Few figures have had as lasting an influence on Canadian institutions, history, politics, and culture as Georges and Pauline Vanier. Georges (1888-1967), a decorated military officer, became a professional diplomat, the first Canadian ambassador to France, and the first French-Canadian governor general of Canada. Pauline (1898-1991), a respected humanitarian, Privy Council member, and university chancellor, shared her husband's responsibilities and helped shape his thoughts on foreign and domestic affairs.
Georges and Pauline Vanier follows their lives and travels across the world - from Canadian military life to the League of Nations, from the inner circles of British government to their harrowing escape from Nazi-occupied France - detailing their disappointments and triumphs during social and political turbulence.
The MQUP sits down with the author for a Georges and Pauline Vanier Q&A.
What inspired you to write a biography of the Vaniers?
I became interested in Pauline Vanier when I saw a 3-paragraph newspaper item in the mid-1970s that said she was selling all her belongings, leaving her home in Montreal and moving to Trosly, France, to live in the community of mentally disabled people that had been founded by her son Jean. She was in her seventies at the time, and I thought it was such a heroic thing to do. There were complexities in her life which I was obviously not aware of at the time, but when I did become aware of them, she became all the more interesting to me. The complexities in people’s lives are always of interest to a writer. But for me, that decision on her part, to leave her comfortable Montreal life and move into the L’Arche community, remains an indication of her essential character.
Georges and Pauline Vanier: Portrait of a Couple is the story of two very important individuals, and it is also the story of a marriage. How do you think the Vaniers shaped each other as leaders, as Canadians, and as people? What might Georges have been like if he had never met Pauline? What about Pauline, if she had never met Georges?
They had two extremely different personalities. Georges was serious, with a dry and ironic sense of humour, bookish, very meticulous and exact, with an iron-clad integrity. Pauline was highly extroverted, utterly spontaneous, with an anxious temperament, and was, at certain times in her life, given to depression. He was a trained lawyer, and by the time they met, in 1919, he had served at the French and Belgian front for most of World War I, and had lost a leg in battle two months prior to the end of the war. Pauline had little more than two years of formal schooling and then inadequate homeschooling from a governess. Her father was a superior court judge, and she moved easily within the well-to-do world of Montreal’s high society. As their marriage progressed, they brought out the best in each other, although not always seamlessly. But they genuinely and openly admired the best qualities in each other.
If they had never met and married, Georges might have remained a bachelor—he indicated as much in letters home from the front. He would probably have remained in the Royal 22nd regiment in some capacity (although he never left it; he always insisted, throughout all his years of diplomacy, that he remained seconded from the army). His health was never robust, and after his amputation, it was even less so. Without Georges, Pauline might have married a Montreal lawyer or businessman within her social circle. Given her particular temperamental tendencies, she might have become an unhappy and unfulfilled woman.
There are ways in which biographies, interesting ones at any rate, act as reference points; for better or worse, they turn a life (whether typical or atypical) into a marker for a particular historical moment, or use it to summarize events too complex for readers to grasp in other ways. Though this is not their only effect, it is a compelling one.
