The island of Montreal was first
occupied by the St Lawrence
Iroquois
, whose small village of Hochelaga
("Place of the Beaver")
was situated at the base of Mont
Royal. European presence began in
October 1535 when Jacques-Cartier
was led here while searching for a
northwest route to Asia. However,
even after the arrival of Samuel
de Champlain, the French
settlement was little more than a
small garrison, and it wasn't
until 1642 that the colony of
Ville-Marie was founded by the
soldiers of
Paul de Chomedey
, Sieur de Maisonneuve. They were
on orders from Paris to
"bring about the Glory of God
and the salvation of the
Indians", a mission that
predictably enough found little
response from the aboriginal
peoples. Bloody conflict with the
Iroquois, fanned by the European
fur-trade alliances with the
Algonquins and Hurons, was
constant until a treaty signed in
1701 prompted the growth of
Ville-Marie into the main
embarkation point for the fur and
lumber trade.
When Québec City fell to the
British in 1759, Montreal briefly
served as the capital of New
France, until the Marquis de
Vaudreuil was forced to surrender
to General Amherst the following
year. The ensuing British
occupation suffered a
seven-month interruption in 1775,
when the Americans took over, but
after this hiatus a flood of Irish
and Scottish immigrants soon made Montreal
North America's
second-largest city. It was not a
harmonious expansion, however, and
in 1837 the French Patriotes
led by Louis-Joseph Papineau
rebelled against the British
ruling class. Their insurgency
failed and was followed by
hangings and exiles.
With the creation of the Dominion
of Canada in 1867, Montreal emerged as the new nation's
premier port, railroad nexus,
banking centre and industrial
producer. Its population reached
half a million in 1911 and doubled
in the next two decades with an
influx of émigrés from Europe.
It was also during this period
that Montreal acquired its
reputation as Canada's "sin
city". During Prohibition in
the US, Québec became the main
alcohol supplier to the entire
continent: the Molsons and their
ilk made their fortunes here,
while prostitution and gambling
thrived under the protection of
the authorities. Only in the wake
of World War II and the subsequent
economic boom did a major
anti-corruption operation begin, a
campaign that was followed by
rapid architectural growth,
starting in 1962 with Place Ville
Marie and the beginnings of the
Underground City complex. The most
glamorous episode in the city's
face-lift came in 1967, when land
reclaimed from the St Lawrence was
used as the site of Expo '67
, the World Fair that attracted
fifty million visitors to Montreal
in the course of the year.
However, it was Montreal's
anglophones who were benefiting
from the prosperity, and beneath
the smooth surface francophone
frustrations were reaching
dangerous levels.
The crisis peaked in October
1970, when the radical Front de
Libération du Québec (FLQ)
kidnapped the British trade
commissioner, James Cross, and
then a Québec cabinet minister,
Pierre Laporte. As ransom, the FLQ
demanded the publication of the
FLQ manifesto, the transportation
to Cuba of 25 FLQ prisoners
awaiting trial for acts of
violence, and $500,000 in gold
bullion. Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau responded with the War
Measures Act, suspending civil
liberties and putting troops on
the streets of Montreal. The
following day, Laporte's body was
found in the boot of a car. By
December, the so-called October
Crisis was over, Cross was
released, and his captors and
Laporte's murderers arrested. But
the reverberations shook the
nation.
At last recognizing the need to
redress the country's social
imbalances, the federal government
poured money into countrywide
schemes to promote French-Canadian
culture. Francophone discontent
was further alleviated by the
provincial election of René Lévesque
and his Parti Québécois in 1976,
the year the Olympic Games were
held in Montreal. The consequent
language laws (Bill 101) made
French a compulsory part of the
school curriculum and banned
English signs on business
premises; only allowing them
inside establishments provided the
signs were bilingual and the
French was printed twice as large
as the English. Businesses that
fail to comply are at the mercy of
the "language police",
inspectors of the Office de la
Langue Française (OLF) who can go
to extraordinary lengths - such as
measuring signs and checking Web
sites and business cards - to
ensure that French is the dominant
form of communication. For many
anglophones, the threat of
sovereignty, combined with
language measures they took to be
pettily vindictive, prompted an
exodus in the tens of thousands
from Montreal; plenty of
companies left too, moving west to
Toronto.
For a while it seemed that Montreal's heyday was over as the
changes and political uncertainty
that dominated the last two
decades of the twentieth century,
combined with a Canada-wide
economic recession in the
mid-1990s, saw Québec lag behind
the rest of the country in
economic growth. But the turning
point came after the 1995
referendum, when a tacit truce was
made on the issue of separation.
The communal bonds between
anglophone and francophone Québécois
were further rejuvenated by the ice
storm of 1998, which plunged
pockets of the province into
darkness for days after 100mm of
icy rain downed power lines, and
left 1.4 million people without
electricity - some for weeks on
end. The ice storm's impact on Montreal's green spaces was
enormous, and most pronounced on
the mountain, where some 80,000
trees were damaged.
The city's face has changed
visibly in other ways recently.
The boarded-up shops that lined
rue Ste-Catherine in the mid-1990s
have reopened and do bustling
business nowadays. Derelict
pockets on the edges of downtown
and Vieux-Montreal have been
renovated to house the booming
multimedia industry. And with the
rising employment and economic
prosperity, popular residential
areas like the Plateau are being
gentrified and apartment
developments abound. Even the
city's nightlife scene is
changing, as full-time workers opt
for the cinq à sept
cocktail hour during the week
rather than going out late into
the evening. But perhaps the most
enduring change is that the gaps
left by departing anglophones have
been filled by young bilingual
francophones who at last feel in
charge of their own culture and
economy. At the same time, the
anglophones that stayed have also
become bilingual, and these days
it's perfectly normal to hear the
two languages intermingling with
one another wherever you may be.
