René Lévesque’s resignation as Quebec premier turns a political gathering into the scene of an abrupt ending: the head of the government departs, and the party he founded is left feeling abandoned. The news also exposes Loïc’s precarious place inside the government’s communications operation. The novel presents the resignation not as an isolated change of leadership but as the culmination of a longer unravelling, in which a cause once able to rally collective hopes has lost its cohesion and promise.

Background: a cause in decline

The immediate setting is the end of the spring session in 1985, but the political atmosphere has been darkening for some time. In an earlier period, the novel shows provincial politics reaching well beyond public speeches and formal campaigns. At the Château Frontenac, Maurice Duplessis launched an election campaign by invoking the need to protect Quebec from Ottawa and presenting himself as a defender of its people, language, and faith. In Touladi, the local contest hardened into a struggle between the Blue faction associated with the Bolducs and Red organizers led by Clovis Lacroix. Roland Bolduc publicly threatened the young activists, while the school-board president warned Clovis that his teaching post was at risk if he continued his political work. Clovis resigned rather than give up his freedom to organize.

On election day, the Red youths barricaded themselves inside Roland’s garage to prevent the Blues from getting voters drunk and steering their votes. The conflict had grave consequences for Clovis: he was later arrested on an attempted-murder charge and spent months in the Rimouski penitentiary. Although his cousin Jean D’Anjou secured his release without a criminal record, the episode ended his prospects in teaching. These earlier scenes establish the force of partisan loyalty and the costs of political participation in the novel’s Quebec. They are not presented as the direct cause of Lévesque’s resignation; they provide a longer view of a political world where collective ideals are repeatedly entangled with faction, pressure, and personal consequence.

The announcement at the Chalet Suisse

At a late-spring gathering at the Chalet Suisse, a favorite meeting place for political staff, the mood initially appears buoyant. A slightly inebriated deputy jokes that the captain seems likely to stay at the helm. The cheer is broken when several people hurry into the restaurant, including a well-known journalist who comes straight to Loïc with a sheet of paper and asks whether he knew. The communiqué from the premier’s office announces that René Lévesque is resigning.

Loïc is the government’s communications officer, so learning of the decision from a journalist reverses his expected role. Ordinarily, he would be the one communicating such news to the press. Instead, he is the recipient of a report already spreading through the restaurant, as journalists, photographers, and cameramen arrive and seek interviews with the ministers and deputies present. The scene’s irony is practical as well as symbolic: the official responsible for conveying the government’s news has been left outside its most consequential announcement.

Party reaction and political aftermath

Within the Parti québécois, the resignation brings disarray, grief, and anger. Some members retreat to a discreet bar on Rue Saint-Jean, seeking company as political orphans. They feel that Lévesque has left them abruptly, after months of bitterly criticizing the party. His departure therefore carries a double force: it removes the leader, and it sharpens the sense that the organization he founded has turned against him and become an instrument of his condemnation.

The novel has already shown Lévesque’s conflict with party members over leaks from caucus. He condemns those who, for a little newspaper attention, disclose what has been said behind closed doors, and insists that although he will leave one day, he will not be driven out. Against that earlier defiance, the resignation reads as an unwelcome reversal. The party’s members are left to absorb both his departure and the failure of their relationship with the leader who had once gathered their hopes around a shared project.

Retrospective meaning

Loïc looks back on the resignation as the final act of a decline that began early in the decade. He recalls an earlier incident in which a promising young minister stole a jacket from a department store. In retrospect, he sees the trivial theft as a sign of broader disintegration: a lapse that seemed to expose the politician’s waning belief in the cause and desire to escape the maze of power. The minister later made his homosexuality public, a personal disclosure the narrative places alongside a wider turn by former political activists toward private life after collective political commitment had faltered.

The novel gives the resignation the shape of a political tragedy. Its account describes the spring of 1985 at the Assemblée nationale du Québec as the final act in a decline that had begun years earlier, ending in political casualties and broken dreams. The next day, Loïc walks through Old Québec and measures the present against the heroic history of New France. The contrast extends the loss beyond one premier or one party: what once seemed a compelling national story now appears to him diminished by indecision and petty rivalries. Lévesque’s resignation thus marks both a change in office and the exhaustion, in Loïc’s view, of a larger political promise.