COLUMN ONE : Quebec’s Freedom Fighter : In Lucien Bouchard, separatists may have found their Thomas Jefferson, a leader who could gain independence for the Canadian province. But critics call him an opportunist and turncoat.

In an oak-paneled parliamentary office once occupied by the country’s World War II prime minister, surrounded by a well-thumbed library and photos of his family, Lucien Bouchard plots the dismemberment of Canada.

It is all very democratic, if sometimes a trifle impolite. Bouchard arrived here in November with the anomalous title of Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, earned by the startling electoral success of the Quebec separatist party that he founded, the Bloc Quebecois. He intends to leave, perhaps as early as next year, as a citizen of the new nation of Quebec, a fact he reminds Canadians of almost every day.

And people here listen, intently, for in Bouchard, Quebec may have found its Thomas Jefferson--or Canada its Jefferson Davis.

Bouchard, 56, is the most compelling presence in Canadian politics today--and perhaps since the flowering of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (to whom he is diametrically opposed, politically). Charismatic, passionate, eloquent, possessed of a thoughtful intensity and married to a French-American wife who grew up in Orange County, Bouchard is by every measure the most popular politician in Quebec.

While Quebec independence is far from assured, the prospect of an acrimonious breakup of America’s northern neighbor and largest economic partner has unnerved financial markets and pushed aside almost everything else on the Canadian national agenda, and Bouchard is largely responsible.

Bouchard portrays himself as a sort of Quebecois Everyman, whose political journey mirrors the centuries-old struggle of his predominantly French-speaking province to come to terms with its place in North America. His story, he says, is one of “an unfinished country.”

The next few months will show whether Bouchard and his colleagues can complete the task. A Quebec provincial election is scheduled for Sept. 12. If the Parti Quebecois, Bouchard’s separatist ally in the province, wins, a provincial referendum on independence is promised within 10 months.

History, and the polls, seem to stand against the separatists. But Bouchard, with typical self-confidence, believes that actually works in his favor.

“One of my hypotheses is they don’t take Quebec seriously,” he says of his opposition. “They think that Quebeckers at the last moment . . . will shy away. And until now, they’ve been right. . . . I’m in the business of proving that they are wrong.”

Bouchard is seen in the province as that rare politician who has staked everything--career, fortune, honor--on a single ideal.

“Lucien is not a political animal. I see him as a type of missionary,” says Jean Lapierre, a Montreal lawyer who served in Parliament with Bouchard and now hosts a radio talk show.

Others denounce Bouchard as an opportunist, a hypocrite and a turncoat. His onetime best friends, who brought him into politics and helped raise him to prominence, believe he betrayed them and Canada in a most calculated fashion.

“Anything to do with Bouchard, you have to read the fine print twice,” says Jean Charest, a member of Parliament from Sherbrooke, Quebec, and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party.

“People (in English-speaking Canada) don’t much like what they’re hearing from Bouchard, but he has served the role of lightning rod. . . . He has forced out the agenda (of Quebec),” says Philip Resnick, a University of British Columbia professor and expert on Quebec-Canada relations.

For a period this spring, Canada was obsessed with Lucien Bouchard.

In Parliament, he jabbed questions at Prime Minister Jean Chretien while Chretien pretended that no one wanted to hear about Quebec independence. Bouchard’s public appearances in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, ostensibly to promote his autobiography, sparked a cross-country debate on Quebec sovereignty. Lobbying trips to Washington and Paris sent commentators and a couple of Western provincial premiers into a rage.

After his return from Paris, Parliament spent nearly a full day in an emotional and rancorous debate on “national unity.” One Liberal Party Parliament member suggested that, in most other countries, a dissident like Bouchard would be in jail.

Bouchard has come to embody the conviction of Quebec separatists--or sovereigntists as they prefer to be called--that the best way to preserve the last island of French language and culture in North America is through independence. The often-troubled relationship of what novelist Hugh MacLennan dubbed Canada’s “two solitudes”--one English-speaking and one French-speaking--last erupted with the failures of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990 and the Charlottetown Agreement in 1992. These proposed constitutional revisions had intended to codify special status for Quebec in the Canadian federation.

A clash over the Meech Lake Accord caused Bouchard to bolt the Progressive Conservative Party and resign from the Cabinet of then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, his longtime friend and political mentor.

Bouchard came back as an independantiste and brought 54 members of the Bloc Quebecois to Parliament with him. Now, Bouchard sees his mission as preparing the rest of Canada for the break he believes will follow a referendum in Quebec.

Dressed in flawless, double-breasted suits, brushing aside the comma of hair that persistently drops to his eyebrow, Bouchard goes about his work with deceptive calm. Today, there are few visible signs in public of the dreaded temper recalled by longtime Bouchard watchers.

Ask if he considers himself a revolutionary, and those eyebrows rise just a bit.

“I’m a very moderate man,” he says. “I came very late to politics and to speaking out about my political beliefs. I practiced law as an Establishment lawyer for 21 years, and no, I’m not a revolutionary.”

Even among those who have known him for years, he remains elusive--a disciplined, introverted intellectual. Much is made here of the fact that he has twice read all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” He drops into conversation anecdotes about Cincinnatus, the savior of the Roman Republic, and Chateaubriand, the early 19th-Century French writer and statesman.

Michael Meighen, a university classmate and now a member of Canada’s Senate, conjures up a quintessential Canadian image to explain Bouchard’s elusiveness: “He paddles his own canoe.”

Those close to Bouchard say he saves his gregariousness for family and friends, and that it’s wrong to see him as a loner. Bouchard himself is not much given to self-examination in public. His 282-page autobiography is a detail-filled recitation of his public life and his private thoughts on public policy, but it reveals little of the inner man.

In an interview, he is relaxed and direct, but the fence that he has erected between the public figure and the private man drops only a couple of times.

The first is when he talks about his father, who delivered construction materials, first by horse-drawn wagon, then by truck, in the logging region near the Saguenay River in central Quebec, where Bouchard was born.

“I learned from my father that life is not easy,” he says. “You have to win everything. You have to win it correctly, the right way. You have to work hard. And I have a sense that you must fight to stay alive, and if you want to rise above average, you have to fight hardest.”

The second is his reflection on the seminal event in his political life: his May, 1990, resignation from Mulroney’s government. Today, those on both sides of the argument can’t even agree on the events leading up to his resignation, much less on his motivation.

He declares it was a matter of conscience, that Quebec’s interests had been sold out in a compromise on the Meech Lake Accord. Others in the Mulroney government believe Bouchard acted with selfish deliberation--”a staged stunt,” one put it--and helped torpedo a historic opportunity for national reconciliation.

The break sundered more than political ties. Mulroney and Bouchard had been close friends for nearly 30 years, since meeting as Laval University law students. Now they refuse to speak to each other. Mulroney, battered by the Meech Lake and Charlottetown defeats and pushed into political retirement, declines all interviews.

The friendship with Mulroney, was “close, very close, probably too close to be in a government together,” Bouchard says. “I wish our friendship had endured, but I felt, and I still feel, that it was a situation where I had to make a choice. . . .

“It’s been like a divorce, you know, with some (friends) staying with me, others staying with him, others trying to be in both camps and having a rough time of it. . . . The complicity of old friends cannot be re-created easily at age 50. I have met good people, of course, very good people for whom I have much respect and with whom I share a common vision of what the future should be. But I don’t have many private relationships with new friends.

“But my life has changed too. I have a family now. I never had any children before, and I have a new marriage. . . . So I take care of my family.”

Bouchard declines to involve his family in much of his political life, which is just fine with his wife, Audrey. When Parliament sits, she and sons Alexandre, 4, and Simon, 3, stay at home in Montreal while Bouchard spends the nights from Monday through Thursday at a Holiday Inn in Hull, the Quebec city just across the river from the Canadian capital of Ottawa, Ontario. He calls home “at least four or five times a day,” says Audrey Bouchard, who describes him as “the mushiest father I’ve ever seen,” incapable of disciplining his children.

“Politics . . . doesn’t play a big role in my life. . . ,” she said. “I try to go with him (to political events) when I can, especially if it’s the weekend, because otherwise I wouldn’t see him. But I’m not a very political wife. . . . You know, when this is over, when he leaves politics, I will be just as happy, if not more so.”

The fluently bilingual daughter of a French mother and a retired U.S. Navy commander, Audrey Best Bouchard, 33, was born on the French Riviera and grew up in Los Alamitos, Calif. She met her future husband on a flight between Paris and London in 1987. He was Canada’s ambassador to Paris, and she was moving from Orange County to live with her Parisian grandmother and study French. It is the second marriage for both.

Audrey Bouchard does not hold Canadian citizenship, and thus can’t vote for her husband. Breezily independent, she displays the same sort of pragmatism about the day-to-day demands of political life as does her husband. Neither professes to lose much sleep over the controversy he stirs up--although there is a Royal Canadian Mounted Police bodyguard assigned to him--and both decline to speculate publicly on his political future beyond a Quebec sovereignty referendum.

Lucien Bouchard grew up far from Montreal in a region where, for 100 years or more, French-speaking Canadians felled trees and cut logs for absentee, English-speaking mill owners. He is part of a breakthrough generation of French-Canadians who transformed Quebec from a rural society--dominated by the Roman Catholic Church and an English-speaking elite--into a modern industrial state where French has become the prevailing language in fact and in law.

Educated at Catholic schools, Bouchard became the first in his family to attend a university. His classmates at Laval University in Quebec City included an extraordinary sampling of Canada’s future political leadership.

“He was obviously one of the better students, if not the best . . . and I suspect there were some of us who drank more beer and chased more girls than Lucien,” classmate Meighen says. “He has a great laugh and is fun to be with, but . . . you know, most people don’t spend their nights relaxing with Proust.”

At Laval, Bouchard developed a friendship with an exuberant Quebecker named Brian Mulroney. A few years later, when both men were lawyers, Mulroney was appointed to a special commission to investigate corruption in Quebec’s construction unions. He selected Bouchard as chief counsel. The commission’s findings were sensational, and Mulroney was launched on the political career that in 1984 made him prime minister.

He took Bouchard along with him, first as speech writer and adviser, then as ambassador to Paris, and finally as a member of Parliament and a Cabinet minister. It was an extraordinary rise and led to complaints of cronyism. Then came the break.

Bouchard’s political permutations--he has been, successively, a Trudeau Liberal, a Quebec separatist, a Mulroney Conservative, then a separatist again--are cited as evidence of his opportunism. But the case also can be made that he is the perfect reflection of Quebeckers’ ambivalence about their future--the tug of war over whether the French language and Quebec’s unique culture can be best preserved within Canada or in a bold strike for independence.

Bouchard says his first romance with separatism ended with the 1980 defeat, by a margin of 60% to 40%, of Quebec’s first and so far only referendum on independence. It revived when the Meech Lake disillusionment dashed hopes of future reconciliation with the rest of Canada.

Jean-Marc Leger, a leading Quebec pollster, attributes Bouchard’s popularity to his “down home” background and his appeal to high principle. Or as talk show host Lapierre, an admitted cynic, puts it, “It takes two things to succeed in Quebec politics: an image of competence and a sense of indignation. He’s got a 150% mark on indignation.”

In fact, Bouchard’s speeches on Quebec “honor” and his lamentations of the “humiliations” heaped on his province cause his critics’ eyes to roll.

How can Quebec be so oppressed when three of Canada’s last five prime ministers--Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien--came from the province, they ask. And how about the fact that Quebec receives more in federal government payouts than it contributes in taxes?

“Ideologues have a tremendous capacity to adjust reality to their ideology, and he will do that consistently,” Charest says.

To Bouchard, none of this changes his fundamental point.

“The main thing is, Quebeckers feel quite different from the rest of Canada,” he says. “They have a sense that they are a people by themselves and they would be much better off if they could make their own decisions when it comes to collective affairs. . . . It would be an open state, a modern state with economic exchange with as many partners as possible.”

Bouchard even talks of an independent Quebec continuing to use Canadian currency--at least for a limited period--perhaps relying on the Canadian military for national defense and leaping directly into the North American Free Trade Agreement as a new equal partner.

Such sentiments strike others as naive, or duplicitously aimed at reassuring nervous Quebeckers that independence would be an easy path. No one can predict how the rest of Canada would react to a referendum vote in Quebec calling for independence, but a growing number of voices suggest the response would not be amicable.

“I still don’t think French Canadians--and Lucien is typical in this instance--know the rest of Canada,” says Meighen. “He doesn’t appreciate the disappointment and inevitable anger that I and most English Canadians would feel if Quebec voted to separate. This is my country too and I have something to say about its future.”

Bouchard--who says, “I know a lot more about English Canadians than most English Canadians know of Quebec”--acknowledges a separatist vote would provoke “strong emotions,” but he refuses to entertain the thought that Canada would do anything other than accept a democratic ballot and let Quebec go.

In any event, the road to a referendum must be paved with a victory by the Parti Quebecois, led not by Bouchard but by the decidedly less popular Jacques Parizeau, 63. As Parti Quebecois candidate for premier, Parizeau will be campaigning on television every night, while Bouchard works the small towns and back roads.

“I compare it to a police motorcycle. Parizeau is driving, and Lucien is in the sidecar,” Lapierre says.

Bouchard publicly professes enthusiasm for this role as Parizeau’s helpmate, but he can’t suppress a smile when reminded of their relative popularity.

Regardless of Parizeau’s personal standing, voter surveys consistently show the Parti Quebecois comfortably leading the governing Liberal Party.

“People want change, and the only other party (on the ballot) is the PQ,” pollster Leger says.

Those polls, however, show much more uncertainty among Quebeckers toward independence. Some suggest Bouchard has stiffened the opposition with his sovereigntist roadshow.

Even Bouchard’s youngest brother, Gerard, 51, a professor at the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi, has doubts.

“We do not look like a society on the verge of declaring sovereignty,” he says. “Are we going to threaten this lifestyle for a political idea that may be desirable but not necessary?”

But Lucien Bouchard remains optimistic.

“I’m not sure a referendum will be won,” he said. “But I know that the objective conditions are in place now for a victory of the sovereigntists. The rest will be for us. If we do our work properly . . . then we have a fair chance to win.”