École Polytechnique massacre

The Event The murders of fourteen women by a misogynistic twenty-five-year-old man

Date December 6, 1989

Place École Polytechnique, University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec

Marc Lépine engaged in a premeditated massacre of women college students because he believed them to be feminists. This gender-related attack profoundly influenced university students, especially women, as well as feminists of all ages across Canada. They demanded that measures be taken to improve the safety of Canadian women, including strengthening gun-control laws; some also spoke out against what they saw as the misogynistic culture that had produced Lépine.

The shooting spree at École Polytechnique, also called the Montreal Massacre, occurred at the end of the autumn semester, 1989, when Marc Lépine entered the school and began shooting female students and staff. Late in the afternoon of December 6, Lépine moved rapidly through the engineering building, finding young women and shooting them with a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle, or stabbing them with a hunting knife. In a grim parallel to gender-related killings in other parts of the world, Lépine targeted a fourth-year engineering class, forcing the men to leave the room, lining the women up against a wall, and executing them. As he killed these six female students, he ranted against “feminists,” demonstrating his extreme hatred and resentment of women.

Lépine eventually killed fourteen women: Geneviève Bergeron (aged twenty-one), Hélène Colgan (aged twenty-three), Nathalie Croteau (aged twenty-three), Barbara Daigneault (aged twenty-two), Anne-Marie Edward (aged twenty-one), Maud Haviernick (aged twenty-nine), Maryse Laganière (aged twenty-five), Maryse Leclair (aged twenty-three), Anne-Marie Lemay (aged twenty-seven), Sonia Pelletier (aged twenty-eight), Michèle Richard (aged twenty-one), Annie St-Arneault (aged twenty-three), Annie Turcotte (aged twenty-one), and Barbara Klucznik Widajewicz (aged thirty-one). With the exception of Laganière, who was a member of the university’s staff, all these young women were students, most of them in the engineering department. In addition to murdering these students, Lépine injured approximately a dozen other individuals, including a few men, before finally turning his rifle on himself and committing suicide. The police arrived on the scene after Lépine was dead, prompting a reevaluation of police response protocols.

Post-Massacre Events

The high death toll of the massacre and the youth of Lépine’s victims shocked the Montreal community and all Canadians. It was the worst single-day massacre in Canadian history, a statistic that was soon noted by the national media. An additional issues of concern was the fact that the gunman had used a high-powered semiautomatic weapon that he had obtained legally after paying a paltry licensing fee. Women across the nation drew attention to Lépine’s hatred for women, especially feminists, as well as the ease with which he had carried out his attack given the delayed police response. All of these issues had significant implications for women’s safety in public settings.

Media accounts of the massacre interpreted the event through two divergent lenses. Some reporters discussed it as a symptom of a larger social problem: They asserted that the cause of the massacre could be directly attributed to the fact that violence against women was still relatively socially acceptable in Canada, and they saw the crime as arising from systematic sexual inequities in Canadian society. Other writers for the Canadian mainstream media eschewed this approach: They focused instead on the mental health and psychology of the killer, suggesting that one pathological individual was solely responsible for the massacre. In this vein, many reporters wrote about Lépine’s unhappy childhood and the physical abuse he suffered during his first seven years of life at the hands of his Muslim Algerian father. Few journalists ventured beyond these two broad explanations or considered the connections between society and the individual.

Despite these attempts at explanation, many members of the Canadian media and the general public had great difficulty understanding such a brutal crime. They could not satisfactorily explain Lépine’s motivation, nor could they comprehend how he had been able to spend twenty minutes hunting down students without any challenge from the police. Some media accounts blamed the school’s male students and suggested that they should have done something to protect their female classmates. These reports were extremely detrimental to the survivors, and after the massacre, several students committed suicide.

Many Canadian students and others strove to create something positive after the event. A number of memorials were established, and groups were founded to work for increased gun safety in Canada, resulting in social changes in the 1990’s and later.

Impact

The Montreal Massacre was a bloody reminder to Canadians of women’s vulnerability to violence and of the ready availability of powerful weapons. It generated a national discussion about misogyny, safety, and gun control whose effects are still ongoing.

Bibliography

Adamson, Nancy, Linda Briskin, and Margaret McPhail. Feminist Organizing for Change: The Contemporary Women’s Movement in Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988. A history of Canadian feminism that does an excellent job of summarizing the state of the movement at the time of the murders.

Eglin, Peter, and Stephen Hester. The Montreal Massacre: A Story of Membership Categorization Analysis. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003. An ethnomethodological analysis of media accounts of the massacre, focusing on the categories employed in those accounts, such as “feminism” and “women.”

Malette, Louise, and Marie Chalouh, eds. The Montreal Massacre. Translated by Marlene Wildeman. Charlottetown, P.E.I.: Gynergy Books, 1991. Documentation of French Canadian reactions to the murders, including newspaper articles and letters to the editor; includes brief biographical information on the fourteen murdered women.

Nelson, Adie, and Barrie W. Robinson, eds. Gender in Canada. 2d ed. Toronto: Prentice Hall, 2002. Presentation of a gendered understanding of Canada.

O’Donovan, Theresa. Rage and Resistance: A Theological Reflection on the Montreal Massacre. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. An account, based in feminist theology, of one woman’s attempt to understand the murders of the Montreal women.

Rathjen, Heidi, and Charles Montpetit. December 6: From the Montreal Massacre to Gun Control, the Inside Story. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999. An account of the massacre and its aftermath and consequences from the perspective of surviving students at the University of Montreal.

Rosenberg, Sharon, and Roger I. Simon. “Beyond the Logic of Emblemization: Remembering and Learning from the Montreal Massacre.” Educational Theory 50, no. 2 (Spring, 2000): 133-156. Study of individual recollections and understanding of the massacre several years after the event.

Wilson, I. P. (Trish). “Reading the ’Montreal Massacre’: Idiosyncratic Insanity or the Misreading of Cultural Cues?” In Ethnographic Feminism: Essays in Anthropology , edited by Sally Cole and Lynne Phillips. Ottawa, Ont.: Carleton University Press, 1996. Feminist analysis of the the Canadian media’s representation of the event and its after-effects.