Andre Laurendeau

Andre Laurendeau was that rarest of Canadian personalities--"a man for all seasons." Known in Quebec as a leading nationalist activist and theorist through the critical decades of societal change from the 1930s to the 1960s, his own generation especially recalled his public role as an anti-conscription dissident and provincial politician during World War II. Younger French Canadians related to him as a gifted political journalist; a media figure in both radio and television; a novelist and tele-theatre dramatist; and through it all, "an engaged intellectual." English Canadians remember him as editor of Montreal's French language newspaper Le Devoir and as co-chairman of the 1960's Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. He was a French Canadian, in other words, whose life story mirrors, in both actions and insights, the agonizing struggle of his people to become modern while remaining distinct.