Young Trudeau: 1919–1944, Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, a highly critical account of the youth of a man and written by self-described admiring friends, is as paradoxical as its subject. Max and Monique Nemni befriended Pierre Trudeau after meeting him in the collective effort to resurrect Cité Libre to fight Quebec separatism in 1991, confided their interest in writing his intellectual biography and were eventually given access to his closed private archives. But unlike the official biographer, John English, who has been working in those archives for years, the Nemnis were so “shocked and troubled” by their discoveries about the early period in Trudeau’s life that they decided to publish them in a stand-alone work: the resulting account of Trudeau’s intellectual development ends with his departure for Harvard in 1944, at age 25.
What the Nemnis found in Trudeau’s archives was not the rebel of legend, but evidence that the fatherless adolescent...
John Hellman, professor of history at McGill University, was a member of the advisory board of the revived Cité Libre and has written several books on the history of personalism.
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