Montreal

• 1. Introduction

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  Montreal sits 196 km east of the national capital, Ottawa, and carries two names at once: the official French Montréal, with its accent intact, and the English Montreal, which quietly drops the mark. That small orthographic gap hints at something deeper. This is a city where French and English have competed, coexisted, and occasionally collided for nearly four centuries, and where the result is a place unlike anywhere else in the Americas. Founded in 1642 as Ville-Marie, a Catholic mission built around faith and fur, it eventually outgrew its original name and took instead the name of the mountain at its heart. How did a small riverside settlement become the largest French-speaking city in the Americas? What made it, for a time, the undisputed commercial capital of Canada? And why, in the 1970s, did so much of what it had built begin to leave? The answers run from the ice of the St. Lawrence River to the fibre-optic cross that lights up Mount Royal, and from the failed American occupation of 1775 to the world-record jazz festival that fills its streets every summer.

• 2. Before the French Arrived

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  Archaeological evidence places human habitation on the Island of Montreal as far back as 4,000 years ago. By the year AD 1000, the people living there had begun cultivating maize, and within a few centuries they had constructed fortified villages. The group the French would later encounter was the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians, a people ethnically and culturally distinct from the Haudenosaunee Iroquois nations then based in present-day New York. They had built their principal village, Hochelaga, at the foot of the mountain the French would later call Mount Royal. When the French explorer Jacques Cartier visited Hochelaga on the 2nd of October 1535, he estimated its population at over a thousand people. He was the only European known to have seen it; by the time Samuel de Champlain arrived in 1603, the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians and their settlements had vanished entirely from the valley. Champlain believed the disappearance resulted from outmigration, epidemic disease, or intertribal war. The island the Mohawk called Tiohtià:ke, meaning roughly "where the group divided or parted ways", had been a significant landmark long before the French planted their flag. In the Ojibwe migration story as told in the seven fires prophecy, the place called Mooniyaang was "the first stopping place".

• 3. Ville-Marie: Faith and Fur

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  In 1639, Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière obtained the seigneurial title to the Island of Montreal with the intention of establishing a Roman Catholic mission to evangelise native peoples. He hired Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, then thirty years old, to lead the settlers, and the group departed France in 1641. On the 17th of May 1642, they founded Ville-Marie on the southern shore of the island, with Maisonneuve as its first governor. The settlement included a chapel and a hospital under the command of Jeanne Mance. By 1643, Iroquois raids had already begun. The colony's survival was anything but assured: before reinforcements arrived in the fall of 1653, the entire population of Montreal numbered barely 50 people. Maisonneuve had returned to France the year before specifically to recruit 100 volunteers, warning that if the effort failed, the settlement would be abandoned and any survivors relocated downriver to Quebec City. The fur trade ultimately gave Ville-Marie its economic reason to survive; by 1685, the settlement had grown to about 600 colonists, most living in modest wooden houses. In 1689, English-allied Iroquois attacked Lachine on the island in what became the worst massacre in the history of New France. The settlement's name persisted in all official documents until 1705, when the name Montreal appeared for the first time in writing, though people had long referred to the Island of Montreal before that date. The mountain's identity is even older: Venetian geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio used the name Monte Real to designate Mount Royal as far back as his 1556 map of the region.

• 4. Invasion, Occupation, Retreat

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  In November 1775, Montreal fell to American forces during the invasion of Quebec that grew out of the American Revolution. Benedict Arnold had captured Fort Ticonderoga in present-day upstate New York in May of that year, using it as a launching point. American general Richard Montgomery took Montreal on the 13th of November after British governor Guy Carleton abandoned the city. The occupation was short and chaotic. Montgomery left David Wooster in charge of Montreal while he marched to attack Quebec City, where he was killed. Arnold, who took command after Montgomery's death, arrived in Montreal on the 19th of April 1776. The Americans sent Colonel Timothy Bedel to form a garrison of 390 men forty miles upriver at Les Cèdres, Quebec, to defend against a British counterattack. Bedel's lieutenant Isaac Butterfield surrendered to British officer George Forster, who then advanced to Fort Senneville by the 23rd of May. By the 24th, Arnold was entrenched in Montreal's Lachine district. The Americans burned Senneville on the 26th of May. After Arnold crossed the Ottawa River in pursuit of Forster, British cannons repelled the American force. A prisoner exchange was negotiated, but the Americans ultimately refused to return British prisoners as previously agreed, with Congress repudiating the arrangement over accusations of abuse, against the protest of George Washington. Arnold blamed Colonel Bedel for the defeat and sent him to Sorel for court-martial. Arnold's forces abandoned Montreal before the 17th of June arrival of Carleton's fleet, attempting to burn the city in the process. Bedel and Butterfield were convicted and cashiered at Ticonderoga on the 1st of August 1776. Congress reinstated Bedel in October 1777.

• 5. Rise and Rivalry

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  Montreal was incorporated as a city in 1832. By 1860, it was the largest city under British rule in North America, culturally and economically dominant over the rest of Canada. The Lachine Canal allowed ships to bypass the unnavigable Lachine Rapids, while the Victoria Bridge established Montreal as the country's main railway hub. Business leaders built their homes in the Golden Square Mile from around 1850. The city even served briefly as the capital of the Province of Canada from 1844 to 1849, until a Tory mob burned down the Parliament building in protest against the passage of the Rebellion Losses Bill. Queen Victoria then established Ottawa as the capital in 1857, partly because it was less exposed to American attack, and partly because it lay on the border between French and English Canada. Population growth during the 19th century strained every city system. In 1852, Montreal had roughly 58,000 residents; by 1901, that figure had risen to 267,000. Maintaining drinking water during this period was a persistent problem; mid-century, the city relied on cisterns transported from pumping stations drawing from the St. Lawrence. Workers called fontainiers opened and closed water valves across the city because the infrastructure could not connect all buildings at once. During World War II, Montreal was the official residence of the Luxembourg royal family in exile. Mayor Camillien Houde publicly urged Montrealers to defy the federal government's wartime registry, and was held in a prison camp for his defiance until 1944. By the 1940s, the volume of stocks traded at the Toronto Stock Exchange had already surpassed that of the Montreal Stock Exchange. The St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, allowing vessels to bypass Montreal entirely, and the migration of corporate headquarters to Toronto accelerated through the 1970s.

• 6. Language, Identity, Crisis

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  French is Montreal's official language, spoken fluently by 85.7% of the city's residents as of 2021. The percentage rises to 90.2% across the metropolitan area. Yet 58.5% of the population can speak both French and English, making Montreal one of the most bilingual cities in the country. The tension between these two linguistic communities has driven some of the most consequential moments in the city's modern history. The 1970s brought the October Crisis, a period of political violence linked to Quebec separatism, and the 1976 election of the Parti Québécois government committed to Quebec sovereignty. Many businesses and English-speaking residents left the province during this period, dealing a serious blow to the city's economic standing. The Parti Québécois also forced a merger of Montreal with 27 surrounding municipalities on the 1st of January 2002, which was deeply unpopular with predominantly English suburbs who saw it as imposition. In separate referendums in June 2004, former municipalities representing 13% of the island's population voted to leave the unified city. The demerger took effect on the 1st of January 2006, leaving 15 municipalities on the island. The 2021 census recorded 32.8% of Montreal residents speaking a non-official language as their first language, with Arabic being the most common at 5.7%, followed by Spanish at 4.6% and Italian at 3.3%. Immigrants made up 33.4% of the city's total population by the same count, with the largest groups originating from Haiti, Algeria, and France.

• 7. Festivals, Architecture, Sport

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  The Montreal International Jazz Festival is the largest jazz festival in the world. Just for Laughs is the largest comedy festival in the world. Les Francos de Montréal is the largest French-language music festival in the world. All three are held in the same city. Mark Twain once observed that Montreal was the first city he had visited where you could not throw a brick without breaking a church window. The count supports the remark: there are an estimated 650 churches on the island, with 450 of them dating from the 1800s or earlier. Saint Joseph's Oratory is the largest church in Canada, carrying the second-largest copper dome in the world after Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. When UNESCO named Montreal a City of Design in 2006, it was one of only three design capitals in the world, alongside Berlin and Buenos Aires. The city's underground pedestrian network, officially called RÉSO, connects shopping centres, universities, hotels, subway stations, and more through 32 km of tunnels across 12 km2. Mount Royal Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed New York's Central Park; it was inaugurated in 1876. The illuminated cross at the summit, installed in 1924 by the John the Baptist Society, was converted to fibre-optic light in 1992 and can glow red, blue, or purple. The Montreal Canadiens, founded in 1909, have won 24 Stanley Cup championships, more than any other team in National Hockey League history, with the most recent victory coming in 1993. Montreal hosted the 1976 Summer Olympics; the stadium built for the games cost $1.5 billion, a figure that ballooned to nearly $3 billion with interest and was not paid off until December 2006. Jackie Robinson broke the Baseball colour line with the minor-league Montreal Royals in 1946, in what he later described as an emotionally difficult year, though he was forever grateful for the support Montreal fans gave him. The Réseau express métropolitain, a 67 km automated rapid transit network with 26 stations, broke ground in April 2018; its first branch opened on the 31st of July 2023.