Drapeau, Jean

Jean Drapeau was Mayor of Montreal from 1954 to 1957 and 1960 to 1986. The son of Joseph-Napoléon Drapeau and Alberta Berthe Martineau, Jean Drapeau was born in Montreal on February 18, 1916. His father, an insurance broker, city councilor, and election worker for the Union nationale, introduced him to politics. Jean Drapeau studied social science, economics and political science (graduating in 1937), and then law (graduating in 1941 and completing the bar in 1943) at the Université de Montréal. He became a protégé of nationalist priest Lionel Groulx in the 1930s and 1940s, and was a member of André Laurendeau's anti-conscription Ligue pour la défense du Canada. In 1942, he ran as a candidate of the nationalist Bloc Populaire, which opposed Canadian conscription during World War II, in a federal by-election, but lost the election. He was also a Bloc Populaire candidate in the 1944 provincial election but was defeated there also. He began his practice as a criminal lawyer in Montreal in 1944. During the Asbestos Strike of 1949, he took on the legal defence of some of the strikers. In 1945, he married Marie-Claire Boucher, and the couple went on to have three sons. From 1950 to 1953, he was prosecutor on the public inquiry into police corruption. Drapeau was elected mayor of Montreal in 1954 as the candidate of the Civic Action League, uniting both French- and English-speaking Montrealers to do so. In 1957, he lost to Sarto Fournier, who was backed by the powerful Premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, but Drapeau was elected again in the election of 1960 at the helm of his newly formed Civic Party (Parti Civique). He was re-elected without interruption until he retired from political life in 1986. During Jean Drapeau's tenure as mayor, he initiated the construction of the Montreal Metro, Place des Arts, Expo '67, the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics, and also created the first public Lottery in Quebec in 1968, to support public expenditures. Despite the nationalism of his youth, Drapeau remained neutral during the 1980 Quebec referendum. In 1967, Drapeau was made a Companion of the Order of Canada and received the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's gold medal.[3] He was named a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec in 1987. After his death on August 12, 1999 (at age 83), Drapeau was interred in the Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges in Montreal. One of the biggest parks in Montreal, Parc Jean-Drapeau, composed of Île Notre-Dame and Ile Sainte-Hélène in the middle of the Saint Lawrence river, site of the universal exposition of 1967, was renamed in his honour, as was the Metro station serving the park. Throughout his long political career, Jean Drapeau received honorary doctorates from a number of institutions: Université de Moncton, Université de Montréal, McGill University, Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University), Université Laval and the Institut Goswell. The Government of France awarded Drapeau its Légion d’honneur with the rank of Commandeur in 1984, and Québec named him a Grand Officer of the National Order of Québec in 1987. Shortly before his death, a statue was unveiled in his honour in La Dauversière Park, near Montréal’s City Hall.

Montreal, QC

Mayor of Montreal
Politician
Criminal Lawyer

RAD, July 2008 version. Canadian Council of Archives.

Catalogued February 2022.

1) Archival material
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Drapeau
3) https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/jean-drapeau