Homegrown Fascism

The history of right-wing nationalism and anti-Semitism in Quebec, particularly in the interwar years, has been the subject of much research, critical writing and angry controversy in the last couple of decades. Although Esther Delisle was certainly not the first historian to take up this delicate subject, her Le traître et le Juif: Lionel Groulx, Le Devoir et le délire du nationalisme d’extrême droite dans la province de Québec, 1929–1939—I wrote a preface to the English translation—did cause both an academic and a popular uproar. Some critics claimed that her scholarship was careless, but the loudest objections came from professors and journalists who were offended by her insistence that the much admired, although often misunderstood, abbé Lionel Groulx was a racist anti-Semite. Soon, more research resulted in more nuanced studies. Esther Delisle, bloodied but unbowed, was the first to uncover the quasi-fascist and anti-Semitic dalliance of the youthful Pierre Elliott Trudeau and others. Yves Lavertu and Jean-François Nadeau, for example, examined the shelter Duplessis provided for such Pétainiste refugees as Klaus Barbie’s buddy Jacques Dugé de Bernonville. (Nadeau’s Robert Rumilly, L’homme de Duplessis also includes some new material on Conrad Black and the Union Nationale.) Now more is known about these activities in Quebec than in any other part of Canada, not because they did not exist elsewhere, but because not much research has been done. For example, quite a lot is known about the Christie Pits riots in Toronto in 1933 and about Ernst Zundel in more recent times. But less is known about fascist movements led by John Ross Taylor and Joseph C. Farr in Toronto, and William Whittaker. Whittaker’s Winnipeg newspaper, The Canadian Nationalist, was the English-language organ of the Canadian Nationalist Party, whose Überführer was Adrien Arcand.

There are glimpses of anglophone fascist and anti-Semitic individuals in Nadeau’s excellent study of Arcand, The Canadian Führer: The Life of Adrien Arcand, but his principal concern is tracing the history of this ugly fascist phenomenon in Quebec from the interwar period until Arcand’s death in the late 1960s. His book is both more and sometimes less than a biography: Arcand is the focus, but numerous other actors appear and additional nationalist groups are analyzed. One of the book’s many strengths is that Nadeau shuts out the shouting match that surrounded Delisle’s work as well as avoids the parti pris that made much of that earlier free-for-all futile. It is not that Nadeau lacks a point of view: his dislike of the leading and supporting actors in his fascinating story is pronounced. But he is cool and detached and his research is thorough and critical. The translation is smooth and readable. A rigorous editor could probably have eliminated repetitious passages and perhaps shortened excursions that sometimes lead rather far away from the main subject. For example, the detailed history of La Presse and the Berthiaume family quarrels or the summaries of post-war B movies depicting Nazi and fascist adventures might have been shorter. Still, some of the digressions add intriguing information.

Arcand’s early life is important for several reasons. He was born into a working class family. His carpenter father, Narcisse Arcand, was an active trade union organizer in an international, secular union rather than a Catholic one. He strongly supported the Labour Party in Quebec, which modelled itself on the British Labour Party. In 1906 Narcisse worked hard and successfully for the election of Labour candidate Alphonse Verville to the federal parliament. (Verville turned out to be Lib-Lab.) Although a party of the moderate left, Labour, like some other workers’ organizations, was mildly xenophobic, especially when it came to Chinese immigration. This was the atmosphere in which the future fascist leader grew up and that, together with the conservative Catholicism he absorbed in his classical college education, would eventually shape his ideology and determine the constituency to which he would appeal. Nadeau’s account of classical college life and education that led many male students to the priesthood is excellent. For a working class boy Arcand was unusual in obtaining such an advanced level of schooling. Certainly his Catholicism was confirmed and deepened, especially by his Sulpician teachers, but he decided against the priesthood.

Instead he chose journalism. In 1920 he found employment at the ultra-conservative La Patrie writing about labour, next at The Montreal Star (he was already bilingual), covering politics and finally as a general reporter for La Presse, also a conservative daily. At the latter newspaper he followed in his father’s path working to organize a trade union for journalists. For that activity he was fired in 1929, but not before he had gained an ally who would support him in many ways, including financially, for more than a decade. Eugène Berthiaume, the brother who had lost out in the family battle over control of La Presse after the death of the founder, recognized Arcand’s journalistic talents, judged him an ally in his efforts to oust his brother and shared many of the young man’s developing right-wing views.

For the next decade, Arcand worked for a variety of small newspapers and founded the satirical Le Goglu (bobolink) with its motto “laugh hard, die fat.” As a first step toward nationalist fascism, he established the Ordre Patriotique des Goglus. That movement advocated a series of panaceas such as trust busting, return to the land and achat chez nous (which is sometimes interpreted as anti-Semitic), common to many French-Canadian nationalists during the Depression.

Throughout his book Nadeau is very good at drawing comparisons between Arcand’s views and those of many other right-wing nationalist movements in the 1930s. The main difference was that Arcand, while a French-Canadian nationalist, did not favour independence or even radical autonomy for Quebec, although he became an ardent supporter of Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale. He wanted to lead a pan-Canadian movement that would remain associated with the monarchy and the British Empire. As his thought developed he was also more clearly anti-Semitic than other right-wing nationalists.

That Arcand should support the continued relationship with the British Empire may seem surprising. Nadeau argues that his extreme conservatism led him to admire the monarchy and the Empire as guarantees of stability in a world threatened by communism and especially by the Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Of course, many French Canadians, perhaps even most, found little reason to leave the Empire provided it left Canada practically free of military obligations. Moreover, Nadeau might have pointed out that one of the earliest separatist writers, Jules-Paul Tardivel, editor of La Verité and author of the novel Pour La Patrie, advocated a Laurentie separate from Canada but remain a British colony. That the ultramontane Tardivel was born in the United States of a French father and an English mother makes the apparent paradox even more delicious.

Arcand was influenced in his increasingly Nazi like views by British anti-Semites and crypto-Nazis. He read and translated Lord Sydenham of Combe’s The Jewish World Problem and became a disciple of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. He also maintained contact with other English-speaking fascists, notably in the United States. And then there was the vicious French anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline who visited Montreal in the spring of 1938. (He would later claim on a false identity card that he was born in Montreal.) He returned to France, after addressing a meeting of fascists from various parts of Canada, satisfied that Arcand and friends would prevent Canada from becoming another Spain. Each of these mentors and intellectual influences further strengthened what was Arcand’s fundamental belief: “Jewry, because of its very essence, because of its destructive instincts, because of its eternal legacy of corruption, because of its exclusively materialistic sense—this is the great danger … That is why the Jewish question must be the basis for any genuine fascism, any serious movement of national regeneration.” As Nadeau writes, “hatred of Jews became central to every aspect of his argument. For him, anti-Semitism became almost a religion.” That, of course, did not prevent him from remaining a faithful Catholic or even from winning the support of a few members of the lower clergy. He named his party the Parti National Social Chrétien du Canada.

Racism and anti-Semitism, as expressed in speeches, pamphlets, Le Goglu and Le fasciste canadien, underlay all of the propaganda of Arcand and his movement: opposition to parliamentary democracy, the führer principle, corporatism and economic nationalism. There was a striking lack of originality in Arcand’s ideology. It had no serious historical dimension, the grounding that most right-wing nationalist thought rested on, and little in the way of general principles. Nazism, which Arcand admired and welcomed on its arrival in power in Germany in 1933, was far more complex intellectually. Christopher Krebs, a German-born classical scholar, has recently shown in A Most Dangerous Book that the Nazi ideology owed a great deal to centuries of interpretation and misinterpretation by German classicists, historians and anthropologists of Tacitus’s Germania. And there was much else: nationalist history, the racial theories of Gobineau and Rosenberg, and so on. Arcand’s reading, as Nadeau shows, may have been wide but his thinking was shallow and derivative. “He had the superficial erudition of those who devour newspapers.” Like all anti-Semites he was delusional to the point of near derangement—he even called for a boycott of the Montreal Canadiens, the beloved team being controlled by Jews!

One of Arcand’s great successes was in capturing attention and convincing the press and the authorities that his movement was large and growing without providing any concrete supporting evidence. One thing is clear: his supporters were mainly unskilled Montreal workers who paid 25 cents per month in their desperate search to find some hope of economic security. The number of members, Nadeau claims, probably never exceeded the 450 that the RCMP recorded, although he adds that as many as 1,500 is possible. Arcand’s newspaper had a larger readership, perhaps somewhere around 3,500 at its peak. His followers obviously formed a marginal movement but one that managed, with swastikas, fascist salutes, public meetings, marches and noisy demonstrations, to present itself as “the symbol of a threatening power.”

Being taken as a serious threat meant that when war came in 1939 Arcand was one of the first to be interned under the Defence of Canada Regulations. He and others, like Camillien Houde, who opposed compulsory registration, remained without trial for the duration. Houde, when peace returned, won election to Parliament in 1945 but never took his place, hoping his empty seat would be a daily reminder to Louis St. Laurent of the injustice that had been done to him. Arcand, once released, continued to broadcast his scurrilous views to a small audience, slipping gradually into cranky obscurity. He irrationally blamed the communist member of Parliament Fred Rose for his imprisonment and, naturally, joined the Holocaust deniers. Prison left him unrevised and unrepentant.

Nor did the war and the destruction of European Jewry completely erase prejudice against Jews in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada. In 1954 abbé Groulx, answering a letter from an admirer who asked what needed to be done about “le problème juif,” replied that while Christian charity forbade anti-Semitism it remained true that the Jews presented a threat to French Canadians. His explanation included almost every anti-Semitic cliché expressed by himself, by Arcand and others before the Holocaust: revolutionary, rootless and unassimilable, “sa passion innée de l’argent,” monopolists, promoters of all shady businesses and pornographic enterprises (books, cinemas, theatres, etc.), lack of professional ethics. The list goes on. And the solution? He despairingly offered none—certainly not accommodations raisonables. Norman Jacques, Ron Gostick, Ernst Zundel, James Keegstra and others in English Canada and elsewhere would have applauded Groulx’s caricature, perhaps proposing specific, less charitable solutions.

Jean-François Nadeau’s study of Adrien Arcand and his times is an engrossing read. It clarifies many disputed issues and raises the discussion of right-wing French-Canadian nationalism and anti-Semitism to a sophisticated new level. A talented historian, Nadeau has put this despicable figure into a rich context of many marginal movements that shared vari- ous parts of the fascist leader’s anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-parliamentary, search for un chef—a charismatic leader—who would save the nation from its many ills. In this account many sometimes surprising figures play out their role: Dr. Paul-Émile Lalanne, Lucien Dansereau, Joseph-Anaclet Chalifoux, Joseph-Maurice Scott, Walter-Patrice and Dostaler O’Leary, André Laurendeau, Pierre Péladeau and others. That context and those characters make Arcand more understandable as “a man moving in the shadows on the margins of society under the banner of the swastika, that blood-soaked hooked cross.”