In Of Montreal, Robert Everett-Green writes weekly about the people, places and events that make Montreal a distinctive cultural capital.
He came to bury, not to praise. Marc-André Cyr had nothing good to say in his mock online obituary of Journal de Montréal writer Richard Martineau, and now the pit-bull columnist – who remains alive – has come for his revenge.
Earlier this week, Martineau launched a defamation suit for $350,000 against Cyr and the bilingual online journal Ricochet, which published his mocking postmortem in February. Cartoonist Alexandre Fatta was also named, for a cartoon that showed dogs lining up to pee on Martineau's grave.
The columnist's lawyer will try to convince the Quebec Superior Court that Ricochet and its contributors made a hateful attack on his client's "reputation, honour, dignity and integrity."
What really caught people's attention in francophone Montreal, however, was the claim that Ricochet had also exceeded the limits of free expression.
Social media lit up with reminders that this was the same Richard Martineau who, after terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo in 2015, issued a series of columns defending the French satirical magazine's right to say anything about anyone. As one wag put it, would Martineau now write a column to say, "I am no longer Charlie"?
Cyr's obituary was part polemic, part wishful thinking. Martineau, he wrote, had made his career writing columns based on prejudice and caricature, with little research or reflection. "He was involved in every reactionary squabble of his generation," Cyr wrote, citing Martineau's support for a policeman who killed an unarmed teen refugee in 2008; his comparison of student strikers in 2012 to psychopathic killer Luka Magnotta; and his appearance on TV in 2013 while wearing a burka.
The wishful thinking came in Cyr's prediction that in 2016, the public would lose interest in Martineau's verbal shenanigans, and that his life as a public figure would be over. The columnist's remains, Cyr wrote in his Homeric conclusion, would be left for dogs and birds, to transform "into a fitting tribute to the infinite depths of human stupidity."
Martineau enjoys a big career in Quebec as a provocateur. In addition to his high-profile berth at JM, he co-hosts the TV talk show Les Francs-Tireurs, for provincial broadcaster Télé-Québec.
The tools of his trade are often blunt. His columns this week included a piece in which he opined that if a secretary can't wear pyjamas to work, a Muslim woman shouldn't be allowed to wear a burka. Another piece pilloried "les lapins" – rabbits – who are coddled as children, grow up believing in unicorns, and roil their universities over imaginary issues such as mascot racism and rape culture. The king of the rabbits, Martineau wrote, is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
By that standard, Cyr is at least a prince among rabbits. He lectures in political science at l'Université du Québec à Montréal, takes a leftish approach to most topics, and recently wrote for Ricochet against rape culture.
Cyr may have failed in his prophecy that Martineau's career would implode by the end of 2016, but he was substantially right about how his target would react. Martineau, he wrote, has no problem demeaning those who disagree with him, but is sensitive to attacks on himself, and has complained in print about "the culture of insult."
This sounds very much like Donald Trump, another flamboyant opinionator who can throw a punch, but not take one. Trump spent his campaign calling opponents liars and crooks, but when his vice-president-elect heard a polite statement of protest in a theatre, Trump demanded an apology. Martineau skipped that step: According to Ricochet editor Gabrielle Brassard-Lecours, he never asked for an apology or retraction. His first move was to complain to the Quebec Press Council, which in June found "no apparent ethical fault" in Ricochet's treatment of him.
Ricochet, a not-for-profit journal that began in 2014, believes that Martineau's defamation suit is meant to drive it out of business. It has launched a $50,000 crowd-funding campaign to meet its legal costs, though pro-bono support should not be hard to find. Brassard-Lecours said that Martineau has no grounds to object to Cyr's satiric use of the obituary form, since he himself wrote a similar piece about JM before joining its staff.
One of Cyr's targets in his rape-culture column was another JM contributor, Lise Ravary. Her latest blog post for the paper called her colleague Martineau "exceptionally brave," for stating his mind and not caving to "the mantras of the official left." Many other Montreal media figures are not so bold, she said, and are hiding their private support for Martineau. The "many people are saying" formula of Trump, it seems, is easily translatable into French.
However his suit turns out, Martineau has done Ricochet an enormous favour by making such a fuss. The fate of an obscure online political journal is now headline material in Quebec. People who had never heard of it now know of its existence, and may even be tempted to subscribe. Martineau has also given them new reason to read, in many cases for the first time, a 10-month-old column by a little-known academic in which he is held up to ridicule.
I expect some Montrealers will soon be wearing buttons that read, Je suis Ricochet. Or maybe T-shirts, printed with a statement by a well-known Montreal columnist: "Freedom of expression is ALSO the freedom to say what is shocking, detestable and unpopular." That was Richard Martineau, writing in JM last March. He has yet to make a formal retraction.