11. Are You Willing to Die For the Cause?

By Chris Oliveros

Got the signed English version (149/200) of Mourir pour la cause for Olman as a Xmas present.

 

I had assumed that it would be a graphic non-fiction account of the FLQ leading up to the October Crisis in 1970.  Instead, it illustrated the chaotic origins of the FLQ founded by Georges Schoeters, reconstructing the three main incarnations (and waves of terrorism) during the 60’s, up until the imprisonment of Pierre Vallières in 1968.  There was an epilogue illustrating a police raid in early 1970 of a secluded FLQ hideout in Prevost where they found a post-dated ransom letter of a planned kidnapping of US Consul Harrison W. Burgess.

 

It was a relief to see that Book 2 is in the works, which will go into the events leading up to the October Crisis, which is primarily what the public associates with the FLQ, including yours truly.  I was somewhat disappointed that I’d have to wait for at least another year for Book 2, but nevertheless, learning about the early beginnings of the FLQ was fascinating.  I suspect many people, Quebecers included, have little knowledge about the FLQ's early days.  First, it was composed of a fairly disorganized, motley group of disaffected young men.  Second, it was led by a Belgian immigrant, Georges Schoeters, who proved to be a bit of a coward after being arrested.  This is the kind of stuff that patriotic Quebec historians would probably rather sweep under the rug.

 

Author and illustrator Chris Oliveros took pains in making the meticulously researched account as objective as possible.  As Toula Drimonis wrote in the back blurb, “Oliveros reveals fascinating details of a group that, depending on which side you find yourself on politically, was either a ragtag team of terrorists or well-intentioned freedom fighters.”

 

Although I finished the main part of the book around the time I started reading The Decagon House Murders, the footnotes were really dense and interesting.  I wish I had discovered them while I was reading through the illustrated section, but this wasn’t a bad way to go about it either, as the flow wasn’t broken by the constant referencing.

 

It also wasn’t until I finished the book did I realize that author Chris Oliveros was the founder of Drawn & Quarterly and its publisher until 2015, when he stepped down to start writing this book!  So it took him about eight years to work on the project.  I just hope that it doesn’t take him another 8 years to release Book 2!  I’m assuming a lot of the research has already been done and he just needs to put it all together.  Some info I found interesting:

 

·       The footnotes really outline how much research Oliveros had devoted.  He even scoured obscure reference sources that didn’t age well, such as Terror in Quebec by prison psychiatrist Gustave Morf.  Despite its abundance of sweeping generalities (it’s clear he saw the FLQ as lowlife degenerates), Morf seemed to be the only researcher given full access to several incarcerated GLQ members, including François Schirm (a Hungarian immigrant who was part of the third wave that focused on military training in the woods).

·       I think because Pierre Vallières had infamously written Nègres blancs d'Amérique, I always thought of him as a Mathieu-Bock Coté of his time, which was based on not really knowing much about him at all.  Vallières was more concerned about class struggle and how francophone Quebecers were treated as second class citizens.  By 1971, he had denounced the FLQ’s use of violence and sought independence for Quebec via nonviolent means by co-founding the Parti Québecois. Even though he was accused of being a sellout by his former cohorts, he also became disillusioned with the PQ and his later years he foucs on other forms of activism, including LGBTQ rights, First Nations self-governance, and aid to war-town Bosnia. 

·       The book was based his account on a fabricated “lost” CBC documentary from 1975 containing fictionalized interview transcripts from real people.  According to Oliveros, while this narrative device is fictional, the actual content hews very closely to the facts”.

 

 ·       About a year after starting work on the book, he discovered that there was a long-forgotten 1975 CBC documentary on the FLQ, a three-hour TV special called “the October Crisis”, that met “a similarly mysterious fate”!  It did air once, for a single evening in October 1976, and was never broadcast again.  Unlike Oliveros’ fictionalized doc, the real TV special focused on the October 1970 kidnappings, mostly skipping over prior events from the 1960s.

 

·       I find it mind-boggling how easy it was to steal cases of dynamite when the underground Metro was being built.  FLQ members were able to descend the ladders down what was to become Sherbrooke Station and make off with three crates of “EXPLOSIFS”!