Montréal

History

Montréal is one of Canada's oldest settlements. Iroquois and Algonquin Indians had established a trading post and settlement, Hochelaga, well before the arrival of Europeans. The French explorer, Jacques Cartier, sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1635 and explored the island and surrounding areas. French settlers, under Sieur de Maisonneuve (Paul de Chomedey, b. early seventeenth century; d. 1676), established Ville Marie in 1642 at Place Royale in what is now Old Montréal. Initially, Montréal was governed as a seigneury, or concession held by a religious order, the Gentlemen of St. Suplice. Ease of water transport established Montréal as the center of the North American fur trade. Montréal remained under the French until 1760 when they were displaced by the British during the French and Indian War (1755–63). The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ceded Montréal to the British.

Following the British conquest, Scottish and English merchants displaced the French and in the next 100 years established a commercial and banking empire. Construction of the Lachine canal in 1825, bypassing rapids in the river, opened up inland trade. The Bank of Montréal was established in 1817. Montréal banking interests financed the construction of the Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk Railways (later the Canadian National Railway), solidifying Montréal's position as a shipping and commercial center. The city of Montréal was incorporated in 1832. English migration briefly produced an English-speaking majority from 1831 to 1867, but this was reversed by migration from the countryside later in the nineteenth century. European immigration lead to further growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The city's population reached one million in the 1930s and has remained stable since then. However, surrounding areas have continued to grow. Montréal island has 1.7 million people, the larger metropolitan area, 3.1 million. Water and rail transport and available work force facilitated the growth and diversification of industry.

Montréal quickly emerged as a major city in both Canada and the province of Québec. Until the 1970s, Montréal was the center of Canadian banking and commerce, as well as an important industrial center. Although the transfer of business and commercial interests to Toronto has undermined the economic position of the city, Montréal's earlier position has left the city with a legacy of public buildings and institutions, reflected in the major museums and cultural centers described below. Montréal is also the center of Québec cultural and intellectual life, and until recently dominated the smaller, more traditional and homogenous provincial capital, Québec City. In the late nineteenth century, Montréal provided a center for French-Canadian nationalism and was at the heart of the Quiet Revolution, which transformed Québec in the 1960s and 1970s.

Relations between English and French speakers have been central in the development of Montréal, Québec, and Canadian politics. English conquest in 1763 transformed Montréal from a French to an English commercial center. Anglophone financial and commercial interests in Montréal allied with Québec upper classes, enabling English-speaking Montréal to flourish in an otherwise rural, traditional, Catholic and church-dominated province. In Montréal, English was the language of business, and French Canadians found themselves frustrated by demands to "speak white"—in English, rather than their native French. Elimination of Catholic (and thus Francophone) schools in Manitoba and other parts of western Canada cut off Québec migration to other parts of Canada, encouraging French-Canadian populations to turn in on themselves in solitude, separate from the rest of Canada. Cut off from both the rest of Canada and France, Québecois opposed Canadian involvement in both world wars. Opposition to the draft led to the arrest and imprisonment of Montréal Mayor Camillien Houde until 1944.

Social and economic change transformed Québec in the 1960s and 1970s. French Canadian intellectuals, including former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau (b. 1919; prime minister 1968–79 and 1980–84) and former Québec Premier René Lévesque, a Montréal journalist, joined with others in a Quiet Revolution against the domination of traditional upper classes and the Roman Catholic Church. Montréal became a major center for competing views of the position of Québec in Canada. Trudeau and other federalists argued for bilingual and multi-cultural Canada while Québec nationalists, such as Lévesque, insisted on primacy for the French language in Québec and sovereignty for the Québec people. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Québec nationalism provoked massive demonstrations and occasional acts of terrorism by organizations such as the Québec Liberation Front (FLQ). Kidnappings led to the imposition of the War Measures Act, a martial law, in Québec in the spring of 1970.

After 1976, new language laws, requiring education in the French language for all, except the children of Anglophones born in Québec, and a dominant position for French in the workplace and on signs, transformed Québec society. Sign laws—Signage—became a point of friction between Anglophones, unable to operate in French, and Québec nationalists. Québec sign laws originally permitted signs only in French, but after negative court decisions, the law was re–written to require that French lettering be at least twice the size of lettering in any other language. Anglophones unwilling to become bilingual left Montréal and the province. In the process, Montréal lost many of its head offices but emerged as vibrant center of Québec intellectual and cultural life. However, language laws demanding that the children of immigrants be educated in French became a source of friction in Montréal's many ethnic communities. More recently, tensions have subsided, in part because of Francophones. To the dismay of Québec nationalists, Montréal has regularly voted against a referenda demanding that Québec establish itself as a sovereign nation loosely associated with the rest of Canada. In turn, Parti Québecois governments have channeled badly needed investment to Québec City instead of Montréal.