The Blue Shirts

Hugues Théorêt, Ferdinanda Van Gennip, Howard Scott

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780776624693
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

While Adolf Hitler was seizing power in Germany, Adrien Arcand waslaying the foundations in Quebec for his Parti national social chrétien.The Blue Shirts, as its members were called, wore a military uniformand prominently displayed the swastika. Arcand saw Jewish conspiracywherever he turned and his views resonated with his followers who, likehim, sought a scapegoat for all the ills eroding society.
Even after his imprisonment during the Second World War, the fanaticalAdrien Arcand continued his correspondence with those on the frontlinesof anti-semitism. Until his death in 1967, he pursued his campaign ofpropaganda against communists and Jews.
Hugues Théorêt describes a dark period in Quebec's ideological historyusing an objective approach and careful, rigorous research in this book, which won the 2015 Canada Prize (Federation for the Humanities andSocial Sciences).

Chapter I

Le Goglu Builds its Nest

Arcand entered the world with the twentieth century, a century that unquestionably saw its fair share of crises and upheavals. Arcand’s life is intimately connected to the extraordinary events that marked that century’s first fifty years, notably, Canada’s second industrial revolution, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of Europe’s fascism, and the Second World War.

Born on October 3, 1899, on Laurier Avenue in the parish of Immaculée-Conception in Montreal, Arcand was the fourth in a family of twelve children. His father, Narcisse Arcand, originally from Saint-Joseph-de-Deschambault, in the county of Portneuf, was a carpenter. His mother, Marie-Anne Mathieu, originally from Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, was a school principal, an organist, and a chapel mistress. When Arcand was born, Quebec was preparing to enter a new century. The new railroad and the hydro power of the St. Lawrence River and its tributaries attracted investors, who opened plants in Montreal, Quebec City, Trois-Rivières, and Sherbrooke, as well as in smaller cities and towns like Hull, Valleyfield, Joliette, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, and Saint-Hyacinthe. It was the era of textiles and pulp and paper. These industries attracted labour forces to those regions, but at the same time caused a rural exodus and brought about urbanization. Difficult working conditions soon prompted workers to organize themselves into unions. Thus began the string of labour disputes that would mark the first half of the twentieth century in Quebec.

In the Old World, France was being shaken by a different kind of turmoil: an unprecedented wave of anti-Semitism had been triggered by Édouard Drumont, who held Jews responsible for every scandal and crisis besetting France at the end of the nineteenth century. His book, La France juive, which he self-published in 1886, had devastating effects in France.¹ Sixty thousand copies were sold in one year; 201 editions were eventually printed. In April 1892, Drumont launched La Libre Parole.² The daily attacked French Jews, especially those who held important positions in the National Assembly and in the courts, police, banks, and the army. It was Drumont’s unwarranted and crude accusations that triggered the scandal surrounding the Dreyfus affair. He used the trial of the French officer Alfred Dreyfus—accused of delivering military secrets to the Germans—as a pretext to denounce the presence of Jews in the French army. France was split over the Dreyfus affair. Those supporting Dreyfus’s innocence included Republicans, Freemasons, anti-clerics, Jews, and anti-militarists. On the other side were the conservatives, monarchists, anti-Semites, military, Catholics, and Catholic clergy. In La Libre Parole, Drumont invited his anti-Semitic readers to take to the barricades. In several cities, synagogues were vandalized and stores owned by Jews had their windows smashed. The Dreyfus affair reverberated as far as Quebec, where newspapers subject to Catholic oversight at times supported the cause of the antidreyfusards. La Patrie was a case in point. When Émile Zola published his famous letter condemning the antidreyfusards on January 17, 1898, the paper discredited him, saying, “Few people take these kinds of accusations seriously, the kind that Zola is making.”

At the end of a legal saga lasting twelve years, on July 12, 1906, the Court of Appeal rendered its decision pronouncing Captain Dreyfus innocent, exonerating him and overturning his 1894 conviction. Certainly, justice was dispensed. But the damage was done. Less than forty years later, Léon Daudet, Charles Maurras, Henry Coston, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Georges Bernanos, and others would raise Drumont’s spectre and his writings would once again fuel hatred of the Jews in France. Was Arcand influenced by Drumont? Most definitely. Arcand quotes him several times in his newspapers and repeats the same themes found in Drumont’s work fifty years earlier. Like Drumont, Arcand saw Jewish conspiracies everywhere. The two men were convinced that Jews controlled the banks and the politicians. Drumont held the unshakeable belief that Jews were responsible for starting the French Revolution in 1789, just as Arcand was convinced that they had engineered the Russian Revolution of 1917. We will return to this in another chapter.

While France was dealing with an explosion of anti-Semitism, Great Britain was preoccupied with defending its empire on all continents. In October of 1899, the month Arcand was born, the British army launched an attack on the Boers in South Africa. Canadian volunteers offered to go and fight in support of the British Crown. Canada was divided over the role the country should play in this conflict. English Canadians pressured Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier to come to the aid of England, while French Canadians wanted the country to remain neutral in this war, which they believed was not theirs. By rejecting British imperialism, Henri Bourassa embodied the distrustful attitude of French Canada toward Great Britain. The Canadian government decided to compromise. It allocated $3 million to support the war effort, and 8,300 Canadians went as volunteers.

This was also the era of imperial conferences, prompting Canada to separate itself from its status as a British colony and increasingly assert its sovereignty. But the ties binding the mother country to the colony were still strong. When in 1909 England called a conference on the defence of the empire, Canada put forward the idea of creating a Canadian navy. In 1910, Wilfrid Laurier’s government presented the Naval Service Bill in the House of Commons, where it received approval; immediately, Canada purchased two ships from England. The bill caused a general outcry throughout the country, especially in Quebec, where Henri Bourassa denounced it as a war measure which, in his view, sought only to satisfy the authorities in London. The naval bill and the problems experienced by francophones outside Quebec paved the way for the first French Canadian nationalist movements, led by Bourassa, Armand Lavergne, Jules Fournier, and Olivar Asselin. Arcand found considerable inspiration in these defenders of the French fact in Canada. This emergent nationalism increased during the First World War.

Arcand was fourteen when, on June 28, 1914, the Austro-Hungarian prince, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a nationalist Serb. Believing that the Serbian government was involved in the plot, Austria-Hungary, supported by Germany, gave Serbia an ultimatum. When Serbia did not yield to the demands of Austria-Hungary, the latter declared war on Serbia and a domino effect ensued. Russia, as Serbia’s protector, entered the war against Austria-Hungary. Germany, in turn, declared war on Russia, on August 1, 1914, and on France two days later. Great Britain followed, a day behind France. Canada had no choice but to follow the mother country. All these factors then converged and led to the outbreak of the First World War.

At the start of the conflict, Canada had a regular army of only 3,110 men. This meant a massive campaign for voluntary mobilization had to be launched. It wasn’t enough. In 1917, 13,400 Canadians died in combat. The country had only 5,500 recruits to pursue the hostilities overseas. Prime Minister Robert Borden planned to impose conscription. Immediately, the country divided between francophone and anglophone opinion. Quebec was fiercely opposed to obligatory enrolment, while English Canada supported it overwhelmingly. Despite the rifts it caused, the Canadian government adopted a bill forcing all bachelors or childless widowers aged twenty to thirty-five to don the uniform. In April 1917, 424,000 men, out of a population of eight million Canadians, were enlisted. Of this number, only 4.5 percent were French Canadian. This rejection of the overseas war was tragically expressed during anti-conscription demonstrations that turned into riots in Quebec on March 31,1918. Rioters shot at soldiers. The army then opened fire on the civilians. Four protestors were killed and several were wounded. In all, fifty-eight protestors were arrested. On April 2, 1918, the front-page headline of La Presse read “FIVE CIVILIANS KILLED BY SOLDIERS IN QUEBEC.” This national crisis would create a deep divide between the two founding peoples of Canada.

At the end of the war, in November 1918, the Canadian economy began to slow down. The drop in demand for goods and services brought about plant closings and increased unemployment. This period coincided with the expansion of communism in many parts of the world. The victory of the Bolshevik Party in Russia in October 1917 propelled Lenin into the political foreground. Energized by Marxist idealism, he drew sympathy from themany Russians seeking change. Marxist-Leninist ideas were gaining favour among the masses as well as the intellectuals, both in Russia and across Europe. In French Canada, communism was slow to take hold. The Catholic Church, which had always exercised a strong ascendancy over the French Canadian people, was fiercely opposed to communism. Despite this ecclesiastical opposition, the precarious economy and difficult working conditions provided fertile ground for the development of the communist movement.

Those were the circumstances that precipitated the formation of the Communist Party of Canada in 1921. In a search to extend its influence to Canada’s worker movement, it changed its name and became the Workers’ Party of Canada. In 1923 it went back to its original name. In 1925, the left became divided and the moderate wing founded the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) political party in 1932. During the 1930s, the Canadian Communist Party achieved a breakthrough in Canada’s francophone community. Activists worked within several different groups to rally new members, seeking out mainly the unemployed, but also workers who were militant within their unions, as unions were experiencing rapid growth during the 1920s. For example, 1921 saw the founding of the Catholic Workers’ Confederation of Canada (Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada; CTCC), with 26,000 members. Young Arcand witnessed the birth of this worker movement through the eyes of his father, who, as a carpenter, was very involved in the union scene at the start of the twentieth century.

Arcand’s Parents

Born on April 24, 1871, Narcisse Arcand Jr. was the eighth child of Narcisse Arcand Sr., a farmer, and Mélanie Belisle. The Arcand family was well established in the community of Deschambault. Their roots dated back to the seventeenth century, when their ancestor Simon Arcand, originally from Bordeaux, France, had settled in Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade before coming to cultivate land in Deschambault. (It is interesting to note that Adrien Arcand’s uncle Georges is the grandfather of the well-known contemporary Arcand brothers: Denys, a film producer; Bernard, an anthropologist; and Gabriel, an actor. They claim nothing in common with their anti-Semitic distant relative.)

Narcisse Arcand Jr. settled in Montreal around 1895, taking on carpentry work. On October 6, 1896, he married Marie-Anne Mathieu. The couple would have twelve children. Narcisse helped found the Workers’ Party in Montreal in 1899, and the following year he became a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. With roots in the United States, this association was one of the largest workers’ unions in Canada at the beginning of the twentieth century. Narcisse belonged to Local 134, the section for Montreal’s French-speaking carpenters and joiners. He was soon to take on an important role within the United Brotherhood. By early 1902 he had risen to the position of the union’s provincial organizer. He helped set up numerous locals of carpenters and joiners, in particular, Local 1554 in Thetford Mines in 1907 and Local 1108 in Saint-Hyacinthe in 1915. In 1910, he was sent as a delegate to the United Brotherhood convention in the United States. Narcisse was not afraid of a challenge. In 1912, he even proposed that the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, a British rival union, should be expelled from the United Brotherhood and from the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLC). He was also a member of TLC’s executive committee for the province of Quebec in 1913, 1914, and 1918, becoming its president in 1917.

Narcisse also took part in the debate that surrounded the Jewish-schools question in the early twentieth century: he represented the Workers’ Party before the royal commission created in 1909 to study the situation of the Catholic schools in Montreal. He argued in favour of amalgamating all the Catholic school boards of the Island of Montreal with the Montreal Catholic School Commission toward ensuring standardized school administration and curriculum. Is it a coincidence that his son would join the crusade against the so-called David bill concerning Jewish schools twenty years later, in 1929? Might his father have influenced his stance in this regard? It is probably safe to assume so.

Narcisse Arcand’s organizational talents also took him into politics. He was campaign manager for Alphonse Verville, the workers’ candidate in the riding of Hochelaga in the 1904 provincial election. Verville was defeated in that election but won a seat in the House of Commons in 1906 in Maisonneuve. Narcisse ran as the Workers’ Party candidate in the provincial riding of Montréal-Dorion in the general elections of 1912. He came in third, garnering 921 votes, behind Conservative Georges-Aldéric Pariseault, who had 1,082 votes, and Liberal Georges Mayrand, with 1,620 votes. According to Bernard Dansereau, he was involved in every political battle going at the start of the twentieth century.³ In 1917, Narcisse helped set up the Quebec provincial section of the Canadian Labour Party. In the provincial election of 1923, he ran for election once more, this time in the riding of Montréal-Mercier. He came in third again, behind Liberal Louis-Georges Lapointe (2,570 votes) and Conservative Adolphe L’Archevêque, who was elected with 4,807 votes. Narcisse had polled just 925 votes. All things considered, Narcisse Arcand had more success in labour unions. Looking back, he left his mark as president of his union’s provincial council from 1921 to 1927, and, in 1925, as secretary of the Montreal district council. He died on February 14, 1927, aged fifty-five.

It is quite paradoxical that Narcisse Arcand Jr. should be one of the pioneers of the Quebec workers’ movement while his son developed into a fanatical anti-communist who would, in the 1930s, become the principal spokesperson for fascism in Canada. Did Adrien Arcand choose that stance as a reaction against his father? Not likely. He admired his father a great deal. In his own words, “I owe to my energetic and very courageous father a love of work which is my most precious inheritance and a certain boastfulness for which I am praised by some and rebuked by others.”⁴

Adrien’s mother, Marie-Anne Mathieu, had a less prominent role in his life. She was a school principal, organist, and chapel mistress. Did he inherit his faith in God...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Le Goglu Builds its Nest
• Chapter II: Le Goglu Takes Flight
• Chapter III: The Blue Shirts
• Chapter IV: The Key to the Mystery
• Chapter V: The Canadian Union of Fascists
• Chapter VI: Arrests and Internments
• Chapter VII: Liberation
• Chapter VIII: The Cold War Years
• Chapter IX: Post-War Anti-Semitic Correspondence
• Chapter X: Arcand’s Legacy
• Conclusion
• The Historiographical Debates
• Bibliography
• Index