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Much of the province's development dates from the early 1960s, when it underwent an expansion of education and state enterprises that French-speaking Quebecois call la Révolution Tranquille (the Quiet Revolution). With the door suddenly open to new opportunities, the church-oriented conservative rural habitant rapidly evolved into the secular, outgoing urban Quebecois, with typically North American tastes for big cars, color-television sets and le rock. Quebeckers trained in economics and sociology thronged into the glass-and-steel cubicles of a mushrooming provincial bureaucracy. But despite this rattrapage (catching up), English-speaking Canadians retained their dominant role in business. Among the 105 largest private companies in Quebec, only 14 have a majority of French-speaking directors; in the other 91, only 9% of directors are Francophones. French remained the dominant language on the factory floor, where Gallic Quebeckers held disproportionate numbers of the lowest-paying jobs. English was the tongue of management. Some French Quebeckers felt that they were being treated as "the white niggers of America"—and in their homeland to boot.
It was in the early '60s that resentment against Anglophone domination led to the first stirrings of radical separatist feelings, embodied by the tiny Quebec Liberation Front (F.L.Q.). Terrorist F.L.Q. members planted bombs in mailboxes outside homes in Montreal's affluent Anglophone suburb of Westmount. Separatism received a huge burst of publicity in 1967, when the late Charles de Gaulle gave his notorious "Vive le Québec libre!" speech at Montreal's city hall. Around the same time, portions of Quebec's 850,000-member union movement turned to Marxist ideology, launching widespread strikes and demonstrations. In 1969, when Montreal police and firemen went on a 16-hour strike for higher pay, hundreds of thugs and militant students launched an orgy of robbing, burning and looting. Property damage came to $3 million; two men were shot dead.
The terrorist activity reached its height in Canada's October Crisis of 1970. F.L.Q. gunmen kidnaped British Trade Commissioner James ("Jasper") Cross and Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte, eventually murdering the latter. Prime Minister Trudeau invoked Canada's 1914 War Measures Act, placing the entire country under martial law. Quebeckers were deeply traumatized by the presence of gun-toting soldiers in their midst, but an overwhelming majority approved the harsh antiterrorist measures.
While Laporte's murder completely discredited the F.L.Q. radicals, it did not demolish moderate, democratic separatists—like René Lévesque and his Parti Quebecois. Slowly and steadily, the Péquistes continued to gain ground, helped considerably by the sloppy government of the dominant Quebec Liberal Party. Then came the 1976 election. At the P.Q. victory party in Montreal's Paul Sauvé Arena, 6,000 supporters embraced, wept and roared out the words of a modern Quebec chanson, "Tomorrow belongs to us ..." The message was not lost on Quebec's 800,000 English-speaking citizens—or on the rest of Canada.
Housing prices slumped in Westmount, Mount Royal, Hampstead and Montreal's outlying English-speaking suburbs as homeowners left the province. In the first