The true French Canadian is entirely determined by the powerful forces of ‘the blood, the soil and the past’, wrote Lionel Groulx, echoing the famous expression penned by Maurice Barrès — ‘the blood, the soil and the dead’, but Groulx saw the ideal as very rare.

Most French Canadians were ‘too much like those we see cluttering the streets: beings without consistency, without dignity, without pride, whom one would say are from no race, no country; mockeries of men who are an insult to mankind, and above all an insult to Catholic education’. […] As for the Jews, they will be parked in ghettos or deported to Palestine.

[…]

The League for the Defense of Canada was created on 22 January at the home of Abbé Groulx. André Laurendeau was named its principal Executive Officer. […] At its first public meeting on 11 February 1942, the crowd chanted, ‘Down with the Gazette!’ ‘Down with the Jews!’

At a youth rally at the Jean‐Talon market on 24 March, the crowd jeered at ‘the International Jewish Finance’, ‘the Toronto Two Hundred’ and the English newspaper Montreal Gazette. A small group screamed, ‘Kill them! Kill them!’ and smashed the windows of shops believed to be owned by Jews. I learnt later that Pierre Elliott Trudeau participated in that event.¹⁷

[…]

There had to be more to Trudeau’s and Levesque’s experiences of the Second World War than what they publicly revealed, especially since they had stated that they were keenly aware of its importance.²¹ What was their youthful stance on Pétain and the Vichy régime? On fascism, Mussolini, Hitler?

A deafening silence resonated in their memoirs. Was it evidence of some truth that had remained hidden in plain sight? After all, the fascism and the anti‐Semitism in the writings of Lionel Groulx, L’Action nationale, the Jeune‐Canada and Le Devoir had been there all along for all to see.

I surmised that their uneasy silence hid their attraction, if not their support, for the government of Philippe Pétain, fascist Italy and perhaps even [the Third Reich]. I was proven right to a large extent. In the 1930s, Lévesque and Pierre Trudeau, like so many others of their generation, had studied in classical colleges run by the Jesuits. They were fed a steady diet of extreme right‐wing nationalism cum fascism, with its aversion to democracy, political parties and [liberal] capitalism.²²

Both admired Lionel Groulx’s nationalism and were impressed by his novel L’appel de la race (The Call of the Race), which claimed that people from different races could not reproduce without dire consequences. The children of the novel’s protagonists — Jules de Lantagnac (French Canadian) and Maud Fletcher (English) — have severe intellectual and psychological issues bordering on mental illness.

Quoting Maurice Barres, one of France’s leading proponents of extreme right‐wing nationalism, Groulx wrote, ‘The races’ blood remains the same through the centuries.’

(Emphasis added.)

There is more that I could paste here, but I’ll end this excerpt thereat for the sake of brevity. The rest of this paper is a much needed tour of Québécois fascism.