ABSTRACT
Vallières, Pierre (1938-98), Canadian activist. Vallières emerged from a workingclass background in Montreal to become a leading member of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), a group with high profile in the 1960s and early 1970s, prepared to use violence to further the cause of independence. He joined the group in 1965, and spent four years in jail starting in 1966, for his role in a demonstration at the United Nations in New York and for accusations associated with an earlier bombing death in Montreal (for which he was first convicted and then acquitted on appeal). Vallières was the FLQ’s most prominent writer, having been a contributor to various newspapers and magazines from the early 1960s, and most famously publishing White Niggers of America in 1968, widely read in Quebec as well as the rest of Canada. He renounced the FLQ’s violence after adherents murdered a Quebec cabinet minister they had kidnapped in October 1970, and publicly supported the Parti Québécois (PQ), a political party that had been formed to lead the sovereigntist charge in provincial electoral politics (and which eventually formed the government). As the PQ moved closer to the centre, he renounced it, too, and remained uninvolved in the campaign for ‘yes’ votes in the pro-sovereignty referendum of 1995.
