No Reincarnation Without Government Permission: And Other Stories From 50 Years of Newspapering by Norman Webster

Author:Norman Webster [Webster, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781988025551
Google: PGFtzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Barlow Book Publishing
Published: 2020-11-12T20:41:15+00:00

July 29, 2007. “Forty Years Later, de Gaulle’s Words Still Make the Blood Boil: Jean Drapeau Had a Lot to Say on the Speech—Too Much for the Gazette and La Presse.” Montreal Gazette

It was 40 years ago this past week that Charles de Gaulle amazed and appalled our little world with his cry of “Vive le Québec libre!”… It was a shameless, almost unprecedented intervention in the affairs of a friendly state—a call, indeed, for the very rupture of that state, and damn the consequences. Just recalling it decades later brings on dangerously high blood pressure.

There was confusion, initially, about whether the French president really meant what he seemed to be saying. Sources in Paris murmured that the great man had perhaps suffered a loss of zee marbles, carried away by the enthusiasm of the crowd.

Nice thought, but no cigar. From the moment he cut short his visit and returned to Paris, the general exhibited an unmistakable, cold-blooded enmity. Diplomatically, oratorically, de Gaulle attacked the unity of Canada at every occasion. He even, as a furious Pierre Trudeau pointed out, sent agents provocateurs into Canadian minority communities to stir things up.

It was all carefully calculated. But perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. For the most offensive statement from Montreal’s city-hall balcony on that memorable July 24, 1967, was not the call for Québec libre; no, it was the general’s comparison of his greeting by Québécois that day along the north shore of the St. Lawrence with the atmosphere in Paris on its liberation in 1944.

Let’s repeat that. Charles de Gaulle, on a visit to France’s ally, Canada, compared the condition of francophones here to French men and women under Hitler’s boot during the Second World War. This is not something one lets slip accidentally; it is a political haymaker.

Prime Minister Lester Pearson, responding icily, noted that many Canadians had given their lives to liberate de Gaulle’s beloved France. Then, in that diplomatic code word for monstrous-outrageous-insulting-take-that-you-cad, he called the general’s remarks “unacceptable.” De Gaulle immediately went home, saved from having to visit that symbol of Anglo oppression, Ottawa.

The 40th anniversary prompted me to ransack my files this week and recover a few pages of notes. These were reminders of an episode involving the one and only Jean Drapeau.

Drapeau, mayor of Montreal, father of Expo 67, a towering figure of the day, was there with de Gaulle when the general launched his bombshell. He had never written about it. La Presse and the Gazette decided to approach him on the matter. Claude Masson and I, assistant publisher and editor-in-chief of our respective newspapers, drove out to Drapeau’s modest quarters on Sherbrooke St. E.

“Bonjour, monsieur le maire,” we chorused when he opened the door. It was just about the last word either of us got in. He gave us an old-time, two-handed political handshake and began to speak in torrents. At 76, a bit shrunken from the glory days, he still slept only five hours a night. It did not leave him short of energy.

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