Recall: How to Start a Revolution

From the BBC World Service and CBC Podcasts comes Hollywood Exiles. Host Oona Chaplin tells the story of the decades-long campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It’s a campaign that eventually drove her grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others out of tinseltown. Hollywood Exiles is a tale of glamour, duplicity and political intrigue that reverberates to this day. It’s the story of how Tinseltown became an ideological battleground. The toll of the fight was enormous – reputations, careers and families were torn apart by the campaign to drive communists from the movie business. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/CRPru5Ys

In response to the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte, the federal government invokes the War Measures Act. And when the body of Pierre Laporte is discovered, popular sentiment turns against the FLQ and leads to the collapse of the group. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/recall-how-to-start-a-revolution-transcripts-listen-1.6756227

With the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte, the FLQ earns the headline attention it craves, and creates a national crisis in the process. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/recall-how-to-start-a-revolution-transcripts-listen-1.6756227

Pierre-Paul Geoffroy and Bob Côté were at opposite ends of the busiest period of FLQ bombing activity. It began in May 1968 with a bomb at the 7-Up factory, and ended in February 1969 with the explosion at the Montreal Stock Exchange. Geoffroy was planting the bombs, Côté had to defuse them. For both men, the period took a toll. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/recall-how-to-start-a-revolution-transcripts-listen-1.6756227

The FLQ’s campaign for liberation did not spring from a vacuum: radical Québec separatists were inspired by and in turn inspired decolonization movements around the world, including the Black Panthers. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/recall-how-to-start-a-revolution-transcripts-listen-1.6756227

Pierre Vallieres taps into the anger and alienation felt by Francophone Quebecers by penning a book of essays that earns him comparisons to Malcolm X and Che Guevara. The revolutionary text inflames separatist sentiment, cements Vallieres’s position as the intellectual and philosophical father of the FLQ… and is held up in the courts as evidence of his guilt in earlier FLQ bombing campaigns. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/recall-how-to-start-a-revolution-transcripts-listen-1.6756227

The story of how a Hungarian born, Austro-German raised, ex-French Foreign Legionnaire became a radical Quebec separatist demonstrates the allure of the FLQ message in the political tinderbox that was Montreal in 1964. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/recall-how-to-start-a-revolution-transcripts-listen-1.6756227

The 1960s began as a time of promise for Quebec, with the feeling that the province was throwing off the shackles of its parochial past. But despite plenty of reason for hope, the seeds were being sown for radical revolt, and by 1963, Montreal would be shaken by political violence. We meet the victim of an early FLQ bombing, and dig into how her story was lost to history. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/recall-how-to-start-a-revolution-transcripts-listen-1.6756227

Introducing Recall, a series about history that is still hot to the touch. The first season, How to Start a Revolution, explores the story of a groundbreaking political movement that rocked Canada in the 1960s. Host Geoff Turner will examine how the movement grew from a global spirit of liberation and how the dream of revolution became a nightmare of bombs, kidnapping and murder.