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Jean-Louis Roux (May 18, 1923 – November 28, 2013) was a Canadian politician, entertainer and playwright who was briefly the 26th Lieutenant Governor of Quebec.
Roux's greatest fame comes from his role on La famille Plouffe, a very successful Quebec situation comedy. He served as President of the Canadian Conference of the Arts from 1968 to 1970.
In 1971, Roux was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was promoted to Companion in 1987. In 1989, he was made a Knight of the National Order of Quebec. Roux received a Governor General's Performing Arts Award for his lifetime contributions to Canadian theatre in 2004.
The following year, Chrétien appointed him as the new lieutenant governor of Quebec, a move that was seen as provocative by many since it was customary to appoint for that ceremonial function uncontroversial figures who had not been politically active for a long time, ever. He resigned abruptly and spectacularly barely two months into his five-year mandate shortly after the publication of a cover story, L'Affaire Jean-Louis Roux, in the magazine L'Actualité on 1 November 1996. Adding to what former federal cabinet minister Gérard Pelletier had already disclosed to L'Actualité journalist Luc Chartrand regarding Roux, his longtime friend, having drawn a swastika on the sleeve of this lab coat during his World War II medical school days, Roux revealed during his pre-publication interview with Chartrand that he had taken part and even been once in the front line of anti-conscription protests in 1942 during which the windows of stores with Jewish-sounding names and the anglophone newspaper The Montreal Gazette had been smashed. Also, he held pro-Mussolini, pro-Franco and pro-Pétain sympathies during those years. Wondering why Roux had come up with embarrassing details about his medical student past at the very beginning of the interview without being asked, Chartrand speculated that by making these revelations himself, he was hoping to nip in the bud any potential revelations by others with the aim of damaging his reputation. It was a course of action that Chartrand thought might have been decided during a private soirée given a few days earlier in honour of the new lieutenant-governor by old friends, including Gérard Pelletier and former Prime Minister Pierre-Elliot Trudeau. (Chartrand, p. 20)Luc Chartrand, L’Affaire Jean-Louis Roux, L'Actualité, November 1996, p. 20–21.Yves Lavertu, L’Affaire Jean-Louis Roux, Yves Lavertu Éditeur, 2012, p. 157–159.
There were soon increasing calls coming from all quarters for him to resign as lieutenant governor,Yves Lavertu p. 171–177 which occurred on 5 November.He remained in office for several more weeks until Chrétien appointed a new lieutenant governor. Chrétien angrily accused "the separatists" of having engineered the whole thing to discredit a man of honour, but Roux himself did not support that accusation, and it was generally agreed that Pelletier's swastika leak during the L’Actualité interview that was at the origin of the scandal.
Roux tearfully told a news conference the day after his resignation that "the carefree attitude of youth may be an explanation, but it can't in any way serve as an excuse and especially not as a justification; I committed a mistake by yielding to the anti-Semitic feelings that poisoned our minds at the time."Lisa Fitterman, Jean-Louis Roux: All of Canada Was his Stage, [1] The Globe and Mail, 20 December 2013.
Roux died in Montreal on November 28, 2013. "L'homme de théâtre québécois Jean-Louis Roux s'est éteint". CBC News, November 29, 2013.
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