How to Start a Revolution
How to Start a Revolution is a two-part series based on the 2020 podcast Recall: How to Start a Revolution, that explores the history of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) in the 1960s. It was a separatist militant group that aimed to establish independence of Quebec from Canada and institute a French-speaking socialist society. The group conducted a number of violent attacks between 1963 and 1970, which culminated with the Montreal Stock Exchange bombing in 1969 and the kidnapping of British Trade Commissioner James Cross and deputy premier Pierre Laporte. Up to 1970, the FLQ gained the support of many left-leaning students, teachers and academics, who engaged in public strikes in solidarity with the FLQ. After the kidnapping of Cross, nearly 1,000 students at Université de Montréal signed a petition supporting the FLQ manifesto. However, public support largely waned after the group announced they had killed Laporte. The KGB, which had established contact with the FLQ before 1970, later forged documents to portray them as a CIA false flag operation, a story that gained limited traction among academic sources before declassified Soviet archives revealed the origins. By the early 1980s, most of the imprisoned FLQ members had been paroled or released.
