Stuart Elden and Marcelo Hoffman, Foucault’s Visit to McGill University and his meetings with Quebec separatists, Verso blog, 2 July 2026
Michel Foucault gave some lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche at McGill University in April 1971. This was his first visit to Canada.
[…]
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.
[…]
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).
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