Marcel Trudel CC GOQ (May 29, 1917 – January 11, 2011) was a Canadian historian, university professor (1947–1982) and author who published more than 40 books on the history of New France.
It was too much: in 1962, under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church, Laval University demoted him from his position as head of the History department.
The DCB is published simultaneously in English and French and has been widely recognized as one of the most important scholarly undertakings in Canada.
Beginning in the 1960s, Marcel Trudel publicly expressed his opposition to Quebec nationalism and the Quebec sovereignty movement, seeing these ideas as a break with the other French-speaking communities in Canada, a fragmentation of these communities on the North American continent and a denial of the historical French and English duality that has shaped Canada.
Having reached age 65 in 1982, he was relieved of his lecturing duties, but he continued to write from his home near Montreal until the year he died; half of his books were published in retirement.
Trudel's life's work was the history of New France, in particular his monumental and authoritative Histoire de la Nouvelle-France.
[5] Trudel meticulously reviewed the primary sources and criticized previous accounts in his effort to tell the colony's story without what he viewed as pious or nationalist bias.