About two dozen people met on Sept. 10, 1960, to found the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale, the organization that carried Quebec independence from the political margins onto the ballot and then, eight years later, voted itself out of existence to clear the way for the Parti Québécois.
The Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée nationale du Québec dates the founding to that day and credits it to André d’Allemagne and Marcel Chaput, citing Bilan du siècle, the historical database maintained by the Université de Sherbrooke. Sources disagree on the setting. The Assembly library’s entry places the founding in Montreal, while Radio-Canada’s archival account describes roughly 20 people gathering at the Auberge Le Châtelet in Morin Heights, in the Laurentians. The head count is also unsettled, with the English-language Wikipedia entry putting it at about 30. Jacques Bellemare is named alongside d’Allemagne and Chaput among the founding members.
The timing is not in dispute, and it matters. Jean Lesage’s Liberals had taken office in Quebec that June, and the period of rapid social and institutional change now known as the Quiet Revolution was only months old. Maurice Duplessis, whose Union Nationale had governed the province for most of two decades, had died the previous September.
D’Allemagne was elected president and Chaput vice-president. Many of the founders came out of the Alliance laurentienne, a nationalist group that dissolved after the RIN was created. D’Allemagne later wrote that he had found the Alliance’s right-wing tendencies unpleasant, which was among the reasons for building an organization that was officially neutral on the left-right question. That neutrality did not hold. As younger members joined, the RIN came to be identified with the left wing of the independence movement.
It did not begin as a party. Its first general assembly published a manifesto calling for the independence of Quebec in October 1960. The following year Chaput published “Pourquoi je suis séparatiste,” or Why I Am a Separatist, an essay the Canadian Museum of History credits with giving the movement its voice. The Gazette officielle du Québec recorded the RIN’s incorporation on Oct. 19, 1961. It formally became a provincial political party at a Montreal congress on March 3, 1963, according to d’Allemagne’s own 1974 study of the group’s early years, “Le R.I.N. de 1960 à 1963.”
Pierre Bourgault, who joined shortly after the founding and took the presidency in 1964, gave the RIN its public profile through a run of combative speeches, and is still sometimes mistaken for its founder.
The party contested one general election, on June 5, 1966. Compiled returns from Pierre Drouilly’s Atlas des élections au Québec, published on the Données Québec open data portal, show the RIN ran 73 candidates, drew 129,045 votes, or 5.55 per cent, and elected nobody. The Ralliement national, a second independence party, took a further 3.21 per cent. Bourgault himself finished second in the northern riding of Duplessis, with 4,392 votes against the Liberal winner’s 6,673.
The arithmetic of that night is a large part of why the RIN is still argued about. Daniel Johnson Sr.’s Union Nationale formed a government with 56 of 108 seats on 40.82 per cent of the vote, while Lesage’s Liberals took 50 seats on 47.29 per cent. The party with the most votes lost. The standard account of that election attributes the result primarily to rural over-representation in the legislature rather than to vote splitting, and none of the sources consulted for this article settles how much the two independence parties cost the Liberals.
In October 1967, René Lévesque left the Quebec Liberal Party after its members voted against debating his proposal for two independent but associated states, and founded the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association. Merger talks with the RIN followed and went badly. The MSA reached an agreement with the Ralliement national to create the Parti Québécois and deliberately excluded the RIN as an organization. On Oct. 26, 1968, on Bourgault’s own motion, an RIN congress voted to dissolve the party and called on its members to join the Parti Québécois individually.
The Canadian Museum of History puts the outcome plainly: the RIN disbanded in 1968, and the Parti Québécois became the political voice for independence. The organization founded in a single room by two dozen people had lasted eight years, never elected a member, and handed its cause to the party that would govern Quebec.
