Pierre Bourgault (January 23, 1934 – June 16, 2003) was a politician and essayist, as well as an actor and journalist, fromQuebec, Canada. He is most famous as a public speaker who advocatedsovereignty for Quebec from Canada.

Bourgault was born inEast Angus in theEstrie (Eastern Townships) region of Quebec. His father was acivil servant and his mother, a homemaker. His parents sent him toboarding school at age seven, determined that he should receive the education which they lacked. After secondary school, he briefly attended theseminary and entertained the idea of a possible entry into thepriesthood, per ancestral tradition, but reneged on his obligation shortly thereafter. He is today entombed within the traditionallyCatholicNotre Dame des Neiges Cemetery inMontreal.^[1]

Beginning in the early 1960s, he supportedQuebec independence from Canada and in 1960 joined the pro-independenceRassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale. A famed and inflammatory orator, he led a number ofunion strikes and marches that resulted in violence. In 1964, he became leader of the RIN, and came up just short in the Duplessis riding of Northern Quebec. During the St. Jean Baptiste celebration in 1968, a demonstration for Quebec nationalism turned into a riot when other supporters threw projectiles at newly minted Prime MinisterPierre Trudeau.^[2][3] He and 300 others were arrested for this incident, while Trudeau's stoic response significantly helped.

In 1964 he made a small appearance inDenis Héroux's student filmOver My Head (Jusqu'au cou), as himself in a political debate.^[4]

In 1968, popular cabinet minister and television hostRené Lévesque foundedMouvement Souveraineté-Association, a more moderate sovereignist party. Lévesque rebuffed in an attempt to have the RIN includeden masse, fearing the RIN's reputation for protests and violence would hurt the movement. Bourgeault disbanded the party and invited its members to join the MSA one by one and the newRalliement national in the newly foundedParti Québécois, under Lévesque's leadership.

In the1970 Quebec election, he was the Parti Québécois candidate inMercier electoral district, running unsuccessfully againstLiberal leader (and soon-to-bePremier)Robert Bourassa, who would become a close personal friend.Bourgault himself did not play any role in the PQ government that came to power in the1976 Quebec election and was given a patronage appointment. He often quarreled with Lévesque, especially in the lead up to the1980 referendum because he disagreed with the strategy on sovereignty advocated by the premier of Quebec. Bourgault leaves the PQ during the 1980s.

In his early life, he was a journalist atMontreal newspaperLa Presse, and he returned to this publication in the 1990s as a columnist forLe Journal de Montréal newspaper. After 1976, he was a professor of communications at theUniversité du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He was also the co-host or regular columnist of several radio shows aired on laSociété Radio-Canada, the French language sector of theCanadian Broadcasting Corporation.

In 1992, he had an acting role in the filmLéolo, cast by directorJean-Claude Lauzon. to whom Bourgault was a mentor.^[5] Lauzon denied he was cast for political reasons.^[6]

He wasopenly 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.

Bourgault was a fluent and eloquent speaker of English. For a brief period in the 1980s, he was a weekly columnist for Montreal's anglophone daily, The Gazette.

• Québec quitte ou double, 1970^[7]
• Oui à l'indépendance du Québec, 1977^[8]
• Le plaisir de la liberté, 1983^[9]
• Écrits polémiques 1960-1981, 1989
• Moi, je m'en souviens, 1989^[10]
• Maintenant ou jamais, entretiens, 1990^[11]
• Écrits polémiques 1. La Politique, Montréal, VLB éditeur, 1982^[12]
• Écrits polémiques 2. La Culture, Montréal, VLB éditeur, 1983^[13]
• Écrits polémiques, Montréal, Boréale compact, 1988^[14]
• Écrits polémiques 3. La Colère, Montréal, Lanctôt éditeur, 1996^[15]
• Écrits polémiques 4. La Résistance, Montréal, VLB éditeur, 1999^[16]

• Andrée LeBel,Pierre Bourgault, le plaisir de la liberté (entretiens), Nouvelle optique, 1983.^[17]
• Jean-François Nadeau,Bourgault, Lux éditeur, 2013.^[18]

• Jean-Claude Labrecque,Le RIN, Production Virage/Télé-Québec, 2002.^[19]
• Manuel Foglia,Paroles et liberté, Productions J, 2007.^[20]
• C’était Bourgault, with Marie-Claude Beaucage and Franco Nuovo, Société Radio-Canada, 2013^[21]

Pierre Bourgault: Podcast, BaladoQuébec, 2018.^[22]

• 1983 -Prix Air Canada
• 1997 -Prix Georges-Émile-Lapalme
• 2000 -Prix Jules-Fournier
• 2001 -Prix Condorcet

Some items from the sections, Works, Biographies, Filmography and Podcast were copied and adapted from the French Wikipedia page ofPierre Bourgault. See that page's history for attribution.

Wikiquote has quotations related toPierre Bourgault.

• Obituary (fromLe Devoir, in French)

• Canadian people of Breton descent
• 1934 births
• 2003 deaths
• Canadian columnists
• Canadian radio personalities
• Canadian gay writers
• Journalists from Quebec
• Canadian gay politicians
• Quebec political party leaders
• French-language Canadian non-fiction writers
• Quebec sovereigntists
• Academic staff of the Université du Québec à Montréal
• 20th-century Canadian non-fiction writers
• 20th-century Canadian male writers
• Canadian male non-fiction writers
• Burials at Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery
• 20th-century Canadian LGBTQ people

• CS1 French-language sources (fr)
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata