MONTREAL—It is one of the most famous pieces of sovereignty-related real estate in Montreal, made so by a man who announced Quebec and its nascent hopes for independence to the world.

But for the 50th anniversary of French president Charles De Gaulle’s controversial speech that ended with the phrase “Vive le Québec libre!” the balcony from which he stoked the smouldering flames of separatism will remain closed to a group led by former Quebec Premier Bernard Landry.

Landry and the Societé Saint-Jean Baptiste de Montréal, a pro-independence advocacy group, had been seeking access to the city-hall perch as part of their plans to commemorate De Gaulle’s speech. But that request, made in an early-April letter from Landry to Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, was swiftly rejected.

“I was surprised, disagreeably surprised,” Landry told reporters Wednesday in front of a stone monument in a Montreal park that was erected in De Gaulle’s honour in 1992.

“I don’t want to lay too much blame, but it’s a lack of vision about the importance of this declaration for the City of Montreal.”

A spokesperson for Coderre said in a statement that the city is planning a week-long exposition at city hall to mark the historical fact of De Gaulle’s 1967 visit to Montreal to visit Expo ’67. On July 24, the day of the anniversary, there will be a series of 30-minute guided visits to the balcony between 11 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.

“Remember that city hall is neutral and apolitical,” the statement said. “The citizens of Montreal would never accept that this place be used like this.”

If it all seems like a quaint historical dispute, it is instructive to delve into the news archives when De Gaulle’s intemperate outburst provoked an emergency cabinet meeting of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson’s government in Ottawa and condemnations in many European capitals, including Paris.

The Prime Minister’s Office was reportedly flooded with telegrams expressing displeasure. Students at the University of Toronto planned an anti-De Gaulle march.

It was no better back home, where French newspaper Le Figaro dubbed the president’s short speech about the progress and maturity of French Canada and its connection to France “a serious diplomatic failure” and a number of Parisians reportedly delivered floral bouquets of apology to the Canadian embassy.

Lost in the popular rendering of the diplomatic entanglement, is the fact that one day after De Gaulle wished long life for a free Quebec he undertook an official tour of the Expo ’67 facilities. The political strategy coursing through the general’s mind isn’t clear, but after a brief address he ended saying: “Long live Canada and long live Quebec.”

It was already too late. A denunciatory Star editorial from that day, July 25, 1967, was headlined: “This meddlesome old man abuses our courtesy.” An official rebuke followed from Prime Minister Pearson declaring De Gaulle’s words to be “unacceptable to the Canadian people and to its government.”

“The people of Canada are free. Every province in Canada is free. Canadians do not need to be liberated. Indeed, many thousands of Canadians gave their lives in two world wars in the liberation of France and other European countries.”

Perhaps he had miscalculated. Perhaps the affront from Ottawa was too much. Perhaps it was the reported threats to mine the railroad tracks that were supposed to take the 76-year-old French president from Montreal to the Canadian capital.

Whatever the reasons, De Gaulle boarded his official airplane at Montreal’s Dorval airport on the 26th, cancelling a planned stop in Ottawa without any official explanation. One French uniformed military officer showed up to Orly Airport in Paris and conveyed apologies to a Star reporter, noting that it was Canadian soldiers who had liberated Normandy from the Nazis.

While the whole incident tainted the man’s legacy for Canadian federalists, it set off a wave of pride in Quebec. The province was in the early days of the Quiet Revolution, throwing off the shackles of the Catholic clergy and taking back business from English industrialists.

Landry recalled that he had just returned to Montreal after three years at university in Paris in July 1967. He had been invited by friends to a dinner in Old-Montreal on the 24th, when the historic address took place.

“I heard that crucial phrase and like all who were there we felt that we had witnessed an historic event, and it was exactly that,” he said.

Three years later, the Parti Québécois would run candidates in the first provincial election. In 1976, PQ leader René Lévesque would become Quebec’s first sovereigntist premier.

During an official visit to China, Landry and Lévesque met with head of the Communist Party newspaper, the China Peoples’ Daily, who confided that De Gaulle’s speech was front-page news and prompted the creation of a Chinese character to represent the province of Quebec.

“General De Gaulle internationalized the Quebec question,” Landry said.

There are still two sovereigntist parties in the Quebec legislature and the independence question still dominates provincial election campaigns. But all these years later, the losing sovereignty referendums of 1980 and 1995 are as much historical relics as the fallout from the balcony speech.

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“My great regret and that of many others is that the General said, ‘Long live a free Quebec,’ but the Quebec people have not yet said that Quebec will be free and we missed two chances to do so,” Landry said.

Societé Saint-Jean Baptiste de Montréal president Maxime Laporte said there are still plans to mark De Gaulle’s speech on the street in front of city hall. There will be speeches and recitations, as well as an actor who will re-enact the French leader’s ride through the streets in a convertible vehicle.

“At least the streets belong to everybody,” Laporte said.

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