He looked a little sullen, a long face that age had made rounder, the scotch glass screwed in his hand, speaking aloud with the air of a raven: thus appeared to those who passed him, at the bar of a a large hotel as elsewhere, the journalist Jean-Louis Gagnon at the end of his life. Founder of newspapers, director of several, radio operator, war correspondent, closely linked to the political world, he had resisted before the courts, in the 1950s, the wrath and gall of Maurice Duplessis, before pursuing a career golden bordered by liberal friendships.
A first biography of Jean-Louis Gagnon has just been published. The spy of the Kremlin is the fruit of the work of historian Yves Lavertu. The book is structured around the bad fate that the Duplessis regime is trying to do to this chubby and colorful character who spoke with a mouth borrowed from the behind of chickens.
“For Maurice Duplessis, any thought which is not mush for cats and which is expressed other than in the form of a pun smacks of communism”, affirms Jean-Louis Gagnon in 1954 about the Prime Minister. The journalist was thus promptly reduced to having to explain the connections he was given without any real basis with the Communists, without even anyone deigning to discuss the substance of his ideas, recalls the historian Lavertu. Pamphlets were printed at great expense against him by the National Union and distributed among the population. Gagnon will end up bringing a resounding lawsuit against Duplessis himself, as well as against the former mayor Camillien Houde and some other conservative figures.
Electoral priorities
How surprised to find that Jean-Louis Gagnon was one of the first to evoke, on the subject of the Duplessis regime, the expression “Grande Noirceur”? The term, strong of coffee, was nonetheless justified by several supporting elements, argued the journalist.
For those who, like him, intended to question the arbitrariness which Duplessis used to shamelessly impose his policies, “the cheuf” also reserved a dog for his dog.
In 1956, in the orgy of publicity which presided over the re-election of the National Union, a passing visitor, Father Pierre, observed that he had never seen such considerable sums devoted to political propaganda rather than to well-being of citizens, reports historian Yves Lavertu. Two million leaflets were then distributed by the men of the National Union in order to destroy Jean-Louis Gagnon. A police raid will eventually be authorized in the premises of the National Union, located in a building belonging to the Sulpicians. There, the agents spot defamatory leaflets printed against Jean-Louis Gagnon: he is presented as a “liberal-communist thinker”.
The journalist had already noted, in the pages of Canada new, that the American senator Joseph McCarthy, known for his witch hunt, had not invented the dangerous practice of guilt by association since “Maurice Duplessis had thought of it before him”.
First a fascist
At the end of the Second World War, to see in Jean-Louis Gagnon a man of the Kremlin or a red in the service of Stalinism, we must forget that he was first kneaded in the margins of a radical right-wing thought, recalls historian Yves Lavertu.
Collaborator of The nation of Paul Bouchard before being excluded, Gagnon is an ardent defender of authoritarian regimes and European fascist dictatorships. More than once he defends such regimes, even going so far as to advocate, as a way forward for French Canada, a sort of local providential dictator who would have more or less the stature of a Duce.
Inhabited by certain ideas of Lionel Groulx, Jean-Louis Gagnon also feeds, during the 1930s, on the fiery prose of the antidemocrats and royalists of the French Action movement of Charles Maurras, Jacques Bainville and Léon Daudet. In To live, the print he founded at that time, he defends the backfiring swellings of the most corrosive right and praises demagoguery.
The journalist supports the identity rants of European dictatorial regimes professed in the name of nothing less than civilization. He calls on this basis, for French Canada, for the creation of “a free and fascist state” based on the fantasy of a human history arched on concepts of cultural purity. “We must return to the Mediterranean and Latin sources from which we came”, wrote Jean-Louis Gagnon before the war, ignoring all the other influences with which a modern society is necessarily kneaded. On this road, he gets caught up in libels that lead him to court. In Granby, who became editor-in-chief of The Voice of the East, he was quickly driven out by a clergy who did not consider him docile enough.
Author, after the war, of news whose title would undoubtedly be badly received today, this polemicist at heart had first been trained with the pamphleteer Olivar Asselin. He made his honey from the readings of Victor Barbeau, the founder of the very conservative Académie canadienne-française, where he was eventually welcomed in 1963.
Change of direction
A man first attached to a sulphurous right, did Jean-Louis Gagnon turn 180 degrees after the war to find himself in the pay of Moscow?
In 1950, Georges-Émile Lapalme took over the leadership of the Liberal Party. He asks the journalist, whose energy and intelligence he appreciates, to explain to him what he means by “social justice”. This is the start of a close collaboration between the two men, reports historian Yves Lavertu. So much so that the Liberal leader, in a speech delivered on November 4, 1950, said he was using Gagnon’s words to explain the social positions he now adopted.
What is he talking about ? Poverty, inequality, anti-working class policies, the deleterious effects of the conservative mentality, the scorned right of association, the meager minimum wage, the need for old age pensions and support for “needy mothers” . Like Jean-Louis Gagnon, he wants to be a reformist.
After having been a correspondent in Canada for Agence France-Presse, Jean-Louis Gagnon went to work in Brazil. On his return, we hear him more and more on the radio. He finds himself at the head of newspapers. Along the way, he founded a literary review, the Writings from Canada French, now known as The writings. At the end of the 1950s, he became editor-in-chief of Press, before replacing its counterpart in the To have to, André Laurendeau, co-director of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. There, he has the task of completing work that will end up shelving his friend Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In the meantime, Jean-Louis Gagnon had launched a daily in Montreal, the New Journal, which will crash after a few months.
At the twilight of his life, Jean-Louis Gagnon was crowned with the notability of a pillar of his profession. His life was made. He had been UNESCO ambassador, then head of various para-governmental organizations. He was wearing his gray suit as if it were a second skin. It was long after that the Union Nationale regime had done everything possible to lose its reputation. Maurice Duplessis, he now believed in the trash of history, even if he was wary that one day we could imagine, by some blindness, that his old electoral maneuvers had something that could be mistaken for greatness. .