In the Name of the People. Liaisons
New Left, in a unique confluence where the most ardent nationalists turned out to be the most significant internationalists. It was at that moment that the concept of a “nation” became more of a call for genuine experimentation than an institutional demand.
In September 1970, following a hot summer throughout the province, the Liberation cell of the FLQ kidnapped the British diplomat James Richard Cross, demanding the liberation of their political prisoners in exchange for his release. The FLQ followed the example of their Palestinian comrades—with whom many of their members had trained—choosing kidnapping as a strategy for mounting tension. Faced with the authorities’ refusal to negotiate, the FLQ’s Chénier cell doubled the stakes by kidnapping the minister of labor, Pierre Laporte, known for his links with the mafia and his crackdowns against the labor movement. In response, on October 16, 1970, the Canadian government, directed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau (the father of current prime minister Justin Trudeau), decreed the War Measures Act, instituting a state of emergency suspending civil rights and sending the Canadian army into the streets of Quebec. Some five hundred arrests and warrantless searches of the extreme separatist Left were made. Within weeks, this vast shock operation succeeded in criminalizing all the militant organizations—even locking up union leaders—and scaring away their partisans, provoking a demoralization of the revolutionary movement.
The three letters FLQ soon became nothing more than a foil that History strove to reduce to a few political hotheads to cover up the vast array of those silenced by the state of emergency. October 1970 broke the alliance that was constructed among heterogeneous forms. The most striking example is the rupture that took place between the Far Left and the counterculture, the former of which later took the form of a rigid Marxism-Leninism, and the latter of which was characterized by a return to the land and a mystic new-age delirium.
III: AMPHIBOLOGY
Some forty years later, the hateful nationalist capture of the 2012 strike replayed this drama that formerly tore apart the independentist movement of Quebec. At the heart of the dispute was the Parti Québécois, a strange object that was both the culmination and the failure of a long maturation of the separatist movement in the 1960s. Between its foundation in 1968, when it was eager to exclude left-wing revolutionaries, and 1976, when it came to power, the Parti Québécois managed to capture the independentist forces and set itself up as a point of reference to replace revolutionary networks with its five-year plan of accession to constitutional independence. After handing over the independentist struggle to the state, which would “solve” the national question by developing infrastructures and Quebecois identity with language protection laws, the Parti Québécois progressively fell back on its old xenophobic foundations.
This nationalization of separatism ensured that all protests would therefore come up against post-Catholic familialism as the main form of Quebecois populism. Entirely extinguished by the institutional forces of the Parti Québécois, the nationalist movement gradually abdicated all willingness to address the question of autonomy except through the lens of incorporated economic independence or state independence acquired by means of a referendum—both attempts in 1980 and in 1995 were major failures. And as independence became a simple demographic-electoral question, everything that the separatist movement was able to put in place, in terms of capacities to immediately carry out independence, was relegated to the dustbin of history.
In the long story of Quebecois nationalism, this failure has been metabolized in the form of resentment against foreigners; within the referendum framework in which nationalism was compromised, the growing number of new arrivals to Quebec could not signify anything but the loss of a future independence referendum. The words of Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau on the night of defeat in 1995, laying blame on “the money and the ethnic vote,” created the xenophobic monster that has taken root in the historical depths of Quebecois nationalism, obviated in the decolonial detour of the 1960s only to return to the clerical-nationalism popular in the 1930s.
For that reason, if it is a question of measuring this failure—by the concerted effort of police repression and recuperation by referendum—it is advisable to make an additional inquiry into the archeology of struggle, in order to see how the division of what the FLQ was holding together was rooted in an older division, at the very origin of the modern movement for sovereignty. In the case of Quebec—except Montreal in certain regards—this modern movement dates back only as far as the beginning of the 1960s to what is called the Quiet Revolution, when the liberal party repatriated from within the state what was once under the purview of the clergy—first and foremost the education system. Before this secularization, Quebec paid the price of its defeat to its British occupiers, sinking into a long cultural lethargy, falling back on its Catholic faith, openly hostile to Protestant industrial development, but obviously submitting to British authorities. Feudal and ultramontane ideologies of terroir2 that were promoted by the clergy then confined French-Canadians to powerlessly break their backs on their meager plots of land, banning any subversive literature, all to maintain an aggressively natalist politics to quickly populate a number of remote regions from land clearing committed by colonizers. From its infancy, in the post-war years, separatism had to position itself as breaking equally from the Canadian state and the institutions of the Great Darkness, which kept the Quebecois in a pusillanimous and stifling “colonized mentality.”3 In this regard, it proved that separatism must first and foremost separate from its own society.
In the mid-sixties, the deadly yoke of the closed off French-Canadian finally gave way to the decolonial wave that shook the imperial world order. Eager for new platforms in a country untouched by counterculture, a group of young intellectuals and artists founded the magazine Parti Pris in 1963. The historical interest of this magazine is that it recognized not only its political and economic affinity with colonized peoples from Cuba to Vietnam, but also its psychological and spiritual affinity. This solidarity with colonized peoples led Parti Pris to understand their people as a “minoritarian society” who “never had a history: the history of others replaced it” (Paul Chamberland, De domination à la liberté).
Yet, if it was the impetus of the Quiet Revolution, Parti Pris failed to carry its own separatism to full realization, still haunted—like a good portion of other decolonialists of the epoch, Frantz Fanon included—by certain humanist-universalist reflexes, where a minority can only be realized and fully flourish by acceding to the majority. Thus, even if Parti Pris critiqued the impossibility of the colonized to understand themselves as separate from “the existence of its correlate, the majority”—that is to say the colonizer—whose project was described as “the building of a society founded on the suppression of a minority,” this didn’t stop Parti Pris, in turn, from enjoining the colonized to “the suppression of their minority status,” toward the resolution of their contradictory being in order to reach the fullness of a majoritarian People.
As for the “socialist” character of the independentist project, it came to mean nothing more than a potentially infinite process of socialization, that is to say a perpetual extension of the state’s reach, aimed at the cultural homogenization of a conquered territory. As a result, the critique made by Parti Pris against reactionary French-Canadian institutions gradually turned into a simple call for their modernization. Instead of becoming the so-called “Cuba of the North,” we have found ourselves as merely the American Norway.
In the early seventies, the deployment of latent industrial capacities in Quebec converted separatism into sovereigntism, at once getting rid of all its fragmentary character. Thus the exploitation of resources, the establishment of distribution networks, and the construction of dams and highways materially embodied the national imaginary, providing the founding image of its national identity: the heroic tale of the brave Quebecois people taming the forces of nature to appropriate its powers and develop its infrastructures. Quebecois nationalism, after all, ended up acceding to the “majority”—by way of the great path of territorial appropriation and logistical-institutional majority.
But what was deployed in concrete and steel across the territory took hold in place of the separatist plane of consistency: energy independence, nationalized under the slogan “Masters in our own home!” After the October Crisis of 1970, in search