Jean-François Nadeau, "The Canadian Führer: The Life of Adrien Arcand" (2012)

I wanted to like this book. I was hoping for something that mixed the research quality of Stanley Barrett's Is God a Racist? with the engaging narrative of Warren Kinsella's Web of Hate. The Canadian Fuhrer offers neither.

First off, what's with this title? It seems a cheap attempt at generating sales, particularly when, as Nadeau notes in the book, Arcand's interest in fascism was more influenced by Mussolini than Hitler. Losing sight of this element helps to confuse some of Arcand's values, such as his granting Catholicism an essential role in his world view.

Nadeau does provide a useful overview of Arcand's thinking, and makes a significant contribution by providing an in-depth description of Arcand's political, personal, and career trajectory. Unfortunately, the narrative and analysis seem to peter out by the middle of the Second World War period. Perhaps this is a personal desire, but I think it would be quite fascinating to see the level of analysis given Arcand's pre-war thought and activities applied to his post-war output. Nadeau intimates how Arcand how ideologically managed the fall of Nazism and Italian fascism, but we don't get much sense of how his post-war thinking really coalesced. Maybe it didn't. Maybe Arcand was simple too old, or too ill, or too disillusioned to worry about formulating an adapted world view. If so, this interpretation needed to be fleshed out. As it was covered, it seemed more that Nadeau simply lost interest in what Arcand was doing after his stay in an Ontario detention camp during the second half of the war.

Aside from this weakness, the book suffers from some editing issues that are perhaps a result of poor translation or rushed production. For instance, a sentence is almost repeated verbatim on pg. 267 (of the hardcover version).

Similarly, some pictures are missing credit lines. I raise this as an issue because most of the pictures are culled from a ‘private source’. It would be useful to know the archival location of any others.

Finally, some some of the commentary is questionable. For instance, a photo of two men standing in the entrance to a store (?) suggests that people were able to openly wear swastikas in public even during the late 1930s. While this may be true, some wider context for the image could clarify that it was a special event, or even a photo staged to normalize wearing of this type of symbol.