Cartoonist Chris Oliveros was a toddler when the Front de libération du Québec was busy blowing up mailboxes with homemade bombs. Between 1963 and 1970, the FLQ—a militant Quebec independence movement—would be responsible for over 200 bombings and dozens of robberies that left many Quebecers injured and at least seven dead: one a young FLQ member.
The FLQ sought to establish a sovereign French-speaking state in Canada, and their actions would culminate in the kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross and the kidnapping and subsequent murder, in October 1970, of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. The events, which became known as the October Crisis, led then prime minister Pierre Trudeau to deploy the Canadian Armed Forces and invoke the War Measures Act at the request of Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau and Quebec premier Robert Bourassa. Basic civil rights and liberties were suspended, with hundreds of people arrested and imprisoned without trial.
“I first learned about the FLQ in my grade ten Canadian history class,” Oliveros says. “I was floored. I didn’t know kidnappings and bombings had happened right here in my own city.” Oliveros remained obsessed with the topic, but life events soon vied for his attention. After borrowing $2,000 from his dad for launching his first single-issue magazine in 1989, Oliveros founded comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly. It grew into one of the world’s leading graphic novel publishers. “I started the company at the age of twenty-three and was a publisher for twenty-five years. I also had a young family,” Oliveros says. “While I wanted to write more, it was impossible.”
In 2015, Oliveros stepped away from D&Q to focus on his own projects. The following year, he returned to that volatile moment in Canadian history that had first piqued his interest decades earlier. He spent months digging through long-forgotten testimonials, newspaper articles, and court cases, and he distilled his research into a graphic novel tracking the rise of the FLQ, complete with an extensive bibliography. Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? was published in hardcover in 2023, alongside a French translation. The first of a planned two-volume chronicle, the paperback English-language version has just been released.
Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? is an absorbing mix of comic-book narrative and journalism. “The FLQ is a complex subject,” Oliveros says. “I didn’t want it reading like a laundry list of events and facts. I felt it could really benefit from being approached from a storytelling angle.” A cartoonist with an energetic and disarming touch, he explores the early years of a movement that tried to level the playing field between a disproportionately affluent English-speaking minority and Quebec’s oppressed working-class francophone population. Oliveros, during his research, found it shocking to see few French-language signs in downtown Montreal in the mid-1960s. “I wanted to put everything in context,” says Oliveros. “Even at the beginning of the Quiet Revolution, a few years after [premier Maurice] Duplessis’s death, things were still very bad for Quebec’s French-speaking majority.”
Oliveros decided that the best way to cover the period between 1962 and 1970 was to focus on three key FLQ leaders who oversaw different emerging versions of the militant group: Georges Schoeters, François Schirm, and Pierre Vallières. Vallières remains well known thanks to his 1968 book N***** blancs d’Amérique, but the first two aren’t household names. Oliveros describes how Hungarian-born Schirm was behind a 1964 robbery of a Montreal gun shop that left two people dead, while the Belgian-born Schoeters, an admirer of Fidel Castro, created the Revolutionary Army of Quebec in a compound in the woods. In reality, they had no recruits for their guerrilla army training camp, they ran out of supplies, and the locals wanted little to do with them. The cause may have been noble, but testimonials paint FLQ members as rudderless, angry, idealistic men looking to latch on to something.
Principal founder Schoeters best exemplifies this sense of bumbling radicalism. He was heralded as a freedom fighter, but to his wife, Jeanne, he was a deadbeat husband who carelessly mixed Molotov cocktails in their home while their children slept in the next room. “I didn’t want to offer a particular viewpoint,” he says. “I wanted to present the facts and let people reach their own conclusions.”
The title of the graphic novel is derived from a questionnaire given to FLQ recruits. “We were asked for our names, addresses, occupations, marital status, whether we had firearms, a hideout, and whether we were willing to die for the cause,” explains Alain Brouillard, an eighteen-year-old student at the time. His testimony, highlighted in Oliveros’s book, describes his recruitment in March 1963. “We were not told what the cause was.”
Oliveros wastes no time explaining that cause. The main narrative opens with a scene in front of “some committee in Ottawa,” where, we learn, francophones are largely excluded from management positions. Company president Donald Gordon is asked why only two of the railway’s twenty-eight directors and top executives are French speakers. “We’ll get to that when we find the ones with talent,” Gordon states. “So long as I’m president of CN, there isn’t going to be a promotion just because a man is a French Canadian.”
The irony is hard to miss: while Quebec’s Coalition Avenir Québec government has denied the existence of systemic discrimination against Muslims, Black people, and Indigenous people, the graphic novel—in just a few panels—makes a compelling case for how similar institutional oppression worked against French Canadians, explaining how the original felquistes fought for French workers’ rights. While Oliveros understands the FLQ’s motives, he doesn’t shy away from highlighting their near-comic amateurishness and the violence it led to—aspects played up by the cartoony style of the drawings (which include sound effects such as “BLAM BLAM” or “BOOM”). “If you plan on recruiting someone to make bombs, you probably shouldn’t get a high school student,” he says.
FLQ member Jean Corbo was only sixteen years old when a bomb he planted exploded in a Dominion Textile factory in Montreal’s Saint-Henri district, his arms and legs blown off by the force of the blast. “Their goal wasn’t to kill people,” Oliveros says, “but they were inept.”
The casualties piled up. In April 1963, Wilfrid O’Neil, a night watchman, was the FLQ’s first victim. A month later, bomb disposal expert Walter Leja’s left arm was blown to bits and his face and chest were crushed when an FLQ bomb, left in a Westmount mailbox, went off while he was attempting to defuse it. In 1966, a secretary named Thérèse Morin was killed by a bomb. And according to the CBC, Thérèse Labbé, eight months pregnant at the time, would nearly lose her left eye and require transplant surgery for blown eardrums. In 1969, a bombing at the Montreal Stock Exchange injured twenty-seven people. The following year, an explosion at the National Defence Headquarters building in Ottawa killed Jeanne d’Arc Saint-Germain, a widowed working mother of two. “It’s actually surprising that more innocent people didn’t die,” says Oliveros. “It could have been far worse.”
A second book focuses on the years of the October Crisis itself. “Many people assume there were potentially thousands of FLQ members,” says Oliveros. However, his research shows that, even at the group’s height during the crisis, there were maybe a few dozen members. “Imagine the irony of the Canadian Army coming in for a couple of dozens of people,” he says.
But it’s also important not to underestimate, or fail to appreciate, the effects of the escalating violence the city lived under at the time. Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? ends on a foreboding note. Oliveros shares an excerpt of a letter written by Vallières, from prison, in 1968, to journalist and supporter Jacques Larue-Langlois. Setting the stage for what was to come, Vallières explains that exceptional measures would have to be taken to get them out of prison—something “along the lines of a rather spectacular operation,” which would include “the political kidnapping of two influential members of the [Quebec] or Trudeau’s governments.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
