In three weeks, a neon-illuminated monument to "prisoners of opinion" detained during the 1970 October Crisis is to be unveiled in the presence of sovereignist members of the National Assembly and Parliament and former premier Bernard Landry.
The nationalist Societe Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montreal, in front of whose Sherbrooke St. headquarters the monument will be erected, should leave room beside it for a second one, to the members of the Front de liberation du Quebec themselves.
For, as the history of the crisis is rewritten on every five-year anniversary, the FLQ terrorists who started it -or did they? -have almost become "victims," too.
As early as 1981, delegates to a Parti Quebecois convention cheered Jacques Rose, a member of the 1970 FLQ cell that had kidnapped Quebec minister Pierre Laporte, who was then murdered.
But the political rehabilitation of the 1970 Felquistes began in earnest on the 20th anniversary of the crisis. That's when stories began to appear in the mainstream media suggesting that Laporte's death, which turned public opinion against the FLQ, was really the fault of the police, not the kidnappers.
Those stories suggested that his kidnappers had "accidentally" strangled him, but that he wasn't quite dead when the FLQ abandoned him for police to find, even though their communique announced they had "executed" him. So his death was the fault of the police for not responding fast enough to the tip.
And subsequent stories would even suggest that it was the fault of Laporte himself. He had been strangled only after seriously wounding himself when he shattered a window in an attempt to escape, to call for help or to kill himself with the broken glass.
And in the past decade, prominent mainstream sovereignists have been increasingly willing to give the Felquistes respectability by associating with them.
Last year, the manifesto justifying the 1970 Felquistes' actions was given a theatrical public reading to cheers at an event that received financial and organizational support from the PQ and the Bloc Quebecois, whose leaders also participated.
The organizers had originally invited Jacques Lanctot, one of the 1970 kidnappers of British trade commissioner James Cross, to read the manifesto at the Quebec City event. But Lanctot declined because they wouldn't pay for a bus ticket from Montreal.
And the minimization of the responsibility of the Felquistes continues in the next quinquennial round of retrospectives, which is already under way.
A Radio-Canada documentary shown last week said Laporte's death wasn't really a murder, since it was by "accident" that he was strangled while his captors were trying to subdue him.
In the documentary, Lanctot implied that Laporte wouldn't have died if police hadn't suppressed a communique from Lanctot's cell signalling the one holding Laporte not to kill him.
(Lanctot also said his cell "made it clear" to Cross from the start that it wouldn't kill him. Apparently the message wasn't clear enough; in a 2004 interview with The Gazette's Jeff Heinrich, Cross said that when he heard his kidnappers' threat to kill him if their demands weren't met in 48 hours, "I knew ... that I must compose myself for death.")
The current edition of L'Actualite magazine features an interview with a novelist who spins a vast conspiracy theory that holds the authorities entirely responsible for the crisis.
Louis Hamelin suggests that it was the authorities who instigated the crisis in order to discredit the sovereignty movement and that the FLQ was manipulated by police agents provocateurs who had infiltrated it.
He also suggests that Cross was in on his own kidnapping and that the police knowingly allowed the FLQ to kill Laporte because the minister was involved in a scandal that would embarrass the government.
On its cover, L'Actualite presents Hamelin's speculation as fact. It asks "who sacrificed Pierre Laporte," not whether he was sacrificed.
And this week, one of Laporte's kidnappers, Paul Rose, will put his spin on events in a Radio-Canada interview.
Laporte was unfortunately not available to give his side.
dmacpherson WWq montrealgazette.com