Ideas - October 8,1970: The FLQ Manifesto

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

In October 1970, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) sparked a nationwide crisis by kidnapping British diplomat James Cross and Quebec Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte, whom they later murdered. In return for Cross, the FLQ issued seven demands, one of which was to broadcast its manifesto. CBC/Radio-Canada complied. IDEAS examines the impact and legacy of the manifesto, and its relevance today. *This episode originally aired on October 13, 2020.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm Nala Ayyad. Welcome to Ideas. So what is it with all these men with guns around here? Haven't you noticed? It was October 1970, and Canada was in the midst of a crisis.

It's more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of a Soviet government. At any cost? At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that? Just watch me. That's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau speaking with a reporter from the CBC about his response to violence and kidnapping in Quebec. Today, the Premier of Quebec saw the face of the enemy.

A bearded young separatist arrested with a half-made bomb in his hand, two others assembled nearby, a booby trap obviously designed to kill, and 200 sticks of dynamite. Radical Quebec nationalists had been planting bombs in Montreal since the early 60s. But in October of 1970, the Front de Libération de Québec, the FLQ, changed tactics. With the slick, daylight kidnapping of James Richard Cross, one thing is certain. They pulled off North America's first political kidnapping. Early in October, the FLQ abducted British Trade Commissioner James Cross.

In exchange for his release, the FLQ had a list of demands. But only one of them really mattered to the group. The broadcast of an eight-page document. A manifesto. On October 8th, Radio-Canada announcer Gaëtan Montreuil sat before a camera and began to read. We are reading the entire manifesto of the Liberation Front of Quebec. before a camera and began to read. The manifesto spoke to a very specific time in Quebec's history. But at its core were questions that are as relevant today as they were back then.

Questions about sovereignty and equality, culture and memory, and what it really takes to spark a revolution. It's about all of us coming together, having this conversation, and beginning to think about what we want our future to be. This episode of Ideas is about a document that sought to ignite a revolutionary consciousness among ordinary Quebecers. And how it very nearly did. And my father, of all people, a federalist and whatever, said to me, these guys, they're right. This documentary is from Jeff Turner, host of the CBC podcast, Recall, How to Start a Revolution. It's called Manifesto. A bomb exploded today in a federal government building in downtown Montreal. Mr. Diefenbaker's whistle-stopping tour of Quebec province was slowed to a drastic crawl last night by its separatist bomb scare.

Another powerful bomb blast rocks downtown Montreal. This one shook the visitors gallery. Today's activities show that the movement pledged to bring about Quebec's independence by violence if necessary is graduating in its sincerity and boldness. Before the October crisis of 1970, before the kidnappings and the murder, Molotov cocktails and bombs were the stock and trade of the FLQ. A few sticks of strategically placed dynamite, a flaming bottle hurled at a federal building. This was the terror that radical separatists unleashed on the city of Montreal for more than seven years. They killed eight people, injured many more, some grievously. But as much power as there was in the FLQ's threat of violence, its members also knew the power of words.

Among its ranks were teachers, journalists, and intellectuals who used newsletters to get their message out. The number of bomb incidents in Montreal over the past year now approaches 60. It's the second one this week in the heart of downtown Montreal. It's how the FLQ's most prolific bomber learned how to make bombs. The newsletters were also powerful tools for recruitment. The FLQ was a diffuse operation. If you were inspired by

something you read and you wanted to start a cell and call yourself a member of the FLQ, well, you could just go for it. And because cells essentially operated independently of one another, it was tough for police to figure out just how many members were active at any given time, let alone where they might be and what they might be up to. If one cell wanted to communicate with another, often the only way was through communiques, which cells issued a lot of over the years. Communiques telling reporters where bombs had been planted and why. Communiques explaining away injurious violence. Communiques making demands. Communiques appointing lawyers

to speak on their behalf, often without the lawyer having any heads up at all. And then there were the books. Pierre Valliere, the philosophical leader of the movement, wrote his revolutionary text from a jail cell in New York City while awaiting deportation. White N-Words of America is a mix of essay and personal history, and in it, Valliere harnesses the alienation and anger he felt growing up in working-class Montreal. He challenges Quebecers to take up arms in the name of independence, all while aligning the experience of French Canadians with that of Black Americans. It was compelling stuff, and it clearly

frightened the authorities. When it was published in 1968, the book caught the eye of a New York Times reviewer who wrote that it would, and here I quote, take its place alongside the writing of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Régis Debray, for it is an eloquent revolutionary document that clutches one's throat like a drowning hand. There were other manifestos, other books, other communiques, always communiques. And the FLQ was always careful about its choice of words, but never more so than in October of 1970. This manifesto, the FLQ's declaration of purpose and ideology, it needed to resonate with ordinary Quebecers.

It needed to be a masterpiece. And right from the opening line, it kind of was. Front de Libération du Québec. Manifeste. Le Front de Libération du Québec n'est pas le Messie, ni un Robin des Bois des temps modernes. The Front de Libération du Québec is neither the Messiah nor a modern-day Robin Hood. I think that's an excellent first sentence because it sets the stage for the rest of the text,

which is about people, wherever they are, starting their own revolution, facing themselves of the text, which is about people wherever they are starting their own revolution, facing themselves in the mirror and asking themselves the big question, what do they want to do with their lives? Do they want Quebec to continue the way it is, or do they have some dissatisfaction, frustration? Is there some social strain that they are under that they don't like and they want to be liberated from, emancipated from? Jean-Philippe Warren is the research chair for the study of Quebec at Concordia University in Montreal. When you think about revolutionary manifestos, he says, your mind may wander off to, say, the communist manifesto. But that's the wrong comparison. This is something that people

seem to forget. These people did not pretend to have the solution to everything. The Communist Manifesto laid out a vision in which the Communist Party would speak for and defend all the world's proletariat. It was also dismissive of other socialist doctrines. But the FLQ, it was no one-size-fits-all operation, and it wasn't interested in prescribing a way of living. We're not the Messiah. We're not Robin Hood. We're not telling you what you should be doing. We're just saying, you know, we're being screwed, and therefore we need to stand up and demand that our rights be respected. We're not the Messiah, and we're not the Robin Hood. The beauty of that first line lies

in how simple and to the point it is, says Warren, but also in how innately hilarious it is. Because the FLQ actually did operate a bit like a Robin Hood organization. So that line, it's not only a wink to a knowing audience, but a bit of clever wordplay that leads directly to what's really at the heart of the manifesto. Namely, marrying the Quebecers' sense of cultural disconnect from an anglophone Canada with the economic worries of Quebec's middle and working classes. Le Front de Libération du Québec wants total independence for Quebecers, united in a free society and purged for good

of the clique of voracious sharks, the patronizing big bosses, and their henchmen who have made Quebec their private hunting ground for cheap labor and unscrupulous exploitation. I don't know if you caught that, but those words, big bosses and cheap labor, well, they're in English in the original French text as well.

Part of it is that these expressions are the ones that Quebecers usually use in ordinary life in the 60s. So they were not talking about les patrons. They were talking about the big boss to emphasize the fact that people who control the finance, people who control the economy, were anglophone.

It's this very simple construct the FLQ is using to convey the foreignness, the Englishness of capitalism in Quebec. And it's doing it in the colloquial language of the Quebecois. You know, many of the expressions are in Joual, which is a kind of a French-Canadian slang. The effect of which can't be underestimated, says Warren. Engaging with ordinary folk on big societal issues and doing it in their own language. Well, it was still a pretty revolutionary idea in Quebec in 1970. It was a time when Quebecers were seeking to see themselves differently than the way they were seeing themselves prior to the 1960s when Quebecers were seeking to see themselves differently than the way they were seeing themselves prior to the 1960s. Quebecers were under the impression that they were never

good enough. They were not speaking French properly. They were uneducated. And their reference point was always France. So it was always compared to France, we're not as good. Compared to France, we're not as intelligent. Compared to France, we're not as intelligent. Compared to France, we don't have the same culture, we don't have the same history. One of the turning points was 1968, when for the first time on stage, there was the play Les Belles Sœurs, Les Belles Soeurs, which portrayed Quebecers as they were, and they were playing that play, you know, speaking slang, speaking joual. And that was like a catalyst. It was like a revolution.

People said, oh my God, even, you know, in theater, we can actually enjoy ourselves the way we actually are in real life. Les Belles Sœurs was the debut work of the celebrated Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay. He wrote the two-act comedy in 1965, and when it finally debuted in late summer 1968, it set off a raucous controversy. First, there was Tremblay's use of some particularly tawdry joual. He also had the audacity to put the stories of working-class women doing working-class things on stage. It upended everything Quebecers knew about what theater was supposed to be. To this day, it's cited as the work of art that has had the most profound effect on Quebec's culture and language.

had the most profound effect on Quebec's culture and language. So the manifesto was also part of that new coming of age of the Quebec nation where people were saying, well, you know, we can express ourselves the way we want to express ourselves, the way we usually express ourselves. This is who we are and we should not be ashamed of who we are. Le Front de Libération du Québec n not an aggressive movement, but rather a response to the aggression perpetrated by high finance through the puppet governments in Ottawa and Quebec. and Quebec. Peppered throughout the manifesto are all these references that are so specific to the cultural moment of Quebec in 1970. The corporations, the big bosses, the nasty labor disputes, the legislation. It makes it tough to parse 50 years later. But Jean-Philippe Warren says that while you may not recognize the references today,

that line about how the FLQ is not an aggression, but a response to an aggression, that's the important bit. That's the heart of the manifesto. The FLQ employed references that were symbolic of how people in power used fear to uphold the status quo, to protect their privilege. Aggressions your average Quebecer would have recognized. And in a very tidy way, those references also tell us about the evolution of the movement from its earliest days, when the fight was about language and culture, and less about class struggle. The history of the FLQ is both short and long. Short because it lasts from 1963 to 1972,

so it's not even 10 years. But it's long in terms of their constant questioning of their strategy and their ideology. Prior to 1966, they were more nationalist than socialist. After 1966, they become more socialist than they're nationalist. But you know, for them, it's two sides of the same coin, because it was believed that the French Canadians were an ethnic class. They were exploited and oppressed because they were French, and they were oppressed and exploited because they were workers, because they belonged to the working class. And so when people of the FLQ asserted that they wanted to defend the working class, FLQ asserted that they wanted to defend the working class.

They didn't have to say that they were also in favor of defending the rights of the Francophones. It went without saying. And defending the rights of the working class, the rights of Francophones, it wasn't cheap. Members of the FLQ were always in search of more cash. And in the manifesto, the FLQ lays out just how it got that cash. Which brings us back to Robin Hood. Le Front de Libération du Québec s'autofinance d'un pouvolentaire... Le Front de Libération du Québec finances itself through voluntary taxes levied on the establishments that exploit workers.

The Front de Libération du Québec was not a party, but it needed to sustain its activities somehow. So it needed money to rent houses. It needed money to print documents. It needed money to organize events in which people could be trained in the art of firing a weapon, for example. Many of the most prominent FLQ members grew up poor, in working-class neighborhoods or in the slums of Montreal's South Shore. In formal settlements where there was no infrastructure for even the basics like running water. So they needed resources to continue their fight. running water. So they needed resources to continue their fight. The only way for them to get these resources was by stealing. Stealing dynamites, stealing rifles, but also stealing

money. So they would rob banks. So it was kind of common practice, so to speak. So by voluntary taxes, the FLQ meant the money they'd stolen from big business. But it was also making reference to a policy of Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau's. The city was using public lotteries to fund various civic projects, a policy that Drapeau called, you guessed it, voluntary taxes. To the FLQ, Jean Drapeau was living this very opulent life, both in and out of office, and it used the manifesto to compare the mayor's lifestyle with those of regular working-class Quebecers. Yes, there are reasons why you, Mr. Tremblay of Panay Street, and you, Mr. Cloutier, who work in construction in Saint-Jérôme,

cannot pay for Véso-Dol, replete with jazz and razzle-dazzle like Drapeau, the aristocrat, who is so concerned about slums that he covers them up with coloured billboards to hide our misery from tourists. Drapeau ran for office on a central campaign promise. He was going to put Montreal on the map. So he had this plan that he would modernize Montreal, build skyscrapers, build the metro, build Place des Arts with museums and opera and so forth, build huge highways across the island, and at the same time, build those entire neighborhoods that were considered slums. So they took like hundreds of families, and they said at the beginning of 1963, here's the eviction notice. You've got a few months to find yourself a new

place to live. You got to move all your things because at the end of the year, this entire neighborhood where you live, where your parents live, where you raise your kids, it's all going to be gone. He was simply not solving the problem of poverty, just making sure that poverty could no longer be seen in Montreal. So on the one hand, Drapeau did put Montreal on the map. He ushered it into modern times with big highways, with a metro, with a party. A really, really big party. The World's Fair, Expo 67,

drew millions of people from all corners of the globe to the city. 1967 also happened to be Canada's centennial year, which only added to the air of celebration. It was by all accounts a wild success. But behind all that jazz and razzle-dazzle, the space between the haves and the have-nots, the space where the frustrations and the ideology of the FLQ could really flourish, it began to feel like a chasm, which the FLQ illustrated to great effect through the manifesto, says Warren,

simply by putting names to it. Oui, il y en a des raisons pour que vous, Madame Lemay de Saint-Hyacinthe... Yes, there are reasons why you, Mrs. Lemay of Saint-Hyacinthe, can't pay for a little trip to Florida like the rotten judges and parliamentarians do with our money. There are reasons why you, Mr. Lachance of St. Marguerite Street, go and drown your despair, your bitterness and your rage in a bottle of that dog's beer. Yes, there are reasons why, generation after generation,

you, the welfare recipients, are kept on social assistance. It's just brilliant rhetoric. It's a way to present your message by making sure that it is embodied in people's daily lives. That it's not something abstract, that it's not something theoretical. It was about people incapable of making ends meet. It was about people incapable of sending their kids to the right schools. incapable of sending their kids to the right schools. It was about people incapable of affording the basic necessities of life. It was about people who were seeing that while they were struggling,

a large portion of the Quebec elite were having it good. They could feel in their bones that something is wrong. And people felt it. When they heard the FLQ on television, they said, they are right. It's true that my life is not what I hoped it would be. It's true that I don't understand why, when Quebec society is rich, large segments of Quebec society remain poor. So maybe the FLQ's manifesto wouldn't spur people to revolution. But it was powerful enough for people to start asking questions, beginning with the simplest one.

How did we get such a raw deal? If you look at the license plates here, it's written Quebec, Je me souviens, Quebec, I remember. So it's all about remembering. It's about memory. But ask anybody in this room here why it's like that. Nobody knows what it means. Absolutely nobody knows why it unites. It's early December 2019. We've come to this busy café in Montreal to meet with Robert Lepage,

playwright, actor, director, beloved Quebecois export. On license plates, it used to be written, Quebec, la belle province, the beautiful province. So, of course, when the PQ came into power, they said, well, we don't want the word province there, right? So let's change it by something else. And they used, there's a poem that was written in the very early 20th century, and it's on the

parliament, it's engraved on the parliament. And it says, basically, je me souviens, it starts by je me souviens, je me souviens d'être né sous le lys et je crois sous la rose, which means basically, I remember being born under the lily flower, but I'm growing up under the rose, right? In other words, I remember being born French, but I'm growing up under the English. So it's a very pro-federalist poem that the separatist government in the 1970s took and said, well, let's take the first three words of that. It's absurd, you know. So it's actually a very pro-federalist thing,

but it was installed by a separatist government. But also, the thing is that these three words, even though people know that it comes from that poem or not, I think it's there to say, don't forget what we've been through. That's how people interpret it. We've been through the mill. We've survived. The culture, even though we've been conquered and eventually repressed or oppressed, we're still there. Remember where you come from.

Remember the heroes of the past. Remember whatever. So that's how people use it now. But that's not where it comes from, unfortunately. Thank you. Lepage says we're all shaped by faulty memory, by history that gets rewritten over time. His own work plays with the truth of childhood in Quebec,

of growing up alongside the FLQ. But truth is subjective, he says, and sometimes that's a good thing. And sometimes it means we forget what we should remember. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on RN and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus.

Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. from CBC's Personally, available now. In early October 1970, British Trade Commissioner James Cross was kidnapped from his home in Montreal

by radical Quebec nationalists. The Front de Libération de Québec had a number of demands for Cross's release, one of which was the broadcast of its manifesto. The eight-page document was a call to working-class Quebecers to rise up in revolution and to claim what was rightfully theirs. And it was written in a language that no Quebecer had ever heard on primetime television. It was their language, a colloquial Quebec French.

The language outraged mainstream politicians and Anglo elites. But ordinary Quebecers were moved by what they heard. They recognized themselves in it. The documentary you're listening to is about that manifesto, The documentary you're listening to is about that manifesto, a document that gave rise to questions about equality, liberation and sovereignty, questions that still linger 50 years later. This is Jeff Turner with Manifesto. There was definitely a tension that I could sense,

but I wasn't very savvy politically. I mean, I knew something was going on, I knew there were some tensions. A lot of the explosive, spectacular things were happening in Montreal, not only in Quebec City, but towards the end of the 60s. Robert Lepage was just a kid in October of 1970, a couple of months shy of his 13th birthday. And his family was in Quebec City, away from the heart of the action in Montreal. But he'd followed the activities of the FLQ

the same way any kid in Quebec might have, and he tried to make sense of it all by barraging his parents with questions. He had questions about why people were rioting in the street, about why parade goers turned their backs on the Queen when she visited in 1967, why a soldier stopped him at gunpoint to check his bag as he was making deliveries along his paper route. The answers weren't always easy to follow.

Clearly, in those days, the bosses spoke English and the cheap laborers spoke French. It was that clear cut. So that's what my father kind of incarnated that contradiction. He was a working class guy who was being in a certain sense exploited, didn't have all the rights that other people would have. But at the same time, he played along because his wealth was the fact that he spoke very good English. He was very proud to be a citizen of the British Empire. Lepage's dad was a federalist, unapologetically so. He'd served in the Navy, and the family lived in Halifax for a while,

where the two eldest Lepage kids were raised in English. Robert and his little sister came along after his parents moved back to Quebec City, so they were raised in French. His dad took up taxi driving after leaving the military. He could earn pretty good money from Americans looking for tours in English. He wasn't shy about advertising his bilingualism. As for his mom, well, she had separatist sympathies, and though she was quiet about them, Lepage says there was always a bit of tension in the family. Lepage would later mine that tension for his stage and film work, but as he says, memory is a complicated thing.

This is Robert Lepage on stage at the Roma Europa Festival in 2015. The bit of theatre he's performing here is from his play 887. It's a one-man memory palace, a fragmented recollection of his 1960s childhood, growing up under the spectre of the FLQ. The protagonist is modelled after Lepage's dad, this paradox of the time, the working-class francophone who also happens to be a federalist.

I see it's auto fiction. So everything's true, but everything's a little not true. You know, you want to make good art. You know, Picasso said art is a big lie that better expresses the truth, right? So it's real memories, but reorganized or re-edited. So anything that's edited is not the absolute truth, right? And I think that's how our memory works, that we edit stuff out and we re-edit stuff

and we leave a space somewhere to be surprised by stuff that comes up. Someone says, oh, I didn't't remember that, oh that's so cool and then you hope that something that you didn't remember that will show up at one point and you go, oh yeah that explains why this or that so memory is not just something

of the intellect or of the memory is a something of the senses or of the... Memory is something of the senses, right? And it's connected to smell and taste and colors or whatever. So we tend to rely or only have faith in things that have been documented or written down or remashed by our intellect. But actually memory is something very intuitive also.

And so that's why people have different memories of the same event, because they all have a different body and different way, and they're at a different place in their lives. So you cannot have a collective consensus about memory. That's part of why the story of the FLQ is such a difficult one to tell, says Lepage. In Quebec, time has blurred the edges of the history. People remember the bombs in mailboxes. They remember the fear.

They remember French President Charles de Gaulle standing on a balcony. Vive le Québec libre! they remember French President Charles de Gaulle standing on a balcony. And Prime Minister Pierre-Eliot Trudeau in confrontation with a couple of reporters on the steps of Parliament. How far would you extend that? Just watch me. But they may not remember what led to those moments or what happened next or why their fear feels abstract. And they don't always remember the victims,

not the way they remember the terrorists, some of whom now enjoy a kind of swashbuckling folk hero status. And that can be difficult to square, says Lepage, but it's also how collective memory works. It doesn't. It's totally unreliable. In a way, the manifesto helped give form to Quebec's collective memory of grievance and hurt. And there was a catharsis in it, even if it was unreliable.

The best anyone can do, says Lepage, is to take what they think they know and work with that. What Lepage knows are words and theatre, and the manifesto delivered on both. And it was read in a very... I don't know if you can decide when you read it. The way it's read, it's amazing. Gaétan Montreuil's reading of the manifesto

stood in stark contrast to the actual words on the page in front of him. And to Lepage, it made for a very strange drama. And there was a kind of a poetry reading a couple of years ago where it was read by an actor who just acted it out the way it was written. And it's an amazing, amazing script. When you take the time to, you know, get into character and you're whether you like the ideas or not, it's an amazing piece of writing, you know. But of course, you have this guy, a very official guy called Demetrius Reisemberg.

And it's funny, the passages where he says these words that you weren't allowed to say on TV, you know, Trudeau la tapette, Trudeau the faggot, words you simply would not hear that were spoken by this official guy live on national TV. So that was quite an event and that was quite an achievement. That bit Lepage is talking about is this one. We have all had our fill of promises of work and prosperity

when in fact we will always be the diligent servants and bootlickers of the big shots, as long as there is a Westmount, a town of Mount Royal, a Hampstead, an Outremont, all the fortresses of high finance on St. James Street and Wall Street. We will be slaves until all of us, the Québécois, have exhausted every means, including arms and dynamite,

to rid ourselves of these economic and political big bosses who are prepared to use every dirty trick in the book to better screw us. We live in a society of terrorized slaves, terrorized by the big bosses, like Steinberg, Clark, Bronfman, Smith, Niepel, Timmons, Geoffrion, J.L. Levesque, Hirshhorn, Thompson, Nesbitt, Damaret, Kearns. A côté de ça, Rémy Popole, La Garcette, Drapeau, Le Dog, Bourassa, Le Serin, Les Cimards, Drapeau, Trudeau, La Tapette, C'est des Pinots. Compared to them, Rémy Popole, The Nightstick, Drapeau, The Dog, Bourassa, The Twink of the Cimards, and Trudeau, The Faggot, are peanut politicians.

An ugly, homophobic slur aimed at the sitting prime minister. Part of what the manifesto revealed was the way language could be sexualized and used as a political weapon. Popol was Quebec's minister of justice, Drapeau, the mayor of Montreal. Bourassa was Robert Bourassa, provincial Liberal Party leader and Quebec's premier. He was just 36 years old when he was elected to office earlier that spring. He'd been up against René Lévesque, whose fledgling

Parti Québécois was feeling some real momentum going into the election. And the PQ actually won 23% of the popular vote. But the way the electoral map worked, it only took a little over 6% of seats in Parliament. It was a blow to separatists. And for the FLQ, further proof that the big parties were in the pocket of big business. Bourassa had married into one of Montreal's wealthiest families, the Simards. They also happened to be major funders of the Liberal Party. So by describing Bourassa as the twink of the family, the FLQ was very simply, very effectively sexualizing the control it believed Montreal's elite had over its politicians. The original translation of the manifesto was dashed off just hours after its release by the Canadian press. And CP played it safe. For decades,

English speakers read that line as Trudeau the pansy, which doesn't pack quite the same punch as the original French. The language the FLQ chose here was meant to shock, but with humor and irreverence. And Concordia professor Jean-Philippe Warren says that as awful as it might seem to a modern audience, ordinary Quebecers would have found the humor and hearing Pierre Trudeau described with a homophobic slur. There was this conception within activist circles, more largely Quebec society, even Canadian society, that if you were a real man, you were not an effeminate man. When Trudeau was elected in 1968, he was seen as a swinging bachelor, but a man of a certain man. You are not an effeminate man. When Trudeau was elected in 1968, he was seen as a

swinging bachelor, but a man of a certain age, unmarried. It raised eyebrows. And when he introduced legislation that would decriminalize homosexuality, it only fueled rumors that he was gay, which of course no newscaster would ever say of him in public. So for people to hear those rumors in this way, live on primetime TV, it was shocking, yes, but kind of amusing too. It was also a jab at Trudeau's politics. Real drivers of change were men more than women because women were confined to the private sphere and men had the opportunity, it was thought, to push an agenda for change in the political public sphere. And this is reflected in the manifesto.

So the manifesto is really gendered. You really get the impression that they are primarily speaking to men much more than to women, but also that if you are virile and strong and tough, you would side with the FLQs, you would side with the nationalists. And if you don't, it's because, well, you know, you're not a real man. The FLQ sought to undermine Trudeau's version of progress, Warren says. Progress it deemed weak and effeminate. And it took just one ugly word to do it. But as Warren points out, we have a tendency to forget that in October of 1970, Pierre Trudeau enjoyed the support of the vast majority of Canadians, including Quebecers,

who could hold their noses, cast a vote for Trudeau, and think of it as a good compromise. You know, with Trudeau we get bilingualism and we get social policies, and we got somebody who at least pretends to defend the rights of the Francophones across Canada. So they could vote for him at the federal level and vote for a totally different party at the provincial level. And that was just an acknowledgement of how the federation works. So at that time, people were saying, you know, we like some of Trudeau's policies, but he doesn't go far enough in terms of acknowledging Quebec's distinctiveness. And therefore, we're going to create our own party in Quebec with its own platform advocating for a Quebec separation. Trudeau was seen for who he was, no more and no less.

If you didn't think he was progressive enough, if you believed he was only paying lip service to a truly egalitarian nation, then you would call him a hypocrite. But the question remained, who are you going to vote for? you would call him a hypocrite. But the question remained, who are you going to vote for? So while people may have been amused by the language the FLQ employed to describe Trudeau, it wouldn't turn public opinion against him. That wouldn't happen until closer to the end of the decade. Then, with the name calling out of the way, the FLQ does something a bit unusual.

It reveals its anarchist side. Workers of Quebec, take back today what is yours. Take back what belongs to you. Only you know your factories, your machines, your hotels, your universities, your unions. Don't wait for some miracle organization. Make your own revolution in your neighborhoods, in your places of work. If you don't do it yourselves, other technocratic usurpers and so on will replace the handful of cigar smokers we now know. And everything will have to be done over again.

Only you are able to build a free society. We must struggle, not individually, but together, until victory is ours, with every means at our disposal, like the patriots of 1837-38. This is the FLQ telling working-class Quebecers that it wasn't an orthodox Marxist movement. It wasn't going to be the miracle organization. This is kind of a beautiful passage.

I mean, it's not about me. It's about all of us coming together, having this conversation, and beginning to think about what we want our future to be. And that is revolutionary, says Warren. By appealing to people as individuals, the FLQ is saying, only you are able to build a free society. We can't do it for you.

We're just here to light the spark. This distinction between leader-less movement and leader-full movement. The FLQ wanted to be a leader-less movement and leader-full movement. The FAQ wanted to be a leader-full movement, not about one, two, three, four, five leaders would be the ringleaders of the coming revolution. It was just an entire people realizing that things were not going the way they should be and starting to question where they're saying, walk the same road that we have walked. Put yourself in our shoes and you will see what we went through, the reasoning that we followed,

the feelings that we experienced, also your feelings. And if you would stop watching stupid TV shows and if you would stop reading La Presse and if you would stop listening to the power holders and if you would stop believing in the notions and the knowledge that you were taught while attending the classes at Université de Montréal or McGill, you would realize that it's important to make our own revolution wherever we are. are. And in raising the specter of the patriots of 1837-38, the FLQ is reminding people that Quebec isn't a conservative place they believe it to be, that it does have a revolutionary tradition. Never mind that the revolt of 37-38 was actually a failed uprising,

largely because it was unplanned and leaderless. It's proof that the revolutionary spirit lives in all of us, says the FLQ. Proof that we all have the potential to rise up on a moment's notice. With the help of the entire population, we want to replace this slave society with a free society, operating by itself and for itself, a society open to the world. Our struggle can only be victorious. An awakening people cannot be kept in misery and contempt for long. Long live Free Quebec. Long live our imprisoned political comrades. Long live the Quebec Revolution. Long live the Front de Libération du Québec. We have made an integral reading of the Front de Libération du Québec manifesto.

The FLQ later said, you know, we at least achieved something, is that we managed to have a small patriot in every household that evening. There's a patriot that walked into the houses and into the apartments of Quebec people and spoke. For them, that's what the... Robert Lepage says that was really the FLQ's great victory. No one really remembers the details of the manifesto, he says, except maybe the slur against Trudeau. But they remember how they felt hearing those words. And my father, of all people,

even though he remained a federalist and whatever, really said to me, these guys, they're right. But you shouldn't be allowed to do that. It's not the way to do things or whatever. So there's a lot of people that night that thought that way. They say, these guys are right, but it's not the right way to do things. Next time let's vote.

There's this great scene in Lepage's 1998 film No. It's set in 1970, and a group of FLQ sympathizers is plotting a bomb attack. It will go terribly, hilariously wrong. But before it does, two of the plotters begin arguing about the language and the communique they sent out after they planted the bomb. It's a send-up of the intellectual and philosophical pretensions of the would-be revolutionaries, and it lands beautifully. Lepage says he took a lot of flack for the film,

for poking fun at what was still a bit raw. Quebec in 1998, after all, was only two years out from its second failed referendum on whether to separate from Canada. But it was just too good to pass up. I mean, there's something very heroic about the whole FLQ thing. There were people in there that were really heroes, you know, and they were taking chances and they were, you know, they had visions and like a lot of revolutionaries around the world at that time. It wasn't just in Quebec. It was a lot of that going on everywhere. So you had great thinkers and you had people.

But you also had people who were there because it was cool to be there and people who thought they knew about it. And we wanted to make fun of that because that was also part of the thing. There was also, during this whole time, part of the people who would adhere to these ideas who weren't well-informed, who just wanted something, a change to happen, whatever the means or whatever and all that. And I remember hearing Woody Allen in an interview describing what's comedy.

He says, well, comedy is tragedy with time. But he says, you can't do that with so many things. The FLQ is one of these things. The October crisis, I mean, it's not a funny thing. But at that point, it's healthy to make jokes about it, too. We have to make fun of ourselves

and of our old ideals. When we didn't know, we thought it was the moment, maybe it was time to maybe also show the funny part of that, because there was some funny stuff. And besides, he says, it was time for people to let go of the remembrance of grievance and past injustice. Jean-Philippe Warren, Robert Lepage,

they can appreciate the manifesto for its historical importance, for the piece of literature that it is. They can take pleasure in its clever wordplay. They can laugh about it. They can be moved by it. It's a very powerful message. When you extract the document from the very difficult, stressful, and eventually dramatic context in which it was written. What you get is the impression that it was ordinary people trying just to democratize the way Quebecers were trying to envision their future together. But even if, as Warren says, this is the FLQ's most memorable document, its power has faded with time. And it shouldn't be read with sympathy. These weren't a

bunch of misguided boy scouts after all. The manifesto, it was written within the context of a city in the grips of terror. In the immediate aftermath of the broadcast, it felt as though the FLQ had the sympathy of the public. Even federalists like Robert Lepage's father, they saw merit in the call for a revolutionary awakening. They were listening to something that talked to them, particularly, of course, the French Canadians in Quebec. They were hearing things that they started believing to be right. So the manifesto had a positive effect. If you are a FLQ activist, it worked. Reading the manifesto was an important

step to publicize their cause, but also to convince Quebecers that their cause was right. It wouldn't last. Two days later, the FLQ would abduct a second public figure, this time Quebec's deputy premier, Pierre Laporte. A week later, his body would turn up in the trunk of a car. And just like that, any public sympathy the FLQ had, well, it just evaporated. In early December, James Cross was finally released. His abductors traded him for passage to Cuba. In late December, Pierre Leporte's murderers were finally captured,

and that, for all intents and purposes, was the end of the FLQ. In 1976, the Parti Québécois came to power under the leadership of René Lévesque. It took only six years for the party to achieve at the ballot box what the FLQ couldn't do with bombs and kidnapping. But for one brief moment, it felt as though the FLQ had managed the impossible by tapping into something that had been simmering for decades, a deeply felt sense of injustice and oppression within Quebec's francophone working class. Shortly after the broadcast of the manifesto, Canadian philosopher and professor

Charles Taylor spoke of its power. The goal of the FLQ is to produce a polarization where people begin to believe their basic idea, which is that we live in a totalitarian society, just like Algeria before the revolution or Greece, and that the only possible way out is terror. And the point of a terroristic act is to make people feel not, isn't that terrible what they're doing, but to make people feel how terribly oppressed they must be if they're forced into this. You have to create an ambience around your act whereby it looks as though it's wrenched out of you by the terrible conditions you're in. And that means that you've got to choose your symbols right,

and choose your propaganda and your explanation right. And the manifesto is beautiful for that, because it built up a picture of oppression and injustice in Quebec. Yes, the manifesto in itself and by itself is a beautiful document. I mean, it speaks of higher values, of people's capacity to be masters of their own lives, of people's need to democratize their society to make sure that people have a fair share of the collectivity's wealth and people are treated equally. So all the right values and the right words are in there, despite some exaggeration

and some prejudices and a kind of a cartoon vision of Quebec society. But it's also more than a 50-year-old object of intellectual curiosity, he says, Also more than a 50-year-old object of intellectual curiosity, he says. Because it stood for something real, a lived experience that ended in tragedy. It spoke to something in 1970 and it still speaks to some universal values today. And that, I think A. Macdonald. The very same statue the FLQ twice tried to blow up. The protesters handed out leaflets that read in part,

Macdonald was a white supremacist who orchestrated the genocide of indigenous peoples. It was a reminder of the transience of the FLQ moment. As powerful as the FLQ manifesto felt in 1970, it's hard to imagine it spurring anyone to knock over a statue in 2020. In Quebec, the story of the FLQ is revisited with every major anniversary. There are op-eds, documentaries, books. But it always takes a slightly different form. And the sharp edges soften and blur a little bit.

Maybe that's how it's supposed to be. Maybe that's just how memory works. You are listening to Ideas and to a documentary called Manifesto, written and produced by the CBC's Jessica Lindsay. Jeff Turner is the host of a CBC podcast about the history of the FLQ called Recall, How to Start a Revolution. You can hear it on the CBC Listen app

or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to Matthew Lazen-Ryder and Francis Plourde. Special thanks to Damien, Claude Bélanger for translation. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in this episode or in any other, you can do that on Facebook or Twitter or on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, where of course you can always get our podcast.

Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.