the Caisse de dépôt et de placement – that appeared to indicate a new public commitment to practices of economic planning.67 These reformist experiments earned high marks from Ryan, who characterized them as “a good tonic” inaugurating a new era of collaboration and consultation between government and economic interests, and enabling French Canadians to enter into “a ‘corporate’ age for which our long traditions of economic individualism have ill-prepared us.”68 With these new institutions, Ryan believed that Quebec had finally entered an age of planning, which he defined as “a collectivity’s act to submit the decisions of physical and moral persons to coherent objectives brought to a successful conclusion.”69 Ryan’s advocacy of planning drew from a number of impulses – from the conjunction that had emerged in the early 1960s between nationalism and social democracy in Quebec and from a Canadian nationalism that sought to resist the forces of continental integration. The growing liberalization of international commerce, he estimated, would only increase Canada’s economic “servitude; thus, the country required sustained planning by public authorities to exercise a more direct control over the movement of investments.”70 Functioning within the framework of a federal system and in a context in which large

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swathes of the economy were controlled by foreign interests, both the Canadian and Quebec governments could not articulate a scheme of planning as far-reaching as that attempted in France. However, Ryan refused to accept this as an excuse for government to opt out of a “stimulating and unifying” role that emerged from “goals of action that are clearly defined, around which the forces of the nation agree to be harnessed together.”71 Despite its technocratic implications, Ryan believed that planning was the obverse of democracy, because it was an exercise involving citizens, the state, and intermediate bodies that “would put an end to the increasingly airtight compartmentalization that separates parliamentarians from civil servants and the vital forces” of society.72 This flowed from his conviction that, in a modern society, “it is impossible to define in an airtight manner where politics begins and ends.”73 He followed the French socialist leader Pierre Mendès-France, who visited Montreal in early 1963 to promote his book La république moderne, in maintaining that the scope of public authority could no longer be limited to narrowly political problems. Planning would enable Quebec to achieve “an economic and political democracy in a great modern country,” and thus avoid the fate of underdevelopment, by controlling the rhythm of growth, disposing of surpluses, and guaranteeing a more equitable distribution of material and cultural wealth. Such an overall plan would be elaborated “democratically, in consultation with the citizens and in liaison with competent authorities,” so that it would be accepted by both private enterprise and unions, who would be required to “rethink their objectives according to the post-liberal era into which we have entered.”74 Here was the clearest conjunction between an updated Catholic social theory and the hopes of a transatlantic intellectual alliance of social democrats and social liberals who believed that developments in sociology and economic knowledge, translated systematically into a planned economy, could not only obviate the ills of capitalism but could actually transcend that system, ushering in a new era of social relations.75 Aware that Quebec lagged far behind France in terms of its commitment to planning and the establishment of the structures and organs necessary to its realization, Ryan exhorted Lesage to work towards “the increasingly close interdependence of action of citizens and the action of the State, between economic action and political action,” which, while preserving the division between the economic sphere and the political sphere dictated by Catholic social theory, ensured a harmonious concerted effort in the cause of national development. As a life-long citizen of Montreal, Ryan



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identified urban planning as a critical new sphere for “rational community development,”76 which would harness the energies of citizens, private developers, social experts, municipalities, and the provincial government in ordering what had hitherto been a rather anarchic terrain of postwar growth. Indeed, it is evident that Ryan considered planning – through the cooperation of state, intermediate bodies, and citizens – the key to a viable “organic democracy.” Such planning was nothing more than a broader social partnership between individuals, voluntary associations, and the state, a partnership whose responsibility was to maintain and enhance a distinctive French-Canadian political culture in Canada and North America, one that would mitigate the dangers posed by a mechanistic and materialist individualism to a Christian mode of life. This partnership, he believed, would result from a dynamic interplay between nationalization of key enterprises, the educative and representational activities of voluntary associations that grouped the energies of individual citizens into cooperative forms of economic and civic activity, and a type of technocratic planning married to structures of popular consultation. Above all, planning was not to become the purview of technocrats and experts; it had to remain close to the life of the people through dissemination and education, which would in turn nourish and sustain new forms of civic activism.77 Such education and activism began at the local, voluntary level through cooperative efforts such as those undertaken by the Mouvement Desjardins, which, Ryan stated, enabled French Canadians to resist being sucked into the “North American capitalist waste-flow” and, of equal significance, were more democratic and “more faithful to the Christian conception of economic life.”78 At the same time, he was adamant that the reinforcement of the voluntary sector must not serve as an excuse for a “sentimental” recourse to “old themes” in which private enterprise was viewed as sufficient.79 Throughout the 1950s, Ryan had been wary of the intrusion of the state in the sphere of adult education: the imperative need to radically improve the educational levels of Quebec’s citizens dictated that “government authority” urgently “assume a role of coordination and promotion,” but caution was required to ensure that popular education would not “dispense political propaganda.”80 In the early 1960s, the boundaries between the Catholic “organic democracy” that Ryan advocated and the Lesage government’s experiments with a type of “political corporatism” were rather hazy.81 Although Ryan explicitly eschewed the label “corporatist,” there were clear

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affinities between his thinking and more democratic trajectories within corporatism that had circulated widely in Quebec since the Depression. Ryan’s perspective remained anchored in Catholic social theory, which even in the early 1960s displayed a markedly corporatist inflection, but he maintained that the initiative for new legislative experiments proceeded from the “social” sphere to the “political” order, thus ideally obviating the emergence of a top-heavy state apparatus. Thoroughly versed in the late 1950s utopianism of the “grandes missions,” which incorporated a commitment to regional and diocesan social planning and extensive consultation between church leaders and lay activists – what was termed the strategy of the “pastorale d’ensemble,” or pastoral planning82 – Ryan urged the state towards realizing an analogous “politique d’ensemble” which would be the fruit of collaboration between political leaders, technocratic experts, and organized bodies of citizens.83 Speaking in 1963, he firmly declared that in all instances, government action, whether in the form of nationalization or planning, must be the result of “an invitation by opinion,” in which organized “bodies of citizens” would be educated about proposed new policies and planning structures.84 Indeed, apart from calling for greater publicity for the actions of bodies like the Conseil d’orientation économique,85 his concern was less for the inner workings of state structures than for the quality of dialogue and participation within the organized intermediate bodies of citizens, such as unions and professions, who were the necessary interlocutors of the state under a system of “organic democracy.” These major economic groups, in his estimation, had not yet lived up to their role because they were overly preoccupied with material questions and had developed little consciousness of their broader social and educative role.86 Writing in 1963, he called for a new place for intermediate bodies, one that would surpass a merely consultative role by engaging them in active participation in the elaboration and working of state policies in particular fields. “In an age of planning,” Ryan stated, “intermediate bodies are called on to play a considerable role in elaborating and putting into effect economic, social, and cultural policies at the regional level.” He was, however, concerned to draw a distance between this type of organicism and full-fledged ­corporatism, as he emphatically maintained that intermediate bodies sought no special favours under such a system, but simply regarded it as an essential element of a “realistic democracy.”87 Under this rubric, the Société générale de financement and the Conseil d’orientation économique functioned first and foremost as experiments in popular education that would create a body of democratic public opinion organically



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linking citizens and their organization to the state and its experts. Rather than creating a hierarchical society typical of corporatism, these organizations would result in greater democratization and popular engagement with politics.88 At both a practical and symbolic level, the defining moment for the Quebec state occurred around the hotly contested issue of hydroelectric nationalization in 1962. On this score, Ryan’s position was significant because of the reasons he advanced for supporting the initiative of the Liberal government and for his implicit critique of those, including former friends, who sought to apply the brakes to the political Quiet Revolution. Ryan never wrote a published editorial on the question of hydro nationalization, perhaps because he was in Rome during the 1962 provincial election. However, a highly revealing sketch of an article exists in his private notebooks, in which he applied the tenets of Catholic social teaching to the question of nationalization. In it, he urged support for the Liberal initiative, based on the fact that it did not proceed from doctrinaire nationalist ideology or from “a statist philosophy” but, rather, from an analysis of “raw facts.” Indeed, in his estimation, Quebec in 1962 confronted a situation similar to Britain and France in 1946–47, when these countries embarked on an even more far-reaching program of nationalizing key enterprises. Ryan thus placed nationalization within a current of social liberalism that sought to reinforce the welfare state, rather than one of explicitly nationalist ideology. Far from being a socialist innovation, or an ill-advised “sentimental” nationalization, Lesage’s legislation was motivated, in Ryan’s opinion, by a concern for “the rational utilization of goods that belong to the community,” in other words, a policy well within the bounds of Catholic social teaching. More significantly, it was an opportunity for an expanded modern citizenship, part of a process of planning from which would emerge a “politics of the whole in which the whole country would be invited to participate.”89 The deployment of the language of “facts” and his concern to distance Quebec nationalism from mere sentiment was, in the first instance, designed to counter defenders of private enterprise, especially the anglophone business community and the Union nationale opposition, who had sought to torpedo the hydro nationalization as a business proposition. However, a more important adversary lurked in the background. This was Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who, since achieving a coveted post in the Faculty of Law at the Université de Montréal in 1961, had embarked on an angry and vocal opposition to what he believed was the growing conjunction of nationalism and socialism in Quebec. Trudeau considered

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Lesage’s efforts to secure greater French-Canadian control of the Quebec economy to be misplaced; he elaborated a spurious discourse, what was to become the standard hard-line federalist critique of the Quiet Revolution, in which efforts by the state to control the Quebec economy benefited only the educated middle classes and thus merely transferred the ser­vitude of the working masses from anglophone to francophone overlords.90 In 1962, in what can only be regarded as the equivalent of an intellectual temper tantrum, Trudeau went so far as to denounce all forms of nationalism, issuing a blanket accusation of “treason” to all intellectuals who endorsed nationalism, claiming that, in so doing, they had abandoned critical reason for the nebulous seductions of passion and sentiment, which could lead only to authoritarianism.91 This was precisely the type of ill-considered intervention that Ryan could not accept because, by its shrill tone, it closed off avenues of ­dialogue and cavalierly ignored that this type of state intervention could proceed both from nationalist ideology and from a Christian commitment to social justice.92 More troubling still, Trudeau apparently evinced an alarming propensity towards totalitarianism, characterizing all nationalists, including men like André Laurendeau whose commitment to democracy and federalism was as impeccable as Trudeau’s, as irrational demagogues or, worse, incipient fascists. During these years, Ryan developed a great respect for René Lévesque, the minister of natural resources and one of the most progressive members of the Quebec Liberal team. Ryan was concerned that Trudeau’s condemnation of all forms of nationalism simply played into the hands of anglophone business circles, which frequently charged Lévesque with being a sentimental ideologue or a Communist stooge. In 1963, in his first published analysis of Lévesque, Ryan praised him for exactly the opposite quality, the fact that he was not tied to any particular ideology nor was his thinking clouded by “the myth of private enterprise” or “old refrains of the auxiliary role of the State.” Here was another slap at Trudeau, whose extreme denunciations left his fellow citizens no alternative but to fall back on conservative free-enterprise ideology and consequently provided them with no intellectual levers with which to overcome the legacy of the Duplessis years. Ryan believed that Lévesque was, in fact, a victim of the ideologism – meaning a kind of knee-jerk conservatism – that had once ruled French Canada, that had paralyzed government activity by invoking “false ideologies” borrowed from “murky” sources. Here again, Ryan critiqued both Trudeau and advocates of private enterprise for lack of intellectual rigour and for engaging



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in their own form of myth making. Lévesque’s only sin had been to insist that “we not use the idea of freedom to reduce the masses of the people to servitude so that a few exploiters could profit.” His admiration for the popular minister of natural resources was evident when he identified him as the type of modern statesman who, according to the rubric of modern Catholic social thought, possessed a system of economic thinking that rested on “solid principles” but avoided undue rigidity in its application, as Lévesque still maintained that “private effort was the motor of the economic order.”93 Although Lévesque’s words and actions seemed to inject “a new element” into public life he tended, when measured against Ryan’s yardstick of sound political leadership, to rely too heavily on his instincts and was in danger of becoming a kind of “machine” that was wound up to talk incessantly. It was high time, Ryan maintained, that Lévesque should formulate for his own guidance, and “in a more clear and coherent fashion,” the “political and economic objectives that he wishes to pursue.” Serious problems that involved Quebec’s economic life and the future of Confederation needed to be addressed “not only with frankness and spontaneity, but with a conceptual framework whose scope and implications have been carefully weighed.”94 If Lévesque could marry political instinct with a thoughtful social philosophy, he would become a leader who could furnish Quebec with the type of social democratic economy and political order desired by Ryan, one that, while ­certainly according new scope to an interventionist state, rested on a systematization of public-private partnerships, underwritten in the final analysis by a firm commitment to a rational strategy of planning and adherence to the structures of an “organic democracy” that must characterize an effective modern state.

“Remaining Christian without necessarily being directed by the clergy”95 Democratization was the watchword for most French-Canadian intellectuals and the political classes of Quebec during the early 1960s, as reformist experiments sought to rapidly compensate for what they believed was the immobilism and authoritarian governing style of the Duplessis years. However, Ryan placed far more weight than did a number of his contemporaries on the notion that the achievement of greater democracy was contingent on maintaining and enhancing the connection between Catholic conviction as the source of civic values, on the one

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hand, and new forms of social and political citizenship on the other. For this reason, he was particularly interested in the series of renegotiations that occurred in Quebec in the early 1960s with respect to the scope and nature of the presence and authority of the Church in society, especially in the areas of social welfare and education. His primary concern was to elaborate ways in which Quebec could ally the apparatus of a modern state and the new scope for public authority in the temporal realm with the power of Christian values in the public sphere. The key, for Ryan, was to elucidate a process of secularization characterized by harmony and respect, rather than confrontation, one that would lead to a rebalancing of spiritual and temporal frontiers that would foster a new partnership between clergy and laity. He believed that such a secularization involved, first and foremost, respect for what the Church and its clergy had historically accomplished in creating a social infrastructure for Quebec; nonetheless, it was one emphatically intended to ensure that committed and professionally trained Catholic laity would assume the responsibilities for management and direction of all matters that constituted a vastly expanded “temporal” sphere. Ryan was ideally placed to generate and popularize such a discourse of secularization, as his entire career in Action catholique had been devoted to forging and maintaining an equilibrium between clergy and laity. Clergymen across Quebec were elated that he had joined Le Devoir’s editorial team, viewing him as a moderating and restraining influence over the anticlerical tendencies of older intellectuals like André Laurendeau. Cardinal Léger esteemed him as “an enlightened and convinced” layman who would assist “in traversing this crisis which menaces our Church and even society itself.”96 One priest praised him as “a new type of Christian” who advanced “a very modern Catholicism” in advocating a mission for the laity that took responsibility for saving the social realm, a task that had been for too long left to the clergy. Others expressed a new confidence in Le Devoir and prayed that divine assistance make Ryan’s “MINIST R Y ” in the field of journalism an authentic and fruitful one.97 Until late March 1963, when Gérard Filion left day-to-day management of the newspaper to head the Société générale de financement, Ryan remained, in his capacity as president of Action catholique for the Archiocese of Montreal, an intimate of senior members of the hierarchy like Cardinal Léger.98 However solicitous of maintaining good relations between clergy and laity, Ryan was punctilious in sniffing out and denouncing any signs of a return to the years of Maurice Duplessis, which he believed were characterized by a troublesome confusion between



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church and state. He took the occasion of one of Jean Lesage’s windy speeches at Baie Comeau, a resource town on the North Shore of the Lower St Lawrence, where the premier had clumsily proclaimed the need for closer links between capital, labour, church, and state to attain the common goal of a dynamic and prosperous Quebec. “Alas,” Ryan sarcastically observed, “we have just emerged from a period where we were able to observe the consequences of such a liaison.” Even a well-­ intentioned and profoundly religious politician like Lesage had erred seriously in blithely ignoring the proper distinctions that had to be drawn between spiritual and temporal spheres: Let each maintain in its dealings with the other a legitimate distance that does not prevent cordial relationships and the inevitable interaction of one upon the other. But please, let us ensure that these diverse elements, especially the Church and the State do not “link” themselves in inextricable alliances that are perilous for each one. From one of the two cities to the other, there is, in effect, an infinite distance that no shortcut invented by politicians can ever erase.99 At this point, the fundamental tension in Ryan’s own thinking appeared stretched to the breaking point. How was it possible to evoke Augustine’s dictum of the vast gap between the City of God and the Earthly City, but in the same breath, to reiterate his own commitment to closing that distance through a system of partnerships – the “cordial relationships” and mutual interactions that must develop in realizing the dream of a visible and revitalized Christendom? Ryan’s attempt to resolve this conundrum revealed a great deal about the heightened interpenetration of religion and politics in Quebec during this utopian era of promise that sought to realize the expectations of the Quiet Revolution. In 1962, the eightieth birthday of one of the heroes of his youth, Jacques Maritain, was Ryan’s occasion to reflect on the intellectual distance his generation had travelled. No one aged between thirty-five and fifty among the “intellectual youth of French Canada” had escaped the influence of the great Thomist philosopher, but the article implied that many of the insights of Humanisme intégral were somewhat passé.100 In particular, the early twentieth-century climate in which Maritain had sought to urgently define precise distinctions between “spiritual” and “temporal” spheres had, in Ryan’s estimation, been surpassed, first, by greater religious and cultural pluralism in Western democracies and, second, by a “more pragmatic, less doctrinaire” concept of the separation of church

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and state. Where Maritain’s program centred on the political means in which Catholic laity could defend the interests of the Church, Ryan contended that the task was less confrontational, and had become one of “participating in collaboration with men of good will in the elaboration of acceptable relationships between the Church and civil societies.”101 He estimated that the pluralism of the postwar years had functioned as a democratic crucible in which the old confrontational divide between Catholic and militant secularist had been entirely superseded, rendering older strategies like Christian political parties self-contradictory and obsolete.102 Indeed, it is apparent that, in considering the modern relationship between church and state, Ryan had largely left behind the Thomistic universe, with its search for overarching answers, in favour of more dynamic perspectives such as that offered by the young McGill University philosopher Charles Taylor, who in 1963 had written an article in Cité libre on the “secular” nature of the state. For Ryan, there was no doubt that the state had both the right and duty to intervene more frequently in social life, but such interventions must be conditioned by a fundamental respect for pluralism. The secular character of the state in no way meant that public authority should act as though religion simply did not exist for its citizens. In fact, from an Augustinian view of the more porous boundaries that existed between religious and political orders, the state had a dual obligation, first, to ensure equal treatment for all religious options and, second, “to assure to individuals equality of conditions for their development according to their religious convictions.” The application of Taylor’s “empirical spirit” to the solution of particular problems was an example of this ancient strand of Catholic theology, and Ryan praised it, rather than Maritain’s systematic approach, which essentialized the entities of “church” and “state,” as more appropriate to modern social realities because it would enable “a large number of people of different spiritual options to work together to improve our democratic institutions.”103 Ryan’s concern to engage French-Canadian Catholic opinion with this new climate of religious and cultural pluralism reflected his own growing awareness of the fact that, in the early 1960s, while francophone Quebec remained demographically an overwhelmingly Catholic society, it was more difficult to simply assume the synonymity of “Catholic” and “French Canadian.” The formation of the Mouvement laïque de langue française (M L F ) in 1961 was intended to affirm the equal civil and educational rights of agnostics and unbelievers, and, while many of its members were, in fact, Catholics disgruntled with the excessive clerical



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dominance in the sphere of public education,104 it marked a significant cultural and political challenge on two levels. First, it sought to reverse what the Church had sought to accomplish since the seventeenth century: ensuring the confessional uniformity of French speakers.105 Second, and of even greater significance, the activities of the M L F opened the door to proposals for redesigning Quebec’s educational system on purely “secular” lines, with language, rather than confessionality, as the fundamental principle of restructuring. This had a more profoundly secularist intent of making religion a purely “private” identity, removing it from the public sphere and disconnecting it from the process of forming civic values.106 A closer analysis of Ryan’s attitude to this secularist challenge revealed distinct limits to his definition of the pluralism of FrenchCanadian society, the “secular” nature of the state, and the rights of minorities. Recognizing that the nuances between secularity, pluralism, and non-confessionality were difficult to elaborate in the context of modern society, Ryan on the one hand fully endorsed the M L F ’s quest for “a religiously impartial State” and for justice in the field of education. However, on the other, he invoked Catholic political theology to remind his readers that, while the state should not accord special privileges to any religious body, “a political society in the first instance rests on the recognition of a supreme Being, a necessity that is derived from natural law.” Such a recognition in no way constituted a yearning to return to a medieval social order, as he observed that the recognition of God, as exemplified in the constitution of the most modern Western nation, the United States, while keeping church and state juridically separate, “confers an indispensable moral support upon civic life and the action of the State.” The continued close relationship between religious values and political society was even more necessary in modern Quebec, where, as he peremptorily concluded, “we live in a country composed of believers in the magnitude of 95 per cent.”107 The contrast between Ryan’s treatment of Quebec’s agnostic minority, which determinedly sought to limit their access to educational rights, and the pluralism that resulted from the presence of Protestants and Jews was a revealing one. As a Catholic thoroughly committed to both internal reform of the Church and the role of religion as integral to a democratic social and political order, Ryan believed that the Church could only benefit from the type of “positive” pluralism that encouraged an ongoing engagement with other religions. He thus supported the United Church minister Rev. Jacques Beaudon in his struggle to secure airtime from Radio-Canada for broadcasts by francophone Protestants. Ensuring that

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Beaudon, and others like him, had a voice was not only “one of the normal requirements of ecumenical dialogue” but was also a recognition, in a Canadian society that viewed itself as predominantly and explicitly Christian in the early 1960s,108 that francophone Protestants were called upon to play a critical role of “bridgehead between a largely Protestant anglophone world and a francophone world that is very strongly Catholic.”109 Similarly, Ryan pushed for equal educational rights for the Jewish communities of Montreal, urging that, in reforms to the confessional structure of education, Jewish ratepayers be exempt from paying taxes to the Protestant system, and that direct assistance from the Quebec government be given to the establishment of a system of Jewish schools. “In granting a perfect equality to those Jews who have already agreed to undertake heavy sacrifices to maintain their culture,” Ryan declared, “we will show the country the real roots that have enabled our own culture to make great strides. We will show that what we ask for ourselves we also desire for others.”110 His commitment to these new, more pluralistic socio-political arrangements was not merely the fruit of pragmatism or expediency but indicated the inseparability in his mind between religion and politics, and the priority of the spiritual as the source that formed and nourished civic values. In a letter to Naïm Kattan, the president of the Cercle juif de langue française, Ryan evoked this new climate of democratic pluralism as conducive to a more far-reaching spiritual rapprochement between “Church and Synagogue,” based on a new awareness of “the explicitly spiritual roots” that were necessary to inspire relations between Christians and Jews. Once this rapprochement had happened, Ryan maintained, “it will be easier for us to discover ourselves as brothers, not only in the spiritual domain but in all spheres of life. I believe that this idea is the only worthy one for the spiritual men of our time to work towards.”111 Ryan did not accept the ineluctable logic of the secularization that was developing in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s that posited a direct correlation between the cultural pluralism of modern societies and religious decline. In his estimation, a superficial analysis of the problem might lead to fears of a “religious syncretism or religion being reduced to an excessively low common denominator, in which the different confessions would be emptied of their substance and vital content,”112 but he did not believe that this was the inevitable fate of religion in modern society. He evoked a more optimistic North American cultural dynamic, one reinforced by the intense utopianism of Vatican II, in which pluralism stimulated churches and religious bodies to “give their members a more



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serious formation so as to enable them to bear witness to their faith among people of other beliefs whom they are called upon to encounter in their daily lives.”113 Here, Ryan used the wider public platform granted to him by Le Devoir, the leading organ of opinion for French Canada’s intellectual classes, to hammer home the message he had reiterated for years in Action catholique circles: that Catholicism required a new and more effective style of presence in the modern world, and that this could be realized only through a renewed idea of the role of laypeople. It was the “creative mediation” of the laity, “conscious of their rights as men and of their spiritual responsibilities in the world,” that would forge new, more flexible relationships between religion and the political order, that “mysterious juncture between the supernatural order and the natural order.”114 He did not ignore the risks inherent in this enterprise, the chief one being that laypeople active in the consecration of the world might become so involved in all-encompassing worldly tasks, “the tentacles of the temporal world,”115 that they would forget the need for spiritual guidance and nourishment. This situation that could be avoided only by ensuring “an intimate communion” between lay activists and church authorities, a partnership characterized by dynamic mutual adaptation that would ensure that the laity would not seek their “complete autonomy” and churchmen would be less assertive about their “right to intervene” in temporal matters.116 In Ryan’s thinking, it was apparent that, by the early 1960s, the distinctions between spiritual and temporal that had once seemed so clear had become so nebulous as to actually undermine concepts of secularization based on “differentiation” – that is, the transfer of social functions that had once been in the purview of the sacred to lay professionals117 – and to greatly complicate the notion of the political order as a secular entity. This new partnership between Catholicism and French Canada’s reinvigorated civil society could be achieved only through a serious effort by the institutional Church to imbibe the spirit of democracy and look to reform many of its outmoded internal practices. Ryan was not an anticlerical, nor did he want to suddenly remove the clergy from the responsibilities they had undertaken in the fields of education and social action by replacing them with laypeople. Such a process, in his estimation, would take many years to accomplish, and, in the meantime, it was better to work out a harmonious relationship that would effectively integrate the expertise and engagement of both laity and clergy in the interests of building new social institutions, a process that would actually lead, in his estimation, to a reinvigorated modern Christendom. However, during his

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years in Action catholique he had built up an intimate acquaintance both with the mentalities of working- and lower-middle-class social milieus, and with a wide range of intellectuals, knowledge that he used to draw the attention of clerical circles to what he described as a new era, where “the foundations of the faith are shaken more than in any earlier age.” Drawing an explicit parallel with the world of the late Roman Empire described by Saint Augustine, Ryan in 1964 emphatically declared that “we are in a phase of intellectual, political, and cultural rupture, in which the place traditionally occupied by the religious factor will be profoundly and acutely called into question.” A new and unexpected element had entered French-Canadian society, and this was a “resentment, a hatred” directed at people of religious conviction, which had not existed in “the quiet society of yesteryear.”118 Speaking in 1964 to an audience of priests involved with Action catholique, Ryan gravely observed that the “awakened milieus” of intellectuals were now far more critical of religion, first, because Catholicism continued to incarnate individualistic values and practices in an era devoted to fostering a new type of “fundamentally socialized” humanity and, second, because many now viewed authority as inherently repugnant, especially as many clergy had not shed their propensity to “dictate morality down to the last detail.” What especially alarmed Ryan was the possibility of a disjuncture between organized Catholicism and the intellectual classes of his society, signalled by a growing propensity of intellectuals and media to seize on and magnify the significance of niggling and ultimately marginal lapses of clerical conduct to bring the entire fabric of institutional Catholicism into disrepute, to identify it with bad memories and negative reactions. These developments simply served to confirm his analysis of the “spiritual schizophrenia” of French-Canadian society that he had articulated since the mid-1950s, whereby “the problem of a vacuum created by an absence of the religious factor in everyday life” rendered both intellectuals and ordinary people “insensible to the antennae emanating from religious reality.”119 In the early 1960s, Ryan remained optimistic about the possibility of a new partnership between clergy and laity that would incarnate a new understanding of both the distinct natures and close and reciprocal dynamics between spiritual and temporal orders. Writing to one clerical correspondent in early 1964, he expressed his hope that a “new equilibrium allowing religion to continue to flourish” could be achieved, despite “the present instability.”120 This relationship would, however, differ significantly from the old spiritual economy, in which the Church occupied



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large swathes of the social: it would depend far less on direct institutional intervention by the clergy and more on a positive and fraternal presentation of Catholic truth, would reconnect the religious factor with society, and would prevent French Canada from “foundering in a militantly antireligious atheism.”121 Soon after his arrival at Le Devoir, Ryan used the account of a courageous Chilean bishop who had daringly begun to transfer church lands to the impoverished peasantry to obliquely critique the burdensome wealth of the Catholic Church in a number of countries. The “revolutionary” analogy with the situation in Quebec could not be missed by readers:122 the excessive wealth of the Church compromised the religious basis of a democratized civil society, and the best policy was a voluntary divestment of “everything that is not directly related to the pursuit of its mission.” Otherwise, the risk was that it would provoke “persecution and spoliation”123 – in other words, religious division between die-hard defenders of the Church and militant atheists, a situation destructive of social peace and democratic progress. It was far better, in Ryan’s estimation, to extend the Church’s moral authority through a more humble and self-effacing posture, especially as regards temporal wealth, and to concentrate the attention of the clergy on a renewed vocation of restoring spiritual vitality through a more effectual religious education, rather than by “the frenzy of works”124 that sought to affirm the clergy’s role in French-Canadian society by multiplying buildings, educational institutions, and costly social initiatives. In 1964, the revelations of the Bouchard Commission’s inquiry into the operations of the book trade in Quebec particularly aroused Ryan’s concern, especially following scandalous revelations that publishing enterprises founded by religious orders with the specific aim of diffusing religious books had, over time, invaded the general book trade, using their tax-exempt status to cripple their “profane” competitors.125 One of the worst offenders was the Pères de la Sainte-Croix, Ryan’s old college mentors, who owned Fides, a large Montreal publishing house. Ryan used the opportunity for a balanced reflection on the relationship that had grown up between French-Canadian society and religious communities, one that he crafted with a careful eye to Le Devoir’s constituency, which included many priests and members of religious orders. He drew the sting of anti-clericalism from his remarks by declaring: The religious communities have given much to French Canada. For generations, they devoted themselves to thankless tasks, employing many who might otherwise have gotten by honourably as laypeople.

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They gave us institutions that henceforth are part of the soul of our milieu. Rare are the French-Canadian families that do not number a child, a brother, or a cousin in a religious community. Also, when we speak of communities, we are not speaking of foreign bodies, but of a reality that is part of ourselves. Some deduce from this that we must speak of religious communities with respect. I would also add that we must also speak freely.126 It is significant that much of Ryan’s praise of religious communities was articulated in the past tense, with the clear expectation that the circumstances that led to the great expansion of religious communities in the educational, medical, and social spheres were historically contingent and not destined to continue. However, at least in public, he stood firmly against certain “secularist” myths that were being propagated in the early years of the 1960s, namely, that the priests, nuns, and brothers who devoted their lives to these orders were somehow social or psychological “failures” who could not have succeeded in secular occupations, and that the institutional control exerted by these individual second-raters somehow made French Canada a psychologically damaged and culturally backward place.127 However, another side of Claude Ryan relished the opportunity to deliver a moral lecture to his old clerical tutors. He openly challenged the motivations that lay behind the rise of the institutional empires carved out by religious orders, tracing them not so much to a manifestation of religious devotion than to a structure of legal and financial collusion between church and state. While he observed that, generally speaking, French-Canadian opinion was still fundamentally sympathetic to the action of religious orders, a large part of the anticlericalism he saw at work could be explained by an overly close association between the superiors of these orders and the previous regime of Maurice Duplessis. In that era, these bodies had used the principle of community of material goods, assisted greatly by tax exemptions and other privileges from the state, to erect educational and social institutions that were distinct from the rest of society. These, in Ryan’s estimation, were incompatible with democracy and with new administrative standards based on transparency and accountability. The problem lay not in the vows of poverty and obedience taken by priests, nuns, and brothers, but in practices of “excessive discretion” that were incompatible with modern values. At a practical level, the religious orders needed to be more prudent in the area of real-estate management and to avoid contracting heavy obligations,



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and their commercial enterprises needed to be subject to the same legal norms and taxation as those of laypeople. For the future, Ryan bluntly declared that “it would be best if, frankly, they would abstain from all commercial ventures.” The urgent need was to avoid a knee-jerk resistance to transparency in the name of defending religion and “to open the doors, to associate the laity and public opinion more closely with the material life of the communities.”128 Behind his moral outrage concerning the materialistic attitudes of religious orders lay a deeper concern, to redefine the relationship between the religious communities and French Canada’s new professional middle classes by rehabilitating the prestige of lay men and women who, for many years, had been employed in colleges, schools, and hospitals managed by clergy. Lay teachers, in particular, had suffered from their status as “intermediate beings” – a dangerous spiritual, intellectual, and cultural hybridity that could lead only to a disjuncture between the Church and intellectuals who worked for, but did not have the spiritual status of, priests or religious.129 Speaking from his own personal experience, Ryan traced the major cause of this problem to the overweening priority that the colleges placed on fostering religious vocations, which had a deleterious effect on the intellectual and social development of young adolescents aged twelve or thirteen. These young people, Ryan declared, “had neither the information, nor the necessary resources” to envisage secular vocations, and when they discovered that they were not cut out for the priesthood, they were simply relegated to a marginal status in the colleges, with only a few lucky ones being able to make their way to university. He concluded that, while this system had undoubtedly generated many excellent vocations, it had, unfortunately, produced many clerics and laypeople with psychological “complexes.” Happily, the student of 1963 was coming to know himself first and foremost as a “natural man,” and, consequently, “lay vocations are regaining their normal importance in our system of education.”130 At a practical level, Ryan charged, religious orders had kept qualified laity in a precarious economic state and had a poor record as employers, and he cited some union leaders who preferred negotiating with rapacious Anglo-Canadian or American capitalists rather than with the superiors of “our religious communities.”131 The consequence was the relegation of lay professionals to a state of tutelage, and from Ryan’s standpoint, such subordinates were poorly qualified to teach their students about freedom. The prominence of the religious in directing educational enterprises only perpetuated this culture of authoritarianism, which had a deleterious effect on the

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teaching of both religious and secular subjects.132 Here, the larger issue at stake was the future of the classical colleges in a reformed system of public education, especially given the resentments surrounding the fact that the baccalaureate degree offered by these colleges was considered the sole passport to a university education. His editorials on the subject, with their evocation of cultural democracy and an overt attack on “privilege,” implicitly advised religious orders not to be too punctilious in ­trying to preserve their institutions from regulation by a democratic state. Otherwise, they would identify themselves with a mentality, from which he and his family had suffered growing up poor in Depression-era Montreal, in which “higher education was considered as a right for the bourgeoisie and a work of charity for the people.”133 Ultimately, reformers like Ryan believed that Catholicism’s destiny as the cornerstone of French Canada’s modern democratic identity rested less on the clergy’s management of an institutional empire and more on the Church’s ability to communicate its spiritual principles to younger generations in a restructured system of public education. And this, in turn, depended on reconciling the imperatives of confessionality – the organization of the school system according to a Protestant-Catholic ­division, which had characterized Quebec’s educational system since its inception in the nineteenth century – with the urgent need for the state to set priorities, control, integrate, and manage the entire system from primary school to university. Between 1961 and 1964, state and society in Quebec engaged in massive inquiry and soul searching on the subject of public education, an enterprise in which Ryan himself was an active participant and not merely an observer or commentator. Before joining Le Devoir’s editorial team, Ryan had, in 1961, been named to head a subcommittee of the Parent Commission, with the mandate to report on adult education, a task that he was eager to take on, given his long-­ standing work in civic education and his realization that 70 per cent of Quebec’s working population had less than a Grade 9 education. This situation required an intensive commitment to innovative and to wellstructured private and public initiatives, to “catch up to and also surpass” countries like Great Britain that were more advanced in the educational field.134 Ryan’s major role in the great education debate was as a moderating influence, both on the negative perception that Le Devoir had acquired among conservative Catholics and in offering his fellow citizens the reassurance that there was no necessary opposition between Catholicism and the authority of a democratic state. Indeed, between 1962 and 1964, Ryan advanced the claim that both imperatives could be



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successfully harnessed to the task of “a great endeavour to create in North America a genuine democratic Christian-inspired French-speaking community.”135 In April 1963, after nearly a year of deliberation, the Parent Commission issued the first volume of its recommendations, in which it set forth the role of new state structures that would henceforth govern public education in Quebec. Ryan’s response was written in a measured editorial, in which, on the one hand, he emphatically endorsed the key recommendation of establishing a ministry of education, a long-standing bogeyman of the clergy and of conservative Catholics. “Quebec,” he stated, could no longer afford the luxury of a system of education carved up into parallel networks that have no unity with one another.” The proposed ministry was a guarantee of both transparency and accountability, in which authority could be “fully, directly, and honestly” exercised, and in which the state was merely recovering its roles of promotion and coordination that it had abdicated to Protestant and Catholic confessional committees. More significantly, the creation of a ministry would enhance the place of education in the scheme of public priorities and contribute to “restoring” the dignity of public institutions in Quebec.136 In his positive assessment of the central role to be exerted by the state, Ryan was echoing the views of one of his early mentors, Olivar Asselin, a liberal nationalist who, in the 1920s and 1930s, had pressed, in the face of considerable clerical opposition, for a ministry of education. Despite his support, Ryan noted three major trouble spots: the proposal for a new consultative interconfessional body, the Conseil supérieur, in which the Protestant and Catholic churches, civic organizations, and intermediate professional bodies and associations of parents would have too little influence and the minister of education too much; the lack of “flexible and democratic mechanisms” that would foster the participation of citizens in the elaboration of educational policy; and, finally and most critically, the way in which confessionality would, in practice, be administered.137 In a followup editorial, Ryan offered a close analysis of the new equilibrium, one in which the Church would “unburden” itself from direct management of the system, except for delivering moral and religious instruction. “The State,” he trumpeted, “will alone take in hand the overall direction of education considered as a temporal task.” Such direction offered real advantages to both parties, relieving the Church of “charges that had become encumbering and compromising, and [obliging] the civil authority to clearly assume responsibilities that it had for a long time placed on the Church.” The Parent Report seemed consistent with the ecumenical

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spirit of Vatican II, inviting Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and members of other confessions to work together, rather than in religiously segmented compartments, for the good of the entire society. But, from both a religious and national perspective, the report had serious omissions. Had the commissioners, asked Ryan, properly thought through the consequences of moving from an explicitly confessional system to placing the overall direction of public education in the hands of a “secular and non-­ confessional” public authority? And, beyond treating the issue of language as a merely administrative consideration, could the new system really express the reality that language was “the vehicle of a culture” whose continued vitality required particular institutions?138 The Parent Report encountered a good deal of heavy weather, as a wide swathe of Catholic opinion pounced on the apparent lack of guarantees for confessionality, fearing that this was an endorsement of the militant secularism of the M L F , which sought to confine Catholicism to a marginal status within the new system. Invoking a number of papal encyclicals, these commentators insisted that there was no parallel between hydro nationalization, where the state had acted unilaterally, and public education, which was an explicit partnership between family, church, and state, the terms of which could not be altered without the state taking into account the established “rights” of parents and the Church.139 The editorial pronouncements of André Laurendeau, Le Devoir’s editor-in-chief, aroused considerable suspicion on this score. Writing shortly after the release of the Parent Report, one senior cleric feared that, with the rumoured departure of Gérard Filion from the directorship of the paper, André Laurendeau, that “figure skater” – which all readers would have understood as a slur on Laurendeau’s manhood –who had daringly exposed a good deal of clerical authoritarianism, might succeed him. As this correspondent bluntly informed Ryan, “I am not interested in supporting a newspaper that spits upon us,” but he agreed to keep his subscription so long as Ryan was able to resist the  urge to “plaster our institutions with formulae imported from Europe.”140 Ryan received warnings that Laurendeau was “engaged in destroying M. Bourassa’s newspaper and with it, Catholicism in our province.”141 Even supposedly progressive clerics viewed Laurendeau as “a baneful, insubstantial man” whose fervour extended only to “secularists, neutralists, and agnostics.” While “honest Catholics” still admired him for his services to the French-Canadian nation, they placed no trust in him for “the defence of a religious and moral order” and, in particular, feared his propensity to seize upon the “clumsiness” of the way



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Catholic apologists communicated their concerns to “ridicule the S U B S T A N C E of their message.”142 Such comments from a number of clergy aroused Ryan’s deepest fear: that the currency given to secularist opinion by Laurendeau and others would foster an inflexible militancy in defence of the “rights” of the Church in public education and thereby polarize the educational question and ultimately weaken the public authority of Catholicism. What Ryan hoped for was the “return to a more serene climate where differences will not be absent but where we can achieve agreement on a certain number of essential questions.”143 He addressed the problem in a lengthy article, typically replete with theological and historical illustrations, in which he sought to reconcile the “nationalist” motivations of the state, which now inspired the actions of many of his fellow citizens, with the abiding and overriding educative mission of the Church. The present-day context, he declared, required Catholic citizens to move beyond the legalistic calculus of respective rights, which imposed a “dangerous hardening” on the Church, which should, after all, be primarily devoted to preaching love and freedom. He impatiently dismissed those conservatives who sought to settle the dispute through repeated “citations from encyclicals” that simply boiled down to an argument from authority, a procedure discredited by the exigencies of democratic discussion. He considered recourse to arguments that simply parroted papal statements an example of present-day “intellectual confusion,” where “any bizarre improviser can erect himself as a teacher of church doctrine in the public sphere.”144 Christian citizens should best approach the problem of the school, in his estimation, from a more pluralistic standpoint, as “a social problem” involving considerable confessional interests. They should certainly take all steps necessary to defend their rights in the public sphere, but such action should avoid “useless morbidity or aggressiveness” and aim at showing the “true face of Christianity.” This implied putting into effect a social philosophy based on the priority of freedom, the dignity of the person, the safeguarding of local and regional initiatives, respect for intermediate bodies, and a sense of the interdependence of regions, classes, and peoples, all under the coordinating action of the state.145 From this wider optic, Ryan determined that the central problem with legalistic definitions of confessionality that invoked an a priori set of “rights” was that they failed to take into account the “educative dynamism of the Christian religion” and that any attempt at overly precise formulation was too constrictive, as Christianity was not a specialized department of human life. The theological reality was that both the

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Church as an institution and its individual members were called to teach, and this elevated the responsibility of Christians far beyond the mere categories of instructing young people in morality or the catechism. Indeed, Ryan went so far as to say that institutional forms of confessionality were historically contingent, and that Christianity should not be too closely identified with any historic form of its action in human society. The principle to bear in mind, Ryan believed, was that the closer the Church remained to its educative task, the greater social authority and influence it would possess. Following from this consideration, confessionality as expressed in the direct control of educational institutions by religious bodies could not be applied as rigorously as in the past. Ryan offered a surprisingly ambiguous assessment of the legacy of confessionality in his own society: on the one hand, it had “formed more anticlericals and religiously frustrated beings than any other system in the world and was poorly adapted to demanding and anxious intellects”; but, in a positive sense, “it helped form a profoundly religious people whose level of religious practice and missionary zeal is among the highest in the world.”146 The overriding question for French Canada’s future as a Christian society was how to ensure “the presence of Christianity within institutions of learning.” Here, he reckoned, lay the need for “a frank and adult dialogue” between religious authorities and “the Christian politician.” While this conversation had to be based upon the premise that the state could make no judgment regarding the philosophical and spiritual concerns of its citizens, there was still wide scope for a fruitful collaboration, as those holding public trust would make known the “normal requirements” of the state in a democratic society and listen to the requests of religious authorities. But in the final analysis, it was the politicians, and not the bishops, who were responsible for legislating, so long as such a decision flowed from “a reasonable entente between the two powers,” which alone could ensure the effective promotion of the common good.147 Above all, while claiming to be “personally unsatisfied” by the Parent Report, Ryan insisted that conservative opponents engage in a real and constructive discussion, not “impute bad intentions” to its authors, and remember that “one can be as good and enlightened a Christian” from the starting point of the sociological and administrative analysis of the needs of a modern society as from the theological optic of respect for vested rights.148 Events of the summer of 1963, however, forced him to change his tack from exhorting Catholic conservatives in the direction of  greater moderation to admonishing the Liberal government for



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attempting to shut down a broader public debate on confessionality in education when Paul Gérin-Lajoie, the minister of youth and putative new minister of education, attempted to steamroller through the legislature Bill 60, proposed legislation to establish a ministry of education and to reduce confessional influence in the education system. In mid-May 1963, Ryan had received a missive from Mgr Raymond Lavoie, a key figure in the Action catholique diocésaine of the Diocese of Quebec, saying he was “grieved” that Action catholique canadienne (ACC), the institutional expression of organized Catholic laity, had had nothing to say about the Parent Report, and thus implicitly blaming Ryan, as the past executive head of the A C C , for not taking a more overt line in his editorials to defend the Church’s educational interests. Ryan was sufficiently rattled by this critique to expose his journalistic philosophy to Lavoie, declaring that he had, in fact, implicitly formulated reservations to the government’s project, but that, given the more subtle role of the journalist, “it was better to let opinion form itself, in order to intervene more effectively later.”149 Yet, Catholic journalists like Ryan had, through their silence, allowed Gérin-Lajoie to seize the initiative with a plan whose overall scope was far more “secularist” than desired by the clergy and many Catholic parents. Although sympathetic to the government’s attempt to recover overall authority in education, and in full agreement with the overall public consensus regarding the need to articulate a more flexible form of confessionality as a key attribute of a system of public education,150 Ryan finally had to make his objections to the new legislation more apparent. It is clear that he believed that the bill was simply not ready: in particular, the government was imprecise as to both the mode of choosing the members of the new Conseil supérieur and the actual powers and responsibilities of this body; worse, the government had potentially created a dangerous paradox, in which a secular official, the minister of education, directed a confessional school system. Summing up the political situation in the late summer of 1963, Ryan considered that, while the people of Quebec certainly wanted a ministry of education to ensure “a system of teaching that was unified and effective,” they also “remained attached to religious values” and were especially concerned that “these values continue to play a central role in the education of youth. They especially want to know precisely how the religious character of education will be preserved within the new regime proposed by Bill 60.” Despite touring the province to explain his new policy, Gérin-Lajoie, as the chief government spokesman, had yet to clarify “the root of the problem,

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which is that of the relation between religion and the school in a democratic regime.”151 Quebec had chosen the way of a single public system, open to all students irrespective of belief, but one in which confessional religious teaching was still a requirement. Ryan’s comments implied a certain ambiguity: the “pillarized” institutional system that prevailed in the Netherlands,152 in his view, actually offered greater security for the teaching of Catholicism, and for the democratic rights of religious minorities, who would thus acquire their own publicly funded schools,153 but he also recognized that, in a North American society with an overwhelming Catholic majority, French-Canadian public opinion ran heavily in favour of a single public system. While the government had suggested a means of reconciling the twin imperatives of democratic public control and confessional religious education through the nomination of Catholic and Protestant associate deputy ministers of education, Bill 60 failed to define their responsibilities. At the very least, Ryan exhorted, the legislation needed amendment to allow religious authorities a voice in the nomination of these officials and to define their powers with greater precision. Only in this way could “the principle of the freedom of education” be given shape.154 “The government,” he gravely intoned, “cannot hold both ends of the string. There is one end that pertains to its competence, and that is the public aspect. There is another end that is within the competence of the Churches, and that is the confessional aspect.”155 Failure to resolve this issue would result in a fundamental and ultimately debilitating confusion between spiritual and temporal orders. Ryan called urgently for “a sort of institutional intermediary that stands between the government and the Church” to, at the very least, handle pedagogical matters.156 For Ryan, however, the reconciliation of state responsibility for education and the continued teaching of Catholic values and doctrines held a significance far beyond mere institutional arrangements. What was at stake was the entire project of a seamless equation between “Catholic” and “citizen” that he had laboured to define since the early 1950s, which would bring religion and national consciousness into a reciprocally dynamic partnership. A successful resolution of this potentially divisive public debate on education was the only way, in his estimation, to encourage greater “cultural vigour” in the French-Canadian nation, through the effective teaching of language and cultural values that would combat alarming tendencies among youth to “become Americans … who speak a jargon that at times verges towards French and sometimes towards English.” The ongoing infusion of new, democratic Catholic values that stressed communitarian



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purpose would transform the “average man’s civic Babbittry” – a bland insertion into the vacuous North American cult of individual satisfaction – into collectivist aspirations to “participate in the edification of a people who are destined for great developments.”157 Towards the end of the summer of 1963, Premier Lesage intervened in the debate and withdrew Bill 60 pending negotiations with the Assembly of Quebec Bishops. That group, in early September, demanded formal juridical guarantees of confessionality, including the re-institution of the old Protestant and Catholic confessional committees, and the right to approve those appointed as confessional associate deputy ministers. Ryan’s role underwent another mutation, from critic of the government to apologist for what on the surface, at least, appeared to be an old-style exercise in lobbying by powerful religious interests. On this score at least, he parted company with his senior colleague, André Laurendeau, who deplored the fact that the bishops had chosen not to make their position known as part of the public debate, but had intervened in a clandestine way reminiscent of the byzantine machinations they had conducted with the previous regime of Maurice Duplessis.158 Where Laurendeau viewed these negotiations as symptomatic of a “mysterious paralysis” that afflicted French-Canadian society,159 Ryan interpreted them as examples of a new religious spirit within official Catholicism, one c­ onsistent with his Augustinian theology of history in which the church hierarchy recognized the temporal order as having a key role in human salvation. The bishops’ intervention, in his estimation, was respectful of public opinion and the pluralistic nature of Quebec society, adopted “a pastoral tone of collaboration,” and, above all, was aimed at ensuring, through confessional education, the formation of a Christian laity able to “participate in temporal activity, which is the principal form of the presence of the Church in the profane realities of the contemporary world.”160 Perhaps only someone like Ryan could discern in this rather heavyhanded exertion of clerical authority a charter of freedom for the laity, but he justified the bishops’ intervention because it accorded with both the canons of Catholic theology and the exigencies of French-Canadian public opinion, which did, after all, wish to preserve confessional religious instruction. The episcopal hierarchy had acted, not to preserve “petty privileges” but in the name of the universal principle of freedom of conscience, and was therefore correct in insisting that confessionality was a “living” principle that involved more than the teaching of specialized subjects like catechism. Consequently, the higher clergy was right to insist on more visible legal guarantees that would ensure that, at the

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executive level, men whose religious views corresponded “intimately” to those of the confessional committees would direct the schools. Invoking the views of his idol Walter Lippmann, Ryan argued that law was a more secure foundation than evanescent public opinion on which to risk the future of confessionality, because it “fluctuated less than opinion, and obliged legislators and citizens to perform precise duties.”161 The result was not only a better piece of legislation, which moved closer to the “institutional compromise” that rendered confessionality and public schooling finally compatible, thus offering Quebec society “solidity and stability,”162 but it placed the Quebec state at the forefront of a new and positive definition of secularity. In the early 1960s, French Canada had turned away from the ideological secularism of the MLF, which sought to confine religion to the private realm in the name of social peace and democratic public purpose. The intervention of the Quebec bishops ensured that all religious groups possessed “the freedom to develop their action normally inside political society.” The result, in “mixed realms” where temporal exigencies met spiritual priorities, was “to seek accommodations” that were respectful both of the needs of religious bodies and of the temporal common good.163 While state and church had to be distinct institutional entities, each had a responsibility for human salvation. The great reform of education had not only laid the cultural foundation for a modern state, but had ushered in a new era of partnership between Catholicism and civil society. Not all agreed with the more “open confessionality” incarnated in the new legislation, and they blamed progressive Catholics like Ryan for conceding far too much to what was, after all, a small minority of secularists. The director of the Séminaire de Sherbrooke, Father Germain Lavallée, who claimed to support the new social agenda of pluralism, declericalization, and desacralization, concluded that the Parent Report “will accelerate the dechristianization of Quebec” – a process in which “we must resign ourselves to becoming the Church of the Diaspora.” Lavallée openly wondered why Catholic intellectuals like Ryan had countenanced a strategy of institutional divestment and why Le Devoir had failed to come forward to defend the position of the Church. Openly questioning Ryan’s knowledge of church doctrine, he stated, “I have never found anywhere in the teaching of the Church that a Christian community must demolish its laboriously acquired legal frameworks so that our Christians – the real ones – can be stronger amid persecutions.”164 Others were far less kind in their assessment of Ryan’s motives. One cleric adroitly seized on the key underpinnings of Ryan’s outlook, charging that his religious



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views were both naive and simplistic and reflected the “religious ignorance of our Christian intellectuals.” This correspondent levelled a range of criticisms of Ryan, for his advocacy of nothing more than the need for a “F R A N K A N D S I N C E R E dialogue,” his bland assurances that humanity had reached an adult stage, his insistence on the need to democratize and modernize the Church, his snide remarks directed at both “clerical paternalism” and religious traditions, his imputation of bad motives to conservative opponents, and his ongoing scare-mongering about the precarious state of freedom of expression within the Catholic Church in order to silence critics, all of which only masked a struggle “against spiritual values.” Such criticism obviously cut to the quick: in a rare moment of anger, Ryan lashed out at this impertinent priest, advising him to attend to his spiritual role rather than engaging in controversies and to imitate the spirit of the pope, cultivating that “serenity of spirit, a just and profound calmness, and a charity towards other men” that marked the achievements of Vatican II.165 Privately, Ryan expressed his real worry, not that the Parent Report had undercut the legal pillars of the relationship of Roman Catholicism and the state, but that the debate over the Church’s institutional presence in education had poisoned the relationship between Catholicism and the media – by which he meant the wider community of FrenchCanadian intellectuals – in which the “ignorance and obliviousness” of journalists in religious matters, when joined with “prejudices fostered by family memories or college experiences,” had given rise to a climate of hostility to all that pertained to French-Canada’s Catholic identity.166 The situation, in his estimation, was not irretrievable, but it enjoined Catholic journalists to take a different approach. By taking “a more moderate tone than those who attack the truth” – an approach that might appear to make Le Devoir a “neutral” organ – he hoped, in the long run, to repair the breach between the Church and the intellectuals, allowing for a wider and more favourable reception of the “positive realities” of Catholicism.167 The “objective” posture of the public intellectual was, in Ryan’s estimation, the surest guarantee of securing a hearing and influence among the educated middle classes of a pluralistic society and, thus, of sustaining Catholicism’s continued intellectual authority and central salience in French-Canadian culture.

7 “The Dawn of a New Political Spring” Biculturalism and the New Spirit of Federalism As Newman once said, the man who is too sure of himself is scarcely reassuring to others. To live in a state of sincere anxiety is to accept not to mathematically know the future. It is to place oneself in a spiritual state that favours faithful cooperation with others. It is, in the final analysis, to accept the human condition. It is the opposite of the bourgeois spirit that has for too long inspired English Canadians in the political realm. Claude Ryan, “L’ouest aux écoutes du Québec” (1964)

The year 1963 was nothing less than an annus mirabilis for Claude Ryan, as he discerned the hopeful convergence of both temporal events and supra-historical forces that presaged the triumph of a universal current of dialogue that promised to transform the Church, the international community, and the political relationship between Quebec and Canada. The adumbration of a new partnership between church and state in Quebec, as demonstrated in the public debate over the Parent Report, was but a local manifestation of a universal movement that, to a Christian believer like Ryan, augured nothing less than the achievement of new modalities for human salvation. A chain of political events in a number of Western democracies, which confirmed for Ryan the prescience of Walter Lippmann’s observation that European voters had rejected the extremisms of both Left and Right to choose centrist parties, seemed to indicate that democratic public opinion was gravitating towards a new age characterized by the flowering of “civic friendship and true freedom.”1 Britain, a country that he had long admired, seemed to be imitating Quebec’s path to national development in the commitment of both Labour and Conservative parties to transcend political polarization by advancing platforms committed to accelerated investment in science



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and research, the democratization of education, planning and rationalization of the economy, the renewal of government structures, and the expansion of social services. Such proposals presaged “a new revolution” that was “peaceful but no less radical” than that accomplished between 1945 and 1950.2 On this side of the Atlantic, despite Ryan’s reservations about the political management skills of the new Liberal prime minister, Lester Pearson, there was a new, more cordial relationship between Canada and the United States, symbolized by the Hyannisport Declaration. Despite its purely symbolic nature, Ryan touted the importance of the joint pledge by Pearson and President John F. Kennedy to “end a period of freezing” in the all-important CanadianAmerican relationship.3 And in December 1963 came the news that both the United States and the Soviet Union had publicly committed to the reduction of arms budgets, which, for Ryan, signalled “the end of the era of rigid monolithisms,” proof that there was now sufficient pluralism within each of the two ideological camps of the Cold War to enable a real dialogue between Western societies and the Communist world. Such a thaw signalled that “there might be an evolution towards concrete attitudes that will not be indefinitely irreconcilable with the requirements of Christian thought,” a direction that would reduce the threat of war.4 Ryan recognized, of course, that many of these developments could be attributed to the realism of world leaders such as Kennedy and France’s Charles de Gaulle and the play of old-style power politics. But, for someone tautly attuned to the indissoluble currents linking the religious and the secular history of humanity, there was a far more significant inner meaning behind these events – nothing less than the convergence of divine imperatives and human aspirations for peace, in which humankind would establish enduring structures of dialogue that, in turn, would foster an abiding global order of democracy. And there was no doubt in Ryan’s mind that the same universal and divinely inspired yearning for dialogue, a search for communication and contact animating the life of both individuals and collectivities, motivated the forces of progressive change in church, society, and state. But what, exactly, did the words “dialogue” and “peace” mean for Ryan? And did his French-Canadian contemporaries who read Le Devoir share his acutely developed sense of the connections between theology and human history? Peace, in Ryan’s lexicon, was the fundamental Christian social virtue. It would be a mistake to equate its achievement with an idealized state characterized by a simple absence of conflict, or with an unrealistic appreciation of the ambiguity of human motives that required the

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interposition of authority to restrain human propensities for sin. Earthly peace was a relative and highly contingent state, a murky reflection of the true peace characteristic of the City of God. This did not mean that the imperfect forms of peace achieved by human civil and political societies did not possess great value in preparing people for salvation. The Christian idea of peace, declared Ryan in a lengthy exposition of the papal encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963), could be encapsulated by the Augustinian definition of “the tranquility of order … a state of calm, of security, of rest, that results from respecting the order established in nature by the Creator.”5 Although Ryan was well-versed from his youth in the need for distinctions between spiritual and temporal, which were enjoined in the “Gospel message,” when it came to the quest for peace, the frontiers between spiritual and temporal were far more hazy, and were “not the most important or most decisive factors.” Peace, in his estimation, was “a concrete good” dependent on several crucial factors that worked outward from the human soul: the cultivation of an inner disposition enabling individuals to resolve conflicts within themselves and the attainment of an order that regulated relationships among individuals.6 This “order” resulted from the application of objective criteria and clearly implied the establishment and mediation of institutional modes of authority – the church and the state – in delineating and maintaining the movement of impulses from the spiritual realm to the temporal. Yet, the Christian idea of peace was not an “elixir” that promised a miraculous healing of the world’s ills. It was a more fluid and open-ended entity, a “germ” acting ceaselessly in human societies, summoning each generation to concretely foster its development. In this way, this primary spiritual good became “the objective par excellence of political society.”7 Ryan offered what was perhaps the clearest concrete definition of how  he conceived the relationship between spiritual and temporal “peace” in writing about the achievements of Pope John XXIII. The dual character of peace was, most emphatically, an example of the mysterious, interpenetrative dynamic between the City of God and the Earthly City. It was, Ryan maintained, a virtue belonging to “the order of the spirit that can be grasped only by those who totally cast aside selfish preoccupations and are ready to devote long hours to silent searching.” This spiritual disposition was clearly connected to the achievement of temporal peace, as “a growing number of men of all religious persuasions believe in the existence of such a link.”8 Commenting on the historic visit of Pope Paul VI to the Holy Land in January 1964, Ryan proclaimed that “the theme of peace is that which, more than any other, symbolizes the



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fragility of the walls that humans sometime wish to erect between the spiritual and the temporal.” In his view, the papal trip was so significant because it appeared to symbolize “the admission by men of all creeds, in a more spontaneous way than ever before, the decisive role that moral and religious forces can play in the building of peace.” It was in the pursuit of peace, Ryan recognized, “that the spiritual mysteriously most concretely encounters the temporal.”9 Here, Ryan’s emphasis on the role of ordinary, “humble” people, whose values served as a critical stimulus to political leaders in the shaping of peace, was of considerable significance, reflecting both his Augustinian theological imperatives and personal experience, which accented the primacy of familial and local communities in shaping political society. “The fate of peace,” he intoned, “will not be played out only at Geneva or in the chancelleries of the great powers, but also in the heart of each man and in the life of each local community.”10 He had witnessed this spirit at work within his own family as, in the summer of 1962, Madeleine Ryan acted as one of the key organizers for an international conference of women from seventeen countries who met to promote international cooperation. Impressed by this initiative in community building, he delineated a process for achieving world peace from the grass roots, starting with local campaigns against hunger and the formation, among “thousands of women’s associations,” of study circles devoted to peace. These developments precisely reflected the Christian idea of peace as a “germ” acting in human societies, enabling Ryan to prognosticate a transformation of educational institutions and the media, in which these organized local efforts, linked to their international counterparts, would work to “eliminate any trace of the warlike spirit” from newspapers, radio, and television.11 A key part of Ryan’s commentary on international developments of the early 1960s lay in discerning ways in which this universal yearning for peace among the world’s ordinary people – the concrete working of Christian theological exigencies – found expression in the higher levels of diplomacy in both Canada and the international community. Commenting on developments ranging from the dispute between de Gaulle and Kennedy, who represented “Europeanist” and “Atlanticist” orientations within Western democracies,12 to Pearson’s gyrations over the presence of nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, Ryan argued for the need to launch a larger process of global peace by transforming the Western alliance from a “defence community” to “a community of peace.” Although hard-bitten realistic diplomats might have dismissed these phrases as the appeals of a hopelessly naïve utopian, Ryan conveyed his own share of

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realism. The transformation of NA T O into an association of nations dedicated to the advancement of peace was, in his view, a process that would take a great deal of time, and would be accomplished only through “the full respect of the diversities specific to each partner, and dependent upon the free contribution of each.” It would be built according to the criteria outlined by Catholic social theory, not through top-down imposition, but in an organic movement “from below, without stifling the intermediate bodies that normally arise during the course of things. The head – the supreme organization which we all secretly dream of – will take shape only much later, after the body has taken shape.”13 The junction of Catholic religion and the hard exigencies of international power politics might lead us to dismiss Ryan as a utopian, but, given the immense contribution of Catholicism and politicians inspired by Catholic values to the promulgation of both the idea of a united Europe and the structures of the European community in the period following the Second World War, the expectation of creating a wider Atlantic community cannot be cast aside as a mere pipe dream. Although this patient, cumulative process at times proceeded in “a half-mist,” it would ultimately give rise to “international legal structures” that would assure stability and peace.14 Canada could participate in launching this movement by solidifying its international “moral authority” achieved by “abstaining from entering the nuclear club.” Only in this way could Canada fulfil “its natural role, which is to collaborate in maintaining peace by collaborating with numerous countries. This can serve as a catalyst between the power blocs,” thus promoting “constructive work” in favour of peace.15 But what ensured the constant transmission of dynamic energy between the spiritual realm and the temporal order by which peace could enter and transform human society? Here, we encounter the second of Ryan’s fundamental socio-political principles, the act of “dialogue,” which he considered coextensive with the essence of the democratic process itelf. However, in order to ensure the transmission of spiritual vigour from divine to human society, dialogue was governed by a number of welldefined criteria, principles that he developed most systematically in an address delivered to the Association of Catholic Nurses in November 1963. It is no exaggeration to state that the core of Ryan’s socio-political thinking and action flowed from what he considered the divine, evangelical quality of dialogue itself – a notion that he derived from the gospel message that Christ was the Word made flesh. From this premise, he advanced the key consideration that “the word is what is the most sacred, the most noble, the most elevated in man. It is this that expresses the most



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worthy values, those that are most fundamental to human nature; and those that enable us to most closely resemble our Creator himself.”16 This definition involved far more than Ryan simply assigning a divine quality to his own work with words, although it would be fair to say that such considerations were never entirely absent from his thought; rather, what concerned him was the elaboration of an explicitly evangelical Catholic basis for a renewed democracy, one that rested on the premise that dialogue “is nothing more than a civilized way of establishing contacts, of solving problems that occur between them, in a civilized way, of establishing contact between men and the solving of problems that are posed to them and to ensure the common progress of all those who desire to enter into this attitude.”17 The recurrence of the adjective “civilized” indicated that Ryan conceived of a set of precise rules and presuppositions to govern the way in which individuals and groups carry on dialogue, and that these were necessary to establish the conditions of social and political peace – that Augustinian “concord” or fundamental agreement on the objects of a given society’s desires. He identified four essential attitudes underlying the pursuit of dialogue that were coextensive with those fundamental human rights ensuring a viable democratic order. These consisted of the recognition of the dignity of each person with whom we come into contact; the recogntion of the fundamental equality between all men; “the recognition of the primacy of truth in all behaviour, in all human attitudes,” with the standard of truth derived from divine revelation and the teachings of the Church; and the idea that “dialogue rests on respect for freedom.” As an added moral consideration, Ryan enjoined his listeners to apply these standards first to their own attitudes and modes of behaviour rather than a priori insisting on their adoption by those whom they sought to engage in dialogue.18 In this formulation, human rights stood as the antithesis of an abstract, universalized individualism: the dialogue that both secured and extended these rights enmeshed the individual in a  tight web of relationships with others that forged a seamless bond between persons and the communities and groups to which they belonged. In other words, Ryan did not envision human rights as standing apart from the context of societies. Commitment to dialogue was, in Ryan’s estimation, not advocacy of a disembodied, otherworldly morality that had no basis in human conduct or social arrangements. Dialogue – that moral and religious grounding of the democratic spirit – was already present in the persons of two major world leaders, Pope John XXIII, the spiritual head of the universal

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Church, and President John F. Kennedy, the Catholic president of the world’s most powerful and advanced nation.19 From the perspective of the early 1960s, Ryan considered dialogue an almost irresistible current traversing both spiritual and temporal realms, ensuring their ongoing communication and the advance of a new set of democratic priorities. What was most compelling about the early 1960s was that Catholicism appeared, by launching a process of internal reform and dialogue with the modern world, to be engaged in a fundamental transformation of the entire relationship of humanity and Christianity, which Ryan believed was then mirrored in the acceleration of similar reformist hopes in secular society. The opening of the second session of Vatican II in 1963 was the occasion for realizing these utopian hopes, as reformist elements in the Church seemed clearly in control. Declarations on ecumenism ended “the era of the ‘pedestal,’” in which the Church stood apart in splendid isolation, and they committed the Church to an ongoing, open-ended dialogue with Protestantism, Judaism, and other religious faiths based on a new attitude of humility,20 thereby affirming the participation of Catholicism in the vanguard of modernity.21 The pronouncements of Paul VI, who succeeded John XXIII after his untimely death, augured the introduction of more horizontal, collegial structures of Church governance, which would foster ongoing dialogue between the pope and bishops, allowing the emergence of a new public opinion by which the Church could better incarnate its “universal” character in the modern world.22 Ryan’s defence of dialogue within the Church extended even to the publication of uncomfortable revelations, such as those of Rolf Hochhuth’s celebrated drama The Deputy, which was one of the first efforts to raise the question of Pope Pius XII’s complicity with the Nazi persecution of the Jews. While critical of the German playwright’s attempt to link the pope with the Holocaust, Ryan considered this discussion both timely and necessary, given the “sick fear of Communism” that characterized the final years of Pius XII’s pontificate. Hochhuth’s play was valuable, especially as it raised the issue of “man’s responsibility in situation.”23 To what extent did Ryan’s theology of history, dominated as it was by the rather hazy boundaries between spiritual and temporal spheres, reflect the aspirations of his readers and contemporaries for the prospects of their own society? Few, to be sure, especially those trained in the newer social science disciplines, would have unquestioningly accepted Ryan’s dictum that “at the root of any human situation that is evolving like ours, there is the militant action of the Prince of Darkness on the one hand and,



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on the other, the work of the Prince of Peace.”24 But it would be incorrect to read francophone Quebec society of the early 1960s through the lens of the transformations of the late 1960s and 1970s, years that witnessed the rapid collapse of the social presence and cultural authority of Roman Catholicism.25 The clergy and the educated laity of both the “old professions” and the mushrooming new professions of teaching, nursing, social work, and hospital administration, as well as in industrial relations, the expanding public service, and key sectors of the media, groups that formed the core of Le Devoir’s readership, had all had a similar educational formation, in a school and college system in which the values of Catholicism still enjoyed a dominant presence. Many, in addition, had as adolescents experienced the imperatives of Action catholique, and many combined professional activism with religious social and cultural militancy. And while all demographic measures of religious practice indicated the continued massive adherence of francophones to the Church, the key to the situation was the attitude of the state, whose leaders, while certainly concerned to expand the capacity of government, had no intention of simply eviscerating the Church from the spheres of health and social services, preferring to work out a series of partnerships in which the combined professional expertise of both clergy and laity underwrote a slower pace of transition to a society that would be ultimately governed by Catholic laypeople. Few questioned the need for a continuing close harmony between religion and national progress.26 Similarly, both clerical and lay leaders could look optimistically on the resolution of the tortuous debate on public education as the dawn of a new partnership that preserved Catholicism as a central support for a new structure of public authority. Political leaders such as Paul Gérin-Lajoie – considered, with René Lévesque, one of the most progressive members of the Liberal cabinet – considered Catholicism most emphatically a key part of French Canada’s future. Indeed, in 1964, Gérin-Lajoie spoke of “a grand quiet revolution” in both church and state that would put an end to any opposition between spiritual and temporal authority.27 The large group of educated, professional men and women who looked to the continuing synonymity of religious and national priorities would have emphatically accepted Ryan’s belief that the ongoing reform of both the universal Church and Quebec’s Christendom expressed the same hopes that impelled the urgent reforms of Quebec’s state and public institutions. “Never before,” Ryan concluded regarding the state of public opinion in French Canada, “have temporal aspirations been so strongly marked by spiritual influences.”28

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“Any real dialogue begins with a certain astonishment, and this applies equally to us”29 If the spirit of civilized dialogue was in the process of renewing the Church, Ryan believed that it would have a similar transformative effect on the relationship of the political society of French Canada to the Canadian nation. If he employed the public platform of Le Devoir for  the expression of his views regarding the relationship between Catholicism and temporal society, he also, between 1962 and 1964, moved increasingly within the orbit of Gérard Filion’s neo-nationalism, without, however, fully accepting the central nationalist postulate that Canada constituted “two nations.” That said, a number of Ryan’s public pronouncements left no doubt as to his sympathies, as he sounded mainstream nationalist themes by mercilessly flaying Premier Jean Lesage for being too soft on the foreign corporations that controlled much of the province’s economic life and exerted undue influence over the financial policies of the state, consigning French Canadians to the status of “a people subjected to the domination of foreign capital” and creating “an explosive socio-economic situation.”30 He accorded fulsome praise to the efforts of René Lévesque to develop secondary manufacturing industry in Quebec as the essential precondition to French Canada’s emergence from a state of tutelage, a necessary strategy of ensuring both greater stability and “overcoming the backwardness of Quebec’s economy relative to that of Canada.”31 Here, Ryan’s abiding concern for the advancement of French Canada’s middle classes was evident, as he linked the province’s ability to catch up to, and in some measure surpass, the rest of Canada to ending the fixation of this social group with the “liberal” professions and encouraging them to opt for better training in economic issues and realities. Education in economic and financial matters had a dual purpose: French-Canadian businesspeople could transcend their individualistic proclivities and build companies able to compete in the world of big business and high finance, while lower-middle-class and working-class people could escape their inevitable fate as debtors in a North American consumerist society. Ryan’s aim was to induce his compatriots not to focus blame on foreign interests for their economic plight, but to initiate their own economic advancement by fostering the values of “a sense of community and team-work.”32 His convictions overlapped with those of his nationalist contemporaries in another key respect, that of a new pre-eminence to be accorded to the state and to more collective expressions of freedom. Believing that “freedom has for a long time not



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so much been literally stifled as prevented from normal expansion,” Ryan emphatically called for a “reasonable widening of the authority and sphere of action of the State.” He argued that Quebec was no longer in “a phase of defence,” but rather one of “more positive liberty, and” that this situation enjoined “the active integration of individual freedoms into the service of the whole,” especially as French-Canadian society was confronted by “backwardnesses” that were too deep and too urgent to be left to private initiative.33 Despite considerable agreement in the early 1960s between Ryan and neo-nationalists on the capacity of the state and the interpretation of liberty, which refused to divide its “individual” and “collectivist” manifestations, there were key differences. Writing in early 1964, Ryan directly stated that he could not subscribe to René Lévesque’s lapidary definition “the State is us,” as he knew of too many cases where “the ‘us’ was singularly restrained.” Significantly, he did not accuse Lévesque of defining the “us” in terms of an ethnic exclusiveness, and it would be mistaken to read back into the early 1960s an augury of the polarizations that occurred after 1974 between Ryan and key members of the Parti québécois over the linguistic rights of the English-speaking minority. Because Ryan’s thinking remained within the orbit of Catholic social and political theory, he was worried that Lévesque’s formulation went too far in a collectivist direction, and that this might lead to “the blind exaltation of the power of the State,” a power that could remain healthy and constructive only if “free citizens were not dissolved in it.”34 Fresh from the debates over reforms to the public education system, in which he had invested a good deal of attention in the nature, authority, and composition of the Conseil supérieur de l’éducation, what was uppermost in Ryan’s thinking was the question of the proper balance between the state and intermediate bodies – the latter conceived as the guardians of the rights of individual citizens. In other words, rights were an attribute of organized groups rather than, strictly speaking, of individuals. In a revealing speech given to a meeting of the Semaines sociales du Canada in 1964, he was emphatic that the state should not become an all-absorbing entity but rather must permit the free association and legal existence of all intermediate bodies, establishing a regulatory framework that would “avoid an overly extensive definition of the jurisdiction of the State in this sphere.” In answer to political leaders like Lévesque whose pronouncements indicated a more unitary concept, which sought an unmediated relationship between the state and the citizen, Ryan juxtaposed the concept of a society organized harmoniously around a partnership

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between the state and a constellation of intermediate groups, so constituted that the latter would furnish an ongoing dynamism to the public service, furnishing both advice, expertise, and trained personnel, thus filling the void left by the declining quality and effectiveness of elected parliamentarians, while avoiding the risks of an extreme form of corporatism that would erect them into “states within the State.”35 While Ryan was deeply committed to the social, cultural, and political advancement of French Canada, the overriding context for his advocacy was a primary and abiding allegiance to the wider Canadian nation. Although he had first formulated this commitment in the late 1940s, his first two years at Le Devoir deepened and refined a consciousness of being Canadian. Both intellectually and sentimentally, Ryan continued to keep his distance from a number of the central doctrines of Quebec’s “neo-nationalism,” but it is clear that he both desired, and considered himself an exponent of, a broader “Canadian neo-nationalism,” which, in his estimation, involved asserting “the right to dispose of ourselves, without foreign interference.”36 Here, briefly articulated, was the main disjuncture between Ryan and the central current of French-Canadian nationalism: while the latter defined Canada as a political superstructure mediating the relationship between two national entities that were cultural in character, Ryan assigned a pre-eminent moral, cultural, and political status to Canada. This new Canadian national spirit, elaborated during the years following the Second World War, rested on two main pillars: one upholding the material and economic progress necessary to maintain Canada’s independent position against the attractions of the American orbit; the second, a set of moral and cultural imperatives governing the relationship between the Canadian nation, the French-Canadian community, and the equilibrium between nationalism and liberty. He articulated the indissoluble connection between the functional and the moral elements of Canadianism in a 1963 editorial, declaring that “in the background there will always be the duty to respect the essential rights of French Canada. But there is also the duty, no less imperative, for all Canadians to face together the peril that the growing domination of our economy by foreign capital represents.”37 It would be no exaggeration to suggest that Ryan could not envision a viable French-Canadian community existing outside a strong Canadian national economy. Given his roots in an interwar trajectory of French-Canadian nationalist thinking, and his experience as a cultural militant in the 1950s, he reckoned the impact of American mass culture and its materialist values a serious



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challenge to the maintenance and advancement of a French-Canadian and Catholic civilization. For this reason, and realizing that, in the early 1960s, “the Canadian economy remains prey to profound malaises,” Ryan consistently advocated measures of concerted planning at the federal level, even though these might enter into tension with the imperatives of planning by the new interventionist Quebec state. The global economic situation that had benefited Canada in the immediate postwar years had irrevocably changed, and the country could neither return to an older protectionist ethos of simple hostility to the United States, nor could it, “under pain of losing our political independence,” simply go on blithely accepting massive infusions of foreign capital. A new, more thoughtful and more consistent form of state intervention was needed, one that would systematically plan to ensure “an internal consolidation,” by which he meant the development of secondary manufacturing capacity that alone would enable an escape from the spectre of economic depression,38 even though Ryan was largely silent on (or unaware of) the potential for conflict between two new aggressive state-building enterprises, one provincial and one federal. There lurked a much more primordial set of imperatives behind his desire to expand the scope of the federal government, one that indicates Ryan’s continued adherence to an older French-Canadian nationalist desire to transform the political and moral bases of the federation by injecting the vision of a nation founded on a equal partnership between two founding peoples. Where older representatives of this current, such as Henri Bourassa and Lionel Groulx, had deployed arguments designed to counter the unitary nationalism of many Anglo-Canadians, positing a bicultural transcontinental nation, Ryan transposed these aspirations to the international scene. He deftly used the occasion of President de Gaulle’s declaration, on the occasion of Prime Minister Pearson’s visit to Paris in early 1964, that Canada constituted a single political entity,39 to exhort federal authorities to take steps to transform Canada’s international posture, which was still “more Anglo-Saxon than bilingual.” This orientation was evident in foreign aid, which was massively directed to countries of the British Commonwealth rather than francophone Africa or Latin America. Canada’s foreign policy had to become, in Ryan’s words, “the authentic expression of Canadian reality,” by which he meant “a more explicit recognition of the bicultural character of Canada,” by inaugurating a new series of cultural exchanges with France that would be “more than mere crumbs thrown to assuage FrenchCanadian sensibilities,” but rather would have the same stature as similar

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schemes negotiated with the anglophone world.40 Any aspirations that Canada might have to “play a constructive and original role in the family of nations” was, ultimately, in Ryan’s estimation, contingent on a renewed affirmation of Canadian cultural duality, one that English Canada must accept, “not as a concession to the irredentist caprices of a retrograde group, but as an essential given of the vocation of our country in the family of peoples.”41 It is clear from Ryan’s language that, despite the functional, material, and economic bases that sustained the Canadian nation and the relationship of French Canada to it, these were ultimately subservient to an overriding set of moral – some would say spiritual – criteria. Perhaps the most striking illustration of Ryan’s overriding concern for the nature of the Canadian community in the early 1960s was a short “bloc-notes” written in 1962 ostensibly to celebrate the ninety-fifth anniversary of Confederation, but actually intended as a response to Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s classic indictment of French-Canadian nationalism, “The New Treason of the Intellectuals,” published in Cité libre in April 1962. Trudeau’s piece was a deliberate provocation to those who believed in using nationalist arguments to advance the vision of an independent Quebec (the target usually assumed by anglophone commentators) as well as to that larger group of staunch federalists represented by Filion, Laurendeau, and Ryan, who felt it was possible to reconcile allegiance to the cultural and political aspirations of French Canada with the Canadian federation and nationhood. No one could miss Trudeau’s meaning: by deliberately appropriating the title of a 1927 polemic by the French intellectual Julien Benda, he was playing on the idea of contrast between the secular and the spiritual to address a group for whom the negotiation of this distinction was fundamental to their self-identity as intellectuals, and whose thinking on such matters had been forged in the 1930s in the backwash of the papal condemnation of Action française. Trudeau’s assertion of the primacy of “universal” principles of justice and rights – the assertion of the French republican “Left” – against the tribalistic values of patriotism and tradition, which both Benda and Trudeau castigated as hallmarks of the political “Right,” made the simple equation between nationalism and fascism. It also implicitly disbarred all nationalists from being true intellectuals, because they replaced reason and justice as the foundation of social and political order with the atavistic myths of blood and soil.42 Ryan chose to answer Trudeau in the name of a conviction that there was no fundamental incompatibility between the supposedly particularistic values represented by French Canada and the more universal values



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for which the larger Canadian community stood. Ryan and his Le Devoir colleagues believed that Trudeau was positing a false and spurious dichotomy in disbarring from access to universal values those whose allegiance was to French Canada. It is of some note that, in evoking the moral qualities of the “Canadian spirit” and underscoring a Canadian experience that was “original and rich in what it teaches,” Ryan drew particular attention to the reputation of Canadians as “a people characterized by good will, who loyally search for peace and cooperation between the nations.” This was the achievement of “a multi-ethnic political society” founded on the core of a partnership of the two founding peoples, which conferred “a particular physiognomy among the family of peoples” to Canadian society.43 Ryan’s meaning was clear. He explicitly countered the central element of the position of both “old” and “new” nationalists in French Canada – that Canada was a political state comprised of “two nations” – by stating that it made more sense to speak of “two ethnic and cultural groups.” At the same time, he pointed to the substantial disparity of power between English and French Canadians, a situation that had led to the minority group never having been treated with justice.44 This inequality, in his estimation, constituted a clear derogation from those “universal” values for which Canada should stand. Canadians might be one people, but this was not something to be achieved at the expense of the culture and institutions incarnated in the history and social development of French Canada. Ryan’s principal adversary was not neo-nationalism, but the hard-line individualistic liberalism of Trudeau, with its aggressively secularist assumptions, which defined all forms of nationalism as retrograde because they placed too much priority on collectivities and tended to exalt the absolute power of the state. Ryan’s critique of Trudeau was far less polemical and shrill than the latter’s original essay, and was subtly articulated by offering a rival reading of Lord Acton, the English Catholic historian and political theorist, one of Trudeau’s principal maîtres à penser, whom he was fond of quoting to show the inherent superiority of liberalism over nationalism. Ryan certainly endorsed Acton’s dictum (as did Trudeau) that the presence of several nations in the same state was the best guarantee of freedom, but his discussion contained Acton’s assertion – lacking in Trudeau’s writing – that such multi-ethnic communities were “important factors of civilization and, as such, they are part of the natural and providential order which is the mark of a higher degree of civilization than the national unity preached by modern liberalism.”45 Ryan pointed out a key element of Acton’s thinking that Trudeau had missed, that the essential conflict

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was not between nationalism and modern liberalism per se, but between multi-ethnic communities, whose national identities were both natural and divinely ordained, and the all-encompassing secularist individualism endorsed by Trudeau, which was derived from the French Revolution via Harold Laski. Acton (and Ryan) preferred another type of liberalism, one matured by long historical experience and respect for the cultures and rights of national communities, a feature particularly characteristic of the British polity. Unlike Ryan, Trudeau either wilfully or unconsciously ignored that Acton was first and foremost a Catholic, who dedicated his career to solving the riddle of reconciling the universal values of Catholicism with forms of liberalism and with the rising appeal of nationalism. The British aristocrat did so in ways that Trudeau, with his facile polemical concern of assimilating nationalism to intolerance, discrimination, and totalitarianism,46 would not have appreciated. Acton’s reasoning had considerable resonance for Ryan, who shared an anchorage with him in the universe of Catholic thinking. And Acton was not irrevocably hostile to nationalism, viewing it as entirely compatible with the “universals” of natural rights and established freedoms, so long as it was considered “an essential, but not a supreme element in determining the form of the State.” Distinguishing between “absolute” views of national unity, derived from French republican democracy, “and the claim of national liberty which belongs to the theory of freedom,” Acton, in fact, celebrated a nationalism that tended to “diversity and not to uniformity, to harmony and not to unity,” and represented it as a force that resisted tendencies towards centralization, corruption, and absolutism. These ideas could easily be read as praise for the French-Canadian nationalist canon championed by Henri Bourassa, Lionel Groulx, and Esdras Minville. The interaction of a variety of self-conscious national groups within the same state, in Acton’s estimation, solidified a dynamic public opinion and served as an essential guarantee of freedom.47 For Acton, the central problem of modern nationalism lay in its equation with the centralized, egalitarian, and individualist democracy that was Trudeau’s pole star. It is difficult to deny the considerable resonances between the “liberal” Acton’s definition of nationality and that proffered by the “conservative” Abbé Groulx, especially because “freedom,” in Acton’s lexicon, had nothing to do with Trudeau’s simplistic calculus of individual rights. It emerged from the cultivation of harmonious relationships between individuals and groups and was oriented towards the preservation of diversity rather than the use of an overriding commitment to individual rights



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to assert the pre-eminence of a national government, the latter in Acton’s view being a form of totalitarianism. A reading of Acton’s liberal Catholic political theory stimulated Ryan’s thinking about federalism and convinced him that there were ways of building a multi-ethnic Canadian political and cultural community based on respect for the achievements and contributions of its two major constituent groups, “without cutting the roots and the distinct life of each cultural group.” Only in this way could an original political society, “animated by the ideal of justice and liberty,” emerge. This community most emphatically depended upon initiating a dialogue that responded to Quebec’s desire for enhanced responsibility and authority within Confederation, considerations to which it was entitled as the political centre of French-Canadian cultural life. “On no issue where there remains one ounce of injustice,” stated Ryan, “can we allow ourselves the complacency of thinking that these can be settled with handshakes with our English-Canadian fellow citizens. Frankness and firmness, in the long run, are more effective elements of real unity than flabbiness or condescension.”48 Ryan’s anniversary piece marked a major signpost in his thinking about the nature of federalism and the need to transform French Canada’s relationship with the Canadian Confederation. It also signalled his willingness to use the platform of Le Devoir to forge a pole of moderate opinion within French Canada, a current of thinking that he believed could initiate a dialogue with English Canada on the reform of Confederation based upon an overt recognition of cultural duality and the equality of the two founding peoples. The ability to engage in constructive dialogue, Ryan insisted, did not flow from a one-directional impetus to “adopt” the psychological or cultural dispositions of the other party, but was a function of constant attention to perfecting and affirming one’s own cultural resources and core values. By this, he meant that understanding others flowed from a clear understanding of, and commitment to affirm, the central values of one’s own milieu. In the context of French Canada, he highlighted the need to uphold the value of the French language, the communitarian ethos of Catholicism, and the long tradition of distinctive French-Canadian institutions, rejecting the path of becoming a “hybrid being,” of believing that by merely learning English and “venerating the dollar,” his compatriots would be able to understand and establish a viable relation with English Canadians.49 Such cultural affirmation also meant acknowledging and engaging with troubling aspects of FrenchCanadian society in the early 1960s, such as the radical separatist terrorism of the Front de libération du Québec (F L Q ). Ryan did not countenance

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this new form of revolutionary violence, and he declared that this organization had no support in public opinion, warning other “partisans of independence” against the temptation of “gargling with verbal violence,” which would so inflame the discussion as to render a moderate stance difficult. But he refused simply to dismiss members of the F L Q as “vulgar criminals,” as did conservative opinion and the English-Canadian media. The conduct of imprisoned members expressed, in his view, a number of admirable qualities, such as solidarity, and he publicly mused about the need to establish a new legal category of “political delinquents” in order to ensure more humane treatment for these prisoners, who, in his estimation, were “young men, most of whom were very talented,” and deserved an opportunity for intellectual development.50 Above all, he viewed the FLQ as an important challenge for the civilized society he hoped his fellow citizens were in the process of building. In ensuring the effectiveness of police measures against the F L Q terrorists, he argued that it was important “that we not allow ourselves to be carried away by the spirit of denunciation and collective vengeance” but rather to trust that the values of fraternity and solidarity would, in the final analysis, overcome the unleashing of this “criminal and unthinking” violence. It was especially important, in his estimation, not to give the F L Q more signficance than it deserved by elevating its activities to the status of “the work of one nation against another.”51 The spring of 1963 brought with it the election of a Liberal government in Ottawa, which Ryan viewed as a critical turning point auguring “a kind of new spirit that has introduced itself into the relations between Ottawa and the provinces.” He believed that the new prime minister, Lester Pearson, was committed to transforming the “unilateral” character of the federation into one characterized by greater respect for provincial diversity and, especially, greater recognition of Quebec’s demands for enhanced constitutional and financial powers.52 Despite some misgivings over the intellectual calibre and political acumen of the federal Liberal team from Quebec, doubts that continued to plague him after Pearson formed a government,53 Ryan had, in an editorial written before the election, warmly endorsed elements of the new party platform that promised a new era in federal-provincial relations and sought to address French Canada’s particular grievances. These planks, he believed, marked “a real progress” over what the Liberals had offered in 1962, and their cumulative effect seemed intended to “restore at least in part the spirit of the Confederation pact.”54 However, Ryan was acutely aware that, while the accelerated growth of more distinct regional economies and outlooks



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in English Canada had built up pressure for a more diversified, decentralized, and reformed federalism, the principal stumbling-block to constructive dialogue remained what it had been since the 1930s: a fundamental political disconnect between English and French Canadians. For the former, “Canada is identified with the central government”: Ottawa remained the primary locus of power in the federation, federalism was largely administrative, and “this line of force must at all costs be preserved.” In contrast, French Canadians’ starting point was that Confederation was “the result of an entente between two peoples,” and federalism was “first and foremost cultural, pertaining to the order of life.”55 In contrast to a growing chorus of nationalist voices in Quebec, Ryan was not pessimistic about the prospects of working within the federal system in order to secure reforms. However, his appreciation of the major divergences between the mentalities of the two founding peoples when it came to the idea of Confederation made him profoundly realistic about the obstacles and impulses to immobilism faced by politicians like Pearson. Writing after the Liberals’ first few weeks in office, he observed that, “while the language is now more courteous and tender towards the provinces,” the “fundamental principles are the same as those of yesteryear.”56 Ryan enumerated two of the central problems facing anyone who sought to institute a new federal-provincial dialogue: first, the structure of the federal administration itself, which – while supported by an honest public service – Ryan brutally characterized as “a curious mixture of Calvinism and prodigality”;57 and, second, “a real psychological blockage,” which afflicted all English-Canadian political leaders in their dealings with French Canada. The latter was a mental state that stemmed from the fact that all such politicians, including Pearson, had gained their political education in a “monocultural country,” a situation that could be remedied only by making bilingualism an essential prerequisite of the political formation of politicians and public servants in English Canada.58 Ryan recognized that this psychology lay at the very heart of English Canada’s understanding of federalism as tending towards a unitary management by Ottawa, which, in the postwar period, had become more exaggerated, given the public’s desire for social welfare and economic prosperity and stability. The principal culprit was the scheme of “joint programs,” or “programmes conjoints,” which encompassed provincial spheres of constitutional responsibility in education, health, aid to municipalities, and social assistance. While such programs were ostensibly managed by the provinces, Ryan believed that the main difficulty lay in Ottawa’s financial and administrative conditions, which entailed “more

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or less subtly” the imposition of federal priorities on the provinces in spheres of their own sovereignty. Here, he charged, “is the attitude of a master coming to assist an inferior, of a superior government that takes an interest in the problems of inferior governments. In this way, a monolithic conception is subtly and discreetly imposed where normally a healthy diversity of methods should be the norm.”59 From the standpoint of French Canada, Ryan reckoned that the way of breaking the ice jam in federal-provincial relations lay, first of all, in ensuring a consensus, or “concord,” within his own society as to what reform of the Canadian federation would entail. It is of some significance that he praised the speech of François-Albert Angers to the Montreal branch of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Angers was a prominent economist, director of the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, and one of the leading nationalist voices in his capacity as director of the Ligue d’action nationale. From the outset, Ryan agreed with one of Angers’s fundamental postulates that “bilingualism is not the last word, because it will not solve the structural problems posed by the existence of two cultural communities living in the same country.” Ryan characterized Angers as one “whose thinking is inspired by the traditional principle” in which the provincial government had priority in preserving the cultural characteristics of French Canadians. He certainly subscribed to Angers’s “very realistic agenda,” which was interested in the collective, institutional dimension of how biculturalism would be expressed, and he agreed that reform of the federation had to begin by redressing the balance in a number of constitutional spheres where French Canadians were disadvantaged. These included minority language schools in other provinces, tax sharing, radio and telecommunications policy, monetary policy, judicial appeals, and the amending formula to the constitution. Sooner or later, declared Ryan, “bonne entente” meetings with English Canadians “are going to have to stop merely bandying words about and get down to the problem of structures.”60 The primary axis of change lay within French Canada itself. Ryan believed it would entail nothing less than “a struggle that begins on the interior level, against ourselves, against our traditional individualism and our fear of modern ideas. A struggle against the old unitary notion of Canadian federalism, which has reappeared in the specious guise of restarting the economy.”61 If, however, the continued assertion of provincial autonomy formed the key pillar of French Canada’s constitutional position, Ryan also recognized that there was a danger that lurked within this strategy if pushed as far as nationalists were prepared to go. Federalism needed to evolve



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through ongoing dialogue and through engagement with changing economic and social realities. It could not, in his estimation, remain tied to the “strict constructionist” formulations that had inspired the Tremblay Commission on constitutional problems in the 1950s, whose guiding spirits, Esdras Minville, Angers, and Father Richard Arès, had seen the solution to the conundrum of Quebec’s place in Canada in defining spheres of sovereignty protected by the erection of strict boundaries around spheres of provincial responsibility.62 The major problem facing this approach, Ryan maintained, was that, although it was attractive to nationalists, it reinforced an artificial and overly rigid concept of FrenchCanadian distinctiveness in which Quebec “always appears to be, under the pretext of autonomy, opposing measures that the rest of the country wholeheartedly accepts in the name of economic and social progress.”63 The postwar Canadian federation, built around a regime of joint sharedcost programs and conditional grants, could not simply be discarded, despite their negative implications for the principles of a true federalism. “We must concede,” Ryan declared, “that these programs provide many advantages for the whole of the country” and were especially important in fostering a democratic society characterized by equality of opportunity for all Canadian regions.64 Given the symbiotic relationship that existed in his thinking between federalism and democracy, it made little sense to simply abolish shared-cost programs and adhere to the more rigid federalism of the Tremblay Commission, because the overlapping federal and provincial jurisdictions in the fields of economic management, agriculture, and immigration required “a close cooperation.” Here was the basic logic of Ryan’s neo-federalism, working from the implicit Augustinian analogy of the hazy boundaries that must exist between spiritual and temporal, now applied to relations between the two orders of government within the Canadian federation. Nonetheless, the entire philosophy that lay behind shared-cost programs needed a fundamental revision, one that moved decisively away from any hint of a unitary federalism towards one based on “faithful cooperation between equal governments.” The provinces required greater respect, especially in the areas of education, social security, and civil rights, where their sovereignty was  constitutionally paramount and where Ryan held that Ottawa could intervene only with the unanimous consent of the provinces. In other spheres of activity, initiatives should not emerge unilaterally from the federal bureaucracy, but “through the mediation of mixed institutions where the two levels of government would be represented on the basis of equality.” Financially, this restructured federalism

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would be underwritten by new governmental machinery ensuring closer liaison between Ottawa and the provinces, and by new fiscal arrangements “that rest on a coherent recognition of the obligations the constitution attributes to the provinces.”65 The most encouraging element of what he believed was a new conjuncture in federal-provincial relations was that Quebec no longer appeared isolated in its more autonomist stance. A number of English-Canadian provincial leaders, principally Ontario’s premier John Robarts, who was interested in developing his own new initiatives in the areas of health care and old-age security, seemed to be in agreement with the Quebec government’s quest for greater fiscal resources and the recovery of provincial powers in key constitutional jurisdictions. Ryan informed Le Devoir’s readers that this was a positive development for French Canada, because, “independently of ethnic considerations, there now exist in English Canada two different concepts of Canadian federalism.”66 This development could, in the long run, only strengthen Quebec’s constitutional position, because its struggle with Ottawa could be cast, not simply as a defensive reflex to enhance its autonomy, but as advancing a broader and more transformative principle: the inauguration of a “true federalism” on the scale of the entire country.67 But there remained the near-­intractable problem of widely divergent expectations between the government of Quebec and those of the other provinces. While Ryan detected considerable desire in both English and French Canada for a reformed and more flexible federalism, sentiment in Quebec favoured “radical reform of the constitution” and, at the very least, the institutionalization of mechanisms of consultation and collaboration that would produce more flexibility and understanding in the relationship between Ottawa and the provinces. On the other hand, English-Canadian leaders, including Pearson, preferred the gradual evolution of a “cooperative federalism” along what Ryan termed “the empirical method” of case-by-case consultation. While Ryan was full of praise for Pearson’s “open and cordial attitude,” which had launched “a promising dialogue” about federalism, this was at best a temporary holding action. Quebec’s urgent need for new sources of revenue to bolster its state-building experiments and reform of its infrastructure would soon provoke a fiscal crisis and ultimately fuel demands for a more radical constitutional revision.68 There is little doubt that Ryan personally favoured the bolder approach to constitutional reform desired by Premier Lesage and René Lévesque, the minister of natural resources, who was a key figure in negotiations between Quebec and Ottawa in 1963–64. Ryan supported this approach



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not only because it promised to give the government of Quebec more financial resources and constitutional authority to enhance French Canada’s autonomy and stature within Canada, but also because it served a greater common good, the wider improvement of equality and democracy within the Canadian federation. Because of its affinity with the spirit of dialogue, he was prepared to give Pearsonian “cooperative federalism” a fair trial, regarding the April 1964 negotiations over a national pension scheme the key test of any hope for renewed federalism. Just as the pension negotiations were entering their critical phase, he observed that “cooperative federalism  proceeds at a snail’s pace. But we must not become exasperated. While the relations between Ottawa and the provinces remain far more easy and intimate than those between Canada and the United States, we must, however, be aware of the very long road to be traversed before cooperative federalism becomes an organic reality.”69 The agreement on pensions, hammered out in Quebec City after lengthy negotiations, seemed to mark a critical turning point in reforming Confederation, a recognition that federalism was flexible enough to preserve a balance between national unity and decentralization and to recognize Quebec’s aspirations to use social security programs as building blocks for a distinct society.70 It was from both the perspective of Canadian nationalism and support for Quebec’s equality in Confederation that Ryan characterized Pearson’s intervention as key to the situation, because he had brought about a consensus among provinces, ensuring that this was the first national program whose imperative was not one of centralization. Here was a sure sign that the long winter of unitary federalism was over, and Ryan hailed the result as “a ray of hope,” one that signalled the “end of the old era” in which Ottawa alone articulated the meaning of the Canadian nation.71 In this apparent retreat from Ottawa’s unilateral assertion of power lay the basis of a more powerful and enduring national purpose, one that was founded on “free consent of the two principal groups in the country, … in which the consent of French Canada flows through that of Quebec,” and that conferred upon the federal system “an enhanced moral and political strength.”72 French Canada’s quest for equality in Confederation was not merely a function of constitutional negotiations and federal-provincial diplomacy. Pearson’s decision soon after his election to appoint a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, co-chaired by Ryan’s editorial colleague André Laurendeau,73 marked the most concrete sign of a new climate of dialogue, an event Ryan hailed as “the beginning of an aggiornamento,” which “for Canada begins an experience analogous to that of

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the Vatican Council for the Church.”74 Ryan’s hyperbole reflected the fact that he was one of the few francophone Quebec intellectuals to enthusiastically endorse Laurendeau’s participation in this federal initiative, as most believed that it was impossible to reform the federal system from within, seeing the strengthening of Quebec’s constitutional powers as the only path to fulfilling French Canada’s aspirations for equality.75 His support also indicated his appreciation of Laurendeau’s critical dilemma: gambling on the survival of Canada as a national community meant participating in Pearson’s initiative of reform from within; the other choice meant standing outside and following a logic that would lead inexorably to an independent Quebec. Given Ryan’s primary allegiance to the concept of “a Canadian experience,” which held a universal and quasi-religious significance as “a laboratory on the road of that continental, and eventually global, federalism, on which the world’s peoples are moving,”76 there was no option but to sustain Laurendeau in his efforts to “rethink the Canadian experience”77 and to use the machinery of national dialogue instituted by the commission to foster the coalescence of a middle ground of moderate opinion in both French and English Canada, a public opinion that would both initiate and sustain the essential reforms without which Confederation would not survive. Ryan considered that the key to elaborating and nourishing a network of moderate opinion that transcended the two “national” communities was to elaborate a new discourse, one that at all costs avoided presenting the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission as a mere exercise in good feeling. In order for the commission to be convincing in French Canada, Ryan was aware that neither Confederation nor the Canadian experience could be elevated as “a magic formula or untouchable.”78 Indeed, he was adamant that the “authentic climate of conversation” represented by the commission not be open ended, but adhere closely to its mandate, anchored “on the principle of the cultural duality of Canada.”79 For Ryan, the key element lay in the fact that the commission was not simply an organ of investigation, but had formulated a “liberal” mandate empowering it to “recommend measures to be taken so that the Canadian Confederation can develop according to the principle of the equality of the two founding peoples.” Laurendeau-Dunton’s primary emphasis on “the realities of culture, which stand first in the order of temporal values,” opened a new chapter in the history of Canadian federalism, one that could potentially reverse the economistic standpoint associated with the Rowell-Sirois Commission of the Depression era, which had been used to legitimate the excessive federal centralization that lay at the root



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of the present crisis.80 This materialist logic, which had made EnglishCanadian politicians the epitome of that “bourgeois” spirit so detested by Ryan’s generation, had to be excised from any modern concept of Canada, to be replaced by new values of communitarianism and the primacy of culture; these values were, in the final analysis, the central expressions of Catholic universalism and French-Canadian civilization. The only hope for Confederation’s survival, in Ryan’s estimation, lay in converting English Canadians to the French-Canadian vision of the future. Ryan’s belief that the equality of the two cultures possessed the status of a central canon of the federation itself entailed a number of significant consequences. First, it meant that the commission should not be sidetracked by the advocacy of groups of new Canadians who considered the foundational cultural duality of English and French Canadians to be an injustice, a denial of individual rights. Ryan answered what he considered this misapplication of the theory of human rights by stating that the official recognition of the two cultures was constituted to ensure the exercise of fundamental human rights. He most emphatically rebuffed the claims of New Canadian champions such as Professor Hlynka, who, while insisting on rights that all agreed were fundamental and prior to any political arrangement – freedom of assembly, free speech, freedom of worship, freedom to found a family – ignored the fact that official recognition of the two cultures was inscribed in Canada’s very constitution “so that these fundamental rights might be fully exercised.” Cultural duality operated only at the level of public institutions and in no way abridged private or personal rights, but it was essential to provide a minimum of unity upon which to found an enduring polity.81 The arguments of New Canadian leaders would, in his estimation, have greater impact if this group were more homogeneous, in which case, “we would have to faithfully re-examine the present dualism, and consider the possibility of giving an official status to a third culture.” But this was not the case, either sociologically or demographically, and any movement in this direction would transform the commission’s mandate into one of “American-style multiculturalism,” which, in his estimation, would lead to “a cultural uniformity” characterized by the supremacy of the English language in the public sphere and the relegation of all cultures to a “folkloric or private state.” In contrast to Laurendeau and other French-Canadian intellectuals, Ryan knew western Canadian society and cultural sensibilities well, having travelled extensively there in the 1950s during visits to francophone Catholic communities in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Western Canada “is the part of the country that is the least aware of the

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realities of biculturalism. It is here that we find the most heterogeneous population, whose mentality is closest to that which prevails in the United States.” He informed his readers that the existence of one million citizens whose origins were neither English nor French was a key fact of the experience of modern Canada, that these peoples were not simply “subjects to be conquered” by either of the larger national groups, and that the founding peoples had an overriding duty to ensure a “human and gradual integration of New Canadians into the Canadian cultural framework.”82 In recognition of the rising presence of elements whose culture was neither English nor French, he was prepared to go some distance in making practical accommodations at the local level, to granting, in certain cases, a “freedom of the city” to other languages that would recognize the significance of the “cultural riches” contributed by other ethnic groups.83 A second consequence was that moderates had to ensure that the overriding desideratum of biculturalism was not obscured or trumped by the second pillar of the commission’s mandate, the extension of bilingualism both in the federal public service and in English Canada. Integral bilingualism across the transcontinental territory of Canada had been part of  a French-Canadian nationalist pantheon extending back to Henri Bourassa, the founder of Le Devoir, and to Ryan’s interwar mentors Abbé Groulx and Olivar Asselin. It was also a fundamental article of the postwar “Canadian” nationalist credo championed by a number of progressive young Catholic intellectuals in Quebec. Ryan noted that it was certainly important not to underestimate the advocacy of limited bilingualism because this had, in fact, encouraged “a firmer crystallization of French-Canadian aspirations.” For this reason, he championed the installation of “a real and effective bilingualism” in the federal public service and throughout “all the private and public life of Canada.” However, he considered bilingualism a by-product of a much deeper reality – that of biculturalism. In other words, the symbolic and official equality of the French and English languages was not the final end in and of itself, but the means of “promoting an equality that is more dynamic, more demanding, and more comprehensive, that of two cultures, of two peoples.”84 Such a project involved something more fundamental – something that operated at the level of recognizing and promoting the equality of differing mentalities, values, and institutions that related individuals to enduring collective identities and purposes. Language, according to Ryan, was “the vehicle of a culture, which in turn is expressed in original institutions.”85 In this sense, he believed, as did André Laurendeau, that the



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right to speak English or French operated at the level of personal and individual rights, while “culture” indicated the priority of collective rights as the central factor in Confederation.86 Bilingualism also intersected with the preservation and extension of the rights of francophone minority communities in the Maritimes, Ontario, and western Canada. Here, Ryan had to navigate carefully, ­recognizing the presence of two divergent currents of opinion within Quebec, one that considered these minorities the bulwark of Quebec in Confederation, and the other holding that Quebec must not be distracted from the autonomous pursuit of its destiny. There was no doubt that Ryan’s experience and sympathies placed him within the first current, as he had long sought to bridge the differences between Quebec – French Canada’s political and cultural “heartland” – and the widely scattered francophone and Catholic communities that were frequently suspicious of dirigisme by “outsiders” from Quebec.87 Bilingualism may not have been Ryan’s ultimate goal, but it was the means, in the form of minority language rights, with which to constantly test English-Canadian intentions towards the ideal of a bicultural Canada during this intense dialogical phase of rethinking the Canadian experience. As Ryan aptly put the matter, “our English-language fellow citizens dream of a prosperous and united Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but are they prepared to pay the price?” This price involved conceding the necessary precondition for the equality of French Canada as a cultural entity – the recognition “by the nine other provinces in practice that the bicultural character of Canada extends from sea to sea, to the territory of each of the provinces. If the French Canadians of the other provinces cannot freely receive a French education in their respective province, Canadian biculturalism will be a myth.”88 Finally, Ryan exhorted French-Canadian moderates not to fall into the conventional expectation of their anglophone fellow citizens by assuring them that, in the final analysis, all would be well with Confederation. This impulse he denounced as the mark of an unfortunate species of “cultural hermaphrodite” who had, in the name of achieving success in business or politics according to an Anglo-Saxon yardstick, ceased to be truly representative of the French-Canadian milieu.89 He noted in February 1964 that the dominant need among the audiences he encountered in western Canada was that French-Canadian public figures reassure them regarding the future of Confederation. Ryan told them that separatism was as yet not an important political movement, and that public opinion in Quebec emphatically rejected terrorism, but he could not conclude

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that these agitations would dissipate. As a precondition to any dialogue, English Canadians had to realize that “the present malaise is not simply marginal,” as the problems and aspirations that provide the working themes of these new movements “are not peripheral” but, rather, “rooted at the most profound level of French-Canadian consciousness.” Most significant among these, Ryan noted, “was the feeling of being treated for a long time like a stranger or an inferior in one’s own society, which has produced a sudden exaltation that takes hold of a being awakened to the creative powers that lie dormant in him. And this realization is not the monopoly of the separatists, but expresses the French-Canadian soul.”90 This taut psychological state, reckoned Ryan, far from debilitating or immobilizing, was the crucible of a new political creativity, one that represented an “authentic heroism in the measure that it frees itself from prefabricated conclusions and leads to an evolution that is the result of the laws of its interior being.” Here was a new call for intellectual activism, the definition of a role for a public intellectual in a society that he believed was torn by adherence to an unreconstructed federal system and the attractions of separatism. In such a climate, the mark of a new political heroism was to work to build a moderate mentality, the foundation of a disposition to dialogue in that “it instinctively feels repugnance for a facile separatism whose political, economic, and cultural implications have not been carefully measured. It is suspicious of the overly mathematical logic of improvised leaders whom, in normal times, he would not allow to direct his most humble local institutions.” Quebeckers audacious enough to subscribe to this mentality belonged to a new group whose dominant characteristic was moderation, which, “while frequently confused with weakness, softness, insignificance and fear,” was in fact, “fidelity to reality and strength.” Although unspectacular, and unattractive to media organs that craved superficial clarity, the spirit of moderation was “more sure, and after a slower approach whose steps are dictated by the exigencies of reality and reason, it generally achieves a clarity that is more serene and durable.”91 Here, translated into political terms, was the Christian disposition as outlined by Cardinal Newman, an understanding confirmed by Ryan’s assimilation of moderation to a true spirit of dialogue, a willingness of citizens “to place themselves and their milieu in a position to listen,” a course that made them appear obscure, weak, and indecisive. In Ryan’s estimation, he and his fellow moderates were nothing of the sort: their goal was to ensure that “reason and moderation imprint the choices of their milieu” while refusing to incant “facile exorcisms” to reassure English Canada. What distinguished such moderates



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within their own community and within the wider Canadian political framework was that they brought no reassurance for the political class as to the future of Confederation. They sought a middle way between immobilism and “the logomachy of the separatists” by consciously attempting to understand the English-Canadian point of view, a quality that gave them an advantage as interlocutors who could debate on a footing of equality with intellectuals such as Eugene Forsey, Blair Neatby, Gordon Rothney, and Norman Ward.92 From being the moral arbiter of reconciling Catholic values and French Canada’s quest for modernity, Ryan as public intellectual now elevated himself as the quintessential political arbiter, charged not only with explaining the new federal dialogue to his French-Canadian counterparts, but also educating his English-Canadian compatriots, inducing them, despite their reservations, to accept a bicultural vision, based on “admiration and respect” for “Quebec’s unexpected accession to maturity and vitality.”93 The ideal of building a viable Canadian political and cultural community on the recognition of an integral cultural dualism was, for Ryan, the only principle of cohesion that could effectively counter the rising popularity of what he considered the prefabricated utopia of the “two nations thesis” in French Canada. In early February 1964, shortly after his return from a speaking trip to western Canada, he gave a detailed rebuttal to those, like Gilles Grégoire, who called for “a French state” within Confederation as the solution to the problem of recognizing Quebec’s national aspirations. Impressed by the good will and interest he and his fellow speakers Jeanne Sauvé and Guy Beaugrand-Champagne received in Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver when they spoke of French Canada’s aspirations,94 Ryan felt more confident about the formation of an influential group of English-Canadian moderates with whom he could engage in dialogue. The fact that erstwhile bastions of Anglo-Saxon privilege like McGill University had decided to establish a French Canada studies program was an occasion for rejoicing, even though pessimistic nationalists, such as the historian Michel Brunet, adamantly opposed this initiative, objections that Ryan dismissed as little more than “a tempest in a teapot.”95 He identified a new “state of sincere anxiety” in English-Canadian public opinion that “favours faithful cooperation with others.”96 He critically scrutinized the claims of the advocates of the “two nations thesis,” arguing that much of what they sought could be attained “within a flexible federation” whose structures were not so closely based on “race and culture.” Their political vision was far too narrow, as the recognition of two distinct nations as a

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fundamental fact of Canadian life was already explicit in the mandate of Laurendeau-Dunton. The approach of the commission, however, was more modern and open, because it placed nationality in dynamic relation to other factors such as geography, economics, politics, and culture. The practical solution proposed by the “two nations” solution was inherently unworkable: Confederation would become “a vague confederal regime” whose authority would be derived not from the people but from officials appointed by each national group. At best, it would be a North American version of Gaullist Europe, a kind of “Canada of the fatherlands,” which arbitrarily and exclusively anchored political society on “supposedly national realities.” It would be inherently unjust, because, within each national state, respective French and English minorities would be forced to identify with the “official culture” of that state, a situation that “failed to take account of the increasing cultural diversity that characterizes our country.” Such a structure could ultimately “not long survive the wear and tear of time and national passions.” What was proposed was essentially “a softened form of separatism” in which there would be inevitable pressures for full national sovereignty, especially as the entire concept of the “two nations” rested on the premise that the state of Quebec was “the national state of French Canadians.” Ryan believed that national distinctions between French Canada and English Canada were “a fundamental fact of Canadian life” – in this respect, he mirrored Lord Acton’s dictum of a liberal nationalism founded upon the idea of nationality as essential to a political community.97 But he did not regard these distinctions as supreme, and as therefore requiring the logic of national sovereignty. Biculturalism was a far more “realistic and reasonable” option. It involved securing the main objective of the nationalists – “taking account of the national factor and requiring that it be inscribed more clearly in the structure and life of the country” – but it also took into account those geographical and economic factors that have “made Canada a distinct entity in the family of peoples.” As such, it was a firmer starting point “for  those conversations that we must engage in over the course of many years.”98 Writing to Blair Neatby, the director of research for the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, in April 1964, Ryan worried about the relative balance between individual and collective rights, stating that while the struggle to preserve two principal cultures in Canada must take priority, the legal structures underpinning these must not be “too categorical.” In practice, he recognized, “we cannot prevent individuals from determining for themselves the concrete ways that appear to them the most practical and effective” in realizing this ideal. The idea “that the



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State of Quebec is the principal political expression of French Canada in our country” was balanced, for Ryan, by the fact that “this State is, equally, the State of the English-speaking Canadians who live in our province. I fear that if our formulations become too rigid, we will end up in very difficult situations.”99

“He is and must remain the master after God in the firm”100 Ryan’s attempt to use the national soul searching occasioned by the ­Laurendeau-Dunton inquiry to elevate biculturalism as a fundamental principle of Canadian life marked a critical divergence from those nationalist intellectuals and politicians who envisioned French-Canadian equality primarily in terms of greater constitutional authority for Quebec. His strategy of elaborating a moderate ethos that would stand between both immobilism and a rising tide of sympathy for separatism was calculated to persuade French-Canadian opinion that far-reaching change was possible by working within the federal system. For this reason, his most acerbic barbs were directed against a type of unthinking English-Canadian opinion that assumed that separatists such as Marcel Chaput or ­Raymond Barbeau were somehow representative of French-Canadian attitudes to Confederation. He was utterly scathing towards the New Democratic member of Parliament and newspaper columnist Douglas Fisher, whom he dubbed “the elephant of Port Arthur” for his “almost abnormal ignorance” in accusing Ryan himself of being “an ardent advocate of the separatist tendency in Quebec”!101 Fisher’s was not an isolated case, but itself represented, according to Ryan, a type of “separatism” that was rampant among the western Canadian contingent of New Democrats.102 A growing chorus among English-Canadian “moderates” – men such as Fisher, federal N DP leader Tommy Douglas, and Manitoba premier Duff Roblin – chose to remind French Canadians of the “boogeyman” of growing English-Canadian hostility to demands for minority education rights in western Canada.103 Such mainstream English-­Canadian political and media commentary aroused impatience and hostility among prominent Quebec political figures and made the formation of a group of FrenchCanadian moderates even more arduous. The occasion of René Lévesque’s famous 1964 outburst, “I’ve had it up to the eyeballs with biculturalism,” prompted Ryan to try to explain why such a prominent leader would give credence to a course of action that, if taken literally,

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endorsed the abandonment of francophone minorities and gave countenance to separatism. In a convoluted editorial, he tried to explain Lévesque’s words as a protest against tendencies in English Canada that sought to “turn the question of biculturalism or the Quebec problem into a political spectacle,”104 thus defeating efforts of moderates like Ryan to foster rational dialogue. Lévesque’s utterance, however, identified a central difficulty for Ryan’s new discursive strategy: for how long would mainstream elements in French Canada’s political classes actually countenance, in the face of English-Canadian resistance, a difficult dialogue that might, at best, yield rather glacial progress towards their society’s constitutional and cultural objectives? Would those whose federalism lacked Ryan’s quasi-religious commitment to dialogue, and proceeded from a premise of power politics, choose a course such as exploring further the implications of the “two nations” theory, which at least on the surface appeared to possess the merits of greater clarity? Ryan’s ongoing attempt to elaborate a “moderate” position was related not only to his federalist convictions, but also to a power struggle at Le Devoir waged in early 1964 to determine the successor to Gérard Filion as director, thus determining who, in effect, would be French Canada’s most influential public intellectual. When Filion hired Ryan as a member of the editorial team in 1962, it was with the clear expectation that he wanted to leave the paper in order to pursue a career in business. At the time of Ryan’s hiring, Filion was already vice-chairman of the Parent Commission on education, and his day-to-day involvement with managing Le Devoir and writing editorials waned. By early 1963, he had made the decision to accept the presidency of the new Société générale de financement.105 While he had made no overt promises to Ryan, it was apparent that sometime between June 1962 and March 1963, Filion became convinced that Ryan possessed the necessary administrative aptitude, and “his ideas corresponded fairly well to those that Le Devoir had defended since its foundation.”106 The critical factor here was that Filion and Ryan shared a common background as militants in Catholic social movements and a commitment to the continued synthesis of Catholicism and French-Canadian identity, which made them wary of André Laurendeau’s sympathies for secularist groups like the M L F .107 Ryan’s recollections corroborate Filion’s version, as he recalled that one day Filion called him into his office and sought to test his financial acumen by showing him documents outlining the financial state of Le Devoir. As national secretary of Action catholique, Ryan, of course, did have experience with budgeting and accounting practices, and he had



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considerable familiarity with business, being vice-president of his parish credit union at St Louis-de-France. Swearing him to secrecy, Filion then told him of his decision to leave the paper, saying that Ryan would succeed him in the director’s chair.108 Yet everyone believed that, as editor-in-chief, Laurendeau was Filion’s logical successor. Filion’s departure led to a prolonged interregnum: Le Devoir’s governing body, a council of directors that included the trustees who owned the paper, was unwilling to make a speedy decision on a permanent successor and adopted the expedient of appointing a triumvirate to manage the paper, consisting of Laurendeau, Ryan, and Paul Sauriol. A younger journalist, Jean-Marc Léger, who was closer to the concerns of nationalist circles, was also an editor, and had some support to head Le Devoir. However, at Filion’s insistence, the board appointed Ryan the “administrator-delegate,” responsible for administrative and financial matters, giving him “the deciding voice  in the enterprise.” This probably suited Laurendeau, who had already decided to accept Lester Pearson’s invitation to co-chair the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, but, according to Ryan, Laurendeau still remained convinced that he would succeed Filion.109 The succession remained in a kind of limbo for over a year. Whoever became director of Le Devoir would acquire immense power, a type of power that was, in relation to lines of authority, more enduring and less subject to challenge than that possessed by any leader of a government, bishop in the Catholic Church, or newspaper editor in French Canada or, indeed, in the Anglo-American world. In fact, the only analogy would be the power enjoyed by the Roman pontiff within the Catholic Church, an authority answerable only to God. As explained by Gérard Filion in 1974, this power resulted from the peculiar circumstances of Le Devoir’s founding: Henri Bourassa launched the paper not with assistance from financiers, but with small contributions made by thousands of French Canadians from Quebec, New England, Acadia, Ontario, and the Prairies. “These thousands of humble people,” declared Filion, “have the right to insist that the purposes for which they subscribed money should be respected,” a responsibility that devolved onto the director. For this reason, the director had “total freedom” in determining the orientation of the paper, and one of his major responsibilities was to “define over the long term of events what he considers the best for French-Canadian society.”110 The board of administration exercised oversight of only financial and administrative matters, leaving the director entirely independent in intellectual and editorial matters. There was, according to Filion, nothing in the regulations of the Imprimerie Populaire, the holding company that

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controlled Le Devoir, or in the two trusts that owned the firm, whereby a director could be relieved of his functions. Indeed, the total control enjoyed by the director over all financial, administrative, and editorial matters derived from the fact that, at the moment of his appointment, the director received a 51 per cent share of the two original trusts established by Bourassa and his associates, thus giving him complete independence, even from the board of directors. The only limitation was that the director could neither sell the shares nor transfer them to his heirs, holding them to pass on to his successor. All previous directors, including Filion, had been appointed for life, a situation that made moments of transition particularly fraught. It was to avoid internecine conflict that the board of administrators had, in 1963, decided on the expedient of a triumvirate, “while awaiting the development of a consensus as to the choice of a director.”111 By March 1964, Ryan was growing restive with this arrangement, especially because Filion had promised him the succession. He was aware that, within the editorial room and among the journalists, there were persistent doubts as to his nationalist credentials – a serious situation, given the fact that nationalist intellectuals and clergy formed a substantial and vocal segment of Le Devoir’s subscribers. As late as the board of administration meeting of 27 March 1964, Laurendeau was quoted as voicing his concern, expressed when Ryan was first hired, that he was not nationalistic enough.112 Finally, Ryan decided to take a more overt stance, buttonholing Laurendeau and “put my cards on the table,” telling his senior colleague that the triumviral arrangment could not continue indefinitely, that he was aware that elements in the firm were opposed to him, and that he wanted the director’s position. As he recalled, Laurendeau was “bowled over” that his younger colleague would make such demands, but, two weeks later, he met with Ryan and agreed to support him.113 This was a key turning point in Ryan’s fortunes, as Laurendeau was a voting member of the board of administration and had considerable capital among nationalist intellectuals; indeed, these might have inclined him, at first glance, in favour of Jean-Marc Léger. What tipped the balance in Ryan’s favour were three major considerations. First, despite their previous disagreements about confessional education, he was one of the few French Canadian intellectuals to wholeheartedly support Laurendeau’s efforts to work within the federal system. Second, he had the opportunity, just before a critical 1 May 1964 meeting of Le Devoir’s editorial board, to proclaim an act of faith that went some way to reassuring the community of nationalist intellectuals.



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Montreal’s leading English-language daily, the Montreal Star, had had the effrontery to publish an article accusing Lionel Groulx of seeking a “bizarre” equation between religion and racism. This canard purported to have eminent intellectual credentials, being the dictum of the American historian Mason Wade, whose massive two-volume The French Canadians linked Groulx with retrograde nationalism, charging that he was a separatist.114 Ryan made no bones about what he thought of this attack by anglophones on one of the great intellectuals of French Canada. Ryan’s response would have conveyed a good deal of authority, particularly because, at the outset, he emphatically stated that he was “pas un ‘disciple’ de M. Groulx.” While disagreeing with him about the “universal” values of Catholicism, he also made it clear that “it would have never entered my head that this priest could have been a racist.” In what was a powerful defence of Groulx, Ryan described a man who interpreted French-Canadian history as “the reconstitution of an original life, which has persisted, through a thousand obstacles, against extinction.” His great contribution, both to Ryan’s generation and beyond, “was to teach French Canadians to be proud of themselves and their culture.” Groulx’s frequently derided idea of survival was one that always sought “an authentic culture, based on original institutions and expressing proud and virile attitudes towards English Canada.” There could be no mistaking Ryan’s meaning: as director of Le Devoir, he would not be pushed around by English-Canadian intellectuals or politicians who sought facile reassurances about the fate of Confederation, nor did he intend to be one of those “opportunistic French Canadians who have gained success in English Canada by denigrating their compatriots, and making men like M. Groulx appear to be narrow-minded fanatics.”115 His advocacy of federalism would remain in touch with the deepest national aspirations of his compatriots. The third – and, for those seeking some measure of continuity with Filion’s overall direction, the most compelling – consideration in favour of Ryan’s appointment as director was that he and and the outgoing director were ideologically similar, in that both were committed Catholics and staunch federalists. Writing to Ryan ten years later, Filion articulated his central worry, that Le Devoir might fall into the hands of a particular ideological tendency and cease to represent the French-Canadian nation as a whole.116 Despite Jean-Marc Léger’s long service as an editorial writer and columnist, Filion suspected that he had “strong leanings” towards separatism: in his eyes, the tradition of Bourassa’s paper had always been staunchly nationalist, but it had never countenanced

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separatism. In his memoirs, Filion categorically stated that, under Léger’s direction, Le Devoir “would probably have enlisted under the banner of the Parti québécois, with all the consequences that would have entailed.”117 Those like Filion who conjugated nationalism and Catholicism were worried above all about the emergence of secularist currents in their society. They reacted viscerally to groups like the M L F , which sought to eradicate confessional education, and to the new Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (R I N), formed in 1963 as the first clearly secular and socialist political force advocating sovereignty for Quebec. Where Léger was, as early as February 1964, giving credence to this new form of nationalism by linking the achievement of independence with the cause of decolonization,118 Ryan was adamantly resisting the merging of secularism and nationalism, declaring that, as “a man who desires to be honest and objective,” he had no intention of debating the respective futures of Catholicism and Confederation with the M L F or the RI N , especially not along the lines of “the arbitrary mode that they wish to impose as the basis of discussion.”119 By the end of April 1964, Laurendeau had decided that it was necessary to nominate a director and that, despite some differences of opinion, Ryan was the only real choice. Laurendeau had to run interference with board member Jean Marchand (not the labour leader and future federal cabinet minister), who felt that Ryan’s nomination would be the “death of Le Devoir,” and he wryly observed that such hasty opinions were never fair or accurate.120 With Marchand on side, there remained only the final hurdle of the board of administration meeting, held 1 May 1964. Present at the meeting were Filion, René Paré (head of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce and of Premier Lesage’s Conseil d’orientation économique), and Dr Archambault, all of whom had two votes in their capacity as trustees. Board members André Laurendeau, Paul Sauriol, François-Albert Angers (Archambault’s son-in-law), Paul-Émile Robert, and Claude Ryan were also in attendance. Filion had prudently taken the precaution, before the vote was taken, of having the firm’s lawyers present, and they presented an amendment to the regulations clarifying the power of the director, who was now explicitly given complete control over editorial matters as well as the ideological and political orientation of the journal.121 This business concluded, the meeting moved to consider possible candidates for the director’s position. Angers demurred, stating that it was too soon to take such a step, that it “was not possible to make a choice that will rally French-Canadian opinion, and that we should first consult



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our nationalist organizations.” His only hope of stopping Ryan was to invoke the “pluralism” of the milieu and aim for a candidate to be, in effect, “chosen by plebiscite.” Marchand, reflecting the rumblings among more junior journalists who were more influenced by nationalism than was Ryan, dissented from Angers’s position, but urged delay and further consultation because he was worried that the attitude of the editorial team might create discontent among the reporters and columnists. Filion responded by saying that there would always be those who would question the choice but that it was “urgent to re-establish authority within Le Devoir.”122 At this point, the meeting seems to have turned stormy, with an exasperated Ryan dramatically getting up from the table, stating that he had not solicited the position, and leaving with a firm and authoritative “Summon me, gentlemen, when your decision is made.”123 Yet, Ryan knew that Filion had, in advance, secured all the necessary trustee votes, especially that of Paré, and that Laurendeau and Sauriol, his fellow-triumvirs, would support him as well. Thus, his exit seemed to be staged in order to assert his independent stance. After this moment of drama, Filion placed Ryan’s name in nomination as director for a ten-year term, a cunning expedient designed to hold any waverers in line with the reassurance that, if they had any objections to Ryan, they could at least retain some control over him by choosing not to appoint him for life. Angers advanced the candidacy of Jean-Marc Léger. The board proceeded to a vote, Ryan securing seven of a possible eleven votes (Filion and Paré, each with two votes, Laurendeau, Sauriol, and Robert), with Léger securing three (Archambault’s two votes and Angers’s one), Marchand abstaining. Ryan was called back into the room, approved as “administrateur général” for a period of ten years, and informed that his salary would be $250 per week, with a $50 weekly expense allowance.124 “The privileges of a director,” wrote Ryan in his first editorial as the unchallenged authority of Le Devoir, “would be excessive if they did not have the goal of assuring the unity of the institution and of guaranteeing to the paper, in the person of its director, the radical independence without which the deeper purpose of the enterprise would constantly be called into question.” In the powers of its director, he believed, Le Devoir exemplified an original journalistic experiment in North America, where, for the most part, the functions of ownership, management, and editorial direction were kept in separate compartments. It thus stood as an alternative to the traditions of Anglo-American journalism, where, in the final analysis, money trumped intellect. Le Devoir, in effect, had no owner, and its distinctiveness lay in the fact that the director was also an editor,

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which ensured that, while “the primacy of ideas over dollars was inscribed in the very structure of the enterprise,” the director’s responsibility for prudent administration guarded it from the pitfall of “a blind cult of pure ideas.”125 Ryan’s article raises a number of questions. What did he mean by vaunting his “radical independence”? How did he position his new responsibility for intellectual leadership within the tradition of Le Devoir’s defence of French Canada’s interests? And, more importantly, how was he to relate these values to the “community” of the paper’s readers, a group of largely middle-class men and women who embodied the “intellectual and social ‘cadres’ that constitute the cultural and professional dorsal spine of our people”?126 In the context of French Canada in the early 1960s, “independence” meant, first and foremost, a sense of living through an “acceleration of history” in which explanations derived from the past could no longer serve as a guide to present action.127 For many of Ryan’s contemporaries, this meant a critical attitude towards Catholicism and traditional social institutions and, above all, a desire to transcend the rhetorical excesses of the political partisanship that had characterized the years of Maurice Duplessis. And, because Ryan had for so many years been directly employed by the Catholic Church, an emphatic proclamation of independence was imperative in order to assure readers that he did not place the Church and its hierarchy above criticism and that the archiepiscopal palace in Montreal had had no hidden influence in securing his appointment. Independence also meant a more “objective,” less combative style of journalism and analysis, a direction in which Ryan was certainly prepared to move, proclaiming his own journey from “facile and negative critique” to “constructive action and in-depth work,” values that accorded well with the new professional, “realistic” ethos of the readership. At several points in the editorial, he proclaimed his freedom and “fundamental independence” from all authorities or “chapels.” While he certainly intended to write with respect for those who had preceded him, he believed that he was “free from any partisan attachment.”128 Having so closely observed and chronicled the formation of a new French-Canadian middle class, Ryan well understood that realism and non-partisanship were fundamental to their self-definition. His promise to continue Henri Bourassa’s mission to “diffuse Christian principles and defend French Canadians” must be understood within this new context, framed by a realization that the “cadres” of his society wanted “proper, competent, lively, informed, and serious journalism”



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that avoided rhetorical excess and took into account the pluralism and diversity of French-Canadian society.129 Ryan’s bridge between the stability of past values and the needs of a society in the throes of rapid change took as its central mediating figure the “objective” public intellectual, whose calling evoked a Catholic heritage that, in 1964, was still the common coin of public discourse. Adopting an imperial tone, reminiscent of Caesar’s third-person style, Ryan’s second editorial explained that “no one among those already at the paper can boast that they have made him eat from their hand. He never solicited a position at Le Devoir; in fact, they begged him to come. He has made no concessions or promises to anyone. He has signed no profession of orthodoxy to any clan. They asked him to serve: he has replied with an affirmative that is both fearful and determined.”130 A close look at Ryan’s choice of words affords a clue to his self-positioning as director. The evocation of the phrase “eat from their hand” harkened back to Le Devoir’s principled opposition to Maurice Duplessis, who had boasted of making the bishops eat from his hand, and indicated that, under his leadership, the paper would continue its vigilant watchfulness over the doings of public figures. As well, it testified to Ryan’s own intense commitment to ensuring the independence of Catholicism from the state, as this was the only way in which its values could ensure a cohesive civic order. The final sentence’s evocation of “service” recalls the conclave of cardinals electing a pope, whose style of acceptance always emphasizes timidity and unworthiness, but whose divinely ordained and unchallenged authority derives not from military power or the mandate of the people, but from his imitation of Christ’s desire to serve. Mastery of Le Devoir did not confer on Ryan the active power of a statesman – a political Caesar – but it gave him the prestige of a political intellectual who envisioned himself standing in a line of succession whose exemplars included the prophets of the Old Testament, St Augustine, and, in modern times, men such as Walter Lippmann. This was an unparalleled position from which to exert moral authority as the chief political educator of his society.

8 Between Christendom and the “New Gods” The Search for a Stable Society, 1964–1966 I remain convinced that the Christian engaged in action must demonstrate a great prudence and a lively sense of perception if he wants to act with a lasting efficacy. My method consists in creating an atmosphere favourable to those reforms I desire. Imposition from on high or by force of authority will prove nugatory if they have not first entered into the spirit of the institution. Claude Ryan, letter, 28 May 1964

After 1964, aspirants to political influence in Canada and Quebec, and a  steady stream of intellectuals, journalists, and international political celebrities visiting Montreal, made the near-obligatory pilgrimage to the premises of Le Devoir, then located at 434, rue Notre-Dame. Upon opening the main doors, visitors encountered a “Dickensian,” “ramshackle” rabbit warren of rooms reminiscent of a Victorian artisanal enterprise.1 They were then ushered into the director’s office, where, enveloped in cigar smoke and surrounded by typewriters, bulging dossiers of documentation, and weighty tomes on theology and politics, Claude Ryan bade them welcome. There, either in private conversation or through a discussion with the editorial team, he outlined his position on the course of world events, the cut and thrust of party politics, the Canadian constitutional crisis, and Quebec sovereignty. Questions and exchanges enabled Ryan to carefully weigh and dissect the calibre of his interlocutors, a process culminating in the next morning’s editorial, in which he would either bestow or withhold Le Devoir’s benediction of his visitors’ political hopes. It was small wonder that, during these years, Ryan earned the sobriquet “the pope,”2 for indeed, in the political universe of Quebec, he wielded the intellectual and moral authority of a pontiff. Although his influence on the politics of his society was considerable, Ryan was not the most brilliant star in the firmament of Quebec



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journalism. Indeed, rivals such as Gérard Pelletier, who was managing editor of La Presse between 1962 and 1965, and colleagues such as André Laurendeau, who stayed on as editor-in-chief, and Jean-Marc Léger, who handled international news and editorial matters at Le Devoir, surpassed him in the fluidity and perceptiveness of their writing and possessed a more acute social conscience and awareness of the course of national and international events. Nor did Le Devoir have the largest audience: its circulation of barely 35,000 in 1964 made it the smallest of the three Montreal dailies, lagging far behind La Presse, associated with the Liberal Party, and Montréal-Matin, the organ of the conservative Union nationale. Devoid of comics and horoscopes, essential appurtenances of most North American newspapers, and with little attention devoted to the arts, sport, literature, and cinema, Le Devoir cut an old-maidish figure next to its larger rivals. Its team of twenty journalists was small and its technical apparatus outmoded, prompting Jean-Marc Léger, who moved from La Presse to Le Devoir, to utter the rueful observation that “it was like trading in a Citroën DS-21 Pallas for a 2 C V.”3 Yet, Ryan possessed a willingness to work indefatigably at being an editor. In any given year between 1964 and 1970, his output stood at over two hundred full editorials, each a substantial two-column effort of approximately eleven hundred words, and “blocs-notes” – shorter commentaries on current news. Ryan’s writing easily eclipsed the output of the combined contributions of any of his editorial colleagues. As director of a morning paper, Ryan would see his day at Le Devoir typically begin in the late morning and not conclude until 8:30 or 9 p.m. And this schedule did not preclude him from accepting over one hundred speaking engagements each year to religious, cultural, and political groups,4 activities that frequently took him outside Montreal and greatly extended the scope of his intellectual influence and that of Le Devoir. There is another clue to explaining the purchase that Ryan’s journalistic reputation had on so many of his contemporaries. Perhaps most striking about the new director was the relationship between his own curious position in the community of Quebec intellectuals and the way in which this group interfaced with the Quebec state and society in the 1960s. Since the 1880s, intellectuals, both clerical and lay, had played a dynamic role in the advent of modernity in Quebec. Being an intellectual encompassed a variety of roles and stances: the more “traditional” journalistcommentator such as Henri Bourassa; hybrids such as Abbé Lionel Groulx, who successfully married the moralizing imperatives of the clerical vocation to the professionalization of historical knowledge in the university setting; Groulx’s fellow clergyman Frère Marie-Victorin, who

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did much to institute and enhance the study of the natural sciences at the university level; social investigators and men of letters such as Léon Gérin, whose example was modernized and brought inside the university during the 1930s by men such as the economist Esdras Minville and the modern social sciences pioneer Father Georges-Henri Lévesque. It would be simply untrue to claim that, in this development, clergymen represented the forces of tradition and laymen the rising prestige of a more modern intellectual outlook. Despite the oppositional stance of many younger intellectuals during the second administration of Maurice Duplessis (1944–59), their politics were, in fact, not typical of the dominant outlook of the francophone intellectual community, which throughout its history was characterized by a fairly intimate engagement with the governing elites in the Catholic Church and at both the federal and provincial levels of the state. Despite the commonalities of language between Quebec and France, the sociability and identity of their respective intellectual communities were of a completely different order, prompting historian Marcel Fournier to declare that Quebec almost completely lacked examples of “intellectuals in the Sartrean sense of the term.”5 By the 1960s, the model of the Quebec intellectual as expert of modernity seemed well entrenched, as the prestige and influence of men such as Claude Morin, Jacques Parizeau, Léon Dion, Louis Bernard, Jacques-Yvan Morin, and Fernand Dumont, who rose to prominence as respected advisers to the Quebec government and political parties, seemed to derive from the possession of university diplomas in the social sciences and economics. Next to this constellation of luminaries, Claude Ryan’s own credentials appeared flimsy: an uncompleted degree in social work, no graduate training at American, British, or European universities, and service in an array of “amateur” church-sponsored social and community movements that appeared shabby and local. But to take such a view would be to miss the essential: Ryan steadfastly maintained that his position was superior to that of other public intellectuals because he could appeal to a cultural legacy that accorded high regard to the journalist, the exponent of an unspecialized form of communication, whose power to address and influence a wide audience drawn from all social ranks far exceeded that of the specialized social scientist. As director of Le Devoir, Ryan selfconsciously belonged to a succession of political intellectuals whose dedication to fostering a relationship between Quebec and Canada rested on harmonizing the imperatives of Catholicism and nationalism.6 Under the aegis of Gérard Filion and André Laurendeau, the prestige of



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the journalist-intellectual had been refurbished, acquiring a firm grounding in the advocacy of social justice. Membership in this pantheon allowed Ryan to maintain that the journalist had replaced the priest as the linchpin between the public authorities and the community and was therefore entitled to exercise a “moral magistracy.” Like the Catholic clergyman of the early 1900s, the journalist of the mid-1960s accepted the moral requirements of public influence “to live in a solitude, in a distancing of oneself in relation to the commitments taken by his contemporaries, in order to see matters with objectivity.”7 By drawing an explicit relationship between morality and objectivity, Ryan located his authority in the “Dickensian” world of the public moralist, a figure particularly prevalent in England (but less so in France or the United States, countries from which most of his contemporaries drew their inspiration). This, in turn, raises a further question. Why, in the mid1960s, was there still space in Quebec’s intellectual life, characterized by the rapid expansion of universities and the unparalleled new technologies associated with mass media, for the commanding character of a public moralist? Although unappealing to francophone nationalists, the most apt comparison is not between Quebec and France, but between modern Quebec and late-Victorian England. As an intellectual type, the public moralist flourished in environments dominated by the classical humanities, where “the social question,” with its emphasis on the mutual duties and obligations of elites and popular elements that must characterize a harmonious society, trumped the universalist and abstract imperatives of the “rights of man” and where educators and social commentators were preoccupied with “character” – both national and individual.8 Such issues fascinated both English intellectuals and their counterparts in Catholic Quebec between 1880 and 1945. And, despite the rapid growth of the social sciences during the postwar years, the hold of the Catholic Church on the systems of education, health, and public welfare in the province, which was not decisively challenged until the mid-1960s, ensured that the transition between the older humanities and new professional knowledge was a relatively slow one. In Quebec, classical humanism and a long tradition of engagement with the question of French Canada’s position and character in Anglo-Saxon North America provided a tone and set of assumptions that can be characterized as “pre-political” – that is, the unspoken, foundational elements of a shared evaluative language that allowed a moralist like Ryan considerable purchase on the minds of his educated contemporaries.9 And in a development of enormous consequence, the overriding importance of

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the national question became even more absorbing to intellectuals during the 1960s, both among supporters and opponents of Québec sovereignty, thus forcing intellectuals and university professors to adopt the moral stance of engaged militants and publicists, which disposed even these “technicians of modernity” to listen to Ryan.10 In any other Western society, Ryan’s frequent praise of his predecessor Henri Bourassa, the founding director of Le Devoir, might have sounded anachronistic, in that he celebrated his anti-intellectual status as an “autodidact.” Ryan assimilated his own near-autodidacticism to that of his predecessor, and by so identifying himself with Bourassa, he latched on to a kind of public moralism that was even more archaic than that represented by Abbé Lionel Groulx, whose stature as a trained historian in a university made him a more “modern” figure. However, this enabled Ryan to claim a superior moral stance for his hero, the true source of his greatness that emancipated him from the thrall of over-specialization, enabling him to escape the “provincial” tendencies of his milieu, and advance a “broad and grand” vision of Canada, one committed to a genuine federalism founded upon a compact between two founding peoples and the cultivation of an enduring civic friendship between English and French Canadians.11

The Transformation of Le Devoir: “A sign of contradiction”12 Ryan’s accession to the directorship of Le Devoir occurred at a moment of serious stress in the world of francophone journalism in Quebec. Gérard Filion, who had directed the paper between 1947 and 1963, had achieved a precarious financial solvency while establishing an enviable reputation for combative, opinionated journalism, passionate in its opposition to the regime of Maurice Duplessis. Although Laurendeau’s name remained on Le Devoir’s masthead, the burden of his activities dictated that his editorial contributions would be minimal, thus leaving the heavy burden of editorial work in the hands of Claude Ryan, Jean-Marc Léger, brought into the editorial team in 1963 as a specialist in international affairs, and Paul Sauriol, the deputy-editor-in-chief and a member of the interim triumvirate that had guided the paper during 1963 and 1964. Ryan was well aware that some members of the board of directors of the Imprimerie Populaire, and some younger journalists in the newsroom, had preferred Léger to succeed Filion, partly because of his background in journalism, extending back to his student years in the late 1940s, his



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detailed knowledge of events in France and the francophone world, and his close attunement to both older currents and the newer, more independence-minded directions of French Canadian nationalism.13 As far as possible, Ryan confined Léger’s contributions to the international affairs bailiwick and refused to include him as a full member of the editorial team. Sauriol’s loyalty to the new director was unquestioned. In 1964, he was the oldest employee of Le Devoir, having joined the firm as a copyeditor in 1928 while Henri Bourassa was still present. Now, as Ryan’s principal adjutant, his concern was to “actively respect the very great authority” invested in the director.14 Ryan’s refusal to engage any new permanent editorialists created a situation of potential peril: as René Paré, a member of the Imprimerie Populaire board, wrote to Ryan, Le Devoir was “living dangerously” because “everything is more or less related to you.”15 Yet, during the first two years of his tenure, fortune favoured Ryan. Beginning in July 1964, Le Devoir’s principal competitor in the Montreal market, La Presse was crippled by a year-long strike of its journalists, who claimed that their freedom of expression was being abridged by the owners of the paper. Its managing editor Gérard Pelletier, an icon of francophone journalism and a champion of freedom of the press, was fired in the spring of 1965. Ryan had taken precautions to foster a far more collaborative climate, offering his journalists greater freedom of expression by enabling them to participate in the shaping of editorial policy, through a process of patient consultation, in exchange for an agreement that required them to adhere to more stringent standards of responsibility. As he confided to his old friend Gérard Lemieux, he was even prepared to break with Le Devoir’s tradition by taking a less visible role as director, to “efface” himself behind “more communitarian methods of work,” thus showing his respect for their status as intellectual workers.16 Such an approach would involve maintaining a firm direction in terms of overall editorial policy while “trying to draw in as many people as possible to the work and orientation” taken by the paper.17 For his journalists, this new emphasis on inclusivity came at a cost: the new labour agreement explicitly prohibited full-time employees from “publicly broadcasting an opinion openly hostile to the editorial policy” of the paper, barred them from providing any news to another Canadian daily paper without prior agreement from the director, and preventing them from employment that would occasion a conflict of interest or interfere with their service to the company.18 There was no doubt that the new labour agreement was explicitly aimed at colleagues like Léger who

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exemplified a more French style of journalism in which leading metropolitan dailies contained few editorials and showcased analytical articles by columnists that were frequently at odds with the political positions taken by the editor. For Ryan, such a practice was an appalling confusion of genres, one that would quickly lead to a loss of directorial authority. For Ryan, Le Devoir functioned in a North American environment where the editorial – which he associated with the more objective aspects of the news – trumped the free-wheeling commentary of gun-slinging columnists. Léger’s approach would stunt Le Devoir, keeping it at “an artisanal stage of organization”19 and thus inhibiting its attempt to join the ranks of high-quality North American dailies. The troubles at La Presse resulted in a net gain of 5,000–10,000 new subscribers and a tidy profit of $300,000 for Le Devoir. In addition, it provided Ryan with the opportunity to recruit some new talent, and he hired Vincent Prince to write editorials on federal and provincial political matters. He also extended a helping hand to the fallen Gérard Pelletier, offering him a regular column. Not only did this gesture enable Ryan to reassert Le Devoir’s commitment to liberty by offering employment to a man “who has symbolized the fight for freedom in our milieu,”20 but it would have afforded him the pleasure of patronizing an old rival who had done his best to scotch his early ambitions as a public intellectual. Ryan’s frequent pronouncements on the nature of the journalistic enterprise and freedom of the press during 1964 and 1965 must be read against the background of the labour conflict at La Presse. As such, they constitute a barely veiled critique of Pelletier’s inability to exercise his authority as managing editor to resolve the tensions between ownership and journalists. Ryan could venture these opinions from a position that was unique in the world of North American journalism, as the constitution of Le Devoir made the director both owner and managing director, with full authority over both the business and intellectual aspects of the paper. It was this quasi-monarchical authority that gave Le Devoir its particular qualities of independence, “originality,” and “audacity,” which contrasted forcefully with “capitalist” enterprises like La Presse. For Ryan, the implicit question was, what was Pelletier, a paladin of social justice and a firm friend of unions, doing in such an enterprise, where his own socialdemocratic convictions were compromised by the interference of the owners, men who were “invariably conservatives in social and ideological matters” and whose calculations were motivated purely by considerations of profit rather than “real intellectual freedom”?21 Intellectual freedom could be harmonized with profit-making journalism only under



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very specific conditions: it required an authoritative managing editor to act as a hinge, one who was “free and responsible” to interpret the intellectual needs of journalists to the ownership and who enjoyed the trust of the ownership and would brook no interference of the board of directors in matters entrusted to the editors. Judged by this yardstick, Pelletier was a failure, because he had issued no statement of principles either aligning the editors behind the journalists and their claims that their “freedom was threatened” or critically examining the actions of management that had led the journalists to make these claims.22 Mindful of the agreement he had negotiated with his own unions, Ryan refused to recognize, in the context of mass-market daily journalism, an absolute right of journalists to intellectual freedom. Although he proclaimed his solidarity with the striking journalists by sending them a cheque, he was explicit he did so in recognition of their financial hardships, not because he totally subscribed to their position that their freedoms were imperilled. Critically examining a draft agreement presented by La Presse’s ownership to the strikers, Ryan acknowledged the need to find a difficult balance: while management’s desire to affirm a “right of sanction” based on shibboleths such as “the paper’s needs” and the public’s right to “objective news” had to be resisted, he recognized that farreaching recent developments in broadcasting had given rise to serious problems of objectivity that had to be appraised by more than the invocation of slogans. More tellingly, he approved of the owners’ insistence on more effective control over the extracurricular activities of its salaried journalists. The only way in which these divergent imperatives could be reconciled was through the constant cultivation of a climate of trust within the firm, the patient enlisting of journalists, editors, and owners in an ongoing collaboration that would teach the latter respect for the freedom of its collaborators, and the former the need for exercising this freedom within limits of responsibility.23 Finding this balance ultimately returned the problem to the need for an “effective authority”: if management were legally liable for articles published in the paper, they should have final oversight over them. In Ryan’s eyes, free and responsible journalism was possible only if there were a single authority: as he confided to Father Henri Bradet, the Dominican director of the magazine Maintenant, it was possible to envision a “parallelism of authorities” at the stage of accomplishing the work of journalism, “but I believe … that there must be a clear authority that can, in the final analysis, resolve all matters.”24 And at Le Devoir, there was no doubt that, despite his vision of a newspaper as “a communitarian enterprise,”25 Ryan was that final

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authority, whose decision on key matters of editorial policy trumped the views of his journalists. The hamstringing of Pelletier meant that Ryan was the only editor of a major Canadian metropolitan daily with any pretention to independence, given that only 50 per cent of Le Devoir’s revenue came from advertising, a significant contrast with the 80 per cent of most North American dailies. This fact elevated him to the status of the key figure in francophone Quebec journalism and an intellectual force to be reckoned with on the Canadian scene, his position in charge of both the business and intellectual facets of the paper was paralleled only by the arrangements of the Times of London and the Economist.26 He proudly referred to the fact that, at Le Devoir, all editorials bore the signature of their writer, a practice that had fallen into disuse in much of anglophone North America and in mass circulation papers like La Presse. “When one of us,” he trumpeted, “adopts an attitude or publishes an opinion under his own signature, we don’t have to inquire to know who is responsible for his actions: at Le Devoir, the editors take full responsibility for their writings, they obey no external authority.”27 His status was soon recognized by membership on the board of directors of Canadian Press (the national news service), a National Newspaper Award in 1964 for editorial work, and the National Press Club Prize for 1965.28 Freedom of expression and responsibility, those watchwords encapsulating Ryan’s own position as both journalist and employer, elevated him to the stature of leading public spokesman on all matters pertaining to freedom of the press. He spoke out on behalf of fellow journalist Jacques Hébert, whose imprudence in criticizing Quebec judges during the Coffin Affair incurred the wrath of Claude Wagner, the new provincial minister of justice, and earned him jail time for contempt of court. Ryan argued that, while Hébert was certainly guilty of a number of false affirmations and mistakes, Quebec judicial practices regarding freedom of the press should adhere to the American model. In that country in March 1964, the Supreme Court had dismissed the conviction of the New York Times for libelling leading politicians in the Southern states, even though the original articles contained serious errors of fact. At that time, Ryan had praised Justice Arthur Goldberg’s decision, maintaining that “an avantgarde newspaper runs more risks than others. We must try to judge it, not according to the accidental damage it may do to certain public figures, but in light of the service it renders to the entire society.”29 Given the arbitrary decisions of officials such as Wagner, whom he lambasted as “a Don Quixote trying to frighten the press,” Ryan saw no alternative to a



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very wide latitude accorded to journalistic expression, and he refused to consider Hébert “a vulgar malefactor simply because he was mistaken.”30 However, the corollary was the responsibility of the daily paper to offer its readers “a day-by-day portrait of society that is real, truthful, and balanced.” Such a responsibility included a heavy obligation to report the beliefs and activities of those with whom one might disagree. In the context of Quebec in 1964, this meant separatists of all political stripes, whose activities frequently roused the antagonism of most francophone newspapers, the owners and managing editors of which stood on the conservative side of the social and political spectrum. Ryan was openly critical of the decision of the Quebec City daily Le Soleil, whose management refused to publish or report anything that attacked established authority or private enterprise and banished any declaration that might preach violence. On the latter score, Ryan urged caution in dealing with statements that might be seditious, but, even here, he questioned whether a “black-out” was good journalistic policy. Referring to Jacques Maritain’s concept of “prophetic groups,” he argued that even radical separatists had the right to be heard as citizens and to participate in the orientation of public affairs. He thus condemned Le Soleil in the strongest possible terms for “committing a veritable anti-democratic heresy” by erecting itself into the “guardian angel” of public opinion, a stance that threatened to close off “the ceaseless process of the renewal of ideas and elites”31 that was a fundamental trait of a healthy democracy. Although he may not have possessed a university degree, Ryan was extremely well read and fluent in several languages, including Latin, classical Greek, Spanish, and Italian. His facility in English enabled him to rapidly scrutinize major dailies like the New York Times as well as the leading Toronto papers, the Globe and Mail, the Star, and the Telegram. He also closely followed the key magazines of the English-Canadian and American intellectual communities, Canadian Forum and Commentary, organs of the non-Marxist, social democratic left.32 Given his education in the tenets of personalism and his long service in community organizations devoted to social action, it is not surprising that Ryan envisioned his audience not as a “mass” of atomized individual customers, but in communitarian terms, as a body of intelligent citizens worthy of engaging in public dialogue on the great issues of the day. Ryan always vaunted the fact that the educational attainments of his readers were superior to the average, citing surveys that 85 per cent of subscribers had at least a Grade 12 education, with 60 per cent holding a university degree. More tellingly, over 80 per cent of subscribers “hold official functions of direction

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in one or more intermediate organizations in our milieu.” He identified “members of the liberal professions, priests and religious, politicians, educators, leaders of trade unions, cooperatives, credit unions and associations of all types, intellectual workers, students, businessmen, public servants and those in charge of institutions” as the most dedicated readers. Yet, while Ryan defined his “public” as “the social elites of French Canada,” he adamantly rejected the imputation that Le Devoir was “the organ of the bourgeois milieu.”33 Significantly, he did not delineate these elites along lines of professional status, income, or educational attainment; rather, he included in their ranks “thousands of humble people” who, without social position or university training, “had attained a level of social conscience, a measure of intellectual concern”34 that vaulted them into the charmed circle of Le Devoir’s readership. Ryan placed the continued influence and survival of the paper clearly on this elite, whom he designated the real “owners” to whom he was accountable. In his estimation, their identity as a group clustered around the collective values of amity – the “friendly witness” that he believed characterized the ideal reader – and an ongoing desire to improve the intellectual and social attainments of French Canada. Their common concern was to ensure “that a free and independent newspaper expresses, from day-to-day, opinions that are solidly rooted in reality and in the conscience of the French-Canadian milieu.”35 Ryan’s evocation of a friendly, intimate dynamic between journalist and reader expressed both his social democratic convictions regarding the capacity of quite ordinary people for active citizenship and also harkened back to the world of the Victorian public moralist, which assumed a comfortable intimacy of shared assumptions between writer and audience. This extended to writing personal vignettes, in which he allowed readers to intrude into his Saturday afternoon leisure – his one day off, as Le Devoir did not publish a Sunday edition – all the while informing them that his sharing his relaxation with them was indeed a privilege because he was a busy public personage whose time was taken up with endless meetings and telephone calls with “ministers, members of Parliament, businessmen, intellectuals, churchmen, visitors, promoters and crusaders of all sorts.”36 He even allowed glimpses into private conversations he had with Madeleine during these precious periods of rest, intimating that she was an essential partner in generating ideas for editorials and claiming that, in “one or two ideas of hers, I can work out a dozen.”37 This more contemplative repose enabled Ryan to evoke an almost religious sense of community with the readers of Le Devoir, to



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feel “closer to that astonishingly alert and diverse public that reads you every day certainly with a critical spirit, but also, in most cases, with a good will that can only be explained by a common interest in higher goals.”38 This cultivation of the intimacy of shared values and deeper cultural predispositions (what Ryan would have, in Action catholique phraseology, termed “contact”) was designed to cement the allegiance of a certain class of readers to Le Devoir – those devoted to the social and intellectual advancement of their society – by insisting not only that he needed their ongoing support, but that he actually regarded the most perceptive among them as a “second conscience,” what he described to the sociologist Fernand Dumont in 1965 as “a ‘hidden critic’ who participates in our work as though he is accomplishing it himself.”39 This relationship depended on the willingness of this audience to be “brought up short and prodded” by intellectuals like Ryan, whose judgments on people and events proceeded from the alliance between an “open” objectivity to currents of modern life and the maintenance of “solid principles” – that is, his pledge to “serve them rather than to make use of them”40 for selfish or temporary calculations of popularity. His evocation of a moral relationship between journalist and reader, based on a seamless unity between inflexible principles and the objective presentation of the news, testified to his conviction that, in 1964, the shared pre-political terrain of values and assumptions still lay in the common coin of Catholicism. Both privately and publicly, Ryan advanced a quasi-prophetic vision of his new position, one that was consistent with his intellectual roots in postwar Catholic theology and his aspirations to join the world of North American public intellectuals. Such a vision would not have sounded jarring or discordant in this cultural environment. His statement, evoked at the beginning of this section, that Le Devoir was a “sign of contradiction” was a direct reference to Christ and the early Christians and the belief that he himself, as the final authority at the paper, incarnated a new conjunction between sacred and profane, in which Catholic doctrine infused temporal responsibilities. It was a conviction that indicated an all-encompassing commitment to constantly preserving and renewing his own faith, despite imbrication in temporal tasks, an activity that qualified him, in a phrase he spoke on national English-language television, to be “one of those men who help orientate their fellow men towards this ultimate destiny.”41 While in one breath he could express a profound sense of humility and gratitude to the administrators of the Imprimerie Populaire for his elevation from the obscurity of “our milieus of community, patriotic, and social action,” he was equally

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convinced that his accession to the directorship was evidence of “Providence leading its children by the hand. The latter have only to answer when they hear its call.”42 He was certainly conscious that the directorship of Le Devoir placed him within a half-century-long tradition of men who strove to articulate a “collective conscience” for French Canadians as a distinct people in North America, a situation that sometimes made the boundaries between objectivity and subjectivity rather porous and, for Ryan, made journalism an intensely personal act.43 If a universe of shared religious beliefs and moral assumptions enabled him to elaborate a dialogue with his readers and fellow intellectuals, the past did not serve as a barrier to Ryan’s key role in shaping a new approach to political journalism at Le Devoir, one that saw the journalist move decisively, during the 1960s, from adversarial “outsider” to “insider” and confidant of both provincial and federal political figures. In this respect, Claude Ryan accelerated a trajectory that had begun in 1960, when the Liberal government replaced the Union nationale and overnight transformed Le Devoir from being the chief prosecutor of the Duplessis regime to a sympathetic advocate for and supporter of the reforms of Jean Lesage. Ryan invoked his admiration for the style and approach of the American journalist Walter Lippmann, a trusted confidant of American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to John F. Kennedy, and latter-day practitioners of this close partnership of politics and journalism such as James Reston of the New York Times, eschewing the “rigorist approach by which journalists must keep their distance from political leaders.” Ryan favoured the method of “direct contact with politicians and their collaborators”44 in the public service, one in which not only his readers could acquire insight into the great principles inspiring the making of policy, but he himself could influence the daily course of political events through well-timed telephone calls or, if necessary, a private meeting. Upon becoming director of Le Devoir, he moved quickly to establish contact with Guy Favreau, the federal minister of justice whom he hailed as representing the opinion of “responsible French Canadians”45 for advocacy of the new “cooperative federalism” that had apparently begun to secure greater recognition for the ambitions of the Quebec state and the rights of French Canadians throughout Canada. A private dinner with Prime Minister Lester Pearson in 1965 also allowed him to voice his  support for the activities of the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission and for his abiding commitment to a vision of Canada founded on an equal partnership of English and French Canadians.46 On the Quebec government side, Ryan had, through his long-standing friendship with journalist Gérard Lemieux, developed close connections



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with René Lévesque, one of the most dynamic ministers in Lesage’s government, and had frequent meetings with him after 1963 at the HydroQuébec offices, where Lévesque frequently confided his anxieties to Ryan about the future of Canadian federalism. “He put all his cards on the table,” Ryan later recalled, “and was very frank”: “even then,” in these private discussions, “I felt that he was ready to go quite far” in seeking Quebec sovereignty.47 Lemieux believed that Lévesque needed “to be enlightened and to rectify some of his judgments,” and he felt that Ryan could exert considerable influence on him, “not simply through your writings but through more personal contact.” Lemieux maintained that their ongoing private contacts would be highly productive and that Ryan could act as a restraining influence on some of Lévesque’s more undisciplined public sallies, musing that Ryan was “one of the people that René should most fear.” Though the two men disagreed – with Ryan attempting to convince him that the problems of Confederation were not insuperable – the contact did give Le Devoir a pipeline into the post-1964 deliberations of the Lesage cabinet and an opportunity to scrutinize key government policy papers before these were made public.48 Ryan tried valiantly to establish the same relationship with Jean Lesage, who complained that his ministers – especially Lévesque and Paul Gérin-Lajoie, the minister of education – frequently made mockery of the rule of cabinet secrecy and solidarity in their attempts to curry favour with journalists. Ryan counselled him to adopt a less distant and stiff manner with the media, assuring him that many of the “leaks” could be avoided by greater flexibility on the premier’s part in public discussions of different subjects and by cultivating “more personal and frequent relations” with the press.49 Ryan’s desire to manifest both sides of the prophet’s face, the incorruptible public moralist and the intimate counsellor of men of power ultimately depended on the continued purchase of the shared values of a non-ideological liberal reformism that infused both the religious and political realms. These values would anchor the pursuit of new achievements for the Quiet Revolution not only in Quebec but in the Canadian federation as a whole.

Wedding Catholic Values and Social Liberalism: Putting “new wine into old wineskins”50 Writing at the end of 1964, Claude Ryan charted the magnitude of the cultural changes traversing Quebec society during the epoch of the Quiet Revolution. Emerging “from the regime of intellectual monolithism,” his

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contemporaries now belonged “to that of a polyvalent culture, from the age of apologetic to that of fraternity, from the era of authoritarianism to that of responsibility, from the reign of individualism to that of community.” Facile, all-encompassing accounts of human society had lost their influence, succeeded by “a more rigorous respect for diverse fields of knowledge,” a process that rendered obsolete the “bookish culture” of an elite few in favour of “personal culture” accessible to all. These mutations signalled, in his estimation, Quebec’s transition from “the era of poor means to one of the varied resources of which an ‘affluent’ society can endow itself.”51 Ryan’s analysis rested on what he believed was the reciprocal creative dynamic between religious and political values, discerning a common process of democratization carrying both Catholicism and the Quebec state into the modern era. This current had the potential to abolish the old artificial distinctions between elites and ordinary people by enlisting the energies of all citizens in an endeavour that conjugated aspirations for individual self-improvement with the progress of the community as a whole. However, the new prosperity evoked by his reference to John Kenneth Galbraith’s concept of “the affluent society” involved not simply supplying consumers with a more widely diffused material well-being, but also the achievement of a social and cultural vision that would lift Quebec, in common with the Western world, into a new, post-industrial era of social organization. Like many of his fellow social liberals in the United States and Britain, Ryan hoped that a new ethos of “social development” – the “socialization” praised by those great social encyclicals of Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra and Pacem in terris – would ultimately foster a new way of life defined by social equality, personal freedom, secularity, and the primacy of non-material values, thus realizing the hopes of the Catholic personalists of the interwar period. In this way, humanistic relational interpretations that spanned both progressive ­liberalism and social democracy would permanently supplant marketdriven explanations of human society, thus thoroughly subjecting capitalism to other social forces, in particular, to the intervention of intellectual institutions and framers of public opinion like Ryan and the expert social scientists located in the modern university.52 This grandiose project to humanize capitalism would finally heal the wounds inflicted by  older, selfish irrational ideologies, based in class and ethnic hatreds, by offering both old and new intellectual elites the prospect of participating in a politics of intelligence – rational, functionalist, dedicated to managing the perpetual social change that was now the hallmark of life in advanced civilizations.



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Ryan considered himself intimately engaged in this spiritually and socially transformative project of Western liberalism, and his attendance in early 1965 at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions’ ­colloquium on Pacem in terris gave him an opportunity to hobnob with the likes of U Thant, the secretary-general of the United Nations, Hubert Humphrey, the new American vice-president, Willy Brandt, the rising leader of the West German Social Democratic Party, and the philosopherhistorian Arnold Toynbee.53 However, his editorials and speeches between 1964 and 1966, though designed to inform and reassure his readers about the course of reform occurring in both church and state, exhibit a certain disquiet, one that stemmed from the problem of pouring the “new wine” – the new values, institutions, and aspirations generated by the 1960s – into the “old wineskins” of traditional attitudes and structures of authority, without the latter bursting and producing a dangerous state of social and cultural deracination. This process of delicately stretching the old skins of tradition was nowhere more critical than in Catholicism itself, which had not only been integral to French Canada’s self-identity, but also constituted a key litmus test of just how far the stability of tradition and the new imperatives of ceaseless change in social relations could be reconciled. In September 1964, Ryan saluted the opening of the final and decisive phase of deliberations of the Second Vatican Council, one that he hoped would definitively align Catholicism with the spirit of democracy. While this did not mean opening the structures of the Church to the electoralism of “one man one vote,” it did suggest the end of “overly personal methods of government” through the modification of papal monarchy with the recognition of the collegiate responsibility of bishops. Such a change, he hoped, would anchor the emerging post-industrial civilization on “a post-imperial Christendom” headed by a fraternal “Pontifex maximu” that was close to the concerns of ordinary people. But collegiality at the upper echelons of the Church had to be accompanied by a delineation of a new status for laypeople within the Church, one that would finally end their subordination to clergy by recognizing the spiritual dignity of their temporal responsibilities.54 So powerful did Ryan consider the global wave of democratization that he argued that it was imperative for the Church to further open its doors to this current. “I do not believe,” he declared, that the layperson “can at the same time be an adult citizen in human society and not be one in the Church. Otherwise, you reduce the spiritual society to the condition of a marginal society.”55 Such marginalization would seriously weaken the new partnership between the Catholic Church and the Quebec state forged during the early years of

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the Quiet Revolution, and it would imperil the reciprocal transmission of values between spiritual and temporal realms that alone could foster a democracy that rested on shared, communitarian values. Like many committed Catholics, Ryan confidently expected that the council’s final session would simply extend and consolidate the liberalizing initiatives that characterized earlier meetings in 1962 and 1963. After all, most of the cardinals and bishops in attendance had aligned themselves with the “progressive” current that sought to open the Church to modernizing impulses. Although he informed the readers of Le Devoir that “the traditionalist current is today overborne by the more liberal current,”56 he already sensed intimations of trouble, problems that centred on the resistance of the pope and many senior clerics to an equal status for laity in the Church. At the root of the problem lay the incomprehension of clerical authorities that laypeople could be anything other than obedient foot soldiers whose commitment to the Church could be measured in “external and quantitative” forms of piety and participation. “Everything is to be redone in the coming years,” warned Ryan, “if we want the Church to continue to mean something in the life of our people.”57 In August 1964, his British friend Pat Keegan wrote to inform him of problems at C OP E C I A L , the international organization for the lay apostolate that Ryan had been so instrumental in shaping during the 1950s, surrounding the “Roman structure for the laity” following the council. Ryan responded with a diatribe against the political influence of certain individuals surrounding Cardinal Montini; once he became Paul VI, they had acquired even greater sway in Vatican circles. “Politics,” he declared, “has gained the upper hand over spiritual formation in the sphere of lay apostolate. They are looking for all sorts of compromises that bear no relationship to the real problem of the dynamic development of the lay apostolate.” While he continued to hold forth the hope that the Church would be able to surmount such difficulties, he feared that “this might take a very long time.”58 What Ryan was witnessing was, in fact, the reassertion of power by the conservative minority over the course of change in the Church. After the euphoric reformist spirit of 1962–63, this minority, encouraged by Paul  VI and worried about the “deconstruction” of whole areas of Church governance, law, liturgy, and religious practice, became particularly entrenched and sought to limit the scope of reformist decrees by emptying them of their substance, and what was more troubling, to prevent the opening of discussion on more contested questions such as clerical celibacy and birth control.59 During the debate over the conciliar



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declaration on Christian-Jewish relations, Ryan excoriated conservatives for insisting on retaining the description of the Jews as a “deicidal people.” Above all, he insisted that the council’s declarations must not remain at the level of vague generalities but must “cut to the quick of today’s situations.” Adoption of the declaration on the Jews in its entirety was essential to prove that the Church truly sought “the conversion of the heart” to new ways of envisioning religious reality.60 However, Paul VI, by contrast with John XXIII and even the more “conservative” Pius XII, seemed less interested in touching on themes involving the relationship of the Church with the world, preferring a “strongly internalist” concentration on the mystery of the institutional Church. While on the one hand, Ryan praised this direction as tending to foster greater dialogue between the Church and the wider world by making the Church more self-aware and solid in its knowledge of its fundamental doctrines and convictions,61 it also tended to undercut democratization by refocusing attention on the clerical apparatus and the need for a single, centralized authority to effectively engage in this dialogue. Thus, while more reformist Catholics like Ryan welcomed the liturgical changes that consecrated the use of the vernacular in the Mass and sought to foster a “pedagogy of popular participation,” he saw these as merely the beginning of a process in which the laity would acquire greater recognition of their rights and responsibilities in all spheres of the life of the Church. Where many conservative clerics believed that popular participation began and ended with the New Mass, Ryan believed that, without a parallel reform of relations between clergy and laity, the spirit of Vatican II would not enter the spiritual life of the people, and Catholicism would remain mired in “the baroque age.”62 It would be no exaggeration to claim that Ryan’s social liberal vision of a post-industrial society depended on maintaining an intimate connection between the process of democratization in the spiritual realm of Catholicism and that occurring in Quebec’s civil society, ensuring a constant and reciprocal communication of values that would ensure both stability and progress. By the time Ryan assumed the directorship of Le Devoir, the process of modernizing the Quebec state and society had already achieved notable gains, with the nationalization of hydroelectric power in 1962 and the great educational reforms announced by the Parent Commission and achieved by the passage of Bill 60 at the end of January 1964. However, underlying and energizing this “political” Quiet Revolution were a number of older shared values and presuppositions derived from Catholic social thought, which revolved around the belief that the state should create conditions of social equality by consulting

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with and protecting its citizens through institutional means other than welfare state legislation directed at improving the conditions of atomized individuals. Here, government’s role was one of stimulation, support, inspiration, and choosing the general line of policy, with the intent of “actively protecting the interests of the community.” Many intellectuals, public servants, and union and business leaders believed that the primary task of the state was not simply to promote material prosperity, but to ensure the larger welfare of the community through the creation of new institutional channels – “mixed bodies,” created to organize and shape opinion, and to invite all citizens who are “friends of the common good to participate in the achievement of the project.” In this way, “a continuous link between public opinion and government” would foster a new, participatory citizenship inspired by communitarian impulses.63 These new intermediate institutional arrangements, whose task was to effectively represent organized citizens, were essential because they “allowed the people of Quebec to act democratically on the course of their economy, without falling into collectivism or totalitarianism.”64 This social liberal vision certainly contained older resonances of Catholic social corporatism, but Ryan spoke in the emphatic tones of a modern democrat when it came to issues such as health care reform and the overall need for sustained economic growth. To overcome their subordinate economic position vis-à-vis the United States, both Quebec and Canada required, in the name of effective international competition and to secure equality of opportunity for all citizens, the increased intervention of public authorities whose goal must be “not only a very advanced concertation among themselves but also with the private sector.”65 Universality was the only path to securing “the equal rights and obligations of all citizens,” and, for this reason, he rejected older “compensatory” models that, while “accessible to all,” maintained the principle of individual “verification of resources,” which smacked too much of a means test.66 But his socio-political outlook remained that of a “liberal” rather than a “social democrat” – he emphatically rejected anything that suggested uniformity achieved through monolithic state control of health and welfare, preferring diversity of services based on the different cultural and spiritual priorities that characterized the citizens of Quebec, as these would “freely and spontaneously express the needs of the citizens.” Here, the state’s role was not to take over the management of institutions, but merely to ensure that “competent services are offered at a reasonable cost to the population as a whole in accordance with standards of equity that will ensure no inferior classes due to geographical, social,



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or monetary factors.”67 He urged private and public bodies to “multiply their consultations and mechanisms of association,” and, as the director of a private enterprise, he urged his fellow employers to forsake “ultraliberal concepts [that are] based on the rights of property and that exclude a social vision” in favour of new outlooks and practices that resisted socialist contentions that private enterprise was obsolete. He called upon them to engage directly with public opinion in order to position private enterprise as a factor of political and social development.68 Unlike the older corporatists, whose views emphasized the need for a healthy rural sector to balance the social instability occasioned by modern urban life, Ryan’s was an emphatically urban, metropolitan perspective, in which a city like Montreal, because of the range of encounters and contacts it offered between people of various walks of life, held forth the potential to achieve the highest form of civilization. A modern metropolis, he declared in 1965, “must shine through the efficiency of its services. But it is also pre-eminently the place for the pursuit of those noble goals of culture, dialogue and contemplation that give to human life its  originality.”69 However, the realization of this dream depended on surpassing the many “situations of misery and underdevelopment” that existed in working-class neighbourhoods such as Saint-Henri, familiar to Ryan as an apprentice social worker in postwar Montreal. His quest for “social development” – the constant search for fulfilling forms of human social relationships – prioritized the quest for equality in both material and cultural spheres, in which the achievement of “justice, freedom, beauty and a certain sweetness of life” required “the concerted action of citizens themselves” and not simply the better distribution of social welfare.70 At the beginning of 1965, he unfavourably contrasted Premier Lesage’s taste for grandiose mega-projects with the appalling lack of a housing policy, commenting dryly that, “after five years of ‘quiet revolution,’ it is high time we took our bearings, and that forgotten questions begin to register in the public conscience.”71 In the Quebec of the mid-1960s, the critical terrain for affirming and extending Ryan’s vision of a modern society founded on a collaborative vision of public and private imperatives lay in the spheres of education, social welfare, and health. These were domains where the Catholic Church had hitherto enjoyed wide latitude for independent initiative, but where the state had, under the reformist impulses of the Lesage Liberals, begun to assert the primacy of public authority. The consequence was that Quebec in the mid-1960s was imbricated in a wide-ranging and complex process of readjustment of the boundaries of spiritual and temporal

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institutions. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the displacement of the Church from these key areas of civil society appeared to be a foregone conclusion, but for Ryan and many of his contemporaries, both clerical and lay, the issue was not so clear-cut. After all, given the long engagement of the Catholic Church and its social agencies with questions of education, health, and welfare, priests, nuns, and brothers possessed the bulk of expertise and managerial skill, relative to laypeople. While in a number of dioceses the network of orphanages, public charities, and industrial schools had been subject to financial stresses and strains during the 1950s, there was, in the period prior to 1966, no reason to suppose that these “private” agencies could not work harmoniously with the state in a reformed system of public welfare, with the meaning of “deconfessionalization” encapsulated in a gradual and seamless transfer of responsibility from clergy to lay professionals, one in which religious values would continue to flow into secular society through the conscience and commitment to social action of Catholic laity.72 Ryan had always cast himself as a spokesman for professionally trained Catholic laity in these spheres, and he was certainly prepared to go quite far in extending the boundaries of the “temporal” sphere. Speaking at the end of 1964 to the annual congress of Caritas-Canada, the Catholic federation of social agencies, Ryan envisioned a process of secularization not as the removal of clergy and religious imperatives, but as a new attitude determining access to positions of authority and direction within the system. These posts had hitherto been held by priests and members of religious communities; now they would be attributed mainly on the basis of personal competence. He was acutely aware that Catholic religious communities, once at the forefront of the creation of new social agencies, were experiencing increasing financial difficulties in sustaining a complex institutional network in the field of social assistance, and he made the case for them stepping back from organizational and managerial tasks and taking the more modest role of “competent moral advisers” in these institutions, which should be taken in hand by the public authorities.73 Ryan’s attitude towards deconfessionalization was not based on a hardand-fast separation of religious and secular institutions into watertight compartments. In some spheres, such as trade unionism, he was quite clear that the “evolution of social conscience” had led to the disappearance of the need for specifically Christian institutions, an analysis he applied to the explicitly Catholic character of “national” societies like the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. These, he argued, should follow the example of the Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (CT CC)



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– which, in 1961, had shed its religious label when it was renamed the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN ) – and become instead a public society open to all French Canadians regardless of religious affiliation. He frequently reminded audiences that, in an age of “democracy and advanced secularization, the importance of Christian institutions cannot be as great as it was during the centuries of Christendom” and that the presence of the Church in the field of social and cultural endeavour now depended upon “the sole personal witness of its members.”74 However, he was adamant that these views should in no way be construed as an argument for the wholesale abolition of Christian institutions in Quebec. Catholicism, he declared, possessed an internal dynamism that would always lead it to “incarnate the love it bears mankind in visible forms.” While in fields like education, health, and social assistance, the Church had to take “the prior initiative of the state” into account, the state, for its part, had to meet the exigencies of pluralism and “respect the personality of its citizens” by allowing for the existence of institutions that met their different spiritual needs, so long as all citizens had access to the same quality of services. The intermingling of the spiritual and the temporal would continue to characterize modern democratic Quebec, leading to “serious problems of coordination” between Christian institutions and the state.75 For all of Ryan’s careful insistence on minutely delineating the changing boundaries between spiritual and temporal, there is no doubt that his social liberal vision was one in which these boundaries were rather porous, and that, in his estimation, secularization meant more, not fewer, opportunities for collaboration between the institutions of church and state. On the one hand, he could press audiences of clergy and Catholic activists with his analysis that the “sphere of the profane is ceaselessly widening and tends more and more to be self-sufficient” and call for them to forsake any attempt to reconstruct Quebec society along old-style confessional lines. “When a society,” he stated in 1965, “expresses its sentiment fairly clearly that it wants to see the borders of the confessional establishment pushed back a bit, it is better that this happen with the free initiative of the Church, rather than accomplishing it by force or by state fiat.”76 On the other, he argued that, what the Church lost in the sphere of direct management would be more than compensated for by new fields of spiritual endeavour in the field of adult education. There Ryan envisioned the need for a Catholic institutional presence in addressing a host of perplexing issues, such as marriage relations and the education of  children for modern life, tasks that the state would be unable to

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undertake. Conscious of the perplexities of many Catholics at the bewildering pace of change in Quebec society, Ryan was intent on explaining that, although it was inevitable during “a wave of liberalization” that there might be injustices perpetrated against certain individuals and institutions and an underestimation of religious values, “all waves of liberalization … are sooner or later followed by a phase of stabilization during the course of which the progress accomplished during the period of radical transformation remains and becomes the object of rational, progressive, and more nuanced adjustments.”77 Speaking to the Caritas-Canada congress in November 1964, Ryan sought to reassure participants regarding the repercussions of the current impulses of “socialization” on the equilibrium between public and private sectors and the effects of the movement towards greater specialization on the action of the Church in the welfare field. He informed the delegates that basic schemes of social assistance would eventually be taken over directly and completely by the state – this was the consequence of the movement towards egalitarian democracy and greater social justice – but “short of a series of radical intellectual revolutions which I do not personally immediately foresee, this will occur only after a fairly long period of transition during which the guiding principles will be … the rational and complete utilization of all available resources.”78 Such a process would necessitate the articulation of new, contractual partnerships between church-run welfare agencies and the Quebec state, a situation in which the state would gladly open wide swathes of action for private services. Nor was this arrangement retrograde: as Ryan noted, most Western democratic states entrusted much of their activity to private enterprises. However, there was a further element to consider. It was in the vitality of the private sector in welfare and education that Ryan discerned the surest guarantee of the communitarian social liberal ethos, one in which Quebec would become a society honeycombed with new professional and community organizations that would become “new interlocutors for leaders of government and traditional agencies,”79 thus ensuring the continuous conjunction of public opinion and the political realm. And it was the emergence of this multiplicity of “intermediate forms” that made Quebec’s democracy, in Ryan’s view, distinct in the Western world. Evoking his experience over two decades in adult education, he exalted this mixed system as critical to the emergence of “a new type of man, a sort of citizen-educator” empowered to undertake responsibilities of social leadership. Here was a form of social liberalism that, by organizing citizens not according to the divisive features of political



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ideologies or parties, but in terms of something more profound, “their vocation to live their ordinary lives,”80 held out the prospect of real participation of ordinary people in decision making. Like many of his contemporaries, Ryan maintained that the school – that “most controversial and vital” of all his society’s institutions – constituted the critical terrain for Quebec’s experiment in secularization, one where he hoped that a modern partnership of spiritual and temporal values might be elaborated.81 The Parent Commission had outlined the general framework for a new system of public education, reconciling the imperatives of confessionality and overall public responsibility, the legislative machinery for which, under the rubric of a new Ministry of Education, was codified in Bill 60. Although the great debate over education was over by the time Ryan assumed the directorship of Le Devoir,82 much work remained to be done. The commission still needed to define the way in which confessionality would operate in the context of a system in which the state had the final responsibility for all facets of instruction and, of equal importance, to determine the place of a large number of private collegiate institutions, the vast majority owned by the Church or Catholic religious orders, in a new network of colleges and professional institutions. At one level, Ryan’s intentions seemed to be quite clear, to act as a dispassionate arbiter helping his contemporaries steer between “two forms of dogmatism” – a “secularist dogmatism” and a confessionality that, in his estimation, confused the defence of religion with the preservation of certain of its historic incarnations.83 He was prepared to see institutions of higher education, such as Quebec’s francophone universities, become non-confessional, governed by precise guarantees for the religious rights of professors and students, and with faculties of theology and ecclesiastical studies enjoying special regimes that would ensure the continued presence of the Church. However, a closer reading of his pronouncements would indicate that he was, in fact, an impassioned partisan of maintaining a very significant confessional presence in Quebec’s system of public education. While he might chide dogmatic confessionalists for an excess of good intentions, his characterization of “secularists” took on the language of diagnosing a deranged psychological state, attributing their educational philosophy to “the transference of a poorly repressed will to power onto the person (?) of the State, which will never succeed, other than by this specious stratagem, to obtain the sanction of public opinion.”84 What particularly roused his ire was the continued public campaign of organizations like the secularist Mouvement laïque

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de langue française (ML F ), which sought to deconfessionalize education by introducing optional periods of religious instruction for students. This, Ryan believed, would transform the school into something resembling a playground or a government office, an anodyne institution based on a minimalist notion of Christian presence in the education of children, one that would “relegate the religious fact to a sector rigidly circumscribed by only the formal study of catechism.”85 He always suspected officials within the Lesage government, especially the minister of education, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, of harbouring designs against the collèges classiques, whose persistence as part of a private network of secondary educational institutions Ryan viewed as essential for the continued presence of the visible Church in the educational sphere. To Ryan, the explicit presence of Catholicism in collegiate education was a bulwark ensuring the preservation of humanistic values, through the accent on “religious and moral formation,” to balance the growing influence of educational experts and technocrats who were too exclusively focused on the didactic and intellectual elements of education.86 To critics of the private colleges who pointed to their elitist, undemocratic character, he retorted that “the colleges were not always haunts for the sons of the bourgeoisie,” citing his own experience as a poor boy to absolve “the fathers of Sainte-Croix … [who] certainly did not make a profit at our expense.” His views adhered to the position he had taken during the debates over Bill 60, that Quebec should emulate the model of democratic societies like England and the Netherlands, where the state extended reasonable financial assistance to private colleges, an arrangement that did not diminish the quality of public services or trench upon principles of educational democracy.87 Indeed, Ryan was adamant that private colleges constituted “riches that we have no right to dilapidate” and that any attempt to diminish them through systematic underfunding would constitute “a practical negation of the principle of freedom and the values of diversity in education.” He did concede that, as in the social welfare sphere, religious bodies had to work with competent laity in the tasks of directing the colleges, and the state must not privilege these private institutions over the proposed parallel public system of “instituts” (the modern-day system of C EG E P s) and must ensure close supervision of admission policies, curriculum, and salary rates.88 With the long-awaited final volume of the Parent Commission’s report, which appeared just before the 1966 provincial election, Ryan declared himself basically satisfied with the definition of the modalities in which the imperatives of confessionality and



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public control would be reconciled. While stating that he would have liked a clearer statement of the “positive good” that the presence of “religious ferment” represented for temporal society and a recognition of the influence of Christian thought “on a milieu definitely composed of a ­considerable majority of Christians,” he fully endorsed the view of the commissioners that the confessional imperative stood at a very high level, nearly equal with that of the state’s obligation to ensure a quality public education for all. And he viewed the more flexible institutional expression of this confessionality in favourable terms, which reconciled the “neutrality” of the structures of the state with the right of parents to choose the spiritual orientation of the local school. Indeed, in so doing, the Parent Commission had equated confessionality with the principle of democracy itself, by locating it in the desire of parents at the level of the school itself, rather than in the doctrinal pronouncements of the Church hierarchy. These reforms, he believed, affirmed the “positive secularity” of the Quebec state and definitively shut the door on “the idea that the school should become the detestable instrument of the sectarian aims of those who desire to exclude religion.”89

Secularization and Quebec’s “End of Ideology” Just after assuming the directorship of Le Devoir, Claude Ryan received a congratulatory missive from an old friend who reflected on the centrality and significance of his new role in Quebec’s Catholic community. Unlike his predecessors Henri Bourassa, Georges Pelletier, and Gérard Filion, Ryan had the advantage of possessing “an intimate association with the hierarchy, priests, religious and thinking Catholic layfolk” – the latter “frustrated by situations that looked as though they would never be changed.” In the estimation of his friend, Ryan’s special mission was to steer Catholic opinion in Quebec between the perils of “outright revolution” and “barren conformity.”90 With little danger of exaggeration, it is possible to make the case that, because he combined his contacts and knowledge as an “insider” of institutional Catholicism with the insight into the liberal world view of North American social critics and public intellectuals, Ryan’s influence on Quebec Catholicism during the 1960s exceeded that of any individual churchman, including his much-respected former superior, Cardinal Léger. Ryan had the key advantage of exercising this influence on a daily basis, rather than through the occasional pastoral letters of the church hierarchy, and was able to position himself

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as a credible interpreter of the values and concerns of both clergy and laity, with the aim of affirming the status of a reformed and revitalized Catholicism as the ground of his society’s stability in an age of rapidly shifting personal, social, and political values. While positively regarding the institutional Church’s overtures to the spirit of democracy in the fields of education and social assistance, Ryan was acutely aware that the consequent renegotiation of the frontiers of the spiritual and temporal had rendered the basis for the cultural authority of Catholicism far more precarious, because it now rested upon the shifting sands of opinion. Despite continued high rates of religious ­practice, which still stood at 85 per cent overall for Quebec Catholics in the mid-1960s, and opinion polls indicating that over 90 per cent of parents wanted religion taught in schools, Ryan soberly informed his co-­religionists that the Catholic milieu was now characterized by considerable divergence of opinion, and that “monolithic unity” could not be reconstructed on the basis of adherence to precise directives of the church hierarchy.91 Indeed, for Ryan, much of the ongoing effort to harmonize the values of Catholicism with the imperatives of a social liberal society lay beyond the surface of opinion polls or even the adjustment of the imperatives of confessionality and democracy that characterized the work of the Parent Commission. Rather, only an inner revitalization of Catholic life could assure the dream of a new Christendom, the interface between Christian institutions and the democratic values of a modern society. What would happen, wondered Ryan, if, in a few years, 50 per cent of normal school students or half of upper-year secondary school students were hostile to the Church? In such an eventuality, would it be realistic “to force them despite themselves through the bottleneck of the confessional school”?92 At one level, Ryan’s solicitude for a Catholic Church open to currents of public opinion and for the continued centrality of Christian institutions in Quebec society testified to his life’s work as a Catholic activist, now transposed to the editorial columns of Le Devoir. At another, it signalled his position within a transatlantic community of liberal intellectuals that, in the early 1960s, was powerfully marked by a sense of optimistic expectation that, in the Western world, old verities of class division and the ideologies based upon it were “exhausted,” rendered obsolete and bereft of their power to persuade. Influential thinkers such as the American sociologist Daniel Bell, whose classic The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1961) pointed to a consensus of ideas in the Western world, converging around acceptance



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of the welfare state, the desirability of decentralized power, and a system of mixed economy and political pluralism, articulated this new mood.93 Ideology – what Bell defined as the “conversion of ideas into social levers” – was energized by passion. Such an analysis shifted attention from the substantive content of particular ideologies like Marxism or nationalism to the emotions and sentiments that roused groups to action.94 Although frequently read as a neo-conservative apology for this development, Bell’s treatise, while positive regarding the transcendence of passion among the intellectual communities of advanced industrial societies, pointed to two tendencies that would have given intellectuals like Ryan pause. First, because of its basis in the emotions, ideology was a “secular religion” and made politics the central avenue for domination, a process that involved the “atrophy” of all other institutional ways of mobilizing emotional energy, including through churches. Second, Bell recognized that among younger fractions of the intellectual community, there was a great yearning for some transcendent ideology that would offer a more complete engagement of energy than the various functional programs of social reform that had become the stock-in-trade of mainstream social thinkers. Bell positively noted the generosity of the “New Left” towards movements of social and national liberation traversing African, Asian, and Latin American societies but contended that proponents of these “revolutions” could not be handed a blank cheque for their actions in the name of a future-oriented emancipation.95 Some of Ryan’s contemporaries might have been tempted to lump Catholicism in with those obsolete ideologies that represented the emotional and sentimental, rather than the rational, or to view it as purely an expression of bourgeois class interest that had to be transcended by a new wave of revolutionary fervour. For Ryan, however, it was a wellspring of beliefs and values that provided an ongoing connection, at the level of shared history and experience, between Quebec’s intellectual and social elites and the aspirations of ordinary men and women, and was “rational” in the sense that it allowed them to make sense of their daily lives and future hopes. The Catholic religion also offered modern humanity “a witness of detachment” from the idolatry of secular ideologies, and it stood, in his estimation, as a necessary corrective to Bell’s diagnosis of the tendency of the political to assume unwarranted domination in modern societies, a process that Ryan believed threatened Quebec in the mid1960s.96 The massive expansion of the governmental apparatus, and the advent of a new breed of officials and technocrats, had raised the spectre of a “return of ideology” in an environment where, as Ryan observed, his

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society was experiencing “a very marked rupture in the universe of values that until now has undergirded Quebec society. The old values are crumbling, and have not yet been replaced.” The danger he discerned was that the new technocratic elite – which included newly empowered bureaucrats and university experts – a group he described as the “new gods” of Quebec, might “surreptitiously cast themselves as the purveyors of a new order of values elaborated within the four walls of their studies.” Enduring values, Ryan believed, had to be prior to politics and flow from the opinions of the people and the real experiences of their lives, rather than from “some super-brain.”97 Catholicism articulated the antiintellectualism of the public intellectual, a persistent undertone of Ryan’s self-identity and his position as something of an “outsider” to the new university elites trained in modern social science disciplines, but it also offered the hope of consensus, of a shared universe that transcended the programmatic aspirations of Left and Right. Most importantly, it constituted a terrain of ongoing conversation and dialogue among francophone intellectuals increasingly divided by the presence of revolutionary socialism and nationalism. More significantly, Ryan identified these shared pre-political values, which were, in the final analysis, animated by Catholicism, as key to the uneasy equipoise achieved by Quebec’s brand of progressive liberalism in the mid-1960s. The considerable achievements of this movement of liberalization might, he feared, be undone by the erosion of public consensus – the pace of social and cultural change might unleash a polarization of Left and Right in his society. In order to preserve the gains of the Quiet Revolution, Ryan urged his fellow intellectuals, and his audience of public servants and institutional administrators, to “forget our tendency to make ideology, and to show ourselves as far more functional and more realistic.” It was important in advanced societies that ideology become secondary and that pressing social problems and institutional needs be judged by the criteria of efficiency, reason, and economy.98 In 1964, he looked on with fascinated trepidation as the American Republican Party chose Barry Goldwater, an exponent of a newly vocal extremist neo-conservatism, as its presidential nominee. Goldwater, according to Ryan, incarnated “the stupefied reaction of millions of Americans in the face of the vertiginous acceleration of history,” a reaction that sought a return to the simpler verities of freedom of opportunity for all, minimal government, and a desire to slow the pace of state intervention in the field of civil rights. What was most to be feared was a hardening of opinion, creating a defective collective psychology in which “those who obeyed



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passion more than reason” would effect a polarization destructive of the old liberal coalition that had ruled America since the 1930s, leading America down the path of a more bellicose foreign policy.99 Even more troubling was Ryan’s characterization of these conservative yearnings as a feature of North American life from which his own society was not exempt. The achievements of the Quiet Revolution might be undone by the surfacing of destructive, polarizing impulses within Quebec’s political firmament. He was scarcely reassured by Jean Lesage’s appointment of a new minister of justice, Claude Wagner, who had been plucked from the judicial bench. Wagner was widely known for his “martial statements” that simply lumped together separatists and terrorists, equating both groups with common criminals. Ryan warned darkly that Wagner represented a Goldwater-like reaction to the liberalization of Quebec society. “The more the bonds of a society crack,” he declared, “the more its leaders seek to defend it against fissuring by hardening the legal apparatus.” Wagner was the alarming representative, in a government ostensibly devoted to liberty, of a rising tide of opinion that sought to erect “‘a religion of justice’ that would dangerously restrict the free discussion of public affairs.”100 The overreaction of police to separatist demonstrators during the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Quebec City in October 1964 – the infamous “Samedi de la matraque” – was an indication that Quebec was on the high road to reaction. Ryan’s editorial severely reprimanded the authorities in no uncertain terms: “On Saturday,” he charged, “we experienced first-hand certain dangers that give rise of violence, notably that of the domination of public life by the police apparatus … The measures of repression … went far beyond the scope of the danger that they wanted to avert.” Ryan stated that no democratic society wanted to live under the threat of terrorist bombs, but it “must continue to take risks on the side of freedom rather than constraint.” If Lesage and his government were aware of risks to the royal personage, they should have put off the visit rather than go forward backed by extreme measures of repression.101 Only the constant infusion of Catholic values into the political sphere could provide Quebec with a prophylactic against such deviations, inoculating its brand of social liberalism against the return of the polarizing passions of Left and Right. While with hindsight Ryan might be open to the charge of naivety, from the perspective of the social and intellectual movements active in mid1960s Quebec, the issue was not quite so clear-cut. Montreal in the early 1960s was honeycombed with a variety of small intellectual magazines and “liberation fronts” all dedicated to revolutionary decolonization, a

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reflection of the importation of ideologies modelled on the African and Asian experience into North American cities that so worried Daniel Bell. One of the most important of these endeavours was the magazine Parti pris, whose appearance on the scene in 1964 Ryan saluted as the first “real left-wing movement” in Quebec’s history. Earlier generations of leftists, social democrats, and even the communist youth leaders whom he had known during the 1940s had all operated within “the habitual frameworks of ‘classic’ Western thought,” but the young men clustered around Parti pris, in his estimation, sought to “establish among us a kind of politico-social thinking that is authentically revolutionary.”102 Ryan studiously noted the twin pillars of the partipriste ideology: the commitment, first, to decolonization and, second, to revolution or a radical form of socialism. While ruefully chuckling that “I would be one of the first targets of this revolutionary thought,” he commended their courage and logic, which he estimated as superior to that of most advocates of Quebec sovereignty, despite his own rejection of the conclusion that the “Quebec nation” needed to be liberated from the “legal fiction” of Canada.103 Believing that this type of revolutionary thought would prove durable in Quebec, he hoped that, through “contact with reality and other forms of thought no less dedicated … to the improvement of Quebec man,” it would undergo “subtle alterations that might attenuate its monolithism and hatred, which may be more verbal than real.”104 Ryan believed that these young radicals could be brought, despite their vocal anticlericalism, within the ambit of social liberalism through the Catholic values they shared with other intellectuals, and he certainly recognized that “left” Catholicism had provided an initiation to revolutionary socialism to many of his younger contemporaries such as Jean-Marc Piotte and Pierre Vallières, as well as to a host of neighbourhood activists and social workers working to improve the conditions of Montreal’s poor.105 Ryan’s elevation of Catholicism as the one force that was able to transcend and reconcile the engagements of both Left and Right both fulfilled Daniel Bell’s prophecy of an “end of ideology” and preserved, in a healthy way, the desire for utopia characteristic of modern intellectuals. However, the institutional Church would have to go much further in opening itself to the winds of public opinion, the “democratization” so desired by Ryan, so that it would not tilt back into a reactionary alliance with the  forces of political conservatism. The critical test case of Quebec Catholicism’s willingness for a full engagement with public opinion occurred in July 1965, when the Dominican father Henri-Marie Bradet, the director of Maintenant, a monthly magazine founded in 1962 and



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inspired by a mainstream social democratic outlook, was summarily cashiered without explanation by his ecclesiastical superiors, evidently as a result of Vatican disapproval of the stance taken by the magazine on controversial subjects like birth control and priestly celibacy. Commenting on the journal, Ryan found fault with its propensity to take up subjects that were “too broad and complex” for both contributors and the audience, which created “an impression of somewhat confused goodwill that one wishes had been sustained by greater intellectual rigour.”106 This cavilling aside, he was in complete agreement with Bradet’s concept of Catholic journalism, which sought to “promote a Catholicism centred on the values of freedom and responsibility.” Writing to Bradet in 1964, Ryan declared himself “in entire communion with the fundamental concern that animates you, that consists in the presentation of religious values under their positive and dynamic aspects.”107 Bradet himself was no revolutionary, as he indicated in a letter to Ryan in 1969, when, as chaplain to Canadian university students in Paris, he voiced his discontent with Maintenant’s overly radical orientation in the late 1960s on central issues like “God, faith, the Church, and freedom.”108 The firestorm of public outrage that greeted the decision of the Dominican Order to remove Bradet highlighted aspects of Quebec’s evolving relationship with institutional Catholicism. For example, the link that much of Catholic opinion drew between the Bradet Affair and the imbroglio over the writings of Frère Untel in 1961 indicated that there was still considerable euphoric expectation over the possibilities that the Church could, through its own dynamic, achieve greater liberalization. The Church was still perceived, by both intellectuals and ordinary faithful, as an institution that was powerful but also highly relevant for Quebec’s future, whose internal liberalization was integral to the ongoing political and social liberalization of Quebec society. The Roman decision to remove Father Bradet brought home to Quebec Catholics the gathering force of the conservative counteroffensive aimed at derailing the reformist impulse and was interpreted as an attack on the entire process of religious renewal begun by Vatican II.109 Ryan addressed these concerns both publicly and privately, stating that, while Bradet, as a cleric, was not the proprietor of his position, the fact that he had been arbitrarily removed without explanation to him or his editorial collaborators indicated that the Church was, unfortunately, still dominated by “an infantile conception of obedience.” Ryan used the opportunity to summon ecclesiastical authorities to a new style of governance, one that involved greater transparency and accountability and would acknowledge the existence

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of an informed opinion as a key factor in the modern Church.110 Ryan’s private pronouncements, in which he forcefully admonished those clergymen who wrote to him complaining about the coverage of the Bradet Affair in the secular press, were equally significant. “For a long time,” he stated, “I have militated actively in God’s holy Church, and I can assure you that many authorities believe as I do that a vigorous public opinion within the Church is necessary. One can hold a difference of opinion over the forms in which such opinion should be expressed, but in the final analysis, one must be firmly in favour of the existence of such an opinion.” For Ryan, the Church was “God’s Church” in whose advancement laypeople had an equal stake and over which the clergy had no proprietary rights of ownership.111 What was increasingly evident in Ryan’s missives to the clergy was a palpable shift in views of cultural authority, one insisting on the elevation of opinion to a quasi-sacral status. Although somewhat disingenuously distancing himself from being “a counsellor or censor of popes and bishops,” he absolved himself and his fellow journalists from criticism by invoking both the authority of Pope John XXIII and the even more fundamental doctrine of freedom of the press in order to “enlarge the scope of questions that can be publicly discussed in the Church.” He claimed that, even though men like himself might be mistaken, their insistence on open discussion was preferable to older practices of secrecy and, in any event, would cause little harm to the hierarchical principle – the bedrock of the Catholic Church.112 Ryan aspired to an almost complete reversal of lines of authority in the Church, one that greatly accelerated the process of secularization then at work in his society. The Bradet Affair was Quebec Catholicism’s counterpart to the bombshell publication of Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew in English Canada, one of whose most significant consequences, according to Nancy Christie, was to enable public intellectuals, particularly journalists, to speak with a tone of superior authority on religious matters.113 This was because they believed that they alone – and not the priests and hierarchy of the Church – enjoyed an ongoing intimate communication with the currents of their society, which, in turn, gave them a fundamental role in forming opinion. The prophetic stance of the public moralist empowered them to pronounce ex cathedra with a growing confidence, even on matters of theology and church governance that had once been the sole purview of ordained clergy. But this consequence entailed a further destabilization of religious authority, as it tended to elevate the media appetite for constant shifts in cultural and intellectual fashion as the arbiter of religious truth.



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Although unaware of the immediate implications of his intervention in the Bradet affair, Ryan had helped loose a genie from the bottle. If he believed that public opinion, as interpreted by responsible Catholic public intellectuals like himself, could be conjugated with a collegial model of Church hierarchy, thus providing a stable authority in the Church that could navigate between the imperatives of tradition and modernity, he was unprepared for a new, more hostile attitude that the Quebec media manifested towards religious authority. The saga of the unfortunate teaching brother Robert Lahaise was a straw in the wind. Lahaise had adopted the rather unorthodox, and ultimately offensive, teaching method of using photographs of Christ and Hitler in his classroom to illustrate the conflict between good and evil, compounding his error by instituting a system of ranks and rewards to induce his students to become “super-soldiers” of Christ modelled on the SS . Lahaise became the object of a media witch-hunt that forced his superiors to discipline him, drawing, once again, unwanted attention to the foibles of the Catholic institutional presence in Quebec’s public education system. Ryan sought to put an end to the media circus in a series of editorials that sought to explain the Catholic theology of the opposition of good and evil. His conclusion was that the suspensions meted out to Lahaise and two of his colleagues were too severe and that his error was simply an inevitable feature of the emergence from “a period of Christendom” when Christian believers would “be subject to the old temptation … of seeking to interpret today’s world according to the old dualism that tries to account for everything in simplistic terms.”114 Dring 1965, with the proliferation of stories like Brother Lahaise’s, Ryan discerned that the tone of discussion in the Quebec media regarding Catholicism had turned from hopeful expectation of renewal to a far more negative and hostile appraisal. In March 1965, he used his column to lecture the student journalists of Université Laval’s Le Carabin against engaging in “para-religious banter” that lowered the tone of public ­discussion of religious themes and using a trifling tone that revealed, at root, an intolerance of religion.115 More troubling still, the effort to form student opinion through journals produced by Action catholique youth organizations appeared riddled with contradictions, as revealed in October 1964, when a group of journalists responsible for the publications of the Jeunesse étudiante catholique resigned in protest over conflicts between the demands of clerical advisers to stick to the apostolic themes of “Christian humanism” and their own desire to explore and promote temporal ideologies like Marxism at work in Quebec’s student

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milieu.116 Secularist organizations like the M L F might have little influence over the direction of educational policy, but Ryan worried that they had captured the initiative in the broader public debate about the relationship between Catholicism and Quebec society by blaming the institutional Church and the religious factor for the collective failures and backwardness of Quebec society, especially “responsibility for our weak attachment to freedom, for our intellectual dogmatism and our other ills.” Indeed, the literary critic Jean-Ethier Blais, in the very pages of Le Devoir, accused the clergy of bearing the primary responsibility for the “debasement of the French language,” which prompted Ryan to take up the cudgel on behalf of the clergy and teaching brothers of Quebec, accusing these newly aggressive secularists of “arbitrarily sundering our history, judging religious institutions by the sole criterion of what was least good about them twenty years ago” and making “odious comparisons” between secular and religious institutions. Was the act of “throwing the responsibility for all our ills on a single scapegoat” really clarifying public debate in Quebec?117 For Ryan, such incidents did not bode well, for they signalled the possibility of a wholesale defection of Quebec intellectuals from Catholicism in the name of a radical reinterpretation of their society’s history that would irrevocably consign the Church to the realm of obsolete values. Ryan used the occasion of Cardinal Maurice Roy’s visit to Quebec’s Legislative Assembly in March 1965 – significantly coinciding with the introduction of the new vernacular liturgy into Quebec’s Catholic churches – to reaffirm his hope that the “near totality of the citizens of this province” believed that the presence of religion in the schools and, by  extension, in the public life of Quebec “will remain a free, varied, and inspiring presence.”118 Ryan was one of the chief spokesmen for a Catholic intellectual generation whose roots lay in the interwar period, men and women who were inspired by Jacques Maritain and the personalist theologians to look on secularization as a positive process, one inaugurated by Christianity itself and tending towards the advent of a new Christendom characterized by a responsible, active laity epitomizing the achievement of a new equilibrium between spiritual and temporal realms, both vital components of human salvation. Much as he might have celebrated Cardinal Roy’s visit as symbolizing the achievement of this equilibrium, he was obscurely aware that the nature of secularization had changed dramatically in the mid-1960s. The Catholic modernism of the interwar years that inspired both the universal transformations of the Second Vatican Council and Quebec’s own Quiet Revolution had fallen



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victim to the acceleration of history and the abrupt irruption of a far more pervasive and corrosive hyper-modernism. It was clear that throughout the mid-1960s, Ryan’s own conceptual framework was straining to  explain and somehow accommodate this transformation, what he described as “a levelling process that is tending to regroup men and institutions around a consensus that is highly different than that characterizing the epochs of Christendom.”119 His stance within the older world of Catholic modernism was evident in his hope that a massive effort of a “second evangelization” would accomplish a return to the familiarities of the “great intuitions of the Aristotelian-Thomist system”120 where, even as interpreted by Jacques Maritain, the external authority of the spiritual realm was always present in the realm both of private conscience and the public values anchoring state and society. Speaking to an audience of clergy in the spring of 1965, he sought to place the discussion of Quebec’s secularization within the new parameters of the stabilization of values that he believed must characterize the mature phase of the Quiet Revolution. And in so doing, he revealed his deepest yearning for a stable synthesis between tradition and modernity. “Some believe,” he intoned, “that everything that is secularization is good in and of itself and must be unreservedly encouraged, without prior examination. This, however, is not my opinion.” While expressing the deep human desire for democracy in personal, social, and civic realms, secularization was ultimately insufficient as the moral basis of human society, because it expressed people’s will to act without reference to external authority. No longer referring principally to the relationship between the Church and the civil power, secularization now rather expressed the conviction that all forms of human activity fell under “the sole responsibility of the individual conscience left to itself.”121 Where in the early 1960s Ryan had been one of those who believed that French Canada might, through the revitalization of Catholicism, engage in a distinctive trajectory of secularization that allowed it to escape from the iron law of religious decline that imprisoned Western industrial societies, he was far less certain in the mid-1960s. Ryan sought to reassure his audience that, despite mounting evidence of declining church attendance in central districts of Montreal, low rates of 40–50 per cent did not “reflect the typical character of French-Canadian society,” especially when he estimated that religious participation in the suburban districts still stood at a robust 80 per cent. However, he discerned a new, more troubling meaning of secularization, one expressed by a desire “to be free of all constraints in moral and religious matters. It is a feeling that

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is spreading very rapidly.” This great desire for experimentation – Ryan employed the American term “self-realization” – was not necessarily anti-religious, but among the intellectuals, it translated as a rejection of all external authority, while among ordinary people, it was expressed as a search for comfort and pleasure.122 He discerned that, for many ordinary believers, and even for many of the lower clergy, the euphoric hopes raised by the Second Vatican Council rested not on providing new solutions to matters of governance and liturgy but, rather, on questions about the Church’s right to authoritatively control central aspects of personal identity and sexuality, which, in an age of heightened individualism, could no longer be tolerated. Ryan placed himself on the side of liberalization, dissatisfied with Paul VI’s “exceptional exercise of authority” in closing down discussions of priestly celibacy. He opened the columns of Le Devoir to letters and opinion over the protests of senior clerics such as Bishop Coderre of Saint-Jean that Ryan, a mere layman, had given Paul VI “a bad press.”123 Coderre’s language revealed the extent to which the church hierarchy depended on the world of public opinion. However, such papal interventions, which did little to reassure Catholic faithful that there was legitimate scope for the exercise of public opinion, did not bode well for the conclusions of the Pontifical Commission studying the question of birth control. Ryan recognized that “both the moral and legal aspects of marriage” were the object of a profound questioning, and he urged the pope to move clearly in the direction of liberalization, clearly enunciating “a renewed conception, a broader vision of the responsibility of spouses, of the equilibrium to be achieved in the ends of marriage, and especially to establish a relationship between particular acts and the whole of conjugal life,”124 by which he meant adopting a more flexible approach to replace the all-encompassing doctrinal opposition to new methods of birth control. The attention to issues of sexual morality constituted an implicit indication of Ryan’s dawning awareness that, in Quebec, as in a number of other Western societies, the cutting edge of secularization had shifted from male intellectual elites to women. Much recent debate among revisionist historians of secularization has focused on the defection of young single women from the Christian moral code as the causal key to the “religious crisis” that afflicted Western societies in the 1960s, with some invoking the early 1960s as the critical tipping point and others pointing to the later 1960s and a wider variety of causes both intellectual and institutional.125 To accurately position Catholic Quebec within this transatlantic dynamic, the years 1965–66 appear significant, both in the



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growing hostility to the public presence of the Church – what Ryan termed “saturation”126 – and in the sudden uncoupling of Catholicism and female identity over the anger and frustration of married Catholic women at the unwillingness of the institutional church to resolve the ambiguous situation over the use of new methods of birth control.127 In all his years as director of Le Devoir, Ryan never wrote a column or ­editorial directly addressing women’s aspirations to equality, but at the national meeting of Action catholique in May 1965, he told the story of  his wife Madeleine’s reading group, which met regularly to discuss women’s issues, deciding that they needed to familiarize themselves with the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Because the Index was not formally abolished by the Vatican before the spring of 1966, they asked permission of the archbishop’s office to read the works of the feminist philosopher, but, as Claude Ryan observed, at the time there were many groups of women in Montreal reading Beauvoir, most of whom “would not even think of asking the Archbishopric for permission.”128 That, by 1965, so many Quebec Catholics, both women and men, were seeking their own paths, without reference to clerical authority, meant that, for public moralists like Ryan, assumptions of a shared pre-political universe of values were becoming more difficult to sustain. And if this foundation were being eroded by forces of dechristianization, what did this augur for the political universe where the question of Quebec’s future in Canada was reaching the crisis point?

9 “We Choose the Canadian Hypothesis” Defining the Ethics of Federalism, 1964 Those who have never lived this ideal are now compelled to grope towards its achievement. Those who have known it and experienced it, even in an imperfect way, have the duty to renew it and adapt it, not to demolish it. Claude Ryan, “Plaidoyer pour un fédéralisme économique canadien” (1964)

Two weeks after his unexpected rise to the directorship of Le Devoir, Claude Ryan devoted an editorial to a manifesto written by a new group of Montreal intellectuals. Manifestoes were a proliferating genre in a society where the word “liberation” – national, social, and personal – had taken on a talismanic quality, but this particular one caught his eye, both for the “austere” quality of the text, which avoided the usual rhetorical flights, and for its insistence on “examining real problems,” a goal that placed it within a North American conceptual framework shaped by the optimistic expectation of the end of ideology. Society’s problems, claimed the authors, would now be solved functionally, in a way that avoided the old ideological straitjackets or nationalist allegiances. In a judicious assessment, Ryan highlighted the central points around which all liberals, that audience of “men of good will,” could rally: the authors unhesitatingly proclaimed that “politics must rest, first and foremost, on the person and not on the race”; second, that “politics must be the work of reason and not of facile sentiment”; and finally, that “the most valuable modern tendencies are oriented towards a humanism that opens on the world, rather than narrowing it within borders.” The tone of the writing, though a little too inflected by “a haughty tone, dominated by a cult of ‘old Roman virtue,’” won his praise for its “almost complete absence of



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that false dogmatism that for some time now has threatened to poison civic life in Quebec.” Here, for Ryan, was a refreshing alternative to the “deformation of patriotism” of those “speechifiers who do the circuit between the student chapels and separatist coteries” and whose stock-intrade was that French Canadians had nothing in common with Canadians of other cultures, therefore Quebec had to become a separate national state.1 The manifesto, produced by a body styled the Comité pour une politique fonctionnelle (Committee for Realism in Politics), signalled a move to refurbish Pierre Elliott Trudeau, one of the authors, who had been somewhat tarnished since 1962 by his angry rants against nationalist intellectuals and by purges at the journal Cité libre, as a substantive political thinker and pole of attraction in the constellation of francophone intellectuals.2

“Our society contains enough people with sufficient presence of mind not to mistake windbags for enlightened guides”3 A close reading of Ryan’s response to the plea of the “Trudeau group” for a new realistic attitude in politics, and the consequent attack on his own nationalist credentials by a number of journalistic colleagues and readers of Le Devoir, reveals much about the alliances and divisions among francophone intellectuals confronted with the question of the relationship between Quebec and Canada. Marc Lalonde, an old colleague from the days of Action catholique, expressed his delight at Ryan’s “objective and fraternal” welcome to the comité’s statement of principles but somewhat huffily dissented from identifying the group with a single person. His private statement to Ryan, that “Pierre played a relatively effective role in the preparation of the manifesto,” suggested that the other contributors had, in fact, done much more than is usually recognized by Trudeau’s admirers.4 However, it is important to recognize that Ryan’s editorial contained a number of caveats regarding Trudeau’s brand of liberalism that were central and persistent elements in the divergent positions he and Ryan occupied with respect to both transatlantic liberal ideology and their views regarding the necessary connections between federalism and Quebec nationalism. While certainly subscribing to the views of Trudeau and Lalonde on the primacy of the person, Ryan reminded them that “the person in the pure state does not exist here nor anywhere else” and that one could not simply abstract the “person” from the “accidents”

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of his or her “ethnic” milieu. For Ryan, the difficulty with Trudeau and his associates lay in assuming that, when it came to issues of legal and political rights, one could simply sweep away two centuries of FrenchCanadian history and tradition as irrelevant. In this respect, the central flaw in the manifesto’s thinking was that “it treats national and cultural realities too dispassionately, and far too easily abstracts serious problems that everyone believes are glaring.”5 Ultimately, for Ryan, although the “national” was not superior to the “person,” it was so imbricated with questions of society and economy that it had to be considered a key factor in the making of public policy. On another score, Ryan’s critique went much further. Although the group clustered around Trudeau made a great deal of their “realistic” stance – thus lumping all their opponents together as too influenced by sentiment, rhetoric, or passion – there is something in Ryan’s reference to  their “cult” of “old Roman virtue” that requires further analysis. First, the term “cult” can hardly be synonymous with “realism. At least implicitly, it would appear that Ryan was accusing them of falling into a similar style of sentimental politics. Second, in defending the rights of the human person, Trudeau and his group explicitly defined the “person” in hyper-individualist terms, as an entity whose rights were irrevocably opposed to the claims of ethnic and national loyalties, or of institutional or corporate allegiances. In order to secure and entrench their rights, individuals had to be severed from their moorings in the allegiances of history and community. Such was not the view of Ryan, or of many other francophone intellectuals in the mid-1960s. Indeed, Trudeau, Lalonde, Albert Breton, and their associates constituted a passionate vanguard of a new political stance that attracted a range of figures from both the Left and Right, one that sought to restore political virtue by resurrecting the republican ideology as the guiding principle of political life in a modern society. Their program was nothing less than the displacement of the older social liberalism, represented by men like Ryan, on the grounds that the postwar consensus of welfare state and mixed economy – the “social state” administered by elites and organized corporate bodies – had detached citizenship from participation in political life.6 Ryan’s apprehensions regarding this ideological foray remained couched in an implicit language that seemed to smooth over divisions within the liberal camp. What readers of Le Devoir remembered was his positioning of the comité as a “civilized” corrective to the tendency he discerned “of allowing ourselves to be dazzled by the charlatans of the national myth, and rapidly led down the road to one form or other of



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totalitarianism.”7 Ostensibly, this language seemed to indicate that Ryan was leaning towards Trudeau’s extreme condemnation of nationalism and separatism articulated in his famous 1962 polemic, “La nouvelle trahison des clercs” (The new treason of the intellectuals). This was ­certainly the conclusion drawn by men such as François-Albert Angers, the influential director of the Ligue d’action nationale, and one of the board members of the Imprimerie Populaire who had opposed Ryan’s accession to the directorship of Le Devoir on the grounds that his nationalist credentials were not sufficiently firm. In early July 1964, Angers resigned from the board, ostensibly on the grounds that Ryan was nothing more than an “apprentice nationalist” and “less trustworthy as a French Canadian, less apt than certain ‘purs’ to understand the mentality and the needs of French Canadians.”8 Nor was Angers simply speaking for himself: during these weeks, Ryan heard from André Patry, who advised Premier Lesage on international affairs, regretfully noting that “there are increasingly marked divergences between us over national problems. Certain articles that have appeared under your signature in these last few weeks have filled me with sadness.”9 Jean-Marc Léger, a key member of Le Devoir’s editorial team, was far more blunt, writing privately to Gérard Filion that Ryan had betrayed his trust with a scatter-gun lambasting of nationalists, promoters of associate statehood, and independence. “It is clear as day,” he concluded, “that Le Devoir has ceased to be the nationalist paper and a guide to national opinion during the decisive period that we are traversing.”10 Léger was already chafing at restrictions Ryan had imposed on freedom of expression among journalists at Le Devoir, and he demanded that Filion convoke the board to force Ryan to openly declare in an editorial “clearly, directly, brutally if necessary, that henceforth Le Devoir’s position is antinationalist and that his own position is anationalist.” He evoked the notion of a “conscience clause” that would allow him and some of his fellow journalists, in the case of a paper that had substantially modified its position, to publish a note in that paper on their departure clearly indicating their dissent. He also insisted that journalists have full freedom of expression outside the confines of the newspaper, and especially “the right to publicly proclaim their disagreement with the newspaper’s editorial policy.”11 Filion’s reply, which was both gruff and lengthy, was highly revealing of both the nature of mainstream French-Canadian nationalism in 1964 as well as Ryan’s own place among its conflicting interpretations. He took immediate issue with the insinuations that his protégé was anti-nationalist, asking Léger rhetorically “If one must, to be

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a nationalist, be in agreement with the long-hairs of Parti-Pris, acclaim as heroes the ill-bred petits bourgeois of the F.L.Q., or applaud Michel Brunet’s politico-historical constructions, I am of the opinion that today’s le Devoir … is not nationalist.” Filion recognized the “strange proliferation of nationalism in these past few years, especially in the class of people who, less than ten years ago, sneered at it.” For this reason, he was wary of “last-minute converts who now display the zeal of neophytes and want to teach us [the Le Devoir team], who have never ceased to struggle on behalf of French Canadians despite limited means, what nationalism is and how to live it in practice.”12 Filion was “suspicious” of these conversions, because he considered them based on sentiment more than reason. Ryan, according to Filion, was carrying on the central mission of Le Devoir: to treat nationalism “as a means, rather than an end in itself,” with the superior goal of the well-being of French Canadians as a people. This mission required responsible editors to distinguish, “in the current proliferation of theses, schools, groups, chapels, movements, clans, between what is valuable and what is cockamamie, what is reasoned or purely sentimental, what is achievable and what is chimerical.” Ryan had, according to Filion, grasped what was important about the FrenchCanadian nationalist ideology: that “it must avoid tendencies towards dogmatism, towards exclusivism, towards the ‘believe or die’ attitude.” He confided to Léger his particular contempt for those elements who were trying to turn Quebec into “a nice little secularist and socialist French-Canadian reservation.” Displaying his usual talent for brutal frankness, Filion dismissed the separatists as “a few cranks” who deserved nothing more than “a sound thrashing” of their posteriors.13 Here, Filion’s language was strangely reminiscent of Pierre Trudeau’s oftquoted assault on the “wigwam complex” for which he mercilessly flogged his French-Canadian compatriots. However, the motives of the former director of Le Devoir were quite different and stood within a long tradition of nationalist hopes centred on securing control of Quebec’s economy as a basic lever. Filion avowed that, as a political philosophy, separatism held considerable interest, but it was, at best, a sideshow to the real objective, the colossal personal and communitarian effort necessary to ensure that French Canadians became “masters of their destiny” in the economic realm. What was crucial to Filion was that Ryan’s opinions were rock solid in his adherence to the long-standing tradition at Le Devoir of aiding French-Canadian minorities elsewhere in Canada. To countenance separatism, in Filion’s estimation, would be to break faith



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with the notion of a French-Canadian people and thus “break with its past.”14 Filion brusquely rejected Léger’s concept of journalism, that there could be a policy expressed by the editors and quite another pursued by individual journalists. “When fundamental choices are involved,” he declared, “the paper must speak with one voice,” and, furthermore, “the team must be united.” Filion characterized journalists who did not share in the broad policy imperatives of the director as “mercenaries and unworthy of themselves.”15 It is clear from Filion’s long missive that both he and Laurendeau considered Ryan as the exponent of a continuing anti-separatist nationalist current in French-Canadian society, one that refused to see any contradiction between a dynamic and autonomous Quebec within a reformed federal system. In 1964, this current still had considerable resonance and was arguably the dominant strand of thinking among both French-­ Canadian intellectuals and politicians in both Quebec City and Ottawa. What has been the most influential historiographical interpretation of the relations between nationalism, federalism, and liberalism posits a dichotomy between nationalism and liberal federalism, in which the priority assigned by nationalism to collective values and statism was ultimately incompatible with liberalism’s emphasis on the primacy of individual rights. Although this position was forcefully articulated by Trudeau and the circle of citélibristes,16 it was not widely shared in Quebec. One of the central difficulties with this line of argument is that it is based on a wholesale acceptance of Trudeau’s own presuppositions and teleology that French-Canadian nationalism could not be countenanced because it would lead inevitably to advocacy for a Quebec nation-state, and therefore separation from Canada. For Trudeau, Quebec’s belonging to a larger political entity was the only guarantee for basic rights that protected the liberties of the person. However, until their surprise decision to seek federal office under the auspices of the Liberal Party in the fall of 1965, the advocates of this position, Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier, were hardly in a strong position. Indeed, leading federal French-Canadian political figures would not have agreed with their sundering of liberalism and nationalism. Even their platform as public intellectuals was highly precarious: in 1963 and 1964, they had nearly lost control of their journal, Cité libre, to radical nationalist elements led by Pierre Vallières, and ­Pelletier himself was about to undergo the humiliating experience of being cashiered by La Presse.17 In 1964, when Ryan assumed the directorship of Le Devoir, the supposed trajectory from nationalism to separatism was not clear to his contemporaries, as most nationalists could

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fit relatively comfortably under certain expressions of federalism. Separatist parties and movements certainly existed, but both the urban social democratic Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (RI N ) and the more conservative, rural-based Ralliement national (RN ) were small organizations and electorally untested. Both major political parties in Quebec were, in varying degrees, dominated by federalist ideas, though these were not monolithic, ranging from a greater emphasis on centralism, to varieties of classic federalism, to defence of the explicit borders of provincial autonomy in the Maurice Duplessis vein, to Jean Lesage’s advocacy of a strong Quebec within Canada, to lucubrations on the idea of “associated states” sometimes expressed by influential cabinet ministers such as Pierre Laporte, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, and René Lévesque. Many of these varieties of federalism were inflected by a sense of French-­ Canadian nationalism in greater or lesser degree, but in none of these instances was there an inflexible logic that would lead from nationalism to support for an independent Quebec. But where did Claude Ryan himself stand on the issue of nationalism, given the suspicions that had been constantly voiced since he joined Le Devoir that his credentials on this score were unpersuasive? In what was perhaps the most direct statement of his convictions, he told a meeting of Action catholique in 1965 that “I don’t think that I am a nationalist in the traditional sense and I don’t think that I will ever become one.” However, he professed his sympathy and identification with certain elements of the nationalist creed, “that reflex that constitutes the fundamental element of our average French Canadian, which has become much more active and dynamic than it has formerly been.” Ryan declared that Quebec’s post1960 movement of self-affirmation “expresses the desire of the members of this distinct society … to no longer eternally play second fiddle in their own country, to no longer be eternally under the tutelage of others.”18 While disclaiming any identification with nationalism in the “traditional” sense, Ryan affirmed his allegiance with certain basic convictions central to a strain of nationalism running from Henri Bourassa through Abbé Lionel Groulx to the postwar era, marked by the pronouncements of Gérard Filion and André Laurendeau: the idea that French Canada – both in its political expression, centred in Quebec, and in the wider cultural sense as a people within Canada – constituted a “distinct” society with a particular mission and destiny. This constellation of beliefs also included a powerful commitment to collective self-affirmation and the achievement of self-mastery, one that involved the notion of a persistent



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struggle of “us” against the dominant Anglo-Canadian “others” who had persistently denied the notion of French Canada as a distinct society. And then there was the claim of Ryan the public moralist to somehow voice the bedrock convictions of the “average” French Canadian. He assumed that these were, in the main, less sentimental and more realistic than those of intellectual ideologues. He also believed that they were federalist. He evoked his own affinity with the positions of Henri Bourassa, “who always wanted to see the destiny of French Canadians worked out within larger frontiers, which were not only those of America but of Western civilization itself.”19 But he was also aware that Le Devoir had a long history as a proudly nationalist newspaper, and, for this reason, he was careful to articulate his mission as holding to a middle position, one that avoided “falling into blind and sentimental nationalism” while respecting and adhering to “those very real values that have given to our people a distinct character and vocation.”20 He cast his own role as a kind of clearing house for the articulation, animation, and interpretation of French-Canadian values, and, for this reason, he declared that he was adamantly opposed to attempts by nationalist leaders like François-Albert Angers or journalists like Jean-Marc Léger to turn the paper into the organ of a particular “clan” or tendency. As director, Ryan’s self-appointed role was to “listen to sounds from every quarter, judging each according to its real value, without regard for the passions of the moment or the former swagger of their authors.” In this way, he believed he could “best serve French Canadians, but remembering also that he is a Canadian, a North American, and the inhabitant of a planet that is growing smaller each year … Ideologues and doctrinaires will always leave him cold. He will view their departure with a certain nostalgia, but will try in the first instance to hold on to them.”21 He insisted that he still “included” nationalists like Léger and Angers within Le Devoir’s broad tent, but it was clear that, by identifying them with nostalgia and the world of sentiment, he systematically excluded them and their brand of nationalism from the “real” world of true intellectuals. Ryan voiced the quintessential canons of the public moralist’s self-identity: the belief that he did not express the views of a partial or sectional interest and the claim that, unlike other intellectuals and political figures, he alone occupied a vantage point that combined reflective disinterestedness with judicious realism.22 Ryan’s overriding concern was to carefully delineate the varieties of French-Canadian nationalism that could be harmonized with liberalism

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and a commitment to a renewed federalist perspective. His intellectual jockeying with Angers and Léger occurred against the backdrop of the  Quebec Legislative Assembly’s Parliamentary Committee on the Constitution, a body of legislators and experts created by Premier Lesage, ostensibly to advise the government on options within a structure of reformed federalism. What particularly concerned Ryan was that the committee gave a public platform and media exposure to various groups advocating Quebec independence, like the RI N . Lesage, he believed, had erred grievously in this respect, by allowing the committee to study the question of Quebec’s independence on the same footing as the original mandate, which was to explore ways in which “Quebec could continue, for the moment, to find its path inside a renewed Canadian federalism.”23 Because, according to Ryan, there was no broad public consensus on the question of independence, it was a mere plaything of experts, and the public was being lulled into a false sense of security concerning this fundamental option, without considering the serious social, political, and economic consequences that would follow from it. Worse still, Lesage’s terms of reference seemed to implicitly endorse the idea that “Quebec could arrogate to itself the right to speak in the name of French Canada,” despite the fact that one-fifth of French Canadians lived outside Quebec and that over a million of Quebec’s citizens were not francophones.24 Most troubling here was that the terms of reference seemed to lend credence to the “associated states” theory, whose most prominent exponent was Jacques-Yvan Morin, professor of constitutional law at Université de Montréal, and one of the chief experts advising the Parliamentary Committee. Though later a leading member of the sovereigntist Parti québécois, in 1964 Morin was still a federalist, who sought modifications of the existing federal structures within Confederation so as to secure a special constitutional status for Quebec. However, unlike Trudeau and Ryan, Morin viewed the 1867 constitutional agreement as completely unsalvageable, because it did not recognize the real existence of “two nations” – one French and the other English – and it would therefore have to be replaced by a new mode of representation. The two nations within Canada would each be represented by its own national state and associated for certain ends by the adoption of a new constitutional pact, at whose centre would be a new set of confederal institutions, all of which, especially the Senate and the Supreme Court, would have to reflect the binational character of the country. The new balance of forces within Canada would be underwritten by a new division of legislative competences between Ottawa and Quebec, giving Quebec full powers



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over regional planning, social security, and the development of natural resources, coupled with a new international capability to negotiate treaties independently within spheres of provincial competences and the power to nominate half the representatives of Canada to international bodies.25 “Associated statehood” was a seductive idea, made all the more so because it seemed to realize a number of key desiderata, especially older ideals like the securing of autonomy and a more modern yearning for new powers in economic and social fields, all in the quest for a distinct constitutional status for Quebec within Confederation. Premier Lesage’s priority was a Canadian nationalist goal of securing repatriation and an amending formula as a prelude to negotiating a new equilibrium of powers between Ottawa and Quebec, a position increasingly at odds with opinion in his cabinet. Thus, for Ryan, Morin’s constitutional ideas threatened to expose fissures within the ranks of the major federalist group in Quebec, the governing Liberal Party, by bringing to the fore fundamental differences between Premier Lesage, the proponent of a pragmatic “cooperative federalism” – which, in Ryan’s estimation, was “a still imprecise but generous ideal” – and ministers such as René Lévesque, who increasingly used his public appearances to heap scorn on the whole idea of cooperative federalism, insisting that Quebec’s problems must be solved within its own borders without reference to Ottawa. Although coyly insisting that he was opposed to separatism, Lévesque took a position openly at variance with that of the premier by declaring that separatism was one option among others that citizens should consider.26 At one level, Ryan maintained that the public venting of these divisions could only weaken the negotiating position of Quebec vis-à-vis Ottawa and the other provinces, which required a united front among all believers in the federal principle. However, he also believed that a greater danger lurked in the concept of “associated states,” which pushed the “two nations” hypothesis to its logical limit by marking the territory of Quebec as an ethnic “national state” for French Canadians. Constitutional reformers such as Morin had erred in giving implicit credence to the program of the separatist R I N, which defined Quebec as the sole “patrie” or fatherland of the “Français d’Amérique,” identified the Quebec government as “the national government of French Canada,” and considered francophone minorities outside Quebec not as communities with a history of their own, but as mere “extensions of the Quebec nation.”27 On the issue of the “national State,” Ryan was implacable. “I am opposed to the national State as an intellectual monstrosity,” he declared in his ­commentary on the R I N’s brief to the Parliamentary Committee on the

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Constitution. The tenet that the state must be the expression of the will of the nation opened the door to injustice, as it would lead to individuals or groups appearing to be “a stranger” to the identity of the dominant national group, able to be ignored, marginalized, or, in extreme cases, treated as “vulgar goods to be haggled over.” The latter phrase was a dismissal of the idea that francophone minorities outside Quebec could be protected only through the efforts of a strong national state in Quebec, which would “trade” rights to the English-Canadian minority in exchange for rights for French Canadians within the English-Canadian national state. He invoked the Christian personalist thinkers Jacques Maritain and Father Jean-Thomas Delos, whose ideas on nationalism have been discussed in chapter 2, to head off the more “traditional” nationalist views of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, which had fallen into the trap of the ethnic state idea. Christian personalism, Ryan maintained, established basic distinctions between the cultural order, which gave rise to the nation as an ethico-social community, and the political order, based on personhood and the law, which grounded the state. In no way, according to Ryan, did the state arise from the nation. Delos, in particular, affirmed that the “national” possessed rights but that these must be clearly understood in relation to the prior and more fundamental rights of the person as a citizen. Thus, any identification of the state and the nation was to be resisted, because the “thesis of the national State contains, in embryo, the principle of grave violation and confusion more serious than that which it seeks to remedy.”28 At one level, Ryan’s warnings about contemporary developments in French-Canadian nationalism expressed disquiet over both the ideology and the tactics of more radical nationalist groups like the RI N . He certainly shared some of the apprehensions of Catholic clergymen who feared that radical nationalists sought to “blame the clergy as the sole cause of all our past humiliations,” holding the Church responsible for Quebec’s economic backwardness, Confederation, and the Rebellion of  1837.29 The R I N frequently resorted to street demonstrations and engaged in noisily heckling their opponents. Yet, unlike many of his more conservative colleagues at other Montreal papers, and hard-line law-andorder politicians such as Claude Wagner, Ryan never linked the RI N with F L Q terrorists, and he severely rebuked the strategy of “moral assassination committed … against persons or groups that do not share our political opinions.” He urged the R I N leaders to clarify their goals and objectives, and especially to avoid language that tried to straddle the fence, on the one hand reprobating violence while, on the other, claiming



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to “understand” the motives of those engaging in violent acts. In both its public and private utterances, leaders and members of the new separatist party had used violent words, and, while some might regard this “seduction of verbalism” as a commitment to intellectual vigour and radical intransigence, others might take these slogans in quite another way. “A party that claims to be peaceful and democratic,” he intoned, “cannot indefinitely admit to its ranks militants persons whose opinions have not been verified in advance.” Thus, in the interests of not falling victim to “infiltrations of a doubtful character,” the leaders of the RI N should explicitly clarify their concept of political action.30 From this discussion, it might appear that Ryan was an implacable liberal foe of nationalism who accepted Trudeau’s simplistic calculus of a moral equation between a sovereign Quebec and totalitarian breaches of human rights. However, his views could take on far more nationalist overtones over issues like the relationship of Quebec’s anglophone ­community to the “renaissance of French Canadian nationalism.” While asserting the potential for deviations within contemporary Quebec nationalism, including what he discerned as an alarming “real risk of confusion between national problems and social problems,” he dismissed the complaints of Quebec anglophone spokespeople that they were being frozen out of Quebec’s public service and would soon be reduced to the status of second-class citizens. Ryan disclaimed any sympathy for separation or for “the thesis of associated states interpreted in its literal sense,” but he categorically stated that one could hold either of these positions without falling into ways of thinking that would violate individual rights. Even radical positions such as those espoused by the R I N did not “inevitably” entail slippage towards “a corruption of thought.”31 Although opposing the “national State” as utter anathema, Ryan was not averse to the marriage of nation and state, declaring himself entirely satisfied with the idea of the “nation-state,” a sovereign entity internationally but one “not necessarily exclusive or stifling in its social and philosophic choices,” an entity that was the dynamic and flexible expression of all the elements and groups that inhabited its territory. Inspired by  reason and justice rather than by “an overly possessive ‘national interest,’” Ryan, unlike Trudeau, actually envisioned the possibility that Quebec, under certain conditions, could become such a nation-state. However, he strongly advised the R I N that its goal was best accomplished not through the medium of a mathematical democracy, by simply convincing the francophone majority of the virtues of the separatist project. Quebec sovereignty, he believed, must be the result of certain

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explicit preconditions: first, there must be a generous definition of the rights of persons and a solemn declaration of minority rights; second, “to avoid any nationalist fraud,” any party advocating separation had to secure the allegiance “of respectable voices of minority groups in favour of their proposed option”; and, finally, there had to be a broad-ranging public consensus that the new regime was preferable to the old one and superior in its ability to secure the good of all citizens.32 Nationalism, he reminded Quebec anglophones, “was on the whole a healthy manifestation, the expression of a people that is becoming conscious of its dignity and that … intends to forge the means to live the life to which it is entitled.” He sternly warned them to stop drawing parallels between the situation in Quebec and the European context that gave rise to Hitler and Mussolini. He believed that these views were widespread even among his “respectable anglophone” fellow citizens, and it is of some significance that his advice to them was to get outside their own “wigwam” and engage with the new social and cultural currents that were transforming the world of the francophone majority, because to withdraw would produce greater isolationism and perhaps engender the precise problems that Anglo-Quebeckers so feared. Such manifestations by the ethnic majority might appear selfish, but, according to Ryan, they had to be read in light of “a far more serious situation which prevailed for a long time, one that tragically illustrates the contempt, the condition of inferiority in which a powerless majority was for a long time held by a powerful and oblivious minority.” The francophone majority was completely within its rights to insist that “certain minority elements stop living in the past and do their bit to inaugurate in Quebec a social equilibrium more in accordance with demographic reality.”33 Nor was he in thrall to attempts by Anglo-Quebeckers to invoke the sacred language of rights to insulate themselves from the new nationalism, to continue living “in the euphoria of unilingualism” that, in the final analysis, was only “the unjustified domination of the minority over the majority.”34 These claims, according to Ryan, had to be carefully dissected and distinctions drawn between what were actual rights anchored “in history and natural law” and what were situations of “privileges” acquired by the “anglophone ‘Establishment’” to police the boundaries of “ghettos of power” paid for indirectly by the majority. “Holders of privilege,” he declared in early 1966, “like to hide the true situation under the seductive but ambiguous cloak of ‘acquired rights,’” but these were now open to question, as, in many cases, they constituted “a negation or abridgment of the no less fundamental rights of the majority.”35



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Nowhere, for Ryan, did the legacy of colonialism cast as long a shadow as in the status accorded to the French language in the urban centres of Quebec, and it was here that his continued engagement in a powerful current of French-Canadian nationalist discourse was most apparent. Writing in 1965, he documented, for readers of Le Devoir, the relative “powerlessness” of French, characterized by “a dangerous penetration of the English language, which often gives to spoken French a style that is  frequently unrecognizable.” This problem was aggravated by the ­continued economic inferiority of French Canadians: while French was spoken in the home, on television, at school, in church, on the street, and at social gatherings, this did not compensate for the fact that “at work, thousands of French Canadians are, on a daily basis, forced to speak English.” Such a situation simply reinforced “the relatively minor place that the language spoken by the majority of Quebec citizens holds in the world of business, finance and industry.” From this evidence Ryan asserted the global and categorical diagnosis that “our French language is sick both from within and from the situations meted out to it in certain sectors of our collective life.”36 In articulating these concerns, which came to centre on the status of French in Quebec’s economic life as the key indicator of the majority’s ability and will to take charge of its collective self-affirmation, Ryan spoke for a growing number of intellectuals, politicians, public servants, educators, and unionized workers. However, such a stance also anchored him within a long succession of both conservative and liberal nationalist intellectuals concerned with the mastery that French Canadians could exert over their economy on a continent dominated by English speakers. Here was a question that had preoccupied Gérard Filion and André Laurendeau in their polemics against Maurice Duplessis’s sell-off of Quebec’s natural resources to AngloAmerican capitalists in the 1950s, that had motivated the young activists of Jeune-Canada and the political dissenters of Action libérale nationale in the mid-1930s, and that had drawn the attention of social corporatists such as Esdras Minville and of the great progenitors of modern FrenchCanadian nationalism, Abbé Lionel Groulx and Henri Bourassa.37 Ryan could evoke the common frustrations of his French-Canadian fellow citizens of having to be served in English rather than in French and the fact that, in many firms operating in Quebec, it was far easier for an employee “of English origins or culture” to be promoted. However, he was acutely aware of the difficulties entailed in acting to redress the balance. A great deal of the inferior status of the French language could, in his estimation, be traced to the “continental” or “pan-Canadian” character of many

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Montreal business enterprises, and he felt that it was “unrealistic” either to deny the economic utility of the presence of these companies in Montreal or to simply assume that business calculations could be made solely on the basis of what occurred within the borders of Quebec. A city like Montreal could not “assume the role of a continental economic and financial metropolis without paying a price. It must consent to certain servitudes such as those demanded by an inevitable bilingualism, otherwise, it would be quickly superseded by its competitors.” But he was perplexed by the “situation currently meted out to French in large sectors of Montreal’s economic life, which is strange, unjust, and intolerable. One would have to be lacking in the most elementary pride to not be surprised and disquieted.”38 What was urgently required was an explicit language policy articulated by the Quebec state in order to define an order of priorities, but Ryan was quite clear that this intervention had to be carefully limited. He declared himself firmly opposed to measures that would legally compel newcomers to Montreal to speak only French, stating that, “if they wish to learn English in North America, I don’t think I have the right to make the decision for them,” but he was quite favourable towards precise government measures that would “encourage [and] incite them” to choose French. 39 First, the state should become more conscious of language in its own capacity as employer: in this sphere, nothing prevented the state from promoting either a generalized use of French throughout the public service and educational system or a systematic effort to improve the quality of written and spoken French. Second, measures had to recognize that the aim was not “to prohibit the use of English, nor to abandon the rule of bilingualism,” the latter a requirement for efficient action in North America. However, Ryan was adamant that bilingualism had to be applied with intelligence and realism, recognizing that 80 per cent of the province was French speaking and that, normally, French should be used as both the default language and by government. Above all, he urged, bilingualism was not to be treated as a mere issue of language, but as a more complex social and political problem that must not be used as an excuse for maintaining the old partitions between English and French communities.40 A trickier problem was how to act with respect to the private sector. Here, Ryan was fully aware of a very complex situation, one requiring a nuanced action that stood somewhere between “direct and authoritarian state action” and a position that “stupidly” closed the door to any state intervention. The goal was “to make French the priority language of Quebec,” and he hoped to accomplish this without



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resorting to “petty legalism” that might, in the long run, prove costly. It was, he maintained, entirely within the purview of the state to legislate and enforce a citizen’s right to be served in his or her language, especially in service corporations like transport, hotels, utilities, banks, hospitals, and communications companies, and he was prepared to countenance the denial of licenses or business permits to offending businesses. He saw no reason why the state should not adopt the example of Switzerland and regulate the language of commercial signage and advertising, insisting on the use of French in areas where francophones formed the majority of the population. These were, for Ryan, issues which went beyond mere commercial considerations because “they affect the image that a society projects of itself to its own gaze and to that of foreigners who visit.”41 To English-Canadian audiences, Ryan often acknowledged the tones of “jealousy and exclusiveness” in certain manifestations of nationalism. He always proclaimed his opposition to what he saw as attempts to place collective liberties before “the dignity and fundamental autonomy of the individual,”42 and he frequently warned against the dangers to democracy of the tendency of the national factor to become all-encompassing, to “devour and assimilate the political,” which would mark “the end sooner or later of democratic life.”43 Nevertheless, Ryan’s liberal federalism had nothing in common with Trudeau’s bleak pessimism regarding any and all forms of nationalism. He expressed his hope that, “if the values of hatred and egoism could be eliminated from the inside, … the [nationalist] movement could have a very dynamic significance for the enrichment of humanity, but in our context this will be very difficult. But I believe that there is a way.”44 This way involved exposing nationalism to ideological countercurrents, a kind of dialogue that, Ryan hoped, would work, over time, an internal transformation on both nationalism and liberal federalism, making the first more responsive to democratic individual rights and the latter more open to the rights of historical and cultural communities. In this position, Ryan adhered to the grandiose dream that had inspired him since the late 1940s: to reforge a sense of consensus and common purpose among French-Canadian intellectuals, a project at whose centre stood Le Devoir and its director. In a key editorial written in September 1964, he expressed his worries at what he saw as “a political manicheanism” surrounding the relationship between nationalism and federalism, one that had given rise to an increasingly bitter “verbal dichotomy” that was preventing a “cordial debate.” He admonished political figures and intellectuals to cease this “false dogmatism”

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and recognize the “sovereignty” of reasonable discussion. What particularly roused his animosity was, on the one hand, the extreme language employed by those like Trudeau, who held that “all nationalism is akin to Hitlerite national-socialism,” and, on the other, “an unregulated tendency to play around with an ill-defined idea of nation, and to identify this idea purely and simply with that of the State, and to make the will and needs of the nation the rule of all progress.”45 By exposing the “excessive verbalism” of both extreme nationalists and liberal anti-nationalists, Ryan was accomplishing the most important task of the public moralist, “demonstrating a firm attachment to our people”46 by reminding all elements of the political classes of French Canada of the superior and abiding claims of reason over the fleeting dogmatism of passion.

“A French Canadian untamed”47 At the core of Claude Ryan’s socio-political vision that sought to harmonize liberalism, nationalism, and federalism lay a set of foundational convictions that forged a clear order of priorities that allowed him to define a course among the bewildering diversity of federal projects and nationalist utopias that proliferated in both French and English Canada during the 1960s. Excavating the nature of these beliefs requires the historian to expose a series of layers of both political and pre-political thought that enlisted moral and religious purpose behind a passionate engagement in the cause of creating a truly federal Canada founded on a renewed partnership between its two founding peoples. Ryan always deployed the language of reason – “froidement” (dispassionate) was the expression most frequently used in his editorials and speeches – to talk about political projects of federalism and of the complicated negotiations between Ottawa, Quebec, and the other provinces that these would entail. Many of his contemporaries in the Quebec intellectual community made the mistake of assuming that, because he spoke of logic and reason, he could be persuaded to favour a course of action tending towards ultimate sovereignty for Quebec. He was, of course, frequently disappointed at both the lack of response from English Canada and by the contingencies of politics but, because his political analysis was anchored in an ethicoreligious frame of reference, the chances of Ryan slipping outside the ambit of federalism were as slim as him deciding to abandon the cardinal doctrines of the Catholic Church.



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“On the moral plane,” Ryan declared in September 1964, “we are first and foremost French Canadians, that is to say we are neither the French of Canada nor Canadians who speak French. We are Canadians who are French to the very marrow of our being and want to remain so from one end of our country to the other.” He warned that, “to cast aside this reality is to commit a moral heresy which is well known as the consecration of selfishness and whose effect is to entirely pervert the political order.” It would also mean blindly rejecting “an entire century of history without measuring the ‘gains’” that French Canadians would sacrifice by narrowing their spiritual compass to the territory of Quebec.48 The clear emphasis here was that the prior and fundamental national identity involved being a “Canadian,” and – like his great intellectual predecessor Henri Bourassa, whom he termed “the father of French-Canadian nationalism but, in a no less real sense, the father of Canadian nationalism” – Ryan always described himself, as he did to the English-Canadian philosopher George Grant, as “one who professes Canadian nationalism.”49 He fully recognized, however, that Bourassa’s thinking rested on a central ambiguity, one that he himself fully shared: that his attachment to Canada meant the entire territory of Canada, not simply Quebec as a political and geographical expression, but that the force of this Canadian nationalism derived from “the existence of a strong Quebec nationalism.” These two imperatives could be reconciled only by the full recognition, constitutionally, of the bicultural character of Canada as resting on a pact between the two founding peoples, “two great cultures,” French and English. Bourassa would not, proclaimed Ryan, “abandon French culture at any price for love of a uniform Canada.”50 Ryan sought to refurbish Bourassa’s message for his own contemporaries through the lens of interwar Catholic political thinking, which had energized a set of careful distinctions between “nation” and “state.” According to this view, nation and nationalism were manifestations of the cultural order; the state was the expression of the political realm, whose overarching goals were the achievement of social and political justice and the protection and enhancement of the human person. Given this distinction, Catholics like Ryan viewed with abhorrence the “nationalist State” that sought to privilege a single ethnicity or culture through political means. Viewed in this light, Ryan interpreted French Canada as a primarily cultural entity. While its political equilibrium might rest on an autonomous and dynamic Quebec state, it was also coextensive with Canada as a political and geographic “nation-state” and was therefore

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equally founded on the achievement of social, cultural, economic, and political equality for French Canadians as individuals and as a collective people at the level of the federal government and in the nine other provinces that many thought constituted “English Canada.” This would entail a fundamental redefinition of Canada as a nation-state founded on the explicit recognition of a bicultural reality. The central difficulty for those like Ryan who saw themselves as lineal intellectual disciples of Bourassa was that, for most of the twentieth century, Anglo-Canadians had sought to erect a version of a unitary “nationalist state” in the territory outside Quebec, one that restricted the full equality of French Canadians in the name of fostering a culturally English ethnic state. This project had, in the years following the First World War, given rise to a counter-movement, “a more intransigent form of cultural nationalism” that had begun with Abbé Groulx and the Ligue d’Action française,51 one oriented to a protectionist withdrawal of French Canadians within the political borders of Quebec, with the attendant implications for the development of a rival “nationalist state.” The challenge facing Ryan was a difficult one, because it involved three levels of persuasion. First, he had to demonstrate to the majority of French Canadians, who were, after all, located in Quebec, that the project of building a bicultural Canadian “nation-state” was one entirely compatible with Quebec’s new social and political dynamism and desire to create a distinctive and progressive French-Canadian society in North America. Second, crafting a bicultural nation-state was possible only if  French Canadians could be convinced that their English-Canadian fellow citizens were in the process of abandoning their own hankerings for a unitary ethnic “nationalist state” and were vitally interested in constructing a new bicultural Canada, a process that, in turn, would entail a fundamental redefinition of their own self-identities, and the consequent articulation of a new form of cultural nationalist discourse. Third, Ryan, as a French-Canadian moderate and an “outsider,” had to persuade English Canadians that the project of dismantling their “nationalist state” and replacing it with a bicultural one was both historically and politically viable and desirable from the perspective of building a Canadian nation that was more just, and that, despite the rising tenor of separatist voices in Quebec, the majority of French Canadians favoured working towards a reformed federalism. These interlocking systems of interpretation fully engaged his status and authority as a public intellectual, and Ryan hoped to succeed where Bourassa had failed. However, he  realized at the outset that the major stumbling block would be to



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somehow reconcile the imperative of absolute equality of French and English Canadians with the daily operation of democracy, whose central canon, after all, rested on the will of the majority.52 And viewed from the perspective of the incipient new Canadian “nation-state,” this majority was effectively English in both its cultural and political complexion. In 1964, the key visible sign that such a far-reaching politico-cultural transformation was possible among both English and French Canadians was the ongoing work of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission), chaired by Ryan’s editorial colleague André Laurendeau. The commission had a dual mandate: the first, centred on language, was to inquire into the status of the French and English languages in Canada and to make recommendations that would achieve a greater measure of linguistic equality; the second, a more political imperative, was to achieve social and cultural equality between English and French Canadians as collective entities. The first volume of the commission’s report fleshed out the position that Laurendeau had defended since the 1940s and 1950s, namely, that integral bilingualism was utopian, because a majority of both English and French Canadians would never become fully bilingual. However, he used this assumption to advance the argument for institutional bilingualism and biculturalism, especially at the level of the federal government, which would allow the two societies to be served and educated and to work in their own language. This, he believed, would lead to a new constitution that defined Canada as a bilingual state, which would afford French Canadians equality of opportunity to participate in the federal government without renouncing their language and culture. But the achievement of social and political equality between the peoples as collective entities, Laurendeau maintained, would require a type of special status for Quebec, as it was the homeland of four of the six million francophones then living in Canada.53 Laurendeau’s description of English and French Canada as “peoples,” “cultures,” and “societies” offered, from Ryan’s perspective, an attractive exit from the terminological straitjacket of “two nations,” which always doubled back to the political solution of “associated states,” raising the spectre of the “nationalist state” obedient to the political will of a single ethnicity. “I am afraid,” he confided to an EnglishCanadian correspondent in 1966, “that if Quebec becomes an exclusively French province and the rest of Canada is confirmed in its English orientation, it may be very difficult for us to build a truly bilingual country. The federal super-structure which would be placed on top of the provincial and regional structures would risk to appear as artificial and unreal.”54

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Writing in June 1964, Ryan used the experience of the LaurendeauDunton Commission to differentiate his position from the neo-­nationalist formulations then in vogue among many Quebec political figures and a growing number of his fellow intellectuals, which tended to conflate the aspirations of French Canada to cultural and social equality solely with the political expansion of the powers of the Quebec state. The choice, he argued, was between a Canada founded on cultural duality or an explicit recognition that Canada was the product of two distinct nations. The latter optic, he maintained, contained within it serious implications for both homogeneity and sovereignty, for it wrongly supposed that the Quebec population was homogeneous and that Frenchspeaking Quebec would abandon francophone minorities living outside its border to their fate. The concept of “two nations,” Ryan charged, “ties the notion of the State too closely to that of a particular nation. This runs contrary to the evolution of contemporary political thought, which conceives the idea of the State as functionally related to the rights of persons, considered as equals, independent of any question of race or religion, and which must increasingly take into account political structures that encompass diverse cultural families.”55 The logic of the “two nations” formula would lead to “the emasculation of the federal power” and to the inevitable weakening of Canada both from the perspective of its internal life as well as its external action. The principle of cultural dualism, on the other hand, offered two complementary principles that ought to gain the allegiance of all those who desired a strong French Canada. It spoke to the concerns of “traditional” nationalists by guaranteeing provincial autonomy in all that pertained to personal, family, social, and cultural life and the development of ­natural resources; it reassured federalists by ensuring the continued existence of a federal authority strong enough to assure the efficient functioning of the country; and it reached out to those who desired a  stronger affirmation of Quebec’s distinctiveness, by “elevating the importance of the regional factor in the life of the country. It also assures the French Canadians of Quebec of the possibility of organizing their social, cultural, political, and economic institutions in conformity with their spirit.”56 The latter statement would have appealed to those neo-­nationalists who still saw the possibility of reconciling Quebec’s aspirations with the preservation of a federal system, the balancing of a “strong Canada” with a “strong Quebec,”57 as it held forth the tantalizing prospect that the federal system might be reorganized to take account of Quebec’s distinctiveness. Ryan’s preference for “the two



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cultures thesis” was also an expression of his resistance to compartmentalizing French and English Canadians in particular geographical zones where they would be largely isolated from contact with one another. This, he believed, was the antithesis of liberalism: only through a “cultural” rather than a “national” perspective could a country secure “the progress of the values of freedom and civic friendship that are, in the final analysis, the primary raison d’être of political societies.”58 Thus, he hoped to affirm the relative balance and harmony between individual and collective rights that he believed would be disturbed by an overemphasis upon the “national” factor. Ryan intended his advocacy of the “two cultures” formula to refute a  number of disquieting tendencies he discerned in both Quebec and English Canada. First, he sought to scotch the attempt to promote multiculturalism as an alternative to a bicultural Canada, the former ideal championed by submissions to the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission from organizations of Ukrainian and Jewish Canadians to force the inclusion of other cultural groups and languages on an equal footing. He was especially exercised at the “stupid” pretention of certain Ukrainian spokesmen who believed that, as an official culture, French should be confined to Quebec. “We have an interest,” he declared, “in not indefinitely multiplying ‘official’ languages and cultures,” and he urged no deviation from the principle that only English and French could be “unequivocally” recognized. Second, he urged greater understanding of the aspirations of other cultural groups and flexible efforts to accommodate the languages of “diverse cultural families” that had demonstrated a right to inclusion.59 Third, he hoped that, by clarifying the political and social meanings of the terms “culture” and “nation,” he could arrest the tendency among a number of key Quebec public figures to oscillate between the two concepts, depending on calculations of strategy in ­federal-provincial negotiations. One of the key offenders in this regard was Premier Lesage, ostensibly a champion of renewed federalism, who in September 1964 declared summarily that Quebec was “the political expression of French Canada.” Ryan pounced on this, concerned that, by denying that the federal government was also a normal channel of expression for French-Canadian political aspirations, Lesage was giving credence to “the thesis of the nationalist State.” Ryan had no difficulty in accepting the formulation that Quebec might be the “principal” or “primary” political expression of French Canada, but he was not prepared to view it as the exclusive one, given his attentiveness to every signal that would remedy the weakness of French-Canadian political leaders in

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Ottawa.60 Finally, as his speech to the 1966 meeting of the Association canadienne-française d’Alberta illustrates, the term “culture” signalled to francophone minorities outside Quebec that, despite growing pessimism among Quebec’s neo-nationalist intellectuals regarding the fate of French Canadians elsewhere in Canada and the tendency of nationalist organizations in Quebec to formulate constitutional issues purely in terms defined by Quebec’s borders, there were those who “stood against the hypothesis which would induce French Canadians to close their borders against the rest of Canada without even having explored the possibility of an enduring accord with the rest of the country.”61 Beneath Ryan’s promotion of the culturalist vision of two societies adopted by André Laurendeau lay an older strand of French-Canadian political thinking, one that relied heavily on an interwar nationalist vision of Confederation and extended back to Abbé Groulx, who defended Quebec’s provincial autonomy by appealing to an idea of Confederation as a “compact” between the original provinces. Unlike most of his fellow French-Canadian intellectuals, Ryan had a wide-ranging knowledge of western Canada, which he frequently deployed to acquaint readers of Le Devoir with the pluralism and diversity of English-Canadian attitudes to federalism. However, he was adamant that the crux of any settlement of the Canadian “crisis” lay with Ontario, the “real leader of English-Canadian opinion.” He leapt immediately into the fray with the appearance of two major interpretations of the origins of Confederation, written by the English-Canadian historians Donald Creighton and P.B. Waite. Ryan was especially exercised that Creighton sought to rework the “compact thesis” into a pact between the Province of Canada and the Maritimes, thus consigning to oblivion what Ryan, following Groulx, believed was important, namely, the fact that there was a prior “moral compact” between “the two Canadas” that occurred before the 1864 Charlottetown negotiations. Ryan discerned in the denial of an original compact between the two Canadas an attempt by modern-day AngloCanadian intellectuals to “hang on to the status quo” by wilfully ignoring the dynamic of the original agreement, which sought to respond to “a very strong autonomist sentiment” from Lower Canada.62 Historians such as Creighton and Waite were trying to subvert the work of the B& B Commission by attempting to show that the past provided little evidence for the reform of the Canadian federation along the lines of recognizing English and French dualism. With the publication of the first abstract of the commission’s report in early 1965, heavily influenced by Laurendeau’s reading of Canadian



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history, Ryan believed that the hour had come for English Canadians to decide, once and for all, “whether their ancient hegemony will at last be called into question.”63 What Ryan dwelt upon in his analysis of the report was the fact that the central question was no longer one of majority/minority relations. It, he emphatically stated, had been irrevocably altered by “the Quebec revolution.” The rest of the country had to take account of the fact that Quebec now constituted “a distinct society determined to achieve self-mastery, as far as possible, over the course of its own destiny.” “The old Canadian order,” which, according to Ryan, was founded on “the rule of the anglophone majority and the relative isolation of the French Canadians in a Quebec reserve,”64 had to be fundamentally re-envisioned and reinvented on the basis of equality, as comprising “two societies, each composed of its own majority, having its own mode of existence, its aspirations.” Writing in a tone that would have appealed to the pride of most of his French-Canadian compatriots, he proclaimed that, “while the second society was for a long time the prisoner of the first, it has become more independent, more conscious of its power, and can, if needed, be self-sufficient. Without being disposed to sunder the alliance, it does not want to see it perpetuated, without question, in its traditional forms. It does not want to leave, but it does not want to stay without solid guarantees.”65 In Ryan’s estimation, the willingness of English Canadians to inaugurate a process by which these guarantees could be made clear constituted the central test of Confederation’s survival. Between 1964 and 1966, much of Ryan’s editorial energy was spent in the eager auscultation of signs that his English-Canadian compatriots were prepared to accept Laurendeau’s diagnosis that Confederation was, indeed, in crisis. His hopes for English Canada returned, in considerable degree, to the “compact theory” and rested on Ontario, which, with Quebec, formed “the historic matrices of Canada, which gave birth to the two founding peoples.”66 He was alert to budding signs of a “new spirit” in the principal homeland of English Canada, such as increasing public willingness to “understand the practical exigencies of biculturalism,” particularly in the teaching of French, which seemed to indicate an awakening to the gravity of the “Canadian crisis.”67 But he reminded Ontarians that, among French Canadians, memories of 1917 and 1942, when English Canada invoked the right of the majority to settle national problems, were still vivid.68 He was quick to flay any propensity to rest content with the status quo, admonishing politicians such as Manitoba Premier Duff Roblin, who questioned the very existence of the B& B

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Commission, and his colleagues at the Globe and Mail, who maintained that, while English Canada was willing to countenance minor adjustments, Quebec opinion was exaggerating the crisis, which did not require a wholesale reform of the federal structure. “We must,” he insisted, “resist this opinion … But we must also understand that it is widespread in English Canada. It is rare for established majorities to be the first to take stock of the gravity of situations that are the result of their hegemonies.”69 Parallel to such clear resistance, however, he discerned what was perhaps a more alarming tendency at work among English-Canadian opinion makers. The Toronto Star claimed to take seriously the notion that French Canadians should be “equal partners” in Confederation, but it did so by seeking to eliminate all barriers preventing them from being placed on an equal footing as individual citizens. This type of thinking troubled Ryan because it “dissociated, among French Canadians, the individual element from the collective element,” the very error made by hyper-modern liberal thinkers such as Pierre Trudeau. To adopt this optic could lead only to “changes within the old order, not the new equilibrium”70 envisioned by the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, whose commitment to a new federal pact was based, in the final analysis, on founding duality on the collective character of the French and English social groups. Ryan’s dealings with English-Canadian politicians and intellectuals after the bombshell of Laurendeau’s report convinced him that French Canadians faced, in their interlocutors, “a feeling of powerlessness, an inability to push dialogue any further” when it came to confronting the problem of recasting Confederation along dualistic lines. Citing the eminent historian W.L. Morton, who bluntly stated that “French Canada has had its revolution: English Canada must now have its own,” Ryan, speaking on behalf of French Canadians, argued that minimum guarantees for cultural protection would no longer suffice, as these flowed from “a paternalist conception of duality.” The key fulcrum of English Canada’s revolution would be to “wholly accept the concept of the presence of two nationalities within a single federal union,” which would imply “a radical change” in English-Canadian interpretations of reality. Above all, he urged anglophone politicians to cease the endless litany of asking what Quebec wanted or what was needed to satisfy its aspirations, and to put forward concrete proposals for a “renewed dualism,” involving a massive restructuring of federal government institutions, foreign policy, political parties, the economy, and social life. English Canadians had to “remember that they are henceforth dealing with a people that is no longer



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interested in being ‘protected’ by another, but that is now searching for the best means to assist it in living its original life.”71 Ryan was, however, too knowledgeable and astute an observer of the English-Canadian scene not to be sensitive to major transformations occurring in the mid-1960s in that society’s own self-identity and expression of nationalism. In the summer of 1964, he wrote approvingly of “an English-Canadian neo-nationalism” that had acquired considerable influence among key members of the “federal Establishment.”72 Although its principal influence lay in Canadian-American economic relations, its proponents had displayed interest in a culturalist turn, exemplified by an awareness of “the enrichment that it could receive from a deliberate ­rapprochement with that other nationalism that it had been inclined to underestimate: that of the French Canadians.” Such an association would, he believed, foster the growth of a political ideal that constituted a viable alternative to that of the United States and would enable both English and French Canadians to better resist the “master-subject relation” that was omnipresent in “our friendship” with the Americans.73 He evaluated this nationalist current as “intelligent, positive, and energetic,” one that “draws inspiration from sources that go deep into Canadian history. It rests on the very strong conviction that Canada, because of its history and its social characteristics, is called to an original vocation.”74 The principal architect of this “neo-nationalism” was none other than Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who had initiated the LaurendeauDunton Commission as one key pillar of a far-reaching reconstruction of Canadian identity. The second pillar was a wholesale reinvention of Canadian symbols, the displacement and removal of references to the British heritage, a process that some historians have hailed as the logical conclusion of a nationalist teleology in which English Canada after 1945 abandoned its “ethnic” British-centred national identity in favour of an inclusive “civic” liberal nationalism premised on multicultural citizenship.75 As a “republican Canadian,” Ryan gave his unconditional blessing to new symbols like the new red-and-white Maple Leaf flag, which, after a stormy debate, replaced the Red Ensign in February 1965. While observing that “the choice of a new flag is self-evident and should have been made long ago,” he acknowledged it as an important signpost of English Canada’s transformation and intentions: “it cut once and for all the umbilical cord that linked our country to one dominant culture.” This reinvention of national symbols indicated that “a new English Canada seems to have taken cognizance simultaneously of the international vocation of Canada and the grave internal problems that must be resolved on

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the cultural level,” although he warned that it was insufficient to make French Canadians forget “their more fundamental grievances.”76 In a fundamental sense, Ryan may have misread this rapid and far-reaching transformation in English Canada’s national identity and may have ­overestimated the commitment of the federal “establishment” to the full  socio-political implications of André Laurendeau’s advocacy of a bicultural Canada. Indeed, the very appointment of the B& B Commission might be read as part of a subtle, long-term strategy undertaken by an Anglo-Canadian political elite whose central aim was to parry the “crisis” in Confederation unleashed by Quebec’s rival nationalist assertion by seeking in multicultural inclusiveness and measures of accommodating “others” – what one scholar has interpreted as the quintessential hallmarks of a British “liberal imperialism” – an alternative to pursuing the more difficult path of constitutional recognition of equality between the French and English collectivities. It should thus come as no surprise that Ryan, in common with all francophone Quebec political elites and intellectuals, have, since the 1960s, been less than supportive of the project of a Canadian nation founded on multiculturalism. What Ryan did not notice in his support for the new flag was that it bore remarkable continuities with the old Britannic symbols – red and white, after all, were the heraldic colours of England – and most emphatically did not incorporate any symbols of French-Canadian identity.77 Writing in September 1964, Ryan brought to the attention of readers of Le Devoir an article by the American journalist William E. Griffiths published recently in Foreign Affairs. Griffiths had discerned, in both French and English Canada, the presence of a “moderate opinion” disposed to far-reaching negotiations, an observation that coincided with Ryan’s own. In elucidating the nature and sources of this moderate strand of opinion, Ryan posed three fundamental and troubling questions, which brought to the fore the nature of moderation as an ethical and moral, rather than as an explicitly political, stance. First, Ryan wondered, “In what measure do ‘moderate’ elements represent the real opinion of their respective milieus?” Speaking for French Canada, he had no difficulty in stating that moderates constituted the large majority of opinion, but the same could not be said for English Canada, where they were limited to a few intellectuals, university figures, and a handful of politicians.78 The second question revolved around the meeting point between the demands of one side and the concessions of the other. On this score, Ryan had to concede that the conversation between English and French Canada had remained at a rudimentary state, one that would soon have



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to be remedied by a more explicit intervention of the moderates to elaborate a “realistic program of entente.” Third, and most significantly, what both sides wanted to know was how much time was left. Here, Ryan was deliberately imprecise, and his answer was far more the statement of a self-identity than an actual timetable: “the moderate remains, in essence, serene and calm; otherwise, he ceases to be a moderate. But he must be conscious of the urgency that spurs him on. The situation remains ripe for a ‘negotiation,’ but ‘alarming symptoms’ … are also at work. He must act quickly, otherwise the house may catch on fire.”79 As a political stance in the Canada of the mid-1960s, Ryan’s commitment to both the content of moderate politics and the role of the moderate was foundational to his federalism. In a lecture to students at the University of Toronto in the fall of 1964, he declared: “I classify myself among the moderates but don’t make a profession of being a moderate, it’s extremely dangerous.”80 He outlined these perils in a response to the Progressive Conservative MP Heath Macquarrie, who was reported as saying that he was more worried by moderates than by extremists. Taking great pains to dissociate moderation from the mere expression of goodwill and willingness to compromise, Ryan defined the “moderate” as “someone who has real roots in his own milieu”; otherwise, such a person risked being perceived as a vague moralist, or worse, an agent “of the dominating power.” He recounted his own experiences with EnglishCanadian audiences, who had an “insatiable thirst for security” in reference to the crisis of Confederation. Many of his interlocutors had seized on any and all statements of good will and a willingness to seek an honest compromise, and although nothing had been seriously studied, “the majority begins to breathe more easily as though the crisis was about to be resolved.”81 The ever-present temptation lay in “los[ing] the sense of one’s roots, and to be carried away by the chorus of praise,” but to give in was to pay a terrible price, as the moderate’s “influence in his own milieu decreases in direct proportion to the rise of his (artificial) popularity in others.”82 For this reason, Ryan always refused to give easy assurances to English-Canadian audiences regarding the attitude of Quebec to Confederation, and he angrily rebuffed the suggestion of a Halifax newspaper that quoted him as saying that Quebec had a moral obligation to remain in Confederation, with the statement that “I have too much respect for morality to use it in this way for polemical purposes.”83 Ryan vaunted the fact that he was a new type of “moderate,” defining himself as “a man who wants to attack problems in a spirit of moderation, but refuses to believe that everything is resolved simply by invoking

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the sacred word.” In the current situation, moderates might, in the eyes of the other group, appear to be dogmatists, and there always existed the counter-temptation to “let oneself be carried away by a certain atmosphere in the milieu … to engage in a more or less refined form of demagogy.”84 In his political lexicon, moderation was not a slogan or a solution; it was “an attitude of the spirit,” a “sign that helps men of good will recognize themselves or rather that leads them to wish to know one another better.” He warmly welcomed “authentic Anglo-Canadians” (a code-word synonymous with “moderate”) such as Ramsay Cook to contribute their insights in regular columns in Le Devoir.85 Throughout his travels in English Canada, Ryan was frequently disappointed by “widespread coldness and indifference towards the problems posed by the coexistence of two cultures.” He was reassured by the support of men such as Robert Stanfield, the premier of Nova Scotia, who responded to the “sign” of his moderation, stating that, while many English Canadians “are frightened by the generality of some concepts … [they] would not be  alarmed by your specific interpretations of these generalities.”86 Moderation was an ethical, pre-political standpoint. Of itself, it was “powerless to produce vigorous and lasting solutions,” but it constituted an essential “grammar of dialogue” that enabled English- and FrenchCanadian leaders to work together more effectively. In such a context, the moderate had to display a heightened sensitivity, balancing a full awareness of the “gravity of the problems that must be solved” with “sufficient trust in the power of reason to believe that the problems can be resolved other than by brutality or separation.” The moderate’s role, above all, was to “find men of a similar type in the other milieu … who accept him, not as a security against the revolt of his own people, but as an equal partner with whom they are disposed to examine dispassionately and in an unprejudiced manner the problems that divide the two communities.”87 Ryan’s use of words such as “dialogue,” “sign,” and “dispassion” powerfully suggests that his commitment to the moderate ethos grew out of two currents fundamental to his self-identity. The first was his sense of belonging in the community of postwar North American public intellectuals, that group of tough-minded realists who ostensibly understood the temptations and limits of power and were suspicious of the rhetorical stances and verbalism of ideology. The second was the disposition to dialogue, which he believed was the essence of the Christian attitude as a temporal force. Writing in 1965, Ryan ostensibly eschewed any aim to enlist Canada’s Christian churches “in the service of my



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t­emporal opinions,” which he defined as those of “a Canadian who has opted for a renewed federalism.”88 Although viewing churches as “spiritual meeting places for citizens who profess diverse and sometimes opposed views in temporal and political matters,” he indicated that he was uncomfortable with overly rigid distinctions between spiritual and temporal matters. The problem lay, he maintained, in “being able to discern between one’s purely political assumptions and genuine moral values.”89 And it is fair to say that Ryan never suffered from any serious doubts about his capacity to do so. The “moderate,” he told Kenneth Bagnell, the host of a 1965 series of C B C broadcasts entitled Ferment, exemplified “a note of serenity and detachment,” a sense of true commitment that was “typical …of a Christian.” As a Christian layman, Ryan was explicit that it was his duty to promote “the ideal of peace” announced by Pope John XXIII, one that, applied to the Canadian situation, rested on the premise that “we have not finished exploring the possibilities of understanding and co-operation, and that it would be vicious on the part of a Christian leader to shut the door before we’ve pushed the exploration as far as we can.”90 There was no doubt in his mind that federalism was an earthly approximation to the Christian spirit: “I personally believe that the federal option … is one of the best that a religious man can make, because it is the one, in my estimation, that best favours the harmonious and peaceful development of religious freedom in a diverse society like ours.”91 It is of some significance that Ryan stressed the link between federalism and religious freedom, and not, first and foremost, its purpose as a guardian of temporal or civic liberties. Here, he was undoubtedly mindful of federalism’s key characteristic, a decentralized state that allowed for the existence and activity in the public sphere of a number of intermediate bodies or powers like churches and religious groups. This, he feared, might be diminished or compromised under a more unitary regime such as proposed by partisans of separation or associated states. But there was something more here. Federalism constituted the vital transmitter, the mode of communication, between the pre-political sphere of shared French-Canadian values and the political sphere of ideologies, specific programs, and party divisions, and was therefore considered by Ryan as a stable terrain by which to measure and judge the social, cultural, and political currents agitating both English and French Canada. Moderation or, as Ryan frequently preferred, “dialogue” was something other than merely engaging in political calculus or the horse trading of specific powers. While it certainly rejected separation, it also

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rejected “brutality,” a synonym for the simplistic reliance on Quebec’s state power to counter the encroachments of English Canada. Such reliance was nothing more than the sterile dialectic of “ever-greater autonomy” and “the insistence on a central government able to resist autonomist pressures.”92 It was the complete antithesis of dialogue, whose “most profound contribution was to insert into human conscience the respect of certain values that prevent it from seeking to resolve all problems through simple equations of force or of power.”93 He was especially critical of what he saw as the foundation of Quebec’s neo-nationalism, the historical writing of men such as Michel Brunet, dismissing it as “a brutal relationship of forces” that could only lead to a “withered constitutionalism.”94 The premise of Quebec’s neo-nationalists, Ryan maintained, held at its core “the emergence of a brand-new type of man, ‘the Quebec man,’ a man who would be wholly committed to reincarnating French culture in North America and would cease to have the hermaphroditic existence which has been imposed on the French Canadians since 1760.”95 Because, in Ryan’s lexicon, the term “hermaphrodite” had a highly pejorative meaning, both from a religious and a cultural standpoint, he had to somehow demonstrate that the “moderate” position, with its allegiance to a federalism founded on dialogue, could overcome any tendencies towards hermaphroditism. He reassured his readers that the “Canadian” viewpoint was “more modest and perhaps more genuinely liberal” than its competitor, and, although it would be a more gradual process, he maintained that “a new type of man will progressively emerge from the Canadian experiment,” a being who – in contrast to the “Quebec man” – would be shaped by the interplay of geography, economics, and “the cultural blending that is inevitably taking place in a bi-cultural country.”96 Ryan’s friend Alan Thomas, director of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, who had invited him to undertake a western Canadian tour in the winter of 1964, perhaps came closest to what was actually required of both French and English Canadians under the rubric of “dialogue”: “Did you want to do something, perhaps to be something with us, badly enough to be willing to bargain and sometimes lose, as well as win, but to be willing to be interested in these alterations that might arise from the bargaining, but were not imagined before.” Ryan himself hinted at “a deeper understanding, a more radical mutual acceptance among the two founding peoples of Canada” in order to resist “the blind forces of national pride.”97 Viewed from this standpoint, there was a transformative quality to dialogue, and the act of engaging in it entailed a kind



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of conversion experience that went far beyond a narrow political creed that Canada was supreme and all other values must be sacrificed to it. It was a progressive process with no fixed time limit and whose work was frequently “obscure,” but one whose result would be the complete spiritual and political transformation of both English and French Canadians, enabling Canadian federalism, like the Catholic Church, to commit to “a loyal effort of renewal to counter the law of aging and death that takes hold of an institution incarnated in the human.”98 “In such a climate we have a duty,” Ryan told his readers, “to state the problem with firmness and frankness, but also to listen with respect to the reaction of the other. It is only after having pursued this straightforward dialogue, for yet a longer time, that we will be able to draw stable conclusions. Any premature conclusion, especially if it comes from those who have never left their lair, is the fruit of blindness and passion.”99 An honest engagement under the sign of dialogue meant that the journey to resolve the Canadian crisis would take unanticipated directions and result in entirely unprecedented institutional and social forms. But Ryan did not mince words when he bluntly stated, “What will be asked of English Canada will be enormous.”100

“Federalism … is inscribed in the very soil of Canada, of which Quebec forms an indissoluble part”101 Claude Ryan had spent his first few months as director of Le Devoir combing through the old editorials of his predecessors Henri Bourassa, Georges Pelletier, and Gérard Filion in an attempt to define a convincing modern relationship that would balance the paper’s allegiance to the advancement of the French-Canadian people with a commitment to the federal system, with the goal of convincingly weaning Quebec’s intellectuals and a number of prominent politicians away from a flirtation with separatism. But he was acutely aware that his intellectual endeavour depended on the success of federalist advocates on the political front. Here, there was, at first glance, cause for satisfaction, that Premier Lesage had achieved a great deal by testing the boundaries of Lester Pearson’s “cooperative federalism” during the tortuous negotiations over the pension plan in the spring of 1964. Ryan hailed Pearson’s assertion of Quebec’s right to opt out of the federal plan in exchange for compensation as an example of “a well-understood cooperative federalism.” He looked forward expectantly to other gains, especially in the realm of

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new Quebec initiatives in international affairs, where he hoped that Quebec’s desire for “new and stable links with other French-speaking governments” could be reconciled with the Canadian government’s desire to avoid the fragmentation of sovereignty. Here was another chance for Pearson to prove that “there was something truly original and unprecedented in his doctrine of cooperative federalism.”102 In September, however, came intimations of trouble, this time in the person of Ryan’s friend René Lévesque, the minister of natural resources, who gave a speech that went to the core of the central problem with cooperative federalism, which, after all, was the brainchild of federal FrenchCanadian politicians such as Maurice Lamontagne, Guy Favreau, and Jean-Luc Pépin. Lévesque characterized their position – and by implication that of anyone who advocated a reformed federalism – as “preposterous” in its refusal to countenance any solution of the problem of “deux nations” and in desiring “permanent negotiation” that would replace formal constitutional guarantees of Quebec’s autonomy and powers. Ryan jumped to the defence of the beleaguered federalists, arguing that, in effect, they were more realistic than Lévesque in their determination to proceed slowly, that opinion was perhaps not ripe for a radical constitutional revision. “At any rate,” he chided Lévesque, “no matter how radical the revision, it will never totally eliminate, in a federation, the necessity of negotiation and permanent consultations between the different orders of government.”103 In launching this bombshell, Lévesque spoke for a rising tide of nationalist opinion that was beginning to have serious doubts about whether the current Canadian federal structure could ever accommodate Quebec’s growing dynamism and aspirations, and this a mere four months after the victory over the pension plan. As always, there was an element of political calculation in his pronouncements: his send-up of cooperative federalism was launched a month before the meeting of the provincial Liberal Party and was consciously designed to rally advocates of the “associate states” thesis impatient with Lesage’s more classic federalist stance. Though he had spent much of the spring and summer in refuting separatism and the associate states idea, Ryan had not yet clearly stated Le Devoir’s position on the nature of federalism and constitutional reform. However, he was aware that Lévesque had rendered imperative a message to the paper’s readership, which included many nationalists anxious to know if and how continued membership in the federal system was compatible with Quebec’s new political aspirations. He was acutely aware that, although he was inundated with speaking engagements in all



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parts of Canada, he had no “foundational text” that summarized his thinking on “Quebec’s major expectations”104 from the new federalism. In company with André Laurendeau, Ryan was now French Canada’s chief “moderate” intellectual, and he realized that in order to take a definite stand that would commit Le Devoir’s editorial position, he had to secure evidence of English Canada’s willingness to change, to engage in dialogue. His opportunity, two weeks before the critical meeting of the provincial Liberal Party, came from a most unexpected source: the federal Progressive Conservative Party, regarded by many French Canadians as a bastion of the old, Anglo-Canadian, unitary nationalism. The Progressive Conservatives were in the throes of a profound crisis of identity that was only partly reflected in a bitter subterranean struggle over the leadership of John Diefenbaker. In 1964, reformers appeared to be in the saddle, with Dalton Camp, recently installed as the new party president, insistent on pursuing a path of intellectual renewal. To that end, Camp’s first initiative was to call a National Conference on Canadian Goals to be held in Fredericton in early September 1964, and one of his major priorities was to introduce the party to informed opinion about French Canada. So intent was he on putting French Canada at the top of the party’s agenda that he personally went to Montreal to urge Claude Ryan to attend, also inviting Marcel Faribault and Marc Lalonde. His attempt to recruit Pierre Elliott Trudeau fell flat, as the two men quickly failed to establish a rapport, Camp dismissing him as too superficial.105 Ryan thus found himself sharing the podium with the eminent historian W.L. Morton, whose concern with preserving a strong central government, refusal to regard Quebec as anything more than a province like all the others, and urgent warnings about Quebec separatism and English Canada’s potential use of force repelled him.106 Strangely, however, he was drawn to Morton’s distinction between “French Canada” as a cultural entity and “Quebec” as a political entity, as well as to his characterization of the essence of the conservative principle in Canada as recognizing “the fact of diversity and dispersion,” which could be reconciled with a strong central authority. This view was encapsulated in the phrase “culturally, Canada is two nations.” It implied a vision of equality between French and English Canadians as cultural communities while belonging to one single political community.107 Reporting on the conference, Ryan discerned a great deal of “bad conscience and nostalgia” among the federal Tories, and an almost complete absence of Quebec in the party.108

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Yet, a closer reading of Ryan’s thinking about Canadian Conservatives in 1964–65 would suggest the growing affinity he felt for a party in the throes of intellectual renewal. A good deal of this feeling was personal predilection – by 1964, faced with the legacy of several years of rapid social change in Quebec, Ryan was leaning heavily towards stability, favouring individuals and organizations that hewed to an “end of ideology” political sensibility. In a 1965 address, Ryan juxtaposed the “conservative spirit” with the liberal tendency towards ideologism, particularly in the former’s innate tendency to balance new ideas with maximum respect for what existed before, thus giving due weight to concrete factors rather than insisting on realizing a political program at any price. This spirit represented a “concern with the harmonious development of each person, the promotion of the spirit of enterprise, the concern for efficiency and competence, an instinctive opposition to waste and bureaucracy, the belief that the received heritage will bear fruit, the respect for individual rights, a well-understood attachment to tradition, the acceptance of a diversity that derives from freedom, a desire for civilized dialogue and the sense of solidarity.”109 These qualities could easily be read as Ryan’s own personal values, but his position was also pragmatic: he saw that the best hope for a profound recasting of the Canadian constitution lay with the Progressive Conservatives, as the federal Liberals were already wedded to a gradualist constitutionalist empiricism. In relation to the Quebec electorate, Ryan sensed that the federal P C party held a very strong sentiment in favour of far-reaching constitutional reform, coupled with “a very great concern for rights.” Such opinion, which reflected “a profound discontent with the empiricism of the regime that has presided over the … political development of our country,” represented an enormous opportunity. If the Tories could generate “a radical and clear option,” they would oblige their anglophone adherents to redefine their vision of Canada once and for all and would “strike a very sensitive chord in Quebec.”110 Ryan’s own text partially refuted Morton’s, while warning the assembled delegates that “separation has become to a large extent a psychological reality.” Any solution, he declared, could not be based on Morton’s differentiation between French Canada and Quebec, which rested on a divorce between the cultural and the political. “Politically speaking,” Ryan argued, “an arrangement with French Canada must pass through Quebec … If the rest of Canada cannot come to terms with Quebec, it is pure nonsense to think of coming to terms with French Canada because Quebec is the bulwark of French Canada.”111 Significantly, Ryan put forward the solution of “genuine biculturalism,” the “real dynamic



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equality” between French and English. But in a subtle modification of his rebuttal of René Lévesque a few weeks previous, he was far more overt that “this equality will have to be guaranteed by law more precisely than it was in the last century,” telling the Tories to forsake any notions of the constitutional status quo and prepare for long and difficult negotiations. But he held forth some reassurance, that “there are many responsible, sober French Canadians in Quebec who accept this necessity and who are not ready to conclude, because we cannot agree on a fundamental point today, that everything must be forgotten about the Canadian ideals.” Members of this group, to which he belonged, “want to have more for Quebec than she has had in the last twenty years but they are not ready to strangle Canada for that.” Tantalizingly, Ryan promised “a series of articles that will appear in our newspaper in the next few days … on this question of ‘Canada First’ or ‘Quebec First.’”112 Just days before the provincial Liberal Party congress, Ryan delivered his foundational text, framed over two days as a statement of Le Devoir’s editorial policy from which none of his colleagues could openly dissent. “Unless one is trying to play the wise guy,” he unflinchingly told his readers, “a paper cannot subscribe to two hypotheses. It must choose between them and defend its choice with clarity and courage.”113 It was a document aimed directly at René Lévesque and supporters of the associated states thesis both inside the government and in the intellectual community, but it also asserted that its perspective was emphatically anchored in Quebec, as it rigorously eschewed the universalistic legalism of the Trudeauite Comité pour une politique fonctionelle, characterized dismissively by Ryan as that of “Canadians at large.”114 Ryan opened with a recapitulation of the two paths open to a French Canadians faced with “the Canadian problem”: one centred exclusively on Quebec, and the other emphasizing a broader engagement with Canada. The first identified French Canada with Quebec and examined all problems in the sole light of Quebec’s supreme interests, a process from which Quebec might ultimately emerge as complete “master of its destiny.” From this perspective, any engagement with the Canadian dimension was “makeshift.” Although there were some in this group who still accepted “the Canadian reality,” Ryan foresaw that they would be inexorably led by others, who viewed Canada as harmful to Quebec, down the path to putting an end to “an experiment … that has never been loyally put to the test.”115 What particularly concerned him about this “Quebec first” tendency was that it ultimately drew its inspiration from an unreflective nationalism, failing to take into account the substantial transformation in English-Canadian opinion that had occurred in the past two decades.

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Fresh from his experience at Fredericton, Ryan was convinced that both federal parties were prepared to engage in serious dialogue with the aim of according some explicit recognition to Quebec’s distinctiveness, through either the “empiricism” of cooperative federalism or more radical constitutional reform. This willingness, he underscored for his readers, validated the second path, what he termed “the Canadian hypothesis,” a disposition to envisage the French-Canadian problem on the scale of the entire country. Within this intellectual framework, Ryan insisted, “there is a place for the straightforward admission of difficulties that French Canadians have experienced in Confederation. There is equally a place for an explicit recognition of the special place that Quebec – as the principal political expression of the French fact in Canada – must occupy in the Canadian political structure.”116 Although devoted to securing a special place for Quebec within Confederation, this perspective remained staunchly Canadian in its orientation. Answering the “global and defeatist” argument of the neo-nationalists that the Canadian polity tended inevitably towards centralization and a unitary state, Ryan declared that it was the federal regime that best expressed the country’s geographical, historical, economic, and political realities. This recognition, however, in no way implied an acceptance of the Canadian system “at any price” or without substantial reforms. Supporters of the “Canadian hypothesis” had to work to “reform our federalism” so as to make it efficient and acceptable to both French and English Canadians. The precondition of reform was that it had to be envisaged, not from the perspective of abolishing the federal structure in favour of a “confederal” or associate states arrangement, but from within, a requirement that entailed “conversations and loyal accords between the two groups.”117 Ryan defended his choice in the light of three criteria. First, he evoked the long tradition of Le Devoir, and especially the attitudes of Henri Bourassa and Gérard Filion, whose horizons had never been purely limited to Quebec, and whose criticisms of Ottawa’s centralizing imperatives had never lapsed into the pure negativism of writing off the Canadian experiment itself. Second, there was the question of francophone minorities, groups outside of Quebec that could not simply be abandoned to their fate. Third, he insisted that Quebec’s economic links with Canada were too important to subject to the uncertainty of political separation, which would expose French Canadians to the domination of the United States and a rapid loss of autonomy. But the “Canadian hypothesis,” he never tired of reiterating, was just that: it was not “a dogma” that underwrote political “immobilism.”118 Ryan attached conditions to continued



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membership in Canada, although his editorials offered no precise constitutional program or timetable. Two conditions were essential. First, Quebec had to “enjoy the full measure of autonomy that it requires for the development of its own life and institutions,” and there must be the possibility of “developing a French life in the rest of the country.” Second, and more significantly, the federal pact must never become a constitutional straitjacket inhibiting Quebec’s desire to expand its authority in “the order of jurisdiction to which it belongs and where it must remain,” a quest in which “Quebec has the right to our primary allegiance.” In certain cases, such as education, social security, natural resource development, and planning the economy, he sought “unrestricted” competence, and obliquely hinted at new spheres, such as international relations, where Quebec might “become sovereign.”119 Strikingly, Ryan’s prescriptions combined the very principles guiding André Laurendeau’s quest for a bicultural federalism with the Lesage government’s impulse to recuperate Quebec’s full authority in a number of zones of jurisdiction under dispute with Ottawa. When Ryan claimed that his federalist option was a “hypothesis” rather than a “dogma,” he was not being completely open with the readership of Le Devoir. Federalism was a dogma, but the term must be understood not in relation to its usual overtones of inflexibility, but according to the developmental definition proffered during the nineteenth century by his spiritual mentor Cardinal Newman. Newman propounded that dogmas or doctrines were organic products, a revealed germ of truth that then developed through contact with human history and civilization, often displaying grotesque imperfections that, while needing periodic purging and chipping away, in no way compromised the validity of the original principle. Indeed, purification was always necessary in the interests of healthy adaptation to changing human cultural realities and to disclose the progressive manifestations of new forms and interpretations that sought to discover the full, and frequently unanticipated meanings, of the original truth. Ryan was quite aware that federalism, like Catholicism, was not “pure,” and its incarnation in Canadian history had oscillated between “a wished-for unitarism and clumsy compromises.”120 The source of these excrescences that had compromised the unfolding of the Canadian federal doctrine in its pristine form was “a bizarre mixture of federalism and more-or-less conscious yearning for a unitary state,”121 one of those defective “hermaphroditic” stances that could be resolved, in Ryan’s view, only by “clearly recognizing that the ‘residual powers’ … belonged to the provinces. In admitting this

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principle, we recognize that the federal organism emanates from the provinces, and not inversely.” Invoking the bond between the pure federal principle and a long tradition of Catholic social thought, Ryan propounded the notion that this purified federalism constituted, “in its fullness, the principle of subsidiarity, which alone would enable the elaboration of a juridical order that is clear, objective, and stable.”122 However, he was adamant that “purification” did not mean the abolition of the federal power and its replacement by a weaker authority. The task, in affirming the priority of the provinces in numerous areas of jurisdictions, was not to exclude the central authority, but to build a new consultative regime anchored on regional, provincial, and interprovincial organizations that could better accomplish the task of economic coordination that the federal government had attempted in the years since the Great Depression. The foundation of the central authority was to be enhanced in a firm structure of consent – but he was quite clear that this restructuring had to be re-envisaged in “moral terms” rather than through the appropriation of powers best left to the provinces.123 Like his opponent Jacques-Yvan Morin, the chief advocate of the associate states solution, Ryan had read the celebrated text authored by the English constitutional scholar K.C. Wheare, simply entitled Federal Government. By comparison with the United States and Australia, the countries that most closely adhered to the classic type of federation, Wheare characterized the Canadian constitution as only “quasi-federal” because, although the federal principle was present in the original British North America Act (B NA Act), he was unsure whether it was a “federal constitution with considerable unitary modifications, or a unitary constitution with considerable federal modifications.” Wheare did note that, while the BNA Act might be defective from the standpoint of federalism, the federal idea was more evident in governmental practice, and therefore he felt quite assured in describing the working of the Canadian government as federal.124 Morin and Ryan drew entirely different conclusions from Wheare’s critique of Canadian federalism: the former advocating the entire supersession of the federal authority and its replacement by a set of confederal institutions in which power clearly belonged to the two “national” states of English Canada and Quebec, which were associated in this arrangement; and the latter holding fast to “the unity of Canadian political structures,” maintaining that “we must preserve in Ottawa a single government that … reflects the two cultures.” He did not see how the “bicephalous regime” proposed by Morin and advocates of the “two nations” theory could function in practice.125 Privately, he viewed



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Morin’s constitutional proposals as “quite irrational,” arguing that they would return French Canadians “to the period of 1845.”126 Ryan’s reference to 1845 raised the bogeyman of political deadlock, the consequence of the “double majority” idea proposed by some political figures of the Union period as a way of protecting French-Canadian rights. It also referred explicitly to an era in which the status of these rights had been quite uncertain. Ultimately, the associate states thesis had to be rejected because, in his estimation, it entailed “a radical rejection of federalism,” whose true principle rested on the existence of a central government independent, in its own sphere of jurisdiction, from the will of regional governments. Worse, advocates of the associate states thesis sought, through this doctrine, to elaborate “an artificial current of unanimity” that was nothing more than “a mitigated version of separatism,”127 and they risked turning the political classes of Quebec away from the true source of consensus, a purified federalism. “Far from being a hoary and obsolete myth,” proclaimed Ryan in 1964, “the federal ideal has become one of the major pivots of the present orientation of peoples.”128 The tone of his statement reveals the true purpose of Ryan’s editorial intervention in September 1964, the articulation and consolidation of a moral consensus behind the federal idea. Overriding all discussion of explicit conditions lay a moral vision in which the purification of federalism underwrote the achievement of a distinctive status for Quebec in Confederation, which in turn was but a prefiguration of a higher type of humanity and civilization. Canada, Ryan stated, “offers us the chance to build a new type of political society … a society whose political structures are auspicious for the development of different cultures, without being rigidly or exclusively conditioned by a single one.” He was convinced that “this type of society can be the best for the cultivation of fundamental liberties,” in contrast to “societies that are too closely aligned to the realities of one particular culture.”129 Federalism, in his lexicon, was but the application of Christian principles to the political order, legitimating it through an ultimate foundation in reason. A lasting political society, Ryan concluded his 19 September editorial, “is not built on impulses or on vague desires, but upon rational ideas, on a certain conception of man and of life in society, on an objective evaluation of reality.” He urged his readers not to be dissuaded from the task by the complexity of forging an entente rendered necessary by the “cohabitation of many cultures.” Rather, they should accept the invitation to “rethink our federalism,” to “bring substantial modifications to the constitution of our country and to the working of our political

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institutions, to dedicate themselves to a new common task of “preventing the errors of the past, correcting former injustices, foreseeing new modes of collaboration that will achieve, in an integral manner, the equality of cultures.”130 But would Ryan’s language of spiritual rededication be sufficient, during the difficult passage of his society through the travails of the Quiet Revolution, to maintain a rational public consensus – in the face of both the growing impatience of nationalist sentiment and troubling divisions among federalists themselves – that would sustain the social and cultural project whose pillars were a strong Quebec in a strong Canada?

10 “There Have Always Been Some Bridge-men” Navigating the Shoals of Federalism and Nationalism, 1964–1967 The blind stubbornness of majorities often ends … with the destruction of grandiose projects that might have been worthy in themselves but that, alas, lacked that extra touch of soul, that profound acceptance of diversity, that would have provided their meaning. Claude Ryan, “Préface,” in Solange Chaput-Rolland, Mon pays (1966) Perfectly logical conceptions have the advantage of clarity, but they frequently stifle diversity. Less logical conceptions are sometimes baffling: however, they can, in turn, be closer to the infinite meanderings of reality. Claude Ryan, “La difficile recherche de l’égalité” (1966)

Claude Ryan’s “foundational” editorials of 18 and 19 September 1964 explicitly committed Le Devoir to the “Canadian hypothesis,” the quest for a renewed federalism. They affirmed, in the first instance, that Ryan was firmly in command of the paper’s editorial line and intended to pursue the intellectual trajectory of his predecessors Henri Bourassa and Gérard Filion to seek ways of reconciling the national self-affirmation and political and cultural dynamism of French Canada with the maintenance of the Canadian federal polity. Opinion among Le Devoir’s readers was sharply divided, with some welcoming the fact that, with Ryan’s clear declaration, “the voice of reason has finally gained the upper hand over emotion,” while others emphatically deplored his “conservatism” and dismissed the “Canadian hypothesis” as but “a still-born cooperative federalism.” According to one reader, French Canadians “must eliminate all possibilities before withdrawing from Confederation. We must engage in dialogue and obtain what we believe is reasonable so that we can profit

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entirely from Confederation.”1 What particularly irked a number of more nationalist readers was Ryan’s solicitude for the minorities of the francophone diaspora, which one correspondent likened to the “Pieds noirs” (the white French settlers in Algeria). There was no logic, he informed Ryan, in urging Quebec to sacrifice itself “to assure the survival of groups who preferred to flee it” and whose anglicization was inevitable.2 Nonetheless, plaudits poured in from both sides of the EnglishCanadian political spectrum. The unilingual anglophone Alvin Hamilton, a leading Progressive Conservative from western Canada, who read translations of Ryan’s editorials in the Montreal Star and the Globe and Mail, recognized them as “classics in the history of Canadian evolution of a Federal system suitable to Canada’s needs.” Ramsay Cook, a historian identified with a more left-leaning academic opinion close to the federal New Democratic Party, volunteered to translate Ryan’s declaration for Canadian Forum, but cautioned him that “much of what you have to say depends upon the response of English Canada.”3 Cook’s assessment implicitly underscored the inherent difficulty of Ryan’s position. The pursuit of a renewed federalism was contingent on  dialogue and negotiation, and its concrete realization ultimately depended, on the one hand, on French Canada possessing a considerable store of patience and forbearance and, on the other, the willingness of English Canada to accept major modifications of the existing constitution. It is evident that some readers of Ryan’s federalist declaration viewed it as an apology for Pearsonian “cooperative federalism,” a kind of constitutional empiricism and practice of experimentation that had developed in the early 1960s as “an adult device to make the fixed constitution more flexible” and that had been invoked in the spring of 1964 to accommodate Quebec’s desire to pursue its own path in the “grey zone” of old-age pension reform.4 However, Ryan himself was quite explicit that, while he was in agreement with the central pillars of cooperative federalism – the respect for the boundaries of each jurisdiction and the recognition of interdependence between the two levels of government – he considered it “more of a technique for the handling of our present problems than a lasting solution,” a kind of middle term that would lead to more stable arrangements, by which he meant a complete revision of the constitution.5 This distinction was frequently missed by anglophone politicians and commentators, who frequently wanted to enlist Ryan as a French-Canadian voice supporting a “believe or die” type of federalism, an apologist for the constitutional status quo.



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Indeed, one of the central ironies of Ryan’s position on Canadian federalism and constitutional reform between 1964 and 1967 was the fact that, while many English-Canadian politicians and intellectuals regarded him as a staunch defender of Canadian unity, and many Quebec intellectuals castigated him for not pursuing the logic of nationalism, his stance had little in common with those most acceptable to mainstream anglophone opinion and differed considerably from the “pragmatism” practised by Jean Lesage and other exponents of “cooperative federalism.” While it conformed in its broad outlines to the “biculturalist” prescriptions mooted by the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, Ryan stood considerably closer to views broached by younger nationalists, both inside and outside the Lesage government, who advocated the “two nations” or “associate states” thesis. Though he studiously avoided the term “nation” – preferring “society” or “culture” to describe French and English Canada – his pursuit of a reformed federalism sought explicit constitutional guarantees for the equality of French Canadians throughout Canada and a recognition of Quebec’s distinct position as the main political vehicle of French Canada’s ambitions. The realization of this dual quest for equality maintained that the premise of any enduring constitutional reform and repatriation of the Canadian constitution was a prior reallocation of powers between Quebec and Ottawa. This, Ryan believed, would considerably enhance Quebec’s authority, competence, and fiscal capabilities in the areas of culture, social security, economic planning, and resource management, and would even allow Quebec to pursue international initiatives in fields of provincial powers. Ryan and Le Devoir were the chief intellectual exponents of a “particular status” for Quebec,6 a position that encapsulated, between 1964 and 1967, the mainstream of Quebec federalist thinking on constitutional reform. It can be argued that Ryan’s extensive writings on federalism and constitutional questions during this period did much to cement the allegiance of the Quebec Liberal Party to the pursuit of “special status” (or “distinct society” in more contemporary parlance), a position that increasingly demarcated it from its federal counterpart, which, after 1966, fell increasingly under the spell of Pierre Trudeau’s uncompromising and legalistic federalism calibrated on the formulaic equality of all provinces. Ryan’s efforts were directed at maintaining a conceptual bridge between what he regarded as modern Quebec’s central needs: the imperative of participation in a wider political community, under which a modern, pluralistic liberal ethos could flourish, and the equally urgent desire for

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national self-affirmation, which underwrote his society’s new-found cultural and social dynamism. Until the events of the summer of 1967 propelled René Lévesque out of the Liberal Party, the electoral weakness of sovereigntist and independence parties meant that Ryan’s central task in  the elaboration of a broad tent “special status” constitutionalism involved debates with federalists of various tendencies and allegiances, in the expectation that proponents of “two nations” or “associate statehood” could be persuaded to remain inside the federalist canopy.

“A living and adult federalism”7 In elaborating his defence of the “Canadian hypothesis,” Ryan intended to produce a “foundational” or reference text designed for a long-term strategy of consolidating a federalist opinion confronted with the alluring prospects of the “two nations” theory and its confederal logic of “associate states.” There was, however, also a short-term objective, that of shoring up the position of Premier Jean Lesage within the Quebec Liberal Party vis-à-vis more nationalistic elements within his cabinet. Ryan was pleased when, at the conclusion of the Congress of the Fédération libérale du Québec held just days after the publication of his key editorials, Lesage announced five “principles” that henceforth would serve to guide Quebec in its dealings with the rest of Canada. Lesage’s directives, explained Ryan, though “firm and insistent,” “were entirely acceptable to a Canadian conscious of the essential diversity of our country,” and, while accepting “the Canadian constitutional framework,” they were adamant on the need for the country’s constitution to evolve and improve in such a way as to allow Quebec to achieve its goals. For the first time, Lesage publicly affirmed that Quebec had “an original vocation” within Canada as the principal political expression of French Canada, a concept that, according to Ryan, had been recognized by Prime Minister Pearson and by the Progressive Conservative Party at its policy conference at Fredericton. This principle had to be inscribed in fact if Quebec’s new dynamism were to be accommodated within the evolving Canadian federal system. Ryan praised Lesage for calling attention to the fact that “Quebec is not satisfied with the article of the B NA A [British North America Act] that confers exclusively on the federal government the capacity to act in the name of Canada in the international sphere … We must soon make our constitution more flexible in this respect, in such a way as to recognize that Quebec, in the spheres of its competence, possesses a real international



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personality. This desire for affirmation is normal and is in no way contrary to the spirit of federalism.”8 Both Lesage and Ryan were in agreement on the need to reverse what they believed was the post-1939 constitutional dynamic – that of placing excessive power in the hands of the federal government. Reversing this trend required the constant assertion that the provinces, and especially Quebec, had to “enjoy a position that permits them, in all freedom, to accomplish their increased and prior obligations” to their citizens. Here, Ryan intoned, “we confront the Gordian knot of the Canadian question. Only a new delimitation of the attributions of each level of government, in the economic and social realms, will permit a rejuvenation and reaffirmation of the Canadian Confederation.”9 Despite this initial agreement, Lesage’s subsequent actions on the constitutional front in the fall of 1964 revealed substantial differences of both emphasis and substance between his position and Ryan’s. For all his insistence on Quebec’s new dynamism and the need to assert provincial sovereignty within a recast federal structure, Lesage was guided by a line of thinking that insisted on the interdependence of both levels of government, which required constant cooperation and the evolution of the structuring and organization of mechanisms of intergovernmental joint action. He was quite happy with the division of powers outlined in the 1867 constitution but was critical of what he perceived as federal subversion through the institution of joint programs. On the content of constitutional reform, the premier was a traditionalist, anchored in an older trajectory of French-Canadian nationalism that sought to free itself from imperial legal servitude. Thus, when presented in October 1964 with the Fulton-Favreau formula, the culmination of a process launched in 1960 to find agreement on a repatriation and amending formula, Lesage eagerly committed his government to the initiative. He believed, as did many Quebec nationalists of his generation, that repatriation was the fulfilment of a Canadian patriotism that sought to eliminate the last ­vestiges of colonial status. Repatriation stood prior to a new division of  powers, and Lesage hoped that the best way to engage positively in  subsequent constitutional discussions was to demonstrate Quebec’s unequivocal attachment to a truly Canadian constitution.10 Ryan certainly shared this older patriotism, praising Fulton-Favreau as “an important gain for the Canadian spirit” because it signified the end of “pilgrimages” to London to seek constitutional amendments. He cautiously endorsed the end of the old rule of unanimity among provinces that had hitherto governed constitutional reform, but worried that, in his haste to make a deal, Lesage had retreated from the position advocated

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by his chief negotiator, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, whose Constitutional Amendment in Canada (1954) had advocated the principle of such amendments requiring the support of two-thirds of the provinces representing 75 per cent of the population, a formula that preserved Quebec’s veto right. The proposed requirement of two-thirds of the provinces representing 50 per cent of the population to amend power over the key sphere of education, an area of explicit provincial competence under the BN A Act, implied that “Quebec’s consent might not be required for such amendments.” As to the formula for delegating powers between the two levels of government, he was “unsure” if this marked any real gain for Quebec, given the two-tier nature of the process: while any individual province could delegate powers to the federal government, any delegation in the other direction required the consent of three provinces. Such a requirement, Ryan believed, might severely limit Quebec’s ambitions and “does not augur well for that particular status to which Quebec opinion aspires. This status will nonetheless be achieved, because it corresponds to a legitimate insistence of Quebec. But we must not count too much upon Ottawa’s agreement to hasten its realization.”11 By the winter of 1965, Lesage faced a firestorm of criticism both outside the legislature and within his own party over his commitment to secure ratification of Fulton-Favreau by spring of that year. Significantly, the undermining of Lesage’s position was accomplished, in large part, by his own Parliamentary Committee on the Constitution, through which the theses of special status, associated states, and independence all began to acquire a certain credibility in the media and the public, enabling them to trump Lesage’s linking of traditionalist Canadian patriotism and cooperative federalism. Rapidly, these ideas began to contaminate even ministerial ranks, with Liberal pillars such as Pierre Laporte forcefully arguing for “a confederation of sovereign states” and René Lévesque pressing the cause of Quebec’s status as an associate state. Aware of the divisions within ministerial ranks, Ryan came out squarely against Fulton-Favreau, devoting two editorials on 4 and 5 March 1965 to a thoroughgoing critique. Describing the constitutional accord as “a grey cloud,” he contrasted it unfavourably with the “exalted horizons” opened to the aspirations of French Canada by the B& B Commission. He correctly positioned Fulton-Favreau within the logic of the 1950s, one that radically failed to understand that the source of the Canadian crisis lay in “the existence … of two societies that are highly distinct from one another and in the fact that one of these … – the francophone society of Quebec – is traversing a phase of ferment that has led it to profoundly



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question the old order.”12 “Our reservations,, he bluntly informed the readers of Le Devoir, “have been transformed into objections.” Specifically, he observed that, under the new accord, section 92 (the enumeration of provincial powers) and section 133 (dealing with the status of English and French as official languages) required unanimous consent for amendment, a result that was “disappointing” for Quebec: its quest for more provincial powers could be scotched by any province, even one representing less than 5 per cent of the country’s population. He feared that Quebec’s new dynamism in the fields of economics, social security, and culture would be “frozen for a long time” in the “straitjacket” proposed by Fulton-Favreau. A most serious problem lay in the provision for reciprocal delegation of powers between the federal government and the provinces. Here, Ryan feared the emergence of two constitutions, one, “the written one,” would be “rigid and immutable, the other, derived from practice, would allow the majority to act according to its will. Once again, Quebec risks being isolated.” He also noted that the placing of responsibility for the arbitration of constitutional disputes in the hands of the federally appointed Supreme Court of Canada was “extremely dangerous in itself,” especially because the overall rigidity of the amending formula would “make any amendment so politically difficult that the inevitable result would be a tendency to make the Constitution’s evolution subject to judicial decisions”13 rather than obeying the natural processes of evolution of political societies. In the short term, Ryan’s intervention contributed to crystallizing a wide swathe of francophone opinion against the accord. On 16 March 1965, Lesage made the ill-advised decision to accept the challenge launched by Jacques-Yvan Morin, a professor of constitutional law at the Université de Montréal, to a public debate on Fulton-Favreau. Without waiting for the return from overseas of Paul Gérin-Lajoie, the government’s best constitutionalist, Lesage sent Pierre Laporte and a reluctant René Lévesque into the fray before a hostile student audience, where they were roundly drubbed by Morin, who insisted that special status and the equal rights for French Canadians outside Quebec similar to those enjoyed by anglophones in Quebec had to be negotiated as preconditions to constitutional repatriation. The debate was watched by Pierre Trudeau, who sat silently at the back of the hall, and by Claude Ryan, who accepted a ride back to town in Lévesque’s ministerial car. Ryan dryly dissected Lévesque’s performance, advising him that “you would do well to take more interest in constitutional matters … They could become more important than you seemed to think this evening.” Several

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years later, Lévesque recalled the evening as a turning point in his evolution towards Quebec independence.14 Ryan’s criticisms of Fulton-Favreau revealed that he belonged to a very different conceptual universe than the premier, despite their common allegiance to the spirit and letter of the “federal pact.” For all of Lesage’s pragmatism, he had failed to appreciate the reality that Canadian politics was characterized by two new factors: the desire of English-Canadian nationalists to reinforce the central government by enlarging its scope, and the equally valid desire of Quebec nationalists to enlarge the activities of their province’s government by going beyond what the B N A Act explicitly defined. In this new context, Lesage’s desire to return to the spirit and letter of the constitution was outmoded. For Ryan, the crux of the wider Canadian problem lay in “finding a point of convergence between these new dynamisms … in each of the two ‘societies’ that make up the country.”15 Ryan stood closer to the promoters of the “two nations” theory than to pragmatic advocates of “cooperative federalism” in his belief that any new constitution that engaged Quebec in the path of federalism must contain written guarantees for the cultural equality of French and English everywhere in Canada and a prior agreement on a rebalancing of provincial and federal powers to undo the effects of three decades of centralization and to provide sufficient scope for Quebec’s distinct status and ambitions as the political heart of French Canada. And this rebalancing of powers would require not mere tinkering, but a fundamental rethinking of both the theory and practice of Canadian federalism. Ryan interpreted Lesage’s failure to build a consensus around acceptance of Fulton-Favreau as both a misguided exercise of executive leadership and evidence of a worrisome tendency he discerned in ­federal-provincial relations. On the one hand, he certainly praised what he viewed as a new climate of flexibility in Ottawa, the product of a new breed of public service mandarin devoted to “a cooperative federalism whose substance is real and dynamic,” an outlook that sought to deal with the provinces “as partners, not as masters.” This induced him to look hopefully for “the beginning of a new era” in which Quebec would no longer be isolated in its opposition to federal centralization, but in which there would exist a plurality of regional viewpoints and interests, articulated by dynamic provincial premiers such as Duff Roblin, Robert Stanfield, W.A.C. Bennett, and John Robarts. “I personally believe,” confided Ryan, “that the regional factor that divides our country into at least four very distinct parts would have sooner or later led provinces other



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than Quebec to demand a greater share of sovereignty.”16 This forceful regionalism, Ryan believed, coupled with the erosion of the centralizing imperative, would confer “an unassailable moral position” on the federal government if it voluntarily chose to curb its tendencies to encroach on provincial jurisdictions.17 However, much as he might lavish praise on the new principle of consultation evident in federal-provincial relations, he was clearly concerned about the confusion of principle and technique and the perils of inaugurating “a ‘supra-executive’ democracy that is a deviation from our mode of governance.” Lesage’s decision to force, in the name of honouring his personal word given to the prime minister and his fellow premiers, “a ‘captive’ Parliament” to ratify the Fulton-Favreau accord had raised the spectre of Quebec society – which, according to Ryan and other intellectuals, had to project unanimity in dealing with English-speaking Canada – being profoundly riven by an agreement for which public opinion had not been sufficiently prepared. Ryan called for an end to this executive federalism founded on secret diplomacy, urging that, in future, no question of principle could be considered settled unless public opinion and the provincial parliament were duly informed and that no government could act on such questions of principle without “consulting its representatives.”18 For Ryan, what the Fulton-Favreau imbroglio most fully revealed was a persistent logic of centralization, one that the “pragmatic” victories won by Lesage’s cooperative federalism had not adequately countered. Indeed, Ryan observed a worrisome long-term conflict between two dynamisms: Quebec’s quest for greater provincial authority and “a persistent groundswell,” in which the other provinces “do not view as rigorously as Quebec does the need to confine Ottawa’s actions solely to the spheres allocated to it by the Constitution.” Quebec might, in his estimation, be able to counter such centralization by invoking its right to opt out, but Ryan wondered how long “the present political structures can support this jockeying of growth without a fundamental re-examination of what Canadians really expect from each level of government.” More significantly, how long could Ottawa be contained in a “strictly federal role” with regard to “what pertains to Quebec” while seeking to become “a halfway house between federalism and unitary government in what pertains to the rest of the country?”19 Premier Lesage ultimately hoped to secure a “‘very particular’ status” for Quebec through incremental federal-provincial negotiations, but Ryan was not so sure that this would resolve the paradox of the two dynamisms. The first difficulty centred on the role of Quebec’s representatives in the federal government: if Quebec’s

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new-found dynamism was to lead in the direction of increased autonomy, “how can we engage first-rate Quebeckers in such a government if it is to be limited to legislating and acting for the other provinces”? Such a situation would negate the old French-Canadian nationalist quest for equal partnership within the entire Confederation and would risk emptying federalism of much of its substance. Here lurked the spectre of the “associate states” thesis, with its significant increase in the scope of Quebec sovereignty. Second, Ryan doubted that federal and provincial parliaments could long put up with “the absurdity of a situation that confers on the federal-provincial conferences – an organism lacking any constitutional substance – real authority over decisions affecting the future of the country in an increasing number of vital spheres.” “The current regime of empirical horse-trading,” he concluded, “is too unstable to last indefinitely,” and he projected the need for new written constitutional arrangements to ensure a healthy federal system characterized by a better equilibrium between the provinces. This would necessitate weaker provinces uniting with others to better enable them to assume their constitutional responsibilities. Third, a new constitution was imperative because “the federal power must be more rigidly confined to the competent exercise of its precise constitutional obligations. We must eliminate the temptation at the source that induces it to constantly seek to stray beyond its limits.”20 But how to at once reverse the dynamic of creeping centralization and secure the explicit recognition of Quebec’s special status in a new constitutional pact, thus at a stroke transcending Lesage’s quest to enhance his province’s sovereignty through the pragmatic incrementalism of “opting out”? Here, Ryan’s hopes rested with the outcome of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, whose preliminary draft of the first volume of its report was released in February 1965 by its ­co-chair André Laurendeau. Though the commission’s original mandate had been concerned mainly with the status of the two official languages in the federal government and institutions, with an emphasis on minority language rights, Laurendeau had, between 1963 and 1965, substantially changed the scope of the inquiry. Indeed, the B & B Commission discarded the premise of examining the status and rights of English- and Frenchspeaking minorities throughout Canada to highlight instead the principle of the equality of the two dominant societies, one anglophone, the other francophone.21 Like Ryan, Laurendeau preferred the term “society” or “culture,” rather than “nation,” to describe these milieus, but the preliminary draft signalled, nonetheless, a fundamental transformation



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in the substance of French-Canadian nationalism. Where one of the key concerns of the era of Henri Bourassa and Lionel Groulx had been the quest for equal language and religious rights by francophone minorities outside Quebec, Laurendeau’s diagnosis of the Canadian crisis reflected Quebec’s new mood of social achievement and political dynamism. Ryan’s analysis of the draft was close to Laurendeau’s own credo, and a revealing synopsis, significantly entitled “The Objectives of French Canadian Moderates,” fills several pages of his notebooks. The B & B Commission, Ryan stated, had highlighted “the nature of the present political crisis of Canada” by effectively linking the crisis to “the need to establish a new relationship between the 2 distinct societies.”22 The key to resolving Canada’s crisis no longer rested with a regime of concessions for linguistic minorities but on elaborating a new political structure in which the dynamisms and ambitions of two majorities could be negotiated, accommodated, and contained. And, in his estimation, these majorities were not passing political combinations but stable cultural types. Even in English Canada, which had undergone massive non-Anglo-Saxon immigration during the course of the twentieth century, “the culture that has resulted from this intermingling will always be a culture of the AngloSaxon type.” On the other hand, “the French-Canadian type has conserved and affirmed with greater vigour than ever its cultural and social originality.”23 As he explained the matter to an English-speaking audience on the occasion of the annual Champlain Lecture at Trent University, the starting point in determining the essential conditions for the maintenance of federalism had to be the premise that two distinct societies existed in Canada, one English speaking, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the French-speaking society of Quebec. In a momentous departure from the old canon of French-Canadian nationalism, Ryan declared that the B & B Commission “did not say the French-speaking society of Canada because, according to their diagnosis, which is correct in my estimation, French Canadians in other provinces but Quebec do not constitute a society in the full sense of the term as they do in Quebec.”24 Although Ryan drew from Laurendeau’s analysis the necessity of a thoroughly reformed and regenerated federalism, the preliminary draft was susceptible to other interpretations. Indeed, French-Canadian nationalists could just as easily move from the starting point of the inferior socio-economic status of the francophone majority within Quebec to conclude that the only effective way to achieve equality was to sever ties with Confederation. From this perspective, it was no surprise that the B &B Commission report was determinant in the political decision of

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Camille Laurin, who, in 1966, rejected the call of federal politics to become an open advocate of Quebec sovereignty.25 Ryan himself realized the difficulty, because, as we have seen, he accepted the central nationalist contention that French Canadians, even where they constituted the majority in Quebec, were inferior in the social and economic spheres. He worried that the language of the B & B Commission had reenergized and conferred a new legitimacy on arguments for Quebec sovereignty or “associate state” status that would undermine his vision of a reformed federalism. Preserving the fragile unity of the French-Canadian intellectual and political classes impelled moderates like Ryan towards more nationalist language. With respect to the two dominant societies, “one … is complete and relatively satisfied … The other society is incomplete and dissatisfied. It has long been subjected to the direction of the other society.”26 Securing the “fundamental equality of the two cultures” rested on the pillars of equal educational opportunities for French-speaking Canadians in all provinces; complete bilingualism in the federal government and all its services could be a only partial goal.27 True equality would flow from a transformation of the basis of the current Canadian constitution, of which “some parts are federal” and “some parts are unitary,” into a truly federal regime, one in which Quebec acquired more authority in the allocation of fiscal resources and more power in certain fields. This, he stated, meant “a particular regime for Quebec within the Canadian system.”28 In Ryan’s political lexicon, special status for Quebec is less a precise constitutional prescription than a strategy of preserving the intellectual consensus that had undergirded the achievements of the Quiet Revolution, one that could lure the proponents of the “associate states” thesis, such as Jacques-Yvan Morin, back towards a federalist allegiance.29 “Is there a place,” Ryan wondered, “for intermediate interpretations, for special procedures in certain precise instances, for more subtle arrangements that would allow us to take into greater account the existence of ‘two societies,’ of ‘two majorities,’ without distorting the working of a wellunderstood democracy?”30 One of the most systematic statements of this “intermediate” federalism was Marcel Faribault and Robert Fowler’s Dix pour un: le pari confédératif, published soon after the release of Laurendeau’s preliminary draft report. Their explicit aim, which earned Ryan’s hearty approval, was to “take up the wager of making a success of this federation while at the same time giving to one of its constituent states, Quebec, all the assurances and guarantees needed so that it may, in turn, offer to the



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French Canadians living there and to those living elsewhere in Canada, the character of a real national state, where they can realize all their ­legitimate aspirations.”31 Faribault and Fowler proposed to accomplish this within the parameters of a classic federalism, under a constitution that was so reformed and recast as to render unnecessary the “optingout” formula or any explicit recognition of “special status” for Quebec. Indeed, it was their contention that “the federal system cannot tolerate such distinctions.”32 Ryan’s analysis, spread over two editorials in Le Devoir, focused on two key elements. First, he noted that the authors sought to start constitution making afresh and did not engage in the ­conventional “replastering” of an aging BN A Act. In proffering renewal, Dix pour un proposed a charter of individual rights, which would be “the supreme foundation of any democratic society”; a rigorous concept of bilingualism at the federal level; and consideration of “ethnic minorities.” Their analysis also included a frank recognition of “the real sovereignty of the provincial states in the spheres of their jurisdiction” would finally remedy the principal defect of the B N A Act, “that curious mixture of federalism and unitarism.” Second, Ryan praised their attempt to combine the principle of “two distinct nations” with an awareness of the regional factor in Canada, which recognized the existence of the provinces as legal and historical entities, although he expressed certain reservations that Faribault and Fowler had not taken into sufficient account the fact that the provinces were unequal in size and resources.33 Turning to the ways in which a new constitution might embody the imperative of equality between French-Canadian and English-Canadian societies, Ryan was critical of the authors because they envisioned equality as too closely related to specifically linguistic concerns, which tended to submerge the question of “society” beneath individual rights. Ryan posited something more flexible, in which French and English Canada might have formal representation in a future constituent assembly, in a revamped senate, on federal bodies dealing with broadcast regulation, or in a constitutional court. “The new equality,” declared Ryan, will be “an ingenious dose” of majority rule, a rule of the majority of the provinces, and in certain cases, commissions “upon which each side is equally represented.”34 It would be incorrect to analyze Ryan’s federalist thinking within the conventional liberal framework of striking a balance between majority and minority rights. He realized that the preservation of the Canadian Confederation required, in the first instance, something more than concessions from English Canada and explicit constitutional guarantees for

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language and educational rights of minorities – indeed, it required nothing short of a more fundamental re-envisioning of Western liberalism itself. The B & B Commission had presented a thorny problem: how to reconcile “our traditional concept of the majority with the new concept of two distinct majorities”?35 Two obstacles stood in the way: on the one hand, partisans of “one Canada” would fiercely resist what they saw as the “balkanization” of Canada in the name of achieving the “real and harmonious living together of two national communities under a strong central government.” Many English Canadians, he realized, held a dogmatic allegiance to “the Canadian national dream,” but their “rigidity” risked leading Canadian federalism to “catastrophe” because the historical experience of the past century strongly indicated that French Canada would never accept this centralist vision.36 On the other hand, Ryan’s intermediate position had to make headway against partisans of the “Quebec First” tendency, which sought to “found all of the national aspirations of French Canadians on the government of Quebec.” Some of these figures were prepared to consent to certain federal or confederal arrangements with English Canada, but only within the rubric of strictly protecting or enhancing Quebec’s interests: “Quebec is the lodestar of their idealism, their political faith, and their projects for the future,”37 he observed to a Toronto audience in 1965. Although evoking the positive prospects of good will on both sides, Ryan was more and more concerned that the swelling tide of social liberalism in the mid-1960s, which ratcheted up the fiscal pressure on Western governments to provide a real measure of social and economic democracy for their citizens, created a real potential for ongoing conflict between the two societies over questions of economic policy. Liberal utopian desires not only nourished the two dynamisms that complicated English-French relations in Canada but also fanned the flames of a far-reaching conflict over which level of government should have priority in determining the criteria of economic planning. “We have entered,” trumpeted Ryan at the beginning of 1965, “into a period when planning must be anchored on development, which principally involves provincial responsibility, if only because of the close imbrication between economic development and progress in education, and social and cultural life.”38 The idea of “development” – that watchword that stood as a talisman for Western intellectuals in the 1960s – conveyed a faith in the malleability of social structures and held forth the promise of a “post-bourgeois society” defined by the marriage of social equality and personal freedom in a regime characterized by abundance, secularity, and nonmaterial values.39 For Ryan and many



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leading French-Canadian political figures and intellectuals of the 1960s, it provided a justification for the quest for greater provincial powers for Quebec, because its central emphases – education, social security, and culture – appeared to lie in the constitutional spheres assigned to the provinces. It was no longer enough for the Quebec government to assert its cultural sovereignty or its desire for full autonomy in the fields of education and social security: it required a real measure of power to act upon its economic destiny.40 “What increasingly worries our English-speaking compatriots,” he told readers of Le Devoir, “is not … the linguistic claims of Quebec, but the amount of economic sovereignty Quebec intends to acquire in order to realize its aspirations.”41 He paid careful attention to the views of a rising young Université de Montréal economist, Jacques Parizeau who, at the same Toronto conference, critiqued the Canadian economic policies pursued for over a century, arguing that these simply benefited Ontario while creating “flagrant inequalities” among Canada’s other regions, with Quebec “harvesting the crumbs from a so-called national planning.” Parizeau concluded that the Quiet Revolution policies of social and cultural autonomy had to be completed by economic policies inspired by the same objective. Ryan concluded that, if pursued to their logical conclusion, Parizeau’s views were “loaded with grave risks,” but he was prepared to countenance them because the quest for economic sovereignty was Quebec’s principal instrument of negotiation in securing “a real rectification of the Canadian edifice.”42 In a long editorial written in the heat of the 1965 federal election campaign, Ryan strove for a balance between a “mathematical equality” that did not reflect Canada’s historical, cultural, and economic realities and the “relative equality” that allowed democracy to operate while respecting certain “sacred rights that stand prior to the concrete exercise of the rule of the majority.” Here, Ryan’s debt to the interwar “personalist democracy” of Jacques Maritain was evident, in that this brand of Catholic social thinking sought to achieve political and social democracy while positing barriers against notions of mathematical majoritarianism based upon the sole criterion of elections. Equality of francophone and anglophone societies, Ryan argued, could not be resolved through the classic liberal panacea of “counting dollars and heads.” In his estimation, this equality was so fundamental to Canadian life that “it must be situated at such a level in the legal and psychological structures of the country, that it can henceforth be placed beyond the vicissitudes of current politics.”43 This statement came closest to a concrete political prescription, proffering six far-reaching recommendations:

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1 reform of the Senate to transform this chamber into “an organ for the representation and defence of the rights and interests of national communities”; 2 oversight of minority language rights and the application of rules of bilingualism; 3 power to intervene in fields of federal power, such as broadcasting and foreign policy, that had cultural implications; 4 the presence of ministers in the federal cabinet “drawn equally strongly from each group,” with a particular concern to secure “the active presence of French Canadians in economic ministries”; 5 the transformation of the upper levels of the public service from “an Anglo-Saxon closed shop” to one in which qualified French Canadians wielded real influence; and 6 the effective recognition of the rights of the French language in all corners of the country, especially in federal institutions. However, Ryan’s major concern was the effective recognition of Canada as a “bi-national country,” which could be achieved only through the effective acceptance of Quebec’s special position as “the bulwark and major homeland of the French fact in the federation.”44 This binational vision of Canada would entail bringing a key element back into focus, the fact that “according to the constitution, matters pertaining to the economic order are within the competence of Ottawa and the provinces.”45 Once this fact was recognized, and the proper balance of sovereignty between Ottawa and the provinces restored, the full implications of Laurendeau’s question of how to achieve equality between the two societies could be examined. “The problem of the two cultures,” Ryan declared, “would not have attained its present degree of acuity if it had not for a long time rested on grave economic and social inequalities between the two principal economic groups in the country.”46 Ryan was equally concerned that Quebec’s search for “special status” within Confederation not be taken as synonymous with a perpetual quest for greater autonomy that would transform federalism into a loose confederal “associated states” polity. “A common instrument of government,” he reminded his readers, was necessary for the common prosperity of both English and French Canadians, but, here, the constitution would have to carefully define those responsibilities of the federal authority that could be exercised by the normal rule of the majority. In the final analysis, the two majorities must consent to the existence of a federal government, “which would be armed with powers that were carefully



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defined but nonetheless real.”47 In the mid-1960s, Ryan’s constitutional thinking, through its advocacy of special status, represented an attempt to find common ground among French-Canadian political intellectuals and public figures. He sought to bridge the concerns of an older generation of nationalists in the tradition of Abbé Groulx and Esdras Minville, the “pragmatic” federalism of Jean Lesage and much of the provincial Liberal party, and the growing commitment to the idea of a confederal “associate states” arrangement articulated by Jacques-Yvan Morin. Ryan concurred with traditional nationalist Father Richard Arès, who believed that the “germ” of the special status idea was already contained in the BNA Act, though it had, for a long time, been understood “passively” in Quebec. Lesage and the Quebec Liberals were engaged in nothing new – they were merely giving a more positive affirmation to a century-old reality. Evoking the spirit of this older nationalist current, Ryan declared in November 1965 that that constitution and history of the past century had hallowed the existence in this country of a “distinct society” from the rest of the country, a French-Canadian Quebec whose language, culture, institutions, and very wishes differ profoundly from those of the other parts of Canada. From the moment we recognize the existence of a community such as this as a living being, we must also admit that this community has a right to grow and flourish … and it has the right, in many spheres, to make different decisions based upon what appears to be dictated by the conception it has of its needs and its destiny. We would be unrealistic to not see the vital link that exists between the right to existence and the right to grow.48 But, unlike many of his counterparts, Ryan was an astute observer of the English-Canadian political scene, and he realized that many “intelligent and realistic Anglo-Canadians” were worried about “the erosion of federal authority in favour of Quebec” and were asking where Quebec’s quest for distinct status would end. There was a growing groundswell of “alarmist” English-Canadian opinion, he realized, in favour of “the preservation of the principle of the equality and identity between the provinces,” even though, in the past five years, Quebec had obtained nothing that could not be justified by the spirit and letter of the constitution and, in a back-handed reference to the “opting-out” formula, “was not also made available to all the other provinces.” The only major change had been the definitive failure of “the centralizing direction that had previously been considered infallible.”49

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However, he had to consider the problem of a rupture between the “one Canada” imperative of English-Canadian nationalism and the growing “Quebec First” sentiment among French Canadians. “The danger of rupture,” he mused, “might exist at the point if Quebec categorically rejected the right of all Canadians to equality of opportunity in fields such as education and social security, and would claim to … be absolved from the rule of ‘equalization’ conceived as a measure to assist poorer provinces,” or if Quebec at some point refused to collaborate with the central government in achieving forms of economic collaboration that took account of both that province’s aspirations and the important role played by the central government in the balanced development of the Canadian economy.50 True federalism was coextensive with the social liberal creed, and the best guarantee for its maintenance was the affirmation of the modern liberal principle of “equality of opportunity.” In Ryan’s political lexicon, this term was synonymous with “social development,” and there is no doubt that he considered it as Canada’s second cornerstone, along with the equality of the two founding peoples. Without this cardinal article, he warned, “federalism becomes a caricature of a common willingness to live together.” In a warning explicitly directed to men such as Jacques-Yvan Morin, Jacques Parizeau, and to others within the Quebec Liberal Party, he pointed out that, “if you reject this principle, you will substitute the balancing act of power characteristic of confederal schemes for the spirit of federalism. You will have lost the battle in advance if you try to sustain a federation that does not offer a real equality of opportunity to its members.”51 He assured his English-Canadian counterparts that there was nothing in the conduct of Lesage’s government that indicated any movement along “such an excessive line,” nor did he see any imminent danger that the pursuit of special status was ineluctably leading towards the rupture of Confederation. “We personally believe,” he concluded, “that such a temptation does exist in many minds, but we are convinced that it will lessen of its own accord through awareness of certain undeniable economic realities, and of certain obvious interdependencies.”52 In the final analysis, the best way, in Ryan’s estimation, to recement the allegiance of the partisans of the “associate states” tendency with federalism was to deal with the major problem of the B N A Act: “the overly frequent silence of this document on the subject of the essential rights of ‘the two founding peoples’ and its terseness … on the place of Quebec in the federation.” This could be best achieved through an overt definition of special status, which would avoid the peril



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of two constitutions, “that of 1867, which will become more dusty and obsolete, the other, which would be scattered in a thousand and one special laws.”53

Autumn 1965 – “The bizarre adventure”54 At one level, Ryan’s belief that the desire, in the face of Lesage’s pragmatic federalism and Quebec’s chorus of demands ranging from special status to associate statehood, to reinforce the power of the central government emanated primarily from English Canada was correct. However, in the fall of 1965, the political choice made by three French-Canadian intellectuals and social activists, Jean Marchand, Gérard Pelletier, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, to enter federal politics under the aegis of the Liberal Party signalled the existence of a well-organized “one Canada” sentiment that existed among francophone Quebeckers and greatly ­complicated Ryan’s efforts to promote particular status as the copingstone of a broad-gauged federalism that could mediate between continued allegiance to Canada and the nationalist quest for the growth and affirmation of French Canada as an equal society within Confederation. Although, in May 1964, Ryan had hailed Trudeau’s reappearance in Quebec’s intellectual firmament and a revivified membership in the fraternity of liberal thinkers with a largely positive analysis of the Manifeste pour une politique fonctionnelle, there had since been intimations of a growing, and increasingly public, rift between Ryan and Trudeau’s intellectual network. In September 1964, Ryan noted an article by the economist Albert Breton, a member of the Comité pour une politique fonctionnelle, that purported to demolish the economic basis of nationalism by suggesting that the Quiet Revolution, and principally the signature policy of hydro nationalization, had succeeded only in creating more jobs for the French-Canadian middle class while doing nothing for the living conditions of working-class Quebeckers.55 And Ryan had taken up the cudgels in defence of Abbé Lionel Groulx in an exchange with Gérard Pelletier in January 1965 over the teaching of history, a discussion in which Ryan confided his “instinctive preference” for Groulx’s notion of history as an artistic, passionate engagement rather than a merely objective, scientific study.56 At the beginning of 1965, both Ryan and Trudeau appeared at a meeting on the constitution organized by a major union central. Ryan later recalled that he had been asked to comment on

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Trudeau’s text. In “defend[ing] the Quebec positions while at the same time rejecting separatism,” he noted, “I became aware of a profound disagreement between Trudeau’s views and mine.” A few months later, the two men met by chance at the Château Montebello near Ottawa, where Trudeau told him that he believed that the opting-out formula could lead to separation and that the federal government should tighten up its policies in this respect.57 That this disagreement had become personal by 1965 should come as no surprise: Trudeau had, since 1962, developed a strident anti-nationalism while Ryan, if not a nationalist, had become considerably more sympathetic to moderate nationalist positions through the “intermediate” solutions he advocated to the federalist conundrum. Their argument was far more than a difference of emphasis over what federalist strategies to adopt in the face of the nationalist challenge from Quebec, for it involved a profound philosophical disagreement over the nature of liberalism itself. As exemplified in his reaction to André Laurendeau’s preliminary draft, Ryan’s abiding commitment was to “personalist democracy,” with its concern for an equilibrium between individual and collective rights. From at least 1958, Trudeau had publicly affirmed his anti-personalism and his allegiance to a hyperindividualistic liberalism that in no way could envision the formal recognition of the historic rights of cultural or social groups in modern society. Trudeau’s intellectual allies, the Comité pour une politique fonctionnelle, had responded to Laurendeau’s preliminary report in a Cité libre article provocatively entitled “Bizarre Algebra,” castigating the B& B Commission as a lobby for “the industry of nationalism” and “the professionals of the race” – a not-so-veiled personal attack on Laurendeau himself, who had been director of the Ligue d’action nationale. Specifically, they questioned the commission’s central premise, which called for equality between Canada’s two founding peoples, on the grounds that political and constitutional theory envisioned equality only between individuals, not between collective groups.58 Thus, while linguistic equality between French and English speakers as individuals was entirely consistent with Trudeau’s expression of liberal theory, the special status desired by Quebec as a means of affirming the equality of French-Canadian society was incompatible with a sound federal constitution. Ryan countered their objections to the commission’s mode of procedure with the critique that the Trudeauites presupposed that language could be treated in isolation from what conditioned it – namely, the political problem of the equality of French and English societies within Canada,59 a fundamental error that could lead only to a deepening of Canada’s crisis.



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In early September 1965, seeking a majority government, Prime Minister Lester Pearson announced the dissolution of the House of Commons and thrust Canadians into a fall election campaign. Ryan had urged ­Pearson to hold off until the fall of 1966, believing that the end result would be another minority government, and in order to avoid imputations of being inspired by “a guilty electoralism.”60 During the week before the launch of the campaign, Montreal was abuzz with rumours that three prominent French-Canadian outsiders were close to entering politics as federal Liberal candidates. For Ryan, the rumours injected some intellectual substance into a campaign that he had already written off as a colossal bore. In a powerful series of editorials, Ryan dissected the political option of the “three wise men,” proclaiming that, because of their prominence as French-Canadian personalities, they represented “the option of an entire generation,” one that had arrived at a critical turning point, one that Ryan himself had evoked over twenty years ago in his influential 1951 article, “Ferions-nous de la politique?” At the dawn of the 1950s, Ryan had counselled the young men of his generation to eschew party politics because it was the “bailiwick of a closed elite that was largely recruited among the liberal professions and the business bourgeoisie” and called for the action of new elites to form intermediate bodies to democratize and organize public opinion. Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau had been among “the nucleus of pioneers, the principal inspirers” of this tendency, one that he deemed essential in freeing French Canada from the overweening supremacy of politics. While the advent of Jean Lesage had, since 1960, drawn many intellectuals into politics, the abrupt decision of these three hitherto “apolitical” figures was “a happy one, whose effect will be to definitively wipe away the taint of suspicion that has always attached itself to political engagement among a large swathe of opinion among French-Canadian social and cultural militants. It will, at a stroke, bring to an end once and for all the reign of traditional politicians.”61 The presence of such men of substance in Ottawa would, in Ryan’s estimation, serve as a powerful bulwark against the drift towards the “associate states” idea, by reversing the trend that had begun in with the advent of Jean Lesage in 1960, where “all the interesting men were drawn in the direction of Quebec City, which had become a source of anxiety for the future of federal institutions.” The presence of ­Marchand and his associates constituted “the starting-point of a new equilibrium,” one in which a stronger FrenchCanadian presence in Ottawa would lead to “a new direction in the Ottawa-Quebec dialogue.” And he hoped that such a dialogue would

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reverse the secretive, executive diplomacy that had marked the relations between Pearson and Lesage and had led to blind alleys like the FultonFavreau Accord. “All of which,” concluded Ryan, “does not diminish by one iota the need for a profound renewal of our federal regime. But the presence of energetic and competent new players at strategic points on the political chessboard will greatly modify the landscape.”62 Ryan also sensed that the leap of the “three wise men” marked a critical turning point in the culture of postwar North American liberalism, one consistent with the “end of ideology” that so fascinated North American public intellectuals in the mid-1960s. He posed what was the nagging question of many political observers in Quebec: why the Liberal Party rather than the New Democrats? After all, all three men had, during their careers as social activists prior to 1965, been identified with the CCF N DP. Ryan was indefatigable in his probing, especially as their jump to the Liberals had occurred at the very juncture “when the socialist idea is starting to embody itself among us, when it is finding increasing support among intellectuals and union members.”63 Marchand’s choice was, in Ryan’s view, the most questionable: a leader of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux, he might have been expected to join most Canadian union leaders in supporting the federal N D P . “Rigorous spirits” like Trudeau, Ryan believed, would find more on socio-economic issues that they could agree with in the NDP platform than in that of the invertebrate Pearson Liberals, and Pelletier, devoted to democratizing the inner working and financing of political parties, should have likewise found a home in social democracy. What was going on? Quebeckers and other Canadians were privy to the spectacle of these erstwhile “postwar New Democrats” being swallowed up by “that ingenious assimilator that the Liberal Party has always been on the Canadian scene.”64 In the name of “a higher national interest,” Marchand, Trudeau, and Pelletier were seeking “as far as possible to widen the centre” rather than “trying to forge a new alignment of political forces by developing the extremes.” This, Ryan observed, “constitutes a mortal blow to the argument that politics must be based on ideology and the grouping of classes.”65 But he remained unimpressed with the group’s claim that they had chosen Pearson’s Liberals “out of a desire to save Canada.” After all, Ryan informed Le Devoir’s readers, “there are many ways to work towards the intellectual realization of the Canadian hypothesis, and one cannot see how ‘the Liberal way,’ especially after the misadventures of the past few months, has been able to so quickly acquire an intellectual ascendancy in the very critical minds of Trudeau and Pelletier.”66 Indeed, he argued that the N DP’s social democratic position – “the necessity of a more activist



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intervention of the State in economic and social life” – was the best way to reinvigorate the Canadian option, because it advanced a very different idea of the role of the state than that prevailing in the United States, and would accomplish a profound and positive transformation of Canadian political life.67 Ryan’s fears that, far from opening federal politics to new intellectual currents, the adventure undertaken by Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau would simply prolong the diseased state of federal politics was borne out by the unsavoury revelations of the three men cozying up to the Quebec Liberal Party barons. Such behaviour, Ryan believed, was the consequence of the fact that none of them had any support within the party. Its result was that Quebeckers had to experience the sorry spectacle of men who vaunted their profession of democratic faith reduced to being parachuted into safe seats through the dubious mechanism of “packed nomination meetings.” What initially appeared to be a democratic option quickly became “an option of the aristocratic type,” the vindication of the old-guard elite politics that Ryan had consistently warned his generation against. “We cannot,” he declared, “simply substitute for the aristocratism of local party barons another type of aristocratism from above. The only abiding reform is that which comes from within organizations, that is undertaken by elements of the milieu supported unequivocally by  the party authorities.” Viewed from this perspective, Pelletier and Trudeau, those staunch foes of Duplessis, had failed miserably in their first great political test. “An overly abrupt passage from theory to practice,” lamented Ryan, “does not seem to be the most sure way to collaborate in the renewal of political life.”68 Writing at the close of the campaign, he urged Quebec voters not to give “massive support” to the Liberals, who, in his estimation, did not deserve it, although he tepidly endorsed Pearson’s re-election with a minority government, on the grounds that he was “on the whole not opposed to Quebec’s fundamental needs.” Individual Liberal candidates in Quebec secured Ryan’s benediction: Jean Marchand, Gérard Pelletier, Maurice Sauvé, Jean Chrétien, John Turner, and Bryce Mackasey. “We must with regret exclude from our list Mr. Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” stated Ryan, “although for a long time we have admired his culture and richness of thought.” Instead, fearing that Trudeau’s presence in Ottawa might prove a barrier to Quebec’s quest for special status, he endorsed the N DP candidate, Charles Taylor, in the suburban Montreal riding of Mount Royal.69 Ryan had hoped that the entry of the “three wise men” into federal politics would transform the dialogue between Ottawa and Quebec City, but he had not expected a hardening of the federal position on Quebec’s

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constitutional aspirations. This was signalled by Pearson’s ambiguous speech in January 1966 in which he enlisted the federal government behind “the right of Canadians of both languages to real equality of opportunity from coast to coast” but in the same breath appeared to regret the accommodations made to Quebec’s quest for greater sovereignty during the past three years, hinting that the era of “concessions” to Quebec was over. Ryan had frequently praised Pearson, if not for his political acumen, at least for his good will towards Quebec; he now feared that the prime minister was “trying to please a certain anglophone opinion that has been on the rise for some time.” He reminded Pearson that, although other provinces might adopt a more “elastic” interpretation of the constitution that countenanced an indefinite expansion of federal authority, Quebec had no intention of renouncing its right to opt out in the face of federal interventions in spheres of provincial competence. Ryan spoke for a large group of Quebec federalists, especially prominent in the provincial Liberal Party, for whom the term “concessions” carried pejorative overtones. “We should,” he averred, “rather be speaking about recognition of certain legitimate aspirations if we wish to reach an agreement,” and he informed English Canadians to expect “negotiations that will allow a more explicit definition of the special position that Quebec, because of its cultural characteristics, wishes to occupy in the federation.”70 He sensed the growing influence of Trudeau’s “pessimism” on the subject of the future of “opting out,” and he hoped that, with Jean Marchand’s rising stature in the federal Liberal caucus, some flexible formula could be found that would recognize both the legitimacy of Quebec’s quest for a special constitutional status and the enhancement of equality of opportunity.71 What Ryan and other Quebec-centred federalists had not expected, however, was the “epiphany” of the freshman MP Pierre Trudeau as Pearson’s principal constitutional adviser and as the “maître à penser” of the Quebec Liberal caucus. Trudeau’s intellectual pre-eminence quickly squelched among Quebec’s federal Liberal contingent any sentiment in favour of “opting out” or special status. Proclaiming himself the “intransigent opponent of any far-reaching constitutional reform,” Trudeau brusquely told Quebeckers that the BN A Act offered all necessary conditions for the expansion of francophones within Canada, and leaned towards a more “classic” type of federalism in calling for a mutual retraction of both federal and provincial governments into spheres of their own authority.72 Although Ryan was full of admiration for Trudeau’s evident mastery of the complex constitutional dossier, he advanced two key reservations.



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First, he maintained that “there was something artificial and unreal” about Trudeau’s federalist arguments. Although the two men shared a similar commitment to “dispassionate” political debate, Ryan worried that Trudeau had not taken sufficient account of English Canada’s desire to increase the scope of federal authority, and seemed blissfully unaware of Quebec’s “powerful movement of political affirmation” evidenced by the Quiet Revolution. These, Ryan believed, were the fundamental “givens” of Canadian political life over the next five years, and any constitutional thinking had to be calibrated to find some mutually acceptable accommodation between these two dynamisms. Ryan’s second, and perhaps greatest, fear was that Trudeau’s intransigent position might be mistaken in English Canada for “the real feelings of the Quebec people in constitutional matters,” which would risk misrepresenting a large swathe of federalist opinion in Quebec and invest the centralist pole of the Canadian dynamic with greater force.73 Trudeau’s conflictual position, Ryan believed, might in the long run confer greater legitimacy on advocates of “associate state” status or outright sovereignty, as, without a process of real dialogue led by federalists in Ottawa, these might come to be seen as the only instruments for the achievement of Quebec’s constitutional aspirations. Such an outcome would imperil the two “bridges” of dialogue that Ryan had laboured to build since his ascension to the directorship of Le Devoir: a common project of fundamental constitutional revision that engaged both English and French Canadians; and the equally important rallying of conservative and liberal French-Canadian nationalists around the belief that the creative developments in their culture and society could be enhanced through membership in the Canadian Confederation.

“At the dawn of the second act of the ‘Quiet Revolution,’ this is our inevitable and difficult destiny”74 The defeat of Jean Lesage’s Liberals at the hands of a resurgent Union nationale, led by Daniel Johnson, on 5 June 1966, was described by Claude Ryan, who had strongly endorsed the Liberal team, as “difficult to swallow.” However, the election result was not entirely unexpected.75 For several months, Ryan’s analyses of the Quebec political scene had focused on the need for the Quiet Revolution to shift gears, to enter “a phase of stabilization and consolidation.”76 He advised the brilliant, but increasingly solitary and erratic, Lesage to concentrate less on impressive

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but costly infrastructure projects and more on economic strategies to boost the province’s productivity, to assess the realities of Quebec’s ­competitive position in Canada and North America, and to accept that “we must progress at a more temperate rhythm” that would bring the hitherto spectacular public sector growth into closer harmony with general economic expansion and that would be mindful of what the taxpayer could bear.77 In defiance of Ryan’s haughty advice to separatist parties to stay out of the electoral fray, the most significant result of the election was the combined vote of the urban-based social democratic Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (RI N ) and the more conservative rural Ralliement national (R N), two independentist parties that, in their first electoral test, polled more than 200,000 votes, even though they did not win a single seat. He estimated that the RI N vote was a key factor in eleven Montreal-area ridings in tipping the balance away from the Liberal incumbent, thus giving the Union nationale its margin of ­victory.78 Regardless of such vote splitting, Daniel Johnson had recouped his political fortunes by recapturing a good deal of the moderate nationalist opinion – which Ryan estimated as comprising about 20 per cent of the provincial electorate – that had gravitated to the Liberals in the early stages of the Quiet Revolution but had since ebbed away as a result of missteps such as Lesage’s mishandling of the Fulton-Favreau accord. Through a skilfully crafted constitutional platform, dubbed Égalité ou indépendance, that “oscillated between renewed federalism and the confederal regime that the regime of associated states will inevitably produce,” the Union nationale leader, “that sly fox,” was able to play upon a growing sentiment that federalism was “old hat” and that the wave of the future lay with independence or “associated states.”79 Johnson’s “ambivalence” on constitutional issues was carefully designed to appeal to both old and new tendencies within French-Canadian nationalism. On the one hand, he frequently affirmed that “égalité” was a cultural expression that applied not to Quebec as a political entity but to the French-Canadian nation, a formulation to which men like Laurendeau and Ryan could not conceivably object; and on the other, he seemed to move towards the idea of two equal governments whose links were minimal, a position close to the idea of the “associate states” thesis.80 Since 1960, Le Devoir’s sympathies had been firmly aligned with the Quebec Liberal Party, and, despite his criticisms of Lesage’s florid, haughty political style, Ryan preferred the Liberals’ explicitly federalist path to constitutional reform. While the advent of the Union nationale might have led to frosty relations between the new government and



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Le  Devoir, there were personal links, beginning with the relationship between Ryan and Johnson, whose acquaintance went back to 1945, when Johnson, then a fledgling lawyer, was president of Action catholique canadienne and Ryan had just been appointed the new national secretary. Between 1962 and 1966, Ryan had written many articles that expressed outright scepticism regarding Johnson’s leadership abilities, but, just before the June 1966 election, Johnson invited him and his editorial colleague Paul Sauriol to lunch, where they were given an inside “scoop” of the Union nationale’s election manifesto. “I’ve been wanting to see you again for a long time,” Johnson told Ryan, “but I didn’t want to do so until I could give you this document, as I knew that your first question would centre on our party’s platform.”81 Ryan was also a longstanding acquaintance of André Patry, who was recruited by Johnson as a special adviser on international relations, thus opening a direct pipeline between the premier’s office and the director of Le Devoir.82 Familiar faces remained in the service of the new government, as Johnson quickly took steps to signal fundamental continuity between his government and the main emphases of Jean Lesage: he kept on the Liberal technocrats Claude Morin, Arthur Tremblay, and Jacques Parizeau, giving them enhanced responsibilities, and pledged to bring to completion the great reforms to the educational and social infrastructure of the province, much to the discomfiture of his own finance minister, Paul Dozois, who told Ryan that “he was afraid of the orientation that the government is taking in this respect.”83 The period after the election was a curious convergence between the conservative Johnson’s commitment to hewing to a liberal-reformist line and the social liberal Ryan’s rediscovery of some of the virtues of conservatism. In September 1966, Ryan offered the readers of Foreign Affairs an election post-mortem, where he outlined what he considered the key differences between Lesage and Johnson. Lesage, he believed, had been able to accomplish so much because the provincial credit was exceptionally good and the money market unusually dynamic in the early 1960s; but Johnson now faced a different, more difficult set of circumstances. “A new sense of thrift,” he prophesied, “will inevitably inspire the major decisions of the Quebec government in the months ahead,” a virtue that would be natural among political leaders “who learned at the school of Duplessis that a government’s real strength lies … in a healthy balance sheet rather than in a verbose affirmation of grandeur.”84 Surprising here was the partial rehabilitation of Duplessis as a fiscally responsible leader concerned to husband his province’s resources, a break with Le Devoir’s

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combative heritage of Filion and Laurendeau. It signalled Ryan’s awareness of a new mood in francophone Quebec’s opinion that had begun to worry about Lesage’s rhetorical flights and spendthrift ways. Ryan saw in Johnson’s dignified manner, and in his careful, yet ambivalent public statements, the antidote to utopianism, and he came to view him as the political figure who could best lead French Canada’s Quiet Revolution towards the “end of ideology” – that is, towards an “open and functional democratic society.”85 Saluting the new government, he declared: We have sometimes succumbed, these past few years, to the temptation of verbalism. We have often said things that are beyond our thoughts, our will, or our power. The adult attitude consists, rather, in adjusting our language to our real means, to our true intentions … We must accept that our life will be doubly laborious because of our unique situation, which requires us to work harder to remain ourselves without being consigned to inferiority … [Our challenge is] to remain fully ourselves without closing ourselves off from our immediate neighbours, and to increase our external influence without losing sight of the fact that our future is in America. Above all, let us build with solidity and bring to a conclusion the enterprises that we undertake.86 It would be difficult to escape the conclusion that, at the core of Ryan’s social liberalism, lay the old liberal virtues of hard work and thrift, transposed into a collective key as the route to securing the economic equality of French-Canadian society as the precondition of its survival in AngloSaxon North America. Ryan’s thinking in the mid-1960s revealed the dichotomy between the utopian progressive liberal dream of social development, achieved through a progressive technocratic, functional manipulation of economy and society, and the yearning for conservative liberal values as the guarantors of orderly progress. As such, it epitomized the mood of “contradiction” evident among mainstream North American intellectuals of the time. Despite imagining human progress achieved through an expanding social sphere that offered the human personality the ability to transcend the old canons of individualism, Ryan, and many of his counterparts in the United States and Canada, still hewed to a faith in an expanding capitalism that emphasized the action of individuals.87 The achievements of the political Quiet Revolution had substantially exacerbated these tensions and contradictions in Quebec society. On the one hand, intellectuals like Ryan were fully in tune with, and acted as the



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principal spokesmen for, the socializing imperative in modern societies, which provided the conditions for a new kind of collective action that they lauded as the fulfilment and flowering of the democratic spirit itself. On the other hand, they worried that the new institutions created by the Lesage Liberals, especially in the burgeoning health and education sectors, were ponderous bureaucratic machines, designed to impersonally swallow an increasing share of the province’s economic resources rather than providing channels for a new, participatory democratic consciousness. By 1966, Ryan was acutely worried that Quebec was trapped in a  contradictory situation. Despite the impressive progress of the early 1960s, Quebec’s economic development remained between 15 and 25 per cent behind that of Ontario. Efforts to remedy this “lag” would depend, for the foreseeable future, on outside investment while French-Canadian society fostered an institutional culture that could counter what he termed “a pessimistic and Jansenist view of entrepreneurs” and began to generate capital investment from inside. This long-term strategy, however, was imperilled by what he viewed as unreasonable public-sector union demands for wage increases matching those in Ontario and the more prosperous American states. “We cannot allow ourselves,” he admonished, “the luxury of such increases in non-profitable sectors ­without paying double for them in those economic sectors that should be profitable.”88 A new solicitude for the rights of employers and management, as opposed to those of organized labour, increasingly marked Ryan’s pronouncements after 1966 as he emerged as a major spokesman for the idea that if Quebec – and French-Canadian society – was to progress economically and catch up to the rest of North America, the public sector, and especially the unions, would have to manifest greater restraint and selfdiscipline. He encouraged the formation of a new association of Quebec employers, “a unified organization providing a solid and stable axis for the coordinated participation of employers in the political and social evolution of Quebec,” because he found it anomalous that “unions are heard every day, but employers too frequently take refuge in a doubtful discretion.” Ryan deemed an organized, public defence of free enterprise a necessary counterweight to a union movement that he deemed had become powerful enough to be “vigorously criticized.”89 The major turning point was the hospital strike that challenged Daniel Johnson’s new government in the summer of 1966. In response to that conflict, Ryan declared that “no particular freedoms, even union freedoms, can be superior to the liberty of the whole,” and he proved far

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more trigger-happy than the new premier in clamouring for the recall of the assembly to pass back-to-work legislation.90 If the social liberalism of the early 1960s rested on a culturalist vision of social progress where human beings had achieved relative freedom from the iron economic laws of the market, Ryan appeared to be falling back from this advanced progressive position. Writing at the end of July 1966, he used an editorial to preach responsibility to the public sector in terms of wage demands, pleading for balance between the “‘social’ argument and the ‘economic’ argument.” While conceding that economic life was based largely on “a dynamic that is frequently akin to the laws of the jungle,” no people on earth could escape its laws “without condemning themselves to live in poverty or on the sufferance of their neighbours.” Social development rested, in the final analysis, on economic progress.91 Ryan’s growing conservatism on labour issues notwithstanding, his political and social views remained firmly within the ambit of the postwar North American liberal consensus. As late as 1967, a progressive social liberalism still seemed firmly in the saddle, exemplified by ­American president Lyndon Johnson’s project of a Great Society, with the progressive dream of equality of opportunity realized not through class war, but through a synthesis of technocracy and community action united in a “War on Poverty.”92 It was not surprising that Ryan emphatically rejected Alberta premier Ernest Manning’s call for political realignment in ­Canada based on the grouping of “social conservatives” in a single party driven by the ideology of economic individualism, opposed by a new alliance of liberals and democratic socialists around the welfare state. Ryan’s dissent from this foundational text of Canadian neo-conservatism was based on the fact that “the classic ideal of social security” had passed into the language of all political parties, so much so that few Progressive Conservatives could wholly subscribe to Manning’s political vision.93 Rather, like Daniel Bell, the prominent American sociologist, he expected that any new ideological fertilization would emerge from the interaction of the New Left and liberal progressives, especially as the union movement attained maturity and sought to transcend its North American preoccupation with bread-and-butter issues by exhibiting a new mood of “democratic confrontation” in quest of “a more perfect democracy.”94 This alliance, he believed, would increase pressure to surpass “the distribution of justice in small doses,” which had constituted the limits of postwar liberalism, and would, in turn, energize political movements committed to a deeper expression of social equality. Such new political formations would tackle Canada’s economic dependency



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on the United States and consequent uneven development, and the overriding question of solving the riddle of inequality that bedevilled relations between French and English Canada.95 With the accession of Daniel Johnson to the premiership of Quebec, especially given his bold slogan of “Égalité ou Indépendance,” the Quebec City pole of French Canada’s political identity acquired a new player willing to confront the growing influence of the Trudeauites in Lester Pearson’s inner circle. This, in turn, fanned the embers of the constitutional debate that had been banked during the final months of Jean Lesage’s administration. In an editorial devoted to Johnson’s constitutional thinking, Ryan observed that, while the return of the Union nationale to power dramatically reopened the debate on “the notion of equality between the two founding peoples,” such a quest faced considerable obstacles. While certainly pleased that, by “equality,” the new premier did not mean simply the political entity of Quebec but the cultural expression “French Canada” – thus validating the underlying premise of the B& B Commission and signalling that he was more sympathetic to federalism than to the “associated states” thesis – Ryan was acutely aware that there now existed “a widespread school of thought in English Canada that spontaneously rejects any idea of an overly explicit recognition of equality in constitutional texts.” Few leading political figures either in Ottawa or the provinces displayed hostility to the abstract notion of equality, but English-Canadian thinking remained dominated by a kind of constitutional empiricism that preferred piecemeal, evolutionary progress. Ryan much preferred Johnson’s demand for an urgent constitutional revision by contrast to Lesage’s pragmatic “cooperative federalism.” Neither Johnson nor Ryan went so far as to advocate inscribing an equality clause into each federal law, but they were adamant that the principle of equality between English and French Canada – by which they meant both a clear recognition of French-Canadian cultural rights throughout Canada and a special constitutional status for Quebec by virtue of its special vocation to serve “the Canadian group that speaks French” – must be “one of the essential norms for the conduct of public affairs.” Most importantly, this meant a significant qualification to current liberal democratic theory based on “the rule of the numerical majority” in the name of “the fundamental equality of all citizens of the country on those questions that, by common consent, are truly of a general interest.”96 Ryan was adamant that Canada’s future not be interpreted as a “classic conflict” between majority rule and minority rights, preferring Laurendeau’s formulation of “two majorities.” “One of these,” Ryan stated,

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has its seat in Quebec. History has taught it that if it had not possessed and jealously conserved this base, it would have lost everything. It is not prepared, at the very moment when it has become more conscious of the positive dimensions of this advantage, to abandon the substance for the shadow. It desires not only to conserve what it has already, but to develop and increase it. And this objective remains compatible with the maintenance of the federal tie, so long as the other side accepts to rethink it in recognizing from the outset that certain postulates that might be literally applied in other societies must, in our context, be subject to more nuanced interpretations.97 Viewed from the perspective of the need to temper majoritarian democracy, based on the atomized individual citizen, with the imperative of cultural and social equality between French and English groups, “the ­current constitution of the country is unsatisfactory in this respect,” and “neither the reticence of English Canada nor the surprisingly conservative reasoning of a Pierre Elliott Trudeau will convince us to change our views.”98 Johnson’s initial constitutional forays impressed Ryan with their thoughtfulness and concern to underscore continuities with the Lesage administration. Though at times frustrated by the premier’s “fairly ambiguous” proposal for a “binational constitution,” he recognized that Johnson stood within a long tradition of Quebec federalists. Like Maurice Duplessis, Johnson “does not like Ottawa,” but at the same time, he spoke as one “from inside Canada” in claiming that the federal government should not lose essential powers.99 Above all, Johnson seemed to have the support of a wide swathe of opinion within Quebec that wanted a more forceful advocacy of equality and a more precise timetable for constitutional change, an approach that underscored the divisions and “drift” among the opposition Liberals.100 Indeed, by 1967, Ryan was acutely aware that Quebec-centred nationalism – what he defined as the preoccupation to realize the national goals of French Canadians through the instrument of the Quebec government – possessed deeper roots in the French-Canadian “soul and history than the broader Canadian-oriented patriotism,”101 a sentiment that Johnson skilfully played upon in his dealings with Ottawa. But Johnson’s brand of nationalism remained generally within conventional channels: Ryan soon recognized that the premier emphasized “egalité over indépendance” and, at the level of his core convictions, was not a separatist.102



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While generally endorsing Quebec’s claim to primary jurisdiction over family allowances, old-age pensions, and all types of education, research, and manpower training as “a new and unsuspected extension of the federal formula,” Ryan warned against what he saw as a maximalist tendency in the new government to tilt towards the “associate states” idea, preferring to leave primary responsibility for manpower and the fight against unemployment in the hands of the federal government. “In a similar way,” he declared, “it appears perilous to us to draw overly punctilious boundaries in the universe of research, and while one might conceive that Quebec has a prior responsibility in this field, it is more difficult to claim that a modern and dynamic federal government must be totally excluded from it.”103 Perhaps most revealing of his “intermediate” brand of federalism was the road map to constitutional reform he offered the readers of Le Devoir on the eve of Canada’s centennial celebrations. In the eyes of many English Canadians, Ryan was aware that he would come across as a “fellow traveller of an ambiguous nationalism,” but he was doing no more than expressing the movement of political ideas in Quebec. Quebec, he maintained, sought “no privileges or special favours, but a realistic recognition of certain diversities that are so pronounced that they cannot be easily contained by overly uniform rules.”104 The new constitution must, at very least, clearly acknowledge that Canadian political society rested on “the principle of cultural duality” and recognize that the government of Quebec had a “special responsibility” to promote the equality of French Canadians in Canada. It should be noted that he was quite modest in his proposals for a new power-sharing agreement, recommending that, of the existing federal powers, only marriage and divorce, the nomination of judges, and control of companies and financial institutions be transferred to Quebec. At the same time, the federal government had to clearly recognize the priority of the provinces in fields of family allowances, old-age pensions, social welfare, social assistance, housing, scholarships, control of financial institutions other than banks, urban and regional development, and scientific research in universities, with the implication that Quebec should be allowed a much wider sphere of “opting-out.”105 The overriding element of Ryan’s federalism was the need to find a constitutional formula that would somehow reconcile and harmonize the two great dynamisms he saw at work in Canada, instead of simply containing them. The competition of English- and FrenchCanadian nationalism, he declared, “was … healthy and legitimate,” and any durable new Canadian constitution needed to rest on “both individual and collective freedoms.” There would, in his estimation, be no return

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to a classic model of federalism in which Ottawa would retreat from spheres of provincial jurisdiction; rather, he expected more initiatives from the central government and more proposals for joint programs, because these expressed a deeper current within English-Canadian nationalism. But, as he informed the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in June 1967, Quebec would continue to object to such initiatives, and its dissent would become more vigorous and more clearly articulated. “And it is equally clear,” he concluded, “that in many spheres, in the coming years, Quebec will generate initiatives that will be a source of astonishment for the rest of Canada,”106 thus rendering a distinct status more necessary. But he also considered these centripetal dynamisms “a transitional phase in our common history” that, over the long run, could be transcended by “confidence and mutual trust being progressively restored between the two peoples.” Unlike Johnson, Ryan eschewed the imposition of precise deadlines or timetables for achieving a constitutional settlement. The “moral foundations of a federal system of government” were, in the final analysis, the fruit of an extended process of educating public opinion, rather than the artificial imposition of legalistic norms.107 The period between June 1966 and the turbulent summer of 1967 offered contradictory signals for the prospects of the “constitutional aggiornamento” that Ryan believed would fundamentally transform Canada in the same way that Vatican II had altered both universal and local expressions of Catholicism.108 On the one hand, Quebec no longer appeared so isolated, as Johnson abandoned Lesage’s practice of one-onone dealings with Lester Pearson to make common cause with his fellow premiers, especially John Robarts, Duff Roblin, and Robert Stanfield – not coincidentally, all Progressive Conservatives – to pressure Ottawa for greater fiscal resources. Here, growing regional diversity within Canada seemed to offer a new opening to Quebec’s aspirations. The apparent tiredness of the federal Liberals augured a resurgence of the federal P Cs, which might in turn alter the conditions for constitutional negotiation, especially as that party seemed more inclined to recognize the fiscal rights of the provinces.109 However, there were worrisome signals of a harder line emanating from Ottawa, beginning with the new proposals for a national health insurance system. Although Ryan declared himself in agreement with each of the four conditions mandated by Ottawa to coordinate the provincial administration of the plan, he feared that, because these were “dictated unilaterally,” they “gravely” distanced the federal government “from the spirit of cooperative federalism.”110



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Mitchell Sharp, the new federal finance minister, followed up this initiative with a proposal to shut down any further “opting-out” initiatives on the part of the provinces by “returning to a regime of absolute purity” in which Ottawa would simply withdraw, subject to compensation, from all joint programs from which Quebec had withdrawn, and would, in the field of direct taxation, allow each order of government to define the taxes it required to perform its responsibilities. The underlying intent was to enforce uniformity between the provinces by ensuring that Quebec would not be able to undertake expensive new social programs that would distinguish its society from the rest of Canada. The social liberal Ryan saw in this the reassertion of an older pre-Depression ideology of liberalism based on the “classical symmetry” of federalism coupled with the valorization of “free competition” in the field of taxation, which blissfully ignored the high level of interdependence that had developed among Canada’s provinces.111 Behind this “triumph of the English-Canadian economists,”112 Ryan discerned darker forces that sought to constrain both Quebec’s quest for special status and the progressive liberal telos of social development. The expansion of the provincial state was premised on a willingness to experiment in the field of social policy and was driven by an optimistic commitment to social development. In their quest to reassert Ottawa’s paramountcy within the federation, federal policymakers either had to appropriate the social development ethos for themselves – as did health and welfare minister Allan MacEachen with his scheme for a national health care system – or, in the case of Mitchell Sharp and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, posit decisive limits to the expansion of the welfare state, countering social liberalism with a dose of the fiscal rectitude of conservative market-driven liberalism. Ryan had gone to the October 1966 federal Liberal Party congress as a keynote speaker, where he exhorted the two thousand delegates to abandon, once and for all, the party’s “ambivalence” on matters of equality and to consider the desideratum of the French-Canadian moderates, “a new order that will guarantee at the same time the rights of French Canadians in the whole of the federation and the special role that the government of Quebec must fulfil in Canada.” Constitutional equality between French and English Canada, for Ryan, was always coupled with the ideal of social development as the cornerstone of a Canadian nationalism, “the vigorous search for a more authentic economic democracy that will be the royal road allowing our country to progressively find the path of real political sovereignty.”113 However, he found the Liberal congress a disconcerting experience, offering a

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“fairly disappointing” constitutional agenda defined by Mitchell Sharp and Pierre Elliott Trudeau; pandered to western Canadian delegates, who wished to hear nothing of Quebec’s constitutional demands, with a new emphasis on freer trade and an obeisance to market forces. Ryan found much to admire about Jean Marchand, Pearson’s new Quebec leader, whose social conscience and knowledge of the French Canadian “common man” and quest for “a reasonable but effective recognition of the two cultures in the federal political apparatus and also in the rest of Canadian public life” identified him as an authentic social liberal, but he worried over his “discretion” regarding Quebec’s place in the federation. Marchand’s hesitation appeared to reflect a new direction in federal policy, which sought to “close the dikes” and bring Quebec back to a position where it was simply a province like the others, in exchange for a clearer commitment from English-Canadian Liberals to the cause of biculturalism as a national goal.114 The convention demonstrated a convergence between EnglishCanadian opinion, which was increasingly intolerant of the “cooperative federalism” of the early 1960s – viewing them as “concessions” made by a weak central government to appease Quebec – and the hard-line federalism of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his intellectual circle, which refused to even consider a dialogue on special status.115 There was, Ryan maintained, an alarming propensity among English-Canadian intellectuals to undermine the authority of the B & B Commission as having exceeded its mandate to become an advocate for change, “travelling salesmen for biculturalism,” in the words of the eminent historian Donald Creighton.116 Creighton’s interpretation of the origins of Confederation was that Canada’s founders – far from wishing to create a “true association between two peoples considered equal from the beginning” – had nourished a consciousness of a single “new nation” that merely tolerated certain cultural, linguistic, and religious particularisms within the territory of Quebec. Worse still, Creighton, in Ryan’s estimation, had “emulators” in French Canada who had reached similar conclusions.117 These were the Trudeauites, whose tentacles were now everywhere. They ranged from Marc Lalonde, an adviser to the prime minister, who challenged Lesage’s great achievement of 1964 by summarily informing Ryan in January 1967 that “the simple fact that provinces legislate in the field of old-age pensions does not exclude federal legislation on this subject,”118 to the pronouncements of Ramsay Cook, whom Ryan had once praised as an authentic voice of English Canada. Reviewing Cook’s Canada and the French-Canadian Question in the summer of 1966, Ryan discerned



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an attitude to French-Canada’s nationalist aspirations that was “a bit too stiff, in a way that recalls the manner of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”119 The rising confidence of this group enabled them to challenge the very basis of modern French-Canadian nationalism, the state-building project of the Quiet Revolution. In early January 1967, Ryan felt compelled to devote an entire editorial to refute Bryce Mackasey, the federal Liberal M P for Verdun, who charged that Lesage’s achievements were nothing more than “a verbal revolution” that, at best, had “provided prestige jobs to a limited group of intellectuals and technocrats” and that the more confident and positive French-Canadian nationalism of the 1960s had simply been a vehicle for the promotion of this class. For Ryan, the danger in Mackasey’s views was that Trudeau’s quest for a “one Canada” federalism of strictly equal provinces had struck an unholy alliance with a kind of French-Canadian populism that expressed the disgust of “ordinary workers” with the empty nationalism of “hundreds of ‘eggheads’ and ‘beatniks.’” This, theory of government, Ryan complained, “was in the purest Duplessis tradition” in that it reduced politics to providing direct and immediate improvement to the individual’s circumstances, “leaving the structures of the State to rot.” It was an indication that Trudeau and his circle had definitively turned their backs on Quebec’s deepest aspirations, summarily dismissing what was important: “For the first time in our history, we discovered in 1960 that the principal task of a government is to provide a society with efficient and modern structures through which the State can dynamically fulfil the responsibilities incumbent upon it in the modern era … Must we start over again from zero because Mr. Everyman in the depths of the boondocks is upset that he no longer receives a strip of free paving from his member of the assembly?”120 Worse, from Ryan’s perspective, was that English-Canadian opinion seemed engaged in a search “for the French-Canadian magician who will liberate it from its nightmares,” a “‘superman’ of goodwill and Canadianism who would succeed, through sheer force of personality, in joining together his compatriots and the rest of the country.” This wishful thinking explained, in part, Trudeau’s growing hold over EnglishCanadian opinion, but it was no substitute for “dispassionate reason, precise facts, concrete analysis, and identifiable persons rather than idealized figures.” 121 It made the task of French-Canadian moderate “bridgemen” or intellectual “pontiffs” like Ryan increasingly difficult, because he now had to consistently labour to undo the perception in the EnglishCanadian press that Trudeau and his circle spoke for French Canada. This task became doubly difficult after April 1967, when Trudeau was

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elevated to the justice portfolio in the federal cabinet, making him ­publicly the principal spokesman on constitutional matters. Despite Trudeau’s brilliance and erudition, Ryan felt constrained to state that his views “do not reflect what we believe is the dominant opinion in Quebec.” Trudeau, Ryan angrily charged, “employs his best energies in demolishing, in front of anglophone audiences … every idea of special status and of far-reaching renewal of the Canadian constitutional regime.”122 The growing personal animosity between the two men, reflected in the fact that Trudeau’s favourite political target had become Quebec federalists like Ryan who promoted special status, was rooted in a profound intellectual disagreement over the nature of the Canadian problem and the nature of liberalism itself. Analyzing Trudeau’s speech to the Canadian Club of Montreal in March 1967, Ryan dismissed as simplistic Trudeau’s belief that the difficulties between French and English Canada could be quickly fixed by putting an end to certain “deviations” from the classic federal model, entrenching a charter of rights guaranteeing the freedoms and equality of individuals, and guaranteeing equality between the English and French languages and between provinces. History, Ryan observed, was a more fundamental reality than legalism, and Canada’s history manifested “the difficult encounter of two nationalisms … or of two distinct societies,” one which sought its development in a strong central government, the other, “after believing in the possibility of a fraternal coexistence on the national level, has tended more and more to fulfil itself around the government of Quebec.” These historical realities, expressing a collective will to equality, “do not jibe with the rigorously ‘liberal’ conception that Mr Trudeau has of the State … in which only equal individuals exist in the eyes of the State.”123 Viewed from the standpoint of social liberalism, which accorded greater scope to the development of collective freedoms, special status was not a purely theoretical proposition, but “a living idea,” an “expression in mitigated form of a desire for freedom that is too profound to be stifled and that … will in consequence not only grow but will give rise in the future to new problems no less acute than those of yesterday.”124 In the manner of “a high-handed judge,” the justice minister had summarily rejected the two nations thesis, equated the advocates of the associate states idea with the worst kind of separatism, and “reserved his worst epithets for those who adhere to the special status thesis,” which he termed “bullshit” and “intellectual humbug.” Such tactics Ryan found disgraceful and unacceptable, a sad decline “from the Pierre Trudeau of the 1950s, who would at least have made an effort to study the matter and discuss it with precision.”125 Despite the



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fact that he discerned a greater willingness on the part of English Canada to recognize French-Canadian language rights at the national level and in the provinces, there seemed to be an inverse relationship between countenancing this type of equality and favouring special status for Quebec. In an editorial aimed directly at Trudeau, written at the end of the fateful summer of 1967, Ryan reaffirmed that equality could not be limited to mere individual rights but had to recognize Quebec’s collective claims to be recognized as a society: “You cannot seek to reduce Quebec to the rank of a mere province like the others, without succumbing to a profound and fatal illusion.”126

July–October 1967: “What is happening to us is heart-rending”127 The greatest challenge posed by the rise of Pierre Trudeau and his hard-line federalism was the growing erosion of a federalist consensus among French-Canadian intellectuals and political elites. Ryan had striven mightily to foster this consensus, invoking the “two societies” model of biculturalism advanced by the B& B Commission as a way of seeking common ground between adherents of special status, Lesage’s “cooperative federalism,” and elements of the “associate states” idea, all of which he believed could be accommodated in a “big tent” of reformed federalism. All these intellectual currents rested, to a greater or lesser degree, on a more collectivist expression of modern liberalism, in which the extension of individual rights was balanced by a quest to develop new relationships around the premise of greater social and economic equality. This social liberalism would underpin and legitimate the purpose of group identities at both the provincial and national levels. Trudeau’s efforts were directed at de-legitimizing the proponents of special status by crystallizing the meaning of federalism around his own hard-line version, with the strategy of amputating those Quebec federalists who sympathized with aspects of the “associate states” idea by forcing them to abandon hope of any dialogue on the part of English Canada. In the process, Trudeau’s ultimate intention was a Darwinian one: to summarily eviscerate all other possible expressions of liberalism in order to ensure that only his own hyper-individualist, economically conservative variety would be coextensive with the Canadian polity. Although, from the vantage point of early 1967, Ryan could take comfort from the political situation in Quebec, in which “a certain unanimity,

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which will eventually transcend partisan boundaries, is being constructed,” he was well aware, on the other side of the coin, of “the hostility or incomprehension of the team that represents Quebec in Ottawa.”128 The summoning of the États généraux du Canada français in the fall of 1966, organized by the joint efforts of the “new” nationalist intellectual Jacques-Yvan Morin and the “old” nationalist Rosaire Morin, struck Ryan, who agreed to serve as a delegate, as inspired by “a desire for sacred unity” around a collective search for a new political future for French Canada. Despite this praiseworthy objective, he quickly realized that the project of the États généraux was vitiated by “a high degree of certitude that some have reached”129 – by which he meant the vocal presence of separatists – and that it risked becoming “the Estates General of nationalist opinion,” in which the cultural and social concept of “French Canada” risked being submerged by a growing pressure to focus the national destiny purely on Quebec as a political entity.130 The growing presence of extreme elements, Ryan realized, would render dialogue among French-Canadian nationalists around the question of federalism extremely difficult, a goal rendered more complicated by the rumours that began to swirl in the spring of 1967 around René Lévesque. Ryan was aware that Lévesque, who was in opposition and free from the discipline of cabinet solidarity, was more and more “tempted” by a political regime that was no longer federal and that there were even some members of Daniel Johnson’s cabinet who were close to sharing his views.131 The growing political respectability of separatism presented a serious danger for federalists, not because Ryan feared any electoral success from that quarter in the immediate future, but because of the nightmare, which had plagued nationalist intellectuals since the days of Lionel Groulx, “that Quebec will once again offer the rest of the country the spectacle of a society divided against itself, and that these divisions will give English Canada a pretext for hardening its attitude in defence of the status quo, and that consequently, it will make significant constitutional change impossible.” While in a healthy democracy diversity of opinion was necessary, the cacophony of the États généraux, which reflected the more ambiguous second stage of the Quiet Revolution, pointed to “the necessity of a general agreement of citizens around a certain number of common convictions.”132 What Ryan had in mind was the assertion of a kind of invisible moral or ethical consensus that lay beneath the surface of the contest of political ideas but could still inspire the fundamental choices Quebec would eventually be called upon to make. This imperative inspired the obituary



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editorial he wrote on the death of Abbé Lionel Groulx in May 1967, in which he celebrated the priest-intellectual’s legacy as the mediator and “spiritual father” of three generations of French-Canadian intellectuals. In characterizing Groulx as “une sorte de trait d’union spirituel” between these generations, Ryan was not only commemorating the life of a figure who “was impregnated with a profound love for his people and for democracy” but was appealing to Groulx’s unifying legacy to assert his own role – the “trait d’union” an oblique reference to the student newspaper at the Externat Sainte-Croix in the 1930s – as Groulx’s successor, the director of Le Devoir whose ongoing role as a public intellectual was to forge a pre-political consensus of values among the varieties of FrenchCanadian nationalist opinion. Like Groulx, he was deeply troubled that the hardening of political options around the poles of Trudeau’s federalism and currents of separatism was “breaking the spiritual unity of our people” and causing “phenomena of rupture and breakup” that would ultimately disturb the equilibrium between tradition and modernity.133 Any hope that federalism might serve as that pre-political basis of cohesion in the French-Canadian political firmament was dashed by the visit of the French president, General Charles de Gaulle to Quebec in late July 1967. The scene on the balcony at Montreal’s Hôtel de Ville and de Gaulle’s impassioned cry of “Vive le Québec libre” have become the stuff of political legend, but as David Meren’s recent study of the postwar diplomatic relations between France, Quebec, and Canada has shown, they were the result of a complex series of nationalist tensions in attempts by Ottawa and Quebec City to solicit French support for rival nationbuilding strategies.134 Just prior to de Gaulle’s arrival, Ryan wrote an editorial attempting to explain English Canada’s scarcely veiled hostility to his presence and the complicated enthusiasm exhibited by French Canada. Fully supportive of the constitutional initiatives of both Jean Lesage and Daniel Johnson to assert an international presence for Quebec in spheres of provincial competence, Ryan argued, in essence, that the quest for intergovernmental contacts between Quebec and France was “so natural and commonsensical that one is astonished at the uproar it has caused in certain quarters.” Unlike some commentators, however, Ryan stated that the projected Ottawa portion of de Gaulle’s visit was of critical importance, “a new and important step” in developing FrancoCanadian cooperation in fostering Canadian relations with “the whole of the francophone peoples.” It also offered Canada the interesting prospect of an alternative to “the myth … of Anglo-Saxon orthodoxy” and an axis of international activity outside the Cold War framework of two

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dominant powers.135 But, despite the growing enthusiasm, Ryan raised a number of caveats, flatly rejecting de Gaulle’s appellation of Quebeckers as “Français du Canada.”136 In so doing, he expressed the “realism” of French Canadians, “who know that their home is in America, not in France. They know that their economic ties are with their anglophone neighbours, not with their European cousins.” Consequently, while they would greet the general enthusiastically, their welcome should not be “confused … with any nostalgic dream of liberation.”137 Ryan was among the dignitaries clustered on the Hôtel de Ville balcony that fateful 25 July. He immediately realized that de Gaulle had gone too far, observing that his statements constituted “a real interference in Canadian affairs, and that we did not need a lesson from him.” Later that evening, he shared his views with Montreal’s mayor Jean Drapeau and René Lévesque, the latter “very discomfited” by the general’s speech, initially agreeing with Ryan but changing his tune according to political calculations in the ensuing days. Drapeau, “enigmatic as always,” advised Ryan to avoid overly severe judgments in his next day’s editorial and adopt the line of inviting de Gaulle to explain his line of thinking.138 And, over the next few days, Ryan’s editorials were far more critical of English Canada, interpreting the wildly contrasting reactions to the general’s visit as proof positive of the existence of “two profoundly distinct communities in Canada.” Prime Minister Pearson had himself profoundly erred in assessing de Gaulle’s statements as “unacceptable,” which closed off any further avenues of dialogue or explanation. But the event was a wake-up call, an “electric shock” for English Canada, which had, according to Ryan, “been befuddled by the Centennial celebrations to the point of forgetting the problem of the two communities. It sought easy reassurance in the idea that the fever of Quebec’s self-affirmation was diminishing, and that, with the appearance of new, conciliatory French-Canadian leaders on the federal scene, the old debates were losing steam.”139 Canada’s fundamental problem had not really changed, but de Gaulle’s visit had certainly given it a sharper focus, to the point where one of Ryan’s English-Canadian interlocutors, Peter C. Newman, could write that “I feel that whatever small understanding I had of French Canada has become quite obsolete.”140 For Ryan, the visit simply highlighted the fact that “Canada’s constitution remains obscure on the vital question” of authority in the sphere of international affairs, a situation that could be remedied only by fundamental constitutional reform. Indeed, given the confusion over which level of government possessed responsibility for the conduct of international relations, it was difficult for the federal



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government to accuse de Gaulle of interference, especially when he had not attempted to circumvent any Canadian law. Even if he sought to encourage Quebec’s membership in cultural and educational bodies like U N ESC O, this could be read as entirely in accord with the Canadian constitution, as his intention was only to support “the people of Quebec in what they hold as essential: the conquest of a greater freedom following the paths that Quebeckers themselves have chosen.”141 Events moved rapidly in the aftermath of de Gaulle’s visit. On 28 July 1967, François Aquin, a Liberal member of the Quebec Assembly, quit the caucus in protest over Jean Lesage’s decision to rebuke de Gaulle. By mid-September, René Lévesque had made the irrevocable decision to put forward a resolution on sovereignty-association to the provincial Liberal convention, in a “discours-choc” that, Ryan estimated, cut through the “intellectual straitjacket” that had constrained him since at least 1964. It did much more than this: sovereignty-association was an attempt to blast apart the second bridge that Ryan had sought to maintain, the ongoing dialogue between federalists and proponents of the “associate states” option. At a stroke, Lévesque reversed the equation, arguing that, because the federal system itself was beyond reform and could never accommodate Quebec’s cultural, social, and political dynamism, sovereignty had to be a priority, to be followed by the negotiation of a new partnership between Quebec and Canada. The solution had a certain elegance and addressed the principal weakness of the “associate states” idea and, to some degree, of Ryan’s special status federalism, which always lay in convincing the federal government and English Canada that a far-­reaching structural reform of the constitution was necessary. Ryan greeted Lévesque’s new political option with respect, believing that it augured a decisive moment of choice for French-Canadian nationalists. “Up until now,” declared Ryan, “many have sought to unify, reconcile, and preserve everything. This time of ambiguity is coming to an end. The strong men of the era that is dawning will be those who have the courage to stand behind those options that are clear and who will have the intellectual vigour to defend them.” With his bold pronouncement, Lévesque had emphatically demonstrated that he was one of these men and, in Ryan’s view, this had elevated him to the status of “a principal actor in the next stage of the evolution of Quebec and Canada.”142 There were now only two choices, sovereignty or federalism, and, given the divergence between the two positions, compromise could come only “after a long search where each one of us will have to clarify his fundamental choice for himself and for others.” For Ryan, this was most

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emphatically the federalist option, and he candidly avowed that he did not believe that Le Devoir’s adherence to the “Canadian hypothesis” needed substantial modification.143 Three days later, Ryan took a far less laudatory view of Lévesque’s political position in an editorial that extolled federalism while decrying sovereignty as “an optical illusion.” His starting point was liberty, and he forcefully refuted the idea that, in achieving independence, Quebec could ever accede to “total and absolute liberty.” Federalism certainly had its problems, “but it offers Quebec all the advantages of a reasonable liberty and spares them the risks of an independence chosen without sufficient consideration and maturity.” Specifically, Ryan took aim at the “association” pillar of Lévesque’s plan, wondering how his post-independence strategy for economic union with English Canada could effectively improve on that offered by “a flexible and intelligent federalism.” Indeed, any such association, premised on the necessity of common economic action, would reduce rather than enhance Quebec’s sovereign attributes, because it would be difficult, outside the federation, for Quebec to achieve sufficient control of common economic and development policies to allow it a significant voice in common defence, foreign policy, and monetary matters. More critically, it would disrupt the Canadian polity while simply doubling back, eventually, upon a federal solution. What most troubled Ryan about Lévesque’s plan was that the post-sovereignty partnership would at best be “a capricious and ephemeral delegation of authority” that would contain all the problems of a “confederal” arrangement. As the creature of unelected technocrats, such a structure would lack federalism’s ability, rooted in the democratic sovereignty of the people, to address fundamental problems.144 Of equal significance, Ryan’s analysis adhered to a “French Canada” rather than a “Quebec only” perspective, dwelling on federalism’s implications for liberty, contending that, without diminishing Quebec’s freedom, it was the only way to ensure equitable treatment for French Canadians living in the rest of Canada. Why, he asked, abandon the “signs of progress” achieved in recent years without “first seeking to define through dialogue the terms of a renewed federalism?” He scornfully refuted those nationalists who contemptuously dismissed the federal idea as a “substitute” for liberty, reminding them that freedom was indivisible and had to be shared among diverse elements in society, “rather than jealously possessed by a single one.” Thus, “the federal principle proceeds from the very idea of liberty and is best able to serve the cause of liberty in a pluralist society. It is because we believe in freedom that we adhere



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to federalism. It is because we believe in freedom for all, not simply for ourselves, that we see in federalism the formula most capable of serving as the keystone of the arch of government in a ‘society of minorities.’” Federalism acted, for Ryan, as the necessary corollary to liberalism, as it rendered possible a balance between individual and collective freedom. However, he was emphatic that this option was not the same as Trudeau’s hard-line legalistic position. “This is not a pure or theoretical federalism,” he stipulated, “but a concrete federalism, a new federalism, a federalism able to give satisfactory answers to acute needs, and to do so within reasonable deadlines.” The idea of special status as an “intermediate” solution was, in Ryan’s view, still the best, provided that the federal and Quebec governments could come to satisfactory arrangements regarding the division of powers in fields such as universities, p ­ ensions, and social security that “took into account Quebec’s unique historic function” as the fulcrum of the defence and affirmation of French-Canadian rights and collective aspirations. But it was clear that Lévesque’s intellectual bombshell had, for the first time, provoked Ryan into setting a timetable for constitutional change. Realizing that the Quebec-Canada problem had stagnated far too long, and that the sovereignty option would gain considerable support within the French-Canadian nationalist community for its very clarity, he warned that “we now have only a few years, two, three, or four at most to find the essential elements to a moderate solution to the Canadian problem.”145 What made federalism more compelling than Lévesque’s “sovereignty-first” option was the ethical dimension it offered to French Canadians as a people, a consideration never far from the horizons of the public moralist. The lessons of the past two centuries showed that national freedoms, in order to be fully realized, had to be “completed and tempered by elements of federalism.” Although surrendering “absolute and unlimited self-affirmation” by belonging to Canada, French Canadians gained something far more valuable from membership in the polity and “respect for the rights of others” – the lesson that, because freedom was indivisible, national liberty could not be purchased at the price of abridging individual, social, economic, and political freedoms.146 Though sceptical that Lévesque would enjoy any immediate political success – he lacked, after all, an organized political movement at the time of leaving the Liberal Party – Ryan vowed to try to maintain the tenuous unity of the French-Canadian nationalist intellectual community. He promised to “welcome with respect the decision of those who prefer or  will prefer the independence option” and “to continue to include,

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primarily, and under forms to be determined, certain members of the Devoir team who, while not sharing our views on the subject, are still in intense communion with the fundamental objectives of the paper.”147 He was undoubtedly aware that Jean-Marc Léger, one of the principal spokesmen of the “associate states” option and a key promoter of the international idea of “francophonie,” was growing restive under the 1964 arrangement restricting Le Devoir’s editorial team from publicly dissenting from Ryan’s “Canadian hypothesis.” On 23 October 1967, Léger finally broke ranks, submitting a projected editorial entitled “La souverainté: condition de salut,” which brusquely rejected the idea of Canada as a federation based on two founding peoples, charging that, at best, it was a “semi-federation where centralizing pressures, either open or disguised, are being exercised more strongly.” He exploded as illusory the idea that the effective equality of two languages and two cultures could be achieved from coast to coast and declared that “the granting to Quebec of exorbitant competences under common law because of its original character, as the national state of French Canadians, in short, what is called special status,” constituted a dead end, because it was, in the final analysis, unacceptable to Ottawa. Special status, Léger concluded, was at best “the shadow of the thing but not the substance,” and the search for an authentic special status in a true federation was as illusory as “to square the circle.” The dynamic of federalism would always be in the direction of greater centralization and of increasing constraints being imposed on Quebec’s powers. Léger had fundamentally accepted the logic of both Trudeau and Lévesque that an understanding of federalism meant that the intermediate position of French-Canadian moderates like Ryan could no longer be sustained. Henceforth, there was only one problem that true nationalists had to confront: “the possibility for Quebec to be in the full sense of the term the country of the French-Canadian nation, to express in its totality the Quebec man and to give to him all the means for his free development”148 – in a word, full national sovereignty. Prior to publication, Léger and Ryan met, with the latter noting that Le Devoir could not have two contradictory positions on so fundamental a question to French Canada. If Léger insisted on publication, Ryan informed him that he would have to abandon the post and status of editorialist, although he could remain with the paper as international news director, with the right to occasionally publish commentaries under the op-ed rubric. Léger chose the second option, recalling years later that his relations with Ryan remained “cordial and courteous.”149



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The dismissal rankled many of Le Devoir’s journalists, some of whom signed a collective letter, which they also sent to André Laurendeau, protesting the lack of intellectual freedom and what they regarded as a dangerous tendency towards “monolithism” at the paper. At the precise moment when Quebeckers were confronted with such a fundamental choice, they asked, “is the director’s judgment the only one that counts, and might this rule also be applied to us in the future under other conditions?” They appealed to the paper’s long tradition of “being historically the point of encounter and debate for the French-Canadian intellectual community on all questions of national interest,” arguing that it was unjust to deny and inhibit the expression of diverse and ­contradictory opinions at such a time. “The editorial page,” the letter declared, “must reflect the pluralism that now exists in Quebec society.”150 Others deplored Ryan’s “hard line” because they believed that it would cause financial harm to the paper, especially given Léger’s popularity with the nationalist readership, and because it tended to identify Le Devoir with “the anglophone ‘establishment’ or its francophone ­lackeys, and tilt it towards social conservatism.”151 The letter forced Ryan to move swiftly to scotch this incipient rebellion in his own newsroom. His riposte took the form of an editorial on 28 October 1967, in which he denied having “clubbed, sacked, or gagged M. Léger” but simply informed him of the paper’s policy on expressions of opinion opposed to the editorial line. However, he was not prepared to give any credence to the idea that the editorial team was in any way, shape, or form “a round table or open forum,” as such a position was “contrary to the nature and tradition of the paper.” Founded with the aim of “accomplishing the work of honest news” and, above all, to “pursue goals of action determined at the level of public opinion,” the paper required “a high degree of unity, a real communion of thought on fundamental questions. To pretend, within the same team, to at the same time pursue and combat a fundamental objective would be to dabble in the most infantile unreality. I know not a single man of action who would accept to direct an institution like Le Devoir under such conditions.” Taking dead aim at his critics, he proclaimed that, “under my direction, Le Devoir will never be a Tower of Babel, nor will it be the property of a clique, a group, or party of any sort … No clamour, no organized pressure, will ever cause me to betray this promise.”152 In forcing Léger off the editorial team, Ryan sought to interpose a firm barrier to the intellectual inroads of sovereignty-association by denying it a foothold at Le Devoir. After all, the only “clique” or “group” that he

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feared were Lévesque’s supporters in quest of allies in their search for political traction. The protest by the journalists quickly fizzled out, marked by a poorly attended demonstration in front of the paper’s offices that some suggested had been encouraged by the RI N .153 Though Ryan’s actions kept the paper firmly within the orbit of a reformed federalism, Léger’s departure was a blow to the director’s efforts to rally FrenchCanadian nationalist opinion behind the cause of reformed federalism. Indeed, the disruption of the sense of comity in the nationalist group raised new and serious doubts as to whether a reformed federalism could serve as a rallying point of dialogue to bridge the differences between English and French Canada. Lionel Groulx, Esdras Minville, André Laurendeau, and their latter-day disciple Claude Ryan, the succession of moderate French-Canadian nationalists who affirmed the possibility of equality for their people within the Canadian federation, had laboured mightily over three decades to forge a consensus in the intellectual community. By the fall of 1967, both that possibility, and the moral consensus that underlay the very existence of French Canada seemed gravely imperilled.

11 “Anger Rumbles over the City” The Unravelling of the Quiet Revolution, 1967–1969 While the merchants of ideology are playing at labelling the parties engaged in the many social conflicts that have arisen in Quebec, we are living through a period whose dominant trait is nothing other than the harsh imperative of the return to realism. Claude Ryan, “Le retour au réalisme” (1967)

Claude Ryan’s editorials and speeches in the late 1960s frequently juxtaposed “ideology” and “realism” as two intellectual trajectories of his contemporaries. Such approaches were common among a host of North American mainstream liberal intellectuals who gravitated within the orbit of a postwar consensus that predicted widening prosperity and social justice achieved, not through structural reform of capitalism, but through the incremental application of social science technique to pressing problems of unemployment, consumption, inequality, and poverty. However, during the late 1960s, perhaps one of the twentieth century’s most prosperous periods, all Western democracies, and the liberal gradualist vision of social progress, found themselves assailed by forces of contestation, some adopting violent forms of action, that challenged the reigning political, social, and cultural consensus. In particular, the years between 1967 and 1970 manifested in many parts of North America a “revolutionary effervescence” among students, African Americans, and elements of the labour movement that induced many moderate liberals and conservatives to fear the overthrow of social authority.1 Recent historical interpretations have occluded political conflict in order to highlight this era as one of “cultural revolution,” in which “countercultural” values and lifestyles, emanating from youth, were universalized in a new

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mainstream morality of individual self-expression and satisfaction – what Ryan would have described as the elaboration of new modes of human relations bearing “no reference at all to superior authority or to an invisible moral order beyond the realities of human nature.”2 Significantly, Quebec society and, in particular, Claude Ryan’s Montreal were some of the liveliest North American cockpits for such movements of contestation, which were lived far more intensively in Quebec than in English Canada. By 1967, Montreal was not only the focal point for a vociferous movement of student protest in both universities and in the new colleges, the C E GE P s that had replaced the old collèges classiques, but also had become the principal site for a coalition of left-wing movements united in their application of the ideology of decolonization to the relationship between Quebec and Canada. In turn, decolonization theory shifted elements of Quebec nationalism into a more radical phase. Labour unrest and radicalism also intensified, as ideas of social confrontation permeated newly organized white-collar unions of teachers and government employees.3 As one of the key public intellectuals of French-Canadian society, Ryan explicitly viewed it as his role to interpret these new social and ideological currents in light of the past history and values of his society, a task he accomplished through the lens of his social liberal creed. North American intellectuals, particularly those like Ryan whose public authority depended on sustaining a mediating pose that involved a persistent search for a moral consensus between established norms of thought and culture and reformist expectations that sometimes verged on the utopian, experienced the late 1960s as one of profound crisis. The manifestations of violence associated with many of the new ideological currents seemed to render dialogue, that currency of the public intellectual, fruitless. Indeed, in Quebec, the francophone intellectual community was fissured by the increasing dissonance that accompanied the erosion of the Quiet Revolution as a consensual project in which the Quebec state had combined the intensities of social reform and nationalism between 1959 and 1968.4 What was more troubling to intellectuals like Ryan was not so much the images of youth on the barricades, but that the years between 1967 and 1970 witnessed the decisive end of older systems of fidelity that had once organized personal and collective identity and, in particular, the outright rejection of the concept of a Catholic French Canada.5 Yet, unlike many of his American counterparts, who saw in the excesses of the New Left and the counterculture the negation of the values of civilization, and undertook a pilgrimage from progressive liberalism to neoconservatism,6 Ryan remained firmly within the



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liberal camp. His choice both reflected and continued to nourish a persistent political culture in both English Canada and Quebec whose bias, throughout the late 1960s and well into the early 1980s, remained wedded to the “vital centre” liberalism of the 1950s, tilted towards the ­progressive side of the ideological spectrum. Through the ministrations of  intellectuals like Ryan, Canada, although subjected to the cultural stresses of the 1960s and the persistent uncertainty of the outcome of the struggle between a reformed federalism and political sovereignty for Quebec, resisted the process of “fracturing” and polarization that had begun to significantly alter American political discourse in this period.7 Ryan’s continued faith was that positive and enduring social change could come from dialogue and cross-fertilization between radical ideological currents and the liberal mainstream, a process mediated by public intellectuals like him. It was a mistake, he believed, to counter radical excess with reactionary intransigence, which could only accentuate appeals to violence by both radicals and conservatives, and thus hasten the obsolescence of those liberal democratic values that alone could ­guarantee Quebec’s future progress.

Chronicling “the decomposition of Catholicism”8 What coherence existed in francophone Quebec society around the aims of the Quiet Revolution was contingent on the widespread acceptance among intellectual, social, and political elites of a vision of a reformed Christendom, in which refurbished and modernized Catholic institutions and convictions functioned as consensual “pre-political” values that undergirded an activist state wedded to a dynamic social liberalism. Church and state would collaborate in forging a new “public spirit” aware of the problems facing a rapidly evolving society, “accepting of the social dimension of existence,” and resting on “an active and unreserved compromise at the service of a society that considers its past but is mainly oriented towards the future.”9 Catholic intellectuals such as Claude Ryan could, as late as 1967, hail Pope Paul VI’s endorsement of “the positive intervention of the state” in the “immense task of planning for development” undertaken with “the concern for the whole man … and the concern for all men.”10 The papal encyclical Populorum Progressio of 1967 appeared to offer theological sanction for the advent of a Galbraithian “good society,” that desideratum of North American social liberals that eschewed questioning the essential structures of society and sought to

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harness “the classic postulates of free enterprise and the interdependence of citizens in the pursuit of more elevated goals than mere individual interest.” The achievement of this “new stage in the perfecting of human life” would be the fruit of a “neoliberal” vision that would avoid the excessive state intervention of a socialist system. Public authority must, declared Ryan, become “less of a technician and more humanist” and attend to “the tasks of planning the human milieu, developing its cultural and social equipment, and improving the quality of human life.”11 Invited to address the Liberal Federation of Canada’s fall congress in 1966, Ryan urged the delegates to aspire to a new stage of human history, by “depoliticizing” the question of social security: it was time to elaborate a more “authentic” idea of democracy by detaching the idea of security from that of reward for productivity, and to target particular human needs. In this way, Canadian society could “rise above the rut to which an excessive and frequently artificial culture of production has consigned us, and … put human need back at the centre of all economic and social policy.”12 Given the rapid pace of change that Quebec had experienced in the early 1960s, Ryan hoped that the election of a more conservative government would allow for a breathing space where both church and state could take stock, and where an orderly transfer of power between clerical and Catholic lay professionals might be accomplished. As evidence of this more conservative mood, Ryan declared that he was “rather struck by the fairly peaceful way in which we have accomplished the transition from one age to another. No one would say that we are witnessing a revolution of the laity against the clergy.” That said, Ryan was forceful in insisting that whatever power the clergy might possess in the future would derive from their capacities as “spiritual educators” and not as builders or administrators of institutions, and that francophone Quebec would live through a lengthy period of transition in which the old social and moral influence of the clergy would pass to lay educators, union leaders, media commentators, journalists, and university professors. While certainly aware that issues of education and birth control posed thorny problems for the relations between clergy and laity, he reminded his audience that “people’s conscience on these two questions is not completely satisfied with purely secular solutions. Public opinion would have a great difficulty accepting that the religious factor would be  simply excluded or relegated to a purely secondary role in these spheres.”13 While sanguine about the continued power of religion in his society, Ryan injected a cautionary note, describing what he termed a



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“malaise” and “disorientation” among the clergy, who, increasingly confined to parish ministry, had been marginalized from decision making in the temporal order by the institutional reforms of the Quiet Revolution.14 However, he wasted few tears on these clerical functionaries, the casualties of Catholicism’s modernization, as, ultimately, the final guarantor of any continued partnership between church and state, and the continued harmonization of conservative and progressive tendencies within Quebec itself, was public opinion, and not theology, the presence of clergy in educational and social institutions, or the precedents offered by the French-Canadian past. Power and authority were wielded not by the clergy, but by public intellectuals like Ryan, whose mission was to interpret, mediate and resolve the tensions between religious values and secular currents. It was these intellectuals who, in the final analysis, could determine “the question of the power that the religious idea … exerts or does not exert on the decisions and behaviour of citizens and institutions.” Read in this light, Quebec’s distinctive path to modernity, based on the close conjugation of religious and secular values, was still open in 1966, because, in his reckoning, the “religious idea” still held “a very great power of seduction” over the minds of his contemporaries.15 Yet, by 1967, the spiritual pillar of social liberalism was suddenly in a state of rapid decomposition in Quebec. Church and state had succeeded in negotiating a new partnership around the question of public education between 1961 and 1966 that apparently maintained Catholicism as a key element of civil society, but the institutional compromises had given rise to a good deal of discontent over the accommodationist strategy pursued by the Catholic hierarchy. The problem, as Ryan framed it in a letter to a senior cleric, was that “it is very difficult to create two categories of citizens in the State, religious citizens and agnostic citizens,” and that, in the sphere of public education, it might be better to pursue piecemeal recognitions of the “religious fact” rather than all-encompassing definitions at the level of the state.16 This view brought cold comfort for those committed Catholics already anxious about the new structure of state-controlled colleges, inaugurated in 1967, that seemed to presage the end of the old classical colleges, directly controlled by the Church, in which Catholicism had for generations infused the education of Quebec’s francophone elites.17 These growing divisions within the Catholic community were exacerbated by a catastrophic decline in weekly church attendance. At the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, average Sunday Mass attendance across the province stood in excess of 85 per cent, a robust figure by comparison with other Western countries. By

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1970, this figure had tumbled to 65 per cent; it slipped further to 42 per cent in 1975 and continued to decline into the 1980s. Despite continued high levels of people in Quebec identifying themselves as Catholic,18 there can be no doubt that the years between 1966 and 1969 constituted a critical tipping point in the erosion of the institutional Church’s power and in the marginalization of Catholicism as a significant cultural authority in Quebec. Because Catholicism constituted a system of authority and an institutional presence that transcended national boundaries, some of its difficulties in the 1960s were not particular to Quebec. Indeed, there were important similarities between the experiences of Quebec, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, all of which had evolved highly articulated religious subcultures that faced significant challenges from the individualizing imperatives of the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, which symbolically culminated in the disaffection of many ordinary Catholics over the papal encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae in 1968. But the “deconstruction” of Catholicism attendant on Vatican II – a process involving the dismantling of the old structures of Christian life and their replacement by new modes of conceiving authority, liturgy, the clerical life, and ecclesiastical governance – was lived far more intensively in Quebec than in any other North Atlantic society during this period.19 The key element that differentiated Quebec was that the interface between Christianity and society was heavily biased towards visible institutional structures and strategies and functional roles played by Catholicism in civil society, rather than incarnated in theology or discursive systems of personal identity.20 The preferred response to modernity of Quebec’s church leaders from the late eighteenth century onwards was to preserve and enhance the close institutional imbrication between Church and civil society, which in the 1960s induced them to optimistically attempt to adapt the ecclesiastical institution to the structural developments of the Quiet Revolution in order to preserve an idea of “Christendom” rather than seeking to “privatize” Catholic institutions outside of immediate state control. Indeed, the significant element accelerating dechristianization in Quebec was less the “social” indicators of class, mobility, and affluence favoured by historians devoted to the classic theory of secularization, or the primacy of gender identities and new sexual mores favoured by scholars influenced by postmodernism, although these elements were all present to varying degrees in Quebec in the 1960s. Rather, the particular context of the political link between church and state – a process that first and foremost involved the rapid and bewildering evisceration of the



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long-standing institutional interface between Catholicism and francophone Quebec society as the state moved to assert control in public education, health, and social assistance – was central to the way in which both clergy and ordinary believers in Quebec lived dechristianization.21 In pastoral life, the state became the template for new religious structures, which bypassed the parish in favour of the diocese or new regional regroupings. At the same time, the pressure to “dismantle” the old institutional armature forced many congregations and religious institutes to fundamentally rethink their long-standing commitments in the fields of education, health, and social services, and to abandon or curtail their presence in universities and classical colleges.22 This, in turn, led to a prolonged sense of bewilderment and anger among thousands of priests, brothers, and nuns, many of whom had chosen the clerical career as a rewarding avenue of endeavour in the provision of temporal services. They found themselves abruptly shunted aside and the prestige of the clerical life itself devalued as Vatican II placed considerable emphasis on the fact that lay men and women could achieve the same level of holiness in the performance of secular vocations. Such changes turned what had been a slow decline in clerical vocations in the postwar period into a full-scale stampede away from careers in the Church, with many religious possessing university degrees being the first to leave.23 After 1965, even local parishes found that new laws constrained their ability to provide and organize leisure activities, thus depriving the parish community – and the local priest – of one of its historic functions and sources of authority, a religious presence in the ordinary sociability of Catholics.24 One of the first public intimations of trouble after the close of the Second Vatican Council occurred in the summer of 1966, with the abrupt decision by the Quebec Catholic hierarchy to end official sponsorship of Action catholique canadienne (A C C ), the national central office of the Action catholique movements that had constituted, since the mid-1930s, one of the primary modes of interface between Catholicism and Quebec society. This decision was motivated by two considerations: first, senior clergy worried that some youth movements, such as the Jeunesse étudiante catholique and the Jeunesse ouvrière catholique, were developing intellectual and institutional links to more radical, quasi-Marxist student and labour groups; and second, a growing number of Catholic activists no longer concurred in the project of creating religious structures parallel to those of civil society and denounced these arrangements as a “Catholic ghetto.”25 These changes vastly reduced the Church’s institutional means of transmitting its social teachings to the

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wider Quebec society: these means became almost completely limited to catechism in the confessional public school system and the liturgical and pastoral life of the parish. As the figure most closely identified with ACC, Ryan devoted three critical editorials to what he termed “the crisis of Action catholique,” deploring the fact that the Church hierarchy had chosen this particular juncture to turn its back on what had proven to be a vital and necessary channel of dialogue with the laity and upholding the right of the lay directors of the movements to publicly criticize their ecclesiastical superiors. To those Catholics scandalized by young lay activists who dared to stand against the bishops, Ryan retorted that the Church could not be regarded as a “closed society” ruled by excessive discretion, and praised these young people for at least trying to find a language that could speak to the concerns of their contemporaries, an action that was “a sign of virility” and paralleled similar struggles in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.26 The summary decision to wind up the ACC, Ryan charged, was “premature and unjust” because, rather than building on the experience of the past, the bishops simply decided to “start over from zero.” This decision reflected a broader dissonance within Catholicism regarding the scope of lay responsibility and was a problem that Ryan believed could be traced to the movement’s beginnings. The significance of Action catholique, he maintained, was that it constituted the Church’s first systematic effort “to produce a type of layperson that was not just a carbon copy of the ecclesiastical type,” which created a “scandal” in a society that produced thousands upon thousands of “sociological Catholics.”27 The bishops’ action bespoke “a certain way of forcing people to humiliate themselves beyond all measure” that had been current in ecclesiastical circles and that was, Ryan stated, “unjustified today, even in spiritual matters.”28 The analogy between currents in the Church and those in temporal society was never far from Ryan’s consciousness, and he dissected the bishops’ decision as one that stood within a particular historical trajectory, of seeking to constrain the laity’s ambition for a “particular status” within the church – the seed of democratic possibilities – by putting all apostolic organizations on the same foundation, thus giving way to a “loose (read cowardly) ‘confederalism’” that masked clericalism and conservatism.29 To one like Ryan who was convinced that even the smallest oscillations in the equilibrium of religious authority produced reverberations in the political order, the hierarchy’s decision to abolish Action catholique’s central offices undermined the pre-political consensus undergirding the quest for a vital and dynamic federalism consonant with authentic democracy itself.



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By early 1967, Ryan informed readers of Le Devoir of a “fairly widespread malaise” surrounding the condition and status of priests in the Catholic Church, an observation prompted by the highly publicized decision of two British priests to renounce their vows, a situation also becoming more frequent in Quebec but hidden behind “an old-fashioned modesty” that stifled public awareness of a serious problem. As one with long-standing contacts with both senior and lower clergy, Ryan was regularly the recipient of letters informing him of “a crisis of confidence in the Magisterium of the Church” prevalent not merely among the clergy, but among many Catholic faithful, who evinced high levels of “disaffection and discouragement” with ecclesiastical structures and modes of action that were “out of sync” with current cultural and social realities. A good deal of clerical discontent, in his estimation, derived from the fact that, although priests were the “hinge element” in the Church, Vatican II had for all intents and purposes ignored them, giving a new stature to bishops and laity, with the result that priests were openly questioning fundamental elements of their identity like celibacy, modes of action, concepts of obedience, their place in the Church, and their relations with human society.30 Ryan, like many Catholic reformers, believed that the institution of the Church could be preserved while excising the “Catholic system,” that compound of customs, legal norms, and psychological traits that had, for centuries, provided the badge and cement of identity for both clergy and laypeople.31 The papal reaffirmation of clerical celibacy in the summer of 1967 posed the problem more acutely: while it would make the shortage of priests more serious, it also raised the question of the need for full-time clergy in a world where many functions had devolved to the laity. For the first time, Ryan wondered if there was a possibility that the formal structures of the institutional Church actually rested on living communities of faith, a problem he traced to the fact that the “gospel precepts, as expressed in the forms given to them by the last phase of the era of Christendom, had become esoteric and often folkloric.” He foresaw a world in which the process of dechristianization, pushed to its limits, might force Christians to regroup themselves into new communities. “All this,” he warned, “will probably begin with a great darkness, a type of darkness that those in positions of leadership are always the last to perceive. Who can say that this is not the price that will have to be paid for a true renewal of Christian experience in the world?”32 By opening the columns and letters section of Le Devoir to an ongoing discussion of clerical celibacy in 1967 and 1968,33 an issue that the pope and senior clergy hoped had been settled once and for all by the authority of an encyclical, Ryan was asserting the power of public opinion, and his

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own role as a public intellectual, as superior to the clergy in determining the nature of the relationship between both clergy and people and, by implication, Catholicism and Quebec society. Conservative Catholics were not impressed, and some blamed Ryan’s interventions for eroding the authority of doctrine. Responding to one critic, Ryan sought to deflect charges of theological liberalism by taking refuge in that classic strategy of public intellectuals, an appeal to the superiority of a non-intellectual, “practical” religion of pastoral concerns. Invoking the legacy of “the pastors who lead the Church” – and there is no doubt that Ryan included himself in this lineage – who must be “conscious of their duty to maintain the integrity of doctrine and their duty to take account of the legitimate queries of their times,” he claimed to “find my friends everywhere there are elements of truth, sometimes among theologians who are progressive and sometimes among the conservatives,” declaring that many people “consider me rather a conservative rather than a liberal in doctrinal matters.”34 From 1967 onwards, Ryan began to harbour doubts about the wisdom of far-reaching accommodation of Catholicism to modern realities, which had exposed the Church to “new temptations.” The “fever” to adapt had led many to wonder whether “the very substance of the institution is not being carried away by the current” of modernization, and had led to ordinary people now openly speaking of the Church “with a familiarity and superficiality that is half-way between insolence, ignorance, and frivolity.” He was especially critical of “socalled newsmen and commentators” who treated the Church as an ordinary society, speaking of its teachings and rites as “mere elements of curiosity that we might find in museums or, at best, as materials that we might find in the programs of political parties or temporal governments.”35 In his estimation, such assessments lost sight of one central fact: that the Church ultimately rested on belief in an other worldly order of reality whose source lay not in “human conjecture” but in the fundamental mystery of God.36 But he was merciless towards priests and laity in his own society who “have unlearned … how to speak of God and the Church in living and intelligible terms” and resorted to formulaic and outmoded answers that had little concrete significance for their contemporaries. The danger he discerned was that this void of spiritual language allowed the secular media to underscore the purely human aspects of religion and would reduce Catholicism to a kind of “natural religion” that would no longer be Christian.37 Ryan’s diagnosis offered little new from the message he had constantly preached since the early 1950s: Quebec’s Catholic milieu offered nothing but “poverty of personal



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spiritual expression and intellectual passivity in religious matters” and fostered a society in which faith was lived out of habit. This impoverishment constituted “a betrayal of the faith and an obstacle to its diffusion in the world.”38 Any hope that Catholicism might find a new language to communicate from the standpoint of a communitarian consensus between the authority of the pope and hierarchy and the more democratic imperatives of public opinion was brutally dashed in the summer of 1968, when Paul VI once again personally intervened to attempt to impose a solution to the longstanding discussions surrounding birth control. His encyclical Humanae Vitae largely dispensed with the advice proffered by the majority report of his own papal commission appointed in 1964 to explore the doctrinal and moral questions surrounding birth control, and it flew in the face of the experiences and practices of many married Catholics in advanced Western societies. It certainly disappointed Catholic spokesmen like Ryan who had hoped for “a satisfactory solution to a problem whose data has radically changed over the last twenty-five years,” one based on “a morality of the reasonable use of sexual functions rather than a morality of meticulously calculated abstention.”39 His editorials on the subject must be read as examples of the “mediating” role of the public intellectual. On the one hand, he genuinely sought to justify and preserve the substance of papal authority by acknowledging the uncontested right of the pope to speak publicly on such an issue in a climate where social life “has become so impregnated by sensuality” that Christians had to think seriously about the consequences, and he urged that the first duty of Catholics was to “a priori, trust the Pope” and read the document with openness and a willingness to learn.40 On the other hand, he recognized that Paul VI had defined, in terms of concrete moral applications, “standards that are so severe that we have the right to ask whether these will be applied and whether these are appropriate in the current context.”41 For someone who had invested a great deal in the expectation that more “collegial” modes of authority could be developed within the Church, and that an ongoing and fruitful dialogue between doctrine and public opinion could enrich contemporary Catholicism, the papal decision was a severe blow. Birth control, he explained, “was one of those questions that most required a collegial decision, one that adhered closely to the reality of the intimate life of today’s world.” What Paul VI offered was “a highly personal decision, one that seems quite distant from the experiences and concerns of thousands of faithful and pastors who constitute the most loyal members of the Christian community.”42

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Significantly, in attempting to find a middle way between papal authority and a moral laissez-faire on questions of sexuality and reproduction, Ryan accorded the conscience of ordinary believers and Paul VI’s pronouncements the same doctrinal legitimacy. While the pope might be “faith’s witness par excellence,” he did not own Catholic truth: the faithful themselves, if they spoke with sincerity, were “each, in their own way, witnesses of the faith of the Church.” Where the Pope undoubtedly spoke for many conservatives in the expectation that an authoritative pronouncement of doctrine would put an end to the vexed debate, Ryan hoped that “the encyclical will give rise to a new debate, one that will be salutary for the Church” in that it would make public “those long and patient pulsations of the Christian conscience” that could alone produce “a perfect communion between the faith taught by ecclesiastical leaders and the faith professed and lived by the people.”43 Ryan was acutely aware that, with Humanae Vitae, something had profoundly changed in the Catholic world, and that he was witnessing the dawn of “one of those darkest moments” in the history of Christianity when there occurred a breach between pastoral action and the daily life of the people.44 With this encyclical, papal authority had undergone “a major shock,” from both outside inside the Church, because the decision was not in accordance with the new Catholic values formed by “an age of democracy and open discussion.” The pope could no longer count on the “Catholic system” to produce obedience and “passive silence” among laity and the parish clergy who had to implement the encyclical. Quebec’s Catholic faithful, Ryan well knew from close observation and long involvement in their concerns, would not submit to a decision “unless their intelligence was deeply engaged.”45 For Ryan, the sundering of the essential connection between the magisterium and the daily lived religion of Catholics symbolized the loss of authority of the institutional Church on the key terrain of personal identity and constituted the central vector of dechristianization in late 1960s Quebec. The years around 1968 presented the spectacle of the Catholic world wracked by a pervasive and global sense of “religious crisis,” a mood of foreboding and pessimism that quickly replaced the optimism and confidence on display at the Second Vatican Council. Catholic clergy and intellectuals were less preoccupied by the disappearance of religion per se than by the “exhaustion of a configuration of Catholicism,” characterized principally by a growing gap in ideas, commitments, and behaviour between society and the institutional Church.46 In Quebec, the perception of “crisis” was complicated by the fact that intellectuals like Ryan



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had invested heavily, since the early 1950s, in promoting a language of “crisis” understood in positive terms, as a stage in the transition of religious values of their society from infantilism to adulthood, whose principal characteristic was radically opposed religious mentalities. They presented secularization not in catastrophic terms as the evisceration of religion, but as a profoundly religious process to be welcomed as a part of the necessary adjustment of the institutional Church and older religious attitudes and practices to the conditions of modern urban life, a development that, guided by a spiritually adult elite, would result in purified beliefs and practices and a new and enduring interface between Catholicism and civil society.47 Such thinking, and that of the Second Vatican Council itself, was built on the presupposition that there existed a common terrain of humanistic values, ultimately derived from Christian anthropology, held by both believers and unbelievers, that would allow for the constant infusion of Christian ideas into society.48 By 1967, Catholic intellectuals like Ryan manifested far more uncertainty regarding these assumptions. Symptomatic of the changing climate was his response to the resignation of Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger from the archbishop’s see of Montreal to pursue mission work in Africa. Despite his haughty and princely demeanour, Léger had been one of the heroes of the “liberal” wing of the Second Vatican Council. At one level Ryan, who had worked closely with him during his Action catholique years, lauded the prelate’s “stunning spiritual youthfulness” in making this decision. Yet Ryan was well aware that Léger had played a key role in shutting down Action catholique’s central offices a year earlier. While the cardinal had succeeded in creating a modern and efficient diocesan structure and had erected many new parishes, he had been unable to stimulate new clerical vocations and, more tellingly, he had kept Action catholique in a “floating and rather feeble” state, refusing to institutionalize the pre-conciliar consultations undertaken in the early 1960s with the laity. If Léger had come to Montreal in 1950 to “stem the tide of paganism and irreligion,” his episcopate had been a signal failure.49 Because the cardinal symbolized the spirit of Vatican II for many francophone Catholics, Ryan’s tepid farewell was a pointed reminder that, in failing to concretely recognize the laity – and, indeed, in abolishing movements like Action catholique – the church authorities were cutting the institutional supports out from under the common humanism, the personalism, that had guided Catholic social thinking since the mid-1930s. Unbelief and non-practice, stated Ryan in 1969, “have become permanent features of our collective life,”50 a stunning realization for a society

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that had prided itself on Catholicism as a defining feature of its collective identity. But what, exactly, did the categories “unbelief” and “non-­ practice” mean in his lexicon? A central leitmotif dominated Ryan’s post-1967 pronouncements on religion: the dawning realization that “secularization,” which his postwar theological reading and career as a social activist and public intellectual had encouraged him to view as a process guided by religious imperatives, had abruptly been transformed into something quite different, and was now dominated by the values of “secularism.” Troubled by a visit to theological students in Ottawa in early 1967, where he was astonished by “the brutality, the exuberant confidence, the extreme directness with which the spokesmen for atheism expressed their opinions,” he laid bare the “intellectual temptations” of a time of prosperity, one of which he characterized as “a tendency to wipe out religion from human life, from society.” Contemporary people, he observed, appeared to “hope that [they] will be able to construct a world where institutions will be complete in themselves, whose aspirations will be completely independent of any divine or remote will.” Unlike the secularism of earlier centuries, this manifestation was not restricted to unbelievers: it infected many Catholics, both clergy and laity, who, in the name of freedom of conscience, had begun to pick and choose among the teachings of the church, all the while holding to a vague concept of the authority of papal teachings. Such an outlook was perfectly willing to tolerate religion, so long as it was confined to “a folklore activity limited to people who want to practise certain rites, provided they do it more or less privately without trying to influence or act upon society at large.”51 Like many Catholic intellectuals in the late 1960s, Ryan was much taken with the French Jesuit François Roustang’s delineation of the phenomenon of the “troisième homme,” a religious mentality prevalent among a growing number of Catholics who were neither progressive nor traditionalist in their sympathies but were cognizant of the growing gap between the message of the Church and their daily experience. Lacking the old sanctions of personal guilt, such people, while they remained believers, abandoned confession, gave the language of the Church little purchase in their daily lives, and felt no need either to defend or reform the Church but simply to distance themselves with as little fanfare as possible.52 Ryan devoted his Easter editorial of 1967 to this new religious type, likening it to those Athenians who resisted the proclamation of the Gospel by St Paul, with the difference that “today’s men no longer combat the faith, but are content to let it decline and die little by little. Above all, they give the impression of not needing it.” Secularism reflected the



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human desire to dispense with all authority not founded in reason and consent, which implied the radical relativization of all the central Christian beliefs, such as original sin, the institutional Church, and the reality of a personal God incarnated in history.53 What Ryan was witnessing was less the destruction of Catholicism than the advent of a new religious regime in which the highly articulated institutional Catholicism of the post-1840 period was quickly replaced by a “cultural Catholicism” characterized by a quasi-unanimous aversion to weekly church attendance, high and relatively stable levels of self-identification as “Catholic” by Quebec’s francophone population, the existence of more individualistic forms of belief alongside the official teachings of the church, and a willingness to participate in certain sacraments such as baptism in order to maintain a sense of “belonging.”54 Catholic intellectuals who were dedicated to the refurbished authority of the institutional Church viewed such attitudes as reflecting the inroads of secularism. Because so many Catholics who considered themselves loyal to the Church unconsciously subscribed to this modern form of secularism, Ryan, like many Catholic reformers, frequently invoked the need for a “second evangelization,”55 by which he meant the re-communication and re-presentation of the essence of the Christian faith in forms and discourse that spoke vitally to the experience of contemporary people. This would enable the Church to recapture the intellectual allegiance of that large swathe of the “unbelievers” and “non-practicing” who still possessed some cultural connection to Christian beliefs and institutions. Such a strategy would follow the traditions of Christian pedagogy in its aspiration to produce “a new man” whose values would be collective, but first and foremost personal. Such modern believers, he declared, would not be generated by the methods of the past, but by “a pastoral of small groups” that was far more intimate.56 But this would necessitate a new climate within the institutional church, which, since Vatican II, had confused structural reform with “true apostolate.”57 Ultimately, what secularism represented for Ryan was an individualism that dissolved collective identity and purpose. Therein lay the central challenge of dechristianization. As a postwar public intellectual, Ryan had an abiding commitment to a political social liberalism that accentuated the primacy of the “social sphere” in generating and fostering meaningful human relationships, and he worried that the advent of secularism, by infecting Catholicism with a hyper-individualistic ethos, would sever the link between the spiritual and the political by banishing the Church to the realm of private values and concerns. This would impoverish

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political discourse by turning it to purely economistic, market-driven concerns whose supreme achievement was to equate citizenship with consumption. The severing of the spiritual would, in his estimation, erode what public consensus and social purpose existed in Quebec around the nature and direction of the Quiet Revolution. During the late 1960s, Ryan, along with a number of other prominent former Catholic activists, was asked by the Assembly of Quebec Bishops to join the Commission d’étude sur les laïcs et l’Église, which was presided over by his close friend Fernand Dumont, a professor of sociology at Laval University, with the aim of exploring the “remarkable parallelism between the crisis of the Church and the crisis in human collectivities.” The aim was to counter the pervasive individualism of North American culture by articulating new forms of social engagement that might replace Action catholique and framing a new consensual “social project” that would provide a new mooring for Catholicism at the heart of Quebec society.58 Known as the Dumont Commission, this extensive consultation with Catholic laity was a novel experiment in the Catholic world, paralleled only by Dutch Catholicism’s scheme of pastoral councils, instituted at the same time. Although differing in their political allegiances – Dumont had, since 1963, been a member of the independentist Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (R I N) and later joined René Lévesque’s Mouvement souveraineté-association59 – they shared a number of fundamental convictions regarding the nature and role of Catholicism in Quebec society. Dumont evoked their mutual “criteria of engagement” as intellectuals – a critical openness towards the future that “does not dispense us from taking, despite the risks and perils of the present, precise and recognizable options.”60 Political differences did not inhibit Ryan from inviting Dumont in 1967 to write an article on Quebec’s independence in Le Devoir’s special supplement on the Canadian constitution, in hopes that he would clarify the question of “the notion of distinct status for Quebec,”61 Dumont sought to alert Ryan to the “boycottage” of Le Devoir by certain péquistes who hoped to capture it for partisan purposes. Dumont believed that the paper, in order to sustain the idea that nationalism, should be both “a tradition and a searching”: it should not become the organ of a single political group but should aim, above all, at “reconciliation” of all the intellectual currents of the Quebec nation,62 something that exactly corresponded with Ryan’s own sense of mission. The horizons of both men had been framed by encounters with personalism and with the “crisis” mentality of reform Catholicism in the 1950s, although Dumont’s influences were more French, and Ryan’s Roman



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and  North American.63 Speaking at a colloquium sponsored by the Department of Social Action of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1968, both men started from the perspective that, in the late 1960s, Catholicism presented a spectacle of “breathlessness” as its attempts to engage with modern values and ideologies gave the impression of an institution that was “irrelevant.”64 Dumont and Ryan shared the precepts of the social liberal creed, recognizing that the central challenge of the 1960s lay less with rising economic measures of productivity than in “the reconstruction of a culture, towards the elucidation of new collective values,”65 though it should be noted that Dumont’s allegiances stood closer to social democracy than to Ryan’s mainstream liberalism. Both Ryan and Dumont spoke for a generation whose intellectual formation lay in Action catholique and its attempt to resolve the conflict between progressivism and the forces of order – that is, whether the definition of Christian life should be private, individual, and politically quiescent, or an emphatically social, communitarian, and public undertaking. Both men invoked the legacy of Jacques Maritain, whose personalist disciples had, for nearly two generations, sought to deploy increasingly “seductive distinctions between the spiritual and the temporal” to posit a barrier to clericalism, revalorize the place of the Christian laity, and elaborate strategies of Christian action in modern society.66 However, Ryan bluntly informed his audience that this theological and intellectual capital had almost been almost entirely used up; it was persuasive only so long as “the institutional frameworks and moral consensus from the ­centuries of Christendom subsisted.”67 What could have been taken for granted even in 1964 – the unquestioned authority of the pope and bishops and a broad public consensus on the place of confessional institutions in Quebec society – did not exist a mere four years later. Ryan was, in actuality, describing the increasingly difficult conditions under which he laboured as a mediating public intellectual whose duty was to summon his contemporaries to a sense of public purpose and engagement. As the exponent of a North American variant of the postwar public intellectual wedded to a liberalism of the “vital centre” that sought to recuperate both progressive and conservative ideological variants, Ryan, like his models Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr, had cast his identity specifically around adumbrating a series of modern inflections to the Augustinian theology of the “two cities”68 around which Left and Right, believer and non-believer, might find common ground. But what if these, and the personalist ethic that had given coherence to the social and political commitments of the postwar

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generation of francophone Catholics, no longer formed the foundation of assumptions underlying political dialogue? Of equal significance, the nature of the public intellectual in a Catholic society revolved around the  constant mediation of the claims of individual conscience and the authority of the external theological and moral standards embodied in the institutional Church. By constantly bridging these two imperatives, men like Ryan sought to forge a stable and enduring public ethic that, in turn, nourished political conviction and action. However, the late 1960s in Quebec, as well as in many other Western democracies, witnessed the sudden detachment of the individual conscience from any external moorings, with its elevation to “sovereign” status as supreme over all institutional constraints.69 This had the effect of dissolving, at the same time, Christendom, the quest for a public ethic, and the position of the public intellectual in a welter of relativistic claims, some of which aimed to break down what previous generations had considered the firm barriers between spiritual and temporal. Commenting on Paul VI’s visit to Bogota, Colombia, in 1968, Ryan observed that “the new generation, in Latin America and elsewhere, will not be satisfied with soothing distinctions between ‘spiritual and temporal’ … This generation wishes that the spiritual either signifies something for justice and liberty, or that it ceases to present itself as offering a valid response to human questions.”70 Liberation theology and the New Left induced both Ryan and Dumont to point to an intense desire for participation, signalling a growing discontent with formal democracy. That some, even in Catholic Quebec, were willing to use violence in the name of the Christian ideal, prompted Ryan to prophesy the advent of a new “political theology” based on a blurring of the lines between spiritual and temporal. The location of freedom – which for Ryan was indivisible – as the fundamental value constituted a breaching of the compartments between spiritual and temporal that had been envisioned neither by Augustine nor by Ryan’s mentor Cardinal Newman,71 because, for these two thinkers, conscience was always subject to the external authority of revelation and the wisdom of the institutional Church. Neither of these men could have predicted the consequences of the harnessing of conscience to the expanded meanings of democracy that confronted human beings at the end of the 1960s. What Ryan and Dumont only dimly grasped – their own intellectual horizons limited by their continued allegiance to the heritage of interwar Catholic social thinking – was that a major feature of the culture of the 1960s, and a major force driving dechristianization, was a new tendency of the spiritual,



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legitimated by the primacy of “conscience,” to override those neat theological distinction that had underwritten the compartmentalization so vital to the maintenance of the Christian “system” and to overflow into zones that had once been designated as purviews of temporal ideologies and practices. Indeed, the disruptive effects of Humanae Vitae on legions of Catholic faithful were due far less to a desire to make sex and birth control purely “temporal” matters on which the institutional church had no right to pronounce than to a refusal to subordinate new, spiritual definitions of marriage and sexual intimacy – validated by the authority of conscience – to an older moral calculus that sought to compartmentalize sex and spirituality and thus to implicitly privilege the clergy’s culture of sexual abstinence as more “spiritual” than the laity’s. Humanae Vitae constituted the first critical public episode in an ongoing new “politics of the body” that entailed a far-reaching reconfiguration of Christian political identities, especially in North America,72 and a collapse of the political comity that had grounded Christendom in a system of personal and collective identities among both Catholics and Protestants. And if political comity had collapsed, what was the place of public moralists like Claude Ryan?

The End of the Quiet Revolution: “A State that is besieged and threatened”73 An outsider looking at the world of Quebec journalism during the later 1960s would have had few intimations of Ryan’s increasingly difficult intellectual mission. As one of the most vocal and consistent federalist spokesmen, he was frequently courted by federal officials: Marc Lalonde, working in the Prime Minister’s Office, sounded out his reactions to speeches and texts, hoping for a positive reaction. And in 1966, he and Madeleine were invited to use the governor general’s private railway car to visit Governor General and Mrs Vanier in Ottawa. Later that same year, he was “informally sounded out” as to his interest in following in the footsteps of André Laurendeau to Ottawa to head the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He continued to be approached to lend his name to a variety of fledgling groups seeking to “develop new views and initiatives with respect to major policy issues.”74 His own position as director of Le Devoir was uncontested, and, despite the outrage of a number of nationalist readers over the departure of Jean-Marc Léger from the editorial team in the fall of 1967,75 Ryan earned praise from a

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number of readers for the transformation that he had gradually worked at the paper. One correspondent wrote to Ryan, saying that “[you have] clearly perfected your craft during the past three years and your current articles are now the most consistent, close to reality and closer to the body of your readers. Without falling into virulence, they do not lack courage.”76 Although there was an increasing restiveness with Ryan’s “spirit of the magisterium” in his editorial pronouncements – a subtle indicator of a growing secular temper, even among readers of an ostensibly “Catholic” newspaper – Ryan continued to advocate a concept of journalism closely tied to the older world of the public moralist, in which the editor, and not specialized columnists, was the key figure animating the action of a daily newspaper. The mission of the editor was to be “that honest man … speaking to other honest men” and possessing a wide but unspecialized knowledge of a wide range of issues. Ryan envisioned his own role as coextensive with government itself. “I prefer,” he informed one reader, “to believe in the legitimacy of those invested with political authority and I try, insofar as I am not convinced of their bad faith or dishonesty, to help them to make wise decisions and to govern well.”77 While Madeleine kept him up to date on new theories of mass media promulgated by Marshall McLuhan, Claude’s own self-identity as an editorialist remained resolutely “Victorian,” that of an ever-vigilant “watchdog” ensuring that decision makers in the centres of power “acted according to the best public interest.”78 In so doing, he prided himself that “I put into each article a sum of contacts, reading, research, and reflection that few others would accept to impose upon themselves. If this sometimes gives me a tone that is more assured or a style that is more affirmative, why be astonished or scandalized?”79 An editorialist, he confided, “must be a highly competent journalist, versatile, and possessing a great capacity for work,” and, while he knew few journalists who met this high standard, he was able, by 1968, to hire some new blood to replace Léger and André Laurendeau. The new men at the editorial desk, Claude Lemelin and Jean-Claude Leclerc, were of a different breed: unlike their predecessors, they were university educated in specialized disciplines like the social sciences and economics, and helped to generate a wider readership in the twenty-five to thirty-five age group.80 Ryan vaunted the fact of Le Devoir’s “freedom,” which derived from the fact that its “real owner and ultimate guardian was nothing more than the profound conscience of a people” – a fact that enabled it to remain “serene and as impartial as humanly possible” – and he praised



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the paper’s ability to accomplish its role of “the daily crossroads of the political, social, intellectual and spiritual life of French Canada.”81 Yet, he was constantly aware of the precarious quality of the enterprise. He emphasized that the paper was produced not simply for professionals or university graduates but also for those “autodidact citizens” who had, through experience, personal study, and participation in professional, trade union, social, religious, and political life, developed “a reflexive type of culture.” Because the paper had preserved the orientation of its founders, its goal was not lucrative, a situation that exalted Le Devoir as a “privileged witness to the freedom of the press in Canada.”82 However, intellectual quality alone could not ensure survival as an independent voice, as evidence by the sale of the Times of London – “the voice of Great Britain” and one of the papers he had invoked as a model for Le Devoir – to the Thomson media empire, an entity “distinguished for its commercial success rather than by its concern for intellectual excellence.” What forced the sale were new financial and technical demands, which necessitated increasing turnover of obsolete equipment, coupled with stiff competition from television for advertising revenue. Ryan was troubled by the fact that his own paper faced similar conditions, as an independent stance required “a relative financial health” to allow for certain necessary improvements “but surpluses slender enough so that the paper does not acquire too much of a taste for money.” Despite the modest surpluses he had been able to accumulate since 1964, he had been putting off the day of reckoning when he would have to confront the problem of “terribly obsolete and fragile” printing equipment. By the fall of 1967, he had taken the step of ending the business of in-house printing, contracting it out to Imprimerie Dumont and, after 1969, to Quebecor.83 The fact that the entire Quebec newspaper market was, in the 1960s, subject to the same imperatives raised a fundamental question involving far more than the economic survival of certain media enterprises. The sale of La Presse, the largest of the francophone Montreal dailies, in 1967 to the Paul Desmarais group prompted Ryan to ask how far “the essential need of a minority people for a native press” could be reconciled with “the cult of economic freedom in the abstract.” Calling for a provincial government inquiry into what he termed “an undefined malaise” in the Quebec press, he worried that the “homogenization” resulting from such takeovers and concentration would “be the very negation of that freedom that the whole system rests upon.” If media concentration reached such a point as to be impervious to being counterbalanced by competition, it was high time, according to Ryan, for the state to intervene. While

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he saw little alternative to the principle of private ownership, because capitalism was the “most vigorous” business formula, some safeguards were necessary to protect those enterprises whose aim was something more than mere profitability. To abandon the domain of news to the workings of private enterprise would be tantamount to Americanization, and contrary to Canadian traditions of state involvement in the field of communications. Ryan was no advocate of excessive state intervention in the realm of newspapers, but he did realize that some state oversight was necessary to define the legal structures regarding media ownership under which “a real freedom and an effective pluralism” might prevail.84 The immediate aftermath of Pierre Trudeau’s accession as prime minister in 1968 brought with it darkening prospects for the kind of diversity that Ryan so desired in the world of news and journalism. Eric Kierans, the new postmaster-general, sought to reorganize the nation’s postal ­service along business lines in quest of profitability, ending Saturday mail delivery and abolishing low-cost postal rates for newspapers. Ryan immediately cried foul, charging that Kierans’s plan saddled papers like Le Devoir with delivery cost increases of 275 per cent, while American publications like Time Magazine would continue to be delivered through the postal service. More significantly, the end of Saturday mail service severely hampered those papers with modest circulations like Le Devoir whose readership was not purely local, a situation that Ryan described as “absolutely intolerable,” an assault on the venerable principle of “the right of every citizen to each day receive the daily paper that he prefers.”85 Then there was the prime minister’s own ill-tempered attack on Radio-Canada as a nest of separatists, which earned Ryan’s unmitigated scorn in an editorial subtitled “The Unexpected Rage of the Prince.” Ryan evoked Trudeau’s own “liberal … spirit” that would not countenance “stifling by force of the separatist idea or any other ideology,” reminding him of the long-standing arms-length autonomy that secured RadioCanada’s independence from direct political intervention. “In modern systems of government and administration,” scolded Ryan, “he who … is placed at the summit of the pyramid must accept that certain realities stand over and above his personal rages and frustrations.”86 The only real questions facing Radio-Canada were: Judged by the standards of broadcast journalism, had it fallen below professional norms? Had it stagnated or become mediocre? And if so, were its breaches due more to the “novelty and nervosity” of the television medium itself than to the “malicious and systematic intent” to promote separatist ideologies? None of these questions, Ryan assured his readership, could be answered



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by politicians and amateurs like Trudeau and his circle; they had to be settled by expert regulatory authorities like the Canadian Radio-­ television Commisison. Ultimately, Radio-Canada had to be governed by laws against pornography, incitement to crime, and religious hatred, and further, as a public broadcaster, had to avoid taking a position “on the goals that global society must pursue.” But even here, Ryan was in favour of flexibility: while avoiding novelty and sensationalism and seeking balance, Radio-Canada had to express “an intimate knowledge of the milieu” and especially favour “a position that is respectful of fundamental human rights”87 – thus implicitly summoning Trudeau to return to his own oft-stated principles of liberal civilization. Claude Ryan’s sense of persistent malaise in the world of francophone journalism and media was but a reflection of a more profound foreboding among many of his intellectual contemporaries after 1967 that there was something gravely amiss with the Quiet Revolution itself. Writing in February 1968 in an editorial portentously entitled “Are We Witnessing the Decline of Quebec Politics,” he discerned a “reversal of energy” between those two poles of French-Canadian identity, Ottawa and Quebec City. “For a few years from 1960 to 1965,” he stated, “Quebec politics tended to occupy pride of place in Quebec public opinion. The important decisions, spectacular initiatives, significant nominations, wide-ranging public inquiries, and bold reforms, all these, which for a long time had come from Ottawa, originated more and more in Quebec.” Since the defeat of the Lesage Liberals in 1966, however, the talk was increasingly of federal matters: the efforts of Dalton Camp and Robert Stanfield to reform the Progressive Conservative Party; the reform projects of Jean Marchand and Pierre Elliott Trudeau; the increasingly riveting race to succeed Lester Pearson as leader of the federal Liberals. Despite the fact that Premier Daniel Johnson was firmly master of his party and the political situation, “we have, above all, the impression that Quebec has entered a dry spell both intellectually and politically.”88 Because Ryan himself was an exponent of realism and moderation, he defended Johnson’s course as a corrective to the “universe full of euphoria” that Quebeckers had lived in since 1960.89 Moreover, the province’s public finances faced a difficult economic situation after 1966. The Union nationale’s decision to prioritize “human resources” in the fields of education and health over the building of expensive infrastructure earned Ryan’s praise, but he was acutely aware that the government needed to think of long-term strategies of elaborating a policy of industrial development similar to Ontario’s, a course rendered even more

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imperative by statistics showing that, in 1966–67, there was an overall increase of 3.2 per cent in investments in Canada, but a contraction of 1.3 per cent in Quebec. Given this situation, Ryan was adamant that public-sector wage increases had to be held in check; otherwise, by conceding what other advanced societies could not afford, Quebec, as a “society with much catching up to do,” would “expose itself to ridicule.”90 Ryan was intent on explaining that the core of the problem lay not in the fact that Johnson was a conservative: after all, conservatives stood for “the values of order, competence, efficiency and freedom.”91 While absolving Johnson of any autocratic tendencies, he did recognize, that the administration was completely dependent on its leader and that this narrowness had eroded the dynamic connection between journalists and politics that had been built up during the Lesage years. Johnson as “traumatized by the ‘leaks’ of the Lesage group” and, to counter this risk, had established a rigid system of press conferences in which he personally controlled all information. This brought to an end the glory years in which press and political leaders engaged in the common task of framing a new public purpose for their state, one built on the notion of a government as “a college of men who have freely chosen to associate and to communicate.” Gone was the world of frank exchanges between journalists, cabinet ministers such as René Lévesque and Paul Gérin-Lajoie, and high-level civil servants such as Claude Morin and Arthur Tremblay, where “everyone participated in manly conversations, where there was real ‘give and take,’ where each one imparted, without dissimulation, not only his official opinions and those of his government or newspaper, but also his searchings and questionings, his hesitations and his projects.”92 After two years in office, the Union nationale had become synonymous with “sterility and immobilism,” which was tending towards the stagnation and decline of wider public life. By all the standards Ryan adduced – the quality of legislative enactments and the mobilization of high-­calibre people – Johnson’s government was losing touch with “the dynamic sectors of an evolving society” and, at most, had simply followed on initiatives already taken by the Liberals. These negatives were, however, symptomatic of a wider problem, one that involved the selfperception of Quebec francophones and their relationship with currents of modernity. “The government of Quebec,” declared Ryan, “without really being aware of it, has returned to being a ‘provincial’ government, that is, one that acts like a good paterfamilias, a government that prudently administers without much vision the affairs of a people uninterested in new risks.” Johnson and his principal associates evinced little



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concern for “grand intellectual discussions or debates on fundamental principles,” thus opening a breach between Quebec politics and francophone intellectuals, who, Ryan feared, might be drawn “towards another centre of attraction named Ottawa,”93 thus weakening the impetus he hoped to build in favour of “particular status” federalism. The travails of the Johnson government, and the weakening of the bonds of brotherhood between the press and public authorities, were, for Ryan, symptomatic of a broader crisis facing both the Quebec state and North American liberal institutions at the end of the 1960s. Writing to Father Gérard Dion, one of the major architects of the democratic spirit of the Quiet Revolution, he confided that, for the past two years, the spirit of the people gives a distinct impression of tiredness and lassitude … that after believing that all was possible for Quebec and French Canada, we are more and more overtaken by economic, geographical, and political realities, and also by our own limitations that remain greater than we thought. Only those truly persevering spirits who are dedicated to the advancement of this people can succeed in truly working in this milieu during this period of lassitude. I think that the slowness and heaviness of the Johnson government are fairly characteristic of a widespread mood in today’s Quebec. I hope I am mistaken.94 The focal point of the crisis was the Quebec state, “the only institution that incontestably belongs to us as a people.” During the earlier part of the decade, it had been able to constitute “an embryo of force” and had raised utopian hopes of conjugating expansive social and democratic reforms harnessed to expectations of national self-determination. In a quasi-poetic riff on René Lévesque’s celebrated aphorism “l’État, c’est nous,” Ryan described this political entity as “the essence of who we are, with all our dreams and limitations, with our projects and our backwardness, with our hopes and also with the frightening competition that surrounds us.” But it now faced the contradictions of limited fiscal resources and enormous pressures emanating both from the American economic juggernaut and the centralizing imperatives of the federal government.95 Ryan was increasingly disturbed by the yawning gap between the resources of the state and the level of expectations that had been raised among many of Quebec’s citizens, which in the late 1960s had touched off massive waves of labour strife, first in the public service and then in 1969 among students in the new CE G E P s and universities.

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“Rather than applying our efforts to consolidating and reinforcing this State,” he lamented, “we are treating it as though we want to destroy it with our own hands.”96 At the level of political ideology and practice, Ryan’s hopes for Quebec’s progress remained firmly within the horizons of liberalism, but one shorn of the quasi-utopian “verbosity and globalism” characteristic of the Lesage administration. Liberalism must still seek the same reformist objectives, but must temper its aspirations with “a concern for costs and a more rigorous conception of efficiency.” Empty promises of freedom would no longer suffice in this new “functionalist” liberal canon: what was now required was to couple freedom with “attractive and remunerative employment, efficient and economical public services, and programs that are within our society’s ability to pay.”97 Political crisis, however, was but the most visible marker of a crisis of values, and, in his capacity as a public moralist, Ryan was ever vigilant in reading the signs in the late 1960s. He seized on a survey of Quebec undertaken by the Toronto Telegram to comment that Quebeckers seemed neither happier nor more optimistic than they had been at the end of the 1950s, as evidenced by “a sensation of emptiness when we try to look beyond the present.”98 What his contemporaries were experiencing was nothing less than “the calling into question of the moral and social values that have undergirded the whole effort of renewal undertaken in Quebec since 1960” – the fundamental equation between “the classical ‘liberal order’” and the Quiet Revolution. Viewed from this perspective, the reforms of the 1960s, according to Ryan, were not really novel, but were simply applications, delayed by a few generations, of a model of civilization that had proved its effectiveness elsewhere. All of these democratic reforms, he maintained, were premised on a single key proposition: a trust in the values of reason and responsibility exercised by its citizens. However, the contestations afflicting most Western societies revealed fundamental cracks in this liberal order and the troubling fact that the classical liberal premise had lost the power to make most people happy. “Now that the foundations of the old consensus that stabilized the liberal order in advanced societies has vanished among the young, what,” asked Ryan, “are those who prefer, despite everything, the liberal order to totalitarian extremism of the left or right to do?”99 The most troubling aspect of these developments was the loss of any “deep consensus” that Christianity had conferred on projects of political and social reform, ensuring that these reforms remained defined by “precise and functional goals” and did not call into question “the fundamental political structures and the very destiny of the nation.”100 This breakdown of



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fundamental social concord made the task of governing exceedingly ­difficult and saddled political leaders with the task of living up to unreal expectations, which, in turn, produced widespread cynicism, political disengagement, and the prospect of an “incessant state of siege” invoked by public authorities in to maintain order.101 Not surprisingly, Ryan’s prescription in confronting the wasteland of liberal values was to transcend the old liberal order through a rediscovery of some forgotten elements of the liberal creed. In the tones of a prophet, he asserted an advocacy of moral ruggedness and the Christian spirit that invoked that “lucidity and sacrifice” that he found so lacking in the inflated expectations of his contemporaries who viewed the interventionist state as simply an agency designed to ensure immediate access to the North American good life. In this way, he called on Quebeckers to discover the collective values of “solidarity and equality” that could purify the “corrupt” aspects of the present economic and social order. “Ghettos of prosperity and comfort,” he warned, “will no longer be possible in the open world of 1970,”102 a direct reference to the quest of many younger Quebeckers for alternatives to the current liberal order. That Ryan was willing to reach out to them, and to envision an ongoing dialogue between mainstream forms of liberalism and more radical ideological currents, indicates a need to account for the continued strength, during the “twilight” years of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, of a “vital centre” social liberalism seeking to incorporate elements of the emergent New Left into the mainstream of political discourse.

Reasserting the Vital Centre: “This puzzling skein that constitutes the first manifestation of our ‘Quebec October’”103 Writing to Claude Ryan at the beginning of 1969, Université Laval political scientist Léon Dion urgently apprised him that the dire situation facing Quebec universities and colleges was approaching a crisis point. Contestation was a permanent characteristic of relations between faculty, administrators, and students, but Dion worried that these movements had begun to target the foundations of the social system itself, dismissing the social sciences as mere ideological rationalizations for oppressive social forces. “Democratization and modernity,” Dion concluded, “affected us more recently and consequently more brutally than they have surrounding peoples,” and the “disorder” apparent in the

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hastily reformed hospitals, universities, and CE G E P s symbolized something more fundamentally wrong – “the crisis of old structures,” particularly those of family and church, that had sustained the identities of both proletarians and notables. Like Ryan, Dion blamed the persistent weakness of the Quebec state for this incipient social crisis, proclaiming, “The Quiet Revolution is finished – where are we going?”104 The way forward lay in a coming together of the reformist liberalism that had launched the Quiet Revolution and the new radicalism, and Dion called for a revalorization of the public service – through the intellectual authority of the social sciences – and radical democratic reform premised on forging “new networks” of participation between the people, administration, and government.105 Ryan read more deeply into the problem than did Dion and, since early 1967, had been more focused than many of his fellow intellectuals on the moral aspects of the crisis. While citing “an obvious decay of morality in the field of sexuality and in relation to authority,” he was not prepared to totally condemn what he termed the “new morality.” Although it posed obvious problems for the external authority of Christian institutions, he discerned that it also evinced “a greater respect for the truth” than in periods when Christianity was a dominant force and had had especially beneficial effects in the ethics of public affairs and academic life. Similarly, while stating doubts as to the wisdom of the 1969 abortion law reforms, which gave scope to protecting the life and health of the mother, as potentially “opening the door to a dangerous generalization of legalized abortion,” he was clear that the ultimate touchstone was not law itself, but “the conscience of citizens,” which necessitated a more pluralistic approach to delineating the new frontiers of freedom and public morality. The Catholic hierarchy, in his estimation, could not engage in public debate on the premise that the Church’s moral teachings constituted a universal standard for all, but only from a more limited grounds of ensuring that Catholics had their rights of conscience respected in the abortion legislation.106 Still, he concurred with Dion that the deviation of labour and students from the Quiet Revolution’s path of reformism, and the seemingly interminable wave of contestation, constituted a grave challenge for the maintenance of social consensus. “A new form of plague,” he wrote sententiously, “has installed itself in the city. No one will die of it, but, as in the days of the physical plague, there now rules a sense of powerlessness and resignation that will engender irreparable loss.”107 Developments within the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (C SN ) most perturbed Ryan. This labour central, which had shed its



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Catholic confessional identity in 1960 and had successfully organized a wide swathe of employees in Quebec’s burgeoning public sector, now seemed to reject the liberal precepts of collective bargaining. Marcel Pépin, who had replaced Jean Marchand as CS N president on his move to federal politics in 1965, sought to shift the union’s horizons beyond the mainstream reformism typical of North American labour and the Quiet Revolution. In 1968, he promulgated the idea of the “second front,” the idea that many aspects of workers’ lives could not be improved through collective bargaining. Therefore, unions had to reach out into a broader political struggle to forge parallel institutions, organizing workers as consumers, renters, parents, and citizens, an endeavour that directly sought to build democracy from below.108 Ryan discerned, behind Pépin’s pronouncements, a kind of ideological schizophrenia that adopted “measured language” while “sometimes falling all too easily into demagogic proposals.” Organized labour’s legal advantages, such as the union monopoly, closed shop, and right to strike, he tartly reminded the CS N , rested on “a certain fundamental accord between the union movement with the general goals of society, and a certain accord with the rest of public opinion as to what must be the good of that society.” Ryan astutely raised the contradiction between the fact that labour sought to be both a  “new ‘establishment’” and a “force of contestation,” a dichotomy that  could not be bridged by Pépin’s “vague populism,” which spoke to another era rather than to “today’s functional realities.”109 By reasserting the canons of North American liberal reformism, Ryan sought not merely to recall organized labour to its obligations to the wider society, but also to ensure that labour’s freedoms were not abridged in a general conservative reaction against contestation. He thus criticized the government’s frequent resort to back-to-work legislation, measures that frequently contained severe sanctions, such as union decertification, for disobedience. Governments, he believed, were too easily prone to forget that trade unionism was a major force in most Western societies in “the maintenance and sanitation of the parliamentary system” and that, while unionists must, in the end, comply with the law, it was important to treat them as “citizens worthy of respect and not like criminals.” Similarly, Ryan was sceptical of public sector wage policies unaccompanied by measures to replace the unions’ loss of freedom to bargain collectively.110 Ryan’s evocation of liberalism as a mediating avenue of dialogue in an increasingly polarized society was given its most severe test during the wave of strikes that afflicted Quebec’s universities and new college

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system, the C E G E P s, in October 1968 This militancy expanded in 1969 to encompass the attempt to transform McGill University into a francophone institution and the anti-colonial protests that wreaked havoc on Sir George Williams University. It exacerbated the intractable issue of language rights for the French-speaking majority, already inflamed by confrontations between Italian immigrant parents and school authorities in the Montreal suburb of St-Léonard.111 Ryan witnessed this apparent conflagration with increasing trepidation: his beloved alma mater, the Externat Sainte-Croix, which had been secularized as Collège Maisonneuve and formed part of the structure of the CE G E P system, was at the radical forefront of student sit-ins and occupations. From the outset, he recognized that many student grievances had considerable validity, especially because the new college system had been established hastily, without much coordination, and lacked proper structures of consultation that could defuse conflict between students and the authorities.112 Colleges differed from workplaces, where the right to strike was balanced by a web of reciprocal obligations that ensured that this right did not trump all others. What was so disconcerting about this type of student radicalism, in his estimation, was its “utopian” and “primitivist” rejection of all clearly established form of authority in favour of a vague belief that power “belongs to the masses.” The student philosophy of action was clearly at odds with Ryan’s cherished liberal values of “reasoned discourse, mutual respect, and openness to constructive change.”113 “Those students who occupy a college,” he declared, seize public property without justification … They violate all rules of civilized dialogue upon which higher education functions. They complain of constraints that stifle them. The truth is, they are profiting from the lack of constraint characteristic of institutions of higher education to impose their views upon others who do not wish to agree. They can recite Marcuse, but they have understood nothing about freedom.114 Student power as elaborated by the Herbert Marcuse–inspired New Left was, for Ryan, a dead end: he considered students incapable of running a college or university and he rejected the notion that the values of the New Left could remake global society on the basis of “entirely new structures where student power will be king,” with the constitution of “an academic republic subjected to the ultimate authority of the student popular tribunal.” However, he urged the authorities to look beyond the divisive and contestatory language and to examine student complaints



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and aspirations with “an open and welcoming attitude.” He especially urged Quebeckers to listen to those elements of the New Left ideology that sought to temper the “cult of the individual with a greater consideration of social values” and that envisioned professors as “fraternal animators” of a “free intellectual community,” values that he believed were necessary correctives to some of his society’s ills.115 Ryan was certainly consistent in adamantly defending the need for a single, clearly defined system of authority in educational institutions and in the wider Quebec society, but he was equally clear that, in dealing with student demands, the authorities had grievously erred in attempting to act without the advice of a broad consensus in the academic community, one of whose essential components was the students. Quebec’s educational system urgently required collegial and varied forms of consultation, participation, and delegation that would ensure a responsible and peaceful democracy that respected the free exchange of ideas among professors and students.116 Ryan’s desire to assert a mediating form of liberalism as an alternative to repression, however, displeased some of his readers, who charged that, in their desire to “pussyfoot around, to pose as impartial umpires” between the authorities and the new radicals, he and his editorial team were prepared to countenance “blind and murderous violence as a means of redressing injustices.”117 Readers of Le Devoir were gravely mistaken if they assumed that Ryan’s mediating position was simply an intellectual pose. Rather, it stemmed from two sources deep within the core of Ryan’s convictions and intellectual experience. The first – derived ultimately from Christian faith – was his abiding commitment to the necessity and efficacy of dialogue as a transformative exercise. The second was a social liberal credo that viewed liberalism not as an essentialized, frozen system of values, but one especially open to further development. The “vital centre” of North American liberalism, particularly its American variant, began to fracture in the years after 1967 under the assault of the New Left. Many former “progressive liberals” – men such as Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Norman Podhoretz – whose roots lay in the socialist tradition were disgusted by the breakdown of authority on university campuses, the excesses of the counterculture, the rejection of reformism by many African Americans, vocal challenges of many youth to their country’s foreign policy, and the inability of the Johnson administration to solve intractable issues of urban poverty. They broke publicly with new radical currents and ultimately became the vanguard of a “neoconservative” intellectual phenomenon that reshaped American politics and society in the 1970s and 1980s.118

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An avid reader of intellectual magazines like Podhoretz’s Commentary, Ryan did, at times, articulate the language and concerns of this incipient neoconservatism, focusing particularly on two elements. First, much of his analysis of the vicissitudes of Quebec politics after 1966 echoed American concerns that the state had fallen victim to inflated expectations, and that the liberal credo of “equality of opportunity” was being corrupted by “equality of outcome.” Second, the focal point of the crisis of North American liberalism could be located in in the emergence of a “new class” composed of intellectuals, academics, bureaucrats, social workers, managers, consultants, and lawyers, who had replaced the old propertied capitalist elite as the new wielders of power under the rubric of social liberalism. The power exercised by this new group was exemplified in the abrupt change from the old progressive agenda of reform liberalism, with its emphasis on trade union issues of the working class, to thornier questions of identity, morals, social values, and minority rights. Ryan was undoubtedly well aware of Donald Bazelon’s celebrated article, “The New Class,” published in Commentary in 1966, a founding text of the fragmentation of American liberalism.119 Indeed, the situation in Quebec seemed ripe for such an analysis, given the rapid expansion of the public and para-public sectors between 1960 and 1966 and the prominent role played by intellectuals and technocrats in public debate. As Ryan’s sense of Quebec’s crisis of values deepened, he more frequently deplored the “plethora of consultants” and excessive centralization infecting federal and provincial bureaucracies. Here, he discerned the existence of a new “power elite” relying on a culture of explanation provided by the social sciences. Such authority had, at one level, brought much necessary progress, but it raised the spectre of “a dangerous usurpation” that flowed from the propensity among the new class to confuse “certain metaphysical or philosophical opinions” with “science” and to believe “that these opinions are the only ones with value.”120 As a creed for the “new class,” social science could not, in Ryan’s estimation, aspire to “replace those larger and more total values of engagement and responsibility, of moral sense, that lie at the foundation of both individual and collective creative existence.” Adopting a tone of prophetic denunciation, Ryan lashed out at the professionals of the “new class,” lamenting that, during the past decade, they had nourished the French-Canadian people with explanation. We have practically emptied it of its ancient faith. If we want our people to live fully, it absolutely needs to have a faith that carries it beyond



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explanations that pure science can provide, it requires an aspiration, a dream that can spring only from a total conception of man, of his life, and of society … I believe that … it will not be possible to find a faith capable of inspiring this people to surpass itself if, unless, at the same time, we can find certain necessary links with what was our great historical tradition. The pretention that consists in literally wanting to create a new man with only the assistance of the social sciences would be the most monumental and the most suicidal illusion that we could foist upon the French-Canadian people.121 However, Ryan had invested too much of his adult life both chronicling the internal life and diagnosing the mentality of the francophone middle classes to view them simply as the vessel of a flawed new liberalism. Indeed, with little exaggeration, it can be said that his own career was coextensive with the rise and consolidation of such a social formation. More tellingly, Ryan’s own thinking had considerable affinities with the more relational and cultural preoccupations of the new middle class. Although flaunting his authority as a public moralist in this arraignment of the pretentions of the “new class” created by the Quiet Revolution, it was, paradoxically, his abiding commitment to a search for a common faith, those pre-political values underlying social concord, that inoculated him against the shift to the right that had begun to occur among many American liberals. Ryan belonged to an important intellectual trajectory that continued, despite the travails of liberalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to hew to the aspiration of a liberal-progressive alliance,122 a current that, in both Quebec and English Canada, continued, with little challenge from the right, to frame the ideological mainstream until the mid-1980s. Although he was an avid reader of American pundits who launched the  opening salvos against the New Left,123 the changing identities of American intellectuals did not disturb Ryan’s belief that progress and social peace in Quebec was best achieved by dialogue and ideological cross-fertilization between liberalism and new radical currents, and not by a conservative turn or by drawing inflexible boundaries to prevent the contamination of the core of the liberal creed. Speaking in 1971 in Toronto to the United Church’s meeting of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service in the aftermath of the October Crisis, Ryan provided a significant clue concerning the open character of his social liberalism. He drew on the touchstone of the Vietnam War, whose grim images had so seared the North American consciousness,

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telling his audience that, in 1962, when he joined the staff of Le Devoir, he had considered the Viet Cong as “criminals” for their apparent disregard for human life in the cause of promoting their ideology. He recounted how one of his colleagues who dealt with foreign affairs (probably Jean-Marc Léger) took him aside, telling him “Mr. Ryan, they [the anti-Communist South Vietnamese government] will have to settle this ultimately through negotiation and not through the kind of action which they have been conducting against it.” Ryan came to realize that “the Viet Cong was not only a bunch of criminals but the expression in forms which I still reject of a political feeling, which in itself is perfectly legitimate.”124 Three key elements stand out here: first, the imperative of “negotiation” or, as Ryan might prefer, “dialogue” between ideological competitors; second, the notion that even socio-political ideas emanating from the extreme left were “perfectly legitimate” interlocutors with the liberal order, although any propensity towards violence had to be firmly discountenanced; and, finally, the fact that the speech was delivered to an audience of Christians, indicated that Ryan was firmly convinced that there did exist a certain liberal Christian attitude of openness to other ideologies that formed an essential feature of a civilized society. By allegory and analogy, the Viet Cong stood for extreme leftist and even for terrorist groups within Quebec society itself, such as the Front de libération du Québec (F L Q), which had been declared illegal with the imposition of the War Measures Act. Ryan’s papers contain a fascinating document from late 1967, Edward Shils’s article “The Intellectuals and the Future,” replete with passages Ryan had underlined. The article constituted a kind of toolkit for public intellectuals, defined as academic and amateur social scientists, “highbrow journalists,” literary critics, novelists, and poets, united in a mission of “protect[ing] not only the weak but the whole of society.”125 Shils offered a paraphrase of Daniel Bell’s influential “end of ideology” argument, stressing the exhaustion of the utopian hopes of liberals and socialists, the unbearable nature of the present, and the “directionless path” to the future provided by ideology. Shils and Ryan discerned a “new radicalism” among young Western intellectuals that was less an orientation to the future than a critique of the present, rejecting meliorism and piecemeal reform. Yet, because the hope of Marxism had been so discredited, despite its confrontational language of “power and the poor,” there was a tentative and cautious quality about the new radicalism, as “it cannot relate its actions to anything more comprehensive or fundamental than particular reforms.”126 Could new movements of



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revolution and decolonization emanating from the Third World hold out any hope for a renewal of ideological meta-narratives in Western society? Shils answered in the negative, as he discerned a “moral consensus” that, while imperfect, ensured that “the inheritance of the West and its recent disillusionment are too strong to permit hatred and aggressiveness to take unquestioned command. There must be an ostensibly positive, factual legitimation for movement; actions must be seen to stand in a chain of means and ends.”127 Shils argued that intellectuals should not “await or seek a substitute ideology. They ought to renounce … the belief that total transformation is the standard by which every action or policy must be judged,” because long-term social predictions were no longer feasible. Intellectuals had, henceforth, to be distinguished by an “ethical sensitivity and their sensitivity to the entire society”; indeed, public ­moralists had a particularly significant task in ensuring the growth of “a genuinely valuable civility” that would enable fruitful conversations between government, universities, and the “new radicals” around a new conception of the future, one that looked to the middle term and thought in more functionalist, less utopian terms to ensure a stable, progressive society.128 In what perhaps constituted Shils’s most fascinating insight, he summoned these public moralists, who incarnated both a commitment to progress and an allegiance to tradition, to engage in “a continuing dialogue” with movements such as socialist humanism or decolonization, to transform these into “an ideology of diminished intensity” whose proponents might then move from alienated radical to become “members of the civil polity” who could then “contribute to the moral vitality of the center of that society.”129 Ryan was thus encouraged to auscultate the Communist bloc, especially countries such as Czechoslovakia, for signs of a “cross-­fertilization” between forms of Western “democratic pluralism” and Marxism that might finally bring about a resolution of the hard-edged ideological positions characteristic of the Cold War.130 Closer to home, he was willing to make overtures to the emergent New Left in the interests of forging that “ideology of diminished intensity” advocated by Shils, devoting an entire editorial in September 1968 to a thorough discussion of one of the leading prophets of the new intellectuals, Herbert Marcuse. He reckoned Marcuse one of the most trenchant critics of the reigning Galbraithian social-liberal functionalism that had secured the allegiance of most mainstream North American intellectuals. While he disagreed with Marcuse’s central proposition – that, in modern society, social structures were “repressive” and intolerant because they generated conformity and

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uniformity, thus reducing human existence to one dimension – he saw in such ideas a sign of “the difficult birth of a new synthesis that, if brought to a conclusion, would enable us to transcend both capitalism and Soviet Communism.”131 Similarly, the May 1968 events in Paris could not simply be written off as a question of “law and order.” They raised far more fundamental issues for Western governments, given that the “burning desire for socialization and responsibility” on the part of students rendered it “nonsensical to reject it absolutely and in principle,” despite the logic in their thinking that would have established “a Marxist or Maoist dictatorship.” For Ryan, and for many of his fellow intellectuals, 1968 demonstrated that the supposedly solid “consensus” upon which Western societies had rested for the past two decades was exceedingly fragile, and that liberalism’s only route to survival lay in “a new synthesis between the values of freedom and the values of responsibility” that would “spiritually integrate” these alienated young citizens.132 Ryan continued to cast a worried eye on developments in the United States, which, after all, was the intellectual foyer of the vital centre liberalism that he espoused and the source of many of the cultural currents agitating Quebec society. Events such as the 1968 assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, and the success of politicians such as George Wallace, who galvanized old legacies of racial hatred, presaged the rupture of civilized dialogue and “revealed the powerlessness of ‘liberal values’ in the face of the emergence of violence and new forms of public demonstrations in urban centres and universities.” America was a society on the brink, one “whose moral foundations are cracking,” torn by a hardening of public opinion and a degeneration of public discourse, which could only engender more violence.133 Quebec, Ryan believed, had to adopt a different path, one in which government and public opinion, while obviously guided by the liberal compass, could not write off exponents of diverse, extreme, and potentially violent ideologies as “troublemakers.”134 In a speech to a conference of Quebec judges, Ryan addressed the issue of “political crimes,” openly criticizing the assertion of Quebec’s justice minister, Rémi Paul, that “the terrorist is not a human being.”135 Arguing that the problem posed by home-grown terrorism had to be explained at a more demanding level of understanding, Ryan was prepared to offer the judges exactly that level of analysis, beginning with the premise that Quebec society was experiencing a crisis of the old liberal order. New movements of contestation stood outside the spirit of reform liberalism that had guided the Quiet Revolution, because, in contrast to the old liberalism that was based on “rights and



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responsibilities of the individual,” these groups “prioritized collective realities like class, nation, social function, and age group.” Actions formerly considered “serious derogations” from the principles of an accepted common code had come to be “considered marks of virtue and sincerity because they are inscribed for … [the new movements] as necessary stages on a path leading to a new justice.”136 The implication was that, despite the propensity for violence that some of these extreme radical movements exemplified, mainstream liberal ideology could, by engaging in dialogue with them, undergo a salutary transformation, becoming more open and aware of collective dimensions of human experience. Could it be that Ryan actually envisioned the dialectic between progressive liberals and radicals as working towards the advent of that “personalist democracy” around which his own youthful hopes had revolved in the 1930s and early 1940s? Something of this thinking influenced his advice to the judges as to how to deal with the perpetrators of illegal violence: “We cannot exclude them from our society, because they have arisen from our society and belong to it. On the other hand, there can be no question of these elements being able to impose by force and terror their conceptions on the rest of the social body. It will require a long experience of cohabitation before each side learns to live with one another.” The experiences of France and Italy ­provided some reassurance, as, despite the presence of large Communist Parties, fears regarding the collapse of liberal democracy did not materialize, thanks to measures of national and international security and also to the ideological evolution of Communist militants themselves towards a wider acceptance of liberal democratic norms. In this process of ideological de-intensification, Quebec’s judges could play a critical role as educators of opinion by acting as “the unshakable defenders of the rights of all citizens, including those of the most radical dissidents,” treating crime in an uncompromising manner, but at all costs avoiding the impression that some citizens were being treated more severely because of their political and social opinions.137 Perhaps the central characteristic of Ryan’s social liberalism at the end of the 1960s was its refusal to rely on recourse to “law and order” to defend the values of liberal civilization. Like his fellow intellectual Gérard Pelletier, who had become secretary of state in Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government, he was an acerbic critic of the facile elision made by advocates of decolonization theory between the experiences of African and Asian peoples and the situation of French Canadians in Canada, a conflation that had radicalized nationalism and social analysis in Quebec

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at the end of the 1960s. Ryan accused them of “too easily establishing an  equation between peoples whose condition and history, as well as their recent situation, are so different from ours that we cannot, without nuance, identify their destiny with that of Quebec.” Independence for Quebec was not irreversibly or fatally ordained, and Ryan was adamant that radical theorists were presenting people with “a false and empty argument,” because the “real laws of history” were built on “free decisions, of personal and collective consents, of difficult pathways where goals are reached only by a process of very complex confrontation and testing that is varied and unpredictable.”138 Ryan diverged from liberals like Pelletier in the fact that the latter was unwilling even to include radical extremists in the conversation, preferring to place them beyond the pale as simply misguided, violent enemies of liberal society. Ryan, by contrast, was willing to include them, as implicitly indicated by his use of words like “confrontation” and “testing,” as part of the process in which the content of modern liberalism might eventually be enriched. He viewed with considerable trepidation the propensity of the authorities and the police to use “excessive violence” in the name of law and order and especially to conflate in advance certain unwelcome political and social opinions with crime and sedition.139 He was particularly concerned to refute the growing tendency of Montreal’s municipal authorities to explain social unrest through “conspiracy theories” in which the security of the state was threatened. To concur in this logic, Ryan stated, required “purging” all intellectual and social elements identified with “subversion.” While echoing conservatives in deploring “that students have been prematurely led by some unscrupulous professors towards revolutionary positions,” he maintained that public authorities had to at least consider the possibility that “the revolutionary vision was able to capture so many spirits not because of some sinister plot hatched in Cuba … but also and mainly by the quality and vigour of its social critique and vision of the future.” Indeed, so long as poverty, slums, and exploitive conditions continued to characterize Jean Drapeau’s Montreal, “radical ideologies will continue to grow in a fertile soil.” There were lessons here for progressive liberals, who needed to match the new radicals in “a pitiless critique of the present social order” out of which would come “the edification of a more just and fraternal society.”140 If Ryan believed in the possibility of dialogue between liberalism and forms of revolutionary extremism, it was because he believed in sufficient moral commonalities between the heightened social conscience of the Christian faith, yoked to a progressive liberalism, and the values of



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“authentic revolutionaries” such as Che Guevara, one of the heroes of the New Left, with their “profound love of people, an overriding concern for lowly citizens, leading them to watch preciously over the lives and security of ordinary people.”141 He felt sufficiently sure of these commonalities to use the figure of Guevara to summon the F L Q , which had bombed the floor of the Montreal Stock Exchange in February 1969, to a higher standard of revolutionary morality than it was manifesting. And he had no compunction about upbraiding the celebrated Quebec pop music idol Pauline Julien, who had criticized him for refusing to allow “the socialist partisans of Quebec” to take out a full-page advertisement in Le Devoir to print an homage to Che Guevara on his death in 1967. Ryan told her that this was not done to contradict “his ideal of social justice,” or because of pressures brought to bear by conservative advertisers, but because he questioned the wisdom of Guevara’s method of armed insurrection. Publishing such an homage, he informed Julien “would be viewed as an indirect call or disguised invitation to insurrection in our milieu, and I am convinced that this would be a counsel of misfortune and ruin.”142 In the case of the F L Q , he understood the rising public anger at their violent actions, but still believed that its members remained “beyond divergences, his brothers.” Indeed, Ryan used his ­platform in Le Devoir to advocate for more humane treatment of FLQ prisoners such as Pierre Vallières, widely regarded as the terrorists’ chief ideologue, sending along supportive messages during his hunger strike and urging the authorities to allow him to write a “libre opinion” for the paper.143 During the past few years, Quebeckers had witnessed a great deal of verbal violence from politicians, union leaders, and intellectuals, which had “cultivated anarchy” and nourished a tolerance for occupying and destroying public property. But the blow against the stock exchange was of a different order: because it symbolized opulence and social inequality, it was possible to see in it the sources of the violence tearing Montreal and Quebec society apart.144 Was there a way out of the ideological polarization that was plunging his society into a maelstrom of violence? Given the degradation of political discourse, Ryan had to turn to more effective means of persuasion. His 1969 Christmas and Easter editorials sought the resonance of the Catholic heritage of Quebeckers as the touchstone of social peace between liberal civilization and radical extremists. Nor was this search entirely misguided: despite widespread defections, 65 per cent of francophone Quebeckers still considered themselves faithful participants in the sacraments: surveys revealed that 90 per cent of the supposedly radical

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students still proclaimed themselves believers; and Christianity, in the form of liberation theology, constituted a powerful element in the constellation of radical groups that sought to promote decolonization.145 In an allegory that could not be lost on anyone who had lived through the 1960s, Ryan evoked the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, whom he described as “the man of new frontiers” – the watchword of the Kennedy administration – as a kind of prototype for the ideological convergence he hoped to accomplish. Christ had been followed by human liberators such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, “men who nevertheless assumed the human problem with sufficient fullness to serenely accept to pay with their lives for their thirst for dignity for their brothers.” Unlike Guevara and the new radicals, these liberators proffered a political message of resolute non-violence. This transformed them into types of Christ, continuing his action in history, and, in this way, these modern liberators, forming a trinity with the martyred American president, conferred quasi-divine sanction on the liberal creed of the vital centre, but as one shorn of its Cold War exclusivism, humble in its desire to converse with the new radicals, and biased more firmly to ideals of social justice. Allegorically, Ryan thus appealed to the Christian conscience of social liberalism. He was convinced that liberal values, epitomized in Quebec’s greatest collective achievement, the Quiet Revolution, still had the vigour and persuasiveness to bring even revolutionaries within the borders of civilized politics, by teaching them the central lesson that, while Jesus had come to “change the basis of man and his history,” a “dangerous and revolutionary” course of action,146 his message was emphatically a transcendent one of peace. Radical hopes for collective improvement had much to teach liberalism, but any hope for dialogue between the two depended on elaborating a political theology that renounced all incitations to violence.

12 “This Bewildering Ambivalence” The Dissolution of French Canada, 1967–1969 At the level of ideas, in spite of my divergences with him, I am closer to Trudeau than to Lévesque. But in terms of what they represent politically, I think I would feel closer to Lévesque, because Lévesque is much closer to the grassroots than Trudeau is. Claude Ryan, in John Kettle, “Claude Ryan: A Voice to Be Heard”

French Canada was an ethnic, cultural, moral, and political concept that boasted a long historical pedigree. It welded together two closely related elements: an old national idea premised on the affirmation and defence of Quebec’s autonomy as a political space, the only province in which French Canadians formed a majority; and a more recent quest for equal language and cultural rights for French Canadians within the wider Canadian entity, which entailed a concern for French-language minorities in New Brunswick, Ontario, and western Canada.1 As expressed by Henri Bourassa between 1900 and 1920 and Claude Ryan in the 1960s, these elements opened into a Canadian patriotism or national sentiment whose aim was to challenge and critique the idea of Canada as a “British” nation and recast the Canadian polity into a partnership between two equal founding peoples. Several generations of intellectuals and activists sought, with varying degrees of optimism, and with differing degrees of emphasis on the “Quebec” or “Canada” side of the equation, to conjugate these twin imperatives through the ongoing articulation of a federalist ethic. Beginning with Bourassa in the 1890s, and extending through Abbé Lionel Groulx to André Laurendeau and Claude Ryan, this intellectual lineage appealed to the “compact theory” of Confederation, with its premise of a moral pact between two equal founding peoples, anchored firmly upon a vision of Quebec as possessing a special vocation within

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the Canadian polity as the political, religious, and cultural heartland of all French Canadians. Of equal importance, the very concept of French Canada was so bound up with the formation and continued existence of a group of public intellectuals as to be both inseparable and mutually constitutive. This group, which particularly stamped the origins and purpose of Le Devoir, generated and sustained a tradition of social enquiry that articulated a progressive response to industrial society informed by Catholic social thought.2 This synthesis of Catholicism and social knowledge had an explicit political aspect. Its exponents elaborated a particular relationship between Quebec and Confederation that always conceived of the linguistic and cultural rights of French Canada and French Canadians in collective, societal terms, as the product of the historical experience of a people, requiring explicit constitutional recognition. The intellectual lineage of Bourassa, Groulx, Esdras Minville, and Laurendeau represented by Claude Ryan, was by the late 1960s besieged on several fronts. In the first instance, its intellectual basis was disturbed by the rapid erosion of the institutional nexus between the Catholic Church and francophone society that threatened to sever Catholicism from French-Canadian identity. Second, it was confronted by René Lévesque’s bold gamble in  the fall of 1967 to break definitively with federalism and harness Quebec’s political future to the concept of sovereignty-association. For a wide swathe of Quebec nationalist opinion, Lévesque’s choice decisively shifted the axis that had sustained the “nationalist federalism” espoused by Le Devoir by identifying Quebec’s aspirations solely with a limited geographical and political space and seemingly abandoning the francophone minorities to their ultimate fate of cultural assimilation. The growing momentum behind sovereignty-association was not the only problem that Ryan confronted during the fateful autumn of 1967. The idea of French Canada found itself whipsawed by the advent on the federal scene of an idea of liberalism hostile to historical experience and to the collective claims of ethnic and cultural groups, exalting the universalist claims of the individual over society and institutions. The principal exponent was himself a French Canadian, whose promise and ultimate political purpose was to bring to an end the very idea of French Canada and thus the very existence and authority of that group of public intellectuals who had so assiduously sustained it. Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s liberalism bore profound implications for the federal idea: if liberalism postulated the absolute primacy of individual, then both ­elements of the French-Canadian idea were untenable. Quebec as a



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political entity could claim no enhanced autonomy or powers within Confederation as the homeland of a French-Canadian majority, thus rendering the nationalist agenda of state building nugatory; and minority language rights flowed not from the collective struggles of francophone minorities outside Quebec, but exclusively from the rights of the individual as defined by the federal government, thus excising the political weight of Quebec as a factor in asserting and sustaining these rights. An ardent anti-nationalist Trudeau may have been, but the logic of his position dictated that older group loyalties and allegiances, such as being a French Canadian, must be silenced and sublimated into a single, pan-Canadian nationalism legitimated by the defence of universal, individual rights. The middle ground of both liberalism and federalism that Ryan had so ably defended since his arrival at Le Devoir had become narrow indeed, as both Quebec and Canada appeared increasingly obsessed by the battle waged by proponents of the extreme positions, offering the stark choices of “Canadian” or “Québécois.” For Ryan, what was at stake in the shrill polemics that bedevilled Quebec politics between 1967 and 1969 was the preservation of the legitimacy of a federalist expression of Quebec nationalism and, more significantly for Ryan, the very existence of French Canada as a moral entity upon which his own identity as a public intellectual depended.

“We are intransigent on the issue of Quebec’s original vocation”3 The promulgation of Lévesque’s plan at the founding convention of the Mouvement souverainté-association (M SA) on 18–19 November 1967 elicited a lengthy response from Ryan.4 He had already signalled, at the moment of Lévesque’s decision to leave the Quebec Liberal Party in September, that Le Devoir would remain firmly anchored in the federalist camp, but a scant two months later, Lévesque had presented Quebeckers with a concrete political, constitutional, and economic blueprint for a new state that suddenly concretized the independence option, translating it from “mythical or utopian” status to the realm of “a coherent idea.” It was an obvious appeal to the “new middle classes” – those intellectuals, students, and social activist elements galvanized by the great reforms of the early 1960s who hoped that a new political movement could articulate a new sense of purpose by openly linking independence and aspirations for renewal.5 Ryan had closely observed the evolution of both

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Quebec’s middle classes and the nationalist idea from the 1940s onwards and he was able to place the MSA (and its successor the Parti québécois) within a trajectory of his society’s history. He stated that, while the new movement might not be the irresistible wave of the future its promoters claimed, it could not be dismissed as composed of “rootless cranks,” nor could its leader be labelled a demagogue, given his abiding commitment to social justice, freedom, and political, economic, and cultural development. Rather, Lévesque and his supporters had to be taken seriously, as incarnating “options that drew very deeply on the French-Canadian political conscience and tradition.” For Ryan, the M S A convention was reminiscent of meetings of the Ligue pour la défense du Canada and the Bloc populaire in their “nationalist fervour, their attachment to French Canada (with, of course, a greater accentuation of the Quebec dimension), and with the same preponderant attachment to the milieu of the middle classes.”6 Although the MSA had less appeal to rural and working-class elements, its resonance among public servants, intellectuals, professionals, and social activists meant that it was a force to be reckoned with. Because Ryan had long maintained that the middle classes constituted the cultural “crossroads” of French-Canadian society,7 the fact that the independence option now occupied a significant fraction of this critical intellectual space – and elicited a great deal of sympathy from the social and intellectual elements that formed Le Devoir’s readership – meant that its tenets would need far more careful examination and refutation than they had in the past. Indeed, Ryan’s sense of feeling “closer” to Lévesque than to Trudeau stemmed at least in part from their competition to capture the hearts and minds of the same francophone middle-class constituency by advancing arguments and counter-arguments regarding the prospects for its social and cultural promotion under the rival options of federalism and independence. For Ryan, the critical issue raised by Lévesque’s choice was what had always worried Abbé Groulx, namely, the loss of unanimity among intellectuals and socially advanced individuals and groups who needed to coalesce around allegiance to both elements of the French-Canadian idea – the affirmation and advancement of Quebec and the pursuit of equality within Confederation. Lévesque’s movement reflected what Ryan had already discerned at the États généraux, that assemblage of nationalistminded associations and groups that met between 1967 and 1969 to devise a non-partisan, consensual constitutional future for the FrenchCanadian people. As a delegate, Ryan lamented “the strong tendency to affirm and enlarge the prerogatives of Quebec and one no less pronounced



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to minimize or view pejoratively the action and role of the federal government, both in the past and in the future.” He vociferously objected to the designation of Quebec as the “national territory” of French Canadians as negating the important role of Canadian national sentiment in maintaining their historic identity. He sought to read beneath the apparent unanimity of Quebec delegates an “unrepresentative” quality of the meetings, in that these ultra-nationalist conclusions did not  reflect the experience of French Canadians living outside Quebec. However, he reckoned that “the tendency to affirm Quebec [and] the desire for greater freedom for Quebec are incontestable realities and a major factor in the present political conjunction” and thus marked an important stage in his society’s political and constitutional evolution.8 The central problem plaguing the États généraux, in Ryan’s estimation, was that changing political circumstances, which by 1968 had forced many Quebeckers to choose their constitutional option – either for or against sovereignty-association – had rendered a non-partisan consensus impossible, and he abruptly dismissed the whole exercise of the états as “crystallizing sovereigntist thinking among a few hundred Quebeckers.”9 “The French-Canadian nationalist current of the 1940s,” lamented Ryan, “has split into two main branches, one that continues to seek its way on the side of a renewed federal Canada, and the other which has resolutely opted for the Quebec way.”10 This prospect of division and disunity among nationalists, which threatened to weaken French Canada’s negotiating position in the ongoing efforts to renew Confederation, impelled Ryan to quickly move to scotch Lévesque’s attempt to assert the unity of francophone Quebec around the new ideal of sovereignty-association. Ryan used the utopian language of freedom to build support and lumped his opponents under the rubric of fear mongering and small mindedness. “M. Lévesque’s desire for freedom is noble and great,” he declared, “but so is the one held by those who do not think like him.”11 Ryan astutely alerted readers to the inherent contradictions in Lévesque’s platform: the assertion that Quebec would acquire “the plenitude of sovereignty” was chimerical, given the insistence on then negotiating common foreign, defence, and monetary policies with the Canadian state. “Why does he want independence above all,” he queried, “if he remains disposed to place such key aspects of sovereignty … in common with the other State?” Ryan considered these elements too important to be simply handed over to joint organizations or to delegated authorities: they must fall directly under the control of a parliament elected by a sovereign people. Control of monetary policy was the

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key, as any delegation of this authority to an unelected body of technocrats would place Lévesque in the invidious position of running against the historic current of North American democracy, whose shibboleth was “no taxation without representation.” To Lévesque’s “bicephalous regime,” Ryan retorted that it would be much better to have “frank and complete separation” that would not exclude collaboration following norms prevailing among independent nations.12 In countering the appeal of sovereignty-association, Ryan invoked his long-standing awareness of, and support for, the social and cultural aspirations of francophone intellectuals and middle-class Quebeckers. Indeed, for Ryan, the crux of the struggle lay in the hearts and minds of Quebec’s middle class and their continued dedication to liberal values of achievement, enterprise, and hard work and their desire to live in a North American environment of competition and constant economic progress. It was therefore critical to undermine sovereigntist economic reasoning by scrutinizing both the history of Quebec society and its future prospects. It was not coincidental that, soon after the M S A congress, Ryan treated his readers to a lengthy review of Fernand Ouellet’s massive Histoire économique et sociale du Québec. Ouellet characterized the “trauma” of the Conquest – which had long been used to explain the ­supposed economic inferiority of French Canadians – as a mere invention of historians. In Ryan’s estimation, Ouellet was “a remarkable technician of history” whose work revealed that French Canada’s economic backwardness could be traced to the “persistent, systematic, and frequently unenlightened resistance of French-Canadian elites towards any profound changes to the socio-economic order inherited from the ancien régime.”13 This review was followed in January 1968 by a prognostication for the  future, which involved a scathing critique of the prospects for the European Common Market, an organization frequently invoked by Lévesque and his associates as evidence that the maintenance of strict national sovereignty coupled with a supra-national collaboration ensured a high level of prosperity. Was this what lay behind Lévesque’s confidence that his option represented the inevitable wave of the future? If so, Ryan believed that the sovereigntists were gravely mistaken. Reviewing JeanJacques Servan-Schreiber’s best-selling Le défi américain (The American challenge) in early 1968, he deployed the emerging American sociological concept of “post-industrial society” to essentially write off the European experiment, arguing that because of its outmoded allegiance to the ­concept of the nation-state, Europe was being “occupied” by American industry and was being relegated to the status of an economic satellite.



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Europe’s “confederal” structure, in which each member remained sovereign and required unanimity to make decisions – the very structure for the “association” between an independent Quebec and Canada proposed by Lévesque and his associates – was too weak and narrow to resist American penetration and harness the elements driving the post-­ industrial future: the achievement of prosperity and progress through investment in research, systems of education, technological innovation, and cybernetics, developments that held forth the promise of a society freed from the shackles of market relations. However, the vast scale of these transformations required intense coordination between multinational industry and a political power strong enough to control these economic giants. The advent of post-industrial society dictated a new regrouping of  nations. According to Ryan, the United States, Japan, Sweden, and Canada were leading the way towards this new society, with western Europe and the Soviet bloc remaining mired in an inferior age of industrialism. This new age could be achieved only through a technological and administrative superiority produced by “a ‘real federalism’” that had gone further than anything inaugurated by the Common Market technocrats. Europeans – and by implication, the PQ – had failed to grasp the need for “an original and authentic political power … of a federal nature, drawing its authority from the people themselves,” the only type of government commensurate with the post-industrial future. In arguing for the economics of independence based on imitating the nationalization and over-regulation characteristic of a number of socialist economies, Lévesque and his advisers, whom Ryan dismissed as “armchair ideologues,” were consigning an independent Quebec to an inferior stage of economic development, and it would not make the leap to a post-­industrial future typical of the freer, liberal North American economies.14 Writing in the wake of the November 1967 M S A convention, Ryan observed that two key global forces militated against Quebec’s quest for independence: the power of multinational corporations and the need to create thousands of new jobs for young people graduating from schools and universities, a problem of middle-class social reproduction and advancement that Quebec faced in a particularly acute form. Lévesque’s economic ideas actually ran counter to the fundamental values of the middle class, namely, hard work, the spirit of enterprise, and the quest for self-improvement. Is it not better, Ryan asked, to offer to these future citizens a wide politico-economic framework, to progressively place within their grasp the advantages of a bicultural country extending from sea to sea, thus increasing (this an

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essential factor to their advancement and integration into the upper management levels of large industry) their chances of professional mobility? Or is it better to offer them a framework such as that proposed by advocates of independence, a framework in which there will be … more French in Quebec and less and less French in the rest of present-day Canada?15 Ultimately, for Ryan, two central contradictions vitiated Lévesque’s quest for Quebec’s freedom. The first was economic: given Quebec’s lack of people and institutions that would enable it to “overthrow the current politico-economic regime” and rapidly build one that was superior in efficiency and freedom, advocates of sovereignty-association would have to resort to an accentuation of state control, planning, regulation, and surveillance, a “cul-de-sac” from which francophone Quebec’s “most dynamic elements would always seek to escape.” This he derided as “a new confessionalism no less costly and ill-adapted as that of yesteryear.”16 Echoing the crusty remark of his predecessor Gérard Filion, who believed that French Canadians were so averse to modern technology that they would seek to restrict their engagement with North America,17 Ryan argued that the election of a government committed to Quebec sovereignty would impose intolerable constraints on free enterprise, which, he maintained, required not “isolation” and government subsidies but the bracing winds of “competition” in “intense participation in all that a large and open country offers as the field of professional and human relations.” Such an advantage could be secured only in the context of a stable and coherent federal regime in which a dynamic economic life could flourish.18 Ryan’s hard-core commitment to liberalism was evident in a 1969 interview in which he categorically rejected “the ideal of Swedish socialism” often invoked by Lévesque and his associates and posited that any genuine claim to freedom must include “liberty of enterprise … because if you don’t have the liberty to undertake things in the economic field you cannot pretend to have the liberty to speak freely. If you are not free to act on economic realities, how can you claim to be free to speak your mind on all subjects? That’s impossible. Economic liberty is a necessary corollary of liberty.”19 For Ryan, the second contradiction in the pursuit of sovereignty-­ association was the conviction that francophone Quebeckers needed independence to secure the full freedom to realize their aspirations as a national group. To counter this reasoning, Ryan interposed the moral idea of French Canada, a view of Confederation as a compact resting



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on historic reciprocal structures of respect for the rights of minorities. Minority rights were central to his critique of Quebec independence, for, as he told a French correspondent, even if separated from Canada, Quebec would have to deal with a minority of over a million anglophone citizens. Was it acceptable to forcibly frenchify them, or was this extremely derogatory to concepts of minority rights? “I do not recognize the right of a majority group,” declared Ryan, “to crush the other. If we are going to establish cultural uniformity in Quebec in the wake of a  political separation, we would end up doing here what we always reproached the Anglo-Canadians for doing in their society.” Far better, in his estimation, to trust in the fact that Canada had become a “pluralist or at least a bicultural society” that would ensure reciprocal respect for linguistic and cultural minorities.20 Ryan was aware that cultural and constitutional developments in the late 1960s constituted a critical turning point in the fortunes of francophone minorities outside Quebec: they secured, in a number of provincial jurisdictions, important educational rights, a process that had reversed the dynamic of nearly a century of attempts to anglicize them.21 In this struggle, the most important weapon on the side of these minorities was the moral legacy of French Canada itself: Quebec’s record, as André Laurendeau postulated as a guiding principle for the work of the B& B Commission,22 was exemplary in terms of its punctilious respect for the rights and privileges of its English-speaking minority, and this, in Ryan’s view, acted as a kind of transformative agent infusing a spirit of harmony and respect into the wider Canadian polity. Constitutional negotiations following the euphoria of the centennial celebrations seemed to  presage a new interprovincial dialogue, and the Confederation of Tomorrow Conference, held in Toronto, seemed to promise “a new reprieve”23 from the spectre of Canada’s breakup. Quebec’s inscrutable premier, Daniel Johnson, responding to Lévesque’s open espousal of ­separatism, eschewed his earlier flirtation with separatist elements to subscribe, in an “extremely conciliatory” manner, to the principle of a reformed federalism, reiterating his allegiance to the concept of French Canada. Johnson, in Ryan’s estimation, had downplayed demands for special status and had made a clear plea for constitutional renewal around the idea that Quebec did not ask for special privileges but needed to be clearly recognized as a political entity possessing a distinct role in “the flourishing of the French fact in Canada.”24 The majority of Englishspeaking provinces, for their part, while yet unwilling to make concessions to Quebec’s distinctiveness, seemed disposed to take a major step

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by fully recognizing French-language rights throughout the whole of Canada.25 This, for Ryan, constituted a major victory for the old concept of French Canada. Such concessions on the part of Ottawa and the English-speaking provinces might be dismissed by advocates of independence as too little and too late. But Ryan wondered if, given the new openness and willingness to accommodate expressed by English Canadian political leaders towards the claims of francophone minorities, French Canada ought, “after a century of incessant claims, to relegate this question to a secondary status, at the same time that the efforts of many generations have begun to bear fruit.” What would Quebec’s independence really mean both for the anglophone minority in Quebec and the francophone minorities in the rest of Canada? In Ryan’s view, because proponents of French Canada such as Bourassa, Groulx, and Laurendeau had for so long considered the historic rights of minorities as “sacred principles,” these vital human rights could not be reduced to the status of a bargaining chip, and “we should declare openly that we do not trust a change in regime that would occur under such auspices.”26 Although René Lévesque and the idea of sovereignty-association represented an ongoing threat both to the intellectual cohesion of Quebec’s francophone middle classes and to the moral legacy of French Canada, from the perspective of 1967, he was but the leader of an electorally untested and still incomplete political formation in an environment where varieties of federalist thinking still occupied the mainstream.27 If anything, the greatest threat to Ryan’s concept of French Canada, premised on conjugating a Canadian national sentiment with the affirmation of a distinct constitutional status for Quebec, emerged from the federal scene. In the fall of 1967, rumours swirled around the imminent departure of Lester Pearson, a decision that, according to Ryan, was long overdue, as the federal Liberals urgently needed not only a new leader, but “a new orientation, a bath of in-depth reform.” He suggested openly that, while the party had a tradition of alternating English- and FrenchCanadian leaders, this issue should be subordinated to that of party reform, and that Liberals should not hesitate to break with it “if there emerged, from the anglophone side, a leader able to speak and act with authority in the name of English Canada in certain upcoming negotiations.”28 Why would Ryan, as a staunch champion of French Canada, prefer an English-Canadian leader? Surely a French-Canadian Liberal leader could far more assuredly promote the national aspirations of French Canada within the wider Canadian political community? The answer became clear over the ensuing eight weeks. A small, almost



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unnoticed item that he wrote on 30 October 1967 – a brief review of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s collected essays, Le fédéralisme et la société ­canadienne-française – likened the author’s style to that of one of his own mentors, Olivar Asselin, and estimated Trudeau as “one of French Canada’s best political writers,” displaying “a political culture and erudition rarely seen in Canada.”29 High praise indeed for Trudeau’s intellectual abilities and the clarity of his political thinking. Pearson announced his resignation in mid-December 1967, immediately opening the prospect of a leadership race. Surveying the field of potential candidates, Ryan set forth the ideal credentials as someone with the qualities of a “mediator,” well prepared for direct action, and able to “maintain the dialogue and to prepare the way for constitutional renewal” and especially to persuade English Canada of the urgent necessity of constitutional reform. He reckoned that leading figures such as Paul Martin Sr, Mitchell Sharp, and Paul Hellyer did not have the stature to lead the whole country; younger Liberals such as Edgar Benson and John Turner were too unknown and “inexperienced” to assume Pearson’s mantle. Of the possible French-Canadian names, the leading Quebec Liberal, Jean Marchand, seemed to have no leadership ambitions and had displayed considerable awkwardness and “not blossomed” since his arrival in Ottawa in 1965.30 If the silence surrounding one name in particular was deafening, it was undoubtedly because Ryan hoped against hope that Pierre Trudeau could be persuaded not to enter the race. Still, he could hardly ignore the fact that a groundswell of support, both inside and outside the Liberal Party, was clamouring for the minister of justice to declare his candidacy, prompting him to write a brief note lauding Trudeau’s legal talents and his “uncontested mastery of theory and fact” in parliamentary debates.31 But so adamantly was Ryan opposed to the latter’s as yet undeclared candidacy that he advanced a number of arguments militating against the presence of a French-Canadian Quebecker, suggesting that if such an individual did not have a sufficient base of personal support in Quebec, he would be “a sort of hostage or agent of English Canada” and, unless chosen on the basis of outstanding personal qualities, English Canadians would consider him but “a living incarnation of an artificial concession … on the altar of national unity.” Because both leading French-Canadian candidates, Trudeau and Marchand, lacked extensive parliamentary and ministerial experience and exposure to English Canada, he urged leading French-Canadian federal Liberals to get behind one or two anglophone candidates who might promise a “vigorous and progressive” program.32

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However, by January 1968, Ryan could not ignore the growing clamour within the Liberal Party for a single French-Canadian candidate, dictating a choice between Marchand and Trudeau. Both men he rated as far more interesting than Sharp, Martin, or Hellyer, especially from the perspective of the party’s intellectual renewal, as “they are liberals in the broadest and most demanding sense of the term.”33 His continued preference for an English-Canadian leader, despite the obvious lack of talent and moral authority among prospective candidates, stemmed from one central consideration: because there could not be two or more candidates from Quebec, any French-Canadian candidacy automatically became “a manifestation of French Canada as such. It immediately raises the question of the relationship of the two cultures in this country.” A FrenchCanadian leadership candidate would be regarded in English Canada as the only legitimate voice of Quebec’s aspirations on the national scene, and, on this score, Ryan believed, “Mr Trudeau’s candidacy would pose serious problems for Quebec, especially because of certain constitutional positions he has adopted.”34 From the perspective of a French Canadian like Ryan who was dedicated to both axes of the concept of French Canada – a pan-Canadian equality of language and cultural rights, and the affirmation of Quebec as the political and cultural homeland of the French-Canadian people – Trudeau spelled disaster. While English Canadians saw in him an uncompromising foe of separatism, he was also on record as standing firmly against Ryan’s desideratum – the “particular status” for Quebec that dictated far-reaching revisions of the Canadian constitution – dismissing this form of federalism as completely illegitimate and a half-way house to separatism itself. Trudeau also opposed the type of constitutional reforms Ryan considered necessary to save the Canadian Confederation, championing a symmetrical, classical view of federalism in which all provinces were equal, and in which the central government occupied the supreme position as the ultimate guarantor of individual rights. This rigid formulation stood as the corollary to his hyper-individualist brand of liberalism. The latter ran counter to Ryan’s social liberalism, the modernity of which stood in firm relation to Quebec’s historic traditions of autonomy and affirmation of a distinct status within Confederation. According to Trudeau’s calculus, Quebec did not require more powers, and any argument drawn from historical experience that these were required to further the national selfaffirmation of the French-Canadian people would be icily dismissed as but a “rustic and clumsy tool to be discarded.” Such reasoning was at best a quaint relic of an age of superstition, and at worst an irrational



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force leading to the breakup of the Canadian state.35 Trudeau’s thinking marked another liberal road towards the “end of ideology,” one based on outright marginalization and suppression of rival perspectives. It was in stark contrast to that of Ryan, who believed in a process of mutual dialogue that would transform each original position. Viewed in this light, Trudeau could not be the mediating figure dedicated to the promotion of dialogue between English and French Canada: his brand of federalism required the complete negation of any other forms and thus necessitated confrontation and division that risked driving moderate nationalists towards the camp of sovereignty-association. There was another, even more serious, peril: Ryan’s concept of French Canada, one of whose central axes was a strong and assertive Quebec, also required that the principal spokesman for that society on the national scene be the premier of Quebec, as that official stood closest to, and possessed the most intimate sense of, French Canada’s most profound historic aspirations. English Canadians, Ryan feared, would, because Trudeau was a French Canadian, easily misinterpret Trudeau’s forceful anti-nationalist, symmetrical federalism as the profound desire of francophone Quebec society, and would be led to ignore or marginalize those voices and political currents that more authentically expressed Quebec’s desire for equality and fundamental change. All of Ryan’s arguments were rehearsed even before Trudeau officially declared his candidacy on 17 February 1968. In a long commentary on his speech on the constitutional problem to a convention of the Quebec Liberal Party at the end of January, Ryan gave Trudeau high marks for his “intellectual vigour, his subtle force of seduction, and his proven courage,” remarking that he had transcended his public perception as an “abstract intellectual.” But, he cautioned, the speech’s resounding success came at the expense of occluding “the particular dimension called Quebec” as key to the constitutional problem, and he was especially exercised that, while not closing the door on a new division of powers, the congress, under Trudeau’s direction, gave no scope to “the specific and original will of Quebec.” Indeed, following the promptings of the minister of justice, Liberal delegates seemed to be reducing the CanadaQuebec problem to a mere question of language rights, rather than viewing these as bound up with Quebec’s aspirations for recognition as “a distinct society (or nation).”36 At this stage, Trudeau’s thinking was “too dispassionately logical and rational to be an accurate reflection of the complexity of Canadian reality,” and, while he might be an admirable representative of French-Canadian culture, his loudly proclaimed lack of

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sympathy for Quebec’s aspirations for distinctiveness within Confederation disqualified him from being an authentic representative of FrenchCanadian society.37 The distinction drawn by Ryan between “culture” and “society” was, in this context, most significant: it signalled his allegiance to André Laurendeau’s formulations, in his draft of the first volume of the B & B Commission report, which transmuted the classic struggle of “two nations” – the old historical dynamic that underlay the concept of French Canada – into a definition of Canada as the product of two distinct “societies,” each possessing political, economic, linguistic, and cultural dimensions. This logic underwrote Ryan’s enunciation of “particular status” for Quebec. It would not be lost on readers of Le Devoir that Trudeau and his acolytes had publicly opposed Laurendeau’s draft,38 and that the extent of his allegiance to the concept of a distinct society was to the linguistic dimension of equality for individual French Canadians. The collective political and economic aspects of promoting French Canada as a distinct society were, to him, little more than the detritus of a bankrupt nationalist heritage. The now-classic joust between Trudeau and Daniel Johnson, which occurred in Ottawa at the constitutional conference in early February 1968, solidified, in the eyes of English-Canadian opinion, Trudeau’s ­stature as a reliable bulwark against the threat of separatism.39 Before the conference opened, Ryan worried that Trudeau’s plan for a charter of  rights as the centrepiece of constitutional reform might sidetrack the momentum towards entrenching the recommendations of the B& B Commission for equal language rights. As a staunch liberal, Ryan was not opposed to such a charter, but he was unenthusiastic, maintaining that it could not take priority over a host of related constitutional discussions, namely those encompassing the respective powers of provincial and federal jurisdictions, and the need for a new machinery for arbitration of constitutional disputes.40 For Trudeau, the overarching cure for Canada’s divisions was to guarantee individual rights; for Ryan, this “cure” was contingent on “keeping the particular States united in the pursuit of common objectives, especially when one of those States aspires to a measure of sovereignty that often astonishes the others” – in other words, the elaboration of a “genuinely binational State” in which no group or province would feel frustrated or exploited by the others, but with sufficient dynamism to compete effectively with other countries.41 It was clear from the outset that the federal government had decided, in undertaking constitutional renewal, to go against the B& B Commission’s advice and to radically bifurcate language rights from discussion of



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greater provincial powers.42 Still, he commented favourably on aspects of the federal brief, which went further than any document since 1867 in recognizing equal language rights and endorsed the need for enhanced federal authority in this sphere to ensure equality between English and French. However, he observed Trudeau’s hand at work in the brief’s “unreal” silence, the failure to mention the word “Quebec” anywhere in its 47 pages!43 This contrasted forcefully with the “realism” of the memorandum of the Quebec government, which, in Ryan’s estimation, articulated modest and collaborative goals for a renewed federation: “a reasonable and original autonomy” that allowed Quebec to “assure its development in all spheres where its personality is vitally implicated” but at the same time, a desire “to continue to participate in a wider federal system.”44 Ryan was clearly taken aback by the English-Canadian reaction to the confrontation between Trudeau and Johnson, which seemed to interpret the conflict between the two as a struggle between federalism and separatism. Worse still, many English Canadians, by pillorying Johnson as a separatist, took Trudeau’s pronouncements as the French-Canadian expression of federalism. Ryan held Johnson accountable for “the sin of vulgarity”45 with his derisive reference to Trudeau as “Lord Elliott” – thus impugning his credentials as an authentic French Canadian – but Trudeau was the major offender, taking what was in fact a legitimate expression of federalism in Quebec’s brief, and “without giving sufficient attention to his adversary’s position” – namely, “particular status” – reduced it to “a demonstration by the absurd,” waving about the “scarecrow” of separatism to argue vociferously against countenancing any of Quebec’s demands for increased provincial powers.46 Ryan objected that Trudeau’s attack misrepresented the logic of Johnson’s position. All Quebec asked – and this had also been the position of Le Devoir for several years – was a more carefully circumscribed sphere of competence for the federal government, to avoid the excessive centralization that had characterized the past four decades; either “exclusive or participating competence” for Quebec in social security, international relations, and the domain of radio and television; and a revision of competences in marriage and divorce, immigration, control and funding of the film industry, incorporation of companies, road transport, and labour relations. Such demands hardly constituted a “heretical” form of federalism that was but the antechamber to full-fledged national sovereignty.47 What, then, were Trudeau’s motives in taking such a hard line, especially as he had, according to Ryan, conceded that the idea of particular status was, indeed,

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present in embryonic form in the British North American Act itself? Could it be that Trudeau had already hitched his star to a rising tide of anti-Quebec opinion in English Canada that had crystallized since Charles de Gaulle’s visit in the summer of 1967? Ryan certainly thought so. It became apparent in February and March 1968 that, while Trudeau had the support of only one of his six Quebec ministerial colleagues (Jean Marchand), a “bandwagon” effect of conversion to Trudeau was sweeping the media as well as political and intellectual circles in English Canada.48 This was, at one level, understandable to him, as Toronto newspapers seemed to swallow hook, line, and sinker the notion that Trudeau’s interventions at the Liberal policy conference and at the constitutional conference had put paid, once and for all, on the idea of special status. However, Ryan felt it necessary to lay bare what he considered the “ambiguities” surrounding Trudeau’s entry into the race, dissecting the motives of English-speaking Liberals as a curious compound of “sentiment, electoral calculation, and self-defence,” none of which indicated any real desire to either understand or confront the fundamental elements of the “Quebec problem” inside the Canadian Confederation, some believing that a “veneer of glamour and bilingualism will reduce the Canadian problem to manageable levels,” while others urging a dose of “intransigence” in resisting Quebec’s demands. The danger here was that Trudeau seemed to be offering English Canada “the seductive promise of a logical shortcut that appears impeccable and more compellingly, one close to their instinctive preferences.” Ryan’s words were an obvious swipe at Le Devoir’s former English-Canadian collaborator, Ramsay Cook, who in November of 1967 had written Ryan a flattering letter downplaying certain “small disagreements with you on particular status.”49 These Cook now magnified into full-blown support for Trudeau, citing the confusing and ambiguous nature of such proposals. Cook’s “conversion” seemed to presage that many Conservatives and New Democrats might be induced to move to Trudeau because of his apparent “hard line” on Quebec. French-Canadian Liberals, Ryan reckoned, would simply vote for the only French-Canadian candidate out of  “vanity,” but this would perpetuate a “conflict of legitimacy” as to whether the French-Canadian prime minister or the premier of Quebec was the true spokesman for the French-Canadian people. Beyond the “euphoria” aroused by the prospect of Trudeau, there were darker consequences: taking a hard line on Quebec would risk “the breakup of the federation” or accusations of weakness from English Canada if the new leader failed to deliver on his promises to pacify Quebec. Far better, he



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believed, to allow Robert Stanfield, the new Progressive Conservative leader, to continue his work of research and persuasion in finding a more demanding, but ultimately more satisfactory, formula to accommodate the national aspirations of both peoples.50 He traced English Canada’s fascination with Trudeau to “an old messianism.” Ever since the days of Louis St Laurent, he charged, “English Canada has been looking for a political messiah who can deliver to them the assurance of a Canada that will continue to progress without French Canadians feeling unhappy … At the very moment when the spring seemed about to dry up, a new figure has surged forth. He is perhaps more brilliant, more vigorous, in many ways more modern than all the preceding ‘apparitions.’”51 Ultimately, for Ryan, the attraction of Trudeau to English Canadians as a potential prime minister lay in his constitutional simplifications, his unwillingness to countenance any discussion of “particular status,” and in his rabid anti-nationalism. Over the ensuing weeks, Ryan’s strategy in stopping the Trudeau bandwagon revolved around the presentation of the Quebec problem as one far more complex than mere linguistic equality, an arraignment of the minister of justice’s anti-nationalism, and the suggestion – which he hoped English-Canadian Liberals would take to heart – that Quebec was, in fact, quite hesitant before the prospect of a Trudeau prime ministership, hoping that this last consideration would sow doubts about Trudeau’s capacity to act as the principal spokesman for French Canada in Confederation. He took particular aim at Trudeau’s favourite method of dealing with his opponents, that of taking their arguments to absurd lengths, thus lumping all those who opposed his hard-line federalism in with separatists and sovereigntists in order to polarize Quebec opinion between his own federalism and Lévesque’s option for an independent Quebec. More significantly, Ryan accused Trudeau of reducing the tensions between Ottawa and Quebec to the level of a simple quarrel between the federal government and the provinces, a view that had become so widely diffused throughout English Canada that any sympathy for “particular status” and enhanced powers for Quebec among mediating provincial premiers such as Ontario’s John Robarts was abruptly silenced.52 The misfortune was that English Canadians did not realize that “the vast majority of sensible and practical Quebeckers are situated somewhere between” Trudeau and Lévesque and were more interested in concrete solutions than in participating in a battle royal between these two champions.53 However, there was something more fundamental that accounted for Ryan’s animus against Trudeau’s quest for the federal Liberal leadership.

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In an editorial published on 14 March 1968, Ryan correctly encapsulated the wider meaning of Trudeau’s quest for power, which involved nothing less than a war to the death between two rival forms of liberal democracy. “Mr Trudeau,” Ryan stated, “has an extremely liberal, and very classical idea of democracy,” and, while he himself flaunted an aristocratic mien, “in reality he is profoundly suspicious of what he calls, with thinly disguised contempt, the elites.” Journalists, political figures, intellectuals, and leaders of social movements, who claimed to be “the authorized spokesmen of the political aspirations of the Quebec people and the supreme guardians of their interests,” fell under Trudeau’s derogatory gaze. His brand of democracy drew its sole legitimacy from the direct communion between political leaders and the electorate, and therefore could countenance no persons, agencies, or institutions that advanced an authoritative claim to mediate between elected government and public opinion For Ryan, such mediation reflected the Quebec variant of North American social liberalism and its long intellectual pedigree incarnated in institutional forms supplied by Catholicism. As a public moralist, the ultimate mediating figure, he easily navigated this world, guiding his audience in a constant negotiation and search for balance between the  multiple identities and allegiances that constituted being a French Canadian. But a key element of Trudeau’s ascent, and why in 1968 so many people from both English and French Canada responded in terms of “liking” both the man and his ideas,54 was that he appeared to promise liberation from these authorities and old allegiances by simply bypassing them, and, in the case of Quebec, this liberation offered escape from the political residue of its Catholic heritage. Viewed from this perspective, Trudeau’s leadership campaign, with its stress on politics as a purely secular practice, constituted a central episode in the unravelling of the Quiet Revolution, as it further weakened the connection between religious values and political action that Ryan so affirmedly sought to maintain. Trudeau offered, according to Ivan Head, “a politics of issues, not partisanship; intelligence, not theology,”55 by which he meant the abrupt demystification of those political and social values invoked by men like Ryan as the product of the conversation between collective historical tradition and present-day exigencies. Under this hyper-modern form of liberal democracy, the role of public intellectuals would simply vanish, replaced by technocratic expertise or mere celebratory political punditry. Such intellectuals could no longer sustain the French-Canadian idea, as their ultimate fate was to become hired servants of the Ottawa or Quebec bureaucracy, apologists for either a



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no-holds-barred federalism or sovereignty-association. Worse still, by applying wholesale his brand of individualist liberalism to federalism, Trudeau was engaged in a dangerous wager, gambling on the possibility that “it is possible in the near future to achieve an ideal democracy where the principal political factor will not be the existence of two distinct societies, one of which, since time immemorial, has become used to the habit of power, but only … a ‘polis’ of free men. It is a wish that the community that has the least to lose from such a wager embraces spontaneously, for reasons that are easily understood.”56 Here, Ryan’s implication was that Trudeau, by positing a brand of liberalism that sought to suddenly transcend a world of conflicting national identities, was inadvertently denying French Canada’s long quest for equality by affirming a vision of Canada reflective of the profound desires of Anglo-Canadian modernists, thus perpetuating the inequalities of ethnic power that had bedevilled the Canadian Confederation. Rather than “stupidly” attacking the Quebec nationalists, many of whom were in the federalist camp, he advised Trudeau to present his own ideas – and those of his opponents – in a more nuanced and complex manner and not engage in the “deceptive act” of putting logic and dialectic before reality.57 What particularly concerned Ryan was that Trudeau’s uncanny ability to crystallize support among English-speaking Liberal delegates, the media, and a wider public was articulated on a series of simplifications: a well-publicized hostility in English Canada to special status and to Quebec’s aspirations for a presence in international affairs, and blunt appeals to French Canadians that their only choice lay between Trudeau and Lévesque.58 Ryan felt compelled to don the mantle of the public moralist to set forth the liberalism underlying his own federalist ethic, one that embraced a society in which all ideological groups and shades of opinion were legitimate interlocutors and would either wittingly or unwittingly have a hand in the building of consensus, a perspective that was most emphatically at odds with Trudeau’s “winnertake-all” approach in which a modern liberal society could work only by delegitimizing and removing from the scene any competing ideologies. For Ryan, the fascination with Trudeau meant that English Canada was losing sight of the minimum conditions necessary to sustain a viable federalism in Quebec, namely, that linguistic equality must be accompanied by a renewed federalism whose centrepiece was a more or less well-defined particular status for Quebec – a position, Ryan once again reminded English Canadians, that went far beyond the circles of the Union nationale.59 Language rights alone, declared Ryan,

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were insufficient to anchor the future of the Canadian federation. He boosted the candidacies of men such as John Turner and Paul Hellyer, “honest but less brilliant” English Canadians whom he believed had “left the door open at least wide enough to the search for a satisfactory status for Quebec.”60 Indeed, after a “good interview” with Hellyer during his visit to Montreal just before the Liberal leadership convention in early April 1968, Ryan decided to throw his editorial support behind his candidacy, as he represented “the best of the virtues of action and efficiency, as opposed to the purely intellectual excellence” incarnated by Trudeau.61 He reasoned that Hellyer “recognized unreservedly that Quebec is not a province like the others” and demonstrated an openness to dialogue based on political “realities as they exist” rather than according to the abstract calculus of Trudeau’s logical system.62 Ryan’s editorials did not go unnoticed by prominent English-Canadian intellectuals and opinion makers. Some were bemused, as was the case of Denis O’Brien of the Montreal Star, who confessed that Ryan’s “failure” to support Trudeau puzzled him. Others, such as Richard Malone, managing editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, confessed that, while he found Trudeau intelligent and charming, he had some reservations, viewing him as not yet ready to be prime minister.63 Paul Fox, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, openly praised Ryan’s editorials, convinced that “the pressure of nationalism in Quebec is so strong that we cannot deny something like particular status, and I think that Pierre is at fault in taking a rigid position against Johnson on this issue.”64 One letter that would have rankled with Ryan was that of Blair Fraser, a senior correspondent in the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa, who astutely picked up on the central flaw in Ryan’s presentation of the constitutional views of the various Liberal candidates and characterized him as “naïve, even gullible,” for assuming that there were real differences between Trudeau and the other candidates on the subject of particular status for Quebec. None of them, nor the Progressive Conservative leader, Robert Stanfield, “has endorsed any part of the Quebec position and none is likely to do so, partly because the implications of the demands themselves have not been spelled out in Quebec’s numerous briefs.” Pressing Ryan, Fraser asked why he assumed that only Trudeau opposed Quebec’s ­constitutional demands. “It seems to me,” Fraser concluded, “that only Trudeau has had the candor and courage to declare his opposition to demands that no federal politician, and certainly no Liberal leader, could or would accept.”65 Clearly nettled by criticisms that he was going against his own oft-stated principles in not supporting



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a candidate whose liberalism had the potential to “lift this country, for a period of time, above its geographical and racial division” and make it possible to “continue as one country based on two cultures,” Ryan retorted that “I am loyal enough to concede that notwithstanding the reservations that people like me have expressed, it may well be that he will become a remarkable Prime Minister.” He nonetheless reasserted that doubts surrounding Trudeau were too great “to give into romantic thinking.”66 His attempts to stop Trudeau by persuading Liberal delegates to unite behind an English-Canadian leader were fruitless. He sat at the Liberal convention watching helplessly and, as recounted by Trudeau’s biographer John English, shaking with rage,67 as his preferred candidate, Paul Hellyer, delivered a lacklustre speech and finished a poor second to Trudeau on the first ballot and then, after the second ballot, inexplicably refused to join Robert Winters to unite their forces in a stop-Trudeau effort. If Ryan was enraged at the outcome, his editorial following the convention revealed no bitterness. Trudeau’s election posed “a redoubtable challenge” to federal Conservatives and New Democrats, as both parties urgently needed to find Quebec spokespeople able to challenge a Liberal Party “transformed by a first-rate leader.” For those French Canadians for whom Quebec constituted the political centre of gravity, the choice of Trudeau posed a serious problem, as it was further demonstration of “a renewal of interest in federal politics” that was displacing administrative and intellectual excellence from Quebec City to Ottawa, a process in which Quebec risked being “eclipsed by Ottawa.”68 He gave generous play to Trudeau’s personal and intellectual qualities, announcing, “Of all the political figures that Quebec has seconded to Canadian public life, he is the one who, at the beginning of his political career, possessed the most universal horizons and the best intellectual preparation for the task that now falls to him.” He was, Ryan conceded, “an altogether exceptional figure.” Waxing almost lyrical, he praised the new prime minister as a “staunch friend of freedom, which he worships with no narrow boundaries. Even if he expresses this conviction in a ruffled or impatient manner, the universalism he professes is fundamentally healthy and creative.”69 As a liberal, he also warmly endorsed Trudeau’s central goal of seeking above all the freedom of persons rather than the aggrandizement of the state or nation, and he welcomed his moderation in terms of practical political matters. However, there was urgent national business: the Liberal Party needed both a program and reunification; economic issues had been largely ignored in the leadership debates; and

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“Quebec nationalism” had by no means been squelched. If Trudeau could recognize that his “systematic anti-nationalism” was hollow, he could reach out intellectually to conciliate Quebec nationalism with “that Canadian nationalism that Mr Trudeau wholeheartedly cherishes.”70 Ultimately, Ryan refused to see the Canada-Quebec problem in the terms posed by Trudeau and most of the federal Liberal Party: it was not the clash of a forward-looking, sophisticated liberal anti-nationalist universalism with a retrograde ethnic nationalism, but the dialectic of two modern liberal nationalisms competing for ideological space. The opening round of the struggle between these two nationalisms was not long in coming. Upon assuming office, Trudeau quickly called a general election for 25 June 1968, one that Ryan initially thought would result in, at best, a repeat of the 1965 Liberal minority government. It was to be followed by a fall election in Quebec, in which Daniel Johnson would ramp up the anti-Ottawa rhetoric. Ryan believed that his fellow Quebeckers would adopt a balance by voting for the Liberals at the federal level, while maintaining confidence provincially in the Union nationale “and letting them fight, with the hope something good will come out.” His main fear was that the anticipated massive Quebec vote for the federal Liberals would “offer an exaggerated image of the real thinking of Quebeckers,”71 which, he believed, remained hesitant about Trudeau federalism. Yet Ryan’s own attitude was hardly that of the neutral observer of federal politics. Since the spring of 1967, he had been closely engaged in the renovation of the federal Progressive Conservative Party, sitting on the party’s Advisory Committee on Resolutions in August 1967 and advising Robert Stanfield about contacts in Quebec. He had strongly endorsed Stanfield’s accession to the P C leadership in the fall of 1967 and subsequently wrote positively about his attempts to transform the party by reining in the “hard core” Anglo-Canadian nationalists, considering his desire to listen to and conduct a dialogue with Quebec, rather than proclaiming ready-made solutions, the best hope for Canadian national unity.72 Added to this were family considerations: Claude Ryan’s brother Yves, the popular mayor of Montréal-Nord, decided to join the Stanfield team and run as a federal Conservative candidate, which, in the eyes of some readers of Le Devoir, seriously compromised Claude’s objectivity in his quest to orient the thinking of French Canadians.73 On economic and social issues, Claude Ryan sought to disabuse those convinced by Trudeau’s donning of the mantle of a radical: “He never really was one. He has for a long time been a classical liberal who did not recognize himself.”74 Ryan noted that only the PCs and the N D P sought to extend the



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principle of social security by countenancing the idea of a guaranteed annual income, hinting darkly that “today, the concept of universality is … rejected or at least called into question by a large number of thinkers, especially among conservatives but even among such important liberals as Mr Trudeau.”75 However, any discussion of social security during the election campaign was pushed aside by the national unity issue. Trudeau built his campaign in Quebec around the idea that the achievement of linguistic equality would be sufficient to accommodate French Canadians in Confederation, while, in English Canada, he offered the assurance that there would be no concessions to Quebec nationalism in the direction of particular status. This, at least, had the advantage of clarity, though Ryan was quick to charge Trudeau with forgetting that language differences were the reflection of distinct French and English communities.76 Stanfield had the misfortune to recruit Marcel Faribault, a staunch federalist and constitutional adviser to Premier Daniel Johnson, as one of his star candidates from Quebec. Faribault had, in August 1967, gone on record at a P C policy convention as favouring enshrining the concept of “deux nations” – translated as “two founding peoples” – into a new ­constitution, but hard-line English Canadian nationalists such as John Diefenbaker immediately accused him of undermining national unity with a policy of “two nations,” an ambiguity that was immediately seized on by Liberal campaign strategists, who echoed the same charges. Lost in the heated atmosphere of the election campaign was the fact that “deux nations” was not official Conservative Party policy, nor did Stanfield personally campaign on it. Indeed, his own approach studiously avoided “particular status,” asserting instead the need for a strong federal government coupled with the offer of certain additional powers to Quebec and the other provinces,77 an approach that did not significantly diverge from Trudeau’s symmetrical federalism. Alerted by a young PC operative named Brian Mulroney to the fact that local Liberal candidates were making hay out of this ambiguous policy, Ryan fought back by insisting on the importance of civilized, non-partisan dialogue in both English Canada and Quebec on the constitutional question, characterizing the Liberal method as a “psychological blitzkrieg.”78 If anything, because Ryan was devoted to Quebec’s “particular status” above all else, his editorials only compounded Stanfield’s difficulties by giving undue prominence to Faribault as a spokesman for Quebec, elevating him to the status of Trudeau’s intellectual rival by asserting that his presence in the campaign offered Quebeckers a real choice between

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two distinct types of federalism.79 By the final two weeks of the campaign, it was apparent that Trudeau’s strategy was working. Many English Canadians were convinced by the constant Liberal hammering that Stanfield and Faribault were in the pockets of Daniel Johnson, and thus aiding and abetting separatism, and a large number of French Canadians appreciated Trudeau’s clarity on the constitutional issue in explaining why Quebec could not be sovereign and yet remain part of Canada. As Andrée Simard – the wife of a rising star in the Quebec Liberal Party, Robert Bourassa – wrote to Ryan, “French Canadians in Quebec who don’t want independence have gotten used to hollow slogans, and we find security with Trudeau, and less and less with Daniel Johnson, who changes ideas as often as he changes his shirt.”80 Ultimately, Ryan offered a tepid endorsement of Stanfield on 19 June,81 but he sensed a groundswell of national support that would confer a clear majority on Trudeau and the Liberal Party. P C recruits in Quebec had been weak and the party organization next to non-existent in the province. In addition, Anglo-Canadian Conservatives had not been ready to welcome Faribault and his ideas, giving the impression of “confusion” and “indecision” within the party on the constitutional question.82 Ryan’s most significant writings during the campaign took the form of two editorials, the first a tribute to André Laurendeau, whose death on 1 June 1968 removed one of the major intellectual pillars of the idea of “particular status.” Ryan used the occasion not only to lament the passing of one of the names most associated with Le Devoir but also to remind his readers of the “tragic paradox” of French-Canadian identity, especially when it sought to conjugate the affirmation of Quebec with “the other part of the French-Canadian dream, that which focuses on the goal of equality on the scale of the whole of Canada.”83 Writing just before the St-Jean-Baptiste holiday, he called on French Canadians to forget their political divergences by remembering “the grave dangers that our people face.”84 Adopting the stance of the prophetic political educator, he called on French Canadians to remember the central doctrines of their survival as a people in Confederation. While the history of the past century revealed many generous statesmen, both French and English, in Ottawa and in the other provinces, who “contributed powerfully to the development of the French fact in Canada,” the central truth remained that, at moments of crisis, none of these men had evinced the necessary strength to persuade the rest of Canada of the centrality of FrenchCanadian rights. What French Canadians had achieved, he reminded his readers, “they owed principally to the historic action of the government



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of Quebec. If they constitute a distinct and truly original force in Canadian political life, it is not because they have one-third of the federal members in Ottawa. It is because they control, in Quebec, a government that is homogeneous enough to be able to usually translate their spontaneous aspirations … into action.”85 Trudeau might insist on linguistic rights, but his ability to do so was merely a function of the reality that the state of Quebec constituted “the cornerstone, the primary political lever that French Canadians have in North America.” Ryan was intent on demonstrating that Quebec’s distinctiveness was not merely social and cultural; rather, he informed his readers that the past few years had taught him the most important lesson of all – that Quebec “formed a strongly distinct reality on the political level,” so much so that it could not be denied or diminished. Trudeau’s invitation to French Canadians to abandon their Quebec-centred nationalism for his species of universalism “is to ask them to surrender the substance for the shadow: they will never do it.” Their massive support for him did not signify corresponding consensus on his concept of federalism: it was another manifestation of “a cunning balancing act” resorted to in times of survival, but if push ever came to shove, French Canadians’ primary concern would be the role and powers of the Quebec government rather than the search for influence in Ottawa.86 What Trudeau failed to reckon on was the “intransigence” of millions of French Canadians around the idea of their province’s distinct vocation. Some, explained Ryan, pushed this intransigence as far as sovereignty, but an overwhelming majority preferred the federal tie with Canada. While Trudeau had “brutally” sought to force French Canadians to choose between “integral sovereignty” and his “integral federalism,” it was the “intermediate position” endorsed by Ryan that “corresponded most closely to the lessons drawn from the historical dossier of Confederation and from the objective study of current reality. It is also perhaps closer to the instinctive and reasoned will of French Canadians. They do not want to separate from the rest of Canada.”87 If a Trudeau majority had become a foregone conclusion, the campaign contained one final unpleasant surprise. On the evening of 24 June – election eve – the traditional St-Jean-Baptiste parade through downtown Montreal was disrupted by hundreds of noisy pro-separatist demonstrators protesting Trudeau’s presence among the dignitaries. Ryan had little commendation for any of the protagonists: the prime minister, knowing that his presence at an event so closely associated with French-Canadian nationalism would cause trouble, “committed a serious and regrettable”

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mistake by attending, placing his own person above the public peace; the demonstrators, though their “antipathy” towards Trudeau was legitimate, had contributed to discrediting their cause by resorting to violence; and the police and civic authorities, by using excessive force against the demonstrators, revealed a dangerous propensity to lump together separatism and violence. None of this boded well for the collective future of French Canada:88 such events appeared to confirm Trudeau’s postulate of an inevitable confrontation between nationalism and federalism and, indeed, seemed to give Quebec nationalists no other alternative than to seek full independence. If anything, Trudeau’s ascent, and his appeal to the “dogma” of “One Canada,” “not heard since the days of John Diefenbaker,” led Ryan to consider the words of the nationalist historian Michel Brunet, who commented favourably on the parallel allegiance of Franco-Quebeckers to Canada … and to Quebec.” The election campaign had unfortunately revealed, however, that English Canadians, and especially “that strange minority of particular status,” the Anglo-Quebeckers, could never show openness to the aspirations and expansion of the state of Quebec, “thus suddenly revealing the whole dimension of the pan-Canadian problem.”89 Public debate over the status of this linguistic minority would soon compel Ryan to reconsider some of the cherished postulates of his liberal creed.

The Prophet of Ambivalence Seeking to reassure federalist supporters of the idea of French Canada and of Quebec’s quest for “particular status,” Ryan downplayed the significance of Trudeau’s electoral majority, claiming that many francophone Quebeckers voted for him merely because he was one of their own, not because they agreed with his type of federalism. The election could in no way be interpreted as a blank cheque for Trudeau’s constitutional views. Quebec’s characteristic ambivalence stood unchanged, because rival interpretations of federalism still had effective exponents and a constituency. However, he drew the lesson that the presence of Trudeau and a more powerful francophone Quebec presence in Ottawa might entail, at least for a time, a more muted Quebec nationalism. “It may well be,” mused Ryan in his election post-mortem, “that the present period is not one of the most propitious for the confident expression of Quebec nationalism.”90 And there was sufficient kinship and possibility for dialogue between the strands of liberalism espoused by both Trudeau and Ryan to



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dictate, at least initially, a favourable attitude towards the new Liberal administration in Ottawa. After all, Le Devoir spoke for that “hinge generation,” to which both Ryan and Trudeau belonged, that had lived its youth during the Depression and acquired its sense of civic and social engagement in the postwar years under the banner of “authenticity” and had now acceded to positions of political and social responsibility.91 Competence and a yearning for renewal were the watchwords of this generation, and it had to be admitted that part of Trudeau’s appeal lay in his promise of a new politics of participation that would replace the rule of traditional elites and a corps of civil service mandarins. On this score, Ryan’s initial appreciation of the Trudeau team was positive, and his first editorial singled out for particular praise the strong representation from Quebec, whose leading representatives were assigned first-rank responsibilities, and the prominent role given to those considered “intellectuals” rather than party workhorses. One major area of agreement between him and the new prime minister was in the need for a “more functional conception” of government. Trudeau seemed to move in this direction with a new structure of cabinet committees for the discussion and dispatch of public business, indicating that the federal government was in the hands of a leader “who is calm and self-assured, conscious of his power but resolved to deploy it in moderation, determined to lead but interested in surrounding himself with colleagues capable of carrying out real responsibilities under his leadership, conscious of balance, but even more aware of the immense desire for renewal that lies at the root of his success.”92 After a year in office, Ryan recognized that the prime minister had significantly tilted the axis of the historic concept of French Canada towards the Ottawa pole, to the point where he worried that many influential English Canadians were either losing sight of, or becoming actively hostile to, any assertion of Quebec’s political aspirations. “A line of demarcation has been fixed,” he observed at the beginning of 1969, “which extends exclusively to particular status. Beyond this line, there is no ­discussion, but only condemnation, rejection, exclusion, ridicule, and if necessary, threats. There is no more study, no more welcome, nothing but a blank refusal to discuss.” The claim of the Quebec government to a presence on the international scene was written off as “excessive nationalism if not separatism.”93 Indeed, Quebec’s quest for international recognition in the spheres of culture and education constituted a critical battleground between partisans of Trudeau federalism and advocates of “particular status” federalism. Ryan regarded it as not an issue of “a single sovereignty to be safeguarded, but of two sovereignties that must

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be reconciled.” Given the tensions and suspicions in the Anglo-Canadian mindset that always characterized relations between French Canadians and France, he scoffed at fears propagated in the English-Canadian media that Quebec’s international status was simply a front for separatism.94 Still, he continued to remind his readers of the need to seek “a very delicate balance between the two centres of power,” and he persisted in using every opportunity to inform English-Canadian audiences that, unless a large measure of sovereignty were allowed to rest with the Quebec government, it was entirely foreseeable that “in five or ten years from now the claims of Quebec may go much higher.”95 To readers of Le Devoir, he began to celebrate ambivalence as a moral and political virtue, a contrast from his days at Action catholique, when any such “hybridity” or “schizophrenia” was denounced as the death-knell of French-Canadian Catholicism. Indeed, it could almost be said that, after 1968, Ryan equated ambivalence with being a French Canadian. How to account for this apparent shift in his thinking? In one respect, it seemed to reflect a growing awareness of the need for a looser definition of the connection between spiritual and temporal values that had always marked his central concern as a public intellectual, but it also expressed a fundamental continuity in his ethos. Ambivalence in the sphere of temporal political values might be a virtue, whereas spiritual ambivalence was not. His exaltation of Henri Bourassa as “a great civilizing figure, one of the most authentic representatives that Canada has contributed to the Western political tradition,”96 provided a significant clue as to the nature of the temper that ran through his society. The constant act of balancing increasingly rival nationalisms devoted to Canada and Quebec marked Ryan’s self-identity, as Bourassa’s successor at the helm of Le Devoir, in a line of prophets who stood for a mediating current reconciling the universal dichotomies of “Herodian” and “Zealotist.” This distinction was long a core element in his appreciation of religion and history,97 and he now refurbished it and applied it to the political destinies of French Canada. As always for one so influenced by Lionel Groulx, history – “that spiritual heritage, the common good of an entire people”98 – offered the chief source of legitimation for French Canada’s hesitation over a definitive political choice. In considering the imperatives behind the making of Confederation, Ryan emphasized the differences between Upper Canada’s quest for a unitary “veritable new nation” with Lower Canada’s “far more ambivalent journey” and the priority placed on safeguarding the historic rights of French Canadians. The central problem that confronted Canadians of



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both cultural groups for over a century, he declared, stemmed from two central and persistent problems: first, that “the intensity of the desired fusion in the stronger of the two cultural communities went far beyond anything that the other community was ever disposed to consent to”; and, second, that “the weaker of the two communities adhered to the project with the greatest reservations, and was itself divided between two currents of thought that continued to be in tension throughout the ensuing century.” This “historical ambivalence” of French Canadians split them between “favouring a full commitment to the federal experience” – the “Herodian” line identified with Cartier, Laurier, St Laurent, and Trudeau – and those “who found their principal focus of action at Quebec” – the “Zealotist” inspiration that had, in recent years, achieved notable success with the development of Quebec nationalism.99 As the chief spokesman for this historical ambivalence, the foundation for a mediating type of federalism, he had to respond to charges, from those who desired a more stark choice of destinies for Quebec, that a position of hesitancy had retarded both Quebec and hampered the progress of Canada. In response, he sought personal sustenance in the examples of his predecessors, Henri Bourassa and André Laurendeau, and refurbished the former’s dream to build in Canada a political society founded on the equal coexistence of two founding peoples. Laurendeau stood as a devoted prophet, committed to the freedom of the FrenchCanadian people, a freedom that Ryan insisted must not be conflated with mere political independence, but rather on the indissoluble tie between external and internal liberty that alone could ensure French Canada’s contribution to human civilization.100 In the final analysis, political ambivalence was a positive good, for it “had … allowed a community that was culturally besieged and economically weak to remain, in essentials, faithful to itself, all the while participating in the numerous and undeniable advantages of integration in a larger economic and political whole.”101 He unhesitatingly renewed his allegiance to this intermediate position in an editorial written to mark the end of the momentous year of 1968. “Between these two attitudes,” he stated, “are lodged a large number of spirits who believe that it is possible and who desire a new synthesis that takes into account both the deepest aspirations of Quebec and the exigencies of a reasonable federalism.” While this intellectual current “did not have an easy time of it in 1968,” he remained “attached to [it], convinced that it alone can succeed, at least for the present generation, in reconciling what is positive in the two panels of this painful diptych that represents the political conscience of French Canada.”102

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As a federalist, Ryan could not deny that the Trudeau administration was committed to enhancing some of these advantages. The passage of the government’s signature piece of legislation, the Official Languages Act, which enacted a number of key recommendations of the B& B Commission, constituted an achievement to which no federalist champion of French Canada could possibly raise objections, “a long-delayed step, but one that is capital in the pursuit of a dream of a Canada inhabited by two equal communities.”103 This approbation was, however, subject to Ryan’s now-ubiquitous caveat that language legislation alone could not serve as a final and definitive settlement of Canada’s political difficulties, which required a wider constitutional settlement of Quebec’s aspirations.104 Yet, the passing of André Laurendeau had removed a powerful moral influence for Quebec’s aspiration to be recognized as an equal and distinct society from the federal scene, leaving the commission’s work “unfinished.” While concurring with Ramsay Cook’s analysis that Laurendeau’s fellow commissioners were divided or at least very ambivalent on this central constitutional question, there was no doubt in Ryan’s mind that, had Laurendeau lived, the final report would have contained “an adhesion to the Canadian project … but would also have grasped and defended the cornerstone of the French fact in Canada, that is the unique role and place of Quebec.”105 Curiously, Ryan seemed to have recognized that liberalism itself had entered a more ambivalent phase, reflected in the initial policy initiatives of the Trudeau government that seemed marked by a number of conflicting cross-currents. There was, of course, the troubling gap that had opened up between the perception of Trudeau as a liberal democrat and his studied contempt for Parliament, which risked, in the name of a functionalist legislative efficiency, being reduced to the position of “a college under the iron rod of a prefect.”106 This pointed to a larger problem, one that Ryan savagely exposed in an editorial one year after Trudeau’s ascension to the leadership of the Liberal Party. During the leadership campaign and the subsequent election, he charged, Trudeau “spoke continually … of a new politics and participatory democracy. However, the more he reveals himself as a leader, the more government policy … appears in its strong continuity [with the Liberal agenda of the past thirty years]. And the more the leader affirms his authority, the more the seductive prospect of a government based on new forms of popular participation becomes blurred.” This authoritarian style, coupled with a functionalist insistence on internal government organization, made the prime minister allergic to reasoned debate and dialogue. Here, too, Ryan discerned a fundamental



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continuity with the Trudeau of the 1950s, the “feared polemicist” of the years of opposition to Duplessis, who deployed the same “peremptory” attitudes when he exercised authority.107 Significantly, in a number of key policy areas, Ryan’s analysis neatly captured Trudeau’s own ambivalent position within the constellation of liberal ideas, characterizing his approach to redefining Canada’s international role as “not exactly the status quo, but it is not the expected aggiornamento.” While underscoring Trudeau’s own personal commitment to renewal, he balanced this with an awareness that the prime ­minister’s most important obstacle was the “inherited orthodoxy” of the Liberal Party establishment,108 compounded by the fact that his accession to the Liberal leadership and the 1968 electoral triumph had been accomplished “without having to present a real political program to the Canadian public.” Here lay the seeds of public disappointment and ennui, a persistent gap between Trudeau’s own “reformist inclinations” and his policies, which, at least in social and economic matters, “were more conservative than even his opponents believed.” Formerly a thinker passionately interested in unemployment and social security, and “in development in the widest sense of the term” – in other words, a social liberal – Trudeau had faithfully carried out Pearson’s commitments in the fields of health insurance and action on regional disparities. Yet he otherwise “showed a marked preference for conservative economic policies,” revealing himself as a prudent guardian of the public purse and reflecting the vitality of a more conservative, market-driven liberalism that was itself entirely compatible with his functionalist commitment to legislative efficiency.109 Initially, Ryan feared that Trudeau’s inclinations and continued reliance on the Liberal civil service establishment might lead to an aggressive “neo-federalism” of occupying provincial jurisdictions through an expansion of joint programs that would further reduce Quebec’s room to manoeuvre, especially in that most critical field of social security, the  essential building-block of the social liberalism to which Ryan was wedded.110 However, even here, Trudeau did not entirely live up to expectations, as his forays in 1969 into federal-provincial matters revealed a far more “moderate,” even “ambivalent,” approach. Ryan discerned certain echoes of the “strict constructionist” Trudeau of 1957, who had denounced the extension of federal spending power into provincial spheres such as university education, and praised Trudeau for his “impartial and impeccable” leadership at the February 1969 federalprovincial conference that seemed oriented to seeking consensus rather than unilateral imposition of federal priorities.111 Here, Trudeau seemed

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disposed to at least consider a stricter definition of the federal spending power, and to act in conjunction with the provinces in elaborating new social programs, in order to build momentum behind the task of constitutional revision. “On the part of the Trudeau government,” Ryan declared, “this is a development that we must take note of with pleasure and interest.” But, lest his readers interpret this as an endorsement of a never-ending quest to extend provincial sovereignty at the expense of the federal system, Ryan’s convictions placed clear limits on assertions of Quebec nationalism. He declared that, “it is impossible to decree a priori that there will be no more joint programs. That said, however, we must absolutely find a way to respect the sovereign will of the provinces involved, otherwise the very idea of a ‘joint’ enterprise becomes a sinister abuse of language.”112 The other side of the coin was that Ottawa had to  acknowledge Quebec’s priority in the field of social legislation by consenting to the “repatriation of programs” initiated by Ottawa and refraining from any new “encroachments.” Social security and welfare were, in his view, “delicate mechanisms,” and Quebec’s desire to exert greater control over them was “not the expression of a Machiavellian will to power. It is the expression of a people who, having become aware of its distinctiveness, intends to direct itself without renouncing the imperatives of a healthy interdependence.”113 The message to Trudeau was equally clear: any agreement to “repatriate” the constitution with a new amending formula would require a prior “repatriation” of powers in the social security field to the provinces. There was an equally compelling motive for Ryan’s reserved counsel of ambivalence that underlay his auscultation of the political destiny of French Canada. In September 1968, Daniel Johnson died suddenly of heart failure, thus removing one of Trudeau’s most wily and cagey antagonists from the ongoing round of federal-provincial fiscal and constitutional negotiations. Ryan’s eulogy of Johnson was a fulsome tribute, praising his personal “epiphany” that transformed him from “trivial and partisan” to an “elevated” statesman marked by gravity and devotion to his people. Acutely aware that many francophone Quebeckers identified Pierre Trudeau as the primary spokesman of the French-Canadian people, Ryan insisted that it was, in fact, the premier of Quebec who was “the most trusted voice of his people.” More than anything else, Johnson had adhered to “the basic constitutional line” that “the government of Quebec, more than any other power, engages the destiny of French Canadians.” Johnson had become, by virtue of his office, “the first and foremost depositary of the historic memory and the political consciousness of the



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majority of French Canadians.”114 Ryan had always hoped that the Union nationale would develop into a kind of Quebec analogue of John Robarts’s Progressive Conservatives in Ontario, a functionalist government that would eschew grandiose rhetoric but would act with efficiency to firmly guide Quebec’s economic development.115 Ryan personally liked the interim premier, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, who was confirmed at a party convention in 1969. However, by holding the premiership while running as a declared candidate, Bertrand alienated powerful elements in the party and, by positioning himself overtly as a federalist, he diverged from Johnson’s strategy of delicately balancing nationalist and federalist elements by maintaining an ambivalent identity in the name of party unity. Soon, Ryan became aware that, unlike Johnson, Bertrand was not the master of his administration, recalling that one evening, he received an agitated telephone call from the new premier, who informed him that he was calling about a delicate public matter from his own residence because it was the only place where he could speak in perfect confidence. “I felt then,” stated Ryan, that “he was not in control of the situation.”116 Writing just after Bertrand’s confirmation as party leader, Ryan wrote pessimistically about the political climate in Quebec, likening it to “a tunnel in which we still cannot see the end.” The Union nationale’s mandate was weak and had been so since 1966 – after all, the party had gained a majority of seats with only 40 per cent of the popular vote – while the Liberal Party was in no better shape, unable to rid itself of Jean Lesage and seemingly on the defensive. René Lévesque was a rising political force and was well respected, but Ryan estimated that the PQ’s prediction of obtaining 15–25 per cent of the popular vote was wildly optimistic, as the sovereignty idea “continues to inspire hesitation and anxiety in an overwhelming majority of citizens.”117 Ryan was less preoccupied by the travails of the near-rudderless Union nationale than by what he discerned as the backsliding of the provincial Liberal Party, under the seductive blandishments of a powerful FrenchCanadian federal leader, from the ideal of a strong, dynamic, and affirmative state of Quebec. The Liberals had, after all, won a large plurality of the popular vote in 1966 and seemed well positioned to regain power in the next election. Already, during the 1968 federal election campaign, Ryan had crossed swords with Pierre Laporte, one of the potential aspirants for Jean Lesage’s mantle, over a critique of the “cloying opportunism” of thirteen Liberal members of the National Assembly who had come out publicly in support of Trudeau, in defiance of their party’s own constitutional position, which favoured special status. For Ryan,

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this piece of political hypocrisy was little better than national betrayal, a de facto pandering to English Canada’s anti-Quebec instincts that could be explained only by a desire to share in the benefits of the party organization and the election war chest provided by their federal cousins.118 Writing on behalf of these Liberals, Laporte soundly berated Ryan for condemning as “opportunism” what he himself had urged in his 19 June editorial, namely, the re-election of Marchand and Trudeau in their own ridings. Laporte acknowledged his own serious disagreements with Trudeau over the constitution but stated that he was voting for him because at least it was clear where he stood; convincing the prime minister of Quebec’s claims would be difficult, but far better this than Stanfield’s tergiversations on the subject of “deux nations” and special status.119 So great were Ryan’s fears that the provincial Liberal Party, which had originated the idea of “Quebec, dynamic state and bulwark of French Canada,” might fall under Trudeau’s sway – thus compromising the autonomy of Quebec as a sovereign entity and reverting to the “satellite” status of the immediate post-Confederation years120 – that he continued to inveigh against what he viewed as the “slippage” from the constitutional lodestar of special status to mere demands for more powers, a process in which he discerned the potential for a dangerous “servitude” to federal interests.121 An opportunity to rectify matters within the provincial Liberals presented itself with Jean Lesage’s decision to resign the party leadership in the summer of 1969. Amid continued rumours that Trudeau and his team sought to imitate Laurier’s strategy of taming Quebec’s drive for autonomy by turning the provincial Liberals into loyal collaborators by parachuting Jean Marchand into the party leadership, Ryan backed those elements dedicated to seeking a leader from inside the provincial wing, so that, “for the first time in a generation, the Quebec Liberal party can, in all freedom, choose a leader from its own ranks, one animated by thinking more immediately shaped by the sources and views that have dominated Quebec politics for more than ten years.”122 Three candidates presented themselves: Claude Wagner, the former minister of justice, whose law-and-order populism Ryan abhorred;123 Pierre Laporte, a veteran of the anti-Duplessis struggles and a former contributor to Le Devoir; and the young economist Robert Bourassa. Ryan got his chance to pay back Laporte for breaking ranks and supporting Trudeau. Believing that his former connection with the paper would garner an endorsement, and considering Ryan part of his “journalistic family,”124 Laporte was no doubt chagrined to find himself unfavourably contrasted as a mere “party



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man”125 with Bourassa, who was glowingly described as an intellectual, a “man of dialogue,”126 who exemplified Ryan’s own personal studious and well-informed style and who could rival Trudeau’s mastery of the modern disciplines of economics and administration. By offering “a new type of leadership, a ‘leadership of consent’ … best expressed by teamwork than by the impossible and ruinous domination of a single figure,” Bourassa could transcend party considerations and could thus be the candidate best placed to counter Trudeau’s recruitment of strong Quebec leaders in Ottawa by attracting a similar team to Quebec City.127 Here lay an opportunity to rebalance the key axis of French-Canadian political identity: the selection of a new provincial Liberal leader whose “functionalist” approach would advance Quebec’s assertion of a distinct political vocation through well-planned economic and social initiatives, the ultimate validation of a federalism resistant to Trudeau’s tentacles.

“Montreal was, is, and must remain a bilingual city”128 The vision of French Canada so consistently defended by the succession of public intellectuals associated with Le Devoir faced its most serious test, not from policies emanating from Ottawa, nor from political advances made by René Lévesque, but from a decision made in the fall of 1967 by an obscure local school commission in the Montreal suburb of Saint-Léonard. There, in a neighbourhood with a large population of Italian immigrants, a ruling to begin to phase out bilingual schools in the fall of 1968 sparked protests from parents outraged over denial of access to English-language schooling and in response to these protests, the formation of the Mouvement pour l’intégration scolaire (M I S ), a group with ties to the radical nationalist Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale, whose aim was to secure unilingual French instruction.129 In a rather cruel irony, the flashpoint of Saint-Léonard, which abruptly transformed language into a social and political problem, was the fruit of the B & B Commission: its opening of public discussions on language questions had involved many experts, organizations, and ordinary citizens, and its exposure of the socio-economic consequences of belonging to English- and French-language communities had revealed the superior earning power and economic status of English speakers, even in a province with a francophone majority. Also of considerable significance was Laurendeau’s own inflection of the commission towards consideration of

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the position of language majorities. These various considerations helped mobilize francophone nationalist opinion in Quebec after the mid-1960s. Two new revelations constituted the critical tipping point. First, in SaintLéonard, which was taken to be typical of the immigrant experience in Montreal, it was apparent that, in 1967, 90 per cent of immigrant children were enrolled in bilingual classes, and of these, 85 per cent went on to English-language high schools. Coupled with a growing number of francophone children who also chose this educational route, it suddenly appeared to francophone nationalists that bilingualism seemed to be the high road to integrating children into Montreal’s English community. Second, these local demographic trends, coupled with the declining birth rate among francophones, were projected to significantly dilute the French character of Montreal over the next two decades,130 fuelling the fear that French-Canadian culture might not survive in its largest metropolis, as a result of the concatenation of English economic dominance and immigrant identification with the English language. The language conflict opened by the Saint-Léonard affair, and the subsequent gyrations of Premier Jean-Jacques Bertrand’s Union nationale government to formulate a language policy that could secure consensus in Quebec, sorely tested both Claude Ryan’s liberalism and his faith, as a Montrealer, in the capacity of his fellow citizens to construct the essential conditions of a civilized urban way of life based on the fruitful coexistence of two major cultural communities. Ryan’s thinking on the subject of rights was the product of a particular intellectual context, one in which the individualist implications of liberalism were substantially modified by communitarian personalism. Postwar advances, such as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, did not emerge from a rising allegiance to individualism, but presupposed a communitarian basis for rights. And men such as Ryan whose views were forged by an encounter with Catholic personalism, insisted on the indissolubility of relations between individual and collective liberties, standing against “an individualism that denies all responsibility of persons towards the collectivity” and favouring “that regular, contained, and responsible liberty that is the salvation of democracy.”131 Unlike hyper-modern forms of liberalism that assigned sacrosanct status to constitutional charters ­protecting human rights, he did not view these freedoms as “a standalone entity that exists in a pure state, and in practice, they must be defined in relation to other equally important rights.”132 Ryan could inveigh against the Saint-Léonard school commissioners for their “clear and deliberate derogation” from over a century of



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practice in Quebec in schooling and language matters, discerning behind the decision the MI S’s darker design “to introduce, into our public life, a new way of interpreting the great concepts of coexistence based on the equality of two communities, substituting for it the concept of a dominant community surrounded by secondary and subordinate annexes.” Worse still, by identifying the francophone group with public institutions, it posited a “monolithic concept” of the future Quebec, thus perverting the very purpose of the state in a democracy, whose true aim was to take diversity into account, “and not to seek to model these by force upon a majority.”133 At the same time, he acutely realized the force of the argument on the other side, seeing in the actions of the M I S “an attempt to change by fait accompli a policy that seems to work against the normal expansion of the majority” and characterizing the nationalist protest as a “vital reaction” against the apparent demographic advance of the English language. “A people remaining indifferent to these perspectives,” he intoned, “would be a people unworthy to live, one that would not deserve to hold its place in the family of nations.”134 While condemning MIS tactics of street protest and occupation of school property as “an unacceptable abuse of power,” he was quick to dismiss those who saw the response as a purely anti-English phenomenon. The movement’s goal was for all immigrants to attend French schools, but it also wanted to introduce the teaching of English, “superior in quality to that which has been traditionally given.”135 Ryan was, of course, devoted to the idea that, in some way, the tradition of Quebec, which recognized the coexistence of two equal cultural groups, incarnated the French-Canadian sense of the ideal Canadian polity. The question, then, was how to reconcile such a coexistence with a nationalism that sought affirmation and protection for French as the majority culture and sought to enhance the rights of the majority collectivity over the free choice of individuals to belong to a particular language community, even to the point of defining Quebec as a unilingual geographic and political space. For Ryan, one eminently practical consideration stood prior to any discussion of rights. This was the unique situation of Montreal as both a Canadian and North American metropolis. As a life-long resident, Ryan had a special affection for Montreal. He was acutely aware that the city’s dynamism was due to the fact that, historically, it had not been a monolithically French city but had “a particular vocation” defined by bilingualism, conferring on it a dynamism that drew people of diverse cultural origins and beliefs “on the basis of the guarantees that Montreal offered them in the educational and linguistic spheres.”136 The city conveyed a

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distinctive spirit, a peculiar compound of “realism and welcome, selfrespect and acceptance of others” that dictated that French and English would continue to cohabit and that they might together achieve great things “if they can avoid exhausting their energies in sterile holy wars and falling into an excessive pessimism that can only lead to powerlessness.”137 It would be no exaggeration to say that, for Ryan, Montreal constituted the template for that “superior form of civilized life”138 to which the B & B Commission had invited all Canadians to aspire in building a country founded on the equality of two founding peoples, and that the commission’s thinking on the subject of bilingualism had been inspired largely by the Quebec model.139 But what, exactly, constituted these “guarantees”? Were they “rights” or were they “traditions,” ways of doing things validated by historical experience? Apart from constitutional rights in education allocated to Catholics and Protestants, the Canadian constitution was silent on the issue of language, nor had the Quebec government sought, for over a century, to legislate on the basis of language. As recently as 1964, when Bill 60 reformed the province’s educational system, religion remained the principle of differentiation. While by 1968 Ryan was numbered among those who favoured restructuring Montreal’s educational structures explicitly along the lines of language and culture, as these were no longer coterminous with religion, the burning question remained how to determine the adhesion of immigrants to one or the other language community. Would it be done through a strategy of “incitation” that was respectful of the ultimate free choice of parents to determine the school for their children, or would more coercive legislative measures be deployed to ensure the priority of French? The latter recourse, according to Ryan, would have the “dangerous” effect of creating “two classes of citizens holding unequal rights,” the antithesis of democracy “and the real urban spirit.”140 The issues raised by the Saint-Léonard situation forced Ryan into a more explicit statement of his thinking on the subject of the respective rights of individuals and collectivities. Speaking at the Conférence provinciale sur les droits de l’homme in the fall of 1968, he observed that majority rights had become hot-button issues in two critical spheres: first, in commerce, industry, and finance, where the working language was that of the employers – namely, English – and not that of the majority; and, second, in education, which had hitherto rested on a consensual coexistence between two language sectors. The system thus favoured the absorption of immigrants into the English minority, “thus compromising the current demographic balance of Quebec and, in the long run, killing the



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predominance of the majority francophone group.” The key question was, would the imposition of official unilingualism in Quebec violate human rights? Here, Ryan gave a qualified no, because the dominant f­actor “remains the principle of national sovereignty,” and legitimate governments had, historically, a wide latitude in the interpretation and practical application of these rights. Such rights could not simply be left, as classical liberalism would have it, to the free choice of enlightened individuals. While personally opting for “the liberal school,” Ryan did not believe that the efforts of those seeking to transform Quebec into a unilingual society could be reprobated on the basis of international law. The only yardstick was the collective “concrete historical judgment” of a people on its current situation, its future chances, and the means it could take, “without violating the rights of others, to assure its future.” Such an option, he realized, did contain the potential for deviation that might trench on individual rights, but, on this score, “liberalism itself contains, in embryo, the principle of attitudes that are destructive of values that one could consider equally essential.”141 Thus, given the economic, social, and cultural challenges faced by French Canadians in their quest to assert their collective equality in Canada, he was prepared to give greater play to majority rights. “There are,” he argued, “undeniable rights of the majority in linguistic and cultural matters. The active respect of these rights is an essential condition of the normal functioning of a democracy.” However, he was quick to balance this statement with the assertion that these rights, taken in an absolute way, can quickly lead to the negation of the rights of the minority. There is also a tendency to consider these majority rights from a strictly individualist perspective … from the standpoint that these rights are conferred only in light of those given individually to each citizen as an equal member of a political society. The slightest realistic examination of the situation of a group like that of the French Canadians obliges us to admit that an exclusively individualist perspective does not take reality completely into account.142 Of great significance here was the implicit tendency to view Trudeau’s exaltation of individual rights and the Parti québécois’s prioritizing of collective rights as two sides of the same coin.143 The former placed the individual’s quest for self-affirmation beyond any moral responsibility to the community, and the latter sought to make the rights of majority

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groups as sacrosanct as those of individuals. Both were the products of  what he considered a growing deviation within Western liberalism, accentuated by the visible decomposition of the Christian social order in many societies by the end of the 1960s, that eviscerated the personalist component from the language of human rights, thus identifying their progress solely with the forces of secularism.144 How, then, to express the balance between individual and collective rights in terms of a tempered liberalism that could safeguard the cultural destiny of the French Canadians as a people? Ryan worried particularly that a new Canadian charter of rights, as proposed by Trudeau, would so entrench the rights of Quebec’s anglophone minority as to constitute a “legal straitjacket.”145 Indeed, anglophone rights in Quebec had already gone so far beyond the legal definitions of the BN A Act that, in the SaintLéonard affair, advocates for the English-speaking community felt no disposition to negotiate or recognize historical reality, elevating the individual rights of parents above all other considerations. This attitude was the result of a social situation that had rendered the anglophone community “impermeable” to contacts and influences from the majority.146 Ryan’s preference was for a Quebec charter, drafted in such a way that would guarantee fundamental individual rights, but “that would avoid creating the illusion of absolute equality between the two language communities, which are neither by number nor by the particular situation each has in North America, really equal in practice.”147 Such a charter would allow the government of Quebec the scope to take a number of necessary measures to protect and enhance the status of the French ­language as the expression of the culture of the majority, a view entirely consistent with the communitarian framework that encompassed Ryan’s liberalism. What options did the Quebec state have in promoting the language and cultural rights of the majority? In answering this question, Ryan adhered closely to the prescriptions of the B& B Commission, which stipulated that belonging to one language community or another was an act of individual choice and not a determination to be made a priori on the basis of ethnic origin.148 Indeed, he was quite explicit that, simply because French Canadians had, through “pure indifference,” allowed new Canadians to swell the ranks of the anglophone community, this did not alter the fundamental imperative that Montreal had to remain a bilingual entity. But “bilingualism” had to be understood in a different way: the francophone citizens of Saint-Léonard, through their actions, had demonstrated that it could no longer be used as a conduit to “English



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unilingualism in real life” and had to be cast in terms of policies that ensured “the clear primacy of French”149 in a city and province whose majority was francophone. “The Quebec government,” he declared, “has a special historic responsibility when it comes to the language and culture of the majority of its citizens. It cannot dodge this responsibility without being guilty of a very grave sin of omission.” The basic aim of any new language legislation had to be to ensure the reasonable priority of French, though he rejected any attempt to furnish public services to citizens based on ethnic group. Still, there were a number of means open to the state to ensure compliance with this goal: more vigorous policies of inciting and promoting education in French among immigrant communities; for future immigrants, firmer requirements as to using the French language (although this could not be undertaken for immigrants already established in Quebec); and requirements that English schools dispense far more advanced French-language teaching. In the world of business and industry, Ryan urged greater state involvement in monitoring the language of advertising, though warning against “totalitarian measures” that might unduly complicate the daily working of economic life, and advised government to enter into consultations with employers and unions regarding greater use of French in the workplace. Finally, the state could do far more to ensure a rigorous policy of priority with respect to French in its own daily workings, thus “playing a leadership role” for the whole society.150 Such interventionism was necessary, he believed, to counteract the fact that the attraction of the English language was due to the fact that the English ethnic element was “established in a regime of privilege,” which meant that, in many respects, bilingualism was a oneway street that simply forced francophones to speak English, especially in the world of business.151 That he was so willing to alter the meaning of “bilingualism” indicated that he was well aware both of the changing nature of the nationalism of Le Devoir’s readership and the raw demographic fact that bilingualism seemed to be in recession across Canada. Language policy in the future, he believed, would be oriented to “a realistic recognition of two great unilingualisms,” completed by a system of bilingual institutions and structures, so defined as to not “hamper the development of the weaker of the two communities, which, in light of the weakness of its historic position in North America, will always be more jealous of each particle of its rights and its own personality.”152 The story of the attempts by a variety of Quebec governments between 1968 and 1977 to resolve the tortuous problem of language rights has been told elsewhere.153 While Ryan agreed in principle with Bertrand’s

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implicit endorsement of bilingualism enshrined in Bill 85 (1968) and its successor, Bill 63 (1969), there is no doubt that he considered such legislation premature and inopportune, because it created a new body of law out of a situation made up of hitherto customary practices, and this before the report of the provincial government’s own commission. Ryan feared that this hasty legislation would detach nationalist elements from the federalist parties by supplying validation for René Lévesque’s demand for a precise policy aimed at regulating and constricting the development of the anglophone minority in Quebec.154 Such a fear was borne out with the success of the P Q in capturing a substantial slice of the popular vote in the provincial election in the spring of 1970. However, the crisis at Saint-Léonard had a subtle, but palpable, effect on the direction of Ryan’s own thinking, accentuating and confirming the tilt in his own intellectual and political axis towards a more exclusive concern with the future of the francophone minority in Quebec, and a consequent affirmation of the priority of Quebec that had begun with the rising tide of Pierre Trudeau’s federalism. While never abandoning his allegiance to the notion of a dualistic French-Canadian identity Ryan felt compelled, after 1969, to give far greater scope to nationalist arguments that placed far greater weight on the Quebec state as the sole reliable vehicle for the enhancement of francophone identity in North America.

13 “The Prophetic Charisma of the Christian Journalist” Disclosing the Meanings of the October Crisis It would be interesting … to draw a parallel between the attitude of [Henri] Bourassa towards Laurier and that of today’s Le Devoir towards Pierre Elliott Trudeau: we would find that the same situations engender, as interpreted by our principles, the same fundamental reactions. Claude Ryan, “1910–1970: ‘Le Devoir’ d’hier et d’aujourd’hui” (1970)

Claude Ryan launched the new decade of the 1970s with a celebration of Le Devoir’s sixtieth year of publication. As had become his usual practice, he invoked the memory of the long line of French-Canadian public moralists associated with the newspaper – particularly Henri Bourassa and André Laurendeau – to remind his audience that, under his own directorship, Le Devoir had remained scrupulously faithful to its original “public ethic”: the promotion of linguistic equality and provincial autonomy within a free Canadian federation. These two elements constituted the irreducible core of French-Canadian identity, which was now expressed more precisely as “a clearer consciousness of the original political vocation of Quebec.” Ryan used the occasion to rededicate his own journalistic enterprise to the explicitly Christian imperatives of the founder. He invoked a set of convictions, anchored in the theology of the Roman Catholic Church, that expressed the utopian dream of “a socio-economic order that is less rigged in favour of the strong and more suitable to the fulfillment of the weak.” And he noted that, despite his realistic stance on politics and public issues, he had devoted his adult life to the realization of these ideals.1 Within months, however, the tragic events of October 1970 – the recrudescence of terrorism; the kidnapping of the British trade commissioner, James Cross, and Quebec’s minister of

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labour, Pierre Laporte, by members of the Front de libération du Québec; the decision by the Quebec government to ask Ottawa to invoke the War Measures Act (W MA ); and the cold-blooded murder of Laporte – engendered a climate of fear and repression that threatened the very existence of Ryan’s Christian public ethic and the liberalism that it nourished.2 During the crisis, Ryan and Le Devoir took a markedly different line from much of the Quebec and Canadian media, adopting a critical attitude towards the hard-line refusal to negotiate adopted by the Quebec government of Robert Bourassa and the federal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and towards the decision to invoke the War Measures Act to deal with the terrorist threat. Both contemporaries and later interpreters have seen Ryan’s own activities during the events of October as the source of considerable ambiguity. Indeed, his actions provoked rumours, which have persisted for decades, that he originated the idea of replacing the duly elected provincial government of Bourassa with a shadowy “provisional” or “parallel” government prepared to negotiate with the terrorists, with the ultimate aim of weakening the ties between Quebec and Canada. His independent stance has been both praised and vilified,3 but such debates are ultimately sterile. Viewed within the context of Ryan’s sense of Quebec’s historical experience within Confederation, his specific theological convictions and identity as a Christian public intellectual, his notion of the nature of the journalistic profession, and his social liberalism, his activities were entirely consistent and, indeed, completely transparent. The origin, existence, and persistence to this day of the “provisional government” rumour testifies to the need to move the grounds of inquiry beyond debating the necessity of imposing the WMA , lamenting the suppression of civil liberties, or finding in these events some veiled aim on Trudeau’s part of scotching the separatist threat once and for all. This is a far too simplistic reading of the meanings of October 1970. The October Crisis was nothing less than a public manifestation of a fundamental, and irreconcilable, conflict within Canadian liberalism. It marked the central act in a drama that pitted Pierre Trudeau’s commitment to building a monolithic Canadian nation on the basis of an authoritative hyper-individualistic liberalism utterly intolerant of ideological competitors, one that appealed to elements in both English and French Canada who wanted a simplified version of federalism, against the vision defended by Ryan and many of his fellow Quebeckers, one that envisioned the possibility of a liberalism premised on the existence and fulfilment of the aspirations of two nations within a federal state. In



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contrast to Trudeau’s majoritarian democracy composed of atomized, passive individuals whose relationship to the state was fixed once and for all by a set of constitutional rights, but whose political horizons remained bounded by the guidance of enlightened technocrats, Ryan’s liberalism was attentive to the role of organized groups, as creators and channels of public opinion, particularly those that sought to widen the meaning of democracy by fostering greater political participation by the poor and dispossessed. Rights occupied both a lesser and a greater place in Ryan’s political lexicon: while they were not the talismanic guarantee of true democracy – because the individual did not exist abstracted from the historical experience of the two societies that constituted Canada, whose equal status stood prior to the individual – they signified the meeting of individual freedom and collective identities and had a far more explicit reference to the achievement of social equality than did Trudeau’s version. Ryan’s version of liberal democracy also envisioned a place for the independent authority of public intellectuals, whose moral stance gave them the right to periodic prophetic interventions to restore the balance of the polity and to summon leaders and citizens to a higher sense of purpose and responsibility. Unlike Trudeau, Ryan believed that liberalism was an open and capacious creed, one that, through dialogue with radical forces – even those that resorted to violence to achieve their aims – could itself be enriched and transformed while bringing extremist groups inside the pale of civilized politics.

“The modern vocation of societies of liberal inspiration”4 Le Devoir’s anniversary celebrations in the early part of 1970 occurred against the backdrop of the Quebec Liberal Party’s search for a new leader. Ryan strongly endorsed the candidacy of first-time legislator Robert Bourassa, declaring that his superior “intellectual formation” more than compensated for his lack of political experience. Characterizing Bourassa as “an honest liberal (in the widest sense of the term),” he presented his “realism, sobriety, and discipline” and “rational functionalism” as exactly what Quebec needed at this critical juncture in its history, a prophylactic against “demagogy, arbitrary rule, and incompetence.”5 Ryan estimated that, at least on the federalist side of the political spectrum, Bourassa offered a refreshing alternative to the Union nationale under Jean-Jacques Bertrand, whose “uncertain and confused leadership” was exemplified by ineffectual economic stewardship characterized

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by an inability to create the thousands of new jobs necessary to employ the rising tide of qualified young people graduating from Quebec’s new educational system.6 Victorious at the leadership convention held on 17 January 1970, Bourassa immediately focused on economic issues, promising to create 100,000 new jobs and a “profitable federalism” that pledged to avoid the sterile rhetoric and constitutional wrangling that had bedevilled relations with Ottawa since the mid-1960s and would offer tangible benefits to counter the appeal of sovereignty.7 Hoping to take advantage of Bourassa’s inexperience and the lack of organization on the part of the Parti québécois (P Q ), Premier Bertrand called a spring election, believing that he had settled the language question with Bill 63. Hoping to please the increasingly divergent nationalist and federalist factions within his own party, he issued a “shock statement” that set a four-year time limit for constitutional negotiations. This strategy gravely concerned Ryan, as it opened “a major breach in the federalist camp,” one that might work to the PQ’s advantage because, if constitutional negotiations failed, it would be very difficult to persuade younger voters and elements committed to social change, forces that represented Quebec’s future, that real change in such matters could emerge only from patient and prolonged dialogue.8 Nor was he impressed with Liberal arguments that Bourassa’s ability to restore prosperity would dissolve the threat of separatism, a belief that he dismissed as misguided because it failed to recognize what had occurred over the past few years in the political consciousness of Quebeckers. “A new dream of fullness and freedom,” he warned federalists, “has established itself in the soul of new generation. It will take more than 100,000 jobs to satisfy this dream within a federal political framework. It will require a federalism truly adapted to the specific realities of Quebec. And this federalism must come in a hurry, because it is already late according to Montreal time.”9 Given these misgivings about Bourassa, Ryan’s endorsement of his leadership claims might have reflected his sense that, because his ideas on federalism and the constitution were unformed and imprecise, he could be “tutored” in such matters by a political educator like Claude Ryan. It was precisely in their ideas about the theory and practice of federalism that Ryan discerned the most serious weakness of the Quebec Liberals and their new leader, a deficiency that might, in the long run, seriously compromise Quebec’s willingness to build the kind of social liberal society that Ryan maintained was the source of Quebec’s distinctiveness within Canada and its central contribution to a viable North American



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civilization. Analyzing Bourassa’s election manifesto, Bourassa-Québec, he critically examined the Liberal leader’s claim to “organize tolerance, direct controversy and negotiate reforms that will be beneficial to some without being prejudicial to others” and his promise of a government dedicated to abolishing privilege without social conflict by employing the methods of economic development and the rationalization of public administration. At one level, Ryan liked the fact that the Liberal Party stood for comprehensive social security, universal education, full employment, and greater participation of citizens in the management of public affairs, thus eschewing a tilt towards market-driven solutions in favour of “collective government.” All of these were laudable goals; indeed, they were the great objectives defined by “the neo-liberals of the Kennedy era.” But Bourassa’s “social criticism remains superficial … verging into a facile optimism” that revealed a missing sense of engagement with concrete realities. “What novel arrangements,” wondered Ryan, did the Liberals “foresee to mediate between the social forces that are disputing economic, social, cultural, and political power?” Ryan feared that Bourassa and his team underestimated the centrality of these forces, considering them but marginal and transitory phenomena when, in reality, they stood “at the centre of the current unfolding of history.” From Ryan’s perspective, the Liberal program needed clearer and more sustained reflection on the nature of democracy itself, which involved the role of unions, the growing danger of monopolies in the field of news and media, the respective roles of the cooperative and public sectors in economic development, and the democratization of party financing.10 Of equal concern to Ryan was that Bourassa’s ideological imprecision within the firmament of social liberalism translated into a lack of rigour in thinking about federalism and a perplexing lack of clarity on the issue of Quebec’s constitutional demands. Scrutinizing the Liberal election platform, Ryan observed that the Liberal leader’s advocacy of “profitable federalism” as the solution to the Quebec-Ottawa conundrum of FrenchCanadian identity “reduced federalism too much to its utilitarian dimensions, which risks … making people forget that the underlying principle of federalism is and can only be nothing less than a more demanding conception of liberty.”11 Two central dangers were immediately apparent to Ryan, imperilling both the inner cohesion of the Quebec Liberal Party and the social liberal creed he expected it to incarnate. First, lack of a cohesive position on “particular status” and a new power-sharing arrangement exposed the Liberals to the “progressive disintegration” of party unity that had undone the dynamism of the Lesage administration.

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Second, this lack of cohesion exposed the party’s internal workings and capacity for independent decision making to the inroads of Trudeau Liberalism, raising the fear that Quebec Liberals might fall into a state of subservience to the federal wing, a situation that had a number of worrisome precedents in the province’s political history. The presence of a vigorous French-Canadian leader in Ottawa, in Ryan’s estimation, constituted Bourassa’s greatest obstacle, and the appeal of Trudeau’s version of federalism had seriously weakened the position of the Quebec Liberals in all major disputes since 1966, to the point where the party’s commitment to securing special status had been watered down to a nebulous quest for more power in certain spheres. Bourassa promised a more flexible approach, and, while the fact that there was no doubt of his federalist credentials might secure the province a more sympathetic hearing in Ottawa, the functionalist Bourassa urgently needed a lesson from history, focusing on the “dubious fruits” that French Canadians had received from the years in power of Laurier and St Laurent.12 Closer to the political consciousness of men of Ryan’s generation was the experience of Adélard Godbout, the reformist Liberal premier from 1939 to 1944 whose fate provided a grim warning for any putative premier who attempted to gloss over the real tensions between the two jurisdictions in  the name of simple monetary advantage. Godbout, Ryan reminded Bourassa, may have achieved a good deal for his province, but his “excessive obeisance” to Ottawa had banished the Liberals from power for sixteen years. Far better to follow the examples of Georges-Émile Lapalme and Jean Lesage, who both adopted a far more “combative” line both in  defending federalism and in expressing the dynamism of Quebec’s ­particular political aspirations.13 It was imperative, stated Ryan, that Bourassa choose between “certain messengers from Ottawa who are prowling about him and men who are squarely identified with the inalienable aspirations of Quebec.”14 Despite these worries over the leadership and direction of the Liberal Party, the director of Le Devoir had many reasons to be pleased with the content and outcome of the provincial election campaign. For Ryan, a central positive element was that, despite the rise of René Lévesque’s P Q to the status of a major political force, the election involved deeper issues than a simple contest between federalism and sovereignty. Indeed, because of what he discerned as a number of serious lacunae within the P Q platform, despite the quality of its leader and its unwavering commitment to democratization and free discussion, he defined the election as actually being about which political expression of federalism would best assure



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the development of Quebec. The time was not yet ripe, he maintained, to force Quebeckers to “resolve the question in the radical and irreversible way that the P Q advocates.”15 Particularly hampering the appeal of Lévesque’s party, in Ryan’s estimation, was the weakness of its economic analysis, which relied excessively upon expanding the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. Such an expansion could not, in his view, either lead to economic efficiency or assure the resources necessary to finance costly social programs. The sovereignty idea itself, however, would in future be solidly implanted in Quebec society, especially in sectors “that represent intelligence and the future.”16 One of the key features of the election was the factor of generational change: the fact that both Bourassa (age thirty-six) and René Lévesque (age forty-eight) appealed to youthful voters, emphatically signalled a changing of the guard, confirmed by the fact that two-thirds of the Liberal candidates and all of their PQ counterparts, with the exception of Lévesque himself, were running for the first time.17 A fundamental challenge for all provincial parties was their ability to “face the swirling ideological, social, and cultural currents that are profoundly shaking Quebec society.” What had scarcely five years before been a relatively peaceful society had become one dominated by contestation, frequently in extremely radical forms, the expression of frustrations that many citizens “and each segment of the social body” were experiencing in their quest to secure a larger share of authority, responsibility, and social advantages. The new government had to skilfully navigate between, on the one hand, “weakness and complacency,” which could only aggravate social contradictions in the long run, and “rigidity and intransigence,” which might stifle the forces of protest but could never vanquish them. Quebeckers, he advised, must choose the party that “offered the most balanced dose of attachment to certain fundamental and inalienable values of our society and openness to new values that could enrich our collective life without destroying it.”18 Despite Premier Bertrand’s commitment to federalism, Ryan could not advise Quebeckers to give the internally divided Union nationale a second term, and called for a Liberal majority government. Of all the federalist leaders, Robert Bourassa was the only one with the education and talents necessary to compete with the appeal of the P Q to young, educated, urban francophones by offering an open, modern, competent, intelligent government that was open to dialogue. His team exemplified a happy balance between youthfulness and an effort to represent all social sectors, unlike the PQ, which too closely mirrored the interests of Quebec’s “new class” of

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“professors, intellectuals and directors of social movements,” groups that were too bound up with enhancing a regulatory, bureaucratic state.19 It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, after April 1970, much of Ryan’s analysis of Quebec society and politics – and, indeed, his response to the October Crisis itself – was a product of the peculiar love-hate relationship he had cultivated with the “new class” of intellectuals and activists. As Ryan himself was an activist and public intellectual, his very identity had, since 1945, been bound up with the rise, consolidation, and peculiar ambitions of this social group. But, on occasion, he assumed the mantle of public moralist to mercilessly expose and flay the inflated pretensions and what he considered the misguided political choices of this key segment of Quebec’s middle class, exhibiting an anti-intellectual stance and sometimes adopting the language and tone of an old-­fashioned business conservative. The prominence of the “new class” in his political thinking was reflected in the public advice he gave to the new Liberal premier. At one level, his fears that Bourassa might fail the test as Quebec’s “faithful, unshakeable and solid interpreter” were somewhat assuaged by the new premier’s first foray into federal-provincial diplomacy soon after the election.20 But Ryan was acutely aware that, despite the Liberals’ solid majority with respect to seats in the National Assembly and the francophone vote, their base of support was quite narrow, resting largely on “the adherence of the middle classes.” The results could in no way be read as “an unconditional support for federalism”; at best, they were but a temporary “reprieve.”21 Indeed, compared with the 1966 election result, the Liberals had lost nearly 2 per cent of the popular vote and were overmatched by the PQ and the Créditistes among “the sector of francophone workers,” especially in Montreal, and rural voters.22 What was most worrisome for the future of the federalist option was that the core of the PQ’s support lay among students, the directors and cadres of social movements, and “workers of the mind.” While, during the election campaign, this had constituted a substantial negative for the representative character of Lévesque’s party, “one would have to be an intellectual lightweight not to be aware that this support is more significant for the future than the support that the other parties received from older and less politicized milieus.” For Ryan, “despite the limits and certain forms of narrowness that characterize intellectual milieus that frequently shock men of action,” it was the intellectuals who, “in the long run, nourish and shape the thinking of the people.”23 Because federalism was, in the final analysis, an ethic and a conviction, the danger, from Ryan’s perspective, was that younger intellectuals could be persuaded by the near-insurmountable challenges to maintaining a



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distinctive French-Canadian cultural identity to take a “shortcut,” circumventing the vicissitudes of historical experience, to enhance the power of the state and harness it to the sole service of the French-Canadian nation. This option was exemplified by the publication of lawyer and union activist Pierre Vadeboncoeur’s haunting meditation on FrenchCanadian history, La dernière heure et la première, just before the election. Vadeboncoeur, once a childhood friend of Pierre Trudeau and contributor to Cité libre,24 evinced a bleak pessimism regarding the survival of French-Canadian culture in the face of a pervasive, universalizing Americanism, unless his compatriots were willing to engage themselves in “a total national effort,” of which independence was the vital precondition. Likening the book to George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, which had become the foundational text of a left-leaning English-Canadian neo-nationalism, Ryan disagreed with its sombre treatment of the past but had to acknowledge the force of the argument for the new generation of intellectuals, who were devoted to the author’s hope that, by applying “the totality of political power” to national salvation, they might avert Quebec’s pessimistic destiny. Vadeboncoeur was no isolated voice, but rather “the interpreter of a generation that practically dismisses personal freedoms in favour of collective freedoms,” and, Ryan warned, “nothing would be more dangerous than to go blindly down this road.”25 The election, with its revelation of the convergence of the aspirations of the “new class” and the P Q , seemed to confirm Vadeboncoeur’s prophecy: time was indeed running out for federalism. Already, Ryan was advising Bourassa of the need to broaden what he considered the government’s rather narrow base of support. There was nothing particularly outlandish or sinister about this advice, as it was fully consistent with his long-standing conviction that democracy involved something more than the achievement of a legislative majority: it also encompassed the far more difficult discerning of areas of fundamental agreement about the direction of the future around which could be woven a lasting social concord. The election had revealed that nearly a quarter of the Quebec electorate had rejected federalism in favour of independence, a situation that, for Ryan, was akin to a “political cancer,” a profound lack of consensus on the future goals of his society. Bourassa’s legislative majority drew too heavily on those sectors – rural elements, anglophones, and the business class – that Ryan believed either looked to the past or were out of step with the intense desire of Quebec francophones for national selfaffirmation, and he exhorted him to shift his sights to look twenty-five years into the future. Prophesying that Quebec would “be living under

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contestation, direct, active, violent contestation,” for the foreseeable future, Ryan told Bourassa’s Liberals that they had to choose the way of affirming the values of liberty and mutual respect by adopting as their primary political task the building of “a much broader consensus. Otherwise you will never have peace in that society.”26 The chief pillar in this strategy lay in recapturing the intellectuals to the cause of liberalism: they were, in Ryan’s estimation, the key hinge elements, because of their links to the aspirations of the disadvantaged swathe of urban francophone workers. To accomplish this required multiple tactics. Bourassa would have to convince Quebec francophones that he could master the bread-and-butter issues of greater fiscal discipline, rationalization of public services, and job creation. But he would also be required to speak to the very powerful movement of “national affirmation” by moving the cause of a renewed federalism forward in the face of Trudeau’s adamant refusal to deviate from classical federalism and recognize the people of Quebec as a distinct nation.27 Finally, he would need to “use the powerful levers of the State to help the less fortunate” and “to have the necessary guts and lucidity to make the State an effective agent of justice and real equality of opportunity.”28 As was always the case with Ryan, the cause of renewed federalism, Quebec’s distinct vocation within Confederation, and the constitutional niceties of particular status were inextricably bound up with the realization of his vision of a society organized on the basis of a commitment to social liberalism, that expression of his continued rootedness in Quebec’s Catholic traditions and the futurist expectations of individual and collective fulfilment in a post-industrial society. And if Bourassa’s government could move towards clearer expression and institutionalization of this social liberalism, it could reaffirm the allegiance of the wayward “new class” to the Canadian hypothesis. The shape of the future, however, rested on modern society’s ability to resolve the fundamental paradox of the increasing internationalization of economic life through the dominance of multinational corporations and the growing intensification of national particularisms on the political level, forces that particularly traversed Quebec as the new decade dawned. Speaking to the Canadian Bankers’ Association in September 1970, Ryan rejected the P Q’s resolution of the dilemma, that of bureaucratic regulation through nationalization, arguing instead that the real solution lay in bringing citizens into an effective participation in decision making. While direct democracy was a utopian dream, and would clog the public sphere with “interminable debates,” he urged his audience to consider “a democracy of dialogue, consultation, and participation.”29



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This was especially vital, given his belief that the adult citizen of the future would be a global being, exposed to social, intellectual, and moral currents from all corners of the planet, and therefore more knowledgeable, better informed, and more critical than in previous ages, and would consequently feel “a growing need to participate in social and cultural life.” Individual citizens would have to confront the same paradox as societies – namely, the “new conflict” that had arisen between the international dimension of many forms of action and the reaffirmation of local and national cultural values.30 Ryan’s fear was that the sheer difficulty of navigating these options in an informed manner would create further layers of marginality in modern society. Estimating that between 12 and 20 per cent of all children in Canada were exceptional, he raised the question as to how many of these were actually exceptional in the real sense of the term, and how many were “products of a system that itself must be changed before we create within it too many marginal categories.” For Ryan, this dilemma possessed an acute political dimension. “The way in which power and economic, social, and cultural goods are currently allocated is, in itself,” he stated, “a cause of permanent and institutionalized alienation. The degree to which power is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals or a few groups is too great. The distance that separates socio-economic classes, ethnic and cultural groups, the different regions of the same society, is too pronounced. These differences provoke the multiplication of phenomena of alienation and, in consequence, the problems of exceptionality and marginality.”31 The older postwar liberal paradigm of redistribution of wealth, coupled with curative programs for the maladapted few, was powerless to arrest this growing tendency to sunder society into a small technocratic cadre ruling over a mass of citizens “passively” enjoying the fruits of economic prosperity, with a permanent underclass of “marginal” people carved up into psycho-social categories of maladaptation.32 This, to a liberal like Ryan, was a nightmarish corruption of the meaning of democracy. In the reformist outlook of the Bourassa administration and the dynamic urban crucible of Montreal, he discerned hopeful signs of a dynamic and popular convergence between new democratic initiatives in social policy and developments in Catholic theology that might transform Quebec into North America’s leading laboratory of social liberalism. Increasingly, Ryan informed his readers about developments in international Catholicism, which, after spending the better part of a decade divesting itself of the obsolete legalistic baggage of Christendom, seemed to be turning its attention to the collectivist implications of the

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gospel message, the realization that Christ’s work on earth, the building of the Kingdom of God, “was essentially intended for the multitude” and sought to address “humans assembled in groups.”33 Christians, Ryan declared, had to shed an older elitism and urgently consider the problems of inequality between nations, peoples, and continents, and bring to the fore “the demand for solidarity towards men who hunger and thirst for justice and equality.”34 He hailed the advent of “a new political theology” accented on development, equality, and solidarity that sought to “fill the vacuum created by the accelerated abandonment of the old social functions once assumed by the Church.” New Catholic social thinking, aware of “the retreat of ideologies,” emphasized the need for a new public purpose in modern societies, “‘a social project’” that would deploy modern techniques of long-term planning to enlist both the intellectual resources and the forces of collective action in communities. The work of commissions of inquiry staffed by intellectuals and technocrats, enjoined this new Catholic vision, had to be completed by populist initiative premised on assessment of human need, perceived through “direct encounters with those ‘new proletariats’ being born in the very heart of urban problems.”35 The mark of the Christian was a willingness to shed the old individualist carapace and engage in “a free and pitiless critique of everything that, in the organization of society, denies or minimizes human values,” a task that would inevitably lead to “action aimed at the transformation of the very structures of society.”36 Ryan himself was at the forefront of this Catholic quest, as a leading member of the Dumont Commission, which sought to marry modern sociological practices and popular consultation in the search for a “projet de société” that would push Quebec society beyond the old liberal verities.37 The report of the Castonguay-Nepveu Commission, a massive inquiry into the province’s health care and social services, released in September 1970, seemed to presage the conversion of the Quebec state to the transcendence of the values of the old liberal individualism by announcing a new vision of social policy that placed collectivism at its core. The report garnered Ryan’s warm approbation as a major effort to transcend “traditional liberalism,” with its accent on the values and practices of individualism in medical care, with a future-oriented “global medicine” calibrated on the idea that health and disease were “social facts.” What particularly stood out in this new social blueprint was a carefully crafted balance between centralized planning and control, on the one hand, and, on the other, a strategy of local and regional community health and social centres whose institutional presence assured “a



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participation of citizens” that Ryan hoped would lead to the creation of “a new community spirit,” the basis for a “social regime” transcending the atomized individualism of conventional North American liberalism.38 The presence of Claude Castonguay, one of the report’s architects, in Bourassa’s cabinet as minister of health, family, and social welfare, seemed to guarantee rapid action in making Quebec the beacon of social liberalism in Canada and North America. However, there were powerful constraints facing the realization of this political vision, the most evident one being the structure of the federal system itself, and the brute facts of federal priorities in the field of social security and of Quebec’s reliance on federal funding to accomplish its goals. Added to these obstacles was the obsession of the Trudeau government, throughout 1969 and 1970, with reining in social security costs and fighting inflation. Ryan accused Trudeau of manifesting the attitude of “Pontius Pilate” – an epithet applied to soulless bureaucrats – in enforcing policies that Ryan judged as aggravating Quebec’s already high unemployment and further inhibiting its quest for a distinct socio-­political organization.39 Between 1968 and 1970, there occurred a radicalization in both the substance and tone of Ryan’s social liberalism, impelled first by the desire of Catholic intellectuals to posit the lineaments of a projet de société, and second by his growing awareness of the variety of radical social movements in Montreal that offered the potential for that direct, organized participation by disadvantaged citizens that might enrich and transform liberal democracy. Here, Ryan returned to his old inspiration as a social worker, revisiting in a series of editorials disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods like St-Henri and Pointe Saint-Charles, where he had laboured in studying youth initiatives in the 1940s, and which were suffering acutely from inferior housing, endemic poverty, and an undemocratic city government. He discerned a new attitude among social workers, whose commitment had shifted from the conventions of liberal “uplift” to a more radical “social animation” in which “an alliance” of professionals and the poor collaborated in “an awakening of social conscience.”40 What Ryan was chronicling was the honeycombing of w ­ orking-class Montreal neighbourhoods by new coalitions of social animators, union activists, and groups of ordinary citizens, some inspired by the tenets of the Catholic left and some by ideologies of decolonization, all of which aspired to the empowerment of the poor, which in turn meant a rejection of rule by civic elites and the infusion of a radical democratic ethos into local, provincial, and ultimately national politics. Shortly after the 1970 provincial election, this ideological ferment took firmer shape, with the

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formation of the Front d’action politique des salariés (F RAP ), which decided to contest the October municipal election in Montreal on the platform of opening and democratizing city government, protecting renters, the construction of public housing to alleviate overcrowding, and developing a network of community centres and health clinics.41 While worried about the potential for political extremism unleashed by the new social animation, Ryan estimated that it could become “a valuable instrument of community progress,” and in the fall of 1969 he sarcastically rebuked a parliamentary inquiry into the activities of the federally funded Company of Young Canadians, stating that “the very concept of collective action in a liberal democratic society” could not be settled by “allencompassing denunciations” or judicial witch-hunts seeking to ferret out “how many agents of Castro” had infiltrated this federal body.42 Through his encounter with this burgeoning social radicalism, Ryan and Le Devoir moved into the camp of opponents of the regime of Montreal’s powerful mayor, Jean Drapeau. After 1968, Ryan’s comments on Montreal’s civic administration took on a distinctly sharper tone. He observed that, while the team of Drapeau and Lucien Saulnier, the mayor’s right-hand man and chair of the city’s executive committee, had been effective builders of a modern urban infrastructure, they had failed dismally in attracting new business investment to refurbish the city’s aging industrial sector and they had not acted to improve the daily living conditions of poorer citizens. Ryan was “scandalized” during Expo 67 at the city officials’ Potemkin village strategy of colourfully painting crumbling apartment buildings to hide poverty from international visitors. “To be frank,” he stated, “I found this shocking.”43 He traced Montreal’s problems to a fundamental lack of political democracy, incarnated by Drapeau’s “regal” leadership style, which rested on secret, autocratic decision making legitimated by a quasi-plebiscitary, popular consultation during municipal elections, a highly authoritarian, conservative version of liberal democracy that, in Ryan’s mind, aligned Drapeau with “the fake millionaires who rule at Ottawa”44 – an obvious reference to Trudeau’s conservative liberalism and hostility to the poor and unemployed – as unbending opponents of the more radical democracy he hoped to inaugurate as the key to Quebec’s particular status within Confederation. Aware of the rise of F R AP as a serious opposition to the monopoly enjoyed by mayor’s Parti civique de Montréal, Ryan was, by the summer of 1970, urging citizens of Montreal to ask serious questions of “an oligarchy with authoritarian tendencies” and to consider the nature of participation in a real democracy. It was no wonder that some



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of his readers in the Montreal business community had come to regard him as a figure “with distinct revolutionary tendencies.”45

Ryan’s Three Hypotheses and the Fate of Liberalism – “The anger of King Herod”46 Ryan’s willingness to countenance more radical visions of democracy took place against the backdrop of increasingly violent forms of contestation, which began with the detonation of a bomb on the floor of the Montreal Stock Exchange in February 1969, one of the most visible ­bastions of anglophone financial supremacy, followed by an attempt to destroy the residence of Mayor Jean Drapeau in the fall of 1969. Attacks continued into the spring of 1970, with the detonation of five bombs in the privileged anglophone neighbourhood of Westmount, constituting what historians have seen as a new wave of the F L Q ’s assault on the established order.47 The citizens of Montreal also came face to face with the complete breakdown of law and order in the fall of 1969, as an illegal one-day work stoppage by police and fire services forced the municipal authorities to call on the Canadian military to maintain order in the streets, an event Ryan deplored as “one of the darkest days in the history of not only Montreal but of all of Canada.”48 While describing such occurrences in biblical language as “plagues” and expressing his outrage that the F L Q had shifted its sights from targeting buildings to the lives of persons in authority, Ryan was always careful to counsel governments to avoid overreaction in their efforts to eradicate such crimes, and to concentrate on remedying what he maintained was the defective socio-­economic circumstances that induced the hatred and despair that led to political extremism.49 For Ryan, liberal values were not fixed but depended on constant action of concerned citizens and public authorities to address the sources of inequality and alienation in modern urban society. Especially after the bombing at Drapeau’s residence, Ryan advised police and civic officials to avoid any propensity to engage in “witchhunts,” a “precipitate excess that could emanate from an unhealthy wish for vengeance rather than a true concern for order.”50 Above all, when faced with such violent contestation, the true statesman could not lull citizens into a false sense of security by appealing to the certitudes of yesteryear. Commenting on the shootings of student protesters by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio in May 1970, Ryan uttered a stern warning to leaders like President Nixon that could not be

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lost on Premier Bourassa: “One is not a head of state to be first and foremost a purveyor of jobs, a penny-pinching accountant, an organizer of administrative services, or a police watchman. One is a head of state to serve and promote liberty, justice, fraternity and peace. In a society that is questioning its foundations and its future, where the old unanimities of yesterday have disappeared, this responsibility must be exercised through a search for dialogue, not by denunciations or hardening that will only aggravate the violence that it pretends to bring to an end.”51 Then, on 5 October 1970, an F L Q cell kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner, from his residence and held him hostage, demanding in exchange the release of “political prisoners,” a cash ransom, and safe conduct to either Algeria or Cuba. Despite his speeches from 1967 onwards about the need to humanize the workings of criminal justice and for police, judges, and prosecutors to consider social and political inequality as a source of violent acts, Ryan had always stood adamantly against the idea of a special category of political crimes, on the grounds that this would create two categories of offenders and might result in harsher treatment of those charged with political crimes. With Cross’s kidnapping, however, he was prepared to revise his opinion, because he saw that Quebec faced an entirely new situation, one in which the conventional categories of the Criminal Code “and the classic norms of liberal justice” no longer applied. He believed that Quebec now confronted the phenomenon of the “urban guerrilla,” a local expression of a worldwide terrorist phenomenon, a situation in which many of the old liberal verities simply did not apply. Decrying those calling for a hard-line stance as “naïve and emotional,” he realized that, while the police must solve the mystery of the abduction, the overriding concern was Cross’s life. Ryan urged both federal and provincial authorities to negotiate, because, to a committed Christian like Ryan, the value of a human life weighed far more than the prestige of the authorities. He found no ­common pattern of political response to terrorist hostage taking: while Uruguay had taken a hard line and refused to negotiate, the governments of Argentina, Guatemala, and Brazil had each sought to negotiate and prevent the loss of life. Ryan thus dismissed the advice of the New York Times, which adamantly urged the Canadian government to not give in to the FLQ’s demands. Although such advice, “drawn directly from the most orthodox liberal catechism,” might be impeccable in normal times, it was unacceptable because it placed the prestige of the authorities above that of a human life.52 While the kidnappers’ demands could not be accepted wholesale, “it would be no less unacceptable to abandon the



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diplomat Cross to his fate.” Significantly, he did not reckon the “new guerilleros” of the F L Q as a serious threat to the stability of liberal society, as he was confident that enhanced police and security measures would eventually dissipate the terrorist threat. But what concerned him more was the economic and social injustices that gave rise to such violence: the only way of ultimately vanquishing the terrorist was the way of “freedom and justice.”53 From the moment of James Cross’s kidnapping, Ryan’s conflictual juxtaposition of the conventions of “liberal orthodoxy” and the precepts of a Christian social liberalism afforded a window into the inner meaning of the October Crisis. What was at stake was far more than the struggle of governments against groups of terrorists. The crisis involved one of the central acts of a prolonged intellectual battle, ongoing since the late 1950s and now reaching a paroxysm, between Claude Ryan and Pierre Trudeau, who championed two competing visions of the liberal individual and the nature of liberal society. Three major incidents during the October Crisis stand out as touchstones for this fundamental conflict within Canadian liberalism: the 14 October 1970 petition of the sixteen “eminent personalities” urging continued negotiation to secure the release of both Cross and Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte, abducted 10 October 1970 by a second F L Q cell acting independently; Ryan’s adamant and consistent opposition to the imposition of the War Measures Act on 16 October 1970; and the widespread rumour that Ryan was a ringleader in a “plot” to replace Robert Bourassa’s Liberal government with a shadowy “provisional government” that would abandon the hard-line response to terrorism and negotiate with the F L Q . Before examining these events, it is necessary to understand what Ryan believed was at stake in the crisis. The abduction of Laporte, one of Bourassa’s most experienced ministers and a key figure in the provincial cabinet, significantly raised the stakes of the unfolding drama and seemed to persuade Ryan that Quebec stood at the brink of “the redoubtable precipice of anarchy or dictatorship.”54 His assessment of what confronted the Quebec government revolved around the assumption that there were two factions within the Bourassa cabinet: a hardline faction clustered around Justice Minister Jérôme Choquette, whom he characterized as, “by his own admission, a runner of messages whose essential tenor has been dictated in Ottawa,”55 and another group, favouring negotiation, that included men such as Claude Castonguay, not coincidentally the leading proponent of social liberalism within the administration, and initially William Tetley, the minister for financial

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institutions, whose diary noted that Choquette was in a minority in ­cabinet and that most of the government were “angry with the federal government and Trudeau for taking a high-minded position” with the terrorists.56 Ryan believed that Robert Bourassa held the balance between the two tendencies, but he considered him as favouring a negotiated settlement, a view his editorials continued to propound until 15 October, when he still urged the government to define a clear option “in the sense of flexibility and openness.”57 Ryan was firm in rejecting the “orthodox liberal” hard line, counselled by Pierre Trudeau and the federal government, that if Quebec’s government bowed to terrorist demands, it would weaken its authority by recognizing “ordinary criminals.” Ryan favoured negotiation, arguing that, by adopting this approach, the Bourassa government would not only secure the overriding humanitarian aim of ­saving the lives of the two hostages, but would establish its authority on a firmer basis by effecting the “reintegration” of the F L Q , which Ryan believed was less isolated that it had been three or four years ago, “into the circuit of democratic life.” He maintained that the ideas of the F L Q and its supporters, but not its violent methods, were “entitled to inclusion in a free society.”58 Ryan saw nothing inherently pernicious about this reasoning: indeed, it accorded with his reading of the radicalization of working-class Montreal that had been going on since 1968, and with the precepts of a social liberalism that believed that the “end of ideology” offered not a bland, monochromatic socio-political landscape, but the possibility of further ideological innovation and the achievement of lasting social concord through dialogue between liberal and radical intellectual currents. In other words, violence in the name of political ends was reprehensible, but it had become, he believed, such a lasting feature of North American societies in crisis that public authorities could not counter it simply by police and security measures. How accurate was this reading of the political situation? It is not surprising that Ryan thought there were two groups at loggerheads in the Bourassa cabinet. The divisions he discerned in the cabinet corresponded to the “Trudeauite” and “Quebec-centred” tendencies within the Quebec Liberal Party, fissures of identity whose essential character ran deep into his society’s past and corresponded to the poles of French Canada’s historic allegiance. And because Ryan had invested so much in insisting on the autonomous character of Quebec Liberalism as the cornerstone of his vision of the Canadian federation, his insistence during his several telephone conversations with Bourassa prior to 16 October on the need to both avoid a hard line and “strengthen its



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moral authority and enlarge, over the coming weeks, its base of support among the people” was intended to interpose a firm barrier against Quebec Liberalism falling, once again, under Ottawa’s tutelage through a “federalism of collaboration.”59 It is through this lens that we must consider Ryan’s role in the petition of the sixteen eminent personalities and the rumours of the “provisional government.” Both linked Ryan publicly and privately with known ­separatists such as René Lévesque and with union leaders and activists assumed to have F L Q sympathies. The prevailing assumption, fostered by federal officials such as Justice Minister John Turner at the time,60 and continued to the present in accounts of the crisis such as those by William Tetley,61 is that there existed a clear connection between the petition, a supposed “plot” concocted by Ryan and others to form a provisional government, and the rationale for imposing the War Measures Act, thus both impugning Ryan’s credentials as a proponent of liberal democracy and seeming to implicate him as one of the intellectual artisans of  “apprehended insurrection.” However, two key considerations are in  order. First, such a view was articulated in hindsight after Ryan’s declared opposition to the imposition of the W M A on 16 October and reflects the anger of the nation’s highest authorities at Le Devoir’s bold decision to stand, despite considerable political pressure, as one of the few organs of opinion not to give the government the benefit of the doubt and either lapse into silence or acquiesce in the decision. In no uncertain terms, Ryan condemned Bourassa’s recourse to the W M A as “consenting to the principle of subordinating his government to that of Mr. Trudeau’s,” a visible derogation from the trajectory of the Quiet Revolution, which had increasingly invested Quebec with the prestige of a national government. He charged that Bourassa’s government had given way to panic, raising the additional troubling question of “what could happen in other spheres” such as federal-provincial fiscal relations and constitutional negotiations. As for the prime minister, “that former theoretician of suspicion of the constituted authorities” had, by proclaiming the WMA , become “a military protector.”62 In turn, Trudeau had Ryan’s offending editorial clearly in mind when he railed in a letter to Gérard Filion, the former director of Le Devoir and still on the paper’s board of directors, about “the total absence of rigour among those who pretend to guide opinion in French Canada.”63 Trudeau’s complaint was the public manifestation of a secret operation, a “psywar” carefully orchestrated in the Prime Minister’s Office, to win Quebec intellectuals and student groups away from social and political contestation to the cause

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of Trudeau federalism.64 What is at times forgotten is that Ryan did not oppose the presence of the Canadian Armed Forces to maintain order; rather, he maintained that such forces could have been used in a more limited way under the provisions of the National Defence Act and the ordinary criminal law without resorting to such draconian breaches of freedom whose necessity was never fully explained by either level of ­government.65 Ryan had to endure the jibes of Filion, who charged that Ryan’s editorial opposing the WMA had misread the gravity of the situation and was naive in assuming that broad-ranging emergency powers were unnecessary. In his inimitable style, Filion ridiculed Ryan, asking, “Who would you call out if you were prime minister – the drum majorettes, or perhaps the Pontifical Zouaves?”66 Ryan’s reasoning rested on the proposition that all three levels of government – municipal, provincial, and federal – were exaggerating the gravity of the crisis, though, in asserting this, he was drawing back from his grim earlier prediction that his society stood on the brink of anarchy or dictatorship. Writing on 16 October, he stated more optimistically that “this country – and the forces able, if needed, to support it on a continental scale – remain strong enough to prevent Quebec from slipping into anarchy and dictatorship.” He lectured radical separatists not to try to take advantage of the situation by entering into an alliance with the F L Q but to remain wedded to democratic means, which alone could persuade world opinion of the legitimacy of sovereignty, hinting darkly that, if they assisted in installing a “totalitarianism of the left,” they risked launching a civil war that would place Quebec under martial law, “the all-too-familiar heel of a power foreign to its culture.”67 But he recognized that the fulcrum that sustained moderate positions like his was shrinking perilously. “In the circumstances in which we are now living,” Ryan declared, moderation becomes unwillingly, a veritable sword. Everything impels people to seek refuge in one or the other extreme paths … When the struggle seems to be engaged between the two camps, a blind dynamism seems to invite each to identify with one or the other camp, and vomit up the lukewarm, generously described as the soft, the undecided, the accomplices of evil. He who, in such a context, absolutely wishes to keep hold of his critical reflexes and to seek moderation despite everything, suddenly become the figure of the declared radical adversary of power, the ally of the forces of contestation … Above all, he risks being caught between the extremes.68



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In Ryan’s mind, the drama of October 1970, the most acute of the crises that afflicted Quebec, elevated into prophets those public intellectuals, such as Ryan himself, who counselled the moderation of negotiation designed to affirm a broader social consensus in Quebec. This self-perception was directly affirmed by his reference to Christ’s enigmatic phrase “I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). In this instance, Ryan stood against the artificial peace imposed by the intervention of outside military forces and the silencing of opposition voices, and in favour of a true peace reconciling both conservative and radical ideological tendencies in his society, secured by the prophetic sword of critical reflection and open public discussion. Ryan’s reflection on the tragic, but essential prophetic, role of moderate political voices like his own was a function of his propensity to read the October Crisis in supra-historical terms, as an act in a great cosmic drama that pitted Christ’s incarnation against the earthly power of kings and tyrants. His Christmas 1970 editorial, “Noël et l’inquiétude du roi Hérode,” was a thinly veiled allegorical assault on the “powers” – personified by Trudeau, Bourassa, and Drapeau – whose anger at the potential offered by the Christian message of a direct mediation between humans and God without recourse to their authority gave rise to “a barbarous repression out of proportion to the event that had given rise to the king’s anxiety.”69 The language echoed Ryan’s persistent critique of the W M A , that it was an excessive and disproportionate response of the authorities to the nature of the threat. But there was a further dimension to the editorial, one that returned to his sense that the core civilizational dynamic in which French Canada was locked was the ongoing dialectic between “Herodian” and “Zealotist” tendencies, encapsulating the federalist/sovereigntist tension, or the Ottawa/Quebec City dichotomy of the French-Canadian political conscience. The Herodians, personified by Pierre Trudeau, and the failed mediator Bourassa, who had thrown in his lot with them, may have succeeded through the use of military repression, but Ryan believed that this would only lead to a reassertion, in more radical, violent forms, of nationalist Zealotism, unless a middle way could be found. In this instance, the resolution of the ultimately crippling civilizational dichotomy lay not with Trudeau’s “just watch me” – the expression of an uncivilized polity ruled by gunslinging supermen70 – but with the patient witness and actions of Christians, who must act publicly “without worrying about displeasing the authorities, and to support the interests of the people without fearing to offend established interests” in order to affirm “the radical

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and inalienable dignity of man,” which, for Ryan, constituted the essential vocation of Christianity.71 Even after the murder of Pierre Laporte on the night of 17 October, Ryan was still declaring that the emergency measures were “excessive” and that “the democrats” of his society must watch vigilantly over their application. He repeatedly observed that, while the legitimate authorities had to be given the benefit of the doubt, there was something lacking about their legitimacy, unless they “took further steps to associate those from different milieus whose social influence and moral authority constitute another, no less vital form, though one frequently disdained by the political powers, of democratic leadership.”72 And here, Ryan both defined and applied the role of the public intellectual at a moment of social crisis: the conjunction of democratic vigilance with the need to organize public opinion through institutional channels to induce governments to adopt a moderate line. His leading role in the Comité des huit, formed in November 1970, extended to planning a series of colloquia to awaken his fellow citizens to what he considered “the habitual acceptance” of a climate of repression that had established itself in Quebec. Based on the premise that the shocks of the F L Q kidnappings were not sudden surprises or isolated events, but constituted a pattern that had become increasingly evident during the past six years, Ryan and his associates sought to counter what they believed would be further attempts by the authorities to abridge civil liberties, and to secure the speedy release of those detained without charge under the W M A. It was imperative that Quebec recover its “confidence in its future” through the organized efforts of “a grouping together of those who believe in the democratic future of Quebec.”73 Throughout the crisis, Ryan contended that it was an episode within a much longer succession of crises extending at least as far back as de Gaulle’s 1967 visit, which had publicly sundered the unity of Quebec nationalists into warring federalist and sovereigntist elements. His own political stance was quite clear: he would continue to seek solutions “in the double line of a liberal democracy impregnated with a social conscience and of a federalism that is flexible and respectful of Quebec’s distinct vocation.” If, by the end of October, he confided to his readers that, six months earlier, Le Devoir had been closer to Robert Bourassa but had come to express a position that approximated that of René Lévesque, it was because he was willing to fearlessly pose two questions that neither Bourassa nor the Trudeauites were willing to countenance. Were Quebec’s social and political structures themselves, and not just



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criminal elements, partially responsible for these incessant crises? And would these structures, the product of an “orthodox liberal” civilization, be sufficient to meet the challenges posed by renewed crises?74 Ryan was insistent and clear about what was needed to meet these challenges: in order to build democracy, the provincial Liberal government had to act to broaden its base to reinforce its authority within the wider society. He had been giving this advice to Bourassa since the election of April 1970. It formed the constant refrain of Ryan’s editorials and explains the nature of his interventions in the October Crisis.75 On the evening of 14 October 1970, the petition of the sixteen eminent personalities was delivered at a press conference and was published in Le Devoir the following morning. It sought to persuade the Quebec government to enlist the positive support of federal authorities for the exchange of political prisoners for the lives of Cross and Laporte. By claiming that the crisis was primarily a Quebec matter, it also urged Bourassa to ignore those outsiders who sought to propagate the “illusion that a chaotic and thoroughly ravaged Quebec will be easy to control by any means.” Finally, it exhorted those “citizens and groups” who shared these ideas to engage in a campaign to make their opinions known to the public authorities.76 Here, Ryan sought to bring to bear his social liberal beliefs about the centrality of organized public opinion to a democracy to the solution of the kidnapping crisis. What most disturbed – and continues to disturb – those in authority were the names on the list of the “sixteen,” which included, in addition to Ryan, well-known opponents of both the Bourassa government and federalism, such as René Lévesque, Camille Laurin, and Jacques Parizeau of the P Q ; separatist sympathizers such as Fernand Dumont and Guy Rocher; and union leaders such as Marcel Pépin, Louis Laberge, and Yvan Charbonneau, all engaged in a “Front Commun” against the government.77 William Tetley was particularly exercised that the supposedly “opportunistic” – and therefore illegitimate – alliance of intellectuals and union leaders seemed to aid the F L Q , or at the very least promote Quebec sovereignty by lashing out at Ottawa and Ontario, and that the tactics of the petitioners seemed to countenance “corporatism,” by which he meant the idea that a legitimate government with a parliamentary majority should consult moderate groups. While corporatism was an ideology with a long-standing relationship to the ideology and practice of governments and groups in Quebec – and, indeed, had been refurbished by Liberal premier Jean Lesage during the Quiet Revolution – it was, in Tetley’s lexicon, tantamount to anarchy, because he believed that the petitioners aimed at replacing the duly elected

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government with a coalition regime that would open the door to further depredations by the F L Q . Worse still, the petitioners had committed the ultimate effrontery of not including a single lawyer or person of legal training!78 For a social liberal like Ryan, there was nothing illegitimate or illegal about an alliance of intellectuals and union leaders, elements that Bourassa would have to reach out to in order to build the stable, consensual regime that could ensure democratic progress in Quebec, nor even collaboration between federalists and sovereigntists in the name of human values and national solidarity.79 He was adamant at the time, and continued to be firm in asserting, that there was nothing devious about the petition: it was purely “humanitarian” and followed all the rules of “peaceful action.” If it were a factor in the decision to impose the W M A, that was evidence of the authorities’ panic and willingness to be led into “committing one of the most incredible abuses of power that can be imagined.”80 In a later interview, Ryan recalled that the petition was originally Lévesque’s idea, and that he had approached Ryan by telephone, praising Le Devoir for its stance during the crisis, but warning that matters were going to come to a head soon. Ryan asked him if he was referring to the possible imposition of the War Measures Act, upon which Lévesque suggested that a statement calling on the government to display moderation might be useful. During the discussion, Ryan and Lévesque were alone. The P Q leader provided a draft of the text while Ryan discussed with him possible names of other signatories. Ryan later looked over and revised the draft and then submitted it to various persons to sign. He was explicit in stating that there was no mention of a provisional government in these conversations and that, indeed, Lévesque was only interested in the petition.81 Just over a week after the imposition of the War Measures Act, once the political situation had been considerably calmed by a strong military presence and mass arrests of suspected F L Q members and sympathizers, disturbing rumours began to circulate, originating with Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, naming Claude Ryan as a key figure in a movement to establish a “provisional government” in the event that Bourassa had been unable to resolve the crisis. The story was picked up by the Toronto media, fuelled by an anonymous editorial written by Peter C. Newman in the Toronto Star (26 October) and then recycled in Montreal by Pierre C. O’Neil of La Presse (27 October) and Dominique Clift of the Montreal Star.82 The rumours were vigorously denied by both Robert Bourassa (28 October) and Pierre Trudeau (5 November), who especially rejected



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any suggestion that such rumours had influenced their decision to resort to emergency measures, largely because they wanted to deflect public attention away from the fact that at no time did they enlighten the public about a precise chain of evidence that would unambiguously justify the recourse to the W MA .83 However, six months after the events, Trudeau appeared to backtrack in an interview, suggesting, “Claude Ryan and other persons projected replacing Mr. Bourassa’s newly elected regime with an ‘alternate government,’”84 a thesis still strongly endorsed by William Tetley four decades after the October Crisis. In an editorial published 30 October 1970, entitled “A Plot that Never Existed,” Ryan placed his version of events on record, largely to counteract what he considered Dominique Clift’s misguided assumption that the petition was somehow evidence for the supposed “provisional government.” On Sunday, 11 October, the workaholic Ryan found himself unoccupied, as no paper would be published the next day, it being Thanksgiving. Constitutionally unable to remain idle, he summoned his editorial colleagues Michel Roy (newly promoted to deputy editorin-chief), Paul Sauriol, Vincent Prince, Claude Lemelin, and JeanClaude Leclerc to the Le Devoir office for a wide-ranging discussion of the F L Q situation.85 The group hashed out three “hypotheses”: first, that Bourassa’s government might maintain the hard line advocated by Justice Minister Choquette and would ultimately succumb to pressure from Ottawa to proclaim the WMA ; second, that new terrorist events might render Bourassa’s government powerless to master the situation, compelling a short-term solution of a provisional government formed of “the most worthwhile elements” of all the provincial parties, reinforced by “a few political personalities from diverse milieus”; and, third, that the government might emerge from the crisis more united and confident by succeeding in obtaining a negotiated solution.86 According to Ryan, the group was firmly of the opinion that the most likely scenario was the third one, all the while restating his long-held view that Bourassa would have to think about reinforcing his cabinet team. The group decided to verify their diagnostic by consulting a number of key figures in the unfolding drama, and Ryan was charged with personally visiting them to obtain their views. His first port of call was Lucien Saulnier, Mayor Drapeau’s powerful right-hand-man, whom he consulted Sunday afternoon. Saulnier, Ryan recalled, “really did not understand, and told me not to touch the subject, it was too dangerous,” and leaned heavily towards the imposition of the WMA , rejecting the second hypothesis as completely implausible. “At no time during this meeting,” Ryan declared,

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“did I broach the project of a provisional government in which I myself would have participated in any way.”87 What Ryan did not know was that Saulnier, though an effective city administrator, was of a highly nervous disposition, and that he tended to fall into a depressed state at moments of tension. “He took my intervention in a completely unwarranted way,” Ryan stated later, “and literally left in a panic,” undoubtedly informing his chief, Jean Drapeau, that Ryan “was with Lévesque and that they are a dangerous gang.”88 It was evident that Drapeau, who was in the midst of a municipal election campaign against the radical democratic F R A P , was more than eager to link the petition, which had been signed by union leaders who were ­supporting the civic opposition, Ryan’s hypotheses, and the F L Q . The mayor ultimately lent his voice to those urging Bourassa and the federal authorities to impose the WMA , feeling that such a move would cripple FR A P, which had made the cardinal error of not denouncing the F L Q . Ryan’s outrage at Drapeau’s conduct was palpable, and he confided to Gérard Filion that the mayor “wanted to drag me through the mud by alleging that I was associated with an F L Q provisional government.”89 The airing of the rumours just two days before the Montreal municipal election was too close to be merely coincidental: Drapeau was undoubtedly involved. They were quickly picked up on the Ottawa cocktail party circuit. In the winter of 1971, in a speech on behalf of the Comité des huit, Ryan linked the spread of the provisional government rumour to a party given by Alex Pelletier, the wife of his old antagonist, Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier. Ryan mocked Pelletier, commenting that, “if the rumour … was true and if I was really the leader of this formation, I would take Gérard Pelletier into my cabinet and name him the Minister of Silence!”90 This was an oblique reference to Pelletier’s role in attempting to silence opposition journalists. Ryan’s adamant refusal to moderate his opposition to the W M A explains why certain members of Trudeau’s government, particularly Pelletier and Marc Lalonde, were so intent on giving the “provisional government” idea even greater currency. Shortly after the Pelletiers’ party, Lalonde approached Peter C. Newman with “information” alleging categorical proof that Ryan was involved in the “plot” to replace Bourassa. Lalonde’s claim was followed by a phone call  to Newman from Trudeau himself. According to Newman’s memoirs, he first resisted the suggestion on the grounds that Ryan was a staunch federalist, but later remembered that, at a party hosted by Bernard and Sylvia Ostry, Alex Pelletier was telling anyone who would listen that “Claude Ryan is out to take over the government,



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and has to be put down.”91 Though not entirely convinced, Newman, who had become a good friend of Ryan’s during the 1960s, wrote an article, naming no names, that asserted that a major factor in the federal decision to invoke the WMA was the existence of a plan to replace the provincial government. After consulting with the Toronto Star’s publisher, Newman phoned Ryan to ask him about the story being circulated, to which Ryan replied acidly that writing articles citing no names as sources did not conform to his concept of journalism. Many years later, though not before Ryan’s death, a contrite Newman reflected bitterly that he had been duped by Lalonde and Trudeau into becoming an unwitting accomplice to defame the director of Le Devoir.92 For Ryan, the conversation with Saulnier had merely been a discussion of hypotheses: Ryan intended these as talking points with his ­editorial team, not as scenarios that he wished to see materialize. Ryan had presented a similar three-fold hypothesis to Le Devoir’s readers on 27 January 1970, in assessing the likelihood of Quebec separatism and Ottawa’s response to the possibility of the Union nationale opting for Quebec independence.93 In a later interview with Newman, Ryan stated that the furthest he himself went was in a direct conversation with Robert Bourassa at the outset of the crisis: I told him, my friend if you want to get through this – and I’m not only talking about the kidnappings but about the moral and social crises which underlay these things – you have to reinforce your government. This was friendly advice I was giving him. I hinted at no names, I hinted at no method by which this could be done. I said that’s your responsibility as head of the government you have to come up with a stronger government … I was amazed at the weakness they were showing when the crisis was developing. He had called me and this is one of the remarks I made during the conversation. It is urgent for him to reinforce the government because other challenges lie ahead which may be more serious than that one.94 As with elections, Ryan was a rather poor prognosticator: he was convinced that Bourassa would ride out the crisis with a stronger government through negotiation. Yet in fact the first hypothesis, that a hard-line response would occur, was the most plausible. In light of Ryan’s explanations, even some hard-line Trudeauites soon recanted having given credence to the fallacious “provisional government” rumours. Bryce Mackasey, the federal minister of labour, wrote to a

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third party in early December to exculpate himself from suggestions that he had spoken to Peter Newman about such a possibility.95 Two old friends, Ramsay Cook and Jeanne Sauvé, also wrote letters of support to Ryan. Cook noted his admiration for “the difficult role which you continue to play in the affairs of Canada and Quebec,” while informing him that, although he accepted his explanation of the “provisional government” episode, it had paradoxically convinced him that the W M A was necessary, because the fact that Ryan had even contemplated such a scenario indicated that the situation in Quebec was extremely serious.96 Sauvé sent along her own acute assessment in the form of a draft of an article, “The Plot That Was Not,” which had been commissioned by a contrite Newman. Noting that rumours had begun to circulate in Montreal as early as 20 October, the day of Pierre Laporte’s funeral, she ascribed their currency to the gap in perception between Montreal and Toronto and the belief in English Canada that “just about anything can happen in the Province of Quebec.” Discounting suggestions that Bourassa had completely collapsed – indeed, the P Q was in far worse internal shape than the provincial Liberals – she insisted that Bourassa’s government was in complete unity, in contrast to Trudeau having to denounce the excessively emotional rhetoric of “his Quebec strongman” Jean Marchand. “Still,” she perceptively concluded, “if this would-be government was at all plausible, one would have to change the key figure in the plot. Instead of having Claude Ryan as the Machiavel, one would have to cast René Lévesque in that role.” Indeed, Sauvé concluded, only the P Q leader, and not the federalist Ryan, could have possibly benefited politically from the collapse and replacement of Bourassa’s government by a coalition or provisional government. “And,” she wondered, “can anyone visualize M. Ryan as an innocent instrument in the hands of the separatist leader?”97 One nagging question remains about these bizarre allegations. Was there something in Claude Ryan’s hitherto easy navigation between the figure of the realistic journalist, the stern, unbending public moralist, and the confidant of political leaders, ministers and public servants, that lent itself to allegations of plotting during French Canada’s most signal moment of crisis? His Montreal Star colleague Dominique Clift, a respected reporter at the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Quebec, certainly thought so. Responding to Ryan’s denial of the “provisional government” rumours on 30 October, which in large part was a rebuke to Clift’s story, the latter asserted that it was not the facts that were in question – these indubitably indicated that there was no conspiracy – but the



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intention of the persons involved. Clift became more explicit, stating, “What is at stake touches directly on the notions that the director of Le Devoir might have about politics and news.” He stated that Ryan’s methods stood apart from those practised at other papers, in that Ryan based his opinions on “assiduous auscultation with persons in power … Your paper holds itself close to power in order to be its chronicler.”98 Essentially, Clift was telling Ryan that the rumours arose because he had crossed the line that professional journalists must maintain in order to keep themselves and the sanctity of the news at arm’s length from power. And, given Ryan’s propensity for closed-door conversations with wielders of political power, Clift asserted, “One can guess that it happens at times … that politics comes into conflict with news.” “We don’t know at times,” he told Ryan, “whether we are dealing with the director of Le Devoir, or a confidant of power, or a concerned citizen.” He provided his own interpretation of the origin of the “provisional government” rumours, namely, that certain persons had noted Ryan’s “personal disposition” to come to the rescue of a falling government “with the aim of preventing the possible collapse of our institutions.” Such persons, Clift alleged, had come to the conclusion that Ryan’s intentions were “political rather than professional.” It should not be forgotten that, during the crisis, Ryan had “made political and public gestures, which had nothing to do with the paper, whose goal was to convince the authorities not to sacrifice the lives of two hostages for inhuman reasons of state.” Ultimately, as a responsible newsman, Clift concluded that such a confusion of roles, which he none too obliquely suggested was an ambiguity cultivated by Ryan himself in order to enhance his authority, was incompatible with the vocation of the professional journalist, concluding with the advice that Ryan should steer clear of political entanglements and concentrate on the true mission of a newspaper.99 It was soon apparent that Clift’s critique had hit the mark, especially when Pierre C. O’Neil of La Presse weighed in with a similar critique of the “intimacy” that had grown up between Le Devoir and politicians and advanced the need for a purer version of journalism that maintained airtight barriers between journalists and political power in order to maintain the credibility of the journalistic enterprise. Ryan responded in an article on 2 November 1970 revealing that he had carried on extensive private conversations with politicians during the Cross-Laporte drama. He argued that, while it was possible to hold to a view of the press as “a kind of sanctuary for news and opinion,” as a self-sufficient authority that chronicled power “with total freedom, without regard to persons,

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established interests, friendships, or personal links of any sort,” this concept was, in his view, more closely associated with the news domain that placed a high value on standards of rigour, objectivity, and precision. However, he referred to a rival view of the journalist’s vocation, characteristic of “those whose primary function is to express opinions at times when power demonstrates that it is concerned to govern in close communion with the entire society.”100 This was the journalism of the editorialist, a devoted public intellectual with a high moral purpose that went far beyond the shibboleth of objectivity, whose daily task was to judge situations, events, and people, and whose pronouncements “could break a career, change the direction of a government, or cause the success or failure of a large-scale project.” How, Ryan asked, could the editorialist “act with justice and realism if he remains continually cooped up in an office and communicates with no one?” How could he come into contact with real political situations without knowing public figures “in a fairly intimate and personal way?” In direct reference to the long-standing Christian imperative of “contact” – the watchword with which he had launched his editorial career – he declared categorically: “In any wellmade contact, there is a dynamism that pushes each party to reveal themselves under their true colours, to know one another better.”101 This type of journalism was coextensive with Christ’s own mission, which rested on personal communication. Its human practitioners were Ryan’s heroes: the great American journalists Walter Lippmann and James Reston, and, from Canada’s past, Henri Bourassa, George Brown of the Globe, and J.W. Dafoe of the Winnipeg Free Press. It was a concept of the journalist’s high calling in which the use of “hypothesis” served a legitimate purpose of orienting informal conversations and in educating the public. “There is nothing in this practice,” declared Ryan “to be scandalized about. It is an essential dimension of the task of he who conceives his role as not simply bound up with writing opinions every day, but writing with the aim of acting on the course of decisions and events. If journalism was but a literary or philosophic exercise, if it was designed only to entertain the public while those who hold responsibility decide, I would have never entered it and I certainly would not have stayed.” Most emphatically, he stated that his practice of journalism required “direct, continuous contact with persons of all milieus, in particular those who hold a public mandate … My duty is to raise my perception and intelligence of situations and men to the highest level of realism. And this cannot be done in the Olympian isolation of an office.”102



Disclosing the Meanings of the October Crisis 543

However, the very fact that the October Crisis exposed Ryan’s journalistic practice to criticism from dedicated and responsible professionals such as Clift and O’Neil indicated the beginning of a subtle sea change, an impatience with the public intellectual’s assertion of independence from the conventions of mere professional journalism. The professionalization and specialization, and in certain ways the fragmentation, of Quebec’s intellectual community was continuing apace under the acids of rapid secularization and politicized nationalism. Ryan’s position as a public intellectual depended on his ability to deploy the moral insight and passion of Christianity, which in the late 1960s still aroused a response in wide segments of Quebec society, and through this establish a direct link between liberal politics and social conscience. In this way, he acquired influence over political figures and sustained connections between his society’s leaders and the conscience of the educated audience for which he wrote. But what if the October Crisis was in fact demonstrating that these common values were wearing thin, with social liberalism itself caught between extremist violence and an aggressive, intolerant version of the liberal creed? In a larger sense, the smear campaign against Ryan orchestrated by officials in the Prime Minister’s Office, and more than condoned by Pierre Elliott Trudeau himself, points to the deeper meaning of the October Crisis in the history of Quebec and Canada. Trudeau had dedicated his political purpose to advancing a modern liberalism premised upon the absolute sanctity of the rights of the individual uncoupled from any ­collective or group allegiances, sustained by a new politics guided by technocratic experts, dedicated to ending ideological competition in the name of a “scientific” politics based upon rational functional planning. Social liberals such as Ryan constituted a major roadblock to the advent of this new liberalism, because he spoke for an older, but still persuasive model of civic participation based upon the consultation and representation of organized interests such as families, unions, professional associations, churches, student groups, and neighbourhood groups representing the urban poor. In some key respects, social liberalism had a particular resonance in Quebec because it echoed that society’s older corporatist heritage in which, through the establishment and cultivation of institutional channels and organs of consultation, citizens would secure a permanent and legitimate voice in legislation and policymaking. Far from being consigned to a backward past, corporatist ideas had secured a new lease on life during the Quiet Revolution with a number of experiments

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attempted by the Liberal Lesage administration.103 During the October Crisis, social liberalism became, in the eyes of a number of important federal Liberals, a suspect ideology, a conduit for radical ideological experimentation. Its opponents believed that it might contaminate the model of liberalism promoted by the prime minister’s inner circle and hence could not be included in the liberal canon. During the late 1960s, labour unions, one of the key components of the social liberal vision, had become considerably more radicalized and drawn towards more violent forms of confrontation with employers and the state.104 At the same time, the “war on poverty” waged by both levels of government had led to a proliferation of organizations in Canadian cities advocating greater rights for the poor.105 And as we have seen, Claude Ryan’s Montreal was the dynamic centre of this radical ideological experimentation. Trudeau Liberals might ask, however, whether all these groups were legitimate interlocutors of the state, given the presence of radical and revolutionary activists in some of them. Far from reinforcing the social authority of the state, it was feared that the admission of these groups to even a consultative voice under the social liberal rubric would institutionalize and prolong social instability and might lead to the grafting of “alien” ideologies of revolution and radical socialism onto Canadian liberalism and to ideological polarization into distinct conservative and radical options. In the process, the raison d’être of the Liberal Party itself would be destroyed. Worse, it would lead to the admission that violence, under some circumstances, might constitute a legitimate means of effecting social change. Claude Ryan, though as dedicated as Pierre Trudeau to the “end of ideology” as the hallmark of a progressive future, believed that liberalism was a far more capacious ideology, one capable of transcending some of its current expressions, and he therefore consistently refused to demonize even those forms of radicalism that advocated social change through violence. For this reason, he was targeted not simply for being “soft” on the F L Q terrorists, but for intellectually aiding and abetting them, acting as an unwitting “multiplier” of terrorism. Defending the petition of the ­sixteen eminent personalities, Ryan categorically rejected this imputation. “It is everywhere written that they pressed the government to bend without nuance to all the demands of the kidnappers. This is not what they thought … Since when has the idea of negotiation become synonymous with pure and simple capitulation?”106 Ryan’s belief in negotiation, apart from its roots in the Christian idea of dialogue, rested on a sociopolitical analysis that viewed the late 1960s as an era where the boundaries between “dissidence” and “delinquency” had become increasingly



Disclosing the Meanings of the October Crisis 545

porous. Speaking in the midst of the October Crisis, he outlined that, conventionally, liberal society had tolerated dissidence within certain closely circumscribed limits, but the breakdown of social and moral ­consensus had rendered this approach increasingly moot. The waves of social contestation Quebec and North American society were experiencing had featured intellectual, social, and political dissidents increasingly deploying methods of action considered “delinquent” under the classic liberal creed, with the authorities responding by lumping them under the rubric of “criminals or defectives.” “The phenomenon of terrorism,” he told his audience, “is not purely and simply a crime in the material sense of the term. It is a new form of politico-social behaviour for us, but one well-known in other parts of the world,” that could not be suppressed simply by drawing a line dividing those who supported the authorities from those considered linked to the F L Q.107 Far from resolving the October Crisis, or fostering greater social concord, the proclamation of the WMA had only aggravated the serious divisions in Quebec society, in his estimation, by forcing intellectuals and leaders of social movements to “question the very foundations of the regime under which we live. Many have hitherto believed … that the main choice is between federalism and sovereignty. It might well be that this choice … has ceased to be the most fundamental one, and that we will be compelled to make a more decisive and heartbreaking one between Trudeau’s artificial democracy, the totalitarian democracy of the F L Q, or the real democracy of which thousands of citizens dream.”108 That such a prominent public intellectual was outspokenly advancing a rival vision of a liberal society more open to ideological innovation and transformation was anathema to the Trudeauites. The difficulty with Ryan was his moral stance: his critique of the W M A and of Trudeau ­liberalism had considerable resonance not only in Quebec, but also in English Canada. Ryan boasted on a visit to Toronto in early 1971 that “I’ve never got so many invitations from English Canada as I’m getting today,”109 including calls from insiders such as Senator Keith Davey to address Liberal grass-roots riding associations and an invitation from the Liberal Students of Canada to speak at their annual convention.110 One letter, from the vice-chairman of the Policy Committee of the Toronto and District Liberal Association, concurred with Ryan’s analysis of the FLQ, stating that, while the means employed by the terrorists were violent and unacceptable, they were the fruit of “the lack of local autonomy and power” and of the fact that the legal system existed simply to protect the privileged. Canada could avoid the polarization occurring in

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the United States between the “law and order” element and the extremists only by taking decision making out of the hands of technocratic experts and returning it to the people.111 More significantly, Ryan accused Trudeau of using the crisis to promote a liberalism anchored on a “plebiscitary democracy” that invoked the rights of the “silent majority” to effectively limit civil rights and free discussion. In other words, Trudeau, the erstwhile champion of civil liberties, had placed himself on the side of political brutes like Richard Nixon and Jean Drapeau to eviscerate the fundamental social liberal premise of “the continuous intervention and supervision of an enlightened and critical citizenry.”112 The promise of Ryan’s social liberalism was a vision of democracy that could not simply be encompassed by the shibboleths of individual rights and majority rule. In order to scotch any appeal that social liberalism might have for the  Liberal Party faithful, Trudeau took the unprecedented step on 20 November 1970 of offering a public definition of liberalism to the policy convention of the Liberal Party. In an unmistakable reference to the contestations of the past five years, Trudeau stated that liberalism’s ultimate goal was to “make sure that we are not caught up in the vortex of change but that, on the contrary, try to dominate change,” thus ensuring that Canadian society was spared becoming the “victim” of undesired social change.113 Convoking the assembled M P s and party faithful to a new consciousness of their “responsibility as liberals,” the prime minister defined the modern liberal idea as valorizing “to the highest degree the freedom of the individual,” with the individual defined as “a personal absolute,” fully integrated into society and culture. “The liberal man,” Trudeau maintained, was a feature of a specific moment of human history and could emerge only at a stage where “the modification of society through violence has become intolerable to a great number of consciences.”114 By polarizing “liberal man” and the recourse to violence, Trudeau was interposing an insuperable obstacle between Canadian liberalism and forms of radical ideology and activism that had flourished in the climate of the 1960s. Where Ryan believed that, through reasoned dialogue, both radicalism and liberalism might be transformed – the one through a lowering of the ideological temperature through contact with the individualistic and functionalist imperatives of modern liberalism, and the latter impelled towards a more affirmative social purpose and human generosity – Trudeau closed off all possibilities of dialogue, stating his belief that such ideological manifestations were “the detritus of history,” an atavistic return to the “magic and superstition” characteristic of prehistory and therefore incompatible with life in a



Disclosing the Meanings of the October Crisis 547

modern polity.115 This was the direct antithesis of Ryan’s approach, whose view of extremists was to “bring them back into the mainstream. And if the mainstream has got to be broadened a little in order to do that, then the public good requires that we work towards that.”116 What Ryan was asking of liberalism was something more profound: as one of his audience recognized, he refused to accept “the classical notion of majority” as a sufficient basis for democracy and, rather, believed that “broadening the mainstream” meant “changing the rules of the game” of liberal civilization.117 However, it was in his definition of the modern state that Trudeau drew the clearest distinction between his version of liberalism and Ryan’s. Where Ryan defined the citizen as the product of a mediation between individual and government involving the former’s engagement in a panoply of semi-public institutions and participating in the elaboration of an intelligent public opinion, Trudeau defined the relationship as one of direct, unmediated contact. Invoking the name of Emmanuel Mounier, his personalist maître à penser, Trudeau charged the state with guaranteeing the fundamental status of the human person and removing obstacles to the free competition of spiritual communities. In accomplishing the second part of its task, the state was justified in using “constraint” – force – to ensure that no extraneous powers menaced the human person. The key to governing a modern state, he concluded, was to bring government and people closer together through better systems of communication and through an enhancement of the state’s ability to balance the functionalist imperatives of bureaucracy with the protection of the human person. Social change might indeed occur, but it would be “gradual, by way of selective and directed evolution.”118 This unmediated connection would abolish what was distinctive about social liberalism: the negotiation of change through the interplay of organized interests, and the admission of the rights and historic experience of human collectivities into the art of governance. In Trudeau’s extreme modernist definition of liberalism, such bodies at best hampered the work of government, and at worst harboured and expressed atavistic, non-liberal ideologies. For Trudeau, what was at stake in the October Crisis was nothing less than a total victory over a rival definition of liberalism, and the enlistment of an overwhelming consensus in favour of his brand of liberalism among the Canadian public, intellectuals, and makers of opinion. And, in this task, his principal obstacle was Claude Ryan.

Epilogue I prefer to enter a time of revision, which will necessarily be a bit long and obscure. Claude Ryan, “Les fruits indirects de la crise” (1970)

In a long letter to Peter C. Newman several months after the October Crisis, Ryan offered a series of wide-ranging reflections on his role and the ways in which events had transformed his self-identity and sense of purpose. “The October crisis,” he declared, “tore off the veil. It made me realize in a flash that far from being disassociated with one another, the successive crises cleaving Quebec … were really closely inter-related, and evidence of deep-seated troubles in the basic structure of our society.” He charged that Trudeau and Drapeau, those two champions of plebiscitary democracy, had come together “to make the Canadian people believe that it was all the result of criminal acts perpetrated by a small group of individuals. They failed in their duty as political leaders in that they did not show that the crisis reflected deep and unresolved tensions potentially present in everyone of us.”1 Ryan himself realized that he had been compelled to make a choice between what he once believed French Canadians could reconcile, namely, his identity as a Canadian and his profound sense of being a Quebecker. He acutely sensed that this polarization had profoundly shifted the underlying basis of his authority and legitimacy as a public intellectual. “For a long time,” he confided to Newman, I was accepted as an interpreter of good will and was able to move in both communities with ease, with the object of making the views, hopes and expectations of both mutually understood. I was witness and a party to all the debates and the battles. All through, I was able, at least on the surface, to preserve objectivity. In certain milieux, a

Epilogue 549

kind of moral arbitrage or mediation was expected of me, to close the gap between conflicting parties. I was accepting this role because I believed it was useful to a country to which I felt attachment, and because it sprang from my own analysis of the situation in which I tended to favor middle-of-the-road solutions rather than extremes.2 What most weakened his authority as a “bridge-man” or “pontiff” was the awareness that English Canada had manifested a positive aversion to engaging in the type of dialogue necessary to transform Confederation. The events of October had revealed to him “a deeper intolerance in English Canada” for the new forms of nationalism in Quebec, and it saddened him to conclude that the differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada were “deeper, more considerable, more substantial” than he had once believed,3 and that “I have the impression that I could never again be accepted by English Canada – nor address English Canadians – in the same spirit of impartiality and objectivity as before.”4 Ryan had not ceased to be a federalist. Although, for his constituency at Le Devoir, he had always written about the Canadian idea as a “hypothesis,” it was always evident that federalism had the status of a doctrine in his thinking. He understood this doctrine not as some fossilized tradition, but in Cardinal Newman’s sense of an evolving, living being. Thus, despite his revulsion against the blunt exercise of federal power to end the threat of terrorism, he maintained that he was committed to giving federalism “a certain benefit of the doubt” because it represented a conservative principle that encapsulated the riches of the experience of former stages that could still be developed to suit modern ends. “I refuse to destroy it,” he stated, “for the doubtful pleasure of satisfying certain fellow travellers.” At the same time, he warned his readers that he would not cling desperately to federalism as the epitome of historical or political truth.5 Federalism had become something far more instrumental, subordinate to the true interests of Quebec society itself, an expression of the fact that he had come, more than ever, to concur with the political expression of nationalism that was now transforming Quebec. He bluntly told Newman that, while he had counselled his readers against separatism in the past, he was leaving his options open and would not hesitate to recommend the Parti québécois if it offered the best choice or a more democratic vision. “A federalism dominated by interests which would make impossible the realization of our destiny? I should have no hesitation in preferring an independence responsive to real democratic values.”6

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The weakening of Ryan’s faith in his own stature as a mediating public intellectual, and in the viability of dialogue with English Canada, ineluctably drew him towards a different vocation. Prior to 1970, he might have welcomed Trudeau’s willingness to compromise, displayed in the federalprovincial discussions around the Victoria Charter of 1971, in which, in order to secure patriation of the constitution, a Charter of Rights, and an amending formula, Trudeau was prepared to accord Quebec a veto, guarantee the appointment of three Quebec justices to the Supreme Court of Canada, entrench French and English as official languages, and consider greater jurisdictional authority for Quebec in the field of social policy.7 Instead, Ryan adamantly urged Robert Bourassa to reject the deal because “it would be imprudent to leave the impression that Quebec’s demands are limited to social policy.” Indeed, for Ryan, the “vocation of the State of Quebec” was the paramount consideration, and he rejected any constitutional deal on patriation and amendment that did not include an in-depth revision of power sharing.8 He reckoned, too, that a constitutional “freeze” would work in the long run to Quebec’s advantage, by “proving by absurdity the urgency of a solution, and giving Quebec the chance to show what price must be paid for a satisfactory solution”9 – in other words, Quebec could wait Trudeau out. Events within Quebec – a growing climate of labour contestation, and the repoliticization of the question of language after 1974, and the erosion of Bourassa’s massive majority – meant the recession of the hopes of a postindustrial future achieved through a more socially conscious liberalism. These circumstances impelled Ryan to shift the horizons of his social liberalism in an older direction more assertive of individual rights. Given the fissures within his own society, he could no longer take his position as a moral and political arbiter as a given. Ultimately, the election of the P Q in 1976 forced the public intellectual to concede that he could no longer accomplish the mission of defending an intermediate federalism – one resistant to both the appeal of René Lévesque’s quest for an independent nation and the blandishments of Pierre Trudeau, one that incarnated a sensitivity to his society’s nationalist political aspirations and the position of Quebec in Canada – through the vehicle of Le Devoir or as a confidante of power. Claude Ryan had to assert it through the direct political engagement of partisan political choice. Reluctantly, the last of a breed of public moralists was driven, against his better instincts, to become an active politician, assuming the uncertain mantle of the leadership of the Quebec Liberal Party.

Notes

A b b r e v i ati on s AH E C Archives de l’École des Hautes Études Commerciales AU M Archives de l’Université de Montréal AU Q AM Archives de l’Université du Québec à Montréal BAnQ M Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montréal BAnQ Q Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Québec b-n bloc-notes CR Claude Ryan CRL G Centre de Recherche Lionel-Groulx D AU L Département des Archives, Université Laval e editorial F ACC Fonds Action Catholique Canadienne F CR Fonds Claude-Ryan F F S S Fonds Faculté de Sciences Sociales F I CE A Fonds Institut Canadien d’Éducation des Adultes JC Jeunesse canadienne JEC Journal of the Jeunesse étudiante catholique L AC Library and Archives Canada LD Le Devoir LM Laïcat et Mission McM U A McMaster University Archives MTS Mon testament spirituel (Ottawa: Novalis, 2004) OFM Ordre des frères mineurs PA Prêtre, Aujourd’hui SAU M Service des Archives de l’Université de Montréal TU Trait d’union

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Notes to pages 3–6

I nt roduct i on  1 CR, “Le Devoir après soixante ans” [e], LD , 30 December 1970. Throughout this book, the translations of quotations from the French l­anguage are my own.   2 For Trudeau, see the major two-volume biographies by John English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, vol. 1, 1919–1968 (Toronto: Knopf, 2006), and Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, vol. 2, 1968–2000 (Toronto: Knopf, 2009), and, more focused on Trudeau’s ideas, by Max Nemni and Monique Nemni, Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919–1944, trans. William Johnson (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006), and Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman, 1944– 1965, trans. George Tombs (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011). See, most recently, Allen Mills, Citizen Trudeau: An Intellectual Biography (Don Mills, O N : Oxford University Press, 2016), which seeks to position Trudeau as a “public intellectual.” For Lévesque, see the three-volume biography by Pierre Godin, René Lévesque, vol. 1, Un enfant du siècle, 1924–1960 (Montreal: Boréal, 1994); René Lévesque, vol. 2, Héros malgré lui, 1960–1976 (Montreal: Boréal, 1997); René Lévesque, vol. 3, L’espoir et le chagrin, 1976–1985 (Montreal: Boréal, 2001).   3 Olivier Marcil, La raison et l’équilibre: libéralisme, nationalisme et catholicisme dans la pensée de Claude Ryan au Devoir (1962–1978) (Montreal: Les Éditions Varia, 2002); Pierre Pagé, Claude Ryan: un éditorialiste dans le débat social (Montreal: Fides, 2012); Guy Lachapelle, Claude Ryan et la violence du pouvoir: “Le Devoir” et la Crise d’octobre 1970 ou le combat des journalistes démocrates (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005). See also the essays published as the result of a colloquium held in 2005 to consider Ryan’s legacy: Gérard Boismenu, Michel Brûlé, Solange Lefebvre, Claude Lessard, and Pierre Noreau, eds., Ruptures et continuité de la société québécoise: trajectoires de Claude Ryan (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2005).   4 Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987).   5 Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2–3, 6, 23–4, 29. Posner accepts the central contention of the “declinist” model, that the social significance of the public intellectual has been eroded by the rise of specialized academic disciplines in the modern university.  6 Pagé, Claude Ryan.   7 For a treatment of the reasons behind the weak development of intellectual ­history in both English Canada and Quebec, which can be traced largely to the long hold of nationalism and an attendant conservative model of the intellectual, see Michael Gauvreau, “Beyond the Search for Intellectuals: On the Paucity of Paradigms in the Writing of Canadian Intellectual History,” in Thinkers and Dreamers: Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger, ed. Gerald Friesen and Doug Owram (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 53–90.



Notes to pages 7–8

553

  8 For the most overt expression of this interpretation in English Canada, see Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). Owram built upon a paradigm first outlined by A.B. McKillop in the late 1970s, which sought to define distinctive elements of a “Canadian” intellect through the pervasiveness of a “moral” intellect that also served to delay the emergence of modern university disciplines and limit their scope. See McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979); and for a specific case study, Marlene Shore, The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). An analogous story for Quebec is told by Marcel Fournier, “Intellectuels de la modernité et spécialistes de la modernisation,” in L’avènement de la modernité culturelle au Québec, ed. Yvan Lamonde and Esther Trépanier (Quebec: Institut Québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1986), 231–51, and Marcel Fournier, L’entrée dans la modernité: science, ­culture et société au Québec (Montreal: Éditions Saint-Martin, 1986). For a persuasive critique of this trajectory, which demonstrates the persistence of ­religious and moral criteria in the “modern” discipline of sociology during the decade after the Second World War, see the excellent study by Jean-Philippe Warren, L’engagement sociologique: la tradition sociologique du Québec (1886–1955) (Montreal: Boréal, 2003). See, however, Nelson Wiseman, ed., The Public Intellectual in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), a wide-ranging, and at times autobiographical series of reflections by current figures who claim the title “public intellectual.”   9 Yvan Lamonde, “L’époque des francs-tireurs: les intellectuels au Québec, 1900– 1930,” in L’inscription sociale de l’intellectuel, ed. Manon Brunet and Pierre Lanthier (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval / L’Harmattan, 2000), 189–211. 10 Julien Vincent, “Introduction: New Directions in the History of Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century,” in Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Christophe Charle, Julien Vincent, and Jay Winter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 3–5. 11 Christophe Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels,” 1880–1900 (Paris: Les Éditions Minuit, 1990); Christophe Prochasson, “Intellectuals as Actors: Image and Reality,” in Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samurai, ed. Jeremy Jennings (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993); Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France: de l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Perrin, 2004). 12 This historical perspective has been admirably analyzed and deconstructed by Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 13 See the previously cited works by Jacoby and Posner.

554

Notes to pages 8–11

14 Indeed, the very way in which Fournier has posed the question, “Pourquoi y eut-il si peu d’intellectuels au sens sartrien du terme au Québec?” underscores the nature of the problem. See Fournier, “L’intellectuel, le militant, et l’expert,” in Brunet et Lanthier, L’inscription sociale de l’intellectuel, 25–30; Lamonde, “L’époque des francs-tireurs”; Lamonde, “L’affaire Dreyfus et les conditions d’émergence de l’intellectuel vues des Amériques,” in Pour une histoire comparée des intellectuels, ed. Michel Trebitsch and Marie-Christine Granjon (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1998), 111–23; Fournier, “Intellectuels de la modernité.” 15 For an admirable account of the ideas, key figures, and institutional networks framing this social scientific endeavour, see Warren, L’engagement sociologique. 16 For the debate in France, see Étienne Fouilloux, “Intellectuels catholiques? Réflexions sur une naissance différée,” Vingtième siècle 53 (January–March 1997): 13–24. 17 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 18 BAnQ Q, F CR, 1995-90-003/114, Revue de Presse, Personnalités, “Ryan Denies ‘Hand of God’ Statement,” Montreal Gazette, 22 September 1978; Daniel L’Heureux, “Ryan a répondu au grand mystère chrétien de la vocation,” La Presse, 21 September 1978. 19 The very dominance of this view in the historiography of postwar Quebec demonstrates the effectiveness of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his historical apologists in proffering a monolithic definition of liberalism as the opposite of nationalism. See the influential and now-classic work by Michael Behiels, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1945–1960 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), which builds upon Ramsay Cook’s essays in The Maple Leaf Forever: Essays on Nationalism and Politics (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1971). 20 Ian McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 4 (2000): 624–5. Recent international developments in thinking about liberalism have cautioned historians against the assumption that liberalism ever achieved a final or hegemonic form and noted that it is more accurate to speak of “liberalisms,” whose tenets frequently overlapped and competed. See Simon Gunn and James Vernon, “Introduction: What Was Liberal Modernity and Why Was It Peculiar in Imperial Britain?” in The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, ed. Gunn and Vernon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 12, 16; Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?” in Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2016), 62–90. 21 For the key features of this transatlantic liberal progressivism, termed the “New Liberalism” in Britain, see Michael Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations of Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought



22 23

24

25

Notes to pages 11–14

555

(Princeton, N J : Princeton University Press, 2005), 26, 38–59; Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870– 1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000). Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Age in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, N Y : Cornell University Press, 2006). McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 635, 643. Quebec historians have paid scarcely more attention to the competing varieties of liberalism within their own society, preferring the hegemonic model of a particularly conservative expression of that ideology among business people and politicians. See, in particular, Fernande Roy, Progrés, harmonie, liberté: le libéralisme des milieux d’affaires francophones à Montréal au tournant du siècle (Montreal: Boréal, 1988); Gilles Bourque et Jacques Beauchemin, La société libérale duplessiste, 1944–1960 (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1994); and Jean-Marie Fecteau, La liberté du pauvre (Montreal: VLB Éditeur, 2004). For Quebec, see Jean-Philippe Warren, L’engagement sociologique; for English Canada, see Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in English Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). C.A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1.

c ha p t e r on e   1 This description is loosely based on the fictional account of the moving-day tribulations of the Lacasse family of Saint-Henri, written in the 1940s by Gabrielle Roy. See Bonheur d’occasion (1947; Montreal: Beauchemin, 1970), 229. For the problems facing Montreal renters during the Great Depression, see Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and François Ricard, Histoire du Québec contemporain: le Québec depuis 1930 (Montreal: Boréal Compact, 1989), 80–2.   2 Aurélien Leclerc, Claude Ryan, l’homme du devoir (Montreal: Éditions Quinze, 1978), 21.  3 BAnQ M, F CR, P558, S 10, S S 1 (Documents personnels), 1995-12-001/292, CR, “Blandine Dorion-Ryan, 1899–1989: témoignage donné par Claude Ryan, à l’issue de la cérémonie des funérailles de Blandine Dorion-Ryan en l’église Saint-Philippe d’Argenteuil, le 4 octobre 1989.”  4 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 17–18.

556

Notes to pages 14–18

  5 The first of these institutions for women was established in Montreal in 1908 by the Soeurs de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame. I am grateful to Lucia Ferretti for this reference.  6 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 18.   7 Ibid., 19.   8 Ibid., 19–20.  9 CR, “Blandine Dorion-Ryan.” 10 Ibid. 11 Further information on Henri-Albert Ryan was provided by Paul Ryan and Patrice Ryan, 14 February 2014. 12 For the impact of the death of Pierre Trudeau’s father in 1935, see John English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, vol. 1, 1919– 1968 (Toronto: Knopf, 2006), 19–21. Trudeau was sixteen at the time. René Lévesque’s father died in 1937, when his son was aged fourteen. See Pierre Godin, René Lévesque vol. 1, Un enfant du siècle (1922–1960) (Montreal: Boréal, 1994), 76–80. 13 However, this theory is advanced directly by Pierre Godin in René Lévesque, 1:80–1, which states that both Lévesque and Trudeau aspired to become charismatic leaders because they lost their fathers during adolescence. This view is also obliquely subscribed to in Max Nemni and Monique Nemni’s biography of Trudeau, whose subtitle, Fils du Québec, père du Canada, conveys Trudeau’s aspirations to a political “fatherhood.” 14 See, in particular, the overall assessment offered by John English in Citizen of the World, 1:3. 15 For the authoritarian and right-wing leanings of Pierre Trudeau’s early political thinking, see Max Nemni and Monique Nemni, Trudeau, fils du Québec, père du Canada, vol. 1, Les années de jeunesse, 1919–1944 (Montreal: Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2006), especially 225–316. 16 These figures for average relief assistance during the Depression are drawn from Linteau et al., Histoire du Québec, 2:80, 84. The average cost of rent declined from $27.92 to $23.04 per month: thus, direct relief would have ­covered less than half the monthly cost. 17 CR, “Blandine Dorion-Ryan.” 18 For the enactment of mothers’ pensions in Quebec and their restriction to ­widows, see Nancy Christie, Engendering the State: Family, Work, and Welfare in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 217. 19 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 21. 20 CR, “Blandine Dorion-Ryan.” 21 BAnQ M, F CR, P 558, S 10, S S 6 (Écrits 1986–2003), 2004-05-006/7, CR, “L’abondance, pour qui?” Allocution prononcée à l’occasion d’une rencontre tenue à Ville-Émard, sous les auspices de la Fondation du CLS C Verdun-CôteSaint-Paul, 4 November 1997; Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 20. 22 CR, “Blandine Dorion-Ryan”; Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 25.



Notes to pages 19–23

557

23 For a description of this traditionalist turn among many Catholics in response to the Great Depression, see Jean Hamelin and Nicole Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, le XXe siècle, vol. 1, 1898–1940 (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1984), 384–5. 24 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 25. 25 Clerical recruitment expanded rapidly among francophone Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s. Between 1901 and 1931, the numbers of religious (priests, brothers, and nuns) grew from less than 9,000 to over 25,000, with the proportion of religious in relation to the Catholic faithful increasing from 1/166 to 1/97, making Quebec’s society one of the most clerically managed in the Western world. The growth in religious personnel was particularly striking among the religious communities, as opposed to the diocesan clergy. See Hamelin and Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, 2:152. For the assistance offered to Gérald and Claude Ryan to pay their college fees, see Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 26. 26 CR, “Blandine Dorion-Ryan.” 27 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 24–5. 28 For the role of the Pères de Sainte-Croix at the Oratoire, see Hamelin and Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, 1:351. 29 CR, “Blandine Dorion-Ryan.” 30 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 20. 31 Ibid., 26. 32 Bernard Vigod, Quebec before Duplessis: The Political Career of LouisAlexandre Taschereau (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986); Conrad Black, Duplessis (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977); English, Citizen of the World, 1:11–15. Max Nemni and Monique Nemni paint a far darker picture of Trudeau père’s ideological convictions, placing him on the far end of a right-wing spectrum, a devotee of Donoso Cortés’s anti-liberal political philosophy. See Trudeau, fils du Québec, vol. 1. 33 Jean-Philippe Warren, L’engagement sociologique: la tradition sociologique du Québec francophone (1886–1955) (Montreal: Boréal, 2005), 225–32. 34 Ibid., 228. 35 Jean-Claude Picard, Camille Laurin: l’homme debout (Montreal: Boréal, 2003); Godin, René Lévesque, 1:77. 36 Patricia Dirks, The Failure of l’Action libérale nationale (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991); Herbert Quinn, The Union Nationale: A Study in Quebec Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963); Black, Duplessis. The provincial Liberals technically won the 1935 election, though with a much-reduced majority. With looming revelations of scandal, the party replaced Taschereau with Adélard Godbout, but to little avail. A new election held in 1936 resulted in a crushing majority for the Union nationale. 37 For Bourassa’s pan-Canadian nationalism, see Réal Bélanger, Henri Bourassa: Le fascinant destin d’un homme libre (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université

558

Notes to pages 23–7

Laval, 2013); Joseph Levitt, ed., Henri Bourassa on Imperialism and Bi-Culturalism, 1900–1918 (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1970). 38 For Asselin’s position within the interwar nationalist firmament, see the biography by Hélène Pelletier-Baillargeon, Olivar Asselin et son temps, vol. 3, Le ­maître (Montreal: Fides, 2010), 36–42, 114–16, 133. 39 Ibid., 309–10, 220–3, 295. 40 CR, “Le cours classique des années 1940,” in De Sainte-Croix à Maisonneuve: 75 ans d’histoire, ed. Laurent Lachance (Montreal: Fides, 2003), 84; Pascale Ryan, “Entrevue avec Claude Ryan,” 27 April 2001 (unpublished transcript). I would like to express my appreciation to Pascale Ryan for furnishing me with a transcript of her interview, which provides a number of key indications to the source of Claude Ryan’s ideas. 41 Omer Bergeron, Philo I, “Impression de la retraite,” TU , May 1939. 42 “L’histoire du Collège en bref,” in Lachance, De Sainte-Croix à Maisonneuve, 59. CR, “Le cours classique,” 81. The eight-year program was organized into two cycles, the first – the “Cours des Lettres,” comprising Latin elements, syntax, method, versification, belles-lettres, and rhetoric – lasting six years. The second cycle, lasting two years, was designated “Philosophie-Sciences” and taught the philosophy of nature, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy and also introduced students to chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, and geometry. See C R , “Le cours classique,” 84. 43 Sainte-Croix au Canada (n.p., 1947), 401. 44 Albert Montplaisir, c.s.c., “Culte de l’humanisme,” in ibid., 535. 45 For the elitism of the colleges, particularly of Brébeuf, see Nemni and Nemni, Trudeau, fils du Québec, 1:49. Even after the rapid expansion of the college network from 32 institutions in 1930 to 58 in 1950, only 5–6 per cent of the pool of eligible male francophone Catholic students actually attended. See Louise Bienvenue, Ollivier Hubert, and Christine Hudon, Le collège classique pour garçons: études historiques sur une institution québécoise disparue (Montreal: Fides, 2014), 23. 46 CR, “Le cours classique,” 86; Gérald Bélair, “Évocation des années 1935 à 1942,” in Lachance, De Sainte-Croix à Maisonneuve, 74. 47 For this description of the curriculum in the colleges of the Pères de SainteCroix, see Paul-Émile Hotte, c.s.c., “L’enseignement des lettres,” in SainteCroix au Canada, 545–6. 48 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 27–8. See also C R , “Le cours classique,” 83. 49 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 29. 50 Classmates remembered the newspaper as Le Devoir, but Ryan was always adamant that in adolescence, he did not read it, viewing it as conformist and somewhat boring. Besides, until 1953, Le Devoir was an evening newspaper. See Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 29. For Ryan’s appreciation of Jean-Charles Harvey, the bête-noire of the Catholic Church during this period, whose journalistic flair Ryan considered a worthy successor to Olivar Asselin, see Pascale Ryan,



51 52

53

54 55

56 57

58 59 60

61 62

63

64

Notes to pages 27–31

559

“Entrevue.” For an analysis of Harvey’s weekly, see Victor Teboul, “Le Jour”: émergence du libéralisme moderne au Québec (Montreal: Hurtubise H MH , 1984). CR, “Le cours classique,” 85. Jacques Ouellet (Rhéto), TU , December 1939, 4; Yvan Perreault (Phi. II), “Bribe de notre vie étudiante,” TU , December 1938, 8; Jean-Charles Valin, “Bribes de vie ‘estudiante,’” TU , May 1939, 5. For Father Saey’s visit, see Bélair, “Évocation,” 73–4. Although wildly popular among the urban masses, Saey was viewed with suspicion by his fellow clerics for his moral absolutism and his tendency to overvalue exterior mortifications. See Hamelin and Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, 1:388–9. Fernand Bélanger (Philo II), “Aux grèves,” TU , December 1940, 5. For Trudeau and Pelletier, see Nemni and Nemni, Trudeau, fils du Québec, 1:117–34; for Laurin, see Picard, Camille Laurin; for Dumont, see Fernand Dumont, Récit d’une émigration: mémoires (Montreal: Boréal, 1997), 69–72; for Lévesque, see Godin, René Lévesque, 1:69–70. CR, “Nouveauté,” TU , May 1940, 4. BAnQ M , P558, S12, SS 1 (Secrétaire national d’Action catholique), 1995-12001/365, CR, “Causerie prononcée à Joliette … le 8 novembre 1959, lors du banquet de clôture de l’Assemblée Annuelle des Scouts Catholiques du Canada”; CR, “Le cours classique,” 87; Bélair, “Évocation,” 75; Jean Lamarre, Le devenir de la nation québécoise selon Maurice Séguin, Guy Frégault et Michel Brunet, 1944–1959 (Quebec: Septentrion, 1993), 93–4, 103. CR, “Causerie prononcée à Joliette.” Valin, “Bribes de vie ‘estudiante,’” 5. Yvan Perreault (Phi. II), “Bribe de notre vie étudiante, TU , December 1938, 8. For Claude Ryan’s participation in this particular camp, see Bélair, “Évocation,” 75. Léonard Crowley (Rhéto), “Veillée scoute,” TU , May 1940, 8. For a stimulating analysis of francophone Catholic attitudes to the Scouting movement, see Pierre Savard, “L’implantation du scoutisme au Canada français,” Les cahiers des dix 43 (1983): 207–62. Ibid., 251; Raphaël Thériault, “La christianisation d’une méthode: la formation des scouts du Petit Séminaire du Québec, 1933–1970,” Études d’histoire religieuse 67 (2001): 239–50. For a brief synopsis of the issues at stake in France surrounding the 1926 papal condemnation, see Étienne Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté: la pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II (1914–1962) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1998), 68–72; Philippe Chenaux, Entre Maurras et Maritain: une génération intellectuelle catholique (1920–1930) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999). The classic treatment of the ideology of Action française remains Eugen Weber, Action française: Royalism and Reaction in TwentiethCentury France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962).

560

Notes to pages 32–5

65 Yvan Lamonde, La modernité au Québec, vol. 1, La Crise de l’homme et de l’esprit, 1929–1939 (Montreal: Fides, 2011), 22. 66 Pascale Ryan, Penser la nation: la Ligue d’action nationale, 1917–1960 (Montreal: Leméac, 2006), 72–3. 67 Ibid., 73–4. 68 For the note of spiritual crisis and the search for a new order that predominated in the Action catholique movements of the 1930s, see Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 14–33. 69 For the contribution of these individuals and movements to the articulation of a sense of spiritual crisis, see Lamonde, La modernité au Québec, vol. 1. 70 For this analysis of the revival of nationalism, see Yvan Lamonde and Denis Saint-Jacques, “Avant-propos,” in 1937: un tournant culturel, ed. Yvan Lamonde and Denis Saint-Jacques (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2009), 5–6. 71 For an analysis of the debate between Groulx and Lévesque, which occurred between 1934 and 1935 and expressed rival positions among Quebec’s Catholic clergy, see Lamonde, La modernité au Québec, 1:107–20. 72 Ibid., 37. 73 For this succinct analysis, see E.-Martin Meunier and Jean-Philippe Warren, Sortir de la “Grande noirceur”: l’horizon “personnaliste” de la Révolution tranquille (Sillery, Q C : Septentrion, 2002). Meunier, in a more recent study of the international ramifications of personalism, is emphatic in defining personalism as an “ethic” that constituted a “rupture de ton” within Catholicism. See Meunier, Le pari personnaliste: modernité et catholicisme au XXe siècle (Montreal: Fides, 2007), 23, 27–9. 74 Meunier and Warren, Sortir de la “Grande noirceur,” 80–1. 75 The most comprehensive literary analysis of this current is provided by Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914 (London: Constable, 1966). 76 BAnQ M, F CR, P 558, S 12, S S 1, 1995-12-001/360, CR, “Les laïcs et la vie liturgique au Canada,, conférence à Joliette, 23 October 1954, and 1995-12001/365, CR, “Un romancier naturaliste au sein de l’Église – En route, de J.K. Huysmans,” Vie étudiante, 15 September 1960. 77 For the political allegiances of these novelists, see Griffiths, Reactionary Revolution, 4, 312. Griffiths places them on the political Right “because of the intransigent tenacity of many of the protagonists to hold to views that seem out-of-date,” 4. 78 CR, “Un romancier naturaliste.” For the definition of these writers as “Catholic” novelists, see Griffiths, Reactionary Revolution, 3–4. 79 Stephen Schlosser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 5.



Notes to pages 35–9

561

80 For Péguy’s contempt for institutionalized intellectualism, see M. Adereth, Commitment in Modern French Literature: Politics and Society in Péguy, Aragon, and Sartre (New York: Schocken, 1968), 59–60. 81 C.H. Gauthier (Philo II), “Notre Ghéon,” TU , December 1939, 11. Like the major figures of the prewar Catholic literary revival, Ghéon was a convert to Catholicism whose works were strongly marked by a “mystical realism.” See Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 117–18. 82 Griffiths, Reactionary Revolution, 4, 7–8. 83 For the vogue of Péguy in French Canada between 1930 and 1960, see Pierre Savard, “Notre Péguy,” Les Cahiers des Dix 45 (1991): 193–216. 84 For this analysis of Péguy and his debt to Bergson, see Meunier, Le pari personnaliste, 103–7. 85 Adereth, Commitment in Modern French Literature, 71–2. 86 For the prominence of the soldier and the saint in this literature, see Griffiths, Reactionary Revolution, 161. 87 Omer Bergeron (Philo I), “Impression de la retraite,” TU , May 1939, 10. For an analysis of the generational dynamic of the 1930s, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins. See also Gauvreau, “‘They Are Not of Our Generation,’” in The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholicism in Ireland, Quebec, and the United States, 1950–2000, ed. Leslie Woodcock Tentler (Washington, D C: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 62–90. 88 CR, “Un romancier naturaliste.” 89 For the new exaggerated masculinity that characterized social thought in the late Depression years in Canada, see Christie, Engendering the State, 199–215. 90 CR, “Un romancier naturaliste.” 91 Ibid.  92 Griffiths, Reactionary Revolution, 75, 85, 109, 153–6. 93 Théophile Bertrand, “Autour de la tragédie sociale,” TU , December 1939, 2. 94 CR, “Le cours classique,” 86. Maritain, though residing in France prior to 1940, and in New York following the establishment of the Vichy regime, visited Montreal frequently to deliver lectures. Florian Michel, in a recent study of the transatlantic dimension of neo-Thomist philosophy, observes that Maritain’s influence in Quebec was great, but because he was always “de passage,” he had relatively little influence on the internal dynamics of the departments and institutes of philosophy established in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Quebec City during the 1930s. See Florian Michel, La pensée catholique en Amérique du Nord: réseaux intellectuels et échanges culturels entre l’Europe, le Canada et les Etats-Unis (années 1920–1960) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2010), 6–7, 34. 95 Pascale Ryan, “Entrevue.” 96 CR, “Une grave injustice du ‘Star’” [e], LD , 20 April 1964. 97 CR, “Le père spirituel du Québec moderne” [e], LD , 24 May 1967.

562

Notes to pages 40–3

 98 Ibid.  99 BAnQ M, F CR , P558, S10, SS6, 2004-05-006/7, CR to David Thomas, Dean, Faculty of Community Studies, Mount Royal College, 26 November 1997. 100 CR, “Une grave injustice.” 101 BAnQ M, F CR , 2004-05-006/20, C R to M. Norman Cornett, Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, 6 June 2003. 102 Ibid.  103 Ibid.  104 For the content of Le Jour, which was given covert financial support by a number of large corporate interests and individuals prominent in the federal Liberal Party, see Teboul, “Le Jour,” 39–40, 110–11, 117–19. 105 For Trudeau’s support for Marshal Pétain’s regime until its downfall in 1944, see Nemni and Nemni, Trudeau, fils du Québec, 1:225–73; for Trudeau’s public support for the anti-conscriptionist Bloc Populaire, see English, Citizen of the World, 1:45–106. For Pelletier’s support of the Vichy regime and critique of the Canadian war effort, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 38. 106 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 27. 107 John English lists some of the names prominent on the anti-conscriptionist side in the 1942 federal by-election in Outremont. They include, in addition to the candidate Jean Drapeau, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Michel Chartrand, D’Iberville Fortier, André Laurendeau, Pierre Vadeboncoeur, Jean-Louis Roux, Jean Gascon, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, Daniel Johnson, and Charles Lussier. See Citizen of the World, 1:103. 108 CR, “Une grave injustice.” 109 CR, “Le père spirituel.” 110 For a compelling analysis of Groulx’s thinking about francophone minorities and nationalism, see Michel Bock, Quand la nation débordait les frontières: les minorités françaises dans la pensée de Lionel Groulx (Montreal: Hurtubise HM H , 2004), 14–15, 23, 325. 111 Ibid., 327. 112 For this analysis, see Michel Bock, “Apogée et déclin du projet national groulxiste: quelques réflexions autour de Directives (1937),” in Lamonde and Saint-Jacques, 1937, 27–38. For Groulx’s remarks to the Congress of the Jeunesses patriotes, see Lionel Groulx, “Labeurs de demain,” in Groulx, Directives (Montreal: Les Éditions du Zodiaque, 1937), 95–135. 113 For these “myths” that inspired the historical writing of Lionel Groulx, see Lamarre, Le devenir de la nation québécoise, 79. 114 Lionel Groulx, Pourquoi sommes-nous divisés? (Montreal: Les éditions de l’Action nationale, 1943), 13. 115 BAnQ M, F CR , 2004-05-006/20, C R à Norman Cornett. 116 François Rocher, Guy Rocher: entretiens (Montreal: Boréal, 2010), 20–1, 23. 117 CR, “Famille chrétienne en 1760 et en 1941,” TU , June 1941, 4.



Notes to pages 43–8

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118 There are some notable resemblances between Ryan’s article and a 1923 lecture delivered by Groulx to the Semaines sociales. See Lionel Groulx, “La Famille canadienne-française: ses traditions, son role,” in Groulx, Notre maître, le passé 1st series, 3rd ed. (Montreal: Librairie Granger, Frères, 1937), 130, 132–3, 150. 119 CR, “Famille chrétienne,” 4. 120 Ibid., 4. For further analysis of this current of ideas and its popularity among a number of influential Quebec Catholics in the 1940s, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 77–119; Denyse Baillargeon, “‘We Admire Modern Parents’: The École des Parents du Québec and the Post-war Quebec Family, 1940–1959,” in Cultures of Citizenship in Post-war Canada, 1940–1955, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003), 239–76. 121 Ibid., 5. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 In this respect, Ryan anticipated some later critics of the orthodox model of secularization. See Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, “‘Even the Hippies Were Only Very Slowly Going Secular’: Dechristianization and the Culture of Individualism in North America and Western Europe,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945– 2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 3–38; Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 125 CR, “Famille chrétienne,” 5. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid. 128 For Ryan’s discovery of La Relève, see Pascale Ryan, “Entrevue”; see CR, “Le cours classique,” 83, in which he recalls also being a frequent reader of Revue dominicaine, Les Carnets viatoriens, and Relations, a Jesuit publication devoted to the discussion of social questions. 129 For the substance and tone of La Relève in the 1930s, see Lamonde, La modernité au Québec, 91–6; and for a more complete analysis, Joseph Dunlop, “La Relève: Catholic Intellectuals in Quebec, 1930–1950” (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2013). 130 Lionel Groulx, “L’éducation nationale: conférence prononcée le 5 décembre 1936 à l’École du Plateau, au Congrès des instituteurs catholiques de Montréal,” in Groulx, Directives, 187. 131 Gérard Bessette, “Thomiste debutant,” TU , December 1939, 5. 132 For the use of Lortie’s text, see Yvan Lamonde, La philosophie et son enseignement au Québec (1665–1920) (Montreal: Hurtubise H MH , 1980), 229. For the use of Lortie after the Second World War, see Henri-Paul Bergeron, c.s.c., “Les études philosophiques,” in Sainte-Croix au Canada, 538. Guy

564

Notes to pages 48–53

Rocher regarded it as unprecedented that his philosophy teacher actually gave him the works of St Thomas Aquinas to read in the original. See François Rocher, Guy Rocher, 18. 133 See Jean-Philippe Warren’s perceptive article, “Fonder l’autorité sur la liberté: un paradoxe de la pensée personnaliste d’après-guerre,” in La rénovation de l’héritage démocratique: entre fondation et refondation, ed. Anne Trépanier (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2009), 119–20. 134 Lamonde, La philosophie, 232–4. For Lortie’s key role in the importation and transmission of the works of the French sociologist Frédéric LePlay to Quebec, see Warren, L’engagement sociologique, 40–1. 135 CR, “Le cours classique,” 88. 136 Bergeron, “Les études philosophiques,” 538. 137 Théophile Bertrand, “Autour de la Tragédie Sociale,” TU , December 1939, 2; Maurice Bélisle (Philo II), “À la gloire de Saint-Thomas,” TU , May 1940, 6–7. Indeed, the priests on the college faculty would not have been unaware of developments at the American university controlled by the Fathers of the Holy Cross (Pères de Sainte-Croix), Notre Dame University in Indiana. There, Yves Simon, a close intellectual associate of Maritain’s, taught philosophy. See Michel, La pensée catholique, 393–404. 138 Bertrand, “Autour de la tragédie sociale,” 2. 139 Maritain, Humanisme intégral, 14–15. 140 Ibid., 100. 141 Schlosser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 6. 142 Maritain, Humanisme intégral, 115–16. 143 Ibid., 117–18. 144 Ibid., 126. I have imperfectly translated Maritain’s “cité” as the Anglo-Saxon “commonwealth,” which captures Maritain’s insistence on the role of the temporal order and its politico-social institutions to promote the common good. 145 Ibid., 169–70. 146 Ibid., 180–1. 147 Ibid., 183–4. 148 Ibid., 195–7, 204. 149 Ibid., 174–5. 150 Ibid., 274. 151 Ibid., 299–301. 152 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Réflexions sur l’avenir du travail social,” November 1946, written for the journal of the École du Service Social. 153 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 30. 154 CR, “Réflexions sur l’avenir du travail social.” For an analysis of the sensation caused in Canada by Beveridge’s celebrated 1942 report and for Leonard Marsh’s rather shameless plagiarism, see Christie, Engendering the State, 270–90.



Notes to pages 53–8

565

155 For an analysis of the forces pushing towards educational reform, see Dominique Marshall, The Social Origins of the Welfare State: Quebec Families, Compulsory Education, and Family Allowances, 1940–1955, trans. Nicola Doone Danby (Waterloo, ON : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 2–9. 156 For the legislative achievements of the wartime Godbout administration, see Jean-Guy Genest, Godbout (Sillery, QC : Septentrion, 1996), 239–­62. For the Garneau Report, see Warren, L’engagement sociologique, 249–50. 157 This building, renamed the Pavillon Gilles-Hocquart, now houses the archives section of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. 158 AU M , F ACC, P16/K 1,11, R.P. Émile Bouvier, s.j., “Votre tâche, jeunesse,” LD , 18 November 1942. 159 For Bouvier’s background, see Yves Vaillancourt, L’évolution des politiques sociales au Québec 1940–1960 (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1988), 126–8. 160 BAnQ M, F CR , 2004-05-006/7, Textes 1998, CR, “Souvenirs de premiers ministres que j’ai connu,” allocution prononcée à Outremont devant le Club “les ultramontois,” 24 February 1998. Closer analysis would suggest that Bouvier’s prescriptions were not so outlandish and stood close to the conventional wisdom of most of the economists and businessmen engaged in the task of postwar “planning.” For the predominance of “productivist” models of thinking, see Christie, Engendering the State, 270–90. 161 For example, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who in the 1950s was close to the CCF, was in 1944, according to his biographers, still keeping close intellectual company with a number of unsavoury European authoritarian, quasi-fascist political leaders, including Marshal Pétain and Léon Degrelle. 162 Jean Hulliger, L’enseignement social des évêques canadiens de 1898 à 1950 (Montreal: Fides, 1958), 192–200. 163 BAnQ M, F CR , 2004-05-006/3, “Entrevue avec Pierre Godin au sujet de René Lévesque,” 18 July 1996. 164 Ibid. 165 For the 1939–40 prospectus, see R.P. Émile Bouvier, s.j., Le Samaritanisme moderne ou service social, Publication no. 317 (Montreal: École Sociale Populaire, 1940), 22–6. 166 Ibid., 23. 167 Ibid., 26. 168 Ibid., 16–19. 169 BAnQ M, CR, “Réflexions sur l’avenir du travail social.” 170 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/359, C R , “La ‘Poor Law’ anglaise,” ca. 1945. 171 For an analysis of these priorities anchored at the heart of Canada’s liberal welfare state, see Christie, Engendering the State, 310–19. 172 BAnQ M, CR, “La ‘Poor Law’ anglaise.” 173 For the close affiinities between Bouvier and the French-Canadian “petitbourgeois” liberalism that sustained the Union nationale of Maurice

566

Notes to pages 58–62

Duplessis, see Vaillancourt, Les politiques sociales, 128. Bouvier was to play a key role in the ideological assault of the late 1940s against the “reform of enterprise” advocated by Catholic trade unions. See Suzanne Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos: une lutte idéologique contre la participation des travailleurs (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005), 109–11, 325. 174 For Guillemette, see Warren, L’engagement sociologique, 278; and for Poulin, see Gonzalve Poulin, o.f.m., “Un plan de dix ans pour le Québec d’aprèsguerre,” Culture 4 (1943): 317–27. 175 BAnQ M , CR, “La ‘Poor Law’ anglaise.” 176 Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 30–1. 177 Ibid., 20–1.

c ha p t e r t wo   1 Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 14–33. The innovative quality of the approach to youth organization is also underscored by Louise Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène: l’Action catholique avant la Révolution tranquille (Montreal: Boréal, 2003).   2 AU M , F ACC, P 16/A 10,1, “Historique,” Document A – Nouvel Organisme d’A.C. – Société nationale pour la jeunesse C-F, n.d., and Action catholique canadienne – Projet de constitution. See also Jean Hamelin, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, le XXe siècle, vol. 2, De 1940 à nos jours (Montreal: Boréal, 1986), 70–82.   3 Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 35.    4 The celebrated publicity photo taken in 1941 of Cardinal Villeneuve standing in a military vehicle aroused a good deal of protest from nationalist and anticonscriptionist elements. See Hamelin, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, 2:17.    5 Michael Gauvreau, “The Protracted Birth of the Canadian ‘Teenager’: Work, Citizenship, and the Canadian Youth Commission, 1943–1955,” in Cultures of Citizenship in Post-war Canada, 1940–1955, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 201–38; Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène, 140.   6 L.B. Kuffert, A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939–1967 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 69.   7 Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène, 140.    8 Johnson resigned from the A C C in 1946 to run as a candidate for the Union Nationale in a by-election in Bagot. He was subsequently premier of Quebec between 1966 and 1968. See A U M, F A C C , P16/B4, 3,6, Me Daniel Johnson, Johnson to Dr J.-A. Vidal, president C N A C , 10 December 1946, resigning from the ACC vice-presidency.



Notes to pages 62–6

567

  9 Aurélien Leclerc, Claude Ryan, l’homme du devoir (Montreal: Éditions Quinze, 1978), 30–1. 10 BAnQ M, F CR, P558, S12, SS 1 (Sécrétaire national d’Action catholique), 199512-001/359, C R , “Le bourgeoisisme,” ca. 1946. 11 Pierre Juneau, “De 1930 à 1960, la Jeunesse étudiante catholique et autres mouvements d’action catholique: réussite et désaveu,” in, Ruptures et continuités de la société québécoise: trajectoires de Claude Ryan, ed. Gérard Boismenu et al. (Montreal: Faculté des études supérieures de l’Université de Montréal, 2005), 63. 12 On the origins of the A C J C , see Michael Behiels, “L’Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Canadienne-Française and the Quest for a Moral Regeneration, 1903–1914,” Journal of Canadian Studies 13, no. 2 (summer 1978): 27–41. 13 Gérard Pelletier, Les années d’impatience, 1950–1960 (Montreal: Stanké, 1983). 14 Gérald Bélair, “Évocation des années 1935 à 1942,” in De Sainte-Croix à Maisonneuve, ed. Laurent Lachance (Montreal: Fides, 2003), 76. 15 For Pelletier’s opposition to the war effort, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 38. 16 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Ryan’s Thesis,” “Les noyaux naturels de rassemblement dans l’organisation des loisirs des jeunes,” ca. 1945. 17 In contrast to the United States, Canada’s postwar moral “panic” over juvenile delinquency was brief and did not seriously shake the confidence of adult authorities regarding their strategies for socializing young people during the reconstruction period. This was due to the fact that the social, cultural, and psychological category of “teenager” was not well developed among either French- or English-Canadian social thinkers or activists. For a fuller discussion, see Gauvreau, “Protracted Birth.” For the American scene, see James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 18 CR, “Ryan’s Thesis.” 19 AU M , FACC, P16/I3, 52, Commission canadienne de la jeunesse, Gérard Lemieux, chef du secrétariat de l’Action catholique, to M. C.-H. Dagneau, l’Action catholique (Québec), 16 February 1945. 20 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “L’importance nouvelle des jeunes dans la cité,” Les carnets viatoriens 11, no. 3 (July 1946): 177, 182. 21 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Attitude des parents en face des mouvements de jeunesse,” ca. February 1950. 22 BAnQ M, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Importants documents sur la jeunesse canadienne,” ca. 1946. 23 Ryan was quoted by R.P. Robert Fortin, s.s.s., “Notre jeunesse,” in La jeunesse: les semaines sociales du Canada, 1945 (Montreal: École Sociale Populaire, 1945), 50. Ryan employed the same phraseology in his 1946 article in Les carnets viatoriens, “L’importance nouvelle des jeunes dans la cité,” 179. 24 CR, “L’importance nouvelle des jeunes dans la cité,” 178.

568

Notes to pages 66–72

25 CR, “La Fédération provinciale des mouvements de jeunesse,” JC , November 1948. 26 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Entre la sortie de l’école et le mariage,” ca. 1949. For the significance of the C Y C ’s definition of youth as aged 15–24, see Gauvreau, “Protracted Birth,” 210. 27 CR, “La Fédération provinciale des mouvements de jeunesse.” 28 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Attitude des parents en face des mouvements de jeunesse.” 29 CR, “Importants documents sur la jeunesse canadienne,” ca. 1946. 30 CR, “Entre la sortie de l’école et le mariage” 31 CR, “L’importance nouvelle des Jeunes dans la Cité,” 184; CR, “Entre la sortie de l’école et le mariage.” 32 CR, “Entre la sortie de l’école et le mariage.” 33 “L’importance nouvelle des Jeunes dans la Cité.” For more “democratic” and “individualist” approaches to education and child rearing, see Denyse Baillargeon, “‘We Admire Modern Parents’: The École des Parents du Québec and the Post-war Quebec Family, 1940–1959,” in Christie and Gauvreau, Cultures of Citizenship, 239–76. 34 CR, “Entre la sortie de l’école et le mariage.” 35 Juneau, “De 1930 à 1962,” 58. 36 For the currency enjoyed by this model among not only the jécistes but also among postwar francophone university students, and the importance of international encounters in bringing this model to Quebec, see Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène, 191–205; Karine Hébert, “Between the Future and the Past: Montreal University Student Youth and the Post-war Years, 1945–1960,” in Christie and Gauvreau, Cultures of Citizenship, 163–200. 37 Gérard Pelletier, “Ce fameux ‘après-guerre,’” JEC 11, no. 3 (March 1945); AU M , F A CC, P 16/G 3, 5.1, Jeunesse indépendante catholique, École civique d’été, 1950, Pierre Juneau, “Les mouvements de jeunesse: formateurs ou rongeurs d’homme?” 38 Pelletier went to Europe immediately after the end of the war as travelling secretary for the Fonds mondial de secours aux étudiants, visiting Dublin, Vienna, Naples, Brussels, and Prague, but circling back through Paris as often as possible. See Pelletier, Les années d’impatience, 39. 39 Gérard Pelletier, “Soldats de campagne ou zouaves paroissiaux,” Cahiers d’Action catholique 74 (October 1946): 55–6. 40 Ibid., 58–9. 41 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “En marge d’un article,” ca. 1946. 42 Ibid., CR , “Regards sur la société actuelle,” 23 June 1947. 43 CR, “L’importance nouvelle des Jeunes dans la Cité,” 179. 44 Denis Monière, André Laurendeau et le destin d’un peuple (Montreal: Québec  /  Amérique, 1983).



Notes to pages 72–4

569

45 The thought of both Maritain and Mounier is subject to close analysis in Martin Meunier’s Le pari personnaliste (Montreal: Fides, 2007). 46 For a discussion of Mounier’s view of human freedom, see Jean-Philippe Warren, “Fonder l’autorité sur la liberté: un paradoxe de la pensée personnaliste d’après-guerre,” in La rénovation de l’héritage démocratique: entre fondation et refondation, ed. Anne Trépanier (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2009), 127. 47 These included Gérard Pelletier, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Pierre Juneau, Guy Cormier, Roger Rolland, and Fernand Dumont, among many others. Interestingly, the extent of Mounier’s influence on Pierre Trudeau has become the subject of debate, with Max and Monique Nemni going out of their way to downplay such influence. See Max Nemni and Monique Nemni, Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman, 1944–1965, trans. George Tombs (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011), 222–3. John English, I think, captures the matter more judiciously in detailing Trudeau’s initial meeting with Mounier and the latter’s influence on Trudeau’s decision to pursue a graduate thesis on the world conflict and prospects of reconciliation between Christianity and Marxism. See English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Trudeau, vol. 1, 1919–1968 (Toronto: Knopf, 2006), 147, 169, 175. Further confirmation of Trudeau’s debt to Mounier has been underscored by Allen Mills, Citizen Trudeau: An Intellectual Biography, 1944–1965 (Don Mills, O N: Oxford University Press, 2016), 58–114, in which Mounier is listed as the primary influence. 48 Emmanuel Mounier, Feu la chrétienté, in Mounier, Œuvres, vol. 3, 1944­–1950 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962), 613–14. For Mounier’s attempt to conjugate personalism and Marxism, see John Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left in France, 1930–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 207, 211–12. 49 Mounier, Feu la chrétienté, 531–39. 50 According to Pelletier’s own account, his reverence for Mounier was such that he could not even trouble the great man for a personal interview. See Pelletier, Les années d’impatience, 144. 51 Ibid., 60–1, 145–6. 52 CR, “Regard sur la société actuelle.” 53 Pascale Ryan, “Entrevue avec Claude Ryan,” 27 April 2001 (unpublished transcript). 54 For the failed morality campaign, see A UM, FA CC, P16/J2, 1, La campagne de moralité – Ébauches de projets – Réunion consultative spéciale, Quebec, 9 August 1946; ibid., P16/J2, 4, Campagne de moralité – Réunions, 5 April 1945 and 5 December 1945. Archbishop Charbonneau, while certainly interested in social reform, desired a return to “traditional” religious observances, which he believed had been allowed to lapse during wartime. See Renaude

570

Notes to pages 74–80

Chapdelaine, L’histoire bouleversante de Mgr Charbonneau (Montreal: Les Éditions du Jour, 1962), 55. 55 CR, “Regard sur la société actuelle.” 56 Guy Rocher, “Lettre ouverte au Directeur,” Vie étudiante 12, no. 5 (May 1946). 57 This incident is mentioned in Guy Rocher’s memoirs, Entre les rêves et l’histoire: entretiens avec Georges Khal (Montreal: VLB Éditeur, 1989), 23. 58 CR, “Anti-communisme … ou quoi?” JC , June 1947, 11; BAnQ M, CR, “Regard sur la société actuelle”; L A C , Fonds Maurice-Sauvé, MG 32B-4, vol. 114-18, Juneau, Pierre, 1947–1950, “Le Festival de Prague,” 18 April 1947. 59 L AC, Fonds Maurice-Sauvé, vol. 116, C R to Mlle Violet Welton, secrétaire, Conseil Provisoire, Assemblée Internationale de la Jeunesse, 4 February 1949. 60 English, Citizen of the World, 165, although Trudeau misspelt “Nichols” as “McNichols.” 61 Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène, 219. 62 L AC, Fonds Maurice-Sauvé, vol. 116, C R to Sauvé, 26 July 1949. 63 Ibid., CR to Sauvé, 26 July 1948, C R to Sauvé, 4 November 1948. 64 Ibid., 4 November 1948. 65 Ibid., CR to Sauvé, 4 February 1949. 66 Ibid., vol. 106, file 22, Commission canadienne de la jeunesse, 1946, Meeting of Planning Committee – Canadian Youth Commission, Trinity College, Tuesday, March 18, 1946. 67 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Une fédération des mouvements de jeunesse,” ca. 1946; A U M, F C C , P 16/E 2, 1.7, “Histoire de la coordination dans le domaine des mouvements de jeunesse au Canada,” September 1950. 68 AU M , F A CC, P16/I3, 51, Comité national des mouvements de jeunesse canadien-français, C R to Mgr Gerald Berry, Peterborough, 15 April 1948; LAC, Fonds Maurice-Sauvé, vol. 116, C R to Maurice Sauvé, 18 January 1949. 69 CR, “Impressions sur l’O.N.U.,” JC , March 1947 ; CR, “Anti-communisme … ou quoi?” JC , June 1947. 70 BAnQ M , F CR, P558, S10, SS11 (Carnets), 2002-12-003/1, “How to Fight Communism?” 1951. 71 Ibid., “Calepin de notes du 18 mai au 9 juillet 1951.” 72 L AC, Fonds Maurice-Sauvé, C R to Mlle Violet Welton, 4 February 1949, and CR to Maurice Sauvé, 4 February 1949. For the NFLY’s role in the FMJ Q , see Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène, 223. 73 L AC, F.R. Scott Papers, MG 30 D211, vol. 105, Cour de Banc de la Reine, Renée Morin vs. Claude Ryan, Factum de l’appellante, Factum de l’intimé. 74 Ibid. The Communist Party in Canada adopted the nomenclature “LabourProgressive Party” during the Second World War in order to escape a legal ban on its activities. 75 Ibid. 76 BAnQ M , F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1949. 77 AH E C, Fonds Esdras Minville, P035, File Invitation à l’Étude, Lionel Groulx to Esdras Minville, 19 July 1943.



Notes to pages 80–1

571

78 For an excellent analysis of the postwar fracturing of the main grouping of nationalist intellectuals, the Ligue d’action nationale, see Pascale Ryan, Penser la nation: la Ligue d’action nationale, 1917–1960 (Montreal: Leméac, 2006), 224–41. 79 For a superb treatment of the post-1940 impact of the American sociology of the Chicago School on Laval University’s Faculté des Sciences Sociales in particular, see Jean-Philippe Warren, L’engagement sociologique: la tradition ­sociologique du Québec francophone (1886–1955) (Montreal: Boréal, 2003), 243–97. 80 The tenets of social democracy, particularly those aimed at the participation of organized labour in the management of firms, gained powerful currency among reformist Catholics in Quebec, many of whom were convinced that the social teaching of the Church, rightly interpreted, legitimated this critique of capitalism. See the massively researched treatment by Suzanne Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos: une lutte idéologique contre la participation des travailleurs (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005). For the characterization of the Duplessis regime as dominated by a “conservative liberal” ideology, see the much-discussed interpretation of Gilles Bourque, Jules Duchastel, and Jacques Beauchemin, La société libérale duplessiste, 1944–1960 (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1994). 81 Laurendeau was at this point still the provincial leader of the nationalist Bloc populaire, a third party that had been founded to oppose conscription but that articulated a more left-leaning program of social reform at odds with the Union nationale of Maurice Duplessis. On the Bloc, see Michael Behiels, “The Bloc populaire canadien: Anatomy of Failure, 1942–47,” Journal of Canadian Studies 18, no. 3 (fall 1983): 45–74. For Laurendeau’s role as editor of Action nationale and editor-in-chief of the influential daily Le Devoir, which introduced an “esprit de gauche” to nationalist circles, see Pascale Ryan, Penser la nation, 227, 241. For Laurendeau’s major role in elaborating a “neo-nationalism,” see Michael Behiels, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism vs. Neo-Nationalism, 1945–1960 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985). 82 BAnQ M, F CR 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Le sens du national dans les milieux populaires,” ca. 1947. 83 Ibid.  84 Ibid. 85 Ibid.  86 This dualistic model was first enunciated in the myth making of the citélibristes themselves and was given scholarly credentials in the influential work by Michael Oliver, whose doctoral dissertation was completed in 1956 but not published until 1991: The Passionate Debate: The Social and Political Ideas of Quebec Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Montreal: Véhicule, 1991). Michael Behiels’s influential and widely cited study of the Quebec intellectual community and the origins of the Quiet Revolution, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution also

572

Notes to pages 82–5

relies on the dualistic model, though it limits its conclusions to the period 1945–60. More recently, Yvan Lamonde, La modernité au Québec, vol. 1, La crise de l’homme et de l’esprit, 1929–1939 (Montreal: Fides, 2011), reasserts the thesis, but gives it even broader purchase as the key to understanding Quebec’s cultural encounter with modernity after 1929. 87 Pascale Ryan, “Entrevue.” 88 AU M , F A CC, P 16/I 3, 12, Association catholique de la jeunesse canadiennefrançaise, CR to M. Léon Patenaude, sec.-gén. ACJ C, 3 March 1948. Interestingly, Ryan confided to him that, while individual Jews were certainly active in the birth of Freemasonry, he could not subscribe to the idea that the “race juive” as a whole was involved in a conspiracy. 89 Hamelin, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, 2:123, notes between 250 and 800 members in Quebec, which was small compared to other youth movements. 90 AU M , F A CC, P 16/G 4, 10,3, Groupe Présence, 21 December 1945–September 1950, Autres dépliants, n.d.  91 CR, “Circulaire,” JC (Montreal), 1946. The editorial board of Jeunesse ­canadienne was also ideologically eclectic, and overlapped somewhat with “Présence,” comprising, in addition to Ryan, Roger Varin, Guy BeaugrandChampagne, Jeanne Benoît, Réginald Boisvert, Guy Cormier, Jacques Dubuc, Jean-Paul Geoffroy, Françoise Lavigne, Gérard Lemieux, Charles Lussier, Guy Rocher, Suzanne Casgrain, Yolande Cloutier, Georges Bilodeau, Renée Blanchard, Gustave Boulanger, and Colette Fortier. Foreign flavour was added by a team of “correspondents,” which at times included Pierre Juneau (Paris), Camille Laurin (Geneva), and Maurice Sauvé and Pierre Elliott Trudeau (London). 92 AU M , F ACC, P 16/G 3, 5,1 Écoles civiques d’été, CR, “Circulaire,” 24 July 1947. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 AU M , F ACC, P 16/G 3, 5,1 École civique d’été, Liste des professeurs à l’École civique d’été, 1950. 98 Dominique Foisy-Geoffroy, “Les idées politiques des intellectuels traditionalistes candiens-français, 1940–1960” (PhD thesis, Université Laval, 2008), 62. 99 “Neo-nationalism” emerged in the postwar years, and while it preserved significant links to the thought of Lionel Groulx, there were marked differences: first, in the propensity to replace the focus on the “Catholic” component of French-Canadian identity with an interest in the social questions thrown up by urban society and industrialization; second, in a much greater willingness to use the machinery of the state to move in a social democratic direction to counter the ills of industrialization, and to ensure a more powerful place for Quebec within the Canadian Confederation. The most complete analysis of



Notes to pages 85–91

573

neo-nationalist thinking has been provided by Behiels, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 20–60. 100 Gérard Filion became director of Le Devoir only in 1947, and it was not until 1948 that Laurendeau definitively abandoned the leadership of the Bloc populaire to combine the positions of editor-in-chief of Le Devoir and editor of L’Action nationale. Ibid., 22–3. 101 For the most revisionist statement of Groulx’s “modernity,” see Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 75–92. 102 Pascale Ryan, Penser la nation, 305. 103 Esdras Minville, Le citoyen canadien-français, 2 vols (Montreal: Fides, 1946), 1:18–19, 20, 22. 104 J.-T. Delos, Le problème de civilisation: La nation, vol. 1, Sociologie de la nation (Montreal: Les Éditions de l’Arbre, 1944). 105 Minville, Le citoyen canadien-français, 2:84. 106 Ibid., 1:24. 107 Esdras Minville, Invitation à l’étude (Montreal: Fides, 1945), 57. 108 CR, “Ferons-nous de la politique?” Action nationale, July 1951, 455. 109 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Notes sur l’orientation du Front Ouvrier,” 18 September 1951. 110 Minville, Le citoyen canadien-français, 1:66–8. 111 Ibid., 70. 112 CR, “Le sens du national” (emphasis in original). 113 Ibid. 114 Minville, Le citoyen canadien-français, 1:72. 115 Ibid., 2:72, 85. 116 Ibid., 2:85. 117 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Une fédération des mouvements de jeunesse,” ca. 1946. 118 CR, “Notes sur l’Action catholique,” Culture 9 (1948): 57. 119 Ibid., 59 (emphasis in original). 120 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Le bourgeoisisme,” ca. 1946. 121 CR, “Ferons-nous de la politique?” 469 (emphasis in original). 122 In 1947, Trudeau published a number of articles in the conservative nationalist weekly Notre temps lamenting the failure of nationalist political movements of reform and bitterly critiquing Quebec’s middle-class elites for being mired in a sterile religious orthodoxy. English, Citizen of the World, 168, views these as the products of an intellectual still unsettled as to his direction; Nemni and Nemni, Trudeau Transformed, 98–100, focuses on his attack on the imprisonment of middle-class elites in religious orthodoxy; Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 70, places Trudeau’s thinking in a broader context of the intellectual concerns of the Quebec milieu of the period. 123 CR, “Ferons-nous de la politique,” 458, 462–3.

574

Notes to pages 91–7

124 Ibid., 463–6. 125 Minville, Le citoyen canadien-français, 1:11–13, 59. 126 CR, “Ferons-nous de la politique?” 474–5 (emphasis in original). 127 BAnQ M, F CR , 2004-05-006/1, file 5, Entretiens, Diane Girard, Entrevue avec Claude Ryan, 16 April 1997. 128 For this episode in Quebec labour history, see Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos, 8–12, 23. 129 AU M , F ACC, P 16/G 4, 10,3, Groupe Présence, Groupes d’action civique, ­programme d’activités, 1947–48, Louis Beaupré to CR, 29 March 1947. 130 CR, “Regard sur la société actuelle.” 131 Ibid. 132 CR, “Le sens du national.” 133 CR, “Ferons-nous de la politique?” 476. 134 Minville, Le citoyen canadien-français, 2:326. 135 Ibid., 2:116. 136 Minville, L’invitation à l’étude, 103. 137 CR, “Importants documents sur la jeunesse canadienne,” ca. 1946. 138 AU M , F ACC, P 16/G 3, 5,1, Écoles civiques d’été, CR, “La raison d’être de l’École civique d’été,” 1947; B A nQ M, FC R , 1995-12-001/359, CR, “Citoyens du Canada,” ca. 1947. 139 J.-T. Delos, Le problème de la civilisation: la nation, vol. 2, Le nationalisme et l’ordre de droit (Montreal: Les Éditions de l’Arbre, 1944), 148–9, 155, 168, 167–8. 140 For an illuminating discussion of the Catholic personalist origin of the language of human rights, see Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 85–106; Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 1–33: “The birth of human rights was not so much about new individualist schemes of protection as communitarian investment in moral order.” 141 Delos, Le problème de la civilisation, 2:170–1. 142 Delos, Le problème de la civilisation: la nation, vol. 1 (Montreal: Les Éditions de l’Arbre, 1944), 159–60. 143 Delos, Le problème de la civilisation, 2:196 (emphasis in original). 144 Ibid., 2:197 (emphasis in original). 145 “Le sens du national.” 146 Ibid. For a similar statement linking “Canada” with the promotion of a superior “common good,” see A U M, F A C C , P16/O4, 101, Institut Canadien d’éducation des Adultes, Maurice Tremblay et Jean-Charles Falardeau, “Notre communauté nationale,” deuxième partie d’une conférence prononcée à l’occasion de l’assemblée annuelle de la Société d’éducation des adultes, Quebec, 9 April 1949.



Notes to pages 97–102

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147 CR, “Notes sur l’orientation.” 148 CR, “Le bourgeoisisme.” 149 AU M , F ACC, P16/E 2, 1,7, “Historique de la coordination dans le domaine des mouvements de jeunesse au Canada,” September 1950 (emphasis in original). 150 L AC, Fonds Maurice-Sauvé, vol. 116, C R to Mlle Violet Welton, 4 February 1949. 151 Ibid., CR to Maurice Sauvé, 26 July 1949. 152 CR, “Notes sur l’orientation.” 153 AU M , F ACC, P16/C 2, 3,7, Rapport Camille Laurin, CR to Dr Camille Laurin, 29 November 1949. Laurin was advised to consult F.-A. Angers, Gérard Filion, Maurice Lamontagne, André Laurendeau, Esdras Minville, Georges Perras, Gustave Poisson (deputy-minister of youth and social welfare), R.P. Gonzague Poulin, Adrien Pouliot, Dr J.A. Tardif, and Mgr Fernand Vandry (rector of Université Laval). Interestingly, the only intellectual who refused to participate was Father Georges-Henri Lévesque. See ibid., CR, “Circulaire,” 13 July 1950. 154 BAnQ M, Fonds Jeunesse ouvrière catholique, P104 art. 181, “Rapport Camille Laurin,” 1950. 155 AU M , F ACC, G3, 5,1, École civique d’été, “Forum sur l’unité nationale,” 1949. 156 Ibid., P 16/C2, 3,7, C R to Dr Camille Laurin, 29 November 1949. 157 Ibid., P 16/I 3, 77, Co-ordinating Committee of Canadian Youth Groups, CR to Miss Winifred Lownie, 13 April 1950. 158 Ibid., P 16/K1, 23, Joseph Folliet, “Extrait de l’avènement de Prométhée,” n.d. 159 BAnQ M, F CR , 2004-05-006/4, C R , “Georges-Henri Lévesque,” allocution prononcée à l’Université Laval, 17 February 2002. 160 Ibid., 1995-12-001/359, C R , “L’Office national du film vu par la Commission Massey,” La Comédie Musicale: Découpages, Cahiers d’Éducation Cinématographique 6–7 (summer 1951). 161 AU M , F ACC, P16/J 5, 1 Commission Royale d’enquête Massey, 1949–1951, March 1950–27 March 1950, “Mémoire soumis par le Comité national de l’Action catholique canadienne, section française, à l’Honorable Vincent Massey.” 162 Rocher, Entre les rêves et l’histoire, 23. 163 Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos, 284. 164 The entire Charbonneau affair remains very murky, and any firm resolution will await the opening of the Vatican archives on the subject in 2019–20. Denise Robillard, Charbonneau’s biographer, has strongly suggested that it was clerical factionalism, rather than his opposition to Duplessis, that brought Charbonneau down. See Monseigneur Joseph Charbonneau: bouc émissaire d’une lutte de pouvoir (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2013), and the review essay on this book by Matteo Sanfilippo, “Note

576

Notes to pages 102–4

critique: une affaire complexe,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 67, nos. 3–4 (winter–spring 2014): 421–30. However, recent work by Suzanne Clavette on the battle between social democratic Catholics and their conservative opponents between 1947 and 1950 in the Quebec labour movement suggests that these opposing ideological camps were at loggerheads well before the Asbestos strike, that European social democratic ideas had penetrated not only the labour movement but sections of Action catholique and members of the clergy who were involved with the trade unions, and that the idea of worker comanagement had garnered considerable support in the French-Canadian intellectual community, with Le Devoir supporting the idea after 1947. The rival Catholic employers’ organization, the Association professionnelle des industriels (A P I ), inspired by Father Émile Bouvier, was given support by Antoniutti, the Papal delegate, and by Mgr Courchesne, and strongly supported the Taft-Hartley anti-labour legislation in the United States. Duplessis did send emissaries to Rome, and in addition a “secret committee,” which included Mgr Laurent Morin, national chaplain of Action catholique, Father Bouvier, Archbishop Courchesne, and Bishop Labrecque, used its influence in Rome against reformist elements in Quebec. See Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos, 321–5. 165 On Léger, see Micheline Lachance, Le prince de l’Église: le cardinal Léger (Montreal: Les Éditions de l’Homme, 1982), 337. 166 Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos, 393, 406–7; Lachance, Le prince de l’Église, 338; and on the ideology of the marriage preparation movement and its anticlerical implications, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 85–8. 167 For Guy Rocher, a prominent figure in Action catholique between 1943 and 1947, the closing off of the burgeoning affinity between the movements and the aspirations of labour created a sterile climate and marked the triumph of the institutional church over socially progressive tendencies. See Entre les rêves et l’histoire, 23–4. 168 For the warm friendship between Ryan and Trudeau in the 1940s, see Nemni and Nemni, Trudeau Transformed, 82–3. 169 BAnQ M, F CR , 2002-12-003/3, C R , “Pierre-Elliott Trudeau: grandeur et limites de la raison en politique,” 30 September 2000. 170 For analyses of Trudeau’s talk, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 45; English, Citizen of the World, 206. 171 AU M , F ACC, P 16/G 3, 5,1 Écoles civiques d’été, “Rapport de la deuxième école civique d’été, tenue au Lac Stukely, du 18 au 25 juin, 1949.” 172 BAnQ M, F CR , 2004-05-006/20, Entrevue avec J.C. Picard, n.d. 173 Pelletier, Les années d’impatience, 140. 174 The events surrounding the Asbestos strike seem to have been a key catalyst in the founding of Cité libre. See English, Citizen of the World, 237–40. There were, however, differences and dissensions between Trudeau and other members of the editorial team, and it would also be inaccurate to posit a



Notes to pages 104–12

577

synonymity between the views of Pelletier and Trudeau on all questions. For these differences, see Nemni and Nemni, Trudeau Transformed, 218–31. 175 As recounted by English, Citizen of the World, 249–50. 176 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/359, C R , “L’Action catholique et les structures sociales,” ca. 1951. 177 Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos, 284. 178 AU M , F ACC, P16/G 3, 5,1, C R , “Gravité du problème de la liberté” (Libres pour vivre pleinement – Rapport de l’École civique d’été, Lac Stukely, June 1950). 179 Hamelin, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, 2:122–3. 180 AH E C , Fonds Esdras Minville, P035, Correspondance du directeur, CR to Minville, December 1951.

c h a p t e r thre e   1 BAnQ M , F CR , P558, S 10, SS 6 (Écrits), 2002-12-003/3, CR, “Pierre-Elliott Trudeau: grandeur et limites de la raison en politique,” 30 September 2000. For Trudeau’s trip to Rome, see Max Nemni and Monique Nemni, Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman, 1944–1965, trans. George Tombs (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011), 256.   2 S AU M, F F SS , E100 B 2.72, C R to Germain Lemieux, 7 January 1952, and CR to Lemieux, 6 April 1952; B A nQ M, F C R , Carnets, 2002-12-001/1, Calepin commencé le 10 juillet, 1951.   3 S AU M, F F SS , C R to Germain Lemieux, 6 April 1952.   4 BAnQ M , F CR , P558, S 12, SS 1, 1995-12-001/363, CR, “Invitation à une culture spirituelle,” Vie étudiante, November 1958.    5 For an analysis of the congress and its wider impact on the Catholic world, see Bernard Minvielle, L’apostolat des laïcs à la veille du Concile (1949– 1959): ­histoire des Congrès mondiaux de 1951 et de 1957 (Fribourg, Switzerland: Editions de l’Université Fribourg, 2001), 16, 18–19, 21, 22–3, 121–3, 151.   6 Aurélien Leclerc, Claude Ryan, l’homme du Devoir (Montreal: Les Éditions Quinze, 1978), 53.   7 BAnQM, FCR, Carnets, 2002-12-001/1, Carnets 1956, “Un grand ami du laïcat.”    8 For a fascinating analysis of this ideological struggle within the Quebec Church in the 1940s, see Suzanne Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos: une lutte idéologique contre la participation des travailleurs (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005), 161, 321–5.   9 Fernand Dumont, Récit d’une émigration (Montreal: Boréal, 1997), 96; Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos, 284.   10 On Léger’s conservatism, see Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos, 407; for Gregorian University, see Pierre Hégy, L’autorité dans le catholicisme contemporain: du Syllabus à Vatican II (Paris: Beauchesne, 1975).

578

Notes to pages 112–17

11 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/363, C R , “Un témoin d’un grand mystère,” LD , 8 October 1958 (editorial 10 October 1958). For the postwar “personality cult” of Pius XII, see John F. Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society, and Politics since 1861 (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 108. 12 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/365, C R , “Causerie prononcée à Joliette … le 8 novembre 1959, lors du Banquet de Clôture de l’Assemblée annuelle de la Fédération des Scouts Catholiques du Canada,” and 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 1, January–February 1957. 13 Ibid., 1995-12-001/363, C R , “Invitation à une culture spirituelle.” 14 Ibid., P558, Carnets, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1952; S AUM, FFS S , E100 B2.72, CR to Lemieux, 6 April 1952. 15 BAN Q M , F CR, P 558, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1952. 16 Ibid. While in Paris, Ryan had also consulted his French contacts about the fate of the worker-priests. 17 S AU M , F F S S , E100 B2.72, C R to Lemieux, 6 April 1952. 18 For a closer analysis, see chapter 1 and Michael Gauvreau, “Catholicisme, nationalisme, et fédéralisme dans la pensée de Claude Ryan: la contribution de l’Action catholique, 1945–1964,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 62, nos 3–4 (winter–spring 2009), 429–72. 19 Ambroise Lafortune, Par les chemins d’Ambroise (Montreal: Leméac, 1983), 48. 20 For the rise, composition, and intellectual achievements of a series of neoThomist networks active in France, Canada, and the United States between the 1920s and the 1960s, see the superb analysis by Florian Michel, La pensée catholique en Amérique du Nord: réseaux intellectuels et échanges culturels entre l’Europe, le Canada et les Etats-Unis (années 1920–1960) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2010). 21 Étienne Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté: la pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II (1914–1962) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1998), 109, 197. 22 Congar, as cited in É.-Martin Meunier, Le pari personnaliste: modernité et catholicisme au XXe siècle (Montreal: Fides, 2007), 245. 23 Meunier, Le pari personnaliste, 28–30. For the classic theological statement, see Yves M.-J. Congar, o.p., Jalons pour une théologie du laïcat (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1954). 24 Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté, 219. 25 Henri de Lubac, s.j., Le drame de l’humanisme athée (1944; Paris: Éditions Spes, 1965), 5–6. 26 Ibid., 103–4. 27 Ibid., 104–8. 28 Yves de Montcheuil, s.j., Problèmes de vie spirituelle (Paris: Éditions de l’Épi, 1947), 20–1, 37–9, 173. For de Montcheuil’s Augustinianism, see Bernard Sesboüé, Yves de Montcheuil (1900–1944): précurseur en théologie (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2006), 99.



Notes to pages 118–21

579

29 For Congar’s presence at the 1951 congress, see Minvielle, L’apostolat des laïcs, 150. 30 Yves-M.-J. Congar, o.p., Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église (1950; Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1968), 29. The influence of Mounier on Pelletier and Trudeau has been discussed in chapter 2. For Dumont’s encounter with Mounier’s thought, see Dumont, Récit d’une émigration, 67–9, in which he adopted his utopia of communitarian personalism as a way of stating his own cultural ideal. 31 Congar, Vraie et fausse réforme, 59, 141, 151–2. 32 Ibid., 198–205. 33 Ibid., 108, 171, 205. 34 Ibid., 247 (emphasis in original). 35 See the suggestive treatment by Jean-Philippe Warren, “Fonder l’autorité sur la liberté: un paradoxe de la pensée personnaliste d’après-guerre,” in La rénovation de l’héritage démocratique: entre fondation et refondation, ed. Anne Trépanier (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2009), 116–37. 36 For an account of developments in the United Church of Canada that tended towards an exclusive emphasis on conscience, especially in matters of sexual morality, see Nancy Christie, “Sacred Sex: The United Church and the Privatization of the Family in Post-War Canada,” in Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969, ed. Nancy Christie (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 348–76. 37 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1952. It should be noted that both Yves de Montcheuil and Yves Congar had considerable contact with English Catholics and would have undoubtedly encountered Newman’s works there. Congar links Newman and the early twentieth-century French personalist thinker Charles Péguy, whom Ryan reckoned as one of the leading intellectual influences on him during the interwar years. See Congar, Vraie et fausse réforme, 205. 38 BAnQ M, F CR, Carnet 1 1953, notes on Lavigne, L’inquiétude humaine. 39 Ibid., Carnets 1958. 40 Ibid., Carnet 5, 1960. 41 “À cœur ouvert,” entretien Roland Leclerc-Claude Ryan dans le cadre de l’émission Parole et Vie, Texte reconstitué par Claude Ryan pour fins de publication, août 2002, published in Claude Ryan, MTS , 17. 42 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/3, C R , “L’actualité de John Henry Newman,” ­conférence prononcé au Collège dominicain de philosophie et de théologie d’Ottawa à l’occasion du centième anniversaire de fondation du Collège, 20 February 2000. 43 Ibid. 44 Ryan, “À cœur ouvert,” 17. 45 Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 90–3. 46 CR, “La mission du laïc chrétien,” in MTS , 27. 47 Ibid., 26.

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Notes to pages 121–6

48 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/365, C R , “Le témoignage du laïc chrétien d’après Newman,” November 1959, and 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 2, 1958, “Newman: Use of Excited Feelings in Religion.” 49 Ibid., 2002-12-003/3, C R , “L’actualité de John Henry Newman.” 50 Ibid., 2001-12-003/5, C R , “Gleanings from the Parochial and Plain Sermons,” Newman Rambler, special bicentennial issue, 5, no. 2 (summer 2001): 22. 51 Ibid., 19. 52 CR, “A coeur ouvert,” 18. 53 CR, “L’actualité de John Henry Newman.” 54 BAnQ M, P 558, S 10, S S 11, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1956, “Newman and Church Unity.” 55 CR, “Le témoignage du laïc chrétien d’après Newman.” 56 Interestingly, Ryan’s great federalist adversary, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fell under the influence of Newman during the late 1940s but held a very different view of Newman’s insistence on testifying publicly to his faith, espousing a more privatized and “hidden” form of religion. See Nemni and Nemni, Trudeau Transformed, 107–8, and John English, Richard Gwyn, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, eds, The Hidden Pierre Trudeau: The Faith behind the Politics (Ottawa: Novalis, 2004). 57 For Newman’s “constitutionalism,” see Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990), 386–9. 58 S AU M , F F S S , E 100 B 2.72, C R to Gérard Lemieux, 6 April 1952; BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1951, “Blackfriars July–August 1951.” 59 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1952. 60 For an analysis of the American cultural climate between 1945 and the early 1950s, see the perceptive study by Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1988), 31–6. 61 Alasdair Heron, A Century of Protestant Theology (Guildford, UK: Lutterworth Press, 1980); Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). 62 Silk, Spiritual Politics, 47. 63 For the conventional view, see R.A. Markus, “The Latin Fathers,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Though, ca. 350–c. 1450, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 106. For a view critical of the influence of the German Protestant interpretation, see John von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 19. 64 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, “Exposition de la situation actuelle dans le monde,” cours de formation pour dirigeants d’A.C., 9 January 1953 (emphasis in original). 65 Ibid., 1995-12-001/360, C R , “L’Église face au monde aujourd’hui,” talk to J EC National Council, June 1955. 66 On this element in Augustine’s thinking, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 99.



Notes to pages 126–31

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67 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 1, 1959, CR, “Church Visible and Invisible” and 1995-12-001/360, C R , “Regards sur l’Église du Canada,” résumé d’une causerie donnée devant les participants au Camp de la J.E.C. des Collèges Classiques au Camp de la Corporation des Escholiers Griffonneurs au Lac Ouareau, 30 August 1954. 68 “Blackfriars July–August 1951.” 69 Ibid. 70 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/347, C R , “L’Église et la paix sur la terre,” Easter, 16 April 1963. 71 Von Heyking, Augustine and Politics, 83. 72 For this typology of Augustinian political leadership, see Peter Dennis Bathory, Political Theory as Public Confession: The Social and Political Thought of Augustine of Hippo (New Brunswick, N J, and London: Transaction Books, 1981), 120. 73 Von Heyking, Augustine and Politics, 215. 74 “Introduction: Politics, Institutions, Ideas,” in Burns, Cambridge History, 341, 360–1. 75 Von Heyking, Augustine and Politics, 71–2. 76 Ibid., 209, 216. 77 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/292, C R , “Travail avec P. Meerschmann,” séjour à Fribourg avec le R.P. Meerschmann, o.p., 16, 17, 18 May 1952. 78 Ibid., 1995-12-001/360, C R , “Regards sur l’Église du Canada.” 79 The “federalist” quality of Augustine’s City of God has been noted by two recent commentators, who point to his analogy and seamless connection between household and polis, and his implication that authority in human society is best exercised by a multitude of cities, just as there is a multitude of households, a view that held that it was necessary to have a variety of bodies mediating between individuals, households, and cities. See John Millbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 407–10; Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, 107. 80 For the Thomist roots of the “classical-Christian” synthesis that underlay French-Canadian “traditional” nationalism, see Dominique Foisy-Geoffroy, “Le rapport de la Commission Tremblay (1953–1956), testament politique de la pensée traditionaliste canadienne-française,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 60, no. 3 (winter 2007): 257–94.

c ha p t e r f ou r   1 For a critique of this “black legend” of Quebec history, which views the period between 1944 and 1960 as the “Grande Noirceur,” see Charles-Philippe Courtois, “Cité libre, Duplessis, et une vision tronquée du Québec,” in Duplessis: son milieu, son époque, ed. Xavier Gélinas et Lucia Ferretti (Quebec: Septentrion, 2010), 52–75. For a stimulating essay on the relationship between Catholicism and Duplessis’s “authoritarian democracy,” see Jean-Philippe

582

Notes to pages 131–5

Warren, “Note de recherché – Religion et politique dans les années 1950: une pièce de plus à notre compréhension de la supposée Grande Noirceur,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 67, nos 3–4 (winter–spring 2014): 403–20.   2 For the diversity of these institutional arrangements, see Jytte Klaussen, “Europe’s Uneasy Marriage of Secularism and Christianity since 1945 and the Challenge of Contemporary Religious Pluralism,” in Religion and the Political Imagination, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ira Katznelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 314–35. Read in a comparative light, Quebec’s degree of “clericalization” was far more moderate than that of Belgium or the Netherlands, where social life was entirely organized in a structure of confessional organizations, capped by Catholic political parties.   3 For these tensions, see Pascale Ryan, Penser la nation: la Ligue d’action nationale, 1917–1960 (Montreal: Leméac, 2006), 224–30, 241, 255–6; JeanPhilippe Warren, L’engagement sociologique: la tradition sociologique du Québec francophone (1886–1955) (Montreal: Boréal, 2003), 181–242, 245– 53, 256–9; Xavier Gélinas, La droite intellectuelle québécoise et la Révolution tranquille (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2007); Michael Behiels, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism versus Neo-Nationalism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985).   4 Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 34–76.   5 Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War Two (New York: Touchstone Books, 1989), 19.  6 BAnQ M, F CR, P 558, S 12, S S 1, 1995-12-001/359, CR, “Le catholicisme en Europe,” notes pour une causerie à l’Équipe UdeM de l’A.C., 25 October 1952, and 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Théologie de l’histoire,” notes sur un cours enseigné par Joseph Folliet, Université de Montréal, 3 October 1952.   7 Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 14–15, 21; Christopher Dawson, Religion and Culture (London: Sheed and Ward, 1948), 216–17.   8 Dawson, Religion and Culture, 216–18.   9 Louise Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène: L’Action catholique avant la Révolution tranquille (Montreal: Boréal, 2003), 200. 10 Ibid., 231; Karine Hébert, Impatient d’être soi-même: les étudiants montréalais, 1895–1960 (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2008),183–241. 11 CR, “Après sept années d’expériences … : Les conférences du Devoir,” LD , 2 Oct. 1953. 12 BAnQ M , F CR, P 558, S 112, S S 1, 1995-12-001/359, CR, “L’unité de penseé et d’action en J.O.C., résumé d’exposé donné au conseil national de la J.O.C.,” November 1953. 13 BAnQ M , F CR, P 558, S 12, S S 1, 1995-12-001/359, CR, “Talk to Ordre du Bon Temps” (hereafter, “Talk to O.B.T”), 5 September 1953.



Notes to pages 135–40

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14 Ibid., S10, SS 11, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 3, 1953: “Autonomie pour la responsabilité” (emphasis in original). 15 Ibid., S12, SS 1, 1995-12-001/360, C R , “Causerie à réunion des aumôniers diocésains de J.O.C. et L.O.C., Ste-Agathe,” 6 October 1954. 16 S AU M , F ACC, P16/I .95, Institut Social Populaire, CR to R.P. Joseph-Papin Archambault, 23 April 1953. 17 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 3, 1953. 18 CR, “Les mouvements d’apostolat laïc dans l’Église,” in Centre catholique des intellectuels canadiens, Le rôle des laïcs dans l’Église: carrefour 1951 (Montreal: Fides, 1951), 77. 19 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 3, 1953; Carnet 5, 1956, Mgr Morin, 16 May 1956; 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Études ecclésiologiques: Promotion du laïcat,” ca. 1952–3, Cardinal Newman, “An Instructed and Articulate Laity” extrait de La Voix du Vicairiat de Grouard, January 1953. 20 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Attitudes du laïc dans l’A.C.,” notes pour une Causerie à Aumôniers locaux de L.O.C., Montreal, 30 August 1953. 21 Ibid., CR, “Rapports entre clergé et laïcs au Canada,” talk to Maison Léon XIII Team, 15 February 1954. Ryan’s notebooks also record the complex negotiations that occurred in 1956, when the national executive of Jeunesse étudiante catholique, directed by Fernand Cadieux, was removed by the bishops, on the grounds that he sought too much power and was unwilling to take direction from the national chaplain. See B A nQ M, FC R , 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 4, 1956. 22 CR, “Rapports entre clergé et laïcs.” See also Ryan’s 1954 discussion with Mgr Coderre, where he had to ask pointedly about the episcopacy’s attitude towards the responsibility of laypeople within the movement. 23 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1953. Péguy’s famous dictum was “Tout qui commence en mystique finit par devenir la politique”; for the importance of Péguy, who was the first Catholic thinker to note the “embourgeoisement” of the Church, see Martin Meunier, Le pari personnaliste: modernité et catholicisme au XXe siècle (Montreal: Fides, 2007), 101–3, 121. 24 Howard Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 39, 52. Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 104, notes the tendency to aestheticize social conflicts as matters of taste rather than issues of power and morality. This tendency was evident even in left-wing circles in the United States. See Gary Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the “politics” Circle: The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy (Ithaca, N Y : Cornell University Press, 1996), 6–40. 25 S AU M , F ACC, P16/B 4, 1,1, Évolution de l’A C C entre 1945 et 1952, January 1950–February 1953, “Bilan du travail accompli par le Premier Comité National de l’A.C.C.,” February 1953  26 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-001/1, Carnets 1953.

584

Notes to pages 140–5

27 Andrew Jewett, “Naturalizing Liberalism in the 1950s”, in Professors and Their Politics, ed. Neil Gross and Solon Simmons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 192. The two major psychological texts of this genre, Harry Allan Overstreet’s The Mature Mind (1949) and Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950), both posited that the problems of a modern industrial society could be ascribed to “child minds” operating in adult bodies and stressed the necessity of the proper achievement of a healthy adult psychological state to the maintenance of the democratic, New Deal order. 28 For an analysis of this popularization, see James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 62–80. 29 Jewett, “Naturalizing Liberalism,” 205–6, 197. 30 For the wide currency of these negative views of French-Canadian popular religion among Catholic intellectuals, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 63–7. 31 See Warren, L’engagement sociologique, 285–90; and for the “backwardness” of French Canada that dominated the work of the Université de Montréal historians Maurice Séguin, Guy Frégault, and Michel Brunet, see Lamarre, Le devenir de la nation québécoise selon Maurice Séguin, Guy Frégault et Michel Brunet, 1944–1959 (Quebec: Septentrion, 1993), 18–19. 32 BAnQ M, F CR, P 558, S 12, SS 1, 1995-12-001/360, CR, “La Rencontre de deux mondes,” Conférence donnée pour la Corporation des Escholiers Griffonneurs, Trois-Rivières, 20 February 1955. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid.  35 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/360, C R , “Regards sur l’Église du Canada,” 30 August 1954. 36 CR, “Rencontre de deux mondes,” 37 BAnQ M, F CR, P 558, S 12, S S 1, 1995-12-001/361, CR, “L’Église catholique et l’évolution spirituelle du Canada français,” Chronique sociale de France, November 1957. 38 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 4, 1952. 39 CR, “Talk to O.B.T.,” 5 September. 1953. 40 Ibid. See also C R , “Les étudiants s’interrogent: Quel serait pour le chrétien le vrai visage de l’espoir?” Vie étudiante 21, no. 8 (May 1955). 41 See, in particular, the analyses of Christine Hudon, Prêtres et fidèles dans le diocèse de Saint-Hyacinthe, 1820–1875 (Sillery, Q C: Septentrion, 1996); René Hardy, Contrôle social et mutation de la culture religieuse au Québec, 1830– 1930 (Montreal: Boréal, 1999). 42 CR, “Rapports entre Clergé et laïcs”; C R , “Regards sur l’Eglise du Canada.” 43 For a stimulating analysis of the period 1950–70 as an “age of secularisation,” see Lucian Hölscher, “Europe in the Age of Secularisation,” in Secularisation in the Christian World: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod, ed. Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 197–204.



Notes to pages 146–7

585

44 The “secularization thesis” has been the subject of massive debate and revision since the 1990s. For a compelling statement of the “orthodox” position, see Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, “Secularization: The Orthodox Model,” in Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis, ed. Steve Bruce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 8–30. One of the principal “revisionist” critics is Callum G. Brown, whose rejection of the automatic equation between religious decline and industrial civilization can be found in “The Mechanism of Religious Growth in Urban Societies: British Cities since the Eighteenth Century,” in European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 1830–1930, ed. Hugh McLeod (London: Routledge, 1995), 237– 60. For a thorough balance sheet of the debate between “orthodox” and “revisionist” positions, see S.J.D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–32, 380–90. 45 In 1953, Ryan recorded attending a lecture by Abbé Houtart at Université de Montréal. Houtart, like Gabriel LeBras, was a pioneering religious sociologist dedicated to the proposition of a largely “dechristianized” urban France. See BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1953, 24 Nov. 1953. 46 This is the view advanced most forcefully by Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2000), who posits that religious decline and dechristianization were the consequences of a “demographic revolution” occurring after the 1960s. 47 For Herberg and the fears of superficial religion, see Silk, Spiritual Politics, 44–5, and for an analysis of the intellectual context of Berton’s Canadian intervention in the debate, see Nancy Christie, “‘Belief Crucified upon a Rooftop Antenna’: Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew, and Dechristianization,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 321–49. 48 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-003/360, C R , “Is Canada a Christian Country?” Citizens’ Forum (Toronto), 20 December 1955. 49 Jean Hamelin and Nicole Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, vol. 2, De 1940 à nos jours (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1984), 127. 50 CR, Esprits durs, cœurs doux: la vie intellectuelle des militants chrétiens (Montreal: Action catholique canadienne, 1959), 11. This gendered critique of institutional religion as unmasculine was a constant refrain among North American public intellectuals. See Christie, “‘Belief Crucified.’” 51 S AU M , F ACC, P16, B6, 3,18, C R , “Les laïcs et la vie liturgique au Canada,” April 1954. 52 On these developments in the United States, see Gilbert, Men in the Middle, 189–214. 53 BAnQ M, F CR, P558, S12, SS 11, 1995-12-001/361, CR, “Crise de conscience des intellectuels canadiens-français,” 2 March 1956.

586

Notes to pages 148–54

54 CR, “Rapports entre Clergé et laïcs.” 55 CR, “La religion des canadiens-français,” Cahiers d’Action catholique 172 (February 1955), 244. See also SA U M, F A C C , P16/B6, 3,18, “Les laïcs et la vie liturgique.” 56 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 170–92. 57 CR, “Rapports entre Clergé et laïcs.” 58 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/363, C R , “Les Collèges classiques et la formation spirituelle et religieuse des professionnels Canadiens-français,” Université Laval, Faculté des Arts, Commission du programme, 24 April 1958. 59 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 3 1956, CCIC 12 March 1956, “Crise des Int. CF .” 60 CR, “La Rencontre de deux mondes.” 61 CR, “L’Église catholique et l’évolution spirituelle.” 62 CR, “La rencontre de deux mondes.” 63 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1958, “Are French-Canadians Christian?” 64 Ibid. 65 BAnQ M, F CR, P 558, S 12, S S 1, 1995-12-001/366, CR, “Liberté du laïc dans l’Église,” conférence à l’Université de Montréal, 28 March 1961. 66 Ibid., 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Les vertus du XXe siècle,” Club Richelieu, 16 February 1954. 67 Yves M.-J. Congar, o.p., Jalons pour une théologie du laïcat (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1954), 39–41, 48, 54, 71. 68 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/366, C R , “Liberté du laïc dans l’Église.” 69 Ibid. 70 Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). 71 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/361, C R , “Les rapports de la religieuse au monde,” talk to Religieuses-Assistantes de J E C , Valleyfield, 27 April 1956. 72 CR, “Regards sur l’Église du Canada.” 73 Ibid., 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Talk to S.P.M.: Place des laiques dans l’Église,” Journées d’Étude, 28, 29, 30 August 1953. 74 Ibid., 1995-12-001/360, C R , “La liberté à l’intérieur du catholicisme: possibilités et limites,” ca. February 1955. 75 CR, “Liberté du laïc dans l’Église.” 76 Ibid. 77 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Attitudes du laïc dans l’A.C.,” notes pour Causerie à Aumôniers locaux de L.O.C., Montreal, 30 August 1953; CR, “Rapports entre clergé et laïcs”; C R , “L’Église catholique et l’évolution spirituelle.” 78 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/360, “La liberté à l’intérieur du catholicisme,” ca. February 1955; ibid., C R , “Le chrétien dans le monde,” 12 January 1956. 79 CR, “Talk to O.B.T.”



Notes to pages 154–6

587

80 CR, “Regards sur l’Église du Canada”; C R , Le contact dans l’apostolat (Montreal: Action catholique canadienne, 1959). 81 For the cult of “realism” among American theologians and cultural commentators, see Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2010). For a particularly stimulating analysis of the gendered origins of the “vital center” concept among American liberals, see K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War Era (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 1–36; for Reinhold Niebuhr’s role, see 31–3. For the movement of American radicals towards liberalism in the postwar period, see Steven M. Gillon, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–1985 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 82 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, “Exposition de la situation actuelle dans le monde,” Cours de formation pour dirigeants d’A.C., 9 January 1953. 83 Julia Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 13; Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 84 There is an enormous literature on the nature and influence of American public intellectuals, generally oriented around a dynamic of declension from the 1950s to the late twentieth century. See Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Son: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: “Partisan Review” and Its Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 2001). For an analysis of Niebuhr and Murray, see McCarraher, Christian Critics, 1–2, 91. For their commitment to a moralism of a high-cultural avant-garde, see Daniel Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), x. 85 For a lengthy discussion of the trope of the “absent” intellectual, see Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and for the “political” definition of national identity that united the intellectual community from 1900 to 1970, see Stapleton, Political Intellectuals, 1–9.

588

Notes to pages 156–60

86 During the late 1940s, Groulx’s position and authority as a professional historian were increasingly challenged by his own “disciples” of the “Montreal School.” They dismissed many of his interpretations as “providentialist,” out of step with recent developments in historical science, and the product of myth making. See Lamarre, Le devenir de la nation québécoise, 16–17. Lévesque’s decision to become one of the commissioners on the federal Royal Commission on National Development in Arts, Letters, and Sciences (Massey Commission) between 1949 and 1951 made him a bête noire in nationalist circles for supporting federal intervention in areas traditionally considered provincial domains. In addition, within his own Faculté des Sciences Sociales, he had, by 1955, been eclipsed by a new generation of academics who, in seeking to separate moralism from sociology, turned their back on his neo-Thomist attempt to directly fuse Christian social theory with American social science. See Warren, L’engagement sociologique, 338–40. 87 For the “middlebrow” character of Canadian activists who sought to assert a vigorous national identity during the 1950s, see L.B. Kuffert, A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939–1967 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 174, 178–9. 88 For further analysis, see chapter 1 and Gauvreau, “Catholicisme, nationalisme et fédéralisme dans la pensée de Claude Ryan,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique Française 62, nos 3–4 (winter–spring 2009): 454–5. 89 For Toynbee’s description, see his Civilization on Trial, 187–99. 90 S AU M , F ACC, P 16/I 2, 56 Correspondance “R,” CR, “Projet de lettre rédigé le 4 mars 1953, mais jamais envoyé à M. Léopold Richer.” 91 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1954. 92 S AU M , F ACC, P16/I3, 43, Centre catholique des intellectuels canadiens, Yvon Blanchard to Claude Ryan, 14 November 1957. This organization, which published a number of proceedings in the early part of the decade, seems to have disappeared. 93 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 7, 20 October 1957. 94 Robert Rumilly, L’infiltration gauchiste au Canada français (Montreal : n.p., 1956). For the divisions between “traditional” and “neo-nationalists” after 1956, see Gélinas, La droite intellectuelle; Pascale Ryan, Penser la nation, 297. 95 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1958. 96 L’Avenir de notre bourgeoisie: conférences prononcées au Premier Congrès de la Jeunesse indépendante catholique, Montréal 25–27 février, 1939 (Montreal: Éditions de la J.I.C./Éditions Bernard Valiquette, 1939), 14, 65. 97 Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 106. 98 CR, Les classes moyennes au Canada français (Montreal: Les Editions de l’Action nationale, 1954), 29–30. 99 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Réflexions sur l’avenir du travail social,” November 1946.



Notes to pages 160–5

589

100 S AU M , F ACC , P16/J4, 2, “Classes moyennes” (Enquête), notes drawn up by CR, 8 October 1954. 101 Ibid. 102 CR, Les classes moyennes, 12–13, 15. 103 Ibid., 14. 104 Ibid., 28. 105 Ibid., 43. 106 Ibid., 27. For the prevalence of critiques of momism in postwar American sociology as emasculating men from realizing their full individuality, see Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture, 124–52. 107 CR, Les classes moyennes, 37–8. 108 Ibid., 30. 109 BAnQ M, F CR , P558, S12, SS 1, 1995-12-001/359, CR, “Loisirs et culture intellectuelle,” 30 May 1954; C R , “Talk to O.B.T.” 110 CR, “Regards sur l’Église du Canada.” 111 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/364, C R , “L’évolution spirituelle du Canada français,” 1959–60. 112 CR, Les classes moyennes, 41-3. 113 CR, Le contact dans l’apostolat, 40–1. 114 BAnQ M, F CR , P558, S12, SS 1, 1995-12-001/365, CR, “L’Église et le Canada français: perspectives d’avenir,” LD , 31 January 1960. 115 Ibid. 116 CR, “L’Église catholique et l’évolution spirituelle.” 117 Ibid., 1995-12-001/363, C R , “Responsabilité du fonctionnaire dans l’élaboration du bien commun,” résumé d’un cours donné 18 mars 1957, Syndicat national des fonctionnaires municipaux, ateliers de la fonction publique. 118 Ibid., CR, “Invitation à une culture spirituelle,” Vie étudiante, November 1958. 119 Ibid., CR, “Les collèges secondaires et la formation spirituelle et religieuse des professionnels canadiens-français,” Université Laval, Faculté des Arts, Commission du Programme, 24 April 1958. For the context of the 1958 discussions, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 72–3. 120 CR, “Les collèges secondaires.” 121 CR, Les classes moyennes, 32, 43. 122 S AU M , F ACC , P16/B6, 3, 18, C R , “L’infirmière dans l’Église d’aujourd’hui,” Bulletin des Infirmières catholiques du Canada 22, no. 6 (November– December 1955): 206. 123 Ibid., 208, 216. 124 It is evident that Ryan closely read not only Talcott Parsons but a wide variety of American and European sociologists during this period. See S AUM, F ACC, P16/J4,1 Classes Moyennes (Enquête), Divers, November 1956 – 6 September 1957, C R , “Plan de travail soumis à Mlle. Monique Mousseau,”

590

Notes to pages 166–8

8 October 1954; ibid., P 16/J 4,3 “Le milieu des classes moyennes et professionnelles,” document de travail, 6 December 1957, which specifically mentioned the American concept of “white-collar class” as the criterion of study. For the centrality of the moral nature of the profession in Parsons’s sociology of the 1940s, see the stimulating work by Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2006), 123, 131–2. 125 For Ryan’s involvement, see D A U L , Fonds Georges-Henri Lévesque, P151, D10.4, CR to Lévesque, 22 March 1949 and 24 April 1949. Under Ryan’s direction, the society produced a vast inventory of the resources available in francophone communities for popular education and leisure. For this effort, see Pierre Pagé, Claude Ryan: un éditorialiste dans le débat social (Montreal: Fides, 2012), 17–19. 126 Mélanie Chabot, L’Éducation des adultes au Québec (1930–1980): témoignages (Montreal: Les Éditions Saint-Martin, 2002), 33–4. 127 AU Q AM, F I C E A , P 56, P 3a/2, Claude Ryan to Roland Péloquin, 27 March 1956. For the close links between the I C EA and the Jeunesse indépendante catholique, see ibid., P56 P3b/23, Monique Lépine to Céline Légaré-Michaud, La Presse, 21 March 1961. Chabot, L’Éducation des adultes, 34. 128 BAnQ M , F CR , P 558, S 12, SS 1, 1995-12-001/360, CR, “Causeries sur l’éducation des adultes, jan. 1956: Problèmes actuels de l’éducation des adultes au Canada,” 21 May 1956, Journées sacerdotales d’études sociales, Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré. 129 Ibid., 1995-12-001/361, C R , “Le Canadien français et la politique,” Vie étudiante, 1 April 1957. 130 Ibid. 131 CR, “Responsabilité du fonctionnaire.” 132 CR, “Causeries sur l’éducation des adultes.” 133 Jacques Maritain, Humanisme intégral (Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 1936), “cives praeclari.” 134 CR, “Causeries sur l’éducation des adultes.” For Dion and Jolicoeur, see S AU M, F ACC , P 16/K 1, 17, Abbé Gérard Dion, “La démocratie à l’épreuve,” La Presse, 17 January 1957; ibid., P 16/K1, 30, Fernand Jolicoeur, “Les relations entre le citoyen et l’administration publique en démocratie,” cours donné par M. Fernand Jolicoeur, directeur du service d’éducation de la C.T.C.C., aux fonctionnaires municipaux de Montréal, 5 and 12 March 1957; AU QA M, F I C E A , 56P 11b/9, “Rencontre consultative avec la CTCC,” 27 March 1958. 135 CR, “Regards sur l’Église du Canada.” 136 Maritain, Man and the State, 6–7, 12, in which the “body politic” and the “state” are not the product of “natural” human communities, and are not emanations of the nation and therefore superior to it. For Aquinas’s modifi­ cation of Augustine with the notion of “specialized” spiritual and temporal



137

138 139

140

141 142

143

144

145

146

Notes to pages 169–72

591

agencies, see Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2006), 412. CR, “Is Canada a Christian Country?” See the discussion of the divine nature of the body politic in Maritain, Man and the State. Maritain gave this classic Catholic political theology a modern, democratic resonance, however, in his view that the rulers of the state were “vicars of the people” rather than “vicars of God” on earth. BAnQ M, F CR , 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 3, 1954, 15.11.54, and Carnets 1958, Minaki 24 August 1958. AU Q A M, F I C E A , 56P 11b/8, “I C E A : Comité de préparation du symposium,” 5 December 1957; B A nQ M, F C R , 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 3, 1954, 15 November 1954. BAnQ M, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 3, 1954, 15.11.54. For the post-Asbestos appropriation of social corporatism by conservative interests, see Suzanne Clavette, Les dessous d’Asbestos: Une lutte idéologique contre la participation des travailleurs (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005), 309–10. BAnQ M, F CR , 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 7, September–October 1956. CR, L’éducation des adultes, réalité moderne (Montreal: Institut canadien d’éducation des adultes, 1958), 13–14, 17–18; S AUM, FACC, P16/O4,127, I.C.E.A Symposium 1958: Education des adultes et promotion de l’esprit démocratique, C R , “Présentation.” Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Berger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989; first published in German in 1962), 27–9. L AC, Fonds Maurice-Sauvé, MG 32 B-4, vol. 116, file Ryan, Claude, 1948– 1957, CR, “Notes sur un récent symposium,” LD , 22 May 1956; BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/360, “Evolution structurelle de notre enseignement secondaire,” panel discussion of Fr Adrien Bluteau, M. P.-E. Gagnon, M. Claude Ryan, and R.P. Lauzon, c.s.v., 1956. For the consensus that had developed between 1954 and 1956 in the intellectual community regarding enhanced state intervention in the education sector, see Behiels, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 149–84; B A nQ M, F C R , 1995-12-001/359, CR, “Organismes privés et organismes publics dans l’éducation populaire,” Symposium I C E A , 7–9 May 1953. For the incident and its aftermath, see Suzanne Clavette, Gérard Dion: artisan de la Révolution tranquille (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2008), 229–308. For Ryan’s adulation of Lippmann, see Leclerc, Claude Ryan, 75, and JeanPhilippe Warren, “Claude Ryan, le dernier des Mohicans: société, religion et langue dans le Québec de la Révolution tranquille,” in Ruptures et continuité de la société québécoise: trajectoires de Claude Ryan, ed. Gérard Boismenu et

592

147

148

149 150

151 152 153

Notes to pages 172–6 al. (Montreal: Faculté des études supérieures de l’Université de Montréal, 2005), 199. Lippmann’s The Public Philosophy was published in 1955. For a discussion, see Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Little, Brown, 1980), 491–501. S AU M, F ACC , P16/K1, 21, Claude Ryan to Jean-Pierre Dubois-Dumée, 10 November 1959; ibid., P16/I3, 96, C R to Paul-Henri Lavoie, 19 November 1959. CR, Les comités: esprit et méthodes (Montreal: Institut Canadien d’éducation des adultes, 1962), 33, 70–2. This was first given as a course to the Union catholique des cultivateurs in 1957 and was subsequently republished in the newspaper of that association, La Terre de Chez-nous in 1961–62. CR, “L’Église catholique et l’évolution spirituelle”; BAnQ M, FCR, 2002-12001/1, Carnets 1958, “Talk to A.P.I – Nov. 8th 1958.” CR, “L’Église catholique et l’évolution spirituelle.” For Lippmann’s own attraction to Catholic theology as a way of restoring natural law as a basis for a new public philosophy, see Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 491–2. CR, “Regards sur l’Église du Canada.” BAnQM, FCR, 2004-05-006/30, file 1, Valeurs libérales, CR to Samuel Marleau Ouellet, Commission Jeunesse, Parti libéral du Québec, 10 November 2002. For a more comprehensive analysis of the “social liberal” ethos that formed a key element in interwar and postwar American social thought, see Brick, Transcending Capitalism.

c h a p t e r f i ve  1 BAnQM, FCR, 1995-12-001/292, “Madeleine Ryan (1925–1985),” L’Argenteuil, 5 March 1985, A-14. For the Action catholique movements as an important locus of opportunity for young women, see Lucie Piché, “La Jeunesse ouvrière catholique féminine: un lieu de formation sociale et d’action communautaire, 1931–1966,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 52, no. 4 (spring 1999): 481–506; for the “feminist” nature of the Action catholique movements, see Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005), 175–246.   2 S AU M, F ACC , P 16/D 6, 5.2, C R , “Dangereuse prédominance de l’élément féminin dans l’A.C.,” 15 March 1953.   3 Ibid., P 16/I 2.23, C R to Madeleine Guay, 17 June 1953; CR, “Dangereuse prédominance de l’élément féminin.”   4 BAnQ M , 1995-12-001/292, “Madeleine Ryan,” L’Argenteuil, 5 March 1985, A-14; ibid., Solange Chaput-Rolland, “Une femme extraordinaire,” Journal de Montréal, 1 March 1985.   5 Pierre-Philippe Gingras, Le Devoir (Montreal: Libre Expression, 1985), 200.



Notes to pages 176–80

593

 6 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 2, 1958.   7 Ibid., 15 May 1958.   8 Ibid., Carnet 2, 1958, 18 April 1958. For the marriage ideal propagated by Action catholique, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 186–93.  9 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 2, 1958. 10 Ibid., Carnet 2, 1958, 18 April 1958. 11 Ibid., Carnet 2, 1958, 28 August 1958. 12 Micheline Lachance, Paul-Émile Léger, vol. 1, Le prince de l’église (1904–1967) (Montreal: Les Editions de l’Homme, 2000), 341. 13 Information from Paul Ryan and Patrice Ryan, 13 February 2014. 14 “Madeleine Ryan Dies of Cancer,” Montreal Gazette, 1 March 1985, A-4; B A nQ M , F C R , 2004-05-006/30, C R , “Remerciements de Claude Ryan à l’occasion de la remise à l’Académie hébraïque, par la famille Nat Shore, d’une collection de volumes à la mémoire de Madeleine Guay Ryan,” 2 March 1986. 15 BAnQ M, F CR, 2004-05-006/30, C R , “Remerciements de Claude Ryan.” 16 CR, “La mission du laïc chrétien: réflexions à partir d’une expérience,” MTS , 25. Information from Patrice Ryan and Paul Ryan, 13 February 2014. 17 CR, “La mission du laïc chrétien.” 18 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/363, C R , “Le sens de mon travail,” L’Oratoire, August 1958. 19 CR, Le contact dans l’apostolat (Montreal: L’Action catholique canadienne, 1959), 7, 12–13. 20 Bernard Minvielle, L’apostolat des laïcs à la veille du Concile (1949–1959): histoire des congrès mondiaux de 1951 et 1957 (Fribourg, Switzerland: Editions Universitaires, 2001), 351–3, 390–1, 395. 21 CR, “Le sens de mon travail.” 22 BAnQ M, 1995-12-001/363, “Projet de numéro de Chronique sociale de France sur le Canada,” 2 May 1954 (élaboré par M. Gérard Lemieux et M. Claude Ryan, à la suite d’une lettre reçue de M. Joseph Folliet); ibid., Joseph Folliet to Gérard Lemieux, 26 March 1954. 23 Ibid., André Laurendeau, “Le Canada français entre le passé et l’avenir,” LD , 2 November 1957. 24 Ryan took extensive notes on Trudeau’s essays. See BAnQ M, FCR, 2002-12003/1, Carnets 1958, “Articles P E T -V R A I”; for his presence at Ryan’s wedding, see ibid., Carnets 1958. The articles were republished in 1970 as Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, Les cheminements de la politique (Montreal: Les Éditions du Jour, 1970). For an analysis, see Max Nemni and Monique Nemni, Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman, 1944–1965 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011), 315–20; John English English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, vol. 1, 1919–1968 (Toronto: Knopf, 2006), 316– 21. For the convergence of Quebec intellectuals around the idea of “democracy” as political purity, see Michael Behiels, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet

594

25 26 27

28

29

30

31

32

Notes to pages 181–2 Revolution: Liberalism vs. Neo-Nationalism (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1985), 220–38. Trudeau, “Quand les fous pensent être ministres et députés,” in Les cheminements de la politique, 21–3. Trudeau, “Pour prévenir les seditions,” ibid., 29. For Maritain’s views on the problem of sovereignty, see Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 28–53, which rejects both the sovereignty of the state and the sovereignty of the people as sources of authority, since both these entities, in his view, are accountable to God. For the view that Trudeau considered himself a disciple of Maritain, see Nemni and Nemni, Trudeau Transformed, 228–30 and English, Citizen of the World, 108–10. For the influence of Laski, see Allen Mills, Citizen Trudeau: An Intellectual Biography, 1944–1965 (Don Mills, ON : Oxford University Press, 2016), 98–114; and for Trudeau’s activities on behalf of the Quebec labour movement, Christo Aivalis, “In the Name of Liberalism: Pierre Trudeau, Organized Labour, and the Canadian Social Democratic Left, 1949–1959,” Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 2 (June 2013): 263–88. Trudeau, “Faut-il assassiner le tyran?” Les cheminements de la politique, 41. For Laski’s debt to the Hobbesian tradition of sovereignty, see David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Trudeau’s evocation of the Jesuits is most significant in this context as, among French Catholics, they were the group most favourable to Maurras. Indeed, as an atheist, Maurras would not have accepted divine sovereignty as the source of political authority, and, in this sense, Trudeau’s transfer of sovereignty from an all-powerful, authoritarian leader to a nebulous popular “general will” was an easy one. See Michael Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). In Laski’s thinking, worked out over the course of the first four decades of the twentieth century, the state became increasingly prominent and powerful. As a utilitarian, Laski adamantly rejected any foundational definitions of rights, viewing these, as Trudeau did, as emerging as the common and basic demands of civilization that the state must recognize in order to fulfil its function. He also tended to view the state as an entity whose true character, if realized, would be directed to removing obstacles to human freedom, rather than being an obstacle to that freedom. See Peter Lamb, Problems of Democracy, the Sovereign State, and International Society (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 61, 3–4. Trudeau, “Saint Thomas d’accord avec Karl Marx,” Les cheminements de la politique, 133–4; “Contrat social et souveraineté populaire: doctrines condamnables?” ibid., 87–8. Here, Trudeau drew directly on Laski’s belief that the



33 34

35

36 37

38

39

40 41

42

Notes to pages 183–5

595

social order tended to destroy the personal will of individuals. Destruction of this spontaneity of will, for Laski, meant the death of liberalism. See Gary Dean Best, Harold Laski and American Liberalism (New Brunswick, NJ : Transaction Publishing, 2005), 25. Trudeau “Pour prévenir les séditions,” in Les cheminements de la politique, 28–9. Edward Hundert, “Mandeville, Rousseau and the Political Economy of Fantasy,” in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods, ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 28–40. There is a considerable literature on the popularity of these “organicist” interpretations of liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic. See James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, “Carnet 9 – 1958,” 9.6.58. See Dominique Foisy-Geoffroy, “Les idées politiques des intellectuels traditionalistes canadiens-français 1940–1960” (PhD thesis, Université Laval, 2008), 120–1. In this respect, pace Trudeau’s biographers (and his own myth making), there is considerable merit to Foisy-Geoffroy’s insight that Trudeau was not influenced by Catholic personalism or by any elements of “progressive” or “left” Catholicism. S AU M , F ACC, P16/B 6, 3.18, C R , “L’Encyclique Mater et Magistra de Sa Sainteté Jean XXIII,” résumé d’un cours donné au collège de travail de la Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, 15 November 1961. Ryan’s thinking on this question was strongly influenced by the influential text authored by Fathers Jean-Yves Calvez and Jacques Perrin, Église et société économique (Paris: Montaigne, 1959–63), which explicated papal social teaching from Leo XIII to Pius XII. For Dion’s significance and the inspiration for his “organic” democracy in progressive Catholic social thinking, see Suzanne Clavette, Gérard Dion: artisan de la Révolution tranquille (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2008). S AU M , F ACC, P16/K 1.17, “Abbé Gérard Dion” and “La Démocratie à l’épreuve,” both in La Presse, 17 January 1957. Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), 101–21, 79, 153–5. Interestingly, Laski found Lippmann’s progressivism too conservative for his “‘modern’” liberalism. See Best, Harold Laski and American Liberalism, 29. John Von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 103.

596

Notes to pages 185–9

43 CR, Le contact dans l’apostolat, 13. 44 There is considerable debate on the chronology of this “culture” of postwar prosperity in Canada. For one interpretation that stresses that the attitudes and values of this climate became far more visible among wide sections of the Canadian population only after 1955, see Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, “Introduction: Recasting Canada’s Post-war Decade,” in Cultures of Citizenship in Post-war Canada, 1940–1955 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003), 3–6. 45 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/365, C R , “Spiritualité laïque et conscience du péché,” programme religieux, 1960–61. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Callum Brown has argued this position most trenchantly in The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2000), 170–80, 187–92, where he notes that indicators of religious adherence in Britain began to decline after 1956 and entered a catastrophic free-fall after the early 1960s. I, on the other hand, suggest that a more positive and more liberalized attitude to sexuality and birth control was a feature of the 1950s in Canada and was promoted by the type of “personalist” Catholicism exemplified by the Action catholique movements (see Catholic Origins, 186–204). 49 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/365, C R , “Le témoignage du laïc chrétien d’après Newman,” November 1959. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 2002-12-001/1, Carnets 1959, notes sur Jean Guitton. Ryan would have, during this period, been aware of the proclivity among many French-Canadian intellectuals, influenced by personalism, to seek a “re-foundation” of authority in the unmediated individual conscience, outside the jurisdiction of the Church or older philosophical traditions. See Jean-Philippe Warren, “Fonder l’autorité sur la liberté: un paradoxe de la pensée personnaliste d’après-guerre,” in La rénovation de l’héritage démocratique: entre fondation et refondation, ed. Anne Trépanier (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2009), 123–4, for a superb and succinct statement of the philosophical underpinnings of this attitude. 52 Robert A. Krieg, c.s.c., Romano Guardini: A Precursor of Vatican II (Notre Dame, I N : University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 4, 13. 53 Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World: A Search for Orientation (London: Sheed and Ward, 1957; German edition, 1950), 107–8, 110, 112–13, 124–5, 127–9. 54 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/365, C R , “Compte-rendu de Jacques Maritain, ‘Réflexions sur l’Amérique.’” Maritain’s book was the product of his years teaching at Princeton University and was a highly optimistic assessment of



Notes to pages 189–93

597

American society during the 1950s that stood at odds with most of the social criticism and commentary, which was highly critical of the values of prosperity. 55 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1962, and Carnets January 1958, Congrès des prédicateurs, Quebec, 21 January 1958. 56 Ibid., Carnets 1960. 57 Ibid., Carnet 6, 1960. 58 S AU M , F ACC, P16/B5, 3.18, C R , “Un divorcé à la tête de l’Angleterre,” 1 May 1955. In its assessment that the English had abandoned moral puritanism by the mid-1950s, Ryan’s views of secularization stood closer to those advanced recently by S.J.D. Green in The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, ca. 1920–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 135–79. 59 For an account of these debates and their significance, see Nancy Christie, “Sacred Sex and the Privatization of the Family in Post-War Canada,” in Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969, ed. Nancy Christie (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 348–76. Ryan apparently followed these debates closely, observing in 1960 that Protestants were far more flexible on divorce than Catholics. See BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 5, 1960. 60 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 11, 1958, Catholic Family Movement Conference, Toronto, 17 October 1958. 61 For this assessment of postwar American life, see Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 62 For Hefner’s influence on postwar American culture and liberalism, see Steven Watts, Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream (Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2008), 75–80, 104. For the influence of Playboy on the ideology of consumption in the 1950s, see Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5–6, 214. For the articulation by social scientists such as David Riesman of the foundation of modern personality in the “playfulness,” especially the sexual playfulness, of individual men and women, see Daniel Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 127–9. 63 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/365, C R , “Le Devoir: Église et Canada français, perspectives d’avenir,” 31 January 1960. 64 Ibid., 1995-12-001/362, C R , “L’Église catholique et l’évolution spirituelle du Canada et du Canada français,” Chronique sociale de France, Cahier sur le Canada, September 1957. 65 Ibid. 66 Michael Gauvreau, “‘Without Making a Noise’: The Dumont Commission and the Drama of Quebec’s Dechristianization, 1968–1971,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe,

598

67 68 69 70

71 72 73

74 75

76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Notes to pages 193–6 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 188–94. For LeBras and his influence, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 316–17. See their celebrated text, H. Godin and Y. Daniel, La France, pays de mission? (1943; Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1950). Ibid., 170. S AU M , F ACC, P 16/I 2.43, Mgr Ménager, “L’Action catholique en France,” n.d.; “Pastorale: La grande mission de Saint-Jérôme,” PA 8, no. 3 (March 1958): 99; Jean-Paul Hétu, “Réflexions sur la déchristianisation,” PA , 12, no. 2 (February 1962), 156–9; A U QA M, F I C E A , 56P 13/23, “Le Canada français est-il chrétien?” Idées en marche, émission du 26 déc. 1958. “Le Canada français est-il chrétien.” S AU M , F ACC, P 16/K 1, 48, Chanoine Maurice Matte, “Pour une paroisse-­ missionnaire par l’apostolat laïque,” n.d. I owe Callum Brown the wonderful metaphor of the “salvation machine” to describe the industrial age as a great era of church expansion. See Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 35–57. BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/359, C R , “Mouvements de jeunesse et rôle des parents,” Le Soleil, 7 February 1960. Ibid., 1995-12-001/366, C R , “La liberté du laïc dans l’Église,” Université de Montréal, 28 March 1961; SA U M, F A C C , P16/I3.109, CR to R.P. Roland Gauthier, c.s.c., supérieur Oratoire St Joseph, 7 July 1960. BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/363, C R , “Marie et l’attente des militants,” ca. 1958–59. For Dumont’s intellectual itinerary, see Dumont, Récit d’une émigration (Montreal: Boréal, 1997), 27, 36–7, 47–8. For a compelling analysis of Dumont’s belief in the “redemptive” powers of sociology, see Jean-Philippe Warren, Un supplément d’âme: les intentions primordiales de Fernand Dumont (1947–1970) (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1998), 49–89. Warren argues that training in sociology allowed him to confirm a sense of apostolic engagement acquired in Action catholique. CR, “L’Église catholique et l’évolution spirituelle.” BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/364, C R , “Évolution et vie de l’esprit au Canada français,” LD , 1959–60. CR, “L’Église catholique et l’évolution spirituelle.” CR, “Marie et l’attente des militants”; C R , “L’Église et Canada français.” CR, “L’Église catholique et l’évolution spirituelle.” CR, “Évolution et vie de l’esprit.” BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/362, Gaston Morrissette, o.m.i., “Essai sur la déchristianisation au Canada français,” Les Cloches de Saint-Boniface 54,  no. 6 (1 January 1955). Ryan seems to have borrowed Morrissette’s sympathetic portrait of “traditional” Catholicism almost word for word. See also Morrissette’s criticisms of the wholesale appropriation of French pastoral



85

86 87

88 89 90 91

92

93

Notes to pages 196–8

599

strategies in the grande mission of Saint-Jérôme. He advocated a more moderate strategy, which sought to use “sociological Catholicism” as a vehicle to infuse the canons of new spirituality into the masses. See the following three articles by Gaston Morrissette, o.m.i.: “Problèmes de pastorale: sommes-nous tributaires de la France?” PA 9, no. 2 (February 1959): 47–53; “Problèmes de pastorale: que faut-il prendre de l’expérience française,” PA 10, no. 3 (March 1959): 111–18; and “Le carrefour pastoral des grandes missions,” PA 9, no. 6 (July 1956): 241–50. Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor: A Sociological Study of Religion’s Impact on Politics, Economics, and Family Life (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963), 1, 44–5, 56, 320. Ibid., 52–3. BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/366, C R , “Le militant chrétien dans un Canada français nouveau,” Journée d’étude tenue sous les auspices de l’Action catholique diocésaine de Trois-Rivières, 3 December 1961. For similar views from Morrissette, see “Chrétienté qui évolue et problème d’enseignement,” PA 10, no. 9 (November 1960): 352–61.  Norbert Lacoste, “L’enquête de 1961 sur la pratique religieuse dans l’archidiocèse de Montréal,” PA 16, no. 8 (October 1966), 319–27. CR, “Église et Canada français.” For this definition of evangelization in the context of modern Catholicism, see Gauvreau, “‘Without Making a Noise,’” 211n.21. For the expectations and approaches, see “Pastorale: la grande mission de St-Jérôme,” 99, 110; Mgr Paul-Émile Charbonneau and M. l’abbé Maurice Matte, La mission de Saint-Jérôme: une expérience canadienne de mission générale (Montreal and Paris: Fides, 1960). However, for the roots of the grande mission in a trajectory of French sociology of religion, and its relationship to the burgeoning social sciences in Quebec, see Jean-Philippe Warren, “Grandeur et déclin d’une science au service de l’Église: sociographie et sociologie religieuses au Québec (1945–1970),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 67, nos 3–4 (winter–spring 2014): 317–41. For an analysis of the grandes missions as examples of a new “consultative” style of governance within the Quebec Catholic Church, see the intriguing analysis by Gilles Routhier, “Governance of the Catholic Church in Quebec: An Expression of the Distinct Society?” in The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Canada, ed. Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 300. For the success in North Atlantic societies in the 1950s of the revival style, which emphasized “simple” faith, see Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow, UK, and New York: Longman, 2006), 188–202; Alana Harris and Martin Spence, “‘Disturbing the Complacency of Religion’? The Evangelical Crusades of Dr. Billy Graham and Father Patrick

600

Notes to pages 198–203

Peyton in Britain, 1951–54,” Twentieth-Century British History 18, no. 4 (2007): 481–513; Kevin Kee, Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 143–87; Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).   94 For his critique of North American Protestant revivalists, see BAnQ M, FCR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1957, 1 April 1957, Dr. Richard McKeon, “Moral Dilemmas of Our Time.”   95 Ibid., Carnet 6, July–August 1956, Carnet 5, 12.7.57.  96 CR, “Changements institutionnels dans notre milieu et implications pastorals” PA , 15, no. 10 (December 1965): 423–4.  97 BAnQ M, F CR , 2002-12-003/1, “Talk to Chicoutimi Priests,” Carnet 1958, January 1958.   98 Ibid., 1995-12-001/366, C R , “Vers un nouveau printemps de l’Église,” Témoignages 13, no. 1 (January–February 1961): 26–7.  99 Ibid.  100 Ibid.  101 CR, “Le témoignage du laïc chrétien.” 102 CR, “Le militant chrétien dans un Canada français nouveau.” 103 CR, “Le témoignage du laïc chrétien.” 104 Ibid., CR, “La Messe, acte central de notre religion,” ca. 1959. 105 Ibid.  106 CR, Un type nouveau de laïc: problèmes et perspectives (Montreal: L’Action catholique canadienne, 1966), 3, 9–10. This was originally published as four articles in Laïcat et mission between 1961 and 1962. 107 BAnQ M, F CR , P 558, S 11, SS 1, Correspondance du Directeur du Devoir, 1995-12-001/297, C R to Mgr Raymond Lavoie, 15 May 1963. 108 Ibid., 1995-12-001/366, C R , “Promotion des laïcs dans l’éducation,” talk to AP P L E C, 25 June 1960. 109 “Talk to Chicoutimi Priests.” The English phrase is in the original. 110 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/363, C R , “Le prêtre en A.C.: conditions d’efficacité,” August 1953; ibid., 1995-12-001/363, CR to Mgr Lionel Audet, évêque auxiliaire de Québec, 12 August 1958; ibid., 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 3, 1962, “Signes du renouveau dans l’Église du Québec,”“Talk to White Fathers: Main Findngs at the Visit to Rome.” 111 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/367, Madeleine Ryan and Claude Ryan, “Ce que les laïcs mariés attendent du prêtre,” Équipes de Foyers 1962 (published in L’Église et les laïcs mariés, Éditions du Jour, 1962); CR, Un type nouveau de laïc, 14. 112 CR, “Promotion des laïcs dans l’éducation.” 113 BAnQ M, F CR , 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 1, 1960, “Avenir de l’Église au c.-f.,” 27 January 1960. 114 Ibid., Carnet 1, 1962.



Notes to pages 204–9

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115 Ibid., 1995-12-001/365, CR, “Le témoignage du laïc chrétien d’après Newman.” 116 The analogy was overtly referred to by Ryan in 1957. See CR, “L’Église et l’évolution spirituelle.” 117 BAnQ M, FCR , 1995-12-001/296, Father Leonard J. Crowley, Archévêché de Montréal to C R , 6 June 1963, text of C R ’s remarks to the Congress on Lay Apostolate. 118 CR, “Le témoignage du laïc chrétien d’après Newman”; CR, Esprits durs, cœurs doux: la vie intellectuelle des militants chrétiens (Montreal: ACC, 1959), 20–1. 119 CR, Esprits durs, 19. 120 Le laïcat Canadien-français: crise de conscience ou prise de conscience (Rapport de la 2e rencontre nationale des Comités diocésains d’A.C., Montréal, les 19, 20 et 21 mai 1961). 121 CR, Un type nouveau de laïc, 20. 122 Ibid., 19, 21–4. 123 S AU M , F ACC , P16/B 6, 3.18, C R , “Spiritualité du laïcat,” n.d. 124 Réal Charbonneau, “Matériaux pour une pastorale du laïcat canadien-­ français,” LM 12 (August 1961), 246–7. 125 CR, Esprits durs, 43. 126 Ibid., 56. 127 CR, “Pour une insertion active des laïcs adultes dans l’Église,” LM 13 (December. 1961), 4-5. 128 “Talk to Chicoutimi Priests.” 129 CR, “Visite à la Centrale nationale des catholiques américains,” LM 10 (January 1961): 121–2; B A nQ M, F C R , 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1958, 12 September 1958. 130 CR, “Pour une insertion active des laïcs adultes,” 6. 131 Le laïcat canadien-français, 55. 132 Ibid. 133 CR, “La liberté du laïc dans l’Église.” 134 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/364, C R , “Physionomie spirituelle du Jeune professionnel canadien français,” exposé présenté à des Journées d’étude pour directeurs spirituels de collèges classiques, tenue à la Maison Montmorency, 14 January 1959. 135 CR, “L’Église et l’évolution spirituelle.” 136 Ibid.; BAnQM , F C R , 1995-12-001/359, C R , “L’inquiétude métaphysique et religieuse dans la pensée laïque américaine,” 25 January 1954. 137 CR, “L’inquiétude métaphysique”; C R , “L’Église et l’évolution spirituelle”. 138 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/359, C R , Notes on speech of Pius XI to students of the Collèges Romains, 10 March 1931. 139 CR, “Liberté du laïc dans l’Église.” 140 CR, “Le militant chrétien dans un Canada français nouveau; BAnQ M, FCR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets November 1960.

602

Notes to pages 210–14

141 BAnQ M, F CR , 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1961, Carnet 1, Card. P.-E. Léger, 28 March 1961, and Carnets 1959, “Persons to See in Rome.” For the Frère Untel controversy and its influence on educational reform in Quebec, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 253–4. 142 Micheline Lachance, Dans la tempête: le Cardinal Léger et la Révolution tranquille (Montreal: Les Éditions de l’Homme, 1986), 88–9, 117. 143 BAnQ M, F CR , 2002, Carnet 6, 1959, 18 August 1959, Mgr Roy, and Carnets 1958, 23 March 1958, Action catholique diocésaine, Montréal. 144 Ibid., Carnets 1958, 14 April 1958, “Points to Raise with Cardinal Léger,” and Carnet 4, 1961, Conseil diocésain d’Action paroissiale. 145 S AU M , F ACC , P 16/G 2, 2.2, Correspondance 1960–1966, CR to Jean Francoeur (centrale nationale de la J.E.C.), 20 April 1960; P16/ B6, 3, CR to Abbé Hozaël Aganier, 14 April 1960; B A nQ M, FCR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 2, 1960; Carnet 3, 1960; Carnets 1958, 17 April 1958. 146 S AU M , F ACC , P 16/B 6, 2,1, C R to R P Hozaël Aganier, 8 March 1960, and P 16/B 6.3, CR to Aganier, 14 April 1960. 147 CR, “Premier contact” [e], LD , 5 June 1962. 148 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Attentes spirituelles de l’homme d’aujourd’hui,” Journées d’étude sacerdotales, Action catholique canadienne, April 1964. 149 Gagnon, Le Devoir, 192; Gérard Filion, Fais ce que peux: en guise de mémoires (Montreal: Boréal, 1989), 283. 150 BAnQ M, F CR , 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 3, 31 March 1957, for a discussion of the implications of the Fowler Report on Canadian broadcasting, which defended the preeminent role of Radio-Canada (the French-language Canadian Broadcasting Corporation); ibid., Carnets 1958, 8 March 1958, for efforts by Benoît Baril and Father Ambroise Lafortune to create a service for press research and study. Ryan’s comments, “les milieux catholiques ne semblent pas conscients de l’importance de ce secteur.” 151 Ibid., Carnets 1955, “Journées d’étude Le Devoir, 1955,” 21 January 1955, in which Ryan noted the remark in Filion’s speech that the paper was “le miroir et la conscience canadienne-française.” 152 CR, Le contact dans l’apostolat, 36–7. 153 Maritain, Man and the State, 167. 154 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/360, C R , “La rencontre de deux mondes”; ibid., 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 3, 1956, André Ruzkowski, “Apostolat catholique international,” 14 March 1956; C R , Un type nouveau de laïc, 97. 155 BAnQ M, F CR , 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 4, 1961, notes on S. Hayes, “Canada, Two Cultures or One?” 24 August 1961. 156 S AU M , F ACC , P 16/K 1, 21, C R to Jean-Pierre Dubois-Dumée, 10 November 1959. 157 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/366, C R , “Les migrations: espoir de l’Église,” Congrès International Catholique de Migrations, 22 August 1960.



Notes to pages 214–22

603

158 For the controversy, see B A nQM, F C R , 1995-12-001/365, “M. Raymond Barbeau croit à un état indépendant au Québec,” L’Action catholique, n.d.; ibid., C R to Secrétaire de la Rédaction, Le Devoir, 18 November 1959; BAnQ M, Fonds Imprimerie Populaire Ltée, P56, 2009-08-003/658, P 56/B45, Gérard Filion to Mgr Gérard-Marie Coderre, Evêque de Saint-Jean, 26 November 1959. 159 Pierre Pagé, Claude Ryan: un éditorialiste dans le débat social (Montreal: Fides, 2012), 20–1. 160 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/365, C R , “Réflexions sur Le Devoir comme journal catholique,” 15 October 1959; ibid., 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 3, 1961, “Les règles des organes de diffusion aux USA: d’après Harold Laski.” 161 Ibid., 1995-12-001/365, C R , “Christianisme, activité économique, et Patriotisme,” October 1959. 162 CR, “Mission du laïcat chrétien dans les nouvelles républiques d’Afrique,” LM  12 (August 1961): 230, 234. 163 Filion, Fais ce que peux, 283, 287. 164 For Laurendeau’s agnosticism and his key role in the Frère Untel imbroglio, see Denis Monière, André Laurendeau et le destin d’un peuple (Montreal: Québec/Amérique, 1983), 270–1. 165 Ibid., 271–3; S A U M, F A C C , P16/B 4, 3.4, Me Renaud Chapdelaine to Claude Ryan, 10 February 1962. 166 Filion, Fais ce que peux, 288–9; B A nQ M , Fonds Imprimerie Populaire, 200908-003/660, P56/B , 65, Gérard Filion to François-Albert Angers, 26 June 1959, Gérard Filion to Abbé Anselme Longpré, 16 April 1962. Ryan himself acknowledged the force of these religious issues as a key factor in his hiring. See Pascale Ryan, “Entrevue avec Claude Ryan,” 27 April 2001 (unpublished transcript). 167 Pascale Ryan, “Entrevue.” 168 CR, “Premier contact” [e], LD , 5 June 1962.

c h a p t e r si x   1 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/298, correspondent to CR, 10 June 1962.   2 CR, “Premier contact” [e], LD , 5 June 1962.   3 Dale C. Thomson, Jean Lesage and the Quiet Revolution (Toronto: Macmillan, 1984), 112–24.   4 Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 247–306.   5 CR, “Premier contact.”   6 Ibid.   7 Ibid.    8 Ibid.

604

Notes to pages 222–9

 9 Ibid. 10 Gilles Routhier, Vatican II: herméneutique et réception (Montreal: Fides, 2007), 8–9. 11 Sylvain Serré, “Les consultations préconciliaires des laïcs au Québec entre 1959 et 1962,” in L’Église canadienne et Vatican II, ed. Gilles Routhier (Montreal: Fides, 1997), 113–41. 12 Claude Ryan, ed., Dans l’Église de Dieu: méditations sur l’Église en état de concile (Montreal: Action catholique canadienne, 1962). 13 Gilles Routhier, “Assurer la couverture du concile Vatican II au Canada: les initiatives de l’épiscopat canadien,” Études d’histoire religieuse 68 (2002): 62–3. 14 BAnQ M, CRL G , Fonds Imprimerie Populaire Ltée, P56/B,66, Gérard Filion to Mgr Gérard-Marie Coderre, 24 July 1962. An English-Canadian Catholic layman, Bernard Daly, was also hired to ensure that articles reached anglophone dailies in Canada. See Réjean Plamondon, “Le service d’information de la CCC à Vatican II,” in Routhier, L’Église canadienne et Vatican II, 214. 15 Plamondon, “Le service d’information de la C C C,” 214. 16 CR, “L’Église à l’heure des choix difficiles” [e], LD 16 July 1962. 17 Ibid.  18 Ibid. 19 CR, “Les impondérables peuvent modifier considérablement l’orientation d’un concile,” LD , 18 October 1962; C R , “Que faut-il attendre du Concile?” [e], LD , 5 October 1962. 20 CR, “Que faut-il attendre du Concile?” 21 Ibid. For the climate of euphoria that prevailed among both clergy and laity in 1962–63, see Routhier, L’Église canadienne et Vatican II, 23. 22 CR, “Jean XXIII a mis fin à l’‘isolement’ des papes,” LD , 12 October 1962. 23 CR, “Rajeunissement des semaines sociales?” [e], LD , 27 August 1962. 24 CR, “Que faut-il attendre du Concile?” 25 CR, “Rome a reçu 10,000 pages de vœux de ses évêques,” LD , 13 October 1962. 26 CR, “Rapprocher la liturgie du peuple, premier souci des pères du Concile,” LD , 3 November 1962. 27 Emile Perreau-Saussine, “French Catholic Political Thought from the Deconfessionalization of the State to the Recognition of Religious Freedom,” in Religion and the Political Imagination, ed. Ira Katznelson and Gareth StedmanJones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 150–70. 28 CR, “Un secret bien gardé: le programme détaillé des travaux du Concile,” LD , 18 October 1962. 29 CR, “Le Concile et le rôle de l’épiscopat” [e], LD , 5 November 1962. 30 Ibid.  31 Perreau-Saussine, “French Catholic Political Thought,” 166. 32 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/297, Réjean Plamondon, Conférence Catholique Canadienne, to C R , 5 November 1962; 1995-12-001/295, correspondent to CR, 3 October 1962.



Notes to pages 229–35

605

33 Routhier, “Assurer la couverture du concile Vatican II,” 67; Plamondon, “Le service d’information de la C C C ,” 215. 34 Plamondon, “Le service d’information de la C C C,” 214. 35 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/347, C R , “L’Église et la paix sur la terre,” Easter, 11 April 1963. 36 CR, “Le rôle des Etats-Unis en Amérique latine” [e], LD , 21 Mar. 1963. 37 CR, “Le parti conservateur et les ‘penseurs’” [b-n], LD , 8 February 1964. 38 CR, “La Commission Parent termine ses audiences publiques” [e], LD , 23 July 1962. 39 CR, “Un exemple de maturité politique” [e], LD , 16 October 1962. 40 CR, “M. Turner et la fonction de député” [b-n], LD , 3 January 1964; CR, “Faillite du député ou du parlement?” [e], LD , 18 September 1963; CR, “M. Lesage chez les jeunes libéraux” [b-n], LD , 6 February 1963 ; CR, “Drôle de raisonnement” [e], LD , 27 September 1962. John Turner’s impressive parliamentary debut in Ottawa has been extensively treated in Paul Litt, Elusive Destiny: The Political Vocation of John Napier Turner (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 46–62. 41 CR, “Un exemple de maturité politique.” 42 Ibid. For Lippmann’s views on the need to preserve the responsibility of executive government from efforts of popular policymaking, see Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), 14, 27, 162. 43 CR, “Heureuse initiative d’un député créditiste” [e], LD , 8 August 1962. 44 CR, “L’affaire Profumo” [b-n], LD , 19 June 1963. For a recent treatment of the Profumo Affair as signalling the casting off of moral respectability by the political and journalistic establishment of Britain, see Richard Davenport-Hines, An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (London: Harper Press, 2013). 45 CR, “La philosophie (?) sociale de M. Lesage” [e], LD , 2 August 1962. 46 CR, “À la dérive” [e], LD , 11 February 1963. 47 CR, “Un congrès pascal agité à Ottawa” [e], LD , 15 April 1963. 48 CR, “La fin du mythe Gordon” [b-n], LD , 26 June 1963. For the 1963 budget disaster, see John English, The Worldly Years: The Life of Lester Pearson, 1949–1972 (Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993), 271–6. 49 CR, “Lourde perte pour l’Angleterre” [b-n], LD , 23 January 1963. 50 CR, “Le peuple américain assis sur un baril de poudre” [e], LD , 17 June 1963. 51 CR, “Le visage de l’Amérique après le passage de John Kennedy à la présidence” [e], LD , 25 November 1963. 52 Ibid. 53 CR, “L’impossible retour en arrière” [e], LD , 30 August 1962. 54 Ibid.  55 Jean-Yves Calvez and Jacques Perrin, Église et société economique: l’enseignement social des Papes de Léon XIII à Pie XII (Paris: Aubier, 1961), 35, 40, 391–2, 396, 413–14.

606

Notes to pages 236–40

56 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/367, C R , “L’Encyclique ‘Mater et Magistra’ de Jean XXIII,” 2 August 1961; SA U M, F A C C , P16/B6, 3.18, CR, “L’Encyclique Mater et Magistra de Sa Sainteté Jean XXIII,” résumé d’un cours donné au collège du travail de la Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, 15 November 1961. 57 BAnQ M, F CR, P558, S11, SS6 (Directeur du Devoir – Allocutions), 1995-12001/347, CR, “Jalons pour une présence chrétienne dans le monde actuel” (sur Pacem in Terris, 5e partie), ca. 1963. 58 CR, “L’éducation permanente, condition de vitalité pour un peuple démocratique” [e], LD , 9 July 1962. 59 CR, “Un budget sans douleur” [e], LD , 25 April 1964. 60 CR, “Enfantement douloureux vaut mieux qu’avortement” [e], LD , 25 July 1962. 61 CR, “Le B.G.R. trame-t-il un coup bas contre le Québec?” [e], LD , 11 June 1962; CR, “Radio-Canada et les flottements actuels de notre régime de ­diffusion,” LD , 19 July 1962; C R , “Une semaine à la télévision” [e], LD , 12 December 1963; C R , “Le marais de la diffusion” [e], LD , 9 April 1964. 62 CR, “Quand le docteur Glassco devient philosophe” [e], LD , 10 January 1963. 63 CR, “Aspects humains de la fiscalité” [e], LD , 9 December 1963. 64 CR, “L’assemblée de M. Douglas à Montréal” [b-n], LD , 3 April 1963. 65 CR, “Perdu dans la foule créditiste” [e], LD , 8 April 1962; CR, “Les pirouettes d’un démagogue” [e], LD , 25 March 1963; C R , “Le crédit social a-t-il vraiment reculé dans Québec?” [b-n], LD , 13 April 1963; CR, “Le créditisme québécois à la recherche d’un nouveau rôle” [e], LD , 3 September 1963. 66 CR, “L’élection de Saskatchewan” [e], LD , 24 April 1964. 67 Thomson, Jean Lesage and the Quiet Revolution, 183, 193, 198–203. 68 CR, “Heureux départ à la SGF” [b-n], LD , 25 May 1963; CR, “Un bon tonique” [e], LD , 24 January 1963; C R , “Le drame de Sainte-Justine” [e], LD , 30 October 1963. 69 CR, “Évitons la supercherie” [e], LD , 5 August 1963. 70 CR, “Une économie ‘techniquement forte mais fondamentalement faible’” [b-n], LD , 9 August 1963. 71 CR, “Évitons la supercherie.” 72 CR, “La démocratie à refaire” [e], LD , 19 September 1963. 73 CR, “Où commence et où finit la politique?” [e], LD , 18 November 1963. 74 CR, “Encore loin d’un plan d’ensemble” [e], LD , 17 January 1963; BAnQ M, F CR, P558, 1995-12-001/297, Robert Mandrou to CR, 30 September 1963. 75 For this trajectory among intellectuals in the United States and western Europe, which held a prominent place in the 1950s and early 1960s, see Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, N Y : Cornell University Press, 2006), 186–218. Intellectuals within this trajectory believed in “the planned, value-determined use of technology to enhance rather than undermine community life” (187).



Notes to pages 241–4

607

76 CR, “Vers une politique provinciale d’urbanisme” [b-n], LD , 12 January 1963; CR, “Encore loin d’un plan d’ensemble.” 77 CR, “Le code du travail: un projet boîteux” [e], LD , 20 January 1963. 78 CR, “Du cadre familial à la formule coopérative” [e], LD , 10 August 1962. 79 CR, “Le fond du problème” [e], LD , 26 June 1962. 80 CR, “L’éducation permanente, condition de vitalité pour un peuple démocratique.” 81 Some scholars have characterized the Liberal regime of Jean Lesage as a type of neo-corporatism, in which, through the creation of new organs of planning and consultation, the Quebec state sought to elaborate a new form of political corporatism to replace the social corporatism of the Church by breaking down the compartmentalization between the political and social realms. See Clinton Archibald, Un Québec corporatiste? Corporatisme et néo-corporatisme: du passage d’une idéologie corporatiste sociale à une idéologie corporatiste politique. Le Québec de 1930 à nos jours (Hull, Q C: Éditions Asticou, 1983), 160–81. 82 Gilles Routhier, “Governance of the Catholic Church in Quebec: An Expression of the Distinct Society?” in The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Canada, ed. Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 299–304. 83 CR, “La démocratie à refaire” [e], LD , 19 September 1963. 84 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Conférence prononcée par M. Claude Ryan, sous les auspices des Écoles et Collèges Indépendants,” 19 May 1963, Hôtel Queens, Montreal. 85 CR, “Les critiques de M. Johnson” [e], LD , 17 January 1964. 86 CR, “Malaises au sein de nos ‘corporations’ professionnelles” [b-n], LD , 20 February 1963; C R , “Syndicalisme ‘international’ et problèmes canadiens” [b-n], LD , 15 October 1963. 87 CR, “Les corps intermédiaires dans la société politique” [b-n], LD , 11 June 1963. 88 CR, “La S.G.F., prochaine étape” [e], LD , 3 July 1962; CR, “Un rôle nouveau pour les Commission scolaires” [e], LD 12 July 1962. 89 BAnQ M, F CR, 2002-12-003/1, Carnets 1962, “Le projet de nationalisation de l’électricité au Québec.” 90 Trudeau’s arguments were first elaborated in a series of informal meetings between 1960 and 1963 held at the home of Gérard Pelletier on every second Friday during the winter months, which began at the initiative of René Lévesque and also included Jean Marchand and André Laurendeau. See John English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, vol. 1, 1919– 1968 (Toronto: Knopf, 2006), 378–9. 91 For Trudeau’s now-famous article, “La nouvelle trahison des clercs,” see Max Nemni and Monique Nemni, Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman, 1944–1965, trans. George Tombs (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart,

608

Notes to pages 244–50

2011), 424–34. For Trudeau’s angry impulses and his propensity to link the promoters of hydro nationalization with the realm of emotion, see English, Citizen of the World, 376–81.   92 Trudeau’s exaggerated critique of nationalism rendered dialogue between “­liberal” federalists and “neo-nationalists” increasingly strained. See Gérard Pelletier, Years of Choice, 1960–1968 (Toronto: Methuen, 1987); Pierre Godin, René Lévesque, vol. 2, Héros malgré lui, 1960–1976 (Montreal: Boréal, 1997), 117–19. See English, Citizen of the World, 392–4, who states that the meetings came to an end on 22 November 1963.  93 CR, “Grandeur et limites de l’empirisme: où se dirige René Lévesque” [b-n], LD , 29 June 1963.  94 Ibid.  95 CR, “L’université de nouveau sur la sellette” [e], LD , 11 March 1963.  96 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/298, Son Éminence Cardinal Léger to CR, 4 April 1963.   97 Ibid., 1995-12-001/295, correspondent to Ryan, 16 June 1962 and 5 July 1962.   98 Ibid., 1995-12-001/298, C R to Son Éminence Cardinal Léger, 25 March 1963; Cardinal Léger to C R , 4 April 1963.  99 CR, “La philosophie (?) sociale de M. Lesage.” 100 CR, “Le 80e anniversaire de Jacques Maritain” [b-n], LD , 18 November 1962. 101 CR, “Jalons pour une présence chrétienne.”  102 CR, “La fin d’une époque en France” [e], LD , 9 September 1963. 103 CR, “Vue nuancée sur la laïcité de l’État” [b-n], LD , 26 February 1963. 104 Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 251–69. 105 For a fascinating discussion and reassessment of this rarely treated subject, see the article by Ollivier Hubert, “L’impraticable laïcité: considérations sur la liberté religieuse au Québec du XVIIe au XIXe siècle à partir du cas des franco-protestants.” I thank Professor Hubert for allowing me to read the article prior to publication. 106 See Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 268–7. 107 CR, “Le M.L.F.: ombres et lumières” [e], LD , 8 June 1962. 108 Although demographic measurements of churchgoing were certainly lower in English Canada than in Quebec in the early 1960s, categories of moral and public discourse remained dominated by Christian imperatives, which affected even “secularist” commentators. See Nancy Christie, “‘Belief Crucified on a Rooftop Antenna’: Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew, and Dechristianization,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 321–50; Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, Churches and Their Peoples: A Social History of Religion in Canada, 1840–1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 190–8.



Notes to pages 250–5

609

109 CR, “Une requête légitime” [b-n], LD , 9 February 1963. 110 CR, “La communauté juive et le problème scolaire” [e], LD , 20 August 1962. Ryan’s article was translated and reprinted in the Montreal Jewish Daily Eagle, 26 August 1962, entitled “A French-Canadian Voice Demands Justice for the Jewish Schools of Montreal.” See B A nQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/295, David Rome to C R , August 1962. 111 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/296, C R to Naïm Kattan, Cercle juif de langue française, 6 February 1964. 112 CR, “Jalons pour une présence chrétienne.” For the historical context in which the “declinist” model of secularization came to dominate the horizons of British clergy and social thinkers, see the compelling treatment by S.J.D. Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, ca. 1920–ca. 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 223–302. 113 CR, “Jalons pour une présence chrétienne.” 114 CR, “L’Église et la paix sur la terre,” Easter, 11 April 1963. 115 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Attentes spirituelles de l’homme d’aujourd’hui,” Journées d’études sacerdotales, ACC, April 1964. 116 CR, “L’Église et la paix sur la terre.” 117 According to the definition of the “orthodox” theory of secularization advanced by Wallis and Bruce, “differentiation” constitutes one of the key ­pillars of the decline of the social significance of religion as occasioned by modernization. 118 CR, “Attentes spirituelles de l’homme d’aujourd’hui.” 119 Ibid. 120 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/297, C R to correspondent, 15 January 1964. 121 CR, “Attentes spirituelles de l’homme d’aujourd’hui.” 122 For comments by readers on this particular editorial, see BAnQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/295, correspondent to C R , 31 July 1962 and 27 July 1962. 123 CR, “Mieux que des paroles, des actes concrets” [e], LD , 27 July 1962. 124 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Les communautés religieuses et la pauvreté,” OFM , 15 May 1963. 125 CR, “Le rapport Bouchard” [e], LD , 27 January 1964. 126 CR, “Les communautés religieuses et l’argent” [e], LD 30 January 1964. 127 The scope and influence of this discourse needs to be analyzed at greater length, but there is no doubt that it was, in the specific instance of the reform of public education, an extremely powerful component of the public debate. See Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 262–3. 128 CR, “Le rapport Bouchard”; C R , “Les communautés religieuses et l’argent”; BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Les communautés religieuses et la pauvreté.” 129 CR, “L’éducateur d’aujourd’hui au service de la culture et de la liberté’ [e], LD , 6 July 1964. 130 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Le choix d’une ‘vocation’ à l’âge de l’espace,” 6 January 1963.

610

Notes to pages 255–62

131 CR, “Les communautés religieuses et la pauvreté.” 132 CR, “L’éducateur d’aujourd’hui.” 133 CR, “Vers la disparition du B.A. traditionnel – 1: Un anachronisme qui a assez duré” [e], LD , 30 July 1962; C R , “Les collèges classiques sont-ils réservés à une caste?” [b-n], LD , 30 January 1963; CR, “Vers la disparition du B.A. traditionnel – 2: Par quoi remplacera-t-on l’actuel B.A.?” [e], LD , 31 July 1962. 134 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Conférence prononcée par M. Claude Ryan.” The fruit of the Comité Ryan was published as Rapport du Comité d’étude sur l’éducation des adultes (Quebec: Gouvernement du Québec, 1964). 135 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Quebec: Revolution or Renaissance?” address delivered at Lakehead University, February 1964. 136 CR, “Le rapport Parent” [e], LD , 24 April 1963. 137 Ibid. 138 CR, “Le rapport Parent et les diversités de religions et de langues” [e], LD , 25 April 1963.  139 For an analysis of this conservative argumentation, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 279. 140 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/297, correspondent to CR, 17 April 1963. 141 Ibid., 1995-12-001/295, correspondent to C R , 12 June 1962. 142 Ibid., 1995-12-001/297, correspondent to C R , 29 April 1963. 143 Ibid. 144 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Christianisme et éducation,” 22 October 1963 (later published in Réflexions chrétiennes sur l’éducation, Collection Foi et Liberté, Fides, 1964). 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid.  147 Ibid.  148 CR, “Discussions autour du rapport Parent” [b-n], LD , 29 May 1963. 149 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/297, Mgr Raymond Lavoie to CR, 21 May 1963; CR to Mgr Lavoie, 15 May 1963. 150 Indeed, Bill 60 recognized both confessionality for the overwhelming Catholic majority and for the significant Protestant minority, and freedom of choice for religious dissidents within a public system. For the commitment of Quebec’s political elites for making confessionality an attribute of a public school system rather than consigning it to a network of private religious institutions, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 304–5. 151 CR, “Une ambiguïté du bill 60” [e], LD , 9 August 1963. 152 For the “pillarized” institutional religious system of the Netherlands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Peter Van Rooden, “Long-Term Religious Developments in the Netherlands, c. 1750–2000,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustdorf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 113–29. 



Notes to pages 262–8

611

153 There is some evidence from Ryan’s papers that he advocated the Dutch solution. See BAnQM, F C R , 1995-12-001/297, correspondent to CR, 15 April 1963. 154 CR, “Une ambiguïté du bill 60.” 155 CR, “L’ancien et le nouveau” [e], LD , 12 August 1963; CR, “Le débat continue” [e], LD , 30 August 1963. 156 CR, “En attendant le débat sur l’éducation” [e], LD , 27 June 1963. 157 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Les finissants de nos écoles publiques,” journée d’étude avec les représentants des associations montréalaises CE CM, 30 March 1963. 158 Denis Monière, André Laurendeau et le destin d’un peuple (Montreal: Québec/Amérique, 1983), 272–3. 159 André Laurendeau, editorials in LD , 10 July 1963 and 18 January 1964, quoted in Monière, André Laurendeau, 273. 160 CR, “Église et questions temporelles” [e], LD , 4 September 1963; CR, “L’épiscopat et le bill 60” [e], LD , 6 September 1963. 161 CR, “L’épiscopat et le bill 60.” 162 CR, “Bill 60: dernières observations avant le grand débat – 2: La confessionalité” [e], LD , 23 January 1964. 163 CR, “Confessionnalité scolaire et laïcité de l’État” [e], LD , 11 September 1963. 164 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/297, R.P. Germain Lavallée (Séminaire de Sherbrooke) to C R , 3 January 1963. 165 Ibid., correspondent to C R , 31 January 1964; CR to correspondent, 7 February 1964; correspondent to C R , 29 January 1964. 166 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/298, C R to correspondent, 7 February 1964. 167 Ibid., 1995-12-001/297, C R to R.P. Germain Lavallée, 13 January 1964; CR to correspondent, 7 February 1964. Lavallée had deplored the fact that Le Devoir had, during the education debate, adopted a “neutral” tone replicating that of the intellectual Paris daily, Le Monde.

c ha p t e r se ve n   1 CR, “L’élection italienne” [e], LD , 29 April 1963.   2 CR, “L’Angleterre à la veille d’une nouvelle révolution pacifique” [e], LD , 17 October 1963.   3 CR, “La déclaration de Hyannisport” [e], LD , 13 May 1963.   4 CR, “À la veille d’importants changements” [e], LD , 19 December 1963; BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Jalons pour une présence chrétienne dans le monde actuel,” ca. 1963; C R , “Devant le nouveau pluralisme communiste” [e], LD , 3 January 1963.   5 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/347, C R , “L’Église et la paix sur la terre,” Easter, 16 April 1963.   6 Ibid. 

612

Notes to pages 268–72

 7 Ibid.  8 CR, “Les armes de Jean XXIII” [b-n], LD , 11 May 1963; CR, “Mort, où est ta victoire” [e], LD , 3 June 1963.  9 CR, “Une mission de paix” [e], LD , 6 January 1964. 10 CR, “Le rôle des femmes dans l’édification de la paix” [e], LD , 17 September 1962. Augustine’s emphasis on the roots of political society in the family and small-scale local communities has been noted by John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 407. 11 CR, “Le rôle des femmes.” For the leadership role in the 1962 conference played by Madeleine Ryan, see Pierre Pagé, Claude Ryan: Un éditorialiste dans le débat social (Montreal: Fides, 2012), 262. 12 CR, “Kennedy vs. de Gaulle” [e], LD , 31 JanuaryJanuary 1963. 13 CR, “Le prône ‘atlantique’ de M. Pearson” [e], LD , 27 May 1963. 14 CR, “L’O.N.U. après 18 ans” [e], LD , 20 September 1963. For the contribution of Catholicism to the postwar definition of the European community, see Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 15 CR, “Politique extérieure et politique de défense” [e], LD , 4 February 1963. 16 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Conférence sur le dialogue,” donnée à l’Association des Infirmières Catholiques, November 1963. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 CR, “La deuxième étape du Concile” [e], LD , 5 December 1963; CR, “Décisions historiques à Vatican II” [b-n], LD , 5 November 1963. 21 CR, “Les droits du travailleur intellectuel dans l’Église” [e], LD , 13 September 1963. 22 CR, “Le retour du pasteur” [b-n], LD , 10 January 1964; CR, “Jean XXIII, pape du renouveau chrétien et de la paix” [e], LD , 4 June 1963; CR, “Choix du conclave, voix du peuple chrétien” [e], LD , 22 June 1963; CR, “‘A Pope Who Knows His Mind …’” [b-n], LD , 26 September 1963; CR, “Heureux départ à Vatican II” [b-n], LD , 2 October 1963; C R , “La catholicité redevenue familière” [e], LD , 29 July 1963; C R , “Sur une ‘improvisation’ de M. Malraux” [e], LD , 19 October 1963. 23 C R , “Un ‘vicaire’ méconnaissable” [e], L D , 6 April 1964. Hochhuth’s play was performed in Montreal, translated as Le vicaire (The Deputy). For the sensation associated with its performance in Germany in the early 1960s, given the fact that it was one of the first endeavours to challenge the Catholic Church’s self-portrait as an element of resistance to Naziism, see Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 69. For Hochhuth’s role in establishing a view of Pius XII that has endured as a historiographical trope, see Robert A. Ventresca, Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII (Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 2–4.



Notes to pages 273–6

613

24 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Attentes spirituelles de l’homme d’aujourd’hui” ca. 1963. 25 Recently, there has been considerable international debate about the exact chronology of the religious “crisis” of the 1960s. The situation in Britain and western Europe has occasioned much discussion between Callum Brown, on the one hand, and Hugh McLeod, on the other, with Brown favouring an earlier tipping point, somewhere around 1963, and McLeod pointing to the years around 1968 as a more significant demarcator of the intensity of religious change. For a commentary on this debate, and a suggestion that in North America, the late 1960s and the early 1970s may have been more significant in the decline of the social and cultural authority of the churches, see Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, “Introduction: ‘Even the Hippies Were Only Very Slowly Going Secular’: Dechristianization and the Culture of Individualism in North America and Western Europe,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945– 2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 3–38. 26 This was the course employed by the Lesage government with the establishment of the Boucher Commission, which reported in 1963. This inquiry sought to reconcile a more dynamic role of the state with the preservation of Quebec’s traditions of private and religious initiative in the field of social assistance, without involving government in the direct administration of social service agencies. See Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 136–7. 27 As quoted in ibid., 308–9. 28 CR, “Attentes spirituelles de l’homme d’aujourd’hui.” 29 CR, “Le point de vue des autres” [e], LD , 7 March 1964. 30 CR, “La philosophie (?) sociale de M. Lesage,” LD , 2 August 1962; CR, “Comment enrayer ces ‘influences’?” [e], LD , 4 September 1962; CR, “La dispute de la rue St.-Jacques” [e], LD , 28 December 1963. 31 CR, “Un bon tonique” [e], LD , 24 January 1963; CR, “Un discours impromptu de M. Lévesque” [e], v, 21 May 1963; C R , “Vous pouvez envoyer le ministre si vous voulez …” [e], LD , 22 April 1963. 32 CR, “Un bon tonique”; C R , “Du bas de laine à la compagnie de finance” [e], LD , 18 April 1963; C R , “Une leçon de réalisme fier” [e], LD , 6 September 1963; CR, “Réflexions sur un naufrage” [e], LD , 27 November 1963; CR, “La réalité économique: cette grande inconnue de notre enseignement” [e], LD , 13 August 1962. 33 CR, “Bill 60: deux monologues à l’Assemblée législative” [b-n], LD , 5 February 1964. 34 Ibid. 35 CR, “Les conditions d’une collaboration entre l’État et les corps intermédiaires,” in L’État et les corps intermédiaires: Semaines sociales du Canada,

614

Notes to pages 276–82

39e Session, Québec, 1964, ed. Richard Arès, s.j. (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1965), 23–7. 36 CR, “La voie de la dignité” [e], LD , 14 October 1963. 37 CR, “M. Pearson et l’avenir du Canada – 1” [e], LD , 21 August 1963. 38 CR, “Les quatre partis et l’avenir économique du Canada – 1” [e], v, 28 March 1963; CR, “Le commerce n’est pas d’abord une affaire d’amitié” [e], LD , 2 May 1963. On this theme, see also C R , “Les rapports du Canada avec les ÉtatsUnis” [e], LD , 7 January 1963; C R , “Une économie ‘techniquement forte mais fondamentalement faible’” [e], LD , 9 August 1963; CR, “Pourquoi nous avons lieu d’être inquiets” [e], LD , 5 March 1964. 39 CR, “M. Pearson à Paris” [e], LD , 20 January 1964. 40 CR, “M. Pearson et l’avenir du Canada – 2” [e], LD , 22 August 1963. 41 CR, “M. Pearson à Paris”; see also C R , “Le Canada et l’Amérique latine” [e], LD , 15 November 1963; C R , “Progrès de la langue française dans le monde” [e], LD , 1 October 1962. 42 For a stimulating analysis of the inner meaning of Benda’s polemic, see Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 283–8. 43 CR, “Propos pour la fête du Canada” [b-n], LD , 30 June 1962. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. Ryan’s citation was taken from Gertrude Himmelfarb, ed., Essays on Freedom and Power: Lord Acton (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1955), 160. 46 Pierre Elliott Trudeau, “The New Treason of the Intellectuals,” in Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 169. 47 Himmelfarb, Essays on Freedom and Power, 158–60. 48 CR, “Propos pour la fête du Canada.” 49 Ibid. 50 CR, “Des procès qui n’auront pas lieu” [b-n], LD , 10 October 1963. 51 CR, “Nouvelle victime du terrorisme F L Q” [b-n], LD , 8 May 1963. 52 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/347, C R , “Conférence sur le dialogue,” 1963. 53 Ryan devoted an ongoing series of editorials and comments to what he perceived as the weakness of senior Quebec Liberal cabinet ministers, which reflected the overall lack of political weight French Canadians could bring to bear on federal issues. See, for example, C R , “La politique va-t-elle tourner en foire?” [e], LD , 28 September 1962; C R , “Le parti libéral fédéral et le Canada français” [e], LD , 14 February 1963 ; C R , “Une grave carence des partis traditionnels” [b-n], LD , 6 March 1963; C R , “Le parti libéral fédéral a-t-il profité de son séjour en opposition?” [b-n], 6 April 1963; CR, “Les nouveaux secrétaires parlementaires” [b-n], LD , 27 April 1963; C R , “Ils n’ont encore rien compris” [b-n], LD , 8 January 1964; C R , “Un pas en avant, deux pas en arrière” [e], LD , 16 January 1964. 54 CR, “Le parti libéral fédéral et le Canada français.”



Notes to pages 283–8

615

55 CR, “Le point de vue des autres.” 56 CR, “Un discours impromptu de M. Lévesque.” 57 CR, “L’administration fédérale, mélange de rigidité et de prodigalité” [e], LD , 10 September 1962. 58 CR, “Impuissance des chefs politiques anglophones en face du Canada français” [b-n], LD , 17 April 1963. 59 CR, “Ottawa a toujours raison” [b-n], LD , 15 June 1963. 60 CR, “Les ‘conditions’ de M. François-Albert Angers” [b-n], LD , 8 May 1963. 61 CR, “Un discours impromptu de M. Lévesque.” 62 CR, “Les critiques de M. Johnson” [e], LD , 17 January 1964. See Dominique Foisy-Geoffroy, “Le Rapport de la Commission Tremblay (1953–1956), testament politique de la pensée traditionaliste canadienne-française,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 60, no. 3 (winter 2007): 257–94. 63 CR, “L’aide fédérale aux municipalités” [e], LD , 7 May 1963. 64 CR, “Faut-il bannir à tout jamais les programmes conjoints?” [e], LD , 30 March 1964. 65 Ibid. 66 CR, “Mlle Lamarsh redevient aggressive” [b-n], LD , 29 August 1963. 67 CR, “L’aide fédérale aux municipalités.” 68 CR, “La conférence d’Ottawa” [e], LD , 2 December 1963; CR, “Les objectifs de la conférence fédérale-provinciale” [e], LD , 28 November 1963. 69 CR, “À pas de tortue” [e], LD , 2 April 1964. 70 See John English, The Worldly Years: The Life of Lester Pearson, 1949–1972 (Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993), 298–304; Dale C. Thomson, Jean Lesage and the Quiet Revolution (Toronto: Macmillan, 1984), 375–90; Penny Bryden, Planners and Politicians: Liberal Politics and Social Policy, 1957–1968 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). 71 CR, “Une victoire pour les personnes âgées et le vrai fédéralisme” [e], v, 21 April 1964. 72 CR, “À Ottawa, la confusion persiste” [e], LD , 8 April 1964. 73 Pearson’s decision was, in fact, made during the election campaign, and he seems to have been persuaded by Laurendeau’s promptings, despite the initial reservations of his own principal Quebec adviser, Maurice Lamontagne. See English, The Worldly Years, 277–9, 269. 74 CR, “Où va la commission Laurendeau-Dunton?” [b-n], LD , 29 October 1963. 75 For the hesitant attitude of most members of the Quebec intelligentsia consulted by Laurendeau in July 1963, see Denis Monière, André Laurendeau et le destin d’un peuple (Montreal: Québec/Amérique, 1983), 282. 76 CR, “Vers un Canada nouveau” [e], LD , 24 July 1963. 77 CR, “Où va la commission Laurendeau-Dunton?” For an analysis of Laurendeau’s dilemma, see Monière, André Laurendeau, 282–3. 78 CR, “Vers un Canada nouveau.” 79 CR, “La voix de la raison” [b-n], LD , 6 November 1963.

616

Notes to pages 289–95

 80 CR, “Bilinguisme ou biculturalisme?” [e], LD , 11 November 1963.  81 CR, “À la bas du mandat Laurendeau-Dunton une prémisse indéniable: la dualité culturelle” [e], LD , 9 November 1963.  82 Ibid.  83 BAnQ M, F CR , P558, 1995-12-001/297, C R to M. le rédacteur en chef de La Presse, 15 April 1964.  84 CR, “Bilinguisme ou biculturalisme?”  85 CR, “Le rapport Parent et les diversités de religions et de langues” [e], LD , 25 April 1963.   86 For Laurendeau’s commitment to the “personal” principle in the application of bilingualism, see Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997).  87 CR, “Les minorités françaises au Canada – 1” [e], LD , 21 December 1963. For an analysis of the idea of “French Canada” and its contested existence among Quebec’s political elites in the twentieth century, see Marcel Martel, Le deuil d’un pays imaginé: rêves, luttes et déroute du Canada français. Les rapports entre le Québec et la francophonie canadienne, 1867–1975 (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1997).  88 CR, “Les minorités françaises au Canada – 2” [e], LD , 23 December 1963.  89 CR, “M. Donald Gordon et le bilinguisme au CN” [b-n], LD , 7 October 1963.  90 CR, “L’impossible assurance” [e], LD , 24 February 1964.  91 CR, “La voix de la raison.”  92 Ibid.  93 CR, “Le point de vue des autres.”   94 For Ryan’s western trip in early February 1964, see BAnQ M, FCR, 1995-12001/347, CR to Alan M. Thomas, director, Canadian Association for Adult Education, 2 April 1964; ibid., Gordon O. Rothney, Dean of Arts, Lakehead College of Arts, Science, Technology to C R , 23 January 1964; ibid., Canadian Association of Adult Education, Press Release, 27 January 1964; ibid., Alan Thomas to Marcel Faribault, 20 December 1963. Ryan’s impressions of western Canada were published as C R , “L’ouest canadien aux écoutes du Québec,” Commerce, April 1964, 33–6.  95 CR, “La vie académique doit-elle avoir des frontières?” [e], LD , 29 November 1963.  96 CR, “L’ouest canadien aux écoutes du Québec.”  97 CR, “Une thèse ambiguë: celle des ‘deux nations’” [e], LD , 26 February 1964.  98 Ibid.   99 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/297, C R to Blair Neatby (director of research, Laurendeau-Dunton Commission), 28 April 1964. 100 BAnQ M , Centre de Recherche Lionel-Groulx, Fonds Gérard-Filion, P 24/C , 38, Gérard Filion to Claude Ryan, 10 January 1974. 101 CR, “Le cas Douglas Fisher: bêtise ou malhonnêteté” [b-n], LD , 9 January 1964.



Notes to pages 295–302

617

102 CR, “Les ‘séparatistes’ de l’Ouest” [b-n], LD , 22 December 1963; CR, “À Ottawa, la confusion persiste” [e], LD , 8 April 1964. 103 CR, “O, Canada …” [b-n], LD , 11 March 1964. 104 CR, “Gaucherie ou sadisme” [e], LD , 10 March 1964. 105 Thomson, Jean Lesage, 209. 106 Gérard Filion, Fais ce que peux (Montreal: Boréal, 1989), 288. 107 For Filion’s animadversions to the ML F and their advocacy of deconfessionalizing public education, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 272. 108 Pascale Ryan, “Entrevue avec Claude Ryan,” 27 April 2001 (unpublished transcript); Aurélien Leclerc, Claude Ryan, l’homme du devoir (Montreal: Éditions Quinze, 1978). 109 Pascale Ryan, “Entrevue.” 110 BAnQ M, CRL G , Fonds Gérard-Filion, Filion to Ryan, 10 January 1974; CR, “Ce journal qui n’appartient à personne” [b-n], LD , 23 March 1964 111 Ibid. 112 Monière, André Laurendeau, 283. 113 Pascale Ryan, “Entrevue.” 114 Mason Wade, The French Canadians, 1760–1967, vol. 2, 1911–1967 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 865–96. Wade’s views are the progenitor of recent attempts to link Groulx with anti-semitism and fascism. See, in particular, Esther Delisle, The Traitor and the Jew: Anti-Semitism and Extreme Right-Wing Nationalism in Quebec from 1929 to 1939 (Montreal: R. Davies, 1993). 115 CR, “Une grave injustice du ‘Star’” [e], LD , 20 April 1964. See also Ryan’s demolition of Wade’s historical analysis in a “bloc-notes” written a day later: “Le ‘Star’s’ empiètre davantage” [b-n], LD , 21 April 1964. 116 BAnQ M, CRL G , Fonds Gérard-Filion, P24/C,38, Filion to Claude Ryan, 10 January 1974. 117 Filion, Fais ce que peux, 288. 118 For Léger’s views, see Léon Dion, La révolution déroutée, 1960–1976 (Montreal: Boréal, 1998), 97–8. 119 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/297, C R to M. le rédacteur en chef de La Presse. 120 Monière, André Laurendeau, 305–6. 121 BAnQ M, CRL G , Fonds Gérard-Filion, P24/C,6, “Procès-verbal d’une réunion du Conseil d’administration de l’Imprimerie Populaire Limitée, tenue au Cercle Universitaire de Montréal, 515 est rue Sherbrooke, le 1er mai 1964, à 11 heurs de l’avant-midi.” 122 Ibid. 123 This account is taken from Pierre-Philippe Gagnon, Le Devoir (Montreal: Libre Expression, 1985), 204. 124 “Procès-verbal d’une réunion.” 125 CR, “Pourquoi un directeur?” LD , 2 May 1964. 126 CR, “Par delà le mandat: un esprit” [e], LD , 4 May 1964.

618

Notes to pages 302–7

127 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/297, C R to correspondent, 7 February 1964. 128 CR, “Par delà le mandat.” 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid.

c h a p t e r e i g ht   1 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/351, John Kettle, “Claude Ryan: A Voice to Be Heard,” Canada Month: Magazine of Government and Politics 3, no. 69 (1969): 13.    2 Jean-Claude Leclerc, “Les dessous d’Octobre 1970: l’armée sera la vraie gardienne de l’unité nationale,” LD , 20 February 2011, quoting Robert Lemieux, the lawyer for the Front de libération du Québec, “Je suis dans le bureau du pape!”; Denis Lessard, “Un homme d’influence,” La Presse, 10 February 2004, which refers to “Le Pape de la rue Saint-Sacrement.” In 1971, Le Devoir moved to new premises on rue Saint-Sacrement.   3 Jean-Marc Léger, Le temps dissipé: souvenirs (Montreal: Hurtubise H MH , 2000), 231–2. For a description of the paper’s format, see Pierre-Philippe Gingras, Le Devoir (Montreal: Libre Expression, 1985), 231.   4 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/349, “Journalism: For the Canadian Hypothesis,” Time Magazine (Canadian ed.), 18 February 1966, 10.    5 Marcel Fournier, “L’intellectuel, le militant et l’expert,” in L’inscription sociale de l’intellectuel, ed. Manon Brunet and Pierre Lanthier (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval/L’Harmattan, 2000), 28. Two major works have broadened the analysis of intellectual identities and networks in Quebec before 1960. See in particular Marcel Fournier, L’entrée dans la modernité: science, culture, et société au Québec (Montreal: Les Éditions Saint-Martin, 1986) and Jean-Philippe Warren, L’engagement sociologique: la tradition sociologique au Canada francophone, 1886–1955 (Montreal: Boréal, 2003).    6 Here, the definition advanced by Julia Stapleton for English intellectuals between the 1850s and the mid-twentieth century seems most apt. See Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 4.   7 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/349, “Corporation des instituteurs et institutrices catholiques: Journées d’étude syndicales, 10 août 1965 – exposé de M. Claude Ryan.”    8 Stefan Collini, “Intellectuals in Britain and France in the Twentieth Century: Confusions, Contrasts, and Convergences,” in Intellectuals in TwentiethCentury France: Mandarins and Samurais, ed. Jeremy Jennings (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), 193–225; Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 251, 107–8. In a number of key respects, the synthesis of liberalism and idealism that characterized Britain after 1890 closely resembled the



Notes to pages 307–11

619

priorities advanced by the Thomist-inspired sociology and social thinking of Quebec’s Catholic intellectuals.  9 Collini, Public Moralists, 4–5. 10 Marcel Fournier, “L’intellectuel,” 28–9. 11 CR, “Bourassa et le séparatisme” [e], LD , 5 June 1964; BAnQ M, FCR, 1995-12001/348, CR, “McGill University, French Canada Studies Program: Should Henri Bourassa Return?” 8 March 1965. 12 CR, “Sur une démission” [e], LD , 4 July 1964. 13 At the same time of Ryan’s engagement in Action catholique, Léger became a member of the Jeunesses laurentiennes, a patriotic organization that owed its inspiration to Abbé Groulx. In 1946, he was invited to join the Ordre de Jacques Cartier, an apolitical secret society devoted to defending and extending the interests of French Canadians at both the federal and provincial level. In 1949, he was invited by André Laurendeau, then director of the Ligue d’Action nationale, to become a member of this select organization. See Léger, Le temps dissipé, 423–6. 14 CR, “Paul Sauriol: témoin des valeurs essentielles du Devoir,” LD , 28 August 1971. 15 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/302, René Paré (La Société des artisans coopérative d’assurance-vie) to C R , 10 March 1966; ibid., 1995-12-001/297, CR to Pat Keegan (COP E C I A L ), 19 August 1966. 16 CR, “La liberté de la presse” [e], LD , 4 November 1964; BAnQ M, FCR, 199412-001/296, C R to Gérard Lemieux (SR C ), 21 October 1964. 17 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/298, C R to Gérard Lemieux (S RC, Rome), 8 May 1964. 18 BAnQ M, CRL G , Fonds Gérard-Filion, P24/C,22, Gérard Filion to CR, 6 August 1964. 19 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/348, C R , “Le travail d’information dans un quotidien: quelques conditionnements concrets,” colloque sur l’information PresseRadio-Télévision, 22 May 1964 (I C E A ). 20 CR, “Gérard Pelletier à la présidence de l’U C LJ F” LD [b-n], 12 April 1965; Gingras, Le Devoir, 208. 21 CR, “Le conflit de ‘La Presse’” [e], LD , 11 July 1964; CR, “Structures capitalistes et liberté de la presse” [b-n], 4 August 1964. 22 CR. “Le conflit de ‘La Presse.’” Pelletier’s own travails at La Presse are recounted in his memoirs. See Gérard Pelletier, Years of Choice, 1960–1968, trans. Alan Brown (Toronto: Methuen, 1986), 92–121, 140–61. 23 CR, “La liberté de la presse est-elle en péril?” [e], LD , 5 August 1964; CR, “La liberté de la presse,” 4 November 1964. 24 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/298, C R to R.P. Henri Bradet, o.p., directeur revue Maintenant, 11 May 1964; C R , “La liberté de la presse,” 4 November 1964. 25 BAnQ M, 1995-12-001/349, C R , “Y-a-t-il crise du journalisme au Québec?” causerie donnée à la Chambre de commerce de Montréal, 2 November 1965.

620

Notes to pages 312–15

26 Ibid. 27 CR, “Le prix de l’abonnement au Devoir” [b-n], LD , 8 September 1965. 28 See www.assnat.qc.ca/en/deputes/ryan-claude-5231/biographie.html (accessed 16 January 2014). Ryan conceded that, with Pelletier’s difficulties, Le Devoir was the only “journal libre” in Quebec. See B A nQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/295, CR to correspondent, 29 December 1964. 29 CR, “Le plus puissant des désinfectants” [e], LD , 12 March 1964. 30 CR, “Une démarche douteuse du procureur général” [e], LD , 8 January 1965. 31 CR, “Pourquoi il faut dire ‘non’ à la politique d’information du ‘Soleil’” [b-n], LD , 5 November 1964. 32 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/299, C R to Col. J.C. Edwards (British Information Services, Ottawa), 19 August 1966; C R , “Un dimanche après-midi calme” [b-n], LD 11 January 1965. 33 CR, “L’amitié agissante de ses lecteurs, condition de la croissance du ‘Devoir’” [e], LD , 16 October 1965; B A nQ M, F C R , 1995-12-001/348, CR, “Le travail d’information dans un quotidien.” 34 CR, “L’amitié agissante de ses lecteurs.” 35 CR, “Les ‘propriétaires’ du Devoir” [b-n], LD 8 September 1965; CR, “L’amitié agissante de ses lecteurs”. 36 CR, “Un dimanche après-midi calme.” 37 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/348, C R , “What a French Canadian Thinks of English Canadians,” Students’ Administrative Council, University of Toronto, 31 October 1964. 38 CR, “Un dimanche après-midi calme.” For the sense of intimacy between writer and audience characteristic of Victorian English intellectuals, see Collini, Public Moralists, 3. 39 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/303, C R to Fernand Dumont (Université Laval), 25 November 1965; ibid., 1995-12-001/302, C R to correspondent, 7 February 1966; CR, “Le journaliste et son public” [e], LD , 29 September 1964. 40 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/298, C R to correspondent, 20 May 1964; CR, “Les ‘propriétaires’ du Devoir.” 41 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/348, “Ferment,” C BC broadcast, 14 June 1965, interviewed by Kenneth Bagnell; ibid., C R , “Le chrétien et la sécularisation ­progressive du monde profane,” Journées d’étude sacerdotales, Sherbrooke, 13 May 1965; B A nQM, F C R , 1995-12-001/297, Jacques Cousineau, s.j. (La Maison Bellarmin) to C R , 14 May 1964 and C R to Cousineau, 20 May 1964. The “sign of contradiction” in the Bible in reference to Christ and the early Church appears in Luke 2:34 and Acts 28:22. Ryan was not alone among his contemporaries in conceiving of his role in quasi-prophetic terms. The EnglishCanadian journalist Pierre Berton, author of a best-selling critique of churches in 1965, The Comfortable Pew, although generally regarded as an advocate of secularism, in fact sought to assimilate the role of the journalist to that of a prophet dedicated to renewing the engagement of the Christian churches with



Notes to pages 316–21

621

modern society. For this interpretation, see Nancy Christie, “‘Belief Crucified upon a Rooftop Antenna’: Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew, and Dechristianization,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 321–50. 42 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/298, C R to correspondent, 20 May 1964, and CR to correspondent, 18 May 1964. 43 CR “What a French Canadian Thinks of English Canadians”; BAnQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/298, C R to Gérard Lemieux, 18 May 1964. 44 BAnQ M, F CR, 2004-05-006/10, “Souvenirs de premiers ministres que j’ai connus,” allocution prononcée à Outremont devant le Club “les ultramontais,” 24 February 1998. 45 CR, “La voix de la raison” [b-n], LD , 6 November 1963. 46 For the invitation from Pearson, see B A nQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/297, 7 June 1965; ibid., 1995-12-001/298, André Letendre (directeur du cabinet, ministre de la justice, Ottawa) to C R , 2 May 1964, and CR to Letendre, 12 May 1964. 47 BAnQ M, F CR, 2004-05-006/3, “Entrevue avec Pierre Godin au sujet de René Lévesque,” 18 July 1996. 48 Ibid., 1995-12-001/297, Gérard Lemieux to C R , 28 September 1964; ibid., 1995-12-001/302, René Lévesque to C R , 11 January 1966. 49 CR, “Souvenirs de premiers ministres.” 50 CR, “Après les outres, le vin nouveau” [e], LD 12 December 1964. 51 Ibid. 52 For the considerable purchase of notions of “social development” and “dynamic sociology” on intellectuals in the United States and western Europe during the 1960s, see Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 186–9, 194–200. 53 CR, “Un colloque international sur ‘Pacem in terris’” [b-n], LD , 6 January 1965. 54 CR, “La papauté dans l’Église de Vatican II” [e], LD , 17 September 1965; CR, “Vatican II: la phase décisive est ouverte” [e], LD , 16 September 1964. 55 CR, “Le chrétien et la sécularisation progressive du monde profane.” 56 CR, “Vatican II: l’enjeu de la dernière session” [e], LD , 22 September 1965. 57 BANQM, F CR , 1995-12-001/298, C R to correspondent, 18 September 1964. 58 Ibid., 1995-12-001/297, Pat Keegan to C R , 17 August 1964, and CR to Keegan, 19 August 1964. 59 For the importance of this “third phase” of Vatican II, see Gilles Routhier, Vatican II: Herméneutique et réception (Montreal: Fides, 2007), 23-4. 60 CR, “Notre dette envers les Juifs” [e], LD , 14 October 1964; CR, “Les effets du concile sur la prière de l’Église” [e], LD , 17 April 1965; CR, “Le concile et les Juifs” [b-n], LD , 19 October 1965 61 CR, “Les voies de l’Église en 1964” [e], LD , 11 August 1964; CR, “L’oeuvre de Vatican II – 1: La réforme intérieure de l’Église” [e], LD , 8 December 1965.

622

Notes to pages 321–4

62 CR, “La fin de l’âge baroque” [e], LD , 6 March 1965. 63 CR, “Le Conseil supérieur de l’éducation” [e], LD , 27 August 1964; Clinton Archibald, Un Québec corporatiste? Corporatisme et néo-corporatisme du passage d’une idéologie corporatiste sociale à une idéologie corporatiste politique: le Québec de 1930 à nos jours (Hull, Q C : Editions de l’Asticou), 205–6. 64 C R , “La gestion du régime de rentes québécois” [e], L D , 20 May 1964; C R , “Le complexe sidérurgique: un projet communautaire” [e], L D , 21 October 1964. 65 CR, “Le défi de la croissance économique dans un pays comme le Canada” [e], LD , 7 January 1966; C R , “Une politique de la main d’oeuvre, clé de la lutte contre la pauvreté” [b-n], LD , 29 October 1965. 66 CR, “L’assurance-santé à dose réduite” [e], LD , 10 October 1964. 67 BAnQ M, F CR (Allocutions), 1995-12-001/350, “Conférence de M. Claude Ryan, Association des hôpitaux du Québec – Congrès-exposition,” Quebec, 17 June 1966. 68 Ibid., 1995-12-001/349, Gilles Gariépy, “Les entreprises n’échapperont pas à la remise en question: Claude Ryan,” La Presse, 21 October 1965; “Conférence de M. Claude Ryan, Association des hôpitaux du Québec.” 69 CR, “Le Montréal de demain: notre oeuvre ou celle ‘des autres’?” [e], LD , 19 June 1965. 70 Ibid; CR , “L’esprit de Montréal” [b-n], LD , 26 June 1965. 71 CR, “La grande oubliée de la ‘révolution tranquille’: l’habitation” [e], LD 5 January 1965. 72 For the rather “ambiguous” secularization that occurred in the field of public charity, see the following three articles by Lucia Ferretti: “Caritas-TroisRivières (1954–1966), ou les difficultés de la charité catholique à l’époque de l’État-providence,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 58, no. 2 (December 2004): 187–216; “L’Église, l’État et la formation professionnelle des adolescents sans soutien: le Patronage Saint-Charles de Trois-Rivières, 1937–1970,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 56, no. 3 (March 2003): 303–27; and “Reynald Rivard: prêtre psychologue trifluvien, l’essor de l’éducation spécialisée au Québec et la fin des orphelinats ordinaires (1947– 1968),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 62, nos 3–4 (winter–spring 2009): 533–64. See also Amélie Bourbeau, “Les catholiques montréalais et la sécularisation de l’assistance privée, 1930–1970,” Études d’histoire religieuse 77 (2011): 55–70. 73 BAnQ M , F CR (Allocutions), 1995-12-001/348, CR, “Conférence de M. Claude Ryan au Congrès de Caritas-Canada,” 28 November 1964; CR, “Quand la besace devient trop lourde” [e], LD , 17 July 1965. For the increasing financial difficulties of Quebec’s Catholic religious communities, which necessitated the abandonment of many educational institutions and social initiatives, see PaulAndré Turcotte, L’éclatement d’un monde: les Clercs de Saint-Viateur et la revolution tranquille (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1981).



Notes to pages 325–31

623

74 CR, “L’avenir des ‘institutions chrétiennes’” [e], LD , 7 April 1966; CR, “La Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste doit-elle demeurer confessionnelle?” [b-n], LD , 6 May 1964. 75 CR, “L’avenir des ‘institutions chrétiennes.’” 76 BAnQ M, F CR (Allocutions), 1995-12-001/348, CR, “Rencontre nationale de l’A.C.,” March 1965. 77 Ibid. 78 CR, “Conférence de M. Claude Ryan au Congrès de Caritas-Canada.” 79 Ibid. 80 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/349, “Exposé de M. Claude Ryan, Corporation des instituteurs et institutrices catholiques: Journées d’étude spéciales, 10 août 1965.” 81 CR, “L’avenir des ‘institutions chrétiennes.’” 82 For Quebec’s great education debate that occurred between 1961 and 1964, see Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 247–306. Claude Ryan’s contributions to the debate have been analyzed in chapter 6 above. 83 CR, “Une tâche nécessaire mais complexe: la réforme de l’université” [e], LD , 13 October 1965. 84 Ibid. 85 CR, “D’un excès à l’autre” [e], LD , 27 November 1965; CR, “L’école voulue par le M L F ” [e], LD , 27 May 1964. 86 CR, “L’application du rapport Parent” [e], LD , 20 February 1965. 87 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/338, C R to Louis Berlinguet (directeur, département de la biochimie, Faculté de Médecine, Université Laval), 13 August 1965. 88 CR, “Deux priorités en éducation” [e], LD , 16 February 1966; CR, “M. GérinLajoie et les collèges classiques” [e], LD , 25 June 1965; CR, “Réforme sans tapage” [e], LD , 13 June 1964. 89 CR, “La commission Parent et la confessionnalité de l’enseignement – 1: Les principes” [e], LD , 14 May 1966; C R , “La commission Parent et la confessionnalité de l’enseignement – 2: Les solutions pratiques” [e], LD , 16 May 1966. 90 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/298, correspondent to CR, 9 May 1964. 91 CR, “L’opinion québécoise et l’école laïque” [e], LD , 10 September 1964. For the persistence of high rates of religious participation and observance, which held firm in Quebec until 1965, see the statistics in Reginald Bibby, Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Irwin, 1987). 92 CR, “L’avenir des ‘institutions chrétiennes.’” 93 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, 2nd ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 402–3. 94 Ibid., 400–1. 95 Ibid., 405–6, 400–1. 96 CR, “Rencontre nationale de l’A.C.”

624

Notes to pages 332–8

 97 CR, “Les nouveaux dieux de la démocratie québécoise.”   98 “Conférence de M. Claude Ryan,” Association des hôpitaux du Québec.  99 CR, “Le phénomène Goldwater” [b-n], LD , 22 June 1964; CR, “Le choix de Goldwater” [e], LD , 17 July 1964; C R , “Après la nomination de Goldwater” [e], LD , 18 July 1964. 100 CR, “De la magistrature à la politique” [e], LD , 22 September 1964; CR, “Réflexions préliminaires en marge du jugement Challier” [b-n], LD , 25 February 1965. 101 CR, “Lendemain de visite royale” [e], LD , 13 October 1964. 102 CR, “PART I P R I S : naissance d’une gauche intégrale” [b-n], LD , 17 June 1964. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 For the role of Catholicism in forming the outlook of the Parti pris circle, see Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 52; and for the impact of the Catholic left on social activism in Montreal, see Carolyn Sharp, “To Build a Just Society: The Catholic Left in Quebec,” in Reclaiming Democracy: The Social Justice and Political Economy of Gregory Baum and Kari Polanyi Levitt, ed. Marguerite Mendell (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 43–55. 106 CR, “Le renvoi du directeur de ‘Maintenant’” [b-n], LD , 19 July 1965. The most complete analysis to date of the Bradet affair is provided by Martin Roy, Une réforme dans la fidélité: la revue “Maintenant” (1962–1974) et la “mise à jour” du catholicisme québécois (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012), 41–57. 107 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/298, C R to R P Henri Bradet, o.p., 11 May 1964. 108 Ibid., 1995-12-001/341, Affaire Bradet, H.-M. Bradet, o.p. to CR, 2–3 February 1969. 109 Roy, Une réforme dans la fidélité, 55–7. 110 CR, “Le renvoi du directeur de ‘Maintenant’”; CR, “La revue ‘Maintenant’ vivra” [b-n], LD , 10 September 1965. 111 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/338, C R to correspondent, 10 August 1965. 112 Ibid., C R to correspondent, 1 November 1965. 113 For Berton’s role and his insistence on the new authority of the journalist visà-vis the clergy in matters of religion, see Christie, “‘Belief Crucified,” 343–4. 114 CR, “Une vieille tentation: le ‘militantisme spirituelle’” [b-n], LD , 5 April 1965; CR, “Rencontre avec des collègues du Frère Lahaise” [e], LD , 14 April 1965. 115 CR, “La discussion publique des thèmes religieux” [e], LD , 8 March 1965. 116 CR, “Pluralisme ou schizophrénie intellectuelle?” [b-n], LD , 30 October 1964. For an analysis of the resignation of the journalists, which involved at bottom the opposition of clerical authorities to encompassing secular ideologies like



Notes to pages 338–43

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Marxism under the rubric of Action catholique, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 313–14. 117 CR, “Le clergé et la qualité de notre langue” [e], LD ; CR, “L’école voulue par le ML F .” For the M LF’s transformation of the terms of religious debate among Quebec intellectuals, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 251–70. 118 CR, “La visite du Cardinal Roy à la Législature” [b-n], LD , 12 March 1965. Roy’s visit was the last occasion when a prince of the Church personally visited with the representatives of the temporal sovereign, the people of Quebec. 119 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/349, C R , “Le prêtre et le monde moderne,” Grand Séminaire d’Ottawa, 13 March 1966. 120 Ibid. 121 CR, “Le chrétien et la sécularisation progressive du monde profane.” 122 CR, “Rencontre nationale de l’A.C.” 123 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/338, C R to Mgr Gérard-Marie Coderre, 1 November 1965, and Coderre to C R , 24 October 1965; CR, “Paul VI et le célibat ecclésiastique” [b-n], LD , 19 October 1965. 124 CR, “L’homme d’aujourd’hui devant le mariage” [e], LD , 9 March 1966; CR, “Étude romaine sur la régulation des naissances” [b-n], 10 July 1964. 125 For the terms of the debate see, on the one hand, Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (2000; London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 170–92, who invokes the period 1958–63 as critical, and, on the other, Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For a recent discussion of the debate, see Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, “Introduction: ‘Even the Hippies Were Only Very Slowly Going Secular’: Dechristianization and the Culture of Individualism in North America and Western Europe,” in Christie and Gauvreau, The Sixties and Beyond, 3–38. 126 CR, “Le prêtre et le monde moderne.” 127 For the differing positions of women and Catholic clergy on the growing desire to use the birth control pill, and the efforts to promote other means of natural birth control in the early 1960s, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 239–46, and Diane Gervais, “Morale catholique et détresse conjugale au Québec: la réponse du Service de régulation des naissances S ÉRÉNA, 1955– 1970,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 55, no. 2 (December 2001): 185–215. 128 CR, “Rencontre nationale de l’A.C.”

chapter nine  1 CR, “Un nouveau manifeste politique” [e], LD , 16 May 1964.   2 Ryan termed the body the “groupe Trudeau” but noted the presence of lawyers Marc Lalonde and Claude Bruneau, economist Albert Breton, sociologist

626

Notes to pages 343–50

Maurice Pinard, and psychologist Yvon Gauthier. Trudeau’s biographers have noted the manifesto’s rejection of the “national state” as obsolete, and the fact that it deplored the exaggerated attention given by political elites in both Quebec and English Canada to constitutional reform. See the mention in John English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, vol. 1, 1919–1968 (Toronto: Knopf, 2006), 391–2, who does capture Trudeau’s growing affinity for a “North American” frame of reference. See also Max Nemni and Monique Nemni, Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman, 1944–1965, trans. George Tombs (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011), 443–5.  3 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/295, C R to correspondent, 22 September 1964.   4 Ibid., 1995-12-001/297, Marc Lalonde to C R , 25 May 1964.  5 CR, “Un nouveau manifeste politique.”   6 See Geoffrey Foote, The Republican Transformation of Modern British Politics (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–11.  7 CR, “Un nouveau manifeste politique.”  8 CR, “Sur une démission” [e], LD , 4 July 1964.  9 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/297, André Patry (S RC) to CR, 29 June 1964. 10 BAnQ M , CRL G , Fonds Gérard-Filion, Jean-Marc Léger to Filion, 22 June 1964. 11 Ibid. 12 BAnQ M , CRL G , Fonds Gérard Filion, P 24/C ,38, Filion to Jean-Marc Léger, 2 July 1964. 13 Ibid. For Trudeau’s metaphor of the “Wigwam Complex,” see “Separatist Counter-Revolutionaries,” in Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 211–12. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 For the classic statement of this influential view, see Michael Behiels, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism versus Neo-Nationalism, 1945–1960 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985). 17 For the struggles to reassert the control of the founding group at Cité libre, see Nemni and Nemni, Trudeau Transformed, 440–3; English, Citizen of the World, 397, 403. 18 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/348, C R , “Rencontre nationale de l’A.C.,” March 1965. 19 CR, “Bourassa et le séparatisme” [e], LD , 5 June 1964. 20 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/298, C R to Gérard Lemieux, 18 May 1964. 21 CR, “Sur une démission.” 22 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Victorian Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 58. 23 CR, “A la recherche de la pierre philosophale” [e], LD , 14 May 1964. 24 CR, “Les équivoques du R I N – 2” [e], LD , 7 December 1964.



Notes to pages 351–7

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25 For Jacques-Yvan Morin and the “associated states” idea, see Edward McWhinney, Quebec and the Constitution, 1960–1978 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 21–4. 26 CR, “Le cas Lévesque” [b-n], 3 April 1964; C R , “Les demi-vérités du premier ministre” [b-n], LD , 22 May 1964; C R , “L’art de fausser le débat” [e], LD , 17 September 1964. For an analysis of Lesage’s federalism and position on constitutional reform, see Gérard Boismenu, “La pensée constitutionnelle de Jean Lesage,” in Jean Lesage et l’éveil d’une nation, ed. Robert Comeau (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1989), 76–107. 27 CR, “Les équivoques du R I N – 2” (emphasis in original). 28 CR, “L’histoire au service d’une thèse fragile” [e], LD , 20 June 1964; CR, “Les équivoques du R I N – 2.” 29 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/338, correspondent to CR, 22 September 1964. 30 CR, “Le RI N ” [b-n], LD , 1 September 1964; C R , “Le drame de la rue Bleury” [b-n], 1 September 1964; C R , “Une assemblée paquetée à Québec” [b-n], 17 June 1964; C R , “Tactiques dangereuses” [b-n], LD , 1 September 1964; CR, “Une enquête ‘personnelle’ … dont décevante” [e], LD , 22 October 1964. 31 CR, “Les inquiétudes de Me Kenneth McKay” [b-n], LD , 15 August 1964. 32 CR, “Les équivoques du R I N – 2.” 33 CR, “La communauté anglophone dans le Québec d’aujourd’hui” [e], LD , 12 February 1966. It is interesting to note, in this respect, the affinities between Trudeau’s logical equation of French-Canadian nationalism and totalitarianism and the fears of Montreal’s anglophone community. 34 CR, “Présence française à Montréal” [e], LD , 23 June 1964. 35 CR, “Un très bon discours de M. René Lévesque” [e], LD , 28 February 1966; CR, “La communauté anglophone dans le Québec.” 36 CR, “L’avenir du français au Québec – 1: Problèmes actuels” [e], LD , 19 November 1965. 37 Although Ryan always disclaimed any allegiance to or discipleship with this current, he noted in 1966, in an article marking Abbé Groulx’s eighty-eighth birthday, that, “on many points, history seems to be confirming his views.” See CR, “Le chanoine Groulx a 88 ans” [b-n], LD , 12 January 1966. 38 CR, “L’avenir du français au Québec – 1.” 39 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/349, “Conférence prononcée par M. Claude Ryan, lors de l’Assemblée générale annuelle des membres de l’A.C.F.A.,” 1 April 1966. 40 CR, “Présence française à Montréal”; C R , “L’avenir du français – 2: Vers une politique de la langue” [e], LD , 20 November 1965. 41 CR, “L’avenir du français – 2.” 42 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/348, C R , “What a French Canadian Thinks of English Canadians,” Students Administrative Council, University of Toronto, 31 October 1964; ibid., C R , “Henri Bourassa: The Unheeded Prophet.”

628

Notes to pages 357–64

43 CR, “What a French Canadian Thinks of English Canadians”; CR, “Le malaise de la société Saint-Jean-Baptiste” [e], LD , 18 February 1965. 44 CR, “Recontre nationale de l’A.C.,” March 1965. 45 CR, “L’art de fausser le débat” [e], LD , 17 September 1964 (emphasis in original). 46 Ibid. 47 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/296, John W. Holmes (Canadian Institute of International Affairs) to C R , 16 November 1964. 48 CR, “Plaidoyer pour un fédéralisme économique canadien: La conférence de Me Faribault à la S S J B ” [e], LD , 27 June 1964. 49 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/301, C R to George Grant, 14 March 1966; CR, “Bourassa et le séparatisme” [e], LD , 5 June 1964; BAnQ M, FCR, 1995-12001/348, CR “Should Henri Bourassa Return?” lecture, McGill University French Canada Studies Program, 8 March 1965. 50 CR, “Bourassa et le séparatisme”; C R , “Should Henri Bourassa Return?” 51 CR, “Bourassa et le separatism.” 52 CR, “Should Henri Bourassa Return?” 53 For a discussion of the B &B Commission’s priorities, see Ramsay Cook and Michael Behiels, The Essential Laurendeau (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1976), 30–1. 54 BAnQ M, F CR (Correspondance), 1995-12-001/302, CR to correspondent, 14 March 1966. 55 CR, “Deux cultures ou deux nations?” [e], LD , 16 June 1964. 56 Ibid. 57 CR, “Une crise qui as sa source, non sa seule cause, dans le Québec” [e], LD , 27 February 1965. 58 CR, “Deux cultures ou deux nations?” 59 CR, “M. Lesage et les dirigeants ukrainiens du Manitoba” [b-n], LD , 6 October 1965; CR, “Le troisième groupe” [e], LD , 3 June 1964. For the role of Jewish and Ukrainian organizations in attempting to transform the commission’s linguistic agenda, see Marcel Martel and Martin Pâquet, Speaking Up: A History of Language and Politics in Canada and Quebec, trans. Patricia Dumas (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012), 122–3. 60 CR, “Les cinq ‘principes’ de M. Lesage” [e], LD , 22 September 1964; CR, “Deux cultures ou deux nations.” For his consistent attention to improving the presence and influence of French-Canadian political leaders at the federal level, see CR, “Les maux de tête de M. Pearson” [e], LD , 13 February 1965; CR, “Le dilemma des libéraux fédéraux ou le cas de M. Sauvé” [e], LD , 1 May 1965; CR, “Au lendemain d’un débat amer” [e], LD , 18 March 1966; CR, “Existe-t-il ‘deux conceptions différentes de l’éthique publique’ au Canada?” [e], LD , 19 March 1966; C R , “L’atmosphère d’Ottawa” [e], LD , 15 March 1966. 61 “Conférence prononcée par M. Claude Ryan.” For the transformations of the early 1960s in the attitudes of Quebec intellectuals and nationalist



Notes to pages 364–9

629

organizations towards the francophone minorities, see the analysis in Marcel Martel, Le deuil d’un pays imaginé: Rêves, luttes et déroute du Canada français (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1997), 139–45. 62 CR, “Aux origines de la Confédération” [e], LD , 9 January 1965; CR, “Nouvelle vocation historique … pour l’Ontario?” [b-n], LD , 23 April 1965. 63 CR, “Une crise qui a sa source.” 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 BAnQ M, F CR (Allocutions), 1995-12-001/349, CR, “Le Québec et l’Ontario dans la Confédération canadienne,” Press Seminar – Quebec, Ontario, Toronto, 7 October 1965. 67 CR, “Nouvelle intéressante d’Ontario” [e], LD , 4 September 1965. 68 “Le Québec et l’Ontario.” 69 CR, “Le rapport Laurendeau-Dunton: premières réactions du Canada anglais” [e], LD , 2 March 1965; C R , “Qui refuse le dualisme?” [e], LD , 20 April1965; CR, “Le ‘début’ québécois de M. Roblin” [b-n], LD , 22 October 1965. 70 CR, “Le rapport Laurendeau-Dunton” (emphasis in original). 71 CR, “Au coeur de la crise canadienne – 1: Le Canada anglais” [e], LD , 14 October 1965. 72 CR, “Une amitié difficile” [e], LD , 28 July 1964. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. For his commentary on another expression of English Canada’s neonationalism, see C R , “L’autre inquiétude du Canada anglais” [b-n], LD , 26 July 1965, which reviewed George Grant’s Lament for a Nation. 75 The major expression of this interpretation is José Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945–1971 (Vancouver: U BC Press, 2006). 76 CR, “Le choix d’un drapeau” [e], LD , 25 May 1964; CR, “Lendemain de visite royale” [e], 13 October 1964; C R , “Le dilemme du drapeau” [e], LD , 15 August 1964; CR, “Le drapeau du Canada” [e], LD , 16 February 1965. 77 For these transformations in English-Canadian identity as less a “neo-­ nationalism” than the fulfilment of a liberal-imperialist cultural project, see C.P. Champion, The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964–1968 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 78 CR, “La ‘révolte’ du Québec vue par un Américain” [e], LD , 24 September 1964 (emphasis in original). 79 Ibid. 80 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/348, C R , “Students’ Adminstrative Council, University of Toronto,” 31 October 1964. 81 CR, “Paradoxes de la modération” [e], LD , 8 May 1965. 82 Ibid. 83 CR, “Le métier de conférencier et ses risques …” [b-n], LD , 25 February 1966.

630

Notes to pages 370–5

 84 CR, “Paradoxes de la modération.”  85 CR, “Bienvenue à M. Ramsay Cook” [b-n], LD , 15 October 1964.  86 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/303, Robert Stanfield to CR, 14 March 1966; ibid., 1995-12-001/302, C R to Solange Chaput-Rolland, 15 March 1966.  87 CR, “Paradoxes de la modération.”  88 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/349, C R , “Le rôle des Églises dans un Canada en effervescence,” 5 July 1965. It is of some interest that Ryan’s manuscript crossed out “fédéralisme biculturel.”   89 Ibid., 1995-12-001/302, C R to correspondent, March 1966.   90 Ibid., 1995-12-001/348, “C B C – Ferment,” spring 1965. The other panelists were the Church of England Bishop John Robinson (author of the controversial Honest to God), John C. Bennett, Paul Doucet, Leslie Dewart, the American religious historian Martin Marty, and the theologian Paul Tillich.  91 CR, “Le rôle des Églises dans un Canada en effervescence.”  92 CR, “Le thème du gouvernement central fort” [b-n], LD , 3 December. 1965.  93 CR, “Le rôle des Églises dans un Canada en effervescence.”  94 CR, “L’histoire au service d’une thèse fragile” [e], LD , 20 June 1964; CR, “Le thème du gouvernement central fort.”  95 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/348, C R , “The French-Canadian Dilemma,” Foreign Affairs, April 1965, 472.   96 Ibid., 474.  97 Ibid.; BAnQM , F C R , 1995-12-001/338, Alan M. Thomas to CR, 2 October 1964.  98 CR, “Les voies de l’Église en 1964” [e], LD , 11 August 1964; CR, “Une première étape fructueuse” [e], LD , 18 June 1964.  99 CR, “De Halifax à New York” [b-n], LD , 12 June 1964. 100 CR, “Le rapport Laurendeau-Dunton.” 101 CR, “Plaidoyer pour un fédéralisme économique canadien.” 102 CR, “La délégation du Québec à Paris” [e], LD , 13 August 1964; CR, “La mise au point de M. Lévesque” [b-n], 2 June 1964. 103 CR, “L’art de fausser le débat” [e], LD , 17 September 1964 (emphasis in original). 104 BAnQ M , F CR (Correspondance), 1995-12-001/295, CR to correspondent, 28 July 1964. 105 For the background and organization of the conference, see Geoffrey Stevens, The Player: The Life and Times of Dalton Camp (Toronto: Key Porter, 2003), 139–41. See also B A nQ M, F C R , 1995-12-001/338, Dalton K. Camp to CR, 22 September 1964; ibid., 1995-12-001/295, CR to Mlle Flora MacDonald, 20 October 1964; ibid., 1995-12-001/296, Brian Mulroney to CR, 18 August 1964. 106 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/295, C R to correspondent, 18 September 1964; Stevens, The Player, 141.



Notes to pages 375–82

631

107 McM U A, W.L. Morton Papers, box 19, file 1, W.L. Morton, “The Conservative Principle in Confederation,” paper prepared for the National Conference on Canadian Goals, Fredericton, 9–12 September 1964. For the admiring correspondence between Ryan and Morton, see ibid., CR to Morton, 21 September 1964. 108 CR, “Le conservatisme canadien à la recherche d’une vocation actuelle” [b-n], LD , 14 September 1964. 109 B A nQ M , F C R , 1995-12-001/349, C R “Les perspectives du parti progressisteconservateur dans Québec,” speech to Fédération étudiante P C , 29 June 1965. 110 Ibid. 111 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/295, C R , “The Canadian Experiment: A Quebec Viewpoint,” commentary to the National Conference on Canadian Goals, Fredericton, 9–12 September 1964. 112 Ibid. 113 CR, “La position du Devoir dans la crise actuelle du Canada – 1” [e], LD , 18 September 1964. 114 CR, “La position du Devoir dans la crise actuelle du Canada – 2” [e], LD , 19 September 1964. It was a mocking reference to Trudeau’s self-description as a “citizen of the world.” 115 CR, “La position du Devoir – 1.” 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. 118 CR, “La position du Devoir – 2.” 119 Ibid.  120 CR, “Plaidoyer pour un fédéralisme économique canadien.” 121 C R , “L’option politique de la S.S.J.B. de Montréal” [e], L D , 11 March 1965. 122 CR, “Plaidoyer pour un fédéralisme économique canadien.” 123 CR, “The Canadian Experiment”; C R , “Plaidoyer pour un fédéralisme économique canadien.” 124 K.C. Wheare, Federal Government, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 19–21, 25. 125 CR, “La modération des uns ne doit pas servir de paravent à la myopie des autres” [e], LD , 26 September 1964; C R , “Délibérations utiles sur l’avenir politique du Québec” [e], LD , 6 October 1964. 126 B A nQ M , F C R , 1995-12-001/297, C R to Me Marc Lalonde, 20 October 1964. 127 CR, “L’option politique de la S.S.J.B. de Montréal.” 128 CR, “Plaidoyer pour un fédéralisme économique canadien.” 129 CR, “La position du Devoir – 2.” 130 Ibid.

632

Notes to pages 384–90

chapter ten  1 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/297, correspondent to CR, 20 October 1964 (emphasis in original). See also ibid., 1995-12-001/295, J.R. Bourbonnière (surintendant des agences, Crown Life) to C R , 3 November 1964, and Louis Beaupré (Service social du Diocèse de Valleyfield) to CR, 11 November 1964.   2 Ibid., 1995-12-001/297, correspondent to C R , 22 September 1964; correspondent to the editor of Time, 30 September 1964; and correspondent to CR, 6 July 1964.   3 Ibid., 1995-12-001/338, Ramsay Cook to C R , 21 September 1964, and Alvin Hamilton to C R , 20 September 1964.   4 Ibid., Alvin Hamilton to C R , 20 September 1964; BAnQ M, FCR (Correspondance), 1995-12-001/298, André Letendre (chef du cabinet, Ministre de la Justice, Ottawa) to C R , 12 May 1964, enclosing a speech by Hon. Guy Favreau, Minister of Justice, “Le fédéralisme coopératif fournit la clef d’une véritable confédération,” 4 May 1964, Canadian Club, Montreal. Though the idea itself is usually linked with the Pearson Liberals, Alvin Hamilton claimed that he had originated the concept while minister of agriculture in the Progressive Conservative government of John Diefenbaker.  5 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/348, C R , “What a French Canadian Thinks of English Canadians,” 31 October 1964.   6 Ryan’s term to define Quebec’s constitutional ambitions was “statut particulier.” Although the term is frequently translated as “special status,” he was always careful to indicate that those who advocated this position did not see it as elevating Quebec to a “special” position vis-à-vis the other provinces. In this context, “particular status” conveys his meaning more accurately.  7 CR, “Les revendications ‘internationales’ du Québec sont-elles hérétiques?” [e], LD , 3 May 1965.  8 CR, “Les cinq ‘principes’ de M. Lesage” [e], LD , 22 September 1964.  9 Ibid. 10 Gérard Boismenu, “La pensée constitutionelle de Jean Lesage,” in Jean Lesage et l’éveil d’une nation, ed. Robert Comeau (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1989), 76–80, 95. 11 CR, “Fin des pèlerinages, mais non des difficultés” [e], LD , 17 October 1964. 12 CR, “La formule Fulton-Favreau – 2: Un temps mal choisi” [e], LD , 5 March 1965. 13 CR, “La formule Fulton-Favreau – 1: L’inacceptable compromis” [e], LD , 4 March 1965. 14 Dale C. Thomson, Jean Lesage and the Quiet Revolution (Toronto: Macmillan, 1984), 354–5. 15 C R , “Les positions constitutionnelles de M. Lesage” [e], L D , 15 February 1966.



Notes to pages 391–5

633

16 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/349, C R , “Les perspectives du parti conservateur dans Québec,” donnée à la Fédération étudiante progressiste-conservateur du Canada, 29 June 1965. 17 CR, “Bilan ‘moral’ de la conférence fédérale-provinciale” [e], LD , 24 July 1965; CR, “’L’Establishment’ fédéral” [b-n], LD , 25 August 1964. 18 CR, “Les conférences fédérales-provinciales sont-elles en train de saper l’autorité des Parlements?” [e], LD , 20 March 1965. For Lesage’s role in the development of an “executive federalism” during the 1960s, see Boismenu, “La pensée constitutionnelle de Jean Lesage,” 101–2. 19 CR, “Les conférences fédérales-provinciales et l’avenir du fédéralisme canadien” [e], LD , 20 July 1965. 20 Ibid. 21 For this emphasis, see Neil Morrison, “Bilinguisme et biculturalisme,” in André Laurendeau: un intellectuel d’ici, ed. Robert Comeau and Lucille Beaudry (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1989), 216. 22 BAnQ M, F CR P558, S 10, S11 (Carnets), 2002-12-003/1, 1965, Carnet 3. 23 BAnQ M, F CR (Allocutions), 1995-12-001/349, CR, “Les perspectives du parti conservateur dans Québec.” 24 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/349, C R , “Is Equality Possible?” Champlain Lecture, Trent University – The Historic Position of Quebec in Confederation, 16 November 1965. 25 Jean-François Simard, “Introduction – Camille Laurin: Un porteur d’innovation sociale,” in L’œuvre de Camille Laurin: la politique publique comme instrument de l’innovation sociale, ed. Simard (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010), 36–7. 26 Ibid., 2002-12-003/1, 1965 – Carnet 3, “The Objectives of French Canadian Moderates.” 27 C R , “Deux conditions d’une nouvelle entente” [e], L D , 20 November 1964; B A nQ M , F C R , 2002-12-001, “Objectives of French Canadian Moderates.” 28 CR, “Deux conditions d’une nouvelle entente” and “Objectives of French Canadian Moderates.” 29 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/303, C R to Jacques-Yvan Morin, 6 January 1966, inviting him to a meeting on “statut particulier” along with a group of constitutional experts and the Le Devoir editorial team. 30 CR, “La difficile notion d’égalité” [e], LD , 9 March 1965. 31 Marcel Faribault and R.M. Fowler, Dix pour un: le pari confédératif (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1965), 11. 32 Ibid., 26. 33 CR, “Le pari constitutionnel de MM. Faribault et Fowler – 1” [e], LD , 30 March 1965; C R , “Le pari constitutionnel de MM. Faribault et Fowler – 2: La nouvelle égalité” [e], 31 March 1965.

634

Notes to pages 395–402

34 CR, “Le pari constitutionnel de MM. Faribault et Fowler – 2”; CR, “Nouveau plaidoyer en faveur d’un réaménagement constitutionnel” [b-n], LD , 22 Mar. 1966. 35 “Objectives of French Canadian Moderates.” 36 Ibid.; BAnQM, F C R , 1995-12-001/349, C R , “Le Québec et l’Ontario dans la Confédération canadienne,” Press Seminar – Quebec-Ontario, Toronto, 7 October 1965. 37 “Le Québec et l’Ontario dans la Confédération canadienne.” 38 CR, “Le premier rapport du Conseil économique du Canada” [e], LD , 12 January 1965. 39 CR, “Le manifeste libéral: premières impressions” [e], LD , 25 April 1966. For an analysis of this intellectual trajectory, see the suggestive work by Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, N Y : Cornell University Press, 2006), 200. 40 CR, “La position de M. Robarts dans le dialogue canadien” [e], LD , 18 January 1966. 41 CR, “Le noeud gordien de la ‘question canadienne’” [e], LD , 11 October 1965. 42 Ibid. 43 CR, “Deux conditions d’une nouvelle entente.” 44 CR, “Les partis fédéraux devant les exigences pratiques de l’égalité” [e], LD , 27 October 1965. 45 CR, “Le projet d’enquête Pearson: trois réserves” [e], LD , 2 July 1964. 46 Ibid. 47 CR, “Les partis fédéraux devant les exigences pratiques de l’égalité.” 48 CR, “La formule du statut particulier” [e], LD , 30 November 1965. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 CR, “Le fondement premier d’un fédéralisme vivant” [e] LD , 25 January 1966. 52 CR, “La formule du statut particulier.” 53 Ibid. 54 CR, “La drôle d’aventure” [e], LD , 24 September 1965. 55 CR, “Un texte curieux de M. Albert Breton” [b-n], LD , 3 September 1964. 56 CR, “L’histoire est-elle une science comme les autres?” [e], LD , 21 January 1965. 57 BAnQ M , F CR, P558, S10, SS6 (Écrits), C R , “Pierre Elliott Trudeau: grandeur et limites de la raison en politique,” 30 September 2000. 58 CR, “La commission Laurendeau-Dunton serait-elle devenue un ‘lobby’ pour ‘l’industrie nationaliste’?” [e], LD , 13 December 1965. For the committee’s intervention, see Max Nemni and Monique Nemni, Trudeau Transformed, 1944–1965: The Shaping of a Statesman, trans. George Tombs (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011), 448–9. Although the statement was ostensibly a collective document, Trudeau himself was the author. See English, Citizen of the World, 413.



Notes to pages 402–8

635

59 CR, “La commission Laurendeau-Dunton serait-elle devenue un ‘lobby’?” 60 CR, “Le mandat avant l’électoralisme” [e], LD , 24 August 1965; CR, “Les inconnues de la prochaine campagne” [e], LD , 9 September 1965. 61 CR, “Le choix d’une génération” [e], LD , 3 September 1965. 62 Ibid. 63 CR, Le rendez-vous manqué” [e], LD , 13 September 1965. 64 CR, “Le choix d’une génération.” 65 Ibid. 66 CR, “Le rendez-vous manqué.” 67 CR, “L’option néo-démocrate vue par MM. Pelletier et Trudeau” [e], LD , 14 October 1965. 68 CR, “Drôle d’aventure” [e], LD , 24 September 1965. 69 CR, “L’attitude du Devoir dans la présente élection” [e], LD , 3 November 1965; CR, “Le gouvernement majoritaire est-il une fin en soi?” [e], LD , 1 October 1965; C R , “Le drame de la présente campagne” [e], LD , 23 October 1965. 70 CR, “Qu’a voulu dire au juste M. Pearson?” [e], LD , 22 January 1966. 71 CR, “Les députés du Québec devront-ils s’abstenir de voter à Ottawa?” [e], LD , 26 January 1966. 72 CR, “Le F L C (Québec): un départ honnête mais incertain” [e], LD , 29 March 1966. 73 Ibid. 74 CR, “A l’aube du deuxième acte de la ‘révolution tranquille’” [e], LD , 23 June 1966. 75 Ryan’s sense of Lesage’s talents and limits were outlined in a number of editorials during 1965 and 1966. It is evident that the Fulton-Favreau imbroglio was a critical turning point in the premier’s popularity. See C R , “Les oscillations de l’autorité” [e], L D , 14 January 1966; C R , “Retour de voyage” [e], L D , 14 November 1964; C R , “Le talon d’Achille de M. Lesage” [e], L D , 6 February 1965; C R , “Le climat politique à la fin d’une longue session” [e], L D , 10 August 1965. 76 CR, “La nouvelle situation politique à Québec” [e], LD , 7 June 1966. For his endorsement of a third term for the Liberals, see CR, “La meilleure équipe” [e], LD , 31 May 1966. 77 C R , “Les limites du Trésor public” [b-n], L D , 2 March 1966; C R , “L’économie du Québec en 1965” [e], L D , 23 December 1965; C R , “Le rapport Bélanger – 1: Les données fondamentales du problème fiscal” [e], L D , 7 January 1966. 78 CR, “La politique québécoise en 1966 – 1: Les rapports de forces” [e], LD , 5 January 1966; C R , “Le comportement des trois partis dans l’élection du 5 juin” [e], LD , 10 June 1966. 79 CR, “Le nouveau départ de M. Daniel Johnson – 1” [e], LD , 23 March 1965; CR, “Le nouveau départ de M. Daniel Johnson – 2” [e], LD , 24 March 1965;

636

80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88

89 90

91 92

93 94

95 96

Notes to pages 408–13 BAnQ M , F CR, P558, S10, SS6, 2004-05-006/10, CR, “Les Premiers ministres que j’ai connus.” CR, “Le programme de l’Union nationale – 1. Les positions constitutionnelles et fiscales” [e], LD , 3 May 1966. For an analysis of Johnson’s constitutional thinking, see François Rocher, “Pour un réaménagement du régime consitutionnel: Québec d’abord!” in Daniel Johnson: rêve d’égalité et projet d’indépendance, ed. Robert Comeau, Michel Lévesque, and Yves Bélanger (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1991), 211–36. BAnQ M, F CR, 2004-05-006/10, C R , “Souvenirs des premiers ministres.” BAnQ M, F CR (Correspondance), 1995-12-001/301, CR à André Patry, 5 July 1966. CR, “Souvenirs des premiers ministres.” BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/350, C R , “Quebec’s Quiet Revolution – Phase Two,” Foreign Affairs, September 1966. BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/350, “Conférence de M. Claude Ryan,” Association des hôpitaux du Québec, 17 June 1966. CR, “A l’aube du deuxième acte de la ‘révolution tranquille.’” For the mood of American intellectuals in the 1960s, see Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), xi–xiv, 1. CR, “Conférence de M. Claude Ryan,” Association des hôpitaux du Québec; CR, “Le redressement économique: entreprise aux multiples visages” [e], LD , 21 September 1966; C R , “Pendant qu’on spécule sur l’avenir” [e], LD , 2 October 1967. CR, “Aspirations ouvrières: version 1966” [e], LD , 10 August 1966; CR, “L’action du patronat du Québec” [e], LD 26 November 1966. CR, “Au bord du précipice” [e], LD , 14 July 1966; CR “Le premier ‘test’ du gouvernement Johnson” [e], LD , 16 July 1966; CR, “Le gouvernement vaincrat-il son impuissance?” [e], LD , 26 July 1966; C R, “La mise en tutelle des hôpitaux” [e], LD , 2 August 1966. CR, “Les responsabilités du secteur public en matière de salaires” [e], LD , 28 July 1966. For the fate of American liberal reform in the 1960s, see Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (1984; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009). For Canadian variants of the “War on Poverty,” see James Struthers, The Limits of Affluence: Welfare in Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). CR, “Le rêve de M. Manning” [e], LD , 12 August 1967. CR, “Aspirations ouvrières”; Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 402–5. CR, “Le rêve de M. Manning.” CR, “La difficile recherche de l’égalité” [e], LD , 30 June 1966.



Notes to pages 414–18

637

CR, “Aspirations du Québec et lien fédéral” [e], LD , 19 April 1967. CR, “La difficile recherche de l’égalité.” CR, “Les ‘éclaircissements’ de M. Johnson” [e], LD , 20 September 1966. CR, “Le devoir immédiat des libéraux du Québec” [e], LD 7 August 1967. BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/350, C R , “Political Leadership and National Goals,” lecture, Carleton University, Centennial Series, 9 March 1967. 102 CR, “Souvenirs des premiers ministres.” 103 CR, “Les revendications du Québec à la conférence fiscale” [e], LD , 14 September 1966; C R , “Les dernières propositions d’Ottawa en rapport avec l’éduction, la recherche et la culture” [e], LD , 26 October 1966. 104 CR, “Le Québec dans le Canada de demain” [e], LD , 30 June 1967. 105 Ibid. 106 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/350, C R , “L’évolution du fédéralisme au Canada – notes en marge d’une communication de A.W. Johnson à la Canadian Political Science Association,” Ottawa, 8 June 1967. 107 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/350, C R , “Political Leadership and National Goals.” 108 CR, “La difficile recherche de l’égalité.” 109 CR, “La politique canadienne en 1966” [e], LD , 30 December 1966; CR, “Fédéralisme coopératif à trois pour cent” [e], LD , 29 October 1966; CR, “M. John Robarts à Montréal,” LD [b-n], 25 November 1966. 110 CR, “Le coup de circuit raté de M. MacEachen” [e], LD , 15 July 1966. For the negotiations over national health insurance and the content of the key “four conditions,” see Penny Bryden, Planners and Politicians: Liberal Politics and Social Policy, 1957–1968 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). 111 CR, “M. Sharp sur la sellette” [e], LD , 15 September 1966. 112 CR, “Le congrès des libéraux fédéraux – 2: Les orientations” [e], LD , 14 October 1966. 113 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/350, C R , “Les tâches de l’avenir au Canada,” causerie prononcée devant les membres de la Fédération libérale du Canada, réunis en congrès à Ottawa, 10 October 1966. 114 CR, “L’ascension de M. Jean Marchand – 1: Les aspects positifs” [e], LD , 1 November 1966; C R , “L’ascension de M. Jean Marchand – 2: Les interrogations” [e], LD , 2 November 1966; C R , “Le congrès des libéraux fédéraux – 2: Les orientations” [e], LD , 14 October 1966; BAnQ M, FCR (Allocutions), 1995-12-001/350, C R , “Quebec’s Mood after One Hundred Years,” Saturday Night, January 1967. 115 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/298, C R to Andrew Brewin, 8 November 1967; CR, “La crainte de ‘l’appeasement’ au Canada anglais” [e], LD , 10 December 1966. 116 CR, “Comment le malentendu fondamental pourra-t-il prendre fin?” [e], LD , 3 March 1967.

 97  98  99 100 101

638

Notes to pages 418–24

117 CR, “Le Québec dans le Canada de demain.” 118 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/301, Marc Lalonde to CR, 24 January 1967. 119 CR, “La difficile rencontre de deux survivances: un ouvrage récent de Ramsay Cook – 1” [e], LD , 23 July 1966. 120 CR, “La ‘révolution tranquille’ aurait-elle profité seulement à une certaine classe moyenne?” [e], LD , 7 January 1967. 121 CR, “Le message de M. Faribault aux conservateurs” [e], LD , 20 August 1967. 122 CR, “La nouvelle représentation québécoise au cabinet fédéral – 1: Les vedettes du remaniement d’hier” [e], LD , 5 April 1967; CR, “Les étreintes dangereuses” [b-n], LD , 11 August 1967. 123 CR, “Les simplifications de M. Pierre-Elliott Trudeau” [e], LD , 15 March 1967. 124 Ibid. 125 CR, “L’attitude déplorable de M. Pierre-Elliott Trudeau” [e], LD , 8 September 1967. 126 CR, “Le message de M. Faribault aux conservateurs.” 127 BAnQ M, CRL G , Fonds Famille Laurendeau-Perreault, P2/D.45, André Laurendeau à Paul Cliche (Tribune de la Presse Parlementaire de Québec), 24 October 1967. 128 CR, “La nouvelle représentation québécoise au cabinet fédéral – 1.” 129 CR, “Les États généraux: voie difficile” [e], LD , 29 November 1966; BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/300, C R to Rosaire Morin, 14 November 1967. 130 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/300, Jacques-Yvan Morin to CR, 24 October 1966; ibid., 1995-12-001/298, C R to Louis Beaupré, 30 September 1966. 131 CR, “L’ambiguïté de M. Lévesque” [b-n], LD , 26 April 1967. 132 CR, “La recherche nécessaire d’un dénominateur commun” [e], LD , 8 April 1967. 133 CR, “Le père spirituel du Québec moderne” [e], LD , 24 May 1967. 134 David Meren, With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms and the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle, 1944–1970 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012) is definitive on the subject. 135 CR, “La France, le Québec et le Canada” [e], LD , 22 July 1967. 136 CR, “Français du Canada ou Candiens français?” [b-n], LD , 25 July 1967. 137 CR, “La France, le Québec et le Canada.” 138 CR, “Souvenirs des premiers ministres”; B A nQ M, FCR, 2004-05-006/16, CR, “En quête de Jean Drapeau,” entrevue Société Radio-Canada, 30 September 1998. According to his biographer Pierre Godin, Lévesque’s discomfiture may have been influenced by the fact that he regarded the general’s intervention as a roadblock for separatism, and indeed, the immediate impact was to induce him to pledge loyalty to Jean Lesage. See Pierre Godin, René Lévesque, vol. 2, Héros malgré lui (Montreal: Boréal, 1997), 312–19. 139 CR, “Les leçons d’une journée historique” [e], LD , 26 July 1967.



Notes to pages 424–32

639

140 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/301, Peter C. Newman to CR, 21 September 1967; CR, “Bilan d’une visite” [e], LD , 27 July 1967. 141 CR, “Les difficiles frontières de la souverainté” [e], LD , 2 August 1967. The constitutional ambiguity over respective federal and provincial jurisdictions in international affairs was long-standing, dating from at least the 1930s, and was a consequence of Canada’s “colonial” constitution. See Meren, With Friends Like These, 146–7. 142 CR, “Un nouveau pas vers la minute de la vérité” [e], LD , 20 September 1967. 143 Ibid. 144 CR, “Le fédéralisme, voie préférentielle de la liberté et de la collaboration” [e], LD , 23 September 1967. 145 CR, “Les conditions d’une solution fédérale acceptable et durable” [e], LD , 26 September 1967. 146 CR, “Le fédéralisme, voie préférentielle.” 147 CR, “Un nouveau pas vers la minute de la vérité.” 148 Jean-Marc Léger, “La souverainté: condition de salut,” Le Devoir, 23 October 1967, reprinted in Jean-Marc Léger, Vers l’indépendance? Le pays à portée de main (Montreal: Leméac, 1993), 255–61. 149 Jean-Marc Léger, Le temps dissipé: souvenirs (Montreal: Hurtubise H MH , 2000), 427–8. 150 BAnQ M, CRL G , Fonds Famille Laurendeau-Perreault, P2/D.45, Evelyn Dumas-Gagnon to André Laurendeau, 27 October 1967. The letter was signed by the journalists André Major, Renée Rowan, J. Pierre Teinturier, Paul Cliche, Claude Lemelin, Gilles Lesage, Solange Chalvin, Jules LeBlanc, Marcel Clément, Jean-V. Dufresne, Michel Roy, Gilles Gariépy, Jean-Claude Leclerc, J. Paul Cofsky, Jean Basile, and Evelyn Dumas-Gagnon. 151 Ibid., Paul Cliche (Tribune de la Presse Parlementaire, Québec), to André Laurendeau, 24 October 1967. 152 CR, “Unité et liberté au Devoir” [e], LD , 28 October 1967. 153 BAnQ M, F CR (Sujets – Jean-Marc Léger), 1995-12-001/338, CR, “Les manifestations de vendredi soir devant l’édifice du Devoir” [b-n], LD , 30 October 1967.

c h a p t e r e l e ve n    1 The phrase is Jean-Philippe Warren’s. See his Une douce anarchie: les années 68 au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 2008), 12.   2 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/350, C R , “The Relevance of the Christian Church’s Message to Canada in the Centennial Year,” 28 February 1967. For the classic statement on the 1960s, see Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, ca. 1958–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

640

Notes to pages 432–5

  3 For the atmosphere in Montreal during these years, see Warren, Une douce anarchie; Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 3, 29–31; Jacques Rouillard, Histoire du syndicalisme québécois (Montreal: Boréal, 1989), 337.   4 For the “end” of the Quiet Revolution in the collapse of the consensus underlying the Quebec state, Lucia Ferretti, “Le dossier de la révolution tranquille,” L’action nationale 89, no. 10 (December 1999): 59–91. For the mood of American intellectuals, see Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 185.  5 Warren, Une douce anarchie, 256–7.   6 For the intellectual origins of neoconservatism among left-liberal American intellectuals, see Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 2010), 7, 63.   7 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).  8 CR, “De la liberté de discussion dans les hautes sphères de l’Église” [e], LD , 5 July 1969.  9 CR, “Education et civisme” [e], LD , 19 August 1964. As late as 1966, most intellectuals and mainstream political figures in Quebec continued to hold to the vision of a refurbished Christendom. See Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 311–12. 10 CR, “De ‘Mater et Magistra’ à ‘Populorum Progressio’” [e], LD , 31 March 1967. 11 CR, “A la recherche de la ‘good society’” [e], LD , 10 May 1967. For the ­centrality of Galbraith’s key text, The Affluent Society, in framing the social liberalism of the 1960s, see Brick, Age of Contradiction, 1–3. 12 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/350, C R , “Les tâches de l’avenir au Canada,” ­causerie prononcée devant les membres de la Fédération libérale du Canada, réunis en congrès à Ottawa, 10 October 1966. 13 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/350, C R , “Pouvoir religieux et sécularisation,” Recherches sociographiques 7, nos 1–2 (January–August 1966): 101–9 (emphasis in original). 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 101–9. 16 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/301, C R to correspondent, 14 August 1967; CR, “Vues sereines sur la confessionalité” [e], LD , 4 July 1966. For the growing pluralism of Quebec’s educational milieu and the difficulties faced by Catholics in an ostensibly “confessional” system, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 305. 17 Ryan himself articulated these anxieties, sensing that these new state-controlled colleges would acquire a monopoly of pre-university education and constituted



18

19 20

21

22

23

Notes to pages 436–7

641

“the death warrant for private institutions.” C R , “Le bill 21 et ses critiques” [e], LD , 17 March 1967. For the figures, see Kevin J. Christiano, “The Trajectory of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Quebec,” in The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec, ed. Leslie Woodcock Tentler (Washington, D C : Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 37; Reginald Bibby, “La religion à la carte au Québec: un problème d’offre, de demande, ou des deux?” Globe: revue internationale d’études québécoises 10, no. 2 and 11, no. 1 (2007–08): 151–79. For the persistence of a “cultural Catholicism” beyond the collapse of church attendance, see É.-Martin Meunier, Jean-François Laniel, and Jean-Christophe Demers, “Permanence et recomposition de la ‘religion culturelle’: Aperçu socio-historique du catholicisme québécois (1970-2006),” in Modernité et religion au Québec; où en sommes nous? ed. Robert Mager et Serge Cantin (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010), 79–128. Gilles Routhier, Vatican II: Herméneutique et réception (Montreal: Fides, 2006), 24–9. Here, I rely on Callum Brown’s perceptive typology of the possible interfaces that have historically characterized Christianity and Western society. He identifies “institutional Christianity,” “functional Christianity,” “intellectual Christianity,” “diffusive Christianity,” and “discursive Christianity.” See The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 12–13. Both the classic theories of secularization, such as that exemplified in Hugh McLeod’s The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), or Callum Brown’s revisionist postmodern The Death of Christian Britain, only partially explain the nature of the post-1965 religious crisis in Quebec. For a new interpretive framework that suggests revisiting the importance of studying the particular relationship between church and state in a variety of national contexts in order to understand secularization, see Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds, Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the “deconstruction” of Catholicism and its experience in Quebec, see Routhier, Vatican II, 300–1; Gilles Routhier, “Governance of the Catholic Church in Quebec: An Expression of the Distinct Society?” in The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Canada, ed. Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 291–314. See, on the crisis of clerical vocations, the perceptive article by Jean-Philippe Warren, “Some Thoughts on Catholicism and the Secularization Question in Quebec: Worldly and Otherwordly Rewards, 1960–1970,” CCH A Historical Studies, 78 (2012): 81–91.

642

Notes to pages 437–42

24 Gilles Routhier, “La paroisse québécoise: évolutions récentes et révisions actuelles,” in La paroisse, ed. Serge Courville and Normand Séguin (Ste-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001), 46–59. 25 For the motives behind the decision, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 343. 26 CR, “La crise de l’Action catholique” [e], LD , 25 October 1966; BAnQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/300, J. Grootaers to C R , 14 December 1966. 27 CR, “La crise de l’Action catholique – 2: La question de fond” [e], LD , 4 November 1966. 28 CR, “La crise de l’Action catholique – 1: L’exercice d’autorité au lendemain du concile” [e], LD , 3 November 1966; C R , “La crise de l’Action catholique – 2.” 29 CR, “La crise de l’Action catholique – 2.” It should be noted that “lâche” can be translated as “loose” or “cowardly.” It is evident that Ryan in this instance meant both. 30 CR, “Quand les prêtres quittent l’Église” [e], LD , 11 January 1967; BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/300, unnamed correspondent to CR, 18 July 1967; CR, “Où vont les religieuses?” [e], LD , 4 March 1968; B AnQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/300, correspondent to C R , 16 May 1967. 31 CR, “Quand les prêtres quittent l’Église.” 32 CR, “Célibat ecclésiastique et sacerdoce chrétien dans le monde de demain” [e], LD , 7 July 1967; C R , “Où vont les religieuses?” 33 There exists a large file of letters received on the subject of clerical celibacy in Ryan’s correspondence. See B A nQM, F C R , 1995-12-001/338. 34 Ibid., 1995-12-001/305, C R to correspondent, 29 February 1968. Ryan was being disingenuous. His papers reveal no intellectual contacts with “conservative” Catholic theologians, and all his “ecumenical” encounters seem to have been with the “liberal wing” of the United Church of Canada. See BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/299, Rev. Stewart Crysdale (assistant secretary, Board of Evangelism and Social Service, United Church of Canada) to CR, 1 June 1966, and Ramsay Cook to C R , 29 March 1966. 35 CR, “Paul VI et le service de la foi” [e], LD , 30 September 1967. 36 Ibid. 37 CR, “Deux enquêtes sur les jeunes d’aujourd’hui” [e], LD , 5 December 1969. For Ryan’s concern to promote new Catholic strategies of social communication through action in the mass media, see B A nQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/300, CR à Mgr Gérard-Marie Coderre (évêque de Saint-Jean), 26 September 1967. 38 CR, “Paul VI et le service de la foi.” 39 CR, “La question qui trouble le pape” [e], LD , 15 May 1967. 40 CR, “L’encyclique, la foi, la discipline et l’opinion dans l’Église” [e], LD , 31 July 1968. 41 CR, “L’encyclique sur la régulation des naissances” [e], LD , 30 July 1968. 42 Ibid. 43 CR, “L’encyclique, la foi, la discipline et l’opinion”; BAnQ M, FCR, 1995-12001/305, correspondent to C R , 11 September 1968.



Notes to pages 442–6

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44 CR, “L’encyclique, la foi, la discipline et l’opinion.” 45 CR, “La convocation d’un Synode extraordinaire à Rome” [b-n], LD , 3 January 1969; CR, “Karl Rahner et les remous créés par ‘Humanae Vitae’” [e], LD , 23 September 1968. 46 Denis Pelletier, La crise catholique: religion, société, politique en France (1965– 1978) (Paris: Payot, 2002), 17, 296–7. 47 A more complete analysis of this type of thinking is available in Michael Gauvreau, “Construire une ‘crise religieuse’: Action catholique, l’impact des nouvelles théologies internationales et les révolutions culturelles au Québec, 1950–1975”, in Catholicisme et cultures: regards croisés, Québec-France, ed. Solange Lefebvre, Céline Béraud, and E.-Martin Meunier (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2015), 191–211. 48 Pelletier, La crise catholique, 22. 49 CR, “3. Le card: Léger dans l’Église et la société d’aujourd’hui” [e], LD , 13 December 1967; C R , “La puissance de la foi” [e], LD , 10 November 1967; CR, “Bilan d’un épiscopat fructueux” [e], LD , 11 December 1967. 50 CR, “Deux enquêtes sur les jeunes d’aujourd’hui.” 51 CR, “The Relevance of the Christian Church’s Message,” Cape Breton lecture series, 1966–67, 28 February 1967. 52 Pelletier, La crise catholique, 27. 53 CR, “Mystère de Pâques et sagesse d’aujourd’hui” [e], LD , 25 March 1967; BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/352, C R , “Où sont les valeurs religieuses de notre monde?” Session des Supérieurs des Jésuites, Saint-Jérôme, 11 August 1969. Ryan explicitly referred in this address to Roustang’s work. 54 Meunier et al. “Permanence et recomposition.” 55 CR, “Relevance of the Christian Church’s Message.” 56 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/352, C R , “Les contacts avec les médias d’information,” rapport de la Réunion des Responsables des Services Diocésains d’information tenue à Montréal, 27–8 October 1969. 57 CR, “De la liberté de discussion dans les hautes sphères de l’Église” [e], LD , 5 July 1969. Ryan referred to Father Louis Bouyer’s book La décomposition du catholicisme (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1968), but called him “Bouillez.” 58 Fernand Dumont, “L’église: histoire, tradition, projet,” Communauté chrétienne 9, nos 50–1 (1970): 128, 133, 144–5. For a more extensive analysis of the commission and its intellectual background, see Michael Gauvreau, “‘Without Making a Noise’: The Dumont Commission and the Drama of Quebec’s Dechristianization, 1968–1971,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 186–216. 59 Dumont, Récit d’une émigration (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1997); D AU L , Fonds Fernand-Dumont, P429, C6 1968, Fernand Dumont to René Lévesque, 3 September 1968.

644

Notes to pages 446–9

60 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/308, Fernand Dumont to CR, 16 May 1970. 61 D AU L , Fonds Fernand-Dumont, C6 1967, C R to Fernand Dumont, 7 April 1967. 62 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/308, Fernand Dumont to CR, 16 May 1970. 63 Dumont, Récit d’une émigration, 118–22; Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 313– 27; Jean-Philippe Warren, Un supplément d’âme: les intentions primordiales de Fernand Dumont (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1998); Gauvreau, “Construire une ‘crise religieuse.’” 64 Fernand Dumont, “Les chrétiens et les défis de l’histoire,” in Le chrétien à la barre des témoins (Montreal: Fides, 1969), 14; BAnQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/​ 351, CR , “Le chrétien et la cité,” communication au colloque organisé par le département d’action sociale de la C.C.C., Montreal, 22–5 December. 65 Dumont, “Les chrétiens et les défis de l’histoire,” 30. 66 Ibid., 15; BAnQ M, F C R , C R , “Le chrétien et la cité.” 67 BAnQ M, F CR, C R , “Le chrétien et la cité.” 68 For the “Augustinian” assumptions underlying the “realistic” posture of mainstream North American intellectuals in the early 1940s and 1950s, see the perceptive recent work by Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 31–3. 69 For an interpretation that places individualism at the forefront of religious change during the three decades following the 1960s, see Christie and Gauvreau, “‘Even the Hippies Were Only Very Slowly Going Secular,’” in Christie and Gauvreau, The Sixties and Beyond, 3–38; and for a fascinating comparative treatment of North America and Western Europe, see Patrick Pasture, “Dechristianization and the Changing Religious Landscape in Europe and North America since 1950: Comparative, Transatlantic, and Global Perspectives”, ibid., 367–402. 70 CR, “Paul VI à Bogota” [b-n], 22 August 1968. 71 BAnQ M, F CR, “Le chrétien et la cité”; Dumont, “Les chrétiens et les défis de l’histoire,” 27. 72 For the rise of a new spirituality of marriage and sexual intimacy among Quebec Catholics, a movement that had begun in the 1930s, and the disturbance created by the 1968 encyclical, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 239–46, 187–204. For the rise of new religio-political configurations as a component of dechristianization, see Christie and Gauvreau, “Introduction,” in The Sixties and Beyond, 12–13. 73 CR, “Un État assiégé et menacé” [e], LD , 21 November 1968. 74 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/301, Peter C. Newman (Parliamentary Press Gallery, Ottawa) to C R , 30 October 1966; ibid., Marc Lalonde (cabinet du Premier Ministre) to C R , 2 June 1967; ibid., R.A. Matthews (Sun Life of Canada) to CR , 9 May 1966; ibid., 1995-12-001/303, Esmond Butler, chef du cabinet du Gouverneur Général to C R , 14 March 1966.



Notes to pages 449–54

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75 See the file of letters from readers on this subject in BAnQ M, FCR, P558, S11, S S 3, 1995-12-001/338, file Jean-Marc Léger. 76 Ibid., 1995-12-001/299, correspondent to C R , 11 December 1967. 77 Ibid., 1995-12-001/341 “Le Devoir: Commentaires et opinions, 1968–1969,” CR correspondent, 29 February 1968. 78 Ibid., 1995-12-001/351, C R , “La page éditoriale,” Séminaires sur l’information, Organisée par les responsables du Baccalauréat en Information de la Faculté des Arts de l’Université Laval, 21 May 1969. For McLuhan, see ibid., 1995-12001/298, CR to correspondent, 25 April 1967, where he informed him that Madeleine’s women’s reading group had been assiduously reading McLuhan’s works for quite some time. 79 Ibid., 1995-12-001/304, C R to correspondent, 29 February 1968. 80 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/308, Pierre Fortier (Department of Economics, University of California Berkeley) to C R , 12 November 1970; CR, “La page éditoriale.” 81 CR, “Changements à la rédaction du Devoir” [b-n], LD , 27 September 1966; CR, “‘On and Off the Track’” [b-n], LD , 1 September 1967. 82 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/352, C R , “Mémoire soumis par Claude Ryan au Comité spécial du Sénat sur les moyens de communcation de masse,” 10 December 1969. 83 CR, “La vente du Times et l’avenir du Devoir” [e], LD , 29 December 1966; CR, “‘On and Off the Track’”; B A nQM, FC R , 2002-12-003/1, Carnet 10 – 1970, “Quelques grandes étapes depuis 1963”; Gagnon, Le Devoir, 210. 84 CR, “La montée des empires de presse au Québec” [e], LD , 28 November 1968; CR, “La vente de ‘La Presse’ et l’avenir des quotidiens francophones” [e], LD , 8 July 1967; C R , “Une enquête privée suffira-t-elle?” [b-n], LD , 18 July 1967; CR, “Macleans: une expérience malheureuse mais instructive” [e], LD , 15 September 1969. 85 CR, “Lettre ouverte à M. Kierans” [e], LD , 12 October 1968; BAnQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/351, C R “Le droit à l’information,” lecture, Université Saint-Paul, Ottawa, 5 December 1968. 86 CR, “Le malaise à Radio-Canada – 1: La colère intempestive du prince” [e], LD , 22 October 1969; C R , “Le malaise de Radio-Canada – 3: Les problèmes réels sont-ils ceux qu’à vus M. Trudeau?” [e], LD , 24 October 1969. 87 CR, “Le malaise de Radio-Canada – 3.” 88 CR, “Assistons-nous à un dépérissement de la politique québécoise?” [e], LD , 20 February 1968. 89 CR, “Climat de rentrée” [e], LD , 7 September 1966; CR, “Les pièges de la critique ‘globaliste’” [e], LD , 9 September 1966; C R, “Le retour au réalisme” [e], LD , 7 February 1967. 90 CR, “Les conflits de travail dans le secteur public” [e], LD , 10 February 1967; CR, “La baisse des investissements au Québec” [e], LD , 20 December 1967;

646

Notes to pages 454–60

CR, “Le premier budget de M. Dozois” [e], LD , 18 March 1967; CR, “L’économie du Québec progresse-t-elle vraiment?” [e], LD , 3 February 1969; CR, “Urgence d’une politique de développement industriel” [e], LD , 22 March 1967.  91 CR, “Assistons-nous à un dépérissement de la politique québécoise.”  92 CR, “Les rapports de l’équipe Lesage avec la presse” [e], LD , 30 August 1969; CR, “La rentrée de M. Johnson” [e], LD , 26 September 1968.  93 CR, “Assistons-nous à un dépérissement de la politique québécoise.” Part of Ryan’s agitation can be traced to the fact that, in early 1968, many francophone intellectuals seemed attracted to the candidacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau as federal Liberal leader. See C R , “Une pétition candienne-française en faveur de M. Trudeau” [b-n], LD , 15 February 1968.  94 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/304, C R to Gérard Dion, 29 February 1968.  95 CR, “Un Etat assiégé et menacé” [e], LD , 21 November 1968.  96 Ibid.  97 CR, “Un colloque salutaire” [e], LD , 13 May 1969.  98 CR, “De quelques signes du temps” [e], LD , 18 July 1969.  99 CR, “Les valeurs libérales à l’épreuve” [e], LD , 11 October 1969. 100 CR, “Des quelques signes du temps.” 101 CR, “Les valeurs libérales à l’épreuve.” 102 Ibid; C R, “Un Etat assiégé et menacé.” 103 CR, “Les CE G E P et état de siège” [e], LD , 11 October 1968. 104 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/308, Léon Dion (Faculté des sciences sociales, Université Laval) to C R , 8 January 1969. 105 Ibid. 106 CR, “Conscience, médecine, et avortement” [e], LD , 23 April 1969; CR, “Relevance of the Christian Church’s Message”; CR, “De la difficile frontière entre la liberté et la morale publique” [e], LD , 15 August 1968. 107 CR, “Quand la poste ne va plus” [e], LD , 18 July 1968. 108 For changes in the C S N ’s identity and its particular effects on the politi­ cization of working-class Montrealers, see Mills, The Empire Within, 165–71. 109 CR, “Le malaise de la C S N ” [e], LD , 6 December 1967; CR, “La politique économique vue par les centrales syndicales” [e], LD , 16 February 1968; CR, “Entre la grève contraire à l’intérêt national et l’arbitrage, des formules intermédiaires peuvent-elles être trouvées?” [e], LD , 20 July 1968. 110 CR, “La primauté du bien commun” [e], LD , 21 October 1967; CR, “Les conséquences à long terme de certaines grèves récentes” [e], LD , 23 October 1967. 111 The linkages between these events have been ably explored in two excellent books on radical ideologies and organizations in late-1960s Montreal. See Warren, Une douce anarchie, and Mills, The Empire Within.



Notes to pages 460–4

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112 CR, “Les CE G E P et état de siège.” 113 CR, “Autorité et participation en démocratie” [e], LD , 9 June 1969; CR, “Le renvoi justifié du professeur Gray” [e], LD , 18 August 1969. 114 CR, “Agitation étudiante et liberté académique” [e], LD , 17 April 1969. 115 CR, “Le ‘pouvoir étudiant’: un corridor sans issue” [e], LD , 16 October 1968; CR, “Le ‘pouvoir étudiant’: mythes et réalités” [e], LD , 22 October 1968. 116 CR, “Autorité et participation en démocratie”; CR, “Où est l’essentiel” [e], LD , 23 August 1969; C R , “Objectivité et engagement en éducation” [e], LD , 26 November 1969. 117 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/308, correspondent to CR, 16 February 1969. 118 For developments among American liberal intellectuals at the end of the 1960s, see Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 275– 442; and for the central role of former progressive intellectuals in the origins of neoconservatism, see Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 1–18. 119 For a presentation of the “seven pillars” of American neo-conservatism, and the prominence of the “New Class” in its thinking, see Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 77–9, for the revival of the “New Class” concept in the 1960s, see Donald T. Bazelon, “The New Class,” Commentary 42, no. 2 (August 1966): 48–53. Indeed, it is fair to say that Ryan had followed the twists and turns of this debate since it was first enunciated by former Trotskyites in the 1940s. One of his earliest pieces of social analysis was a comment on James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World Today (New York: John Day, 1941). For the origins and persistence of thinking on the “New Class” among American intellectuals prior to the 1960s and Burnham’s role, see Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind, 19–67. 120 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/352, C R , “Sciences sociales et réflexions sur la société lors du colloque des Sciences Sociales,” lecture, Collège Ahuntsic, 18 March 1970; ibid., C R , “Les professions organisées dans la société de demain,” Conseil interprofessionnel de Québec, 30 January 1970. 121 CR, “Sciences sociales et réflexions sur la société.” 122 Brick, Age of Contradiction, notes that throughout the early 1970s, most American intellectuals continued to think in terms of an ideological opening between progressive liberalism and new radicalism. 123 Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind, 162–4. 124 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/353, C R , “Board of Evangelism – United Church of Canada,” talk given in Toronto, 26 February 1971. 125 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/299, Edward Shils, “The Intellectuals and the Future,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1967, 14. The emphasis here and below reflects Ryan’s own underlining.

648

Notes to pages 464–70

126 Ibid., 9. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid., 14, 12. 129 Ibid., 13. 130 See the following editorials by C R : “La Révolution russe après cinquante ans,” LD , 8 November 1967; “La crise tchécoslovaque et l’avenir du socialisme,”D 29 July 1968; “Pax sovietica,” 22 August 1968; “L’anniversaire tragique d’une chance manquée,”LD 21 August 1969. 131 CR, “Notes de lecture: Herbert Marcuse, prophète moderne de la contestation,” LD , 11 September 1968. 132 CR, “La crise sociale et politique en France … et ailleurs” [e], LD , 22 May 1968. 133 CR, “La tragédie de Los Angeles” [e], LD , 6 June 1968; CR, “L’élection américaine” [e], LD , 4 November 1968. 134 CR, “Magistrature et délits imputables à des motifs politiques,” LD , 29 September 1969. 135 CR, “Pas même un être humain?” [e], LD , 25 August 1969. 136 CR, “Magistrature et délits.” 137 Ibid. 138 CR, “Un argument faux et vide” [e], LD , 9 January 1968. Ryan’s editorial was prompted by a growing awareness of the power of decolonization theory in Montreal radical circles after 1967 and its effectiveness in radicalizing expressions of nationalism. See Mills, The Empire Within. For Pelletier’s views on the inapplicability of decolonization theory to Quebec, see his Years of Choice, 76–7. 139 C R , “La nervosité dangereuse des ‘forces de l’ordre’” [e], L D , 25 March 1969. 140 C R , “Le vrai problème qu’ait fait voir les événements récents” [e], L D , 1 December 1969; C R , “Où est la vraie force?” [e], L D , 14 November 1969. 141 CR, “La cité menacée.” 142 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/341, Pauline Julien to CR, and CR to Julien, 6 November 1967. 143 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/311, Pierre Vallières to CR, 27 December 1969, and Vallières to C R , 16 May 1970; C R , “La cité menacée.” 144 CR, “La cité menacée.” 145 For the statistics of adherence to Catholicism at the end of the 1960s, see Gauvreau, “‘Without Making a Noise’”; C R , “Deux enquêtes sur les jeunes d’aujourd’hui”; Mills, The Empire Within, 25. Jean-Philippe Warren has cautioned historians against ascribing a monolithic political radicalism to students. See Warren, Une douce anarchie. 146 CR, “La voie de Noël” [e], LD , 24 December 1969; CR, “Pâques, jour de plénitude” [e], LD , 5 April 1969.



Notes to pages 471–8

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c h a p t e r twe lve   1 For the existence of “autonomist” sentiment prior to Confederation and the growing awareness of francophone and Catholic minorities evinced by Quebec public opinion in the years after 1870, see Arthur Silver, The French-Canadian Idea of Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).   2 For the close links between the rise of sociology and the existence of the concept of French Canada, see Jean-Philippe Warren, L’engagement sociologique: la tradition sociologique du Québec francophone, 1885–1955 (Montreal: Boreal, 2005).  3 CR, “L’avenir politique des Canadiens français: propos d’actualité” [e], LD , 22 June 1968.   4 Lévesque’s speech later served as the centrepiece of the published manifesto Option-Québec (An Option for Quebec), published in February 1968.  5 CR, “Le Parti québécois: une force réelle et saine” [e], LD , 19 October 1968.  6 CR, “Le congrès du MSA : un autre visage du Québec” [e], LD , 23 April 1968; BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/351, John Kettle, “Claude Ryan: A Voice to Be Heard,” Canada Month: Magazine of Government and Politics 3, no. 69 (1969).  7 CR, “Le congrès du MSA .” For his original use of the concept, see the analysis in chapter 4.  8 CR, “A la veille des Etats généraux” [e], LD , 22 November 1967; CR, “Etats généraux … ou Etats particuliers?” [e], LD , 27 November 1967.  9 CR, “Le dilemme des Etats généraux” [e], LD , 19 October 1968; CR, “Bilan d’une expérience” [e], LD , 11 March 1969. 10 CR, “Le congrès du MSA .” 11 CR, “Autres questions sans réponse” [e], LD , 20 November 1967. 12 CR, “Questions sans réponse” [e], LD , 18 November 1967. 13 CR, “L’histoire du Québec sous un jour différent,” LD , 10 January 1968; CR, “L’histoire du Québec sous un jour différent” [Pt 2], LD , 11 January 1968; CR, “Un prix hautement mérité” [b-n], LD , 23 December 1967. 14 CR, “Le risque fédéral, dernière chance de l’Europe?” LD , 26 January 1968; CR, “Le risque fédéral, dernière chance de l’Europe?” [Pt 2], LD , 26 January 1968. For the concept of “post-industrial society” in American social thinking of the 1960s and 1970s, see Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 195–8. 15 CR, “Autres questions sans réponse.” 16 Ibid.; CR, “L’entrée de M. Parizeau dans le PQ a-t-elle fait fondre toutes les objections?” [e], LD , 21 October 1969. 17 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/305, Gérard Filion (Marine Industries Ltée) to CR, 10 July 1968. 18 CR, “Autres questions sans réponse.”

650

Notes to pages 478–84

19 Kettle, “Claude Ryan.” 20 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/303, C R to correspondent, 23 December 1966. 21 Michael Behiels has described this as the “renaissance” of francophone minority communities outside Quebec. See Behiels, Canada’s Francophone Minority Communities: Constitutional Renewal and the Winning of School Governance (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 3–52. 22 André Laurendeau, The Diary of André Laurendeau: Written during the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 1964–1967 (Toronto: Lorimer, 1991). 23 CR, “Net rapprochement, mais pas de conclusions” [e], LD , 1 December 1967. 24 CR, “Le Québec à la conférence de Toronto” [e], LD , 28 November 1967. 25 CR, “Net rapprochement.” 26 CR, “Autres questions sans réponse.” 27 Lévesque’s Mouvement souverainté-association was not the only independentist party on the scene, as it competed with the rural-based Ralliement national and the more radical Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale. It was not until October 1968 that the MSA and the R N joined to form the Parti québécois and, shortly following, the R I N dissolved, with its members invited to join the P Q . 28 CR, “Une échéance qui ne saurait plus tarder” [e], LD , 11 November 1967. 29 CR, “Sur quelques livres récents” [b-n], LD , 30 October 1967. 30 CR, “La décision de M. Pearson” [e], LD , 15 December 1967. 31 CR, “L’ascension de M. Trudeau” [b-n], LD , 23 December 1967. 32 CR, “Les Canadiens français et le prochain chef libéral” [e], LD , 22 December 1967; CR, “Les candidats Sharp et Martin” [e], LD , 22 January 1968. 33 CR, “M. Marchand ou M. Trudeau” [e], LD , 17 January 1968. 34 CR, “La course au leadership libéral: simples conjectures” [e], LD , 15 January 1968; CR, “M. Marchand ou M. Trudeau.” 35 Pierre Elliott Trudeau, “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason,” in Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 202. 36 CR, “Deux communautés linguistiques ou deux sociétés?” [e], LD , 27 January 1968. 37 CR, “Les deux événements du congrès libéral” [e], LD , 29 January 1968. 38 For Trudeau’s anonymous critique of Laurendeau, published in Cité libre as ostensibly the product of the Comité pour une politique fonctionnelle, see Douglas Horton, André Laurendeau: French-Canadian Nationalist, 1912–1968 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 223. 39 For an account of the conference, see John English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, vol. 1, 1919–1968 (Toronto: Knopf, 2006), 456– 8. English perceptively observes that the now-epic confrontation between the two men masked the very real achievements of this meeting: it secured agreement of all the provinces for linguistic equality for both official languages in the government of Canada, and it created a formal structure for regular review



Notes to pages 484–90

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of the constitution. Ryan warmly supported both of these. See CR, “Bilan de la conférence d’Ottawa” [e], LD , 8 February 1968. 40 CR, “A quelques jours de la grande conférence d’Ottawa” [b-n], LD , 2 February 1968; B A nQ M, F C R , 1995-12-001/306, CR to John D. Harbron (associate editor, Toronto Telegram), 29 February1968. 41 CR, “Les défis de la conférence d’Ottawa” [e], LD , 3 February 1968. 42 Ryan was informed of this decision by Richard Malone, his counterpart at the Winnipeg Free Press, who had dined with Prime Minister Pearson before the conference: B A nQ M, F C R , 1995-12-001/305, Richard Malone to CR, 2 February 1968. 43 CR, “Ottawa et Québec: deux mondes” [e], LD , 6 February 1968. 44 Ibid. 45 CR, “Le duel Johnson-Trudeau” [e], LD , 7 February 1968. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. For Ryan’s sense of the convergence between the constitutional goals of Le Devoir and the Quebec governments of Lesage and Johnson, see BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/305, C R to unnamed correspondent, 29 February 1968. 48 CR, “Le pari de M. Trudeau” [e], LD , 14 March 1968; CR, “La vieille tentation du Canada anglais” [e], LD , 1 February 1968. 49 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/301, Ramsay Cook to CR, 27 November 1967. For Cook’s “conversion” to Trudeau federalism, see Ramsay Cook, The Teeth of Time: Remembering Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2006), 35–6, 56–7. 50 CR, “Les ambiguïtés de la candidature de M. Trudeau” [e], LD , 17 February 1968. 51 CR, “Le pari de M. Trudeau.” 52 Ryan recalled a conversation with Robarts in which the latter indicated that he was willing to go quite far in terms of an opening to Quebec, but was prevented by the fact that Trudeau had “bewitched” Anglo-Canadian opinion. See BAnQM, F C R , 2004-05-005/10, C R , “Pierre Elliott Trudeau: grandeur et limites de la raison en politique,” 30 September 2000. 53 CR, “L’antinationalisme de M. Trudeau” [b-n], 5 March 1968. 54 CR, “Du style … et des autres qualités que doit posséder le chef politique” [e], LD , 30 March 1968. 55 Ivan L. Head, foreword to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Conversation with Canadians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), v. 56 CR, “Le pari de M. Trudeau.” 57 CR, “L’antinationalisme de M. Trudeau.” 58 CR, “Le simplificateur” [e], LD , 20 March 1968. 59 CR, “La course au leadership libéral et le ‘problème du Québec’”[e], LD , 2 March 1968. 60 CR, “Le pari de M. Trudeau”; C R , “La course au leadership liberal.” 61 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/305, Paul Hellyer to CR, 2 April 1968.

652

Notes to pages 490–3

62 CR, “Le choix du prochain chef libéral. 2 – Les trois candidats les plus marquants” [e], LD , 3 April 1968; C R , “Le choix du prochain chef libéral. 3 – Qui doit être l’élu?” [e], LD , 4 April 1968. 63 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/306, Denis O’Brien (editor, Montreal Star) to CR, n.d.; ibid., 1995-12-001/305, Richard Malone (managing editor, Winnipeg Free Press) to CR, 1 March 1968. 64 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/305, Paul Fox (Department of Political Economy, University of Toronto) to C R , 14 February 1968. 65 Ibid., Blair Fraser (Parliamentary Press Gallery, Ottawa), to CR, 5 March 1968. 66 Ibid., J.R. Murray (executive director, Hudson’s Bay Co.) to CR, 16 February 1968, and CR to Murray, 28 February 1968. 67 The story is recounted in English, Citizen of the World, 477, based on interviews with Robert Bothwell and Norman Hillmer, both young historians at the time. 68 CR, “Le nouveau chef libéral” [e], LD , 8 April 1968. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 CR, “Où le prochain gouvernement trouvera-t-il sa majorité?” [e], LD , 29 April 1968; BAnQM , F C R , 1995-12-001/351, C R , “One Country: Two Societies,” address to the Canadian Club, Ottawa, 26 April 1968. 72 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/299, C R to Bernard Flynn (Bureau du chef de l’Opposition, Ottawa), 7 December 1967; ibid., 1995-12-001/301, Edwin Goodman QC & Roger Régimbal, Congrès Progressiste-Conservateur du Centenaire to C R , 14 June 1967; C R , “D’autres voix du Canada anglais” [e], LD , 18 May 1968; C R , “M. Stanfield au Parlement” [e], LD , 15 November 1967; CR, “Le départ de M. Churchill ou l’échec des ‘durs’ chez les conservateurs” [e], LD , 28 February1968; B A nQM, FC R , 1995-12-001/310, CR to Donald Smiley, 7 November 1969. 73 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/305, unnamed correspondent to CR, 23 June 1968. 74 CR, “La campagne de salissage contre M. Trudeau” [b-n], LD , 21 June 1968. 75 CR, “Le revenue annuel garanti, selon le NPD et M. Stanfield” [e], LD , 10 May 1968; CR, “Le revenu annuel garanti: une idée récente, polyvalente et difficile d’application” [e], LD , 9 May 1968. 76 CR, “De quelques différences entre le Québec et les autres provinces” [e], LD , 27 May 1968. 77 On Stanfield’s woes surrounding the “deux nations” idea, see Geoffrey Stevens, Stanfield (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973), 218–20. 78 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/305, Brian Mulroney to CR, 31 May 1968; CR, “Les propriétaires de ‘l’orthodoxie canadienne’” [e], LD , 14 May 1968; CR, “La lutte s’engage pour de bon dans Québec” [e], LD , 15 May 1968; CR, “La dialectique boîteuse du Montreal Star” [e], LD , 14 June 1968. Trudeau later retracted the smear campaign against Stanfield, but, by that point, the damage



 79  80  81  82  83  84  85  86  87  88  89  90  91  92  93  94

  95  96   97  98  99 100 101 102 103 104 105

Notes to pages 494–500

653

had been done. See C R , “Une rétractation tardive du chef libéral” [b-n], LD , 21 June 1968. CR, “M. Marcel Faribault ou l’autre volet de la pensée fédéraliste canadiennefrançaise” [e], LD , 7 May 1968. BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/305, Mme Robert Bourassa à CR, 14 May 1968. CR, “Le choix du 25 juin” [e], LD , 19 June 1968. CR, “Le parti conservateur au lendemain de la défaite” [e], LD , 5 July 1968. CR, “André Laurendeau” [e], LD , 3 June 1968. CR, “L’avenir politique.” Ibid. Ibid.; CR, “De quelques différences entre le Québec et les autres provinces.” CR, “L’avenir politique.” CR, “Les événements de lundi soir” [e], LD , 26 June 1968. BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/304, Michel Brunet to CR, 24 June 1968; CR, “L’avenir politique.” CR, “L’avenir politique.” CR, “Jacques Dubuc et J.-P. Pothier: témoins généreux d’une génération durement éprouvée” [b-n], LD , 3 January 1969. CR, “Le cabinet Trudeau: équilibre et vigueur” [e], LD , 8 July 1968. CR, “Les allergies de la presse torontoise” [e], LD , 25 January 1969. CR, “Le Canada, la France et le Québec” [e], LD , 14 September 1968; CR, “Après le livre blanc d’Ottawa, sommes-nous plus avancés ?” [e], LD . See also CR, “Grandeur et limites d’une collaboration” [e], LD , 28 January 1969; CR, “De Gaulle, la France, le Québec et le Canada” [e], LD , 29 April 1969. Kettle, “Claude Ryan,” 14–15. CR, “Henri Bourassa devant l’histoire” [e], LD , 31 August 1968. For Ryan’s introduction to these categories in the late 1940s, see the analysis in chapter 4. CR, “La commission B-B et l’enseignement de l’histoire” [e], LD , 6 January 1969. CR, “Aux origines de la Confédération” [e], LD , 2 July 1969. CR, “André Laurendeau: images et souvenirs,” LD , 12 May 1969; CR, “Henri Bourassa devant l’histoire” [e], LD , 31 August 1968. CR, “Aux origines de la Confédération.” CR, “Les deux visages du Québec face au problème canadien” [e], LD , 31 December 1968. CR, “La première pierre d’un édifice complexe” [e], LD , 9 July 1969. CR, “Le bill C-120: pièce maîtresse d’un programme de bilinguisme pour le Canada” [e], LD , 21 May 1969. CR, “L’oeuvre inachevée de la commission Laurendeau-Dunton” [e], LD , 20 August 1968; C R , “La coprésidence de la commission B-B” [b-n], LD , 10 October 1968. Ryan was referring to Cook’s article “Le Canada vaut une enquête,” International Journal 23, no. 2 (spring 1968). For Cook’s sense of

654

106 107

108

109

110

111

112 113 114

115

Notes to pages 500–3 a divided commission that may never have reached a final consensus even had Laurendeau lived, see “The B and B Commission and Canada’s Greatest Crisis/Crise majeure,” in Cook, Watching Quebec: Selected Essays (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 127–32. For the sense that much of the energy of the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission had petered out even by 1967, before the advent of Trudeau, see Horton, André Laurendeau, 225–6. CR, “La démocratie parlementaire à l’école de MM. Trudeau et MacDonald” [e], LD , 25 July 1969. CR, “Le phénomène Trudeau un an après – 1: Le déclin du mythe et la révélation du chef” [e], LD , 19 April 1969; B A nQ M, FCR, 1995-12-001/310, Donald Smiley to C R , 12 November 1969. CR, “La ‘nouvelle’ politique de défense du Canada – 1: L’option fondamentale n’a pas changé” [e], LD , 8 April 1969; C R , “La ‘nouvelle’ politique de défense du Canada – 2: Des intentions plutôt que des choix véritables” [e], LD , 9 April 1969. CR, “Le phénomène Trudeau un an après – 2: Les politiques à l’épreuve du réel” [e], LD , 21 April 1969. For the inability of the first Trudeau administration to concentrate on a smaller number of priorities, and Trudeau’s own doubts about greater social security spending, his emphasis on the need for fiscal restraint, and his reliance on the advice of conservative liberal businessmen, see John English, Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968–2000 (Toronto: Knopf, 2009), 45, 48. CR, “Le néo-fédéralisme sous son vrai visage” [e], LD , 30 October 1968; CR, “Le premier message constitutionnel de M. Bertrand” [e], LD , 5 November 1968. CR, “Serait-ce la fin prochaine d’une période de confusion qui a trop duré?” [e], LD , 12 February 1969; C R , “Pour le Canada, un pas en avant; pour le Québec, partie remise” [e], LD , 13 February 1969. For Trudeau’s 1957 plea for a return to classic federalism, see Trudeau, “Federal Grants to Universities,” in Federalism and the French Canadians, 79–02; for Ryan’s interpretation of Trudeau’s message, see C R , “M. Trudeau et le pouvoir de dépenser d’Ottawa, 1957–1969 – 1: Les écrits antérieurs à l’engagement politique” [e], LD , 8 December 1969. CR, “Une rencontre fructueuse” [e], LD , 14 June 1968. CR, “La prochaine conférence fédérale-provinciale: une entrée en matière décevante” [e], LD , 6 December 1969. C R , “Un diptyque exaltant et tragique” [e], L D , 28 September 1968; C R , “M. Daniel Johnson, premier ministre du Québec” [e], L D , 27 September 1968. Kettle, “Claude Ryan,” 13; C R , “L’Union nationale sous M. Johnson” [e], LD , 1 October 1968; C R , “L’Union nationale et son future chef” [e], LD , 15 March 1969.



Notes to pages 503–7

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116 BAnQ M, F CR , 2004-05-006/10, “Souvenirs de premiers ministres que j’ai connus” allocution prononcée à Outremont devant le club “les ultramontais,” 24 February1998. 117 CR, “Cinq mois après” [e], LD , 27 February 1969. 118 CR, “L’opportunisme gluant de certains libéraux provinciaux” [e], LD , 21June 1968 119 “Opinion du lecteur: Pierre Laporte répond à Claude Ryan,” LD , 25 June 1968. 120 For an analysis of the tight imbrication between Quebec federal parties and provincial parties in the period 1867–78, see Marcel Hamelin, Les premières années du parlementarisme québécois, 1867–1878 (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1974). 121 CR, “Le glissement constitutionnel des libéraux du Québec” [e], LD , 9 October 1968; C R , “Après le 14e congrès des libéraux du Québec” [e], LD , 7 October 1968. 122 CR, “La décision de M. Marchand” [e], LD , 26 September 1969. Ryan’s analysis referred to the fact that, since 1952, both provincial Liberal leaders, Georges-Émile Lapalme and Jean Lesage, had been transplanted from federal politics. See also C R , “La première étape d’une clarification nécessaire” [e], LD , 21 August 1969. 123 CR, “Pourquoi ce malaise autour de Wagner?” [e], LD , 9 September 1969. 124 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/309, Pierre Laporte to CR, 1 October 1969. 125 CR, “Une première candidature” [e], LD , 27 September 1969. 126 CR, “Les bons moments d’une session plutôt grise” [e], LD , 2 May 1968. 127 CR, “La candidature de M. Bourassa” [e], LD , 18 October 1969. 128 CR, “Saint-Léonard, problème politique” [e], LD , 4 September 1968. 129 For the Saint-Léonard affair, see Mark V. Levine, The Reconquest of Montreal: Language Policy and Social Change in a Bilingual City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 67–8. 130 Marcel Martel and Martin Pâquet, Speaking Up: A History of Language and Politics in Canada and Quebec, trans. by Patricia Dumas (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012), 116–17, 108–9; Levine, Reconquest of Montreal, 67–8. 131 CR, “Libertés individuelles et libertés collectives” [e], LD , 13 December 1967. For the communitarian and personalist origins of the “modern” language of human rights, especially in the European context, see Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 85–106; Thomas D. Williams, Who Is My Neighbor? Personalism and the Foundation of Human Rights (Washington, D C: Catholic University of America Press, 2005). 132 CR, “Saint-Léonard: problème politique.” 133 CR, “Le conflit non réglé de Saint-Léonard” [e], LD , 12 September 1968. 134 CR, “Saint-Léonard, problème politique.”

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Notes to pages 507–12

135 CR, “De la dissidence au fascisme” [e], LD , 5 December 1968. 136 CR, “Saint-Léonard: problème politique.” 137 CR, “Une mentalité étrangère à l’esprit de Montréal” [e], LD , 18 September 1969. 138 CR, “Le rapport Laurendeau-Dunton: une invitation à une forme supérieure de vie civilisée” [e], LD , 7 December 1967. 139 CR, “Le deuxième rapport de la commission B&B” [e], LD , 11 December 1968. 140 CR, “Le rapport Pagé et la réforme des structures scolaires à Montréal” [e], LD , 11 November 1968. 141 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/351, C R , “Document de travail sur les droits ­culturels et linguistiques du Québec,” Conférence provinciale dur les droits de l’homme, Québec, 2 and 3rd November 1968. 142 Ibid. 143 CR, “Le congrès du MS A .” 144 Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” 106. 145 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/351, C R , “Document de travail sur les droits ­culturels et linguistiques.” 146 CR, “Une mentalité étrangère à l’esprit de Montréal”; CR, “De l’huile sur le feu” [e], LD , 11 September 1969; B A nQ M, FC R, 1995-12-001/351, CR, “Christian-Jewish Dialogue,” lecture, Loyola College, 23 February1969. 147 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/351, C R , “Document de travail.” 148 CR, “Une politique linguistique pour le Québec – 1: Les normes sociologiques et juridiques” [e], LD , 5 September 1968. 149 Ibid. 150 CR, “Une politique linguistique pour le Québec – 2: Pas d’égalité vraie sans une priorité raisonnable au français” [e], LD , 6 September 1968. 151 Ibid. 152 CR, “L’avenir du Canada serait-il dans la coexistence des unilinguismes? Notes sur un ouvrage récent de Richard J. Joy – 1,” LD , 17 July 1968. 153 For discussions of the various Quebec government language policies, see Richard Jones, “Politics and the Reinforcement of the French Language in Canada and Quebec, 1960–1986,” in Quebec since 1945, ed. Michael Behiels (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1987), 223–40; Matthew Hayday, “Bilingualism versus Unilingualism: Federal and Provincial Langauge Education Policies in Quebec, 1960–85,” in Contemporary Quebec: Selected Readings and Commentaries, ed. Michael D. Behiels and Matthew Hayday (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 418–46. 154 CR, “Une tâche prioritaire de la commission Gendron” [e], LD , 20 September 1969; CR, “Premiers jalons d’une politique linguistique à Québec” [e], LD , 9 December 1968.



Notes to pages 513–19

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c h a p t e r t h i rt e e n  1 CR, “1910–1970: ‘Le Devoir’ d’hier et d’aujourd’hui” [e], LD , 10 January 1970.   2 There is now a large body of historical work on the background and events of the October Crisis of 1970. See in particular Louis Fournier, F.L.Q.: histoire d’un mouvement clandestin, 2nd ed. (Montreal: Québec-Amérique, 1998); Éric Bédard, Chronique d’une insurrection appréhendée: la Crise d’octobre et le milieu universitaire (Sillery, QC : Septentrion, 1998); Jean-François Cardin, Comprendre octobre 1970: le FLQ , la crise, et le syndicalisme (Montreal: Editions du Méridien, 1990); Reg Whitaker, “Apprehended Insurrection? RCM P Intelligence and the October Crisis,” Queen’s Quarterly 100, no. 2 (summer 1993): 383–406; Dominique Clément, “The October Crisis of 1970: Human Rights Abuses under the War Measures Act,” Journal of Canadian Studies 42, no. 2 (2008): 160–86. Among “insider” accounts, see the classic by Gérard Pelletier, The October Crisis (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), and more recently, William Tetley, The October Crisis, 1970: An Insider’s View (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). Tetley’s volume contains a valuable appendix of online documents essential to understanding the mindset of Robert Bourassa’s government.   3 For a positive assessment of Le Devoir during this period, see Guy Lachapelle, Claude Ryan et la violence du pouvoir: “Le Devoir” et la Crise d’octobre 1970 ou le combat des journalistes démocrates (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005); and for a negative view that essentially repeats the allegations of the “provisional government,” see Tetley, The October Crisis.  4 CR, “Le pari de Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber” [e], LD , 30 September 1970.  5 CR, “Le prochain chef libéral” [e], LD , 14 January 1970; CR, “L’actualité électorale: l’univers politico-social de Robert Bourassa” [e], LD , 2 April 1970.  6 CR, “Ce que M. Bertrand aurait pu ajouter” [e], LD , 24 February 1970.   7 Charles Denis, Robert Bourassa, vol. 1, La passion de la politique (Montreal: Fides, 2006), 67–81.  8 CR, “La réponse de l’UN au défi du P Q et des libéraux” [e], LD , 6 April 1970.  9 Ibid. 10 CR, “L’actualité électorale.” 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 CR, “Les deux ‘points faibles’ des libéraux du Québec” [e], LD , 7 March 1970; CR, “Un jeu dangereux pour tout le monde” [e], LD , 18 March 1970, which inveighed against the intervention of Jean Marchand, federal minister of regional economic expansion, in the provincial election campaign. 15 CR, “Le Devoir et l’élection du 29 avril – 2: Le Parti québécois: un pari douteux et prématuré” [e], LD , 24 April 1970.

658

Notes to pages 519–24

16 CR, “Deux facteurs nouveaux dans l’élection du 20 avril” [e], LD , 16 April 1970; CR, “‘La solution’ péquiste et ses limites” [e], LD , 9 April 1970. 17 CR, “L’image des leaders après un mois de campagne” [e], LD , 20 April 1970; Denis, Robert Bourassa, 72. 18 CR, “Le Devoir et l’élection du 29 avril – 1: Les enjeux du scrutin” [e], LD , 23 April 1970. 19 CR, “Le Devoir et l’élection du 29 avril – 3: Le meilleur choix” [e], LD , 25 April 1970; C R , “Qu’est-ce qui n’a pas marché” [e], LD , 12 May 1970. 20 CR, “Le premier ‘test’ du gouvernement Bourassa” [e], LD , 5 June 1970; CR, “Excellent début de M. Bourassa à Winnipeg” [e], LD , 6 June 1970. 21 CR, “Les tâches prioritaires de M. Bourassa” [e], LD , 1 May 1970. 22 CR, “L’idée fédérale au lendemain de l’élection” [e], LD , 2 May 1970. 23 Ibid. 24 Jean-François Nadeau, “Pierre Vadeboncoeur (1920–2010): une vie de combats et de littérature,” LD , 12 February 2010, at www.ledevoir.com/societe/­ actualites-en-societe/282944/pierre-vadeboncoeur-1920-2010-une-vie-de-­ combats-et-de-litterature (accessed 17 July 2014). 25 CR, “Un essai séduisant sur l’idée de l’indépendance” [e], LD , 22 April 1970. 26 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/353, C R , “Board of Evangelism, United Church of Canada,” talk, Toronto, 26 February 1971. 27 CR, “Les tâches prioritaires de M. Bourassa”; C R, “Les relations OttawaQuébec sous M. Bourassa: y aura-t-il déblocage et à quel prix?” [e], LD , 5 May 1970; CR, “Les deux ‘points faibles’ des libéraux du Québec.” 28 CR, “Les tâches prioritaires de M. Bourassa.” 29 CR, “Système bancaire et perspectives d’avenir de la société canadienne,” LD , 29 September 1970; C R , “Le pari de Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber.” 30 CR, “Le défi des années ’70: quelques frontières nouvelles de l’exceptionnalité,” 30 November 1970 (Séance d’ouverture du Congrès de l’enfance exceptionnelle). 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 CR, “Visages humains de Pâques” [e], LD , 10 April 1971; CR, “Le tombeau vide de Pâques et l’épreuve actuelle de la foi” [e], LD , 28 March 1970. 34 CR, “Développement et paix: le Jour du Partage,” LD , 14 March 1970. 35 CR, “L’Église et les frontières nouvelles de la vie collective” [e], 17 May 1971; CR, “Valeurs et politique: par-delà le recul des idéologies” [e], LD , 18 May 1971. 36 CR, “L’Église et les frontières nouvelles.” 37 The very title of the Dumont Commission’s report, L’Église du Québec: héritage et projet (Montreal: Fides, 1971), provides a key to its central priorities. For a more pessimistic analysis of its methods and conclusions, see Michael Gauvreau, “‘Without Making a Noise’: The Dumont Commission and the Drama of Quebec’s Dechristianization, 1968–1971,” in The Sixties and



38 39

40

41

42 43

Notes to pages 525–6

659

Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945– 2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 186–216. CR, “Les derniers fruits d’un travail colossal” [e], LD , 4 September 1970. CR, “Les ambiguïtés de la lutte contre l’inflation” [e], LD , 17 February 1970; CR, “Ottawa a-t-il le droit de jouer les Ponce Pilate?” [e], LD , 21 February 1970; CR, “Où sont la vérité et la bonne foi?” [e], LD , 3 March 1970; CR, “L’économie canadienne en 1970: après les folies, la discipline” [e], LD , 4 March 1970; C R , “Le cercle vicieux du chômage” [e], LD , 23 July 1970; CR, “Les 538,000 éclopés d’une croisade anti-inflationniste” [e], LD , 18 January 1971. CR, “La première, la plus grave des priorités” [e], LD , 7 March 1969; BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/307, Michel Blondin (Conseil des oeuvres de Montréal) to CR, 16 October 1969; ibid., 1995-12-001/309, correspondent to CR, 11 March 1969. There is a growing literature on both the new social animation and radical ferment in the working-class districts of Montreal. See Donald McGraw, Le développement des groupes populaires à Montréal (1963–1973) (Montreal: Editions coopératives Albert St Martin, 1978); Jacques Gilbert and Jean-Pierre Collin, Les organismes populaires en milieu urbain: contre-pouvoir ou nouvelle pratique professionnelle? (Montreal: Institut national de recherche scientifique, 1977); Louis Favreau, Mouvement populaire et intervention communautaire de 1960 à nos jours: continuités et ruptures (Montreal: Editions du Fleuve, 1989). On the formation of F R A P , see Marc Comby, “L’expérience du FRAP à Montréal (1970–74): La tentative de créer au Québec un parti d’extrême gauche,” in Contester dans un pays prospèr: l’extrême gauche en Belgique et au Canada, ed. Anne Morelli and José Gotevich (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2007), 153–75. For the wider ideological context, see the important work by Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). CR, “Une boîte de Pandore des temps modernes” [e], LD , 29 November 1969. BAnQ M, F CR, 2004-05-005/16, C R , “En quête de Jean Drapeau,” S RC interview, 30 September 1998; C R , “Montréal à la croisée des chemins” [e], LD , 16 November 1968; C R , “Le dilemme d’un maire” [e], LD , 31 January 1969; CR, “Le monstre au souffle court” [e], LD , 25 July 1970. Paul-André Linteau, a leading historian of Montreal, notes that the Drapeau-Saulnier years were characterized by neglect of internal development, the deterioration of inner-city neighbourhoods, lack of green spaces, and a growing housing problem. The city government evinced little concern about the economic decline of the city and the loss of its position as Canada’s leading metropolis to Toronto. See Linteau, Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération, 2nd ed. (Montreal: Boréal, 2000), 429–30, 536–9.

660

Notes to pages 526–31

44 CR, “Montréal à la croisée de chemins”; C R , “En quête de Jean Drapeau.” 45 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/312, Marcel Allard (président, Stuart-Montréal) to CR, 10 February 1971; C R , “Les questions qu’il faudra poser au parti de M. Drapeau” [e], LD , 20 August 1970. 46 CR, “Noël et l’inquiétude du roi Hérode” [e], LD , 24 December 1970. 47 Éric Bédard, “The Intellectual Origins of the October Crisis,” in Creating Postwar Canada, ed. Magda Fahrni and Robert Rutherdale (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 45–60. 48 CR, “Bilan d’une sombre journée” [e], LD , 9 October 1969; CR, “L’arrêt de travail des policiers” [e], LD , 8 October 1969. 49 CR, “L’arrêt de travail des policiers”; C R , “Westmount sous les bombes” [e], LD , 1 June 1970. 50 CR, “Un nouveau seuil dans l’escalade de la violence” [e], LD , 30 September 1969; CR, “Westmount sous les bombes” [e], LD , 1 June 1970. 51 CR, “Une grave leçon pour M. Nixon et les hommes politiques” [e], LD , 9 May 1970. 52 CR, “Jusqu’où faut-il aller pour sauver la vie d’un homme?” [e], LD , 9 October 1970. 53 CR, “La violence entre dans une nouvelle phase” [e], LD , 6 October 1970. There is a 1968 note from James Cross in Ryan’s correspondence, inviting him to a reception at the British Trade Commission for the retiring high commissioner, Sir Henry Lintott. B A nQ M, F C R , 1995-12-001/305, Jasper (James) Cross to CR, 13 May 1968. 54 CR, “Ce qui doit encore être tenté” [e], LD , 13 October 1970. 55 Ibid. 56 Tetley, The October Crisis, 200–1. Tetley’s diary reveals his personal shift by 14 October to a hawkish demand to call in the troops, impose the War Measures Act, and institute preventive detentions of FLQ sympathizers, largely due to his frustrations at the inability of the municipal and provincial police to locate the kidnappers. 57 CR, “Où est le vrai bien des personnes et de l’État?” [e], LD , 15 October 1970. 58 Ibid.; CR, “Jusqu’où serons nous conduits?” [e], LD , 16 October 1970. 59 CR, “Jusqu’où serons-nous conduits?”; C R , “Les fruits indirects de la crise” [e], LD , 9 November 1970. The phrase was uttered by William Tetley, Bourassa’s minister of financial institutions. For people of Ryan’s generation (and Tetley’s), the term “collaboration” had a far more sinister meaning. Ryan’s notes reveal two telephone calls with Bourassa, on 10 and 11 October 1970. See BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/343, C R , “Rencontre le Devoir,” memorandum, and Tetley states that Bourassa called Ryan on 12 October. There also remains the possibility, disclosed by Tetley, that Bourassa was far more canny than Ryan believed, and was in fact “using” him as a sounding board to gauge the state of public opinion while denying him any real information or influence. See Tetley, The October Crisis, 129.



Notes to pages 531–4

661

60 CR, “Que vient faire cette explication de M. Turner?” [b-n], LD , 13 November 1970, in which Ryan sought to counter Turner’s speech to the Canadian Club, which alluded to the 14 October Petition by the Sixteen Eminent Personalities as an example of the erosion of legitimate authority. 61 Tetley, The October Crisis, 53. 62 CR, “Les mesures de guerre: trois questions” [e], LD , 17 October 1970. 63 BAnQ M, CRL G , Fonds Gérard-Filion, P24/P,19, Pierre Elliott Trudeau to Gérard Filion, 30 October 1970. Federal officials such as Gérard Pelletier, the secretary of state, and Marc Lalonde, principal secretary to the prime minister, were particularly active in whipping Quebec journalists either into silence or into support for the federal hard line and the WMA. See Lachapelle, Claude Ryan et la violence du pouvoir, 40, noting that Pelletier telephoned Ryan a number of times and made several secret visits, while Lalonde telephoned Ryan on 6 October. Ryan’s notes indicate that he called Lalonde on 9 October. See BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/343, C R , “Rencontre Le Devoir.” 64 For a more complete analysis of this psychological warfare, whose key operatives were James Davey and Marc Lalonde, see Michael Gauvreau, “Winning Back the Intellectuals: Inside Canada’s ‘First War on Terror,’ 1968– 1970,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 20, no. 1 (2009): 161–90. 65 BAnQ M, CRL G , Fonds Gérard-Filion, P24/P,19, Claude Ryan to Gérard Filion, 20 October 1970; C R , “Jusqu’où serons nous conduits?” in which he described Bourassa’s request for military assistance as “a sad but necessary act” but one that preserved the initiative of the Quebec government in the crisis and staved off Ottawa’s tutelage. 66 Ibid., P 24/P,19, Filion to Ryan, 20 October 1970. Filion communicated his letter to Pierre Trudeau to demonstrate the orthodoxy of his own attitude towards the F L Q . 67 CR, “Jusqu’où serons nous conduits?” 68 CR, “Les fruits indirects de la crise.” 69 CR, “Noël et l’inquiétude du roi Hérode.” 70 Two recent biographers of Trudeau, Max and Monique Nemni, have insisted on the Christian roots of Trudeau’s famous phrase. See Trudeau Transformed, 1944–1965: The Shaping of a Statesman, trans. George Tombs (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011), 34–5. But it seems to have roots in an absolutist concept of conscience freed from all external restraints. It is more plausible to view the phrase as an atavistic resurgence from Trudeau’s ideological past at a moment of tension. Fascism, for which the youthful Trudeau felt a great attraction, believed that truth was a question of successful political action, the ultimate pragmatism. See Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 93. 71 CR, “Noël et l’inquiétude du roi Hérode.”

662

Notes to pages 534–6

72 CR, “Dans l’épaisseur d’une nuit tragique” [e], LD , 19 October 1970. Interestingly, Ryan gave honoraria received from his participation in two television broadcasts following Pierre Laporte’s death to his widow. See BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/343, C R to Mme Pierre Laporte, 23 October 1970. 73 D AU L , Fonds Fernand-Dumont, C6 1970 f.3, “Circulaire,” 30 November 1970; CR, “Le gouvernement québécois et la loi des pouvoirs d’urgence” [e], LD , 6 January 1971; B A nQ M, F C R , 1995-12-001/314, Vincent Harvey, o.p. to CR, 1971; BAnQM, F C R , 1995-12-001/314, C R to correspondent, 29 January 1971. The Comité des Huit comprised sociologists Guy Rocher and Fernand Dumont, Vincent Harvey, o.p. (director of Maintenant), philosopher Charles Taylor, Claude Ryan, Raymond Laliberté, Pierre Harvey, and Jean Gérin-Lajoie. 74 CR, “Les fruits indirects de la crise.” 75 There was at least some awareness of and sympathy for Ryan’s position within the Bourassa cabinet. In mid-November 1970, Claude Castonguay made a speech that closely reiterated some of Ryan’s views, placing the October Crisis in a longer trajectory and emphasizing the solution of “la participation responsable des citoyens au grand domaine de la vie collective,” something that could not be accomplished by police action, repression, or the promise of new jobs. See CR, “Enfin, un discours réfléchi” [e], LD , 19 November 1970. 76 See Appendix J, “The Petition of the Sixteen Eminent Personalities,” in Tetley, The October Crisis, 232–4, on the website of William Tetley, at www.mcgill.ca/ maritimelaw/crisis (accessed 22 July 2014). 77 For a full list of the “Sixteen,” see ibid. It should be noted that Bourassa had tried to recruit Guy Rocher for the Liberal team in 1970, and Rocher became a separatist only in the wake of the October Crisis. See Denis, Robert Bourassa, 70. 78 Tetley, The October Crisis, 53, 57 – “And if the Quebec government had given in to the sixteen unelected personalities and allowed them to dictate terms of the negotiations with the F L Q , there would have been a descent into corporatism, if not anarchy” (166). For the continuing role of corporatism in twentiethcentury Quebec social and political practice, see Clinton Archibald, Un Québec corporatist? Corporatisme et néo-corporatisme: du passage d’une idéologie corporatiste sociale à une idéologie corporatiste politique, le Québec de 1930 à nos jours (Hull, Q C : Éditions de l’Asticou, 1983). 79 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/308, Fernand Dumont to CR, 16 May 1970. 80 CR, “Que vient faire cette ‘explication’ de M. Turner” [b-n], LD , 13 November 1970. 81 BAnQ M , F CR (Écrits), 2004-005-005/3, C R , “Entrevue avec Pierre Godin au sujet de René Lévesque,” 18 July 1996. Tetley is mistaken in relying upon Jacques Parizeau’s recollection that Ryan was the principal author of the petition. Lévesque’s biographer, Pierre Godin, corroborates Ryan’s version of



Notes to pages 536–44

663

events. See Pierre Godin, René Lévesque, vol. 2, Héros malgré lui (Montreal: Boréal, 1997), 493–98.  82 Tetley, The October Crisis, 120–1.   83 Ibid., 121; L A C , Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fonds, MG 26, O11, vol. 38, file 4, Speeches 1970, “Programme Encounter: Interview with the Prime Minister,” 5 November 1970, interview by Ron Collister (CBC), Charles Lynch (Southam News), and Pierre C. O’Neil (La Presse). For an extended discussion, see Gauvreau, “Winning Back the Intellectuals.”  84 CR, “Quand M. Trudeau a-t-il dit la vérité?” [b-n], LD , 12 May 1971.   85 Michel Roy, Claude Lemelin, and Jean-Claude Leclerc were recent promotions to the editorial room, though Roy had been a long-time veteran of the news side of the enterprise. See C R , “La rédaction du Devoir: changements et départs” [e], LD , 5 September 1970.  86 CR, “Un complot qui n’a jamais existé” [e], LD , 30 October 1970.  87 CR, “Entrevue avec Pierre Godin,” 1996.  88 CR “En quête de Jean Drapeau”;C R , “Entrevue avec Pierre Godin.”  89 BAnQ M, CRL G , Fonds Gérard-Filion, P24/P,19, CR to Filion, 26 October 1970.  90 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/353, C R , “La dernière crise n’a rien réglé, au contraire,” Joliette Journal: l’étoile du nord, 3 February 1971.   91 Peter C. Newman, Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2004), 308–13.   92 Ibid., 314–17.  93 CR, “Si le Québec voulait se séparer” [e], LD , 27 February 1970.  94 M cM U A, Peter C. Newman Fonds, box 179, file Ryan, Claude, research notes, interviews, correspondence, interview on the Manifesto of 16 Eminent Personalities, n.d.  95 BAnQ M, F CR , 1995-12-001/342, Bryce Mackasey (minister of labour, Ottawa), to Brian McKenna (Last Post, Montreal), 1 December 1970.   96 Ibid., Ramsay Cook to C R , 25 November 1970.   97 Ibid., 1995-12-001/343, Jeanne Sauvé to C R , 30 October 1970. Sauvé seems to have been unaware of the earlier divisions within the Bourassa government.   98 Ibid., Dominique Clift (Montreal Star – Tribune de la Presse Parlementaire, Quebec) to C R , 30 October 1970.  99 Ibid. 100 CR, “La presse et le pouvoir: l’impossible angélisme”, LD , 2 November 1970. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 For the social corporatist model in twentieth-century Quebec, see Pierre Trépanier, “Quel corporatisme? (1820–1965),” Cahiers des Dix 50 (1994); Archibald, Un Québec corporatiste?, 147–206.

664

Notes to pages 544–9

104 On the radicalization of Canadian and Quebec labour, see Bryan D. Palmer, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Jacques Rouillard, Histoire de la CSN , 1921–1981 (Montreal: Boréal, 1981), 221–34; François Cyr and Rémi Roy, Éléments d’histoire de la FTQ : la FTQ et la question nationale (Laval: Editions coopératives Albert Saint-Martin, 1981), 95–180. 105 Gareth Davies, “Understanding the War on Poverty: The Advantages of a Canadian Perspective,” Journal of Policy History 9, no. 4 (1997): 425–49; Rodney S. Haddow, Poverty Reform in Canada, 1958–1978 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 165–84. 106 CR, “Les simplifications dangereuses d’un premier ministre” [e], LD , 5 November 1970. 107 CR, “Le défi des années ’70: quelques frontières nouvelles de l’exceptionalité”; C R , “Le projet de loi Turner sur le FLQ ” [e], LD , 3 November 1970. 108 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/352, C R , “Pourquoi la proclamation de la loi des mesures de guerre fut une mauvaise décision,” communication faite à Hull, 5 November 1970. 109 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/353, C R , “Board of Evangelism.” 110 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/308, Sen. Keith Davey to CR, 26 October 1970, and John Varley (president of the Liberal Students of Canada) to CR, 24 December 1970. 111 Ibid., 1995-12-001/343, correspondent to C R , 10 October 1970. 112 CR, “Board of Evangelism.” 113 L AC, Fonds Pierre Elliott Trudeau, MG 26, O11, vol. 46-21, PM Appearances 10-12-70, “Broadcast of Interview with Prime Minister by Larry Zolf on Weekend, CB C -TV Network at Close of Liberal Policy Convention,” 22 November 1970. 114 Ibid., “Notes pour l’allocution du Premier Ministre lors du Congrès sur la politique libérale,” 20 November 1970. 115 Ibid. 116 CR, “Board of Evangelism.” 117 BAnQ M , F CR , 1995-12-001/314, Patrick Kenan, s.j. (co-director, Canadian Catholic Conference) to C R , 8 March 1971. 118 Ibid.

Epilogue  1 M cM U A, Peter C. Newman Fonds, box 179, file Ryan, Claude, CR to Peter C. Newman, 14 January 1971.  2 Ibid.  3 BAnQ M , F CR, 1995-12-001/353, C R , “Board of Evangelism, United Church of Canada, talk, Toronto, 26 February 1971.



Notes to pages 549–50

665

 4 M M U A, Peter C. Newman Fonds, C R to Newman, 14 January 1971.  5 CR, “Les fruits indirects de la crise” [e], LD , 9 November 1970.  6 M M U A, Peter C. Newman Fonds, C R to Newman, 14 January 1971.   7 For the details of the Victoria deal, see John English, Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968–2000 (Toronto: Knopf, 2009), 135.  8 CR, “Le Québec peut-il consenter à la formule Turner-Trudeau?” [e], LD , 15 March 1971.  9 BAnQ M, F CR, 1995-12-001/353, C R , “La formule Turner-Trudeau,” communication présentée à un colloque de la Fédération des Sociétés Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Québec, Montreal, 15 May 1971.

Index

Action catholique, 52, 60–1, 210, 212; and adult education, 93–4, 166–7; and Asbestos Strike, 101–3, 110–11, 134–5 Action catholique canadienne (ACC), crisis of, 437–8; foundation of, 62 Action française, 23, 31–2 Action libérale nationale (ALN ), 22 Acton, Lord John, 279–80 Adam, Karl, 113 Adam, Marcel, 225 Aganier, Father Hozael, 211 Angers, François-Albert, 284, 300–1, 345, 349 anti-semitism, 23, 35; Claude Ryan’s opposition to, 40–1 Arès, Richard, 85, 285, 399 Asbestos strike, 101–3, 110–11; influence on Action catholique, 134–5 Asselin, Olivar, 23–4, 84, 88, 94, 290 associate statehood, 350–1, 380–1, 394, 399, 415 Audet, Lionel, 202 Augustine, 303, 448; explained by French theologians, 116–20; influence on Claude Ryan, 115, 154–5,

231, 268; and personalism, 118; and politics, 127–8; and theology of history, 124–7 Barbeau, Raymond, 295 Barbeau, Victor, 159 Barth, Karl, 117; and Protestant thought, 125 Beaudon, Rev. Jacques, 249–50 Beaugrand-Champagne, Guy, 293 Beaupré, Louis, 92–3 Bell, Daniel, 138–9, 330–2, 334, 412, 461 Benda, Julien, 278 Bennett, W.A.C., 390 Benson, Edgar, 481 Berton, Pierre, 146, 336 Bertrand, Jean-Jacques, 503, 506 Bill 60, 261–3 Bloy, Léon, 34–5 Bourassa, Henri, 3, 23, 84, 280, 290, 297, 302, 305, 329, 348, 355, 359, 360, 378, 383, 393, 471–2, 498; on state and nation, 88–9 Bourassa, Robert, 5, 494, 504–5, 514; liberal ideas of, 516–18, 550; rise of, 515–16; and October Crisis,

668 Index

529–30; supported by Claude Ryan, 516–18 Bouvier, Father Émile, 54–5, 58–9, 91–2 Boy Scouts, 29–31 Bradet, Henri, 311, 334–6 Brandt, Willy, 319 Breton, Albert, 344, 401 Brunet, Michel, 293, 372, 496 Cadieux, Fernand, 83, 137 Calvez, Jean-Yves, 235 Camp, Dalton, 375, 453 Canadian Catholic Conference, 224–5 Canadian nationalism, 239–40, 276– 8, 359–60; and French Canada, 99–100 Canadian Youth Commission (CYC), 61; support of Catholic Bishops, 62; and Claude Ryan, 68 Casgrain, Thérèse, 55, 91–2 Castonguay, Claude, 525, 529 Castonguay-Nepveu Commission, 524–5 Catholic Church, 8–9, 252–6, 435–6, 439–41; and Action catholique, 60–1; and corporatism, 21–2, 535– 6; and the Great Depression, 18–19; and liberalism, 21; and totalitarian ideologies, 21–2. See also Catholicism Catholicism, 245–8; critiques of, 36; and French-Canadian nationalism, 31–3, 45–6, 79–101; and personalism, 33–4, 144; and secularization, 192–9; and social thought, 47–8, 233–7, 251–2, 321–3, 523–4. See also Action catholique; Action catholique canadienne; Catholic

Church; gallicanism; Second Vatican Council; ultramontanism Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 319 Chaput, Marcel, 295 Charbonneau, Archbishop Joseph, 61, 74, 91, 101, 102, 105, 111 Chartrand, Simone (Monet), 63, 69 Choquette, Jérôme, 529 Christie, Nancy, 336 Cité Libre, 142, 347–8; attitude of Claude Ryan towards, 179–80; and Catholicism, 208–9; foundation of, 103–4 Clift, Dominique, 536–7; critique of Claude Ryan, 540–1 Coderre, Bishop Gérard-Marie, 224, 340 collèges classiques, 25, 163–4 Comité des huit, 534, 538 communism, 21, 72 Confédération des syndicats nationaux, 458–9 confessional education, 259–65 Congar, Yves, 113, 115–16, 150; influence on Claude Ryan, 118–20 Conservative Party (Quebec), 21, 22 constitutional reform, 386–92, 413–16 Cook, Ramsay, 370, 384, 418–19, 486, 500, 540 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (C C F), 55–6 cooperative federalism, 287, 373–4, 391, 416–17 Cormier, Guy, 83 corporatism, 21–2, 80, 92, 241–3, 322–3, 535–6 counterculture, 431–2 Courchesne, Archbishop Georges, 60, 101

Index 669

Creighton, Donald, 364, 418 Cross, James, 513 Daly, Bernard, 229 Daniel, Yves, 193 Davey, Keith, 545 Dawson, Christopher, 124, 133–4 dechristianization, 45–6, 192–3, 196, 341 de Gaulle, Charles, 267; visit to Canada, 423–5 Delos, Jean-Thomas, 86; on federalism, 96–7; influence on Claude Ryan, 97; on nation and state, 86; on nationalism and human rights, 95–7 democracy, 66–7, 80, 91–5, 105, 150–2, 165–72, 180–2, 183–6, 222, 229–32; social democracy, 91–5, 236–8 Diefenbaker, John, 232, 375 Dion, Gérard, 168, 170–1, 183–4, 455 Dion, Léon, 306, 457–8 distinct society, 399 Douglas, Tommy, 238, 295 Drapeau, Jean, 424, 468, 526–7, 546; accuses Claude Ryan of conspiracy, 536–7 Dumont Commission, 446–7 Dumont, Fernand, 28, 111, 118, 141, 315, 446–7; on Catholicism, 194 Duplessis, Maurice, 21, 22, 58, 64–5, 80, 92, 101, 102, 113, 141, 142, 166, 171, 180, 234, 302–3 École civique d’été, 102–3 École de service sociale, 53–7; curriculum, 56–7; foundation of, 56–7 École des relations industrielles, 54–5

États généraux du Canada français, 422, 474–5 evangelization, 197–9 Externat Sainte-Croix, 13; curriculum, 24–5; extra-curricular activities, 27–8 Falardeau, Jean-Charles, 141, 180 Faribault, Marcel, 375, 394–5, 493–4 fascism, 22–3 Favreau, Guy, 316, 374 federalism, 88–90, 123–4, 239–40, 282–95, 394–5, 413–16, 426–7, 473, 482–3, 499–502, 549. See also associate statehood; cooperative federalism; particular status; ­special status for Quebec Filion, Gérard, 7, 33, 84, 94, 213, 222, 223, 246, 258, 296–301, 306, 329, 345–8, 355, 373, 378, 383, 478; and Claude Ryan, 135, 212– 13, 532; as director of Le Devoir, 217–18; on federalism, 213–14 First Apostolic Congress, 109–10 Fisher, Douglas, 295 Folliet, Joseph, 110 Forsey, Eugene, 293 Fowler, Robert, 394–5 Fox, Paul, 490 Fraser, Blair, 490 French-Canadian nationalism, 85, 274–6, 351–8; and Catholicism, 31–3, 45–6, 79–101; and Confederation, 42–3; neo-nationalism, 85. See also Ryan, Claude: and FrenchCanadian nationalism Frère André (Saint André Bessette), 19, 20, 25 “Frère Untel” (Jean-Paul Desbiens), 217

670 Index

Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), 281–2, 352–3, 464, 469, 514, 527; kidnapping of James Cross, 528– 30; kidnapping of Pierre Laporte, 529 Fulton-Favreau formula, 387–92 Gaitskell, Hugh, 232 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 318 gallicanism, 227–8 Gérin, Léon, 306 Gérin-Lajoie, Paul, 261, 273, 317, 328, 348, 388–9, 454 Goardini, Romano, 187–9 Godbout, Adélard, 58; and reform measures, 53–4 Godin, Henri, 193 Goldwater, Barry, 332–3 Gordon, Walter, 232 Gouin, Paul, 21. See also Action libérale nationale Graham, Billy, 198 grande mission and Catholicism, 198–9 Grant, George, 359, 521 Grégoire, Gilles, 293 Groulx, Abbé Lionel, 7, 9, 23–4, 27, 32–3, 35, 54, 79–80, 85, 123, 290, 305, 348, 355, 360, 399, 401, 422– 3, 471–2, 474, 498; as federalist, 41–2, 130; influence on Claude Ryan, 39–40, 108, 214, 393; on middle classes, 159; opposition to party politics, 90; parallel with Lord Acton, 280–1; as public intellectual, 156; on state and nation, 88–9 Groupe présence, 83 Guevara, Che, 469 Guitton, Jean, 187–9

Habermas, Jürgen, 170 Hamilton, Alvin, 384 Harvey, Jean-Charles, 27, 40–1 Hébert, Jacques, 312–13 Hefner, Hugh, 190–1 Hellyer, Paul, 481, 490 Herberg, Will, 146 historians, Montreal School, 142 Hochhut, Rolf, 272 Houde, Camillien, 21 Hughes, Everett C., 141 human rights: Claude Ryan on, 506– 10; and personalism, 506; in thought of Jean-Thomas Delos, 95–7; United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, 506 Humanae Vitae, 441–2, 449 Humphrey, Hubert, 319 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 34, 37–8 individualism, 10–11, 45, 68, 135, 184, 445–6, 448–9, 506; and individual conscience, 170; and Pierre Trudeau, 183. See also liberalism Institut Canadien d’éducation des adultes (IC EA ), 166 Jeunesse agricole catholique (J A C ), 60 Jeunesse étudiante catholique (J EC ), 60; and Claude Ryan, 69–70 Jeunesse indépendante catholique (J IC ), 60, 82; and relationship to middle classes, 159 Jeunesse indépendante catholique féminine (j ic f), 174–5 Jeunesse ouvrière catholique (J OC ), 60, 135 Jews, 249–50 John XXIII (pope), 222, 227, 236–7, 268, 271–2, 318, 320, 371

Index 671

Johnson, Daniel, 62, 234–5, 407–10, 423, 453–5, 479, 493–4; and constitutional reform, 413–16, 484–6; death of, 500–3 Johnson, Lyndon, 412 Jolicoeur, Fernand, 168 Julien, Pauline, 469 Juneau, Pierre, 63, 69–70, 75, 137; attacks Canadian Youth Commission, 70 Kattan, Naim, 250 Keegan, Pat, 320 Kennedy, John F., 233, 267, 272, 466 Kierans, Eric, 452 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 466 Lacoste, Norbert, 196–7 Lafortune, Ambroise, 114, 212 Lahaise, Robert, 337 Lalonde, Marc, 343, 375, 418, 449 Lamontagne, Maurice, 374 language policies, 505–12 Laporte, Pierre, 348, 389, 503–4, 513–14, Laski, Harold: on Catholic Church, 151; influence on Pierre Trudeau, 182 Laurendeau, André, 7, 32, 72, 80–1, 84, 93, 94, 213, 222, 258, 287–8, 296–8, 300–1, 306, 308, 355, 361, 364–5, 375, 379, 392–3, 398, 402, 429, 449, 471–2, 479, 500, 505–6; as anti-clerical, 217–18; and Claude Ryan, 56, 180; critical of Jean Lesage, 263; death of, 494–5; on federalism, 213–14, 244; as neo-nationalist, 87 Laurin, Camille, 22, 83, 103, 394; and Claude Ryan, 99–100

Lavallée, Germain, 264 Lavoie, Raymond, 202 Le Bras, Gabriel, 193 Leclerc, Jean-Claude, 450 Le Devoir, 3–4, 135, 203–4, 212–13, 213–15, 217–18, 221–2, 258, 272– 3, 296–303, 304–5, 308–12, 345– 7, 378–80, 427–30, 449–51, 513–14, 540–3; readership of, 313–16 Legault, Father Émile, 224 Léger, Cardinal Paul-Émile, 102, 104, 113, 220, 223, 246, 329, 443; and Claude Ryan, 210 Léger, Jean-Marc, 297, 298, 299, 305, 308, 345–6, 349, 428–30, 449 Lemelin, Claude, 450 Lemieux, Gérard, 83, 107, 124, 224, 309, 316–17 Lenski, Gerhard, 196 Leo XIII (pope), 184, 234, 236 Lesage, Jean, 5, 217, 220, 231–2, 234, 240, 247, 286, 316, 317, 323, 348, 363, 373, 385, 399, 407–9, 423, 503–6; and Bill 60, 263; on constitutional reform, 386–92 Lévesque, Father Georges-Henri, 33, 61, 100, 306; and adult education, 166; as public intellectual, 156 Lévesque, René, 4, 16, 22, 28, 220, 273, 275, 286, 295–6, 317, 348, 351, 374, 377, 386, 424, 428, 446, 454, 473–6, 505, 512, 531, 550; friendship with Claude Ryan, 244–5, 389–90; and sovereignty-­ association, 425–6 liberalism, 10–11, 343–5, 395–7, 403–7, 410–13, 416–19, 432–3, 447–8, 455–7, 459–65, 470, 472– 3, 478–80, 487–9, 496–8, 500–2,

672 Index

509–10, 514–15; conservative, 80; hyper-modern, 366, 421, 488–9, 506; and social sciences, 140. See also individualism; social liberalism Liberal Party (Canada), 403–7, 417– 18, 434, 480–4; 1968 leadership race, 486–92 Liberal Party (Quebec), 20–1, 220, 323–4, 374–5, 385, 407–9, 425–6, 503–5, 515–19; and Le Devoir, 234–5; and nationalization of hydro, 222, 243–4; and Parent Report, 261; and planned economy, 239; reaction to October Crisis, 529–30 liberation theology, 448, 470 Lippmann, Walter, 303, 316, 447; on democracy, 231; influence on Claude Ryan, 171–2, 184, 264, 266; as public intellectual, 212–13 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 461 Lubac, Henri de, 113; influence on Claude Ryan, 116–17 MacEachen, Allan, 417 Mackasey, Bryce, 419, 539 Macquarrie, Heath, 369 McLuhan, Marshall, 450 Maintenant, 334–6 Malone, Richard, 490 Mandeville, Bernard, 182–3 Manning, Ernest, 412 Marchand, Jean, 83, 238, 401, 404–5, 418, 453, 459, 481–2, 504 Marcuse, Herbert, 460, 465–6 Maritain, Jacques, 31–2, 35, 72, 94, 104, 119, 447; and authority, 181– 2; and Catholic laity, 50–2; and Christian social order, 48–50; and democracy, 50–1, 151, 168–9;

influence on Claude Ryan, 46–8, 73–4, 108, 169–70, 183–4, 188, 247–8, 313, 397 masculinity, 105–6, 109, 147–8, 161– 2, 174–6; and Action catholique canadienne, 63; and Boy Scouts, 29–31 Mendès-France, Pierre, 240 Mills, C. Wright, 159–61 Miner, Horace, 141 Minville, Esdras, 7, 35, 35, 54, 58, 79–80, 84, 105, 109, 123, 280, 285, 355, 399, 472; and Canadian nationalism, 94–5; as federalist, 130; on French-Canadian citizenship, 86–7; influence on Claude Ryan, 85–7; on middle classes, 159; opposition to party politics, 90; on state and nation, 88–9 Martin, Paul, Sr, 481 Massey Commission, 99–100; Claude Ryan on, 100–1 Maurras, Charles, 23, 31, 35; influence on Pierre Trudeau, 182 middle classes, 135, 136–7, 159–62, 274–5 Montcheuil, Yves de, 113, 117; influence on Claude Ryan, 127 Morin, Claude, 306, 409, 454 Morin, Jacques-Yvan, 306, 350–1, 380–1, 389–90, 399, 400, 422. See also associate state Morin, Lauren, 62, 105, 110–11 Morin, Renée, 78–9 Morin, Rosaire, 82, 422 Morrissette, Gaston, 196 Morton, W.L., 366, 375 Mounier, Emmanuel, 72–5, 84, 104, 116, 547; opposition of Claude Ryan to, 76

Index 673

Mouvement Desjardins, 241 Mouvement laïque de langue française, 220, 248–9, 300, 327–8 Mouvement pour l’intégration scholaire (MI S ), 505–6 Mouvement souverainté-association, 446, 473–4 Mulroney, Brian, 493 Murray, John Courtney, 155 NA T O , 269–70 nationalism, 10; defence of by Claude Ryan, 278–81. See also Canadian nationalism; French-Canadian nationalism; Quebec nationalism Neatby, Blair, 293, 294 neo-conservatism, 461–3 New Democratic Party (N DP), 238, 404 New Left, 412–13, 432, 448–9, 460–1, 464–6 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 113, 448; Catholic renewal and, 199– 200; on church and state, 129–30, 151–2; on individual conscience, 170; influence on Claude Ryan, 120–5, 146–7, 152–3, 178, 187–9, 195, 225–6, 230; on public opinion, 203–4 Newman, Peter C., 424, 537–9, 548 Nichols, Ted, 75, 77, 108, 139–40 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 117, 154, 155, 447; and Protestant thought, 125 Nixon, Richard, 527, 546 nouvelle théologie, 115–16, 228 O’Brien, Denis, 490 October Crisis, 514–15, 528–36 Official Languages Act, 500 O’Neil, Louis, 171, 183

O’Neil, Pierre-C., 536; critique of Claude Ryan, 541–2 Oratoire Saint-Joseph, 13, 19, 20, 25 Ouellet, Fernand, 476 Paré, René, 300–1 Parent, Alfonse, 220 Parent Commission, 220, 256–9, 327 Parizeau, Jacques, 306, 397, 400, 409 Parsons, Talcott, 165 Parti Pris, 334 Parti québécois, 509, 512 particular status, 385, 391–2, 493 Patry, André, 345, 409 Paul VI (pope), 223–4, 268–9, 272, 320, 433, 441–2 Paul, Rémi, 466 Pearson, Lester B., 232, 267, 282–3, 286, 288, 316, 367, 373–4, 386, 416 Péguy, Charles, 34–6, 137–8 Pelletier, Alexandrine (Leduc), 63, 69, 538 Pelletier, Georges, 329, 373 Pelletier, Gérard, 7, 28, 63, 83, 94, 118, 137, 180, 309–11, 347, 401, 404–5, 467–8, 538; attacks Canadian Youth Commission, 70; on Catholicism, 195, 208–9; and Claude Ryan, 66, 103–4; and Emmanuel Mounier, 73–4; opposition to French-Canadian nationalism, 87; opposition to the Second World War, 64; pro-Vichy government, 41 Pépin, Jean-Luc, 374 Pépin, Marcel, 459 Perrin, Jacques, 235 personalism, 33–4, 144, 397; critique of Catholicism, 36; and democracy,

674 Index

50–1, 150; and human rights, 506; and masculinity, 37; and Saint Augustine, 118. See also Catholicism Piotte, Jean-Marc, 334 Pius XII (pope), 90, 105, 109, 179,184, 272; 321; on Catholic laity, 200–1; and labour unrest, 113 Plamondon, Réjean, 224, 228 Podhoretz, Norman, 461 popes. See John XXIII; Leo XI; Paul VI; Pius XII Prince, Vincent, 310 Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, 375–7, 386 public intellectual, 6–8, 108–8, 130, 147–8, 155–8, 212–13, 296, 305– 8, 330–3, 349, 374–5, 447–8, 449– 51, 464–5, 488–9, 533, 540–3, 550 public moralist, 9–10, 307–8, 315– 16, 336–7, 349, 450, 550 Pères de Sainte-Croix, 13, 253–5 Quebec nationalism, 32–3. See also French-Canadian nationalism Quebec sovereignty, 394 Quiet Revolution, 11, 220, 223, 233– 4, 273, 317–18, 321–2, 338–9, 446, 453–7 Rahner, Karl, 212 Ralliement nationale (RN ), 348, 408 Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (R I N ), 300, 348, 351–4, 408, 446 religious pluralism, 249–51 Richer, Léopold, 157 Riesman, David, 140 rights. See human rights

Robarts, John, 286, 390, 416, 487 Roblin, Duff, 365–6, 390, 416 Rocher, Guy, 43, 63, 69–70, 75 Rothney, Gordon, 293 Roy, Cardinal Maurice, 338; on Action catholique, 210 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (LaurendeauDunton Commission), 287–90, 361–5, 396, 402, 413, 505–6 Ryan, Claude: on 1968 election campaign, 491–6; on 1970 election campaign, 518–21; abandons university, 58–9; on Abbé Groulx, 298–9; on A C C as feminized, 63; admiration for England, 76, 91, 230–1; and adult education, 166– 7; on André Laurendeau, 56, 80–1; on anglophone Quebec, 354–7; apoliticism, 69, 90–1, 94; on associate statehood, 380–1, 394, 415; on authority, 136, 151–2; on biculturalism, 293–5, 358–65, 376–7; on Bill 60, 262–3; on birth control, 441–2; on bureaucracy, 331–2; on Canadian conservatism, 37; on Canadian foreign policy, 277–8; and Canadian nationalism, 94–5, 97–100, 239–40, 276–78, 359–60, 367–8; and Canadian Youth Commission, 68; and Canadian youth organizations, 75, 77–8; and Cardinal Léger, 210; and Catholic Church, 114–15, 137–8, 142–3, 152–3, 199–200, 209–10, 252–6, 263–4, 334–41, 434–5, 438, 442– 5; on Catholic laity, 200–7; and Catholic social thought, 47–8, 233–7, 251–2, 523–4; on the C C F, 55–6; charged with malicious libel,

Index 675

78–9; on Charles de Gaulle, 423–4; on Charles Taylor, 248; and Cité Libre, 179–80, 208–9; and classical colleges, 163–4, 328–9; college life, 25–9; and communism, 72, 75–6, 78–9, 102–3, 465–6; and concept of hybridity, 162–3, 230, 498; on confessional education, 259–65, 328–9; on conservatism, 172; on consumerism, 186–7; on corporatism, 242–3; and death of Daniel Johnson, 502–3; on deconfessionalization, 324–5; and democracy, 66–7, 91–5, 105, 150–2, 165–72, 183–6, 222, 229–32, 236–8, 522– 3; on dialogue, 270–2; dismissal of Jean-Marc Léger, 428–30; and distinct society, 399; early life, 12–20; on education, 327–8; and Emmanuel Mounier, 76; European trip, 113–14; and evangelization, 197–9; on family allowances, 91–2; on fascism, 40–1; on federalism, 88–90, 123–4, 239–40, 280–95, 357–8, 362–4, 373–5, 383–6, 400– 1, 413–16, 426–7, 473, 478–80, 482–3, 499–502, 549; and freedom of the press, 312–13; and the French-Canadian family, 43–6, 67–8; and French-Canadian nationalism, 80–2, 87–91, 131–2, 214–17, 274–6, 281–2, 345–50, 351–8, 475–6; and Gérard Filion, 135, 212–13; and Gérard Pelletier, 70–2, 309–11; on Hugh Gaitskell, 232–3; on human rights, 506–10; and idea of French Canada, 471–3, 495; ideas about political leadership, 127–8, 231–4; and idea of the state, 170–1; on individual

conscience, 170; on individualism, 135, 184; influence of Jacques Maritain, 73–4, 84, 108, 247–8; influence of Rome on religious thought of, 112–13; influence of Saint Augustine, 115, 154–5, 231; and international youth organizations, 74–7; on Jean Drapeau, 468, 526–7; on Jean Lésage, 231–2, 247, 349–50, 386–92, 408–9; and Jeanne Sauvé, 76; and J EC , 69–71, 211; and J OC , 186; on John Diefenbaker, 232; on John F. Kennedy, 233; on journalism, 27–8; on labour unrest, 410–12, 455–6, 458–9; on language policy, 354–7; and Le Devoir, 3–4, 135, 203–4, 212–18, 221–2, 272–3, 296–305, 308–12, 345–7, 378–80, 427–30, 449–51, 513–14, 540–3; on Lester B. Pearson, 232; and Liberal Party (Quebec), 40–1; and liberal Protestantism, 77; liberalism and, 149, 343–5, 395–7, 403–7, 410–13, 416–19, 432–3, 447–8, 445–7, 459–65, 470, 487–9, 496– 8, 500–2, 509–10; on Lord Acton, 279–80; marriage, 176–9; on masculinity, 29–31, 37, 105–6, 109, 147–8, 161–2, 174–6; on mass culture, 68–9, 139–40, 155–7; and Maurice Sauvé, 76; and media, 212–13, 219–20, 222, 451–3; on the middle classes, 135–7, 159–62, 238–9, 274–5; as moderate, 291–3, 368–73, 532, 548–9; on moral relativism, 189–91; national secretary of A C C , 62, 74–5, 104–5, 132–8, 201–2, 204–7; on nationalism, 278–81; as nationalist, 9–10; on

676 Index

nationalization of hydro, 243–4; on NA T O , 269–70; on New Left, 412–13, 448–9, 460–1, 464–6; and nouvelle théologie, 115–16; on October Crisis, 528–36; opposes candidacy of Pierre Trudeau, 483– 4; on Parent Commission, 256–9, 260–1; on peace, 267–73; and personalism, 34–7, 144; and Petition of the Sixteen, 531, 535; and Pierre Trudeau, 75, 102–3, 181, 184–6, 191, 342–5, 401–2, 418–21, 481– 4, 491–2; on planned economy, 239–43; on political violence, 466– 70, 495–6; on police repression, 333, 527–8; as political journalist, 316–17; and Progressive Conserva­ tive Party, 492; as public intellectual, 6–8, 108–9, 130, 147–8, 155–8, 212–13, 296, 305–8, 330–3, 349, 374–5, 447–8, 449–51, 464–5, 533, 540–3, 550; as public moralist, 9–10, 307–8, 315–16, 336–7, 349, 450, 550; on public opinion, 184, 203–4, 207–8, 273; and Quebec intellectuals, 131–2, 139–40, 149– 51, 156–9, 252, 357–8, 421–2, 427–30, 474–5, 520–22; on Quebec nationalism, 414, 473, 496, 512; on Quebec’s international relations, 497–8; on Quiet Revolution, 317– 18, 338–9, 453–7; and radical left, 333–4, 464–5, 525–6; on readership of Le Devoir, 313–16; on ­relations of church and state, 119– 20, 128–9, 245–8, 435–6; and religious crisis, 139–45; and religious pluralism, 249–51; and religious vocation, 28–9, 52–3; and René Lévesque, 244–5, 275, 389–90,

473–6; on Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 361–5, 392–4; and rumours of provisional government, 536–40; and Second Vatican Council, 223– 9, 319–21; on secularization, 45–6, 142–3, 145–6, 148–9, 163– 4, 187–91, 192–99, 221, 246, 248–51, 325–6, 329–41, 445–7; on sexuality, 187, 340–1, 458; and social liberalism, 10–11, 173, 238–43, 318–20, 321–4, 396–7, 400, 410–13, 433–6, 466–9, 482– 3, 488, 522, 524–6, 529–30, 544– 5; on sovereignty-association, 425–6, 476–9; on special status, 398–401; on student protests, 445–6, 459–61; study in Rome, 107–8, 112–16; supports Paul Hellyer, 490; supports Quebec Liberal Party, 519–20; supports Robert Bourassa, 516–18; and ­theology of history, 124–7; and Thérèse Casgrain, 91–2; and Thomism, 64–5, 119; tribute to André Laurendeau, 494–5; on unbelief, 248–9; and United Church of Canada, 249–50; on Vietnam War, 463–4; on Walter Gordon, 232; and Walter Lippmann, 264, 266; on war effort, 41; on welfare state, 53–4, 57–8, 237–8, 326–7, 493–4; on youth, 64–7 Ryan, Blandine (Dorion – mother), 12–18, 19–20, 25, 59; and liberalism, 20–1; and Liberal Party, 22–3 Ryan, Gérald (brother), 13, 15, 25, 59 Ryan, Henri Albert (father), 14–15, 20–1

Index 677

Ryan, Madeleine, 174–9, 449, 450; critique of clergy, 202–3; and feminism, 269, 341; as inspiration for editorials, 314; and Jeunesse indépendante catholique féminine, 174–5; marriage to Claude Ryan, 176–9 Ryan, Yves (brother), 13, 15, 58–9, 492 Saint Leonard affair, 505–9 Saulnier, Lucien, 537–8 Sauriol, Paul, 297, 300, 308–9 Sauvé, Jeanne (Benoît), 63, 69, 76, 293, 540 Sauvé, Maurice, 63, 76, 159, 230 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr, 447; and concept of American intellectuals, 154–5 Scott, F.R., 78 Second Vatican Council, 222–9, 272, 319–21, 416, 435, 441–2 Second World Congress of the Lay Apostolate, 179 secularization, 45–6, 142–3, 145–6, 148–9, 163–4, 187–91, 191–9, 246, 248–51, 325–6, 329–41, 436– 7, 445–7; and sociology, 144–5, 221. See also dechristianization; unbelief Sharp, Mitchell, 417, 481 Shils, Edward, 464–5 Simard, Andrée, 494 Social Credit Party (Quebec), 238–9 social liberalism, 10–11, 173, 238–43, 318–20, 321–4, 396–7, 400, 410– 13, 417–18, 466–9, 482–3, 488, 522, 524–6, 529–30, 544–5 sociology: American, 80, 138–9, 140, 141, 146, 159–61, 165, 172, 196,

330–2, 334, 412, 451, 464–5; French, 193–4; and secularization, 144–5; at Université Laval, 80, 141–2 sovereignty-association, 425–6, 476–9 special status for Quebec, 385, 398–401 Stanfield, Robert, 370, 390, 416, 453, 492–4 student protest, 432–3, 455–6, 459–61 Taschereau, Louis Alexandre, 20–1 Taylor, Charles, 248, 405 Templeton, Charles, 198 Tetley, William, 529, 535–6 Thomas Aquinas, 47–8. See also Thomism Thomas, Alan, 372 Thomism, 47–8, 115; and federalism, 96–7; influence on Claude Ryan, 64–5, 118 Toynbee, Arnold, 133–4, 157–8, 319 Tremblay, Arthur, 409, 454 Tremblay Commission, 285 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 4, 5, 7, 16, 28, 107, 118, 353, 366, 375, 385, 401– 2, 403–7, 414, 421, 428, 450–3, 467, 481–4, 514, 550; and 1968 leadership race, 486–92; and authority, 181–2; and Claude Ryan, 102–3, 342–5, 418–21; and constitutional reform, 484–6; ­critique of Catholicism, 181–2, 208–9; critique of nationalism, 243–4, 278, 347; on democracy, 181–2; and federalism, 482–3, 499–502; on individualism, 182–3; and Jacques Maritain, 182; John

678 Index

Henry Newman’s influence on, 123; and liberalism, 10–11, 472–3, 482–3, 487–9, 497–8, 500–2, 543– 7; lifestyle, 191; and nationalization of hydro, 243–4; opposition to party politics, 90; pro-Vichy government, 41; reaction to October Crisis, 531–2 Turner, John, 230, 481, 531 ultramontanism, 227–8 unbelief, 248–9, 443–4 Union nationale, 407–10, 453–4, 503; and the nationalization of hydro, 243 United Church of Canada, 189–90, 249–50 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, 506 U Thant, 319

Vadeboncoeur, Pierre, 521 Vallières, Pierre, 334, 347, 469 Vanier, Georges, 449 Victoria Charter, 550 Vietnam War, 463–4 Villeneuve, Cardinal Rodrigue, 61 Wade, Mason, 299 Wagner, Claude, 312, 333, 352, 504 Waite, P.B., 364 War Measures Act, 514 Ward, Norman, 293 welfare state, 53–4, 91–2, 237–8, 326–7, 416, 492–3 Wheare, K.C., 380 Whyte, William, 172