October Crisis

The October Crisis is recalled as a turning point in Loïc’s political life: the 1970 emergency measures that he had opposed as a student became part of the history he had to reckon with when he later accepted work in Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government. Its shadow also touches the D’Anjou family through Clovis Lacroix, whose revolutionary associations and presumed murder remained taboo. The novel places this national crisis alongside older local political conflicts, showing how political loyalties, family memory, and silence persist across different scales and generations.

Loïc’s Memory of the Crisis

Years later, as Loïc recalled accepting Régis’s offer to work in the prime minister’s office in Ottawa, he returned to his final year at university, five years earlier. He had been among the students who protested Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s response to the kidnappings of a diplomat and a minister by a small group of militants. The government imposed emergency measures, sent heavily armed soldiers into Montreal’s streets, and imprisoned hundreds of intellectuals and writers. Loïc regarded the measures as an unjustified assault on Quebec, and his memory of the crisis made accepting a government position politically uncomfortable.

The recollection is personal as well as political. Loïc remembers the university meetings and the atmosphere of youthful revolt, which was bound up with his relationship with Lise, a fellow political-science student. His anger at Ottawa and the army deployed under Trudeau belonged to an intense period of student activism, before he faced a choice between those convictions and the opportunity to work alongside his cousin. The crisis thus marks a contrast in his trajectory: he had once protested the government he would later serve.

Clovis and the Family’s Political Silence

The crisis also summons the memory of Clovis, a cousin who had associated with the Front de libération du Québec in the 1960s. Loïc thinks of him as a family subject that could not be openly discussed. Clovis had been politically active well before the October Crisis: during an earlier election campaign in Touladi, he organized young Liberal supporters against the locally dominant Blue faction. Threatened with losing his teaching position because of his political involvement, he resigned rather than abandon the campaign.

An election-day confrontation brought Clovis into further conflict with the local power structure. Young Liberals barricaded themselves in a garage to prevent Roland Bolduc’s men from getting voters drunk and influencing their votes. After the ensuing violence, Clovis was arrested on a charge of attempted murder and imprisoned for several months at Rimouski. His cousin Jean D’Anjou defended him, but Clovis missed the 1952 school year and, despite holding a teaching diploma, could not return to teaching. He worked in Quebec as a proofreader and clerk at the Garneau bookstore before moving to Montreal in the early 1960s, where he entered beatnik and revolutionary circles close to the Front de libération du Québec. These earlier conflicts establish a history of political pressure and exclusion in Clovis’s life without making them identical to the national crisis.

A Crisis That Remains Unresolved

Clovis later died in Paris, apparently murdered after the October Crisis. The qualification matters: the account does not establish the circumstances as certain, but the family’s reluctance to speak about him leaves his fate suspended between political history and private loss. His association with the Front de libération du Québec and his death after the crisis make him a disturbing presence in Loïc’s recollection, not a resolved family story.

For Loïc, the October Crisis therefore survives as more than a recalled confrontation between Quebec and the federal government. It shapes the tension between his youthful political convictions and his later employment, while Clovis’s history gives that tension a familial dimension. The crisis is remembered through both public events and what the family will not discuss: state action and student protest on one side, a cousin’s political affiliations and uncertain death on the other.