This book is a good read about an interesting era in Quebec, one most commonly referred to as the Quiet Revolution, during which the Liberal government, which replaced Duplessis's conservative Union Nationale in 1960, modernized Quebec's institutions. In The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, historian Sean Mills takes issue with this characterization, arguing that students of this era have not given enough attention to the radical anticolonial movements that emerged at the same time, especially in Montreal.

His description seeks to incorporate into the standard analyses that focus on language and the consolidation of Quebec less mainsteam state developments, in particular in black politics and the women's liberation movement, to show that the stories overlap and to set the history of political activism in the 1960s in Montreal in the context of global intellectual currents of that time built around anticolonial thought. For his book launch, Mills organized a walking tour of the city's sites where influential countercultural writers lived and protests took place.

Among the events vividly brought back to life in this well-written and well-researched book is the famous Opération McGill Français in March 1969 when over ten thousand marchers protested that “symbol of imperial domination” McGill University. The first important action described is the Sir George Williams (now Concordia) events early in 1969, when mainly black students occupied and damaged the university's computer centre. It closes with a useful retelling of the events surrounding the public-sector common-front strike of 1972, when the Quebec labour movement reached its pinnacle of radical solidarity.

There is no action of comparable scope in the first part of the book, which covers the years through 1968. The early chapters concentrate on ideas, with substantial analyses of the works of Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Vallières and a number of influential articles in the journals Parti pris and Révolution Québécoise. Mills does a good job of setting out the views expressed by these authors in clear and concise prose. Clearly this is a book to be read by anyone interested in the events and texts in question.

I do, however, have a few problems with the author's approach. The main problem is the connection between the parts and the whole, the fit between the ideas treated at length in the early chapters, and the events described in the later chapters. Mills is too good a historian to exaggerate, in the latter part, the influence of the ideas of Fanon and the anticolonialist literature more generally on the actions described – which raises the question whether the texts merit all the attention given to them. It is true that a group of Quebec intellectuals were caught up with these ideas in the former period, but I am not persuaded that is sufficient justification. To put the question otherwise: would Quebec be much different today if the generation that emerged in the 1960s had not had the literature of decolonization into which to frame their desires for change? Personally, I would need to be convinced of this.

My second problem is more a matter of judgment. Mills bends over backwards to give the texts credibility, from the work of Memmi and Fanon, right up to the famous declarations of the three unions, and especially the CSN's “Ne comptons que sur nos propres moyens.” Yet, as he admits, Vallières in later life rejects key assumptions in Nègres blancs (1994), and it is well known that no one in Quebec today looking for inspiration for political strategy and action reads them. Can a scholarly book published in 2010 justify taking the same acritical stance to these ideas that a book written in the early 1970s could? In my view, the analysis would have been well served by a little more critical distance from the texts. It would be strengthened by placing them in the context of what we know today, and not only in relation to the developing ideas of the mainly youthful radical intellectuals of the early and mid-1960s. For one thing, this would help us undertsand their lack of contemporary relevance – indeed relevance since the mid-1970s.

Such an approach, it is true, would take away from the intensity of the narrative; but while that intensity makes for good reading, it also makes for a skewed perspective. An anglophone reaching maturity in Montreal in the early 1960s, I was part of but also somewhat outside the movement described. Similarly, as a white undraftable Canadian in 1968–69 in Washington, DC, I was part of but also outside the anti-Vietnam, antiracism movement in the United States. Nothing in my years in Montreal compared to the real intensity we young radicals experienced from being, as we put it, “in the belly of the monster.”

It may be that Mills is projecting onto an earlier generation in Montreal something he feels to be missing from his own generation, a sense of having a rendezvous with destiny. The sentence below, which comes near the end of the introductory chapter, illustrates the problem that results, when subjective truth crosses the line – in this case with one word – into wish-fulfillment.

Countless?