Montreal And The Red Death

00:02 - The pandemic is raging through the town, one that would take more than 5,000 lives.

00:07 - Crowds take to the streets in protest of the heavy-handed government regulations.

00:10 - Statues are torn down, windows are broken, the whole city is taken by surprise.

00:15 - Rioters are suspicious of the international powers that be.

00:18 - It’s both anti-scientific and anti-vaccination, strong nationalistic feelings permiate throught them.

00:26 - But it’s not covid, it’s 1885, this was the Red Death.

00:30 - In another episode of “Montreal, rowdiest city on the continent?” I was walking down Saint Catherine the other day on my way to film a bunch of bike lanes that I have heard are sexist.

00:40 - Not going to try to explain that now. But coming down the road you could see a bunch of flags.

00:46 - Quebec Flags, American flags, it was pretty obvious from a distance that we had a bunch of yahoos situation. [1][2] And yeah this protest was crazy, but Montreal, we have been here before.

00:57 - The Backstory In March 1885 a patient called George Longley[3], a railway conductor, presented himself at Hotel-Dieu.

01:05 - At the time the nuns asked “Oh, WHY here?” “Why did you not go to Montreal General given that you’re an Anglophone Protestant” but Montreal general had rejected him. [4] So why would the nuns be praying especially hard that night? Well with disease outbreaks at that time you have kind of tiers.

01:24 - Polio? Comes during the summer, it’s dangerous for kids.

01:29 - We would keep them isolated. Cholera? Well, Montreal has had that a few times, caused by poor sanitation.

01:35 - We fixed the sewer system. But the Red Death was caused by the human killer.

01:39 - The apex microbial predator for our species: Smallpox.

01:43 - Smallpox just killed and killed and killed.

01:46 - Every year, hundreds of thousands of people.

01:48 - Covid, has a fatality rate of you know, a few percent and mostly affects the elderly.

01:54 - Smallpox has a fatality rate of around 30% and mostly kills children[5] Then if you lived, lucky you, there’s a third of a chance you’re blind.

02:03 - The once in a century event, the Spanish Flu which is often considered the worst-case scenario for influenza killed maybe 50 million people[6].

02:11 - In one century smallpox killed 500 million.

02:15 - By the end of April it was tearing through the hospital wards, but it had been held in check so far.

02:21 - Prior to June 1st a single case existed outside of the hospital.

02:24 - But large processions came together for the funeral of Bishop Bourget and the annual procession de la Fete Dieu.

02:30 - Catholics gonna cathloic. Especially back in the day when Jesus existed! Luckily a vaccine also existed.

02:37 - Unluckily though the vaccine and the research around inoculation was an English innovation.

02:43 - The smallpox vaccine story is easily the most famous one in history, and it was very early.

02:49 - It even predated one of the greatest French scientists, Louis Pasteur, who created germ theory.

02:55 - So it was kind of crazy, scientists didn’t know HOW vaccines worked, but they did know they worked.

03:00 - The vaccine for smallpox arrived in Newfoundland waaaay back in 1798[7][8][9] This technique had not only proven itself a game changer, thanks to the work of Louis Pasteur, the mysterious mechanism behind it was starting to be understood.

03:11 - You know those oddly satisfying videos where everything just like fits together perfectly? Well that’s how good science works too.

03:18 - You have two scientists, in different countries, different times, and… everything kind of builds towards the same conclusion and just fits perfectly.

03:27 - In this case it’s a conclusion that we all just take for granted today, you know, how the immune system works.

03:31 - But public distrust back then was very high.

03:35 - Remember how the anglophone elites rejected the anglophone patient and made it someone else’s problem? Well that short of bullshit was happening every single day.

03:43 - The French were constantly irritated by the Anglophone elite and treated like second-class citizens.

03:49 - Meh, you clean it up. You deal with it.

03:51 - Taking the role of chloroquine during this pandemic, homeopaths did a better job at connecting with the french-speaking population than the English authorities of the time. [10] Vaccines, an English invention that will kill you! We have the real solution.

04:04 - Shazam, it’s called, bullshit. Actually, it’s not bullshit, it’s water! Among other things, vaccines in this era were said to be “Greece taken from the heel of horses”[11] The newspapers were happy to print whatever and there was constant recommending of herbal remedies[12] I mean checkout the ads beside the article on the pandemic.

04:24 - “Halls Vegetable Scicillian Hair Renewer” Bad hair? It’s a crime! “Lunnys Cod Liver Oil Creme” It’s like our cod liver oil technology has regressed.

04:34 - “Kidney Wort” “cleansing the blood” And, latching onto the whole controversy.

04:40 - Get Vaccinated and Use TOWNSHENDS pure bedding be secure from all contagious diseases[13] High thread count, Low probability of that impossible achievement! And, parallel bars, I need some of those.

04:53 - NEED! While the Francophone population was being misled by literal snake-oil salesmen in their newspapers the anglophones were getting a totally different experience. [14] They were taking health advice.

05:05 - It was as natural for an Irishmen to vaccinate his child, as to eat his dinner But the papers were rife with stories about irresponsible Canadiens avoiding vaccination and walking around contagious, clearly affected by smallpox. [15] Did they think? The poverty and a lack of education that cause this uninformed behavior could be fixed, fixed by someone.

05:25 - They would have to be powerful, in charge of decision making and educating.

05:32 - Fixing social ills. Responsible for the community.

05:36 - But personally, it just feels better to just call half the population stupid and call it a day.

05:40 - There’s another common theme that disruptive pandemics often have.

05:43 - Playing down the virus and playing up the risk of the vaccine.

05:47 - On a exagéré à plaisir les dangers et les accidents actuels pour aboutir à quoi! A grossir la peur bleue que fait toujours cette maladie aux populations anglo-saxones, et à montrer la lâcheté qu’elle leur inspire.

06:00 - So they were getting the “No big deal, it’s just a cold virus, this isn’t that bad.

06:05 - They want you to be scared because… insert political goal. ” treatment.

06:09 - They did this about smallpox. SMALLPOX.

06:13 - If you can play the no-big deal card about a vaccine preventable baby killer, we can reliably say that the contagious disease “no big deal” crowd will make an appearance at virtually any outbreak.

06:25 - And further down you kind of see that risk calculus problem.

06:29 - de ne pas faire vacciner ses enfants. “La vaccine n’est pas seulement une opération répugnante; c‘est aussi une pratique dangereuse qui a inoculé des maladies abominables à un grand nombre d’enfants de Montréal.

06:42 - Now vaccines have saved more lives than just about anything, and this experience is just a small slice of what life just used to be like for people when polio, measles, mumps would just blow through every single season.

06:54 - Parents would be like, oh, polio’s in the air, bring the kids inside.

06:57 - But the further back you go in time the less safeguards there were on medicine in general.

07:02 - You have mercury used for treatment, bloodletting, all sorts of crazy shit.

07:06 - I think it’s been about 70 years since the last bad vaccine in Canada, but in the early days the chances of that happening were way way higher of course.

07:14 - And one of those times that there was a bad vaccine was during this very outbreak.

07:19 - Which really sewed mistrust in the population[16][17][18] I mean even educated francophone doctors[19][20].

07:24 - And a bad batch of a vaccine turned this from a hard sell, communications wise, to a total disaster.

07:31 - Often with anti-vaccination people what is off is their risk calculus.

07:35 - There are always risks to almost any medical intervention, you know for example when you get an x-ray you’re exposed to a certain amount of radiation.

07:43 - Back in the early days vaccines were still totally worth it.

07:46 - But the risks were a lot higher. And this time, yet again, the anti-vaccination crowd showed up with terrible risk calculus.

07:55 - Between the poverty and the misinformation by the end of the pandemic 9 out of 10 victims were French speaking, most of them, were children[21].

08:04 - Yet on top of all this. There was yet another, highly relatable thing going on for those living through 2020.

08:11 - Leading up to the day of the riot and present in the reporting from the time is an immense amount of contempt for several institutions.

08:18 - The first was the police. There are constant reports of sanitation constables attacked by mobs of people, of people criticizing them as lazy, cruel and dangerous You have one story of a women whose husband had come down with smallpox and he had deliriously wandered outside of his house in the rain.

08:35 - She ran to the nearby police station and she pleaded with the officers “please help me get my husband back in the house, he’s fucking lost his mind” And they said, that’s not our job, that’s a medical thing.

08:45 - And she spent the night, crying over the dead body of her husband lying in the street and was found the next morning.

08:52 - Fucking appauling. James McShane was an Irish[22] councilor from the time and, quite a character.

08:58 - He said this just a couple of days before the riot The whole police system was rotten.

09:03 - The force were a pack of lazy vagabonds. Thirty or fourty could be seen almost at any time lounging around the Central Station, while their officers sat in their chairs doing nothing instead of helping the citizens who were bravely doing battle with the disease… He continued…

09:16 - four or five of the men when they got together were able to club some unfortunate wretch.

09:21 - They were also able to watch their chance to go into low shebeens and get drunk and then brag about arresting some unfortunate only a little less drunk than themselves.

09:28 - One of the saddest parts of nationalism is that it always emphasizes a few differences instead of the millions of commonalities that we have as people.

09:36 - The poor Irish neighbourhood and the poor French neighbourhoods, had a lot of common causes, but couldn’t seem to work together.

09:43 - So we have serious systematic problems with the police.

09:46 - But we also have systematic issues with the Health Committee.

09:50 - The Health Committee was also in the crosshairs, because they were the administrator of these vaccines.

09:55 - And they would publicly shame people with a placard on their door.

09:59 - These people suck! The government also distributed a CERB at the time, and it was a little bit different.

10:08 - That support? “Wines, spirits, sago, arrowroot, oysters and fruit” Family got smallpox? Husband dying in the street? He’s a grande bouteille d’alcool pour toi et ta famille.

10:22 - You see the gasoline? You see the match? The day before the riot Honore Beaugrand[23], of subway station fame, wrote a letter to the chief of police Monsieur Paradis which effectively was the 1900s version of “nut up, and shut up” The mayor had literally come across Health officials trying to remove three small pox cases from a house.

10:43 - A woman with an axe, at the head of the stairway, threatened… and a rough crowd was gathering The mayor was basically like, where the fuck are the cops? Axe lady… rough crowds…

10:54 - So Honore Beaugrand went with fellow councilor Raymond Prefontaine to the police station.

10:58 - It is really funny because the stories from this era sound like subway stations have rich social lives.

11:05 - Are you lonely way out the end there? Rumble rumble rumble Anyway, the “greenline crew” arrived at the police station to rustle up some cops to deal with “axe lady” and “rough crowd” and found no one in charge.

11:19 - I think he snapped. Had a “We’ve had enough of this bullshit” time.

11:23 - So he wrote a letter to Monsieur Paradis, the police chief and the city council.

11:26 - He had to write a letter to the council because he was sick with flu-like symptoms.

11:31 - Hmmm. Which does make me, kind of wonder.

11:36 - “Hi, Mr Mayor, we’re a rough crowd full of smallpox” So at the council meeting, hours before the riot.

11:42 - Acting (Anglophone) mayor Gray took over the mayor’s responsibilities of running the council meeting.

11:47 - The city clerk commenced the council by reading his letter to the council as the first order of affairs.

11:52 - It was resisted at first but eventually got read, a sign of problems to come in this incredibly disfunctional council meeting meeting.

12:01 - Here is part of the letter. You will suspend from their functions, the sergeant who was absent from duty at the time the sanitary officers visited the Central Station.

12:12 - An investigation will be held shortly, and Justice will be given to whom it is due[24] And further down The Mayor further requests a personal inspection of the police force to see that they are vaccinated and a refusal to re-vaccinate will be cause for dismissal.

12:33 - Someone give that man a subway station, no no, make it a terminus! Jacques Grenier then addressed council saying the force was as good and better than that of any city in the world, the men being brave and devoted McShane then basically said What the fuck are you talking about? Councilors had more letters than ever showing that the Chief and his organization failed to do their duty.

12:54 - It was not his place to scratch the backs of policemen.

12:58 - He went on. They had lots of detectives but what did they do? Arrest little boys and old woman The letter from Honore was written to say once and for all “Guys, in a pandemic, this is your job.

13:11 - Go get vaccinated, and get out there supporting our health care workers. ” Grienier then said that the reason McShane was so hard on the chief of police, Mr Paradis, was because he was a francophone.

13:23 - The chief did his duty, in fact, he was the best Chief Montreal had seen since she had been a city Montreal, is a lady, a lady with 300 years of identity politics issues it seem.

13:35 - Well McShane begged to disagree and responded that the police system was in fact, A disgrace It’s fucking embarrising This caused a substantial squabble between McShane and Grenier.

13:46 - So much so that the acting mayor ruled the whole question out of order.

13:51 - So instead of the City Council endorsing a rational message to the police to take on a task during a pandemic, to lead by example and be vaccinated, to admit that that police force were doing a shitty job, the entire issue was basically rejected.

14:05 - The acting mayor thought the issue was put to rest.

14:08 - But simply put the match closer to the gasoline.

14:11 - Later in the meeting a letter was read about a member of the health board resigning which triggered, i guess, the “Alex Jones” of this city council meeting to pipe up.

14:19 - Alderman. Rainville appeared to think this a good opportunity to get in a word on the smallpox question.

14:24 - He stated that Another proof of the bad odor in which vaccination was held was the riot that morning on St.

14:31 - Catherine street East. All doctors admitted that vaccination was hurtful.

14:36 - Cries of “No! No!” “Oh!” This caused a massive debate to break out about mandatory vaccination The public were under a false impression as regarded compulsory vaccination.

14:46 - What was proposed was isolation as far as possible.

14:49 - Children were not to taken from their mother by force, neither was it the intention to force re-vaccination Councilor Stevenson who had watching all of this going on for 3 hours at this point said that he had seen city councilors in the past “criticise the press, but the inaction of the Council that afternoon justified anything the press might say or had said when one saw a list of 238 deaths within a period of seven days. ” Adjusting for population, that would be like 4,000 deaths in a week for Montreal today.

15:18 - The Council should at once have extended a helping hand to those poor dying creatures, yet it had wasted from 3 to 6:15 o’clock and nothing had been gained but obstruction.

15:27 - This is the toxic and unproductive political backdrop to the events of that evening.

15:32 - From the Daily Witness: The trouble in the afternoon was caused by an attempt to affix a placard to the house of a resident of Visitation street who had the disease in his family These placards declared the residence infected and often triggered mandatory disinfection and sometimes vaccination.

15:48 - His wife tore the placard which a sanitary officer was preparing to put up, and the row followed Luckily reinforcements did show up.

15:55 - The best police chief In charge of the BEST POLICE FORCE IN THE WORLD Watch out crowd, here comes Mr Paradis.

16:02 - Mr. Paradis, also visited the scene and counselled quietness on the part of the populace.

16:07 - Or not. The police and Chief were then.

16:10 - Taunted and howled at and threatened by the loiterers who stood about, and who seemed to hold the police force in as much terror as children do lamp posts The mob swelled to thousands of people Sounds like this crowd was hitting the old, liquid CERB.

16:25 - It then started moving, first towards the health office.

16:28 - The hoots and yells were redoubled, and then the first stone went through the windows of the Health Office.

16:33 - In an instant the windows were smashed to pieces, and doors were broken open.

16:37 - The ring ­ leaders rushed in and smashed chairs and everything that could be smashed.

16:41 - They left nothing but the bare walls. Then the establishment took a hit The crowd then turned further on, and reached the residence of Dr Laberge, the Health Officer, whose course has been so firm during the whole small-pox trouble.

16:54 - They threatened to break down the building and smashed a window So the health establishment took a beating, but so did someone else The cry was, ‘to the City Hall. ’ The crowd passed down Saint Denis Street and when Alderman Greniers house was reached they stopped and discharged a volley of stones, breaking windows and threatening to wreck the place.

17:13 - Old Councilor police defender. Also the the Herald and Morning Star, the “Fake news” of the time seemed[25] at least the fake news according to the crowd, the were stoned so the police headed there to defend them.

17:26 - But most of the crowd headed towards city hall The crowd thinned rapidly as it reached Notre Dame street, and at that time seemed to be composed, for the most part, of boys between the age of twelve and eighteen years.

17:38 - The youthful Antifa of the time, I guess. On arriving at city hall the rioters exchanged fire with revolvers out the windows.

17:45 - I’m picturing the bureaucrat whose like “I was told government jobs were” Both the mayor[26] and the deputy mayor headed to the scene.

17:52 - Apparently the mayor had been having a hot bath to deal with his sweats or whatever.

17:57 - The deputy mayor Gray telephoned his home and ordered his daughter to take the loaded revolver and empty it into the mob if they should assail his house Definitely one of those moments where you realize this was a different time.

18:08 - It was the differentest of times, it was the stupidest ideas of times.

18:11 - 6 bullets in the crowd later, that ladya going to be dead.

18:15 - The whole evening was ended when the military were called in to help: The best police force in the world[27].

18:22 - The day after the riot on the smoldering streets there were many stories in the newspaper about the shenanigans of the previous night.

18:28 - A large crowd of French-Canadians of both sexes were viewing the damaged Health Department on St. Catherine street East this morning and the expression generally was that it was a brave deed.

18:38 - One excited young man, evidently not long out of a bed of small pox, yelled, “Hurrah for the French Canadians Montreal is no longer for the English nor Irish. ” A buzz of approval went around and the young man disappeared in an adjacent saloon to drink to his own sentiment My man.

18:53 - Continuing the slice-of-life sentiment on encountering a gossipy milkman.

18:57 - As a reporter was walking up Panet Street and when near Mignonne, he heard a MILKMAN giving several of his customers a dissertation on the evils of vaccination.

19:05 - He said “It has killed several old men that I know, and is especially dangerous for women and children.

19:10 - Quebon? QAnon. Woah If you’re not already kind of blown away by the similarities with the complaints about police and crazy pseudoscience? How about adding a little bit of fake news? Stories appeared around the world detailing the events of the riot.

19:28 - The article which made me aware of this event actually came from New Zealand and states The residence of Dr, bloody, Laparte was set on fire and Men in the crowd mounted the pedestal of Queen Victoria, and demanded to know who should rule the town, eliciting “The French” as an answer I recon.

19:51 - So, well, that stuff? Pretty sure it was exaggeration and fake news.

19:58 - Both these things do remain permanently in the coverage from New Zealand’s newspaper archive.

20:03 - And those stories from the witness about the milkman and the drunk kid? Someone was “Heard to say”? I mean, come on.

20:11 - The news of the time was rife with this stuff and it was like 3rd hand accounts of god knows what.

20:16 - People profiting off us being angry at each other has been a long standing thing.

20:22 - As a local paper put it Exaggeration is to be deplored at a time like the present; yet under pressure of the nocturnal excitement “both morning papers have yielded to it in detailing last night’s riot.

20:34 - One described the Herald Office as “ wrecked,” and Dr Laportes house as set on fire.

20:39 - Neither report is true… . Very likely New York, Chicago, Boston and other cities will be told to-day that Montreal is in a state of siege from small-pox rioters as well as from disease.

20:49 - Such journalism is as bad as rioting and far worse in the mischief it does. “ Conclusion It’s crazy reading through these stories.

20:55 - You have nationalism. You have out-of-touch elites.

20:59 - You have policing being questioned for their effectiveness and maybe even their own crimes.

21:05 - You have the conspiracy theorists. You have the fake news.

21:10 - News that wants us all to be angry and profits off us hating each other and dividing us.

21:15 - But I think it’s actually why Montreal is my favorite city.

21:18 - It has it all. Of course we get one of the largest environmental protests in history, and then one year later, a huge anti-establishment covid protest.

21:29 - If you find humanity interesting, I don’t think there’s a better vantage point than this.

21:34 - The term Identity politics was coined in 1977[28] but we’ve been on the front lines of it in this city for hundreds of years.

21:42 - And, get used to it, it’s never going to be easy to be Montreal.

21:46 - We just have so much more work to do to get along than other places.

21:50 - I’ve been reading the Montreal building code recently and came across a section on fortifications[29] But it’s not the fortifications you would think.

21:59 - You know, this is the regulatory burden of bikers that bomb, sepratist and the mafia.

22:05 - Yet still, people flock here from around the world, like this asshole, even though for most people Toronto would be so much “easier”.

22:13 - It’s easy to be cynical about all of this, see people as predictable.

22:17 - And in aggregate, we are. You have inputs like.

22:22 - Social inequality, linguistic challenges, failures in leadership.

22:27 - Everything is going along, you know, not super smoothly, but it works.

22:31 - Then you throw a global pandemic into the cogs and maybe some social upheaval in our largest economic partner, and those same inputs will pretty reliably and obediently make the same outputs.

22:43 - But I can tell from the story of Montreal this time, there is something different about this pandemic.

22:48 - We’re actually doing better. Although it often doesn’t seem like it.

22:52 - Do you see people shooting revolvers into crowds of protesters? That would be fucking stupid right? Well in the past people thought that was a great idea.

23:01 - Do we give booze and oysters to people with the virus? No! Oysters are far too expensive.

23:07 - How many politicians have you seen attacked by widows with axes? The proportion of the town back then who refused vaccines and thought it was a conspiracy was much, much higher than it is today.

23:18 - We have improved as a species, and it’s not surprising, people back then were just straight up far less educated.

23:24 - A lot of those people couldn’t even read. We see that same complaining about people “not taking masks seriously” but if it was killing ¹⁄₃ of the population, I think that even stupid people would be doing the calculus right this time.

23:38 - And despite the disappointment from our shit politicians.

23:41 - The scientific institutions that we’ve built over the last couple of centuries.

23:46 - Have. Been. Crushing it. Fastest vaccine development in history.

23:50 - Quick, rapidly adapting to information. Research coming in from all corners that rapidly answers questions that policymakers and politicians didn’t even know they needed.

24:01 - Information that people in 1885 could only dream of.

24:04 - And that what the most encouraging thing for me.

24:07 - Because given that humanity is this predictable machine with predictable outcomes for predictable inputs.

24:14 - All we have to do is tweak the machine and these inputs to do better.

24:18 - And the people that study this machine and talk about the inputs and make suggests to the politicians are the exact same people who have proven themselves during this pandemic.

24:29 - Scientists and researchers. So from Montreal, a city that represents all that is human.

24:34 - The good and the bad. We’ve been here before, but worse and we’ll be here again, but better. .