Sex and jazz, liquor and gambling: Montreal in the early twentieth century was a city that offered an exceptional nighttime scene in North America. By mid-century that scene came under scrutiny, and Montreal’s influential mayor Jean Drapeau would be elected for the first time on a reformist platform that promised to end corruption. Over more than three decades, Drapeau would endeavour to transform Montreal into a world-class global city by regulating its nightlife.

Montreal After Dark chronicles the spaces where nighttime regulations were enforced and contested. City authorities understood the night as enabling disorder, and they reorganized policing and crafted bylaws to gain control over it. Police and politicians mutually reinforced each other’s drive to morally cleanse the urban landscape, especially for international events like Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics. But in an era of social unrest Drapeau’s administration also found itself responding to the protective services’ discontent. The political culture of the city was quickly transformed following terrifying nights without their services. Matthieu Caron shows how, in an effort to incorporate the night into the expansionary tendencies of consumer capitalism, municipal authorities took sides in a debate over who had the right to public space at night, what constituted acceptable behaviour or expression, whose sexual activity sustained the social order – and whose threatened to destroy it.

In terms that are strikingly familiar today, Montreal After Dark elucidates how the desires of politicians would come to reorganize how consumption and leisure, labour and dissent, noise, sex, and art were lived in Montreal after the sun went down.

Montreal After Dark elucidates how nighttime regulation became a central issue in Montreal during the second half of the twentieth century. Labour, dissent, sex, noise, and art, as well as sites of leisure and consumption, were reorganized to suit the desires of politicians who envisioned Montreal within a global network of cities."Written with scholarly rigour and sympathetic to those most harmed, Caron’s book is a sharp, engaging account of how controlling the night became key to controlling the city." Canada's History“Montreal After Dark brings Montreal’s postwar histories together through the innovative lens of a night studies perspective. Caron’s scholarship is top-notch.” Julie Podmore, Concordia University“Montreal After Dark offers a portrait of a shifting Montreal, reminding readers of the power our municipal leaders have in shaping the city around us - by day and by night. It comes as a timely history lesson, a call for civic action as Montrealers look ahead to a consequential election this November.” Montreal Review of Books“Montreal After Dark sheds new light on Montreal’s long Drapeau administration and the interminable fight against disorder and immorality that remained a significant part of the city’s municipal politics until the very end of the twentieth century. Caron’s compelling prose, mastery of pertinent historiography, and fresh perspective make this a history that is local, national, and international in equal measure.” Harold Bérubé, Université de Sherbrooke"Deeply researched, [Caron's] book focuses on the Montreal municipal government’s suppression of nightlife from the 1950s through the 1980s, driven by a reform movement that sought to turn a city 'gripped by an underworld” into one with a “new-found global reputation.'" Literary Review of CanadaMatthieu Caron is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University.

Magda Fahrni et/and Nicolas Kenny
Directeurs de la collection / Series Editors

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