QUEBEC'S NASTY GIRL
Like the heroine of a German film who traces her hometown's past, historian Esther Delisle uncovers wartime links between the French Canadian political elite and Nazi collaborators
Esther Delisle, who stirred up a furor with a study exposing the anti-Semitism in 1930s French Canadian nationalism, is about to do it again. This time, she has documented how key French Canadian politicians and public personalities smoothed the way for French Nazi war criminals and Nazi sympathizers to escape into Canada after World War II, and protected them once they got there.
In new research she plans to turn into a book, the 40-year-old Delisle, a post-doctoral fellow at Montreal's McGill University, says she has uncovered disturbing similarities between the postwar Canadian Embassy in Paris and the infamous "Rat Line," which spirited Nazis using false papers to new lives outside devastated Europe.
One of the ex-Nazis smuggled into Quebec was known as the Count De Bernonville (it later turned out that the title was phony). Jacques Dug de Bernonville's wartime record included a stint as the Vichy French official responsible for "Jewish affairs" in Morocco, and later in occupied France, where he was a close associate of Klaus Barbie, the German "Butcher of Lyons."
In Quebec, De Bernonville was joined by Georges Simenon, the Belgian writer and Nazi sympathizer, and about eight other wartime collaborators. The dashing and handsome De Bernonville was the darling of the French-Canadian intellectual elite, with its strong fascist sympathies. He remained in the province until the early 1950s, when the Canadian government expelled him, and was murdered in Brazil in 1951.
What has been called "L'Affaire De Bernonville" was no secret at the time. Indeed his presence in the province was staunchly defended by French-Canadian newspapers, some of which observed that if he had been "De Bernovitch," a Jewish Communist, no one would have said a word about his being there.
But Delisle's research takes the story a step farther. She has discovered how De Bernonville and his associates came under the protection of prominent and very respectable Quebec citizens, including Louis St. Laurent, later to become prime minister of Canada; Maurice Duplessis, at the time Quebec's provincial premier; and the former rector of Quebec's Francophone Laval University, the late mayor of Montreal and the designer of the provincial flag.
Before De Bernonville was expelled, St. Laurent told him that his hubris had led to deportation. "Damned fool," St. Laurent wrote in a letter to the bogus count. "If you had kept your mouth shut, you could have stayed."
Delisle says she also has evidence connecting the Canadian Embassy in Paris - which before the war was told by immigration officials to regard the prospect of even one Jewish refugee arriving in Canada as "too many" -with the escape operation.
"It seems that there was a lot of blackmail going on. Everyone was blackmailing everyone else," Delisle told The Jerusalem Report in a phone conversation. Quebec historian Robert Rumilly, who served as the front man for the French collaborators, helped them avoid deportation, says Delisle: "He acknowledged in many letters that he was using money to bribe politicians, and collecting information to threaten them."
Delisle's findings, some of which are based on previously classified material archived in Washington, concern "more than just the people immediately involved," she says. "These fierce Quebec nationalists had connections with well-known French fascists and extreme nationalists after the war, which leads me to suspect that they had these links before the war."
The real issue, she says, is not just about how the characters, most of whom are now dead, behaved almost half a century ago. "This is really about French Canadians, about how we view our national past."
Delisle's penchant for ruffling feathers has led some students and teachers to label her "a traitor to Quebec." Says Delisle: "I've been told the problem is not that what I say is not true. The problem is that I am prepared to document, perhaps leading others outside of Quebec to think ill of us."
Montreal Jewish author Mordecai Richler used some of Delisle's earlier research to support the thesis of once-endemic Quebec anti-Semitism he advanced in magazine articles and in his 1992 book "Oh Canada. Oh Quebec. Requiem for a Divided Country." Delisle maintains that for the Quebecois, Richler's cardinal sin "wasn't what he said - it was that he published the scathing articles in The New Yorker."
"In France," she says, "you can now talk freely about Francois Mitterrand's close associations with an extreme nationalist group during the war. But in Quebec, although these people are by and large all dead, there is still great difficulty in coming to terms with what happened then."
Delisle refers to the way Francophone Canada reacted to her 1993 bestseller "The Traitor and the Jew," a study of anti-Semitism and extreme French Canadian nationalism in 1929-39. Reviled by her Quebecois associates for having been "bought by the Jews," she says she was blacklisted by some Quebec universities and research institutions.
That was the second time she had gotten the cold shoulder. In 1987, as a doctoral candidate at Laval University, Delisle, who is not Jewish, returned from three years' work at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for a hearing on her dissertation, on the pre-WWII anti-Semitism and pro-fascism found in the writings of revered Quebec historian Abb Lionel Groulx. Critics charged that Delisle's thesis was "extreme" and "lacking in context," and that the anti-Semitism was "marginal" to Groulx's vast output.
Her doctoral work was placed on a back burner for two years; the normal waiting period at Laval is three to six months. The hearing where it was approved in a 3-2 committee vote, she says, was like "a Gothic scene from the Middle Ages. A friend of mine in the audience told me, We had the impression that if you didn't pass, they would burn you.'"
She maintains that the anti-Semitism of Groulx (1878-1967) was there for all to see in his 1930s writings. "It was," she charges, "deliberately swept under the carpet."
The Quebec-born daughter of a French-Canadian federal govern-ment clerk, Esther Delisle says she has no Jewish ancestors. Her first name - her mother just found "Esther" exotic - has figured in the controversies that have swept around her. University professors and other members of the Francophone elite invariably ask about her Jewish connection. "It's the only way," she says, "that the Francophone kings of my tribe can fathom my treachery."
Delisle was drawn to the subject of French-Canadian nationalism while teaching a course on Quebecois political ideas at a local community college in the early 1980s; initially she sought new ways to look at Groulx, in a way that might entice her students. And she was intrigued by the fact that the recognized histories of Quebec said nothing about Groulx's anti-Semitism.
Indeed during his early years, Groulx had little influence, and his own people did not accept his proposed "Buy at Home" boycott of Jewish shop owners. Only in the 1960s, when French-Canadian nationalism was in need of national heroes, was he afforded wider recognition.
Her work on Groulx earned her more than one epithet. She was dubbed Quebec's "Nasty Girl," after the real-life heroine of a 1990 German film who researches the wartime record of her Bavarian hometown. Others labelled her a "Pasionara with scrawny arms," and charged she had been "bought by the Jews, if she isn't Jewish herself."
Delisle's publisher, Robert Davies, says that some bookstores stocked only one copy of her first book, to protect themselves from charges of silent censorship. An official at one shopping mall cut off the power to another bookstore, when it did not heed his warnings to stop offering "The Traitor and the Jew" for sale.
But someone out there is interested. "Traitor" stayed on the Montreal Gazette's list of bestsellers for 21 weeks. Delisle's new book on "the French-Canadian connection" with co-author John Hellman, a noted American scholar of French also at McGill, is likely to match that both in sales and controversy.