Who ruled Montreal?

Montreal occupies an island in the St Lawrence River at the point where the Ottawa River joins it and where the Lachine Rapids block further navigation upstream. Ships from the Atlantic had to stop here, and canoes heading for the Great Lakes and the interior had to start here, so the island became a natural hub for the fur trade and later for railways and shipping. Founded as a French Catholic mission, conquered by Britain and long dominated by an English-speaking business elite, it is a city whose story turns on the relationship between its two languages.

When the French navigator Jacques Cartier came up the river in October 1535, during the Age of Discovery, he found Hochelaga, a large fortified village of St Lawrence Iroquoians beneath the mountain he named Mont Royal. By the time Samuel de Champlain arrived in the early 1600s the village had vanished, and the island was largely empty. Champlain set up a short-lived trading post there in 1611.

The permanent settlement began on 17 May 1642, when Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance led a small group of colonists sent by a devout Catholic society in France to found Ville-Marie, a mission meant to convert the Indigenous peoples. The outpost nearly failed: raids by the Mohawk, part of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, reduced it to a few dozen settlers by 1651, and it survived only because Maisonneuve brought reinforcements from France. Peace came with the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, signed by the French and some forty Indigenous nations. By then the town, increasingly known as Montreal, was the base for fur traders and explorers heading west across New France.

During the Seven Years' War the French governor surrendered Montreal to a British army in September 1760, and the 1763 Treaty of Paris confirmed the transfer of Canada to the British Empire. American revolutionary forces held the city over the winter of 1775 to 1776 before withdrawing. Scottish and English merchants took over the fur trade, and later banks, shipping and industry, while the majority of the population remained French-speaking and Catholic.

The opening of the Lachine Canal in 1825, the Victoria Bridge over the St Lawrence in 1859 and the headquarters of the Canadian Pacific Railway turned Montreal into the commercial capital of Canada and its largest city. It served as the capital of the Province of Canada from 1844 until 1849, when a Tory mob burned the parliament building in protest at a law compensating people for losses in the rebellions of 1837 and 1838. Irish immigrants and French Canadians from the countryside supplied the labour for its factories and docks.

Montreal hosted the world's fair, Expo 67, and the 1976 Summer Olympics. At the same time the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and the rise of the separatist movement changed the city's balance: the FLQ crisis of 1970 brought troops onto the streets, and the 1977 Charter of the French Language made French the language of work and public life. Many anglophone businesses moved to Toronto, which overtook Montreal as Canada's largest city by the end of the 1970s. Quebec voted against sovereignty in referendums in 1980 and, very narrowly, 1995. Today Montreal has about 1.8 million people in the city and over 4 million in its metropolitan area, and it remains the economic and cultural centre of French-speaking North America.