René lévesque a défendu
In 1947, Lévesque married Louise L'Heureux, his fiancée from before the war, with whom he wouldhave two sons and a daughter.
RENÉ LÉVESQUE A DÉFENDU TV
Short, balding and chain-smoking, Lévesque lacked the good looks for this emerging visual medium, but his intelligence and wit, and his ability to explain world events to a domestic audience, enabled him to become one of Québec's first TV stars.
RENÉ LÉVESQUE A DÉFENDU SERIES
From 1956 he hosted the television series "Point de mire" (Focal Point) and became one of Québec's most influential TV commentators. He quickly established himself as an engaging and widely-followed foreign newsman, reporting from the Korean War in 1951 and the Soviet Union in 1955. It wasn't enough to erase his own nationalist impulses, but it did temper them he was committed throughout his life to democracy.Īfter the war Lévesque returned to Radio-Canada, becoming an announcer for La voix du Canada, a news program broadcast out of Montréal to French-speaking countries around the world. The war instilled in Lévesque a fondness for Americans (versus English Canadians), and a deep awareness of the barbarism that can flow from the extremes of nationalism. He was among the first US correspondents to see the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp following its liberation.
He didn't get to the front lines until February 1945, joining the American armies as they crossed the Rhine and swept through the devastated remains of Germany. Radio-Canada refused to send him, so in 1944 Lévesque found a position in London with the French section of the United States government service, Voice of America - thereby avoiding conscription by the Canadian military. When the Second World War broke out, he was keen to get into the action, not as a soldier but as a war correspondent.
In Québec City he worked at CBV, a regional Radio-Canada station. Lévesque had discovered radio journalism in 1938, his last summer in New Carlisle. His mother quickly remarried, the family relocated to Québec City, and Lévesque drifted away from both his family and his studies.Įxpelled from the Collège des Jésuites Saint Charles Garnier for low marks, he finished his formal schooling at the Séminaire de Québec and enrolled in the law school at Université Laval, but gave up on his studies before obtaining a degree. When Lévesque was 14, however, his father died in hospital at the age of 48. He idolized his father, who introduced him to politics, and to French and English literature - giving the boy a bilingual upbringing. René became aware at a young age that most of the French Canadians were poorer, with smaller homes and more wretched schools, than the English Canadian families - descendants of Loyalists who had fled the American Revolution - who were the self-appointed elites of the region.Ī bright student who impressed his Jesuit teachers, Lévesque resolved early on at the Séminaire de Gaspé that he was destined to be a leader. Although the Lévesques were well-to-do, poverty was dire in the Gaspé at that time. Because there was no hospital there in 1922, he was born in nearby Campbellton, New Brunswick, the eldest child of Dominique Lévesque, a prominent lawyer, and Diane Dionne. Lévesque grew up in the remote, coastal town of New Carlisle, among the fishermen and farmers of the Gaspé peninsula. The PQ's main objective was Québec independence, and for 15 years Lévesque was the leading champion of that ideal - holding and losing the province's first referendum on sovereignty in 1980. A prominent member of Jean Lesage's Liberal Cabinet during the Quiet Revolution, Lévesque later founded the Parti québécois (PQ), eventually bringing it to power in 1976. René Lévesque, premier of Québec 1976-85, politician, journalist, nationalist (born in Campbellton, NB died 1 November 1987 in Montréal, QC).