Pierre Bourgault

Infobox Person
name = Pierre Bourgault


image_size =
caption =
birth_date = birth date|1934|1|23|mf=y
birth_place = East Angus
death_date = death date and age|2003|6|16|1934|1|23|mf=y
death_place =
occupation = Politician
spouse =
religion =
nationality = Québécois

Pierre Bourgault (January 23, 1934 – June 16, 2003) was a politician and essayist in Quebec, Canada, and a public speaker who advocated sovereignty for Quebec from Canada.

Profile

Bourgault (pronounced Bour-go) was born in East Angus in the Estrie (Eastern Townships) region of Quebec. His parents sent him to boarding school at age 7, determined that he should receive the education which they lacked.

Beginning in the early 1960s, he supported Quebec independence from Canada and in 1960 helped found the pro-independence "Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale". He participated a number of union strikes and marches that resulted in violence. In 1964, he became leader of the RIN. In 1968, he disbanded the RIN and invited its members to join René Lévesque's "Mouvement Souveraineté-Association" and the "Ralliement national" in the newly founded "Parti Québécois", under Lévesque's leadership. During the St. Jean Baptiste celebration in 1968, he and other supporters rioted and threw objects in the direction of Pierre Trudeau. He and 300 others were arrested for this incident. However, Bourgault himself did not play any role in the PQ government that came to power in the 1976 Quebec provincial election, and often quarreled with Lévesque before leaving the PQ in the 1980s. Some say that he sacrificed his own political career to unite pro-sovereignty forces.

In his early life, he was a journalist at Montreal newspaper "La Presse", and he returned to this in the 1990s as a columnist for "Le Journal de Montréal" newspaper. After 1976, he was a professor of communications at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He was also the co-host or regular columnist of several radio shows aired on la Société Radio-Canada, the French language sector of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

He was non-religious to the point of atheism, and despite their political differences, had a solid friendship with Robert Bourassa. An ardent defender of the French language, even against "joual", he received the Prix Georges-Émile-Lapalme in 1997.

It was once estimated that he had given 4,000 speeches in his life, which are however mostly lost to posterity since he did not write them down.

He was openly gay, though he said in an interview for Radio-Canada a few years before his death that in his later years he chose to stop having sexual relations.

External links

* [http://www.ledevoir.com/2003/06/17/30082.html Obituary] (from Le Devoir, in French)