On 8 October 1990 a ceremony of remembrance took place at the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui (Montreal) to commemorate the political crisis which, twenty years earlier, had shaken Quebec. The 1970 ‘October Crisis’ remains, to this day, a sensitive subject of Québécois history entirely oriented, as we know, towards the national question. The kidnapping, on 5 October 1970, of the English commercial attaché, James Richard Cross, by the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec), followed on 10 October, by the kidnapping of Pierre Laporte, the Quebec Minister for Labour and Immigration, marked the climax of a movement which had been trying, since 1963, to turn the ‘peaceful revolution’ into armed insurrection. On 17 October Laporte's body was found in the boot of a car, and the terrorists were arrested before the end of the year. In exchange for Cross's liberation some were allowed to go into exile to Cuba; the others were jailed, but all were freed in the early 1980s.