Book Review

Canada and the United States

During a visit to Montreal's Expo 1967, General Charles de Gaulle declared: "Vive le Québec! Vive le Québec libre! Vive le Canada français et vive la France!" in a planned attempt to boost the political fortunes of the emerging Québécois neonationalist and separatist movements and to advance the geo-political interests of France. His intended visit to Ottawa was cancelled by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, who asked de Gaulle to leave immediately. At the time, few Canadians recalled that this was not de Gaulle's first visit to Canada. Indeed, General de Gaulle had made a triumphant tour of Ottawa, Quebec City, and Montreal in July 1944 as the co-president of the French Committee of National Liberation, soon to be transformed into the Provisional Government of the French Republic as the Allied Forces pushed back the Germans.	1
Contrary to the imbroglio of the second visit, which the Canadian government had foreseen but had not tried to prevent, de Gaulle's triumphant tour of 1944 was the culmination of a remarkable and dramatic turn of events that the Canadian government had initially stalled and then aided and abetted. Éric Amyot reveals in his superbly researched, lucidly written, and brilliantly analyzed account how the minuscule Gaullist forces defeated their far more powerful and entrenched Pétainist rivals in both France and North Africa as well as throughout Canada's French-Canadian communities. The United States' role in the struggle between the Vichy regime and Free France is well documented, and the historiography is mature and highly revealing of the complexities of both the French and American societies. Amyot's study is the first comprehensive account of how this titanic struggle was played out in Canada, primarily in Quebec's French-Canadian community but also in the corridors of power of Prime Minister William L. Mackenzie King's wartime Ottawa.	2
The traditional historiography maintains that the Pétain-de Gaulle (Vichy-Free France) struggle was a fixation exclusively of French-Canadian nationalistic clerical, political, and intellectual elites. To the contrary, Amyot demonstrates quite convincingly that ordinary French Canadians were preoccupied by the plight of France and became embroiled in the political and ideological battles over France's questionable survival and its future if it did survive. Indeed, Mackenzie King's Liberal government, very conscious of the French-Canadian community's widespread initial support for the Vichy regime of Henri-Phillipe Pétain, for purposes of national unity felt obliged to recognize Pétain's diplomatic representatives well into 1943, despite the overt hostility of a large majority of English-speaking Canadians.	3
Amyot contends, with solid evidence and rational argument, that the vast majority of French Canadians had an ambiguous attitude toward the Vichy regime. They supported Vichy not for its much-hated collaboration with Nazi Germany but because they identified with, and supported, Pétain's "national revolution." A still largely rural and traditional French-Canadian society, led by extremely conservative clerical, political, and intellectual elites, longed for an ancien régime France, one that re-embraced and fully supported traditional social, cultural, and religious values, behavior, and institutions (tarted up in the form of Catholic social corporatism). Indeed, most French Canadians were ecstatic to see the defeat of the corrupt, anticlerical, prosocialist Third Republic, even if it meant having to tolerate for a while the presence of the Germany's Nazi occupation forces. Unfortunately, what they got was far more than they dreamed of, including oppressive social and political policies and, of course, inhumane anti-Semitic beliefs and practices that took the lives of thousands of Jews.	. . .