René Lévesque

René Lévesque

René Lévesque , GOQ (born August 24, 1922 in Campbellton ; † November 1, 1987 in Montreal ) was the 27th Prime Minister of the primarily French-speaking Canadian province of Québec (from November 25, 1976 to October 3, 1985 ) and founder of the Parti Québécois , a party campaigning for the secession of Québec from Canada. He was previously a reporter and minister in the Lesage cabinet . He was the first Québec state leader to try to achieve Québec's independence through a referendum .

Life

René Lévesque was born the eldest of four children at the Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu in Campbellton, New Brunswick , and grew up in New Carlisle (Québec) . Lévesque attended the Séminaire de Gaspé and the Collège Saint-Charles-Garnier College in Québec , both of which were run by Jesuits . He then studied law at the Université Laval in Québec, but left the university in 1943 without a degree. A few years as a broadcaster in New Carlisle and Québec followed.

From 1941 to 1945 Lévesque was a liaison officer and war correspondent for the US Army . He reported from London that the city had been regularly bombed by the Germans, and he followed the US Army on their campaigns through France and Germany. He reported on the liberation of Paris, traveled up the Rhine with the troops of George Smith Patton and Alexander McCarrell Patch and saw the destroyed German cities. Lévesque was part of the vanguard of North Americans who experienced the Dachau concentration camp at the moment of its liberation. He reported that he vomited there for the first time in the war.

In 1947 he married Louise L'Heureux, with whom he later had two sons and a daughter. Lévesque worked again after the war as a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and continued his old job as a war correspondent in 1952 during the Korean War . After the war he had the opportunity to continue his career in the USA, but he decided to stay in Québec.

René Lévesque interviews Lester Pearson

From 1956 to 1959 Lévesque hosted a weekly news program on Canadian television. He was briefly arrested in 1959 because of his involvement in a strike in 1958.

In 1960 Lévesque got into politics and was elected as a member of the Liberal Party in the Assemblée législative (Legislative Assembly) of Québec, where he served as a minister in various positions in the government of Jean Lesage from 1960 to 1966. After the Liberals were defeated in the elections in 1966, Lévesque was able to defend his seat in parliament.

In 1967 Lévesque left his party after it refused to discuss the idea of ​​an independent Québec. He initially remained in parliament as a non-party. After leaving the party, he founded an independence movement that merged with another movement with the same goal in 1968 to form the Parti Québécois, of which he became chairman and was to remain until 1985.

After Lévesque could not get a seat in the elections of 1970 and 1973, he succeeded again in the 1976 elections at the same time as the election of the Parti Québécois. Ten days later he was Prime Minister of Québec.

In 1977 a scandal broke out when he ran over a homeless man who was lying on the street and who died as a result of the accident. Allegations have been made that Lévesque was intoxicated at the time of the accident. The scandal was further fueled by the fact that he had a female companion in the car, the secretary Corinne Côté. Lévesque's previously troubled marriage ended in divorce, and in 1979 he married his companion at the time.

Lévesque enforced an ordinance that limited financial contributions to corporate and individual parties to $ 3,000 and took the first steps to make French the sole official language of Québec. Its social policy was based on social democratic principles. In 1980 the promised referendum finally took place, but with only 40% supporters of independence, it was a defeat for him. A year later, however, he was able to lead his party to an even greater victory with 49% of the vote.

In 1982 Lévesque participated in the far-reaching constitutional changes in Canada, which included, among other things, the formal independence from Great Britain. Disagreements within his party about the extent to which Québec's aspired independence should play a role in the next elections led him to resign as party leader in June 1985 and as prime minister in October of the same year. Lévesque had positioned himself during the conflict as an opponent of an electoral program based on the aspirations for independence. In 1983 he visited the Swiss canton of Jura, newly founded by a Francophone separatist movement, as a guest of the cantonal government .

In 1987, Lévesque, who was a heavy smoker, died at the age of 65 from complications from a heart attack . The boulevard René-Lévesque in Montreal is named after him .

Awards

• Grand Officer of the French Legion of Honor
• Grand Officer of the Ordre national du Québec

Web links

• Lévesque, René . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . tape 21: 1981-1990 . University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2018 ( English , French ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Paul Schneeberger: Among brothers in the separatist spirit - The visit of the Prime Minister of Quebec in the newly established Canton of Jura . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . No. 201 . Zurich September 1, 2014, p. 8 .