Some of the demonstrators had come prepared for battle. They now hurled bottles, sticks, eggs, tomatoes, and more firecrackers at the police. Under this unexpected barrage, the line of uniformed officers pulled back momentarily, then charged into the crowd. At the same time, a second group of protesters, positioned curbside at the south end of the park, crashed through police barricades and charged the officers standing point on the parade route. Mounted officers and police on motorcycles confronted the mob, bloodying many of the protesters before delivering them to nearby ambulances. Officers dragged at least one demonstrator to a police van by his long hair. A girl with a bandaged head wound and blood running down her face was photographed entering an ambulance.
By now, a full-scale riot was under way. The crowd chanted, swung bludgeons made of metal and wood, and threw Molotov cocktails—pop bottles filled with gasoline, kerosene, and other flammable liquids. The air filled with the acrid scents of smoke, rotten eggs, and chemicals. Two police cruisers were flipped onto their roofs, and one of them was set ablaze. Ten other police cars were vandalized, as were civilian vehicles parked around the library. Six police horses were injured, one of them fatally. A man carrying an English-language placard that read “Separatists are people with narrow minds” was assaulted. Some of the young demonstrators, their clothes torn and their bodies bloodied, gave up the fight and made their own way to the ambulances.
Roughly an hour into the melee, just before 9 p.m., Pierre Bourgault was hoisted triumphantly onto the shoulders of some of his RIN supporters and then carried defiantly straight into the police line. Trapped in the ensuing crush of bodies, Bourgault could not break free. He was wrestled to the ground by a uniformed officer, hauled off to a paddy wagon, and booked.
Blocks away, another group of Quebec youth were falling into formation. They adjusted their costumes, tuned up their musical instruments, and climbed aboard their floats. Parc La Fontaine was in flames, and the défilé de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste had not yet even begun.
Outside Quebec, Pierre Bourgault was never as well known as Quiet Revolutionaries like Jean Lesage or René Lévesque—liberals who eschewed violence and rejected both ethnic nationalism and revolutionary socialism. Yet in the early 1960s, the RIN was at the cutting edge of the separatist movement in Quebec, and Bourgault was its unrivalled spokesperson.
Bourgault was born in 1934 in Quebec’s Anglo-dominated Eastern Townships. Like Pierre Trudeau, he received a classical education at the Jesuit-run Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal, and he was fluently bilingual. But unlike Trudeau, he had wanted nothing to do with English Canadians and had nothing but contempt for Canadian federalism. A devoted separatist and social radical, Bourgault emerged as one of the most determined Québécois artistes of his day to champion Quebecers’ dream of nation. Until his death in 2003, he was seldom out of the spotlight in his home province—as an actor, broadcaster, university professor, and adviser to premiers up to and including Jacques Parizeau.
Bourgault was twenty-six when he joined the RIN in October 1960, just a month after its founding as a sovereignist organization. He was fifteen years younger than Pierre Trudeau and thus the product of a very different experience of Quebec politics. Trudeau had cut his teeth in the 1950s as a civil libertarian confronting Premier Maurice Duplessis. By the time Bourgault’s star was on the rise, Duplessis was dead, the Quiet Revolution was transforming Quebec into a modern secular state, and Premier Jean Lesage was working overtime to protect his province from the nationalist genie he had himself let out of the bottle. In October 1960, Bourgault helped to write the RIN’s separatist manifesto. Four years later, by which time the RIN had become a full-fledged political party, he was elected its president, appealing to Quebecers to throw off the yoke of Anglo domination and reclaim their birthright. His oratorical gifts were legendary. “There was an icy brilliance to his style,” wrote one observer of the young Bourgault, “a theatrical, precise rhetoric that had none of the slang or joual that marked the speech of many Quebec politicians.”8 Ironically, perhaps, people would say exactly the same thing about Trudeau.
Bourgault’s talent as a provocateur blossomed alongside his knack for speechmaking, but these gifts would turn out to be too much for the mainstream sovereignist movement in Quebec. As RIN leader, he organized non-violent protests and sit-ins demanding, among other things, that French be the sole working language of the province. Then, in 1964, during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Quebec, Bourgault gave an inflammatory separatist speech that caused an ugly riot, cementing his reputation as a militant. Moderate Quebec sovereignists including René Lévesque distanced themselves from him. (Lévesque thought Bourgault a demagogue and a troublemaker, and he was also reportedly uncomfortable with Bourgault’s homosexuality.) Pierre Trudeau, by then an avowed enemy of Quebec separatism in any incarnation, congratulated the RIN leader for turning the peaceful people of Quebec against his own movement.9 “The separatists despair of ever being able to convince the public of the rightness of their ideas,” Trudeau wrote sneeringly in the journal Cité libre in 1964. “So they want to abolish freedom and impose a dictatorship of their minority. They are in sole possession of the truth, so others need only get into line. And when things don’t go fast enough they take to illegality and violence. On top of everything, they claim to be persecuted. Imagine that, the poor little souls.”10 Journalist Peter C. Newman, then covering Quebec politics for the Toronto Star, reported that Bourgault was so loathed in rural Quebec that people refused to rent him a hall.
Undaunted, Bourgault announced that the RIN would run candidates in the provincial election of 1966. They would campaign on a platform combining separatism and socialism, infused with a hard-hitting critique—perfectly suited to Bourgault’s own rhetorical skills—that blamed the Lesage Liberals for having delivered on neither. By all accounts, the RIN took the campaign extremely seriously, taking pains to overcome its hooligan image. On election day, RIN candidates won 5.6 per cent of the popular vote but no seats. Their share of the popular vote in Montreal was over 9 per cent, Bourgault himself coming second in the riding of Duplessis with 33 per cent. Author Graham Fraser later revealed that Union Nationale leader Daniel Johnson, the winner of the 1966 provincial election, had cut a secret deal with Bourgault at the start of the campaign. In an effort to prevent vote splitting, the UN and the RIN had agreed not to run strong candidates in ridings where the other had a chance of winning. Fraser rightly concluded that the deal did more for Johnson than for Bourgault, drawing off votes from left-leaning Quebecers that would otherwise have gone to the Liberals.11
Bourgault continued to rabble-rouse in the cause of an independent Quebec over the course of 1967, a year in which the dream of nation seemed to many sovereignists to be within reach. By this time, Pierre Trudeau was making headlines across Canada as Lester Pearson’s dashing young justice minister, making him, in Bourgault’s books, the worst sort of vendu (sellout). In late June 1967, just days before Canada’s July 1 centennial, Bourgault gave a fiery speech in Montreal. “We are just a little province, not a state or a country,” he said of Quebec. “We, a poor little people, are basking in an illusion of riches.” Liberal MPs who claimed to speak for Quebecers merely fuelled this illusion, Bourgault continued. Pierre Elliott Trudeau “is not a French Canadian so there’s no problem.” Trudeau’s friend and ally Jean Marchand, then serving as Lester Pearson’s immigration minister, was another federalist turncoat. “I say a man is a traitor,” railed Bourgault, “when he literally vomits every day on the nation from which he emerged.”12
When French president Charles de Gaulle famously cheered “Vive le Québec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal city hall in July 1967, Bourgault and his rowdy RIN comrades were present in the crowd, their separatist placards hoisted, ecstatic to hear the général mouthing one of their signature slogans. And when René Lévesque resigned from the provincial Liberal Party just weeks later to found the Mouvement souveraineté-association (MSA)—precursor to the Parti Québ
écois—Bourgault announced his support for a unified sovereignist push led by Lévesque, promising to bring in the eleven thousand card-carrying members of the RIN. More doubtful than ever about Bourgault, Lévesque refused a formal merger with the RIN.13 He did, however, agree to join his MSA with Laurent Legault’s Ralliement national and René Jutras’s Regroupement national. In late 1968, Bourgault would dissolve the RIN to allow its members to join Lévesque’s MSA. The embittered leftist rump of the RIN would re-form as the Front de libération populaire.
Lurking on the radical fringe of the sovereignty movement in these years was Parti pris, an intellectual collective advocating the decolonization of Quebec through revolution, and the avowedly militant FLQ. Inspired by Algerian and Cuban guerrillas and promoting the violent overthrow of the Canadian state, FLQ members organized themselves into commando-style paramilitary cells and set out to bomb, kidnap, and ultimately murder their way towards a classless utopia. “Quebec is a colony!” shouted the FLQ manifesto in April 1963. “QUEBEC PATRIOTS, TO ARMS! THE HOUR OF NATIONAL REVOLUTION HAS STRUCK! INDEPENDENCE OR DEATH!”14 The immediate targets of Felquiste attacks were nominally English-Canadian and federal institutions, most of them in Montreal. They included armed police and military units but also unarmed English-language media outlets and businesses believed to discriminate against francophones. FLQ sabotage began in earnest in the spring of 1963, with bombings at a federal armory, a section of the rail line running between Montreal and Quebec City, RCMP headquarters, and a Canadian Forces recruiting centre. Felquistes blew up mailboxes in the affluent Montreal suburb of Westmount using time bombs, one of which critically injured Canadian Forces bomb-disposal expert Walter Leja. Trudeau’s close friend and ally Gérard Pelletier excoriated FLQ terrorism in La Presse in May 1963. “As I write, a man is lying in hospital, hovering between life and death,” wrote Pelletier. “He is the second victim of the FLQ in less than a month, the second tragedy in the blind violence unleashed in Montreal by a group of madmen.”15
The Felquistes were unmoved, even as their own young foot soldiers were rounded up and imprisoned. The carnage continued. Four civilian deaths and many more injuries were attributed to the FLQ in the first three years of its quixotic struggle. In September 1966, eight Felquiste youth were convicted of criminal responsibility in the death of sixty-four-year-old Thérèse Morin, a secretary killed during the bombing of the H.B. La Grenade shoe factory. One of those convicted was an underage “Mod” who, in full Pete Townshend regalia, had delivered the time bomb on his souped-up scooter. One of two men later incarcerated for the same attack was the writer Pierre Vallières, once a protégé of Gérard Pelletier and contributor to Pierre Trudeau’s own Cité libre. While serving time, Vallières would pen the incendiary separatist tract Nègres blancs d’Amérique (White Niggers of America). As historian David A. Charters has concluded in a recent survey of terrorism in Canada, the fear generated by the Felquistes in the 1960s turned out to be disproportionate to their modest organizational size and capability. In other words, the FLQ succeeded as a terrorist group in spite of its amateurism and incompetence, right up to the moment in October 1970 when members of Paul Rose’s Chénier cell murdered Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte in cold blood.16
René Lévesque, for whom political violence was anathema, would later dismiss the FLQ as “a couple of dozen young terrorists, whose ideology was a hopeless hodgepodge of anarcho-nationalism and kindergarten Marxism.”17 Pierre Bourgault, too, understood that any perception that the RIN was connected with the FLQ would destroy his own credibility. At least once, in April 1964, Bourgault threatened the Montreal Star with a $1 million libel suit for implying that the mastermind of an FLQ bank robbery and armory raid, François Schirm, was a member of the RIN.18 This legal threat did not change the fact that the three founders of the FLQ were RIN activists who had together created the Réseau de résistance (Resistance Network) as the forerunner of the FLQ.19 Nor did it mitigate the public scorn heaped onto Bourgault when he or other members of the RIN threatened federal politicians like Pierre Trudeau with violence.
It is unlikely that Trudeau lost much sleep when Bourgault impugned him as a vendu or sneered that he had no right to call himself a French Canadian. As Trudeau would later say after hearing one of President Richard Nixon’s more colourful slurs against him, “I’ve been called worse things by better people.” Moreover, Trudeau was comfortable in the role of the separatists’ bête noire. He knew better than most of his youthful adversaries that what he called the “rough and tumble” of politics affected everyone.20 Several days after Trudeau had declared his candidacy for the Liberal leadership, in February 1968, Bourgault announced that the RIN would be supporting him—because he was the candidate most likely to “hasten Quebec’s separation” from Canada.21 “The RIN approves Trudeau,” said Bourgault wryly. “He’s the best candidate we could hope for. He has never been popular in Quebec. He has complete disrespect for the people.”22
On the evening of June 20, 1968, just days before Trudeau was to appear at the défilé de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Bourgault pleaded with his supporters to come out to Parc La Fontaine and challenge the prime minister. Trudeau had to be resisted as “a traitor and a sell-out,” he fumed. “It is intolerable to us that a man who does not believe in our nation and spits on it every day should hold the limelight at these celebrations. If an English-speaking prime minister came here and told us what he is telling us, we would kill him.”23
At 9:40 p.m., Trudeau arrived at the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Montréal, entered inconspicuously by a side entrance, and made his way through the towering black doors out onto the reviewing stand.
By now, the riot on rue Sherbrooke was well into its second hour. The separatist demonstrators had been expecting Trudeau, of course, but so, too, had some of the other Quebecers in the crowd. When the prime minister made his entrance, he was greeted by a rousing round of cheers. Trudeau smiled and waved in response. Hurrahs and Vives turned to hisses and boos, however, as the demonstrators responded en masse to Trudeau. “Trudeau au poteau!” (Trudeau to the gallows!) and “Trudeau vendu!” they shouted. The prime minister shrugged and took his seat in the front row of the platform. A bottle smashed on the sidewalk in front of him. Some of the demonstrators got close enough to Trudeau to leer directly at him. The two-dozen-strong police and RCMP officers standing point in front of the reviewing stand linked arms to form a protective chain, just in case anyone tried to leap up onto the platform. More bottles smashed onto the sidewalk and the street. More rioters were escorted into paddy wagons, passing noisily right in front of the prime minister and the other VIPs. An unconscious police officer was carried by one of his comrades in front of the reviewing stand just as Trudeau was taking his seat. Nothing in the prime minister’s cool demeanour suggested that he was fazed by any of this turmoil.
The president of the Montreal Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Dollard Mathieu, was seated to Trudeau’s right. Premier Daniel Johnson, Mayor Jean Drapeau, Drapeau’s wife, Marie-Claire Boucher, and Le Devoir editor Claude Ryan were seated to the right of Mathieu. Montreal archbishop Paul Grégoire sat to Trudeau’s immediate left—an arrangement that Trudeau later joked had afforded him divine protection. Among those standing on the sidewalk was Trudeau’s young tour manager, Bill Lee, with whom the prime minister would lean over and chat from time to time. All told, there were perhaps as many as sixty people on the VIP platform, those in the front row seated, the rest standing three rows deep. The dignitaries included several women, most of them wearing the brightly coloured suits and pillbox hats that were the style of the day. Two police officers were posted to the roof of the library, their feet dangling in front of the building’s massive facade.
Just minutes after 10 p.m., the parade arrived, with banners, bands, and majorettes in full regalia. Trudeau smiled broadly and applauded—even though the demonstrators drowned out the sound of the marchers almost entirely. Occasionally, a police van would interrupt the parad
e and pass in front of the stand. Knowing, perhaps, that they were being broadcast, most of the dignitaries, including Trudeau, did their best to ignore the demonstrators. (Archival footage of the action on the reviewing stand was shot from a stationary camera to the north, which captured almost nothing of the chaos unfolding on the street and sidewalk below.) At one point, Trudeau stood up to blow kisses to a float loaded with young women in bikinis.
At 10:50 p.m., with the parade stalled yet again, a young man darted from the pack of rioters to the front of the library and threw a Molotov cocktail into the reviewing stand. It was a pop bottle containing some kind of flammable liquid, possibly gasoline. Since the television lights set up to illuminate the reviewing stand blinded everyone on the platform, no one saw the projectile as it sailed between Trudeau and Dollard Mathieu, roughly six feet over their heads. But everyone heard it shatter on the library wall behind the prime minister. Most of the people, including Trudeau, instinctively ducked for cover. Moments later, many of them, including all the women, moved either on their own or with police escorts to safety behind the library doors. From the back row, RCMP officers moved purposefully, directing the exiting VIPs into the library and converging on those still in the front row. Premier Daniel Johnson left his seat to take shelter in the back. Mayor Drapeau escorted his wife into the library and returned immediately to the front of the platform.
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