The island of Montréal 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, Montréal 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 Montréal
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,
Montréal 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
Montréal 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 Montréal in the course of the
year. However, it was Montréal'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
Montréal. 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 Montréal. 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 Montréal; plenty of companies left too, moving west to
Toronto.
For a while it seemed that Montréal'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 Montréal'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-Montréal 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.