The Sounds and the Fury

Situated in a heritage theatre from 1913, the Montreal performance hall La Tulipe has been dogged by noise complaints since an investor bought an adjacent building in 2016 and converted it into residential units. In September 2024, Quebec’s Court of Appeal ruled that La Tulipe must not emit any noise audible to its neighbours. Under the continual threat of fines and a mounting pile of legal fees, the venue decided to cease activities “for the time being.” It’s now been shuttered for over a year.

The Diving Bell Social Club closed its doors in December 2023 after receiving noise complaints. The multidisciplinary entertainment space was located on Boulevard Saint-Laurent — where much of Montreal’s nightlife scene is concentrated — in a four-storey building. It was just above Champs Sports Bar, a dive beloved for catering to its largely queer clientele with parties and drag shows. Champs is still open, but this past winter, it had to put a pause on karaoke and dancing after a neighbouring landlord reported disturbances to the provincial body that regulates alcohol permits. At the same time, the police were repeatedly visiting another popular venue next door, Blue Dog. Opened in 2007, it shut down in July 2025, fearing the impact of a recently proposed (and fiercely contested) noise bylaw, which risked costing it $20,000.

At several points in Montreal After Dark: Nighttime Regulation and the Pursuit of a Global City, the historian Matthieu Caron likens the night to a battleground, where civic disputes have come to a head and revealed the defining fault lines of their eras. Deeply researched, his 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.” Caron doesn’t address the present clashes between residential property owners and the cultural ecosystem, but by examining which nocturnal activities have been deemed illegal, he traces a long history of attempts to control nightlife under the pretense of promoting social harmony. The battle has always been marked by ideological divides about what constitutes propriety and progress.

In the early twentieth century, Montreal was known as a wide-open town, a place where Dionysian leisure was undergirded by organized crime. Speakeasies, brothels, and gambling dens dotted the red-light district, and nightlife carried on well past the legal closing times. Caron explains that, aside from some attempts to quell the debauchery during the Second World War, this permissive state of affairs continued until there were crackdowns in the late ’40s, initiated by the appointment of Pacifique Plante as the head of the police department’s morality squad. Plante saw it as his duty to stamp out the “informal economy that comprised sex workers, cab drivers, gangsters, hospitality industry labourers, corrupt police and politicians, nightclub and cabaret artists, and, perhaps most importantly, residents and tourists.”

Caron depicts Plante as someone who, with “a love for luxurious goods like silk clothing and rare wines,” was propelled by his disdain for “low” culture. Between November 1949 and February 1950, wishing to drum up support for his views, Plante penned a series of articles in Le Devoir that disclosed how city officials had, for decades, been complicit in commercialized vice. The lawyer who was hired to defend the newspaper from potential defamation suits was none other than Jean Drapeau.

It’s surprising that Drapeau’s name doesn’t appear in this book’s subtitle, since his two mayoralties defined the period of technocratic modernization that Caron chronicles. He describes how Drapeau, while a practising criminal lawyer, would drive around in a black sedan, looking for signs of disorder. Members of the Public Morality Committee, a reformist group founded in 1950, did the same. With Plante and Drapeau leading the charge, the PMC successfully petitioned the Superior Court of Quebec to launch the years-long Caron Inquiry, which exposed rampant corruption among local law enforcement and civic leaders. A few weeks after the inquiry tabled its report in October 1954, Drapeau was elected mayor for the first time.

Spurred by his “obsessive edifice complex,” Drapeau started reshaping Montreal into his idea of a modern metropolis, which meant expanding the police budget, clearing ground for development projects, and constricting unregulated nightlife. Bars, restaurants, and cabarets had their permits revoked for remaining open after lawful hours or “tolerating immorality.” Jazz musicians lost the clubs in which they played until sunrise; performers saw their tips dwindle as an “anti-mingling” bylaw, intended to curb prostitution, prohibited employees from interacting with customers beyond standard transactions. Drawing on the work of the legal historian Constance Backhouse and the sociologist E. Nick Larsen, as well as experiences of the sex workers Rita Picard and Fernande St‑Martin-Poitras, Caron underscores the misogyny latent in these public safety efforts. Women — not their male clients — were charged for soliciting.

Caron makes it clear that Montreal’s distinctive edge is hard-won and that it has long been fought for after hours. He threads together some of the most seminal protests of the era. In November 1969, the feminist group Front commun des Québécoises marched in opposition to an anti-demonstration bylaw, and in October 1971, that same bylaw was invoked to send riot units to break up a rally in support of striking La Presse employees.

Drapeau’s violent cleanup campaigns were motivated by heteronormative ideas of socially acceptable behaviour, Caron argues. He details a series of police raids throughout the ’70s that targeted queer nightclubs, bars, and saunas. In October 1977, after 155 people were arrested during an ambush of the gay bar Truxx, the Association pour les droits des gai(e)s du Québec mobilized about 2,000 protesters in the downtown the following evening. This gathering sparked more activism in the streets, which ultimately led to Quebec’s decision, in December of that year, to “include sexual orientation as a prohibited ground for discrimination” in its Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

Then, as now, the residents of Montreal defended their civil liberties at night — a time when strictures can be loosened, contested, and, in many cases, transcended.