He was sitting right in front of me. So close that our hands resting on the table could have touched, if he hadn’t used his to bring his cigarette to his lips or to amplify his arguments with his gestures. He was 53, I was 16. I was on the organizing committee that had brought him to Cégep de Thetford Mines on that day in 1974 or 1975. My classmates, he and I were discussing the day’s topics. The incredible mismanagement surrounding the construction of the Olympic Stadium. “Do you believe there is corruption in this? I asked her. It’s not impossible, he replied. Either way, it smelled bad. I was obviously very impressed to be in his presence, but amazed by his simplicity. The lack of distance. He chatted with us as if we were old comrades, worthy of his attention. He was perfectly at ease in this student environment.
Then, I committed the irreparable. I who had in front of me the man who was going to give a compass to my whole professional life, I got up to go and do something else that I found, at that moment, more interesting. I confess this today and will never give myself absolution. In the corridor, I had seen the Radio-Canada journalist following Lévesque. I think he was in the process of recharging, thanks to an electrical outlet, the battery of his recorder, in those days quite voluminous. He was the one I wanted to question. How did he organize his work? How did he edit it? How did he send it to headquarters? Did he follow Lévesque wherever he went?
I really only had one other real interaction with him. Silent but, in my opinion, full of meaning. He was visiting Paris in 1984 and held a press conference with the French Socialist Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy, in a large and magnificent hall of the Hotel Matignon. France’s formula for supporting the Quebec cause was well known: non-interference and non-indifference. Known and hated by Canada. However, we were far from the 1980 referendum, and no rematch was for the moment possible. French diplomacy, in moments of weakness, decides to cut the pear in half by claiming that France’s position has not changed, but refusing to utter the words. This was exactly the attitude, frankly childish, adopted by Pierre Mauroy.
At the time, I was a freelancer in Paris. My turn to ask a question, I stood up and asked the French Prime Minister, if I remember correctly: “You say that your position has not changed, so you can say it: non-interference and non- indifference. He replied that his position, indeed, had not changed.
I turned my gaze to Lévesque, who was staring at me with interest, as if curious to know what I would do next. Deciding to see this as encouragement, I drove home the point:
“Mr. Mauroy, what would it cost to pronounce the words, non-interference and non-indifference. It would be clear to everyone, right? »
Mauroy answered on the mode: you will leave me the choice of my remarks and not to dictate my answers to me.
I looked again at Lévesque, who, still staring at me, shrugged his shoulders slightly, as if to say: it’s a good try, son, but that’s all we’re going to get out of it today. I had the impression of sharing with him, at that moment, a strong emotion: frustration.
I was going to relive this frustration one morning in November 1987. Then correspondent of The Press in Washington, I received this order: “Take the tour of the American reactions to the death of René Lévesque.” The task seemed neither pleasant nor difficult. There are only a number of cognoscenti from Quebec to the United States, the list will soon be exhausted.
In New England the harvest was good. The governor of Vermont, Madeleine May Kunin, although on a trip to Italy, had her secretary recalled to sympathize, she said, with “this real tragedy”. A former governor of Maine returned my call to emphasize how “René,” he said, “brought honor to the people of Quebec.” And the adviser to Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts and then aspiring president, took it upon himself to immediately compose a little formula of regrets in which he spoke of Lévesque as a “source of pride” for his people. He had been there two years before. The trace was still hot.
I then tried my luck in official Washington, among professionals in international politics.
First glitch, at the State Department, at the press officer of the Canadian desk.
Who ? The-what ? Can you spell it? Who was he?
L-é-vesque. All day the same letters had to be laboriously repeated. The same explanation, patiently given.
To the White House. “Do we know him? But yes, President Ronald Reagan even briefly met him, shook his hand, at the summit in Quebec in March 1985. Ah good. We will call you back if…
At the political adviser of Senator Ted Kennedy, from Massachusetts, who must have met Lévesque half a dozen times, even ignorance. In that of New York senator Patrick Moynihan (who also received Lévesque in the summer of 1985), it is as if we were talking about a Serbo-Croatian leader.
Impatience grips me. A pain mixed with anger welled up inside me. With the advisers of three other senators, I played my best card. “Listen, for Quebec, this is the equivalent of the death of Martin Luther King. Your boss knows him, talked to him. Please deliver the message. I’d be surprised if he didn’t want to say at least one polite sentence. »
Then the phone went tragically silent.
I was able to transcend these frustrations by playing, seven years later, an unforeseen role. Having become an adviser to Jacques Parizeau, then freshly elected Prime Minister, I was to write the first speech he was going to deliver to a national council of the Parti Québécois since his election. I was convinced that we had to send a strong signal of openness, of enlargement of the independence coalition, if we wanted to have a chance of winning the referendum.
The speech was therefore entirely turned towards the reconciliation of the various factions which had been quarreling for at least 15 years within the party and the movement. I was simply flabbergasted to note that the name of René Lévesque was never mentioned, had become, so to speak, taboo, never pronounced. It is that the Parti Québécois, and its independence wing led by Jacques Parizeau, had still not made peace with the adventure of the beautiful risk of Lévesque. His name had become taboo, never pronounced. But it was the attempt and then the failure of the big risk that now made independence possible.
For the first time, therefore, I introduced into the speech a tribute to Lévesque and an appeal to all those who had believed in his fine risk of returning to the fold, since we were all now heading in the same direction.
Mr. Parizeau was going to deliver this speech with great sincerity and energy. If we had a fear that the militants, veterans of all these battles and bearing many scars, would have a bad reaction to this reconciling will, it was to know them badly. They received this breath of fresh air with enthusiasm. The sentence written to close the long passage which called for rediscovered unity still appears, sometimes, in the writings of each other: “that the last entered leave the door open, please”.
It was kind of my revenge on history and frustration. Play a role, minor but real, at a pivotal moment, to rehabilitate the memory of René Lévesque in his own political family.
It’s a bit as if, aware of my youthful mistake, I had come back to sit down opposite him.