PEIRRE Elliott Trudeau is the dashing, elegant, liberal Prime Minister of Canada. He dates Barbra Streisand, wears wxhite carnations on his pin-striped lapels, and kisses girls as well as babies when he shows himself in public.

PR isn't his only side, of course. When Trudeau first ran for Prime Minister three years ago, he was regarded by many Canadians as something of an enfant terrible; brash, controversial, a dilettantish leftist who had even visited Communist China. But gradually, he oozed his way to the core of the political establishment, promising the nation that he would deal with Quebec's blossoming separatist movement in a way that would unify Canada, not rend it apart.

Finally, though, sheer virility won out. Two weeks ago, in a stunning tour de force, he drove the country into a state of martial law, stripping its people of all civil liberties and airlifting thousands of federal troops into the streets of Montreal. The object: to crush an underground separatist band known as Front de Liberation du Quebec.

How much farther was the Prime Minister prepared to go?

"You watch me," Trudeau snapped back at newsmen who cornered him on Ottawa's Parliament Hill. "There are a lot of bleeding hearts who don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is go on and bleed. But it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people."

Indeed. And yet it appeared that the government had crumpled to its knees as well. The FLQ had kidnapped two of its men whom it was holding hostage: British Trade Commissioner James R. Cross and Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte. In a sense, the imposition of military rule and massive search-and-arrest terror on the people of Quebec was the reaction of men who feared for their own safety and lives.

There was no other rational explanation for Trudeau's surprise move. The FLQ was known to be merely a tiny fringe of terrorists whose numbers probably did not exceed 150. Not only that: they were incapable of launching any sort of effective mass action by themselves because they worked through small, completely separate cells. The Liberation cell had kidnapped Cross, the Chernier cell was holding Laporte. There was every indication that the two groups had acted independently of each other, and there was no reason to believe that larger assaults would follow.

But then, one ought to give Trudeau some credit for being a competent political thinker as well as an out-and-out cad. The invocation of the War Measures Act, announced in the tense early morning hours of October 16, outlawed the FLQ and subjected its members to five-year prison terms. But it also placed in similar jeopardy anyone who "advocates or promotes the unlawful acts, aims, principles or policies" of the FLQ.

Interpreted narrowly, the law threatened all those who would "thus seek to destroy the basis of our democratic governmental system on which the enjoyment of our human rights and fundamental freedoms is founded"; the law's invocation would merely "insure the continued protection of those rights and freedoms in Canada." But buried beneath the platitudes was the distinct likelihood that Trudeau would use the crisis legislation to throw in jail those who posed the greatest legitimate threat to the government of his ruling Liberal party.

As police and militiamen swept through Quebec in a week-long blitz that involved 1600 raids and bagged more than 375 prisoners, it became clear that the government was carrying out a well-coordinated strategy of political terror. Very few of those arrested could be directly linked to the FLQ; most were a broad assortment of politicians, labor leaders and other public figures who sympathized with the underground terrorist group but did not endorse its activities.

WHAT TRUDEAU challenged, in effect, was a separatist movement in Quebec that had begun in the early '60's and was rapidly gaining strength and respectability in electoral circles as well as in terrorist cliques. One of the early groups, the Parti Quebecois, had attracted a significant province-wide following and won nearly 25 per cent of the popular vote in Quebec's elections last April. Another party, the two-year-old Front d'Action Politique, had been threatening to topple the administration of Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau in the municipal elections last Sunday.

The FLQ itself was founded in 1960. Its movement had been a confused struggle that few people in Quebec really understood; it had begun with arson and bank robberies, progressed to bombings with the explosion at a strike-bound shoe factory in 1966, and escalated to the political kidnappings of earlier this month. The FLQ was always a self-consciously underground group, rarely offering any explanation of what it did, never attempting to build an above-ground political base. Its acts were characterized in the Canadian media as those of mad and reckless terrorists.

But there were a handful of men who identified themselves to the public as ideologues and spokesmen for the FLQ, and one of them, Pierre Vallieres, published an autobiography in 1967 which became the first comprehensive statement of the FLQ's methods and goals. Vallieres wrote Negres Blancs d'Amerique in the Manhattan House of Detention, where he spent four months after a protest in front of the United Nations building in New York. Quebec, since the establishment of the first trading post in Quebec by Champlain in 1608, has always been submitted to the interests of the ruling classes of the imperialist countries-first France, then England, and now the United States," Vallieres wrote in Negres Blancs. "It is by force and not by resignation, passivity and fear that we will be free."

It was at this time that the FLQ first became an overtly political entity with whom many French Canadians in Quebec could identify. And the need for some kind of political movement among French Canadians there had long existed. The French comprise 85 per cent of Quebec's population, yet they are the victims of severe economic and social discrimination: paid less, poorly housed, heavily unemployed. A provincial survey revealed last year that an English-speaking resident of Quebec earns roughly twice as much as one whose native tongue is French. In this context, the kidnapping of the Quebec Labor Minister was by no means an act of unmotivated terrorism; Laporte had long been called "Minister of Unemployment and Exploitation" by many French laborers in Quebec.

But even more striking is the fact that most capital investment in Quebec is owned, not by English Canadians, but by Americans. (Just before the invocation of the War Measures Act, Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa had returned from a whirlwind tour of the Wall St. investment community.) It was clear, the, that a nationalist struggle such as the FLQ's against the encroachment of Americans and English Canadians in Quebec would also be an economic movement to be waged along class lines. And the kidnapping of British Trade Commissioner Cross-who was abducted only after an attempt on the American commissioner had failed-was intended as an openly political act that might catalyze support for the FLQ.

In the year before the proclamation of military rule, tension increased markedly in Quebec. Vallieres' book was declared illegal in Canada and its author was arrested on charges of sedition. Labor protest intensified considerably, and Premier Bourassa promised that 100,000 new jobs would be created by 1971. The provincial government stepped up its prosecution of suspected FLQ terrorists; one man whom police arrested, Pierre-Paul Geoffroy, pleaded guilty to 120 incidents of bombing in order to prevent the authorities from prosecuting others in the FLQ for those incidents. Geoffroy is now serving a 12,000-year sentence in a Quebec jail.

The vote for the Parti Quebecois in the April parliamentary elections indicated strong support for the goals, if not the methods, of the FLQ; and the separatist Front d'Aotion Politique was thought to have strong backing in the Montreal city elections. And yet, even as the government felt the threat of increasing secessionist tendencies among Quebec's electorate, the FLQ was tiring of the ballot box as a means of achieving power: the April vote had yielded the PQ only seven out of 108 National Assembly seats, and the temper of the underground group was wearing rather thin:

"We once believed that perhaps it would be worth it to channel our energy and our impatience . . . in the Parti Quebecois, but the Liberal victory showed us clearly that that which we call democracy is nothing but the democracy of the rich" ( from the FLQ manifesto, issued three weeks ago. )

Finally, on the morning of Monday, October 5, four armed members of the FLQ's Liberation cell entered the home of British Trade Commissioner James R. Cross, seized him, and issued a list of seven demands:

the release from prison of 23 FLQ members (including Pierre-Paul Geoffroy) who had been convicted of armed robbery, arson, bombing, or murder;

the safe transport of these prisoners to Algeria or Cuba;

a $500,000 ransom, payable only in gold (the FLQ did not want the government to pass them marked bills);

the reading of the FLQ manifesto over French-speaking Montreal radio;

the rehiring of 456 Montreal mail drivers who had earlier been dismissed in a labor dispute with the Post Office management;

the disclosure of a police informer whom the Liberation cell suspected of having infiltrated their group;

an immediate halt to any police search for the kidnapped Trade Commissioner.

The kidnapping threw Montreal into a panic. From Ottawa, External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp ordered armed guards posted at all foreign embassies and consulates; Canadian officials and prominent businessmen began themselves to live at home and travel only under heavy protection. After the passage of several "deadlines" for the meeting of the demands, Montreal radio broadcast the FLQ manifesto; but negotiations between the government and the FLQ's representative Robert Lemieux never got underway, and on the evening of October 10, the Chernier cell of the FLQ seized "the Minister of Unemployment and Exploitation," Laporte.

By now the government was wild with rage. The disappearance of Cross, though painful, had not hit home nearly so hard as the abduction of Laporte, a powerful political figure and a personal acquaintance of both Bourassa and Trudeau. Justice Minister Jerome Choquette immediately offered to negotiate a safe-conduct passage abroad for the kidnappers in exchange for the return of the two hostages. Lemieux responded by lauding the FLQ as "the most progressive, devoted, and generous element of Quebec youth, perhaps even Quebec society." And many Montreal youths joined in the response. The 7000-student University of Quebec voted to close indefinitely until the provincialgovernment met the FLQ's demands. A rally in support of the FLQ's manifesto drew a tempestuous crowd of 500.

As the FLQ's popularity continued to grow, Lemieux rejected the government's final offer: the release of five prisoners for the return of the two men. Trudeau then met with his Cabinet and announced the enactment of martial law. Laporte's death followed 36 hours later.

When the tally of arrests began to skyrocket, it became clear that the government was using its power to move against political opponents who had little if anything to do with the activities of the underground group. Aside from the few FLQ spokesmen they could lay their hands on (Lemieux and Vallieres were among the first to be arrested), the police and the military were singularly unsuccessful in cracking the FLQ's tight security and uncovering is members. If there were any truth or logic to what the Trudeau government was doing, it would have outlawed the FLQ only if it knew precisely the people in the FLQ whom it was looking for and then sought them out with a minimum of dispatch. But the available evidence now indicates that the ban on the FLQ was designed not so much to jail its few dozen members as to be able to punish those far more numerous individuals and organizations whose political outlook approaches a position of support for the FLQ.

The list of those arrested reads like a Who's Who of the Canadian Left. In includes Michel Chartrand, a Quebec leader of the Confederation of National Trade Unions; Pauline Julien, a supporter of the Parti Quebecois and a nationally-famous singer who once refused to perform for Queen Elizabeth; Dr. Henri Bellemarre, director of a Montreal health clinic and a city council candidate of the Front d'Action Politique; to name only a few. Some of the hardest-hit youth groups have been the Vietnamese Patriots, an organization of students from South Vietnam who are sympathetic to the NLF; Cartier Latin, a student newspaper of the University of Quebec which published the FLQ manifesto before its reading on Montreal radio; and the American Draft Resistance Committee.

THE QUEBEC separatist movement has been dealt a stunning blow, and Montreal, the eye of the storm, is now gripped with a mood that borders on quiet desperation. The military stalks the streets; the police refuse to disclose arrests or charges; political activity is at a complete standstill; the students have obediently gone back to school. Most American media, of course, have portrayed the crisis as something which affects only a small number of irrelevant people; if you've read your New York Times, then you are aware that the average Canadian is unmoved by the spectacle and continues undisturbed to plod his weary way. On the other hand, very few observers have bothered to communicate the feeling of paralysis that has snared Trudeau's political opposition by the throat.

Someone might have taken as an example the government's calculated destruction of Montreal's major opposition party, Front d'Action Politique (FRAP), which endorses the FLQ's political and economic goals. That party ran candidates for 31 of the 52 seats on the Montreal city council last Sunday, and most of the candidates were given a decent chance of winning their contests. But after the declaration of martial law, two of the candidates were arrested and the party itself was repeatedly assailed.

Regional Minister of Economic Expansion Jean Marchand said that the FRAP was a "front" that provided "moral support" for the FLQ. He also charged that the underground group was planning to disrupt the municipal elections "by explosions of all kinds and by further kidnappings or even shooting people." Mayor Drapeau joined in the condemnation, claiming that FRAP was "bringing together all the terrorist and revolutionary elements in Montreal." He also stated that "blood would flow in the streets if a party based on socialism were to be elected."

FRAP filed a $3.6 million libel suit against Drapeau late last week. Sunday's voting took place under heavy military guard. An estimated 45 per cent of Montreal's eligible voters showed up to cast ballots-an unusually meager turnout. Drapeau was swept into office with more than 90 per cent of the vote, and his party won all 52 city council seats. He will now begin his fourth term as Montreal's mayor.

And Pierre Elliott Trudeau, of course, is still Prime Minister of Canada.