Louis St. Laurent - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Louis St-Laurent was born on 1 February 1882 in Compton, Quebec, a village in the Eastern Townships to Jean-Baptiste-Moïse Saint-Laurent, a French-Canadian, and Mary Anne Broderick, an Irish-Canadian. He grew up fluently bilingual. His English had a noticeable Irish brogue, while his gestures (such as a hunch of the shoulders) were French.

He received degrees from St. Charles Seminary (B.A. 1902) and Université Laval (LL.L. 1905). He was offered, but declined, a Rhodes Scholarship upon this graduation from Laval in 1905. In 1905 he married Jeanne Renault (1886–1966) with whom he had two sons and three daughters.

St-Laurent worked as a lawyer from 1905 to 1941, also becoming a professor of law at Université Laval in 1914. St-Laurent practised corporate and constitutional law in Quebec and became one of the country's most respected counsels. He served as President of the Canadian Bar Association from 1930 to 1932.

St-Laurent's father, a Compton shopkeeper, was a staunch supporter of the Liberal Party of Canada and was particularly enamoured with Sir Wilfrid Laurier. When Laurier led the Liberals to victory in the 1896 election, 14-year-old Louis relayed the election returns from the telephone in his father's store. However, while an ardent Liberal, Louis remained aloof from active politics for much of his life, focusing instead on his legal career and family. He became one of Quebec's leading lawyers and was so highly regarded that he was offered a position in the Cabinet of the Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Meighen in 1926 and was offered a seat as a justice in the Supreme Court of Canada.

It was not until he was nearly 60 that St-Laurent finally agreed to enter politics when Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King appealed to his sense of duty in late 1941.