Montreal After Dark

On Oct. 7, 1969, during Montreal’s Night of Terror (a.k.a. the Murray Hill riot) precipitated by a police strike, rioters destroyed the interior of Mayor Jean Drapeau’s Le Vaisseau d’Or restaurant. The bust of its namesake, the doomed French-Canadian poet .mile Nelligan, emerged unscathed — a fitting example of the resilience of the city’s creative spirits.

In Montreal After Dark, historian Matthieu Caron traces how postwar Montreal sought to reinvent itself from this kind of nightlife capital to a sanitized “global city.” The author opens with 1940s Montreal at its peak, a hub where sex, jazz, gambling and whisky fuelled one of North America’s hottest after-dark scenes, mixing artists, entrepreneurs and marginalized communities with organized crime and vice.

The book’s central figure is Mayor Drapeau, whose nearly three decades in office redefined Montreal’s image. Determined to make the city internationally respectable and pave the way for Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics, Drapeau cracked down on nightlife while aligning with a provincial government hostile to labour unions and dissent.

Where Caron’s book stands out from earlier works about Montreal (such as William Weintraub’s City Unique) is its focus on the marginalized: Drapeau’s “morality squad” targeted the very communities that had sustained the city’s after-hours economy — sex workers, musicians, taxi drivers and queer and racialized populations. 

Drapeau’s Civic Party sought not just to regulate bars and brothels but also to police bodies — particularly women’s sexuality, using anti-sex work laws to “beautify” the city. Everything from pornography (Drapeau ordered the seizure of the Swedish film I, a Woman) to pinball machines fell under scrutiny, as municipal policy turned nightlife into a checklist of prohibitions, all of which unfolded against the backdrop of the Quiet Revolution, the sovereignty movement and the October Crisis.

Written with scholarly rigour and sympathetic to those most harmed, Caron’s book is a sharp, engaging account of how controlling the night became key to controlling the city.