On December 6, 1989, the attack on the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal marked a mass feminicide, which took more than 30 years to be recognized as such.
Online, many Internet users idolize and praise his anti-feminist killer, Marc Lépine.
In the “Faire Face” podcast, Jean-Marc Dalphond and Marie-Joanne Boucher interview those who celebrate the killer, online and offline.
December 6, 1989: Marc Lépine, 25, enters the Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, gun in hand.
In a classroom, he asks the men out, and shoots the women present.
“You are all feminists and I hate feminists,” he will say.
Fourteen women will be killed, before the killer commits suicide.
In a letter, he says: “Please note that if I commit suicide today it is for political reasons.
Because I decided to send
ad patres
the feminists who have always ruined my life.
Although the epithet “mad shooter” will be attributed to me in the media, I consider myself a rational scholar.
Feminists always have the gift of making me angry.
In addition to this letter, he leaves behind a list of names of 19 women he allegedly intends to kill.
The Polytechnique attack will have taken 30 years to be recognized as an anti-feminist attack and as a mass feminicide.
For Quebec, each December 6 marks the reopening of a living wound.
Especially since the killing continues to haunt society as a whole: online, many men identify with Marc Lépine, idolize him, consider him a hero who deserves his own commemorative day.
It is in this context that the podcast "Projet Polytechnique - Faire Face" was born, carried by Jean-Marc Dalphond and Marie-Joanne Boucher, and produced by Myriam Berthelet.
“One day you will pay for all the harm you do to men”
Jean-Marc Dalphond is an actor, director and author.
On December 6, 2018, he posted on social networks the names of the fourteen victims of Polytechnique, including that of his cousin, Anne-Marie Edward.
Following this post, he will receive many hateful messages, believing that the girls of Polytechnique "had been looking for him".
Marie-Joanne Boucher, actress and author, contacts him, and they start working on an idea for a documentary theater play, which will be performed at the end of 2023 in Quebec.
As part of this project, they decide to meet those whose thinking is diametrically opposed to theirs: pro-firearms activists, anti-feminists, worshipers of Marc Lépine.
“With all due respect to the victims and their families, we were not in a process of commemoration.
We wanted to go somewhere else
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“One day, you will pay for all the harm you cause men to suffer”: on incel forums or at the bend of a Facebook post, misogynistic and violent remarks are multiplying.
Throughout the seven episodes, which span two and a half years of research and interviews, the two actors meet some of these admirers of Marc Lépine.
“We tried to show people who are close to us: these are people who live in our street, who look like everyone else.
We realized that they were human beings doing monstrous things.
It would have been easier to meet a monster to put it at a distance,” explains Marie-Joanne Boucher.
While Quebec society is considered much more pacifist and much less sexist than in other countries,
"Poly's Mourners"
Online, some even speak of “Saint Marc Lépine” to talk about December 6, and have made a hero of the masculinist terrorist.
Others speak of "mourners of Poly", in particular to address the survivors and the families of victims militant for the control of firearms in Quebec.
For Jean-Marc and Marie-Joanne, the issues of firearms or mental health monopolized public debate after the killings, which ignored other topics, such as misogyny and anti-feminism.
“The wounds are still raw because these are discussions that we did not want to have” evokes Myriam Berthelet.
The seven episodes of the "Faire Face" podcast precisely call for dealing with all these aspects, without forgetting to address the rise in power of masculinist discourse online, which is recomposing and evolving.
"I hate feminists" is heard singing in one of the episodes, against a background of piano.
This “song” comes from Pierre, a notorious anti-feminist, on trial for having written numerous violent texts on a blog read by more than 60,000 people: Marc Lépine had “restored dignity to men” according to him.
An episode that freezes the blood, as the masculinist arguments are unfolded against the two actors, and which makes it possible to measure the (too) current character of this type of remark.
Because online or in “real life”, anti-feminism is galloping.
If the podcast was released on December 6, 2022, its adaptation on the boards will take a few more months: several hours of “marathon” show with the company Porte Parole, to transcribe these years of research and meetings.
“We want there to be a communion aspect, that we all live a strong moment together.
You can look at your seat neighbor and feel the same emotion without knowing each other,” adds Jean-Marc Dalphond.
In the meantime, Quebec offers us to face its monsters, which also hide in each of us.
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Canada
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Violence against women
