Foucault’s Visit to McGill University and his meetings with Quebec separatists
Stuart Elden and Marcelo Hoffman dive into Foucault's 1971 visit to Montreal
Michel Foucault gave some lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche at McGill University in April 1971. This was his first visit to Canada. He had visited SUNY Buffalo in 1970 and returned there in spring 1972 and visited Cornell University in autumn 1972. These early visits to North America were generally to French departments, and he usually spoke in French. A complete course from Buffalo has recently been published, Histoire de la vérité,after sitting largely unknown in the University archives for over five decades. It was only later, when Foucault was visiting UC Berkeley regularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that he became more comfortable in speaking English. Some of his initial talks to anglophone audiences were given in French with an interpreter – this is how he delivered his 1975 talk to the Semiotext(e) conference in New York, for example. Foucault also visited Brazil regularly from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, where he again spoke in French. These Brazil visits have been discussed by Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues in Michel Foucault au Brésil: Présence, effets, résonances and Marcelo Hoffman in Foucault in Brazil: Dictatorship, Resistance, and Solidarity.
Foucault arrived in Montreal only months after the October Crisis of 1970. The crisis was triggered by the separate kidnappings of the British Trade Commissioner James Cross and the Deputy Premier of Québec Pierre Laporte by cells of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) in early October. The FLQ sought to use the kidnappings as leverage to force the federal government to meet various demands, including the release of imprisoned FLQ members. The FLQ cell that had kidnapped Laporte executed him a week after his kidnapping. In response to the kidnappings, the federal government invoked the War Measures Act for the first time in peacetime in Canadian history. The Act prohibited the FLQ, suspended civil liberties, and resulted in hundreds of arrests without charges. In December, the House of Commons overwhelmingly passed an emergency powers measure, the Public Order (Temporary Measures) Act, as a replacement for the War Measures Act. The new act remained in place until the end of April 1971. Foucault’s arrival in Montreal coincided with a time when Canada was still experiencing the effects of emergency powers stemming from the October Crisis.
It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that he had an interesting political experience in Québec. Foucault may well have detected powerful resonances between the climate of political repression in Canada and the contemporary situation in France. Only months before the October Crisis in Canada, the French state proscribed a Maoist organization, the Gauche prolétarienne (Proletarian Left), with which Foucault had close connections, especially through Daniel Defert, who discusses this in his Une vie politique (Part I, Ch. 3). The arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of its members had served as the general backdrop to the formation of the Prisons Information Group (GIP). Robert Lemieux, with whom Foucault met in Montreal, was a central actor in the October Crisis. He was a lawyer who represented the cells of the FLQ that had kidnapped Cross and Laporte.
In his valuable chronology of Foucault’s life and career Defert says this of the visit:
A visit to Montreal, where Foucault is invited by McGill University. He is questioned about his experience with the GIP. Meets activists from the independent Québecois movements, the MDPPQ and the FLQ. Meets Chartrand, Robert Lemieux, and Gagnon and visits Pierre Vallières, author of Nègres blancs d’Amérique, in prison.[1]
Beyond the FLQ, Defert also mentions the Mouvement pour la défense des prisonniers politiques du Québec (MDPPQ), along with Michel Chartrand, Lemieux, Charles Gagnon, and Pierre (P.K.) Vallières. Gagnon and Vallières had been imprisoned in the United States, and were later extradited to Canada. They were released on parole in early 1970, but rearrested later that year. It would be interesting to find out what kind of conversations Foucault may have had with Lemieux as well as with militants of the FLQ and MDPPQ. Unfortunately, there appear to be no obvious traces of these conversations.
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Similarly, it has been difficult to unearth much information about his visit to McGill. Foucault was invited to McGill by Benjamin F. Weems III, who taught there at the time, but died in 2020. From correspondence with John K. Simon at Buffalo, it is clear Foucault took a side trip to Buffalo and possibly to New York City on this visit. Part of a McGill lecture on Nietzsche was included in the 1970-71 Collège de France course Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, edited by Defert, and translated by Graham Burchell as Lectures on the Will to Know. It was used there to make up for the absence of material from the Paris course manuscript. Defert says Foucault took a part out to use for a lecture elsewhere and did not return it to the file. (We think it was used as part of the 1973 Brazil course on ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, for which the manuscript survives and matches the Paris gap well, as one of us discusses in The Archaeology of Foucault, pp. 193-94.)
The McGill material Defert used as the supplement in Lectures on the Will to Know was not a complete lecture, since he did not transcribe pages 1-3 and 20-27 of the manuscript. Additionally, the lecture was one of a series of three given in McGill. Foucault’s archive includes an 88-page manuscript marked as lectures from McGill.[2]The three lectures have individual page numbers, and then a pencil continuous numbering of these pages was added at some point: the excerpted part was only pages 66-79 of this text. The entire lecture sequence was later edited by Bernard Harcourt, and included in the Nietzsche: Cours, conférences, travaux volume which was published in 2024. In his editorial contribution Harcourt situates the three lectures expertly in relation to Foucault’s other work on Nietzsche but uses Defert’s indication quoted above to situate this short course contextually, and does not provide much other information on the visit.
Foucault gave a lecture entitled “Sade – le savoir et le désir” in Montreal, a variant of one he had given in Buffalo in 1970. While the Nietzsche lectures were given at the anglophone McGill University, this lecture was given at the francophone Université de Montréal, in the French department.[3] The Buffalo version of the lecture was included in La Grande étrangère/Language, Madness, Desire, on the basis of a transcription of a recording. (The opening lecture and one of the Sade lectures seem to be the only surviving recordings of Foucault’s 1970 course in Buffalo, though as outlined in a piece in Foucault Studies, quite a lot of the other material delivered in 1970 has been published in some form.) One of the manuscripts on Sade in Foucault’s archive is titled “Montréal, Spring 1971”.[4]
Foucault was interviewed by Wilfred Lemoine for Radio-Canada in 1971, and the first half of the interview is on YouTube.
There is another part of this interview, which apparently was more political and concerned his work on prisons, but this does not appear to be available online.
Another Radio-Canada broadcast, from 2022, is a discussion of Foucault’s career and briefly mentions his 1971 visit. Interestingly, in the broadcast Jonathan Livernois quotes a letter Foucault sent to Weems after his visit: “Getting to know Quebec has been a political and cultural experience I never expected”. This broadcast is also interesting because it includes a very brief excerpt of Foucault speaking in Montreal, albeit in a poor recording, which suggests longer recordings may exist.
Curious about Foucault’s visit to Montreal in April 1971, we searched the catalogue of the archives at McGill and, drawing a blank, asked archivists there if they had any information. This unfortunately produced nothing. We tried our faculty contacts at McGill, including Todd Meyers and Gillian Lane-Mercier. They made their own inquiries but were unable to find more, and Gillian in particular went far beyond what we initially expected. If there are surviving archival traces of the visit there, they are well hidden. We tried other routes to discover more, but all to no avail. Nor is there anything about his 1971 visit to the University of Montreal in their archives.
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We asked a non-academic Canadian friend, Jeff Jackson, to file an Access to Information request to see if there was any information about Foucault’s visits to Canada held by government agencies. We understood that you needed to be a Canadian citizen, permanent resident in Canada, or a person or corporation present in the country to do this. One of us had done this with some success for Foucault’s visits to the United States in the same period, as discussed in “The FBI File on Foucault”. The Canadian response was striking: there is a file on Foucault, but we are not allowed to see it. Despite repeated attempts on our behalf, we were told section 13 (1) had been invoked by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and that this meant the entire file was restricted – we were not able to see any part of his file, let alone a redacted page. This section of the Access to Information Act indicates that some of the record has information obtained from either a foreign state, international organisation, provincial government, municipal or regional government, or aboriginal government. While it is possible there was information shared from France or the United States, a Canadian province, probably Quebec, seems more likely. 13 (2) of the Act says it can be authorised with consent, which is what has been refused. Why would there still be a need to block access to a 1971 file? Our best guess, though we have no evidence for it, is that Foucault’s meetings with Quebec separatists led to security concerns which endure today. The other alternative, given that Quebec separatism is no longer seen as an extreme position, with referenda in 1980 and 1995, is a more general security concern about Foucault’s radical politics and influence.
Foucault returned to Montreal on several occasions. In 1973, he gave a series of lectures, including a conference on anti-psychiatry, “Faut-il interner le psychiatres?”, organised by Henri Ellenberger. Foucault’s text “Histoire de la folie et antipsychiatrie” was published posthumously.[5] He wrote to Defert: “It hardly seems like the restive Quebec of 1971”.[6] Foucault was in Montreal again in 1974, when he gave a short course on “L’épreuve et l’enquête [The proof and the inquiry]”. The course is not yet published, but its manuscript possibly survives.[7] He returned in 1976, when he gave the “Alternatives to the Prison” lecture. He delivered the “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual” lecture in Toronto in 1977, and the Speaking the Truth about Oneself short course at Victoria University in 1982, and used one of those lectures at Queen’s University, Kingston. There may have been other visits.
Steven Maynard has written about some of these later visits to Canada, and his connections to gay activists, particularly in “Alexander Wilson: Queer Parrhesiast” and “‘The Party with God’: Michel Foucault, the Gay Left, and the Work of Theory”. His planned book on Foucault’s visits to Canada will be an invaluable source for more information; some of which he generously shared with us in the writing of this essay.
However, the first time Foucault went to Montreal seems to be underexplored, particularly in terms of the political context, perhaps because of the absence of documentary evidence.
[1] Daniel Defert, “Chronologie”, Dits et écrits, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, Vol I, p. 37; “Chronology”, trans. Timothy O’Leary in Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary and Jana Sawicki (eds), A Companion to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell, 2013, p. 46. The reference is to Pierre Vallières, Nègres blancs d'Amérique, autobiographie précoce d'un "terroriste" québécois, Montréal: Éditions Parti pris, 1968; White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec Terrorist, trans. Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
[2] Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds Michel Foucault, NAF 28730, NAF 28730, box 65, folder 4.
[3] It was announced in the local paper, Le devoir, 5 April 1971, p. 3.
[4] Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds Michel Foucault, NAF 28730, box 54, folder 5.
[5] Michel Foucault, “Histoire de la folie et antipsychiatrie”, in Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Frédéric Gros and Judith Revel eds., Cahier de L′Herne 95: Michel Foucault, Paris: L′Herne, 2011, 95-102.
[6] Quoted by Defert in “Chronologie”, p. 43; “Chronology”, p. 54.
[7] Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds Michel Foucault, NAF 28730, box 55, folder 12.
