Pierre Trudeau - Education and The Second World War

Education and The Second World War

Trudeau earned his law degree at the Université de Montréal in 1943. During his studies he was conscripted into the Canadian Army like thousands of other Canadian men, as part of the National Resources Mobilization Act. When conscripted, he decided to join the "Canadian Officers' Training Corps", and he then served with the other conscripts in Canada, since they were not assigned to any overseas military service until after the Conscription Crisis of 1944 (after the Invasion of Normandy that June.) Before this, all Canadians serving overseas were volunteers, and not conscripts.

Trudeau said he was willing to fight during World War II, but he believed that to do so would be to turn his back on the population of Quebec that he believed had been betrayed by the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King. Trudeau reflected on his opposition to conscription and his doubts about the war in his Memoirs (1993): "So there was a war? Tough... if you were a French Canadian in Montreal in the early 1940s, you did not automatically believe that this was a just war... we tended to think of this war as a settling of scores among the superpowers."

In a Outremont by-election in 1942, Trudeau campaigned for the anticonscription candidate Jean Drapeau (later the Mayor of Montreal), and he was thenceforth expelled from the Officers' Training Corps for lack of discipline. The National Archives of Canada, in its biographical sketches of Canadian Prime Ministers, records show that on one occasion during the war, Trudeau and his friends drove their motorcycles wearing Prussian military uniforms, complete with pointed steel helmets.

After the war, Trudeau continued his studies, first taking a master's degree in political economy at Harvard University's Graduate School of Public Administration. He then studied in Paris, France in 1947 at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. Finally, he enrolled for a doctorate at the London School of Economics, but failed to finish his thesis.

Trudeau was interested in Marxist ideas in the 1940s and his Harvard dissertation was on the topic of Communism and Christianity. At Harvard, Trudeau found himself profoundly challenged as he discovered that his "... legal training was deficient, his knowledge of economics was pathetic." Thanks to the great intellectual migration away from Europe's fascism, Harvard had become a major intellectual centre in which Trudeau profoundly changed. Despite this, Trudeau found himself an outsider – a French Catholic living for the first time outside of Quebec in the predominantly Protestant American Harvard University.< This isolation deepened finally into despair, and led to his decision to continue his Harvard studies abroad.

In 1947, Trudeau travelled to Paris to continue his dissertation work. Over a five-week period he attended many lectures and became a follower of personalism after being influenced most notably by Emmanuel Mounier. The Harvard dissertation remained undone when Trudeau entered a doctoral program to study under the renowned socialist economist Harold Laski in the London School of Economics. This cemented Trudeau's belief that Keynesian economics and social science were essential to the creation of the "good life" in democratic society.