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This is the grim climate in which Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque are now circling each other like wary knife fighters, probing before attack. Quebecois call the longstanding separatism debate one between head and heart, between reason and sentiment. Surely no two opponents better fit their respective roles.
In personality, Trudeau and Lévesque are almost exact opposites. Canada's Prime Minister is cerebral, disciplined, removed, impatient with his intellectual inferiors. His personal motto is "Reason over passion." Trudeau is a political theorist turned political activist who thinks of himself as a philosopher-statesman. His public speeches frequently sound like university lectures. First elected Prime Minister in 1968, partly because of his Kennedy-like charismatic appeal, he has seldom been far from the front pages, some of which he would prefer to have avoided—most notably those recounting the stormy breakup last spring of the marriage to his young, attractive wife Margaret.
Lévesque, by contrast, is a chainsmoking, disorganized, hot-tempered bundle of emotional energy from one of Quebec's poorest farming regions. His manner is shy and self-deprecating. While Trudeau's speeches are structured and formal, Lévesque's are extemporaneous, meandering marvels that somehow manage to reduce complex abstractions to simple—often too simple—terms. He is extraordinarily popular with his constituents; polls show that Lévesque would be overwhelmingly re-elected today.
Despite their differences, the careers of the two Quebecois are curiously intertwined, and reflect both the unity and conflict within Quebec's tightly knit society. Said Claude Ryan, until recently editor of Montreal's intellectual daily Le Devoir: "Destiny has for a long time prepared Messieurs Lévesque and Trudeau for a decisive confrontation."
Trudeau was born in 1919 in Montreal's affluent, French-speaking Outremont district, the son of a millionaire oil and land investor. He attended the best Jesuit schools, consistently topping his class. He went on to the University of Montreal law school, then spent two years studying politics and economics at Harvard and in Paris and London. He returned to Quebec in 1949 as a labor lawyer and economist. Trudeau flirted with socialism and became an outspoken civil libertarian, fighting against the autocratic and nationalist provincial government of Premier Maurice Duplessis. Early on, Trudeau accepted the idea of Quebec as a nation and a people, but never saw the necessity that it be a political state. As he later wrote in his political journal Cite Libre (Open City), ethnically based governments are "by nature intolerant, discriminatory, and, when all is said and done, totalitarian."
Lévesque was born in New Carlisle (pop. 1,100) on Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula. The son of a local lawyer, he attended Laval University in Quebec City, where he earned a B.A. but spent much of his time playing poker (he is "reckless" at it, says a partner of later days). Lévesque was suspended from Laval's law school in his third year for smoking in a lecture hall, and