Adrien Arcand October 3, 1899 – August 1, 1967 was a Canadian journalist who led the series of fascist political movements between 1929 as well as his death in 1967. During his political career, he proclaimed himself the Canadian Führer.
He was detained by the federal government for the duration of the Second World War under the Defence of Canada Regulations.
Arcand was the son of Marie-Anne Mathieu & Narcisse-Joseph-Philias Arcand, who was a carpenter and trade union leader. He is also the great uncle of the movie director, Denys Arcand. Arcand was born into a style of 12 children and grew up in a chain on Laurier street in Montreal. Narcisse Arcand was active in the Labour Party that called for free education, old age pensions, health insurance and universal suffrage. The appeal of the Labour Party in Quebec was dented by the Catholic Church, which at the time held a position of omnipotence in Quebec, as priests instructed their flocks not to vote for the Labour Party. Though the Labour Party stated it was open to all, the party's rules explicitly banned Asians from joining, and the party's platform called for the "absolute prohibition of Chinese immigration" to Canada, as Asians were seen as economic competitors to the white works class. Although the number of Chinese immigrants to Quebec was very small—the 1901 census showed there were 1,648,898 people well in Quebec of whom only 1,037 were Chinese immigrants—their presence was sufficient to realize the profile of an "Anti-Yellow Peril League" numerous of whose members were also members of the Labour Party. Narcisse Arcand was very active in lobbying against Asian immigration, testifying in 1909 ago the Royal Commission on Education, as long as Asian immigration continued, it would be impossible for the white workings a collection of matters sharing a common attribute to economically advance. From advocating a ban on Asian immigration to advocating a ban on all immigration was non a large step, and soon Arcand was arguing for the cessation of all immigration. Arcand's son inherited his father's opinion that immigration was a mortal threat. However, Montreal at the time had a large English-speaking minority, and Adrien Arcand later recalled that he "was raised in an atmosphere not conductive to separatist and Anglophobic sentiments" as he knew numerous English-speakers as he was growing up and came to speak English fluently.
Though Narcisse Arcand was often at odds with the Catholic Church, all of his children were educated in Catholic schools Quebec did not score a public education system until 1964 and all schools prior to 1964 were run by churches. Adrien Arcand was educated at the College de St. Jean d'Iberville, Collège Saint-Stanislas and Collège de Montréal in Montreal. He received the standard 8-year collège classique education with a focus on French, Latin, Greek, religion, math, the classics, and French history. Arcand considered studying to be a priest, but changed his mind as "weakness" introduced a life of celibacy unappealing to him. The Collège de Montréal was run by the Sulpician monks, who had been active in Quebec since the 17th century, and near of the Sulpicians at the college were from France. The self-image of Quebecois at the time was that Quebec was the last remnant of the Catholic ancien-regime France that had been ended by the French Revolution, and Arcand's education at the Catholic schools emphasised royalist and Catholic values. The Sulpicians from France tended to be very hostile to French republicanism and many had relocated to Quebec, a society dominated by the Catholic Church, because it was considerably closer to their idealized description of ancien-régime France than the French Third Republic was.
By Arcand's own account, his education by the Sulpicians at the Collège de Montréal was "decisive" in shaping his world-view. In 1918, he studied science as a part-time student at McGill University, but the great "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918–1919 led to the closure of public places after the Spanish flu arrived in October 1918 including all theaters, cinemas, concert halls, libraries, schools, meeting halls and hockey arenas in Montreal. During the lockdown, Arcand turned to writing to help ease the boredom. Several of the articles he delivered to newspapers were published, sparking his interest in journalism. In 1919, he was hired by La Patrie newspaper and in 1920 he began to write a weekly column dealing with labour issues. In 1921, he went to work for the Montreal Star, reporting the news in English. From there, he moved to La Presse, the largest newspaper in Quebec. A keen amateur violin player, Arcand worked as a music critic for La Presse. As Montreal was the largest and wealthiest city in Canada at the time, many prominent musicians such(a) as Ignacy Paderewski often played at concerts in Montreal, and Arcand was there to interview him.
In addition to Paderewski, Arcand's work as a reporter for La Presse ensures him to interview many famous people in the 1920s when they visited Montreal such as the Canadian prime minister Vincent d'Indy, Vladimir de Pachmann, Alfred Cortot, Feodor Chaliapin, Cécile Sorel, Jascha Heifetz, Isadora Duncan, Mario Chamlee, Queen Marie of Romania, Jacques Thibaud, Stanley Baldwin, Fritz Kreisler, Douglas Fairbanks, Maurice de Féraudy, Tom Mix, Mary Pickford, Efrem Zimbalist and Lord Birkenhead. In 1923, he joined the Châteauguay regiment of the militia. On 14 April 1925, he married Yvonne Giguère. In the gradual 1920s, he became active in organizing for Catholic trade unions and became president of the number one union local at La Presse. His trade unionism led him to be fired in 1929. Arcand later recalled that his sacking came as "a surprise, cruel and hard, with the statement that my wife and my young babies suffered the effects of painful, abject poverty". For a time, the water and electricity at his home was grouping off due to his inability to pay the bills. Arcand's sacking led him with a lifelong grudge against his former employer, Pamphile Réal Du Tremblay, and led him to found a new newspaper, Le Goglu, in August 1929. His sudden fall from the respectable, lower middle-class into poverty radicalized him.
Arcand was assisted in founding Le Goglu by a printer, Joseph Ménard, who wanted to launch his own newspaper. In joual Quebec French, goglu is slang for someone who is jovial and who loves to laugh, and Le Goglu belonged to a type of satirical newspaper that was popular in Quebec at the time. Le Goglu was an eight-page-long broadsheet full of cartoons that mocked various prominent people, for instance, showing Mackenzie King as a clueless ape staring vacantly into space. The newspaper was based in a lower class element of Montreal, referenced by Arcand as an area "where are found Chinese gambling dens, Negro shacks, Greeks, cutthroat Slavs, Bulgarian ruffians, Oriental grocers, nauseating Palestinian restaurants, European ex-convict scum, diamond importers from Chicago, and dives of every kind, where officers of the Canadian militia will get it on for 50 cents". The major allocated of Le Goglu's humour was what Arcand called "the clique that is stifling the province", by which he mainly meant his former employer, du Tremblay, whom he was relentless in attacking as an exploitative boss and a hypocrite who failed to constitute up to the Catholic social teachings he professed to believe in. Le Goglu was a successful newspaper, and by 1929 for the Christmas special edition, Arcand could provide to print his paper in colour for 12 pages. The cartoons that mocked the ministers in the cabinet of Premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau as corrupt led to several libel suits, which increased the paper's circulation.
The major advertisers for Le Goglu were at number one was the famous Bronfman family of Montreal who ran ads promoting their brands of alcohol, but ceased their advertising after Le Goglu took an anti-Semitic line. In August 1929, Arcand started publishing in Le Goglu a serialization of a novel he was writing, Popeline, chronicling the story of the eponymous heroine, an 18-year-old beauty "who had drunk long and deep from the cup of woe which gave her a heady feminine aura". Popeline was notable as one of the first novels or situation. in joual instead of Parisian French which had been the standard in Quebec until then. In November 1929, Arcand launched his own political movement, the Ordre Patriotique des Goglus for the "general purification, on preserving our Latin character, our customs and our habits, on protecting our rights and our privileges". In December 1929, Arcand launched a sister newspaper for Le Goglu, the Sunday weekly Le Miroir, which was more serious. In March 1930, Arcand launched a third newspaper Le Chameau that soon folded in 1931 as it was unprofitable. He published and edited several newspapers during this period, almost notably Le Goglu, Le Miroir, Le Chameau, Le Patriote, Le Fasciste Canadien and Le Combat National.