Matthieu Caron

Matthieu Caron, Montreal After Dark: Nighttime Regulation and the Pursuit of a Global City. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025.

Matthieu Caron’s Montreal After Dark: Nighttime Regulation and the Pursuit of a Global City is an engagingly written book on an original topic. In the early twentieth century, Montreal was known for its vibrant nightlife, where sex, jazz, alcohol, and gambling made it one of North America’s most lively and open destinations. By the mid-century, as Caron careful study shows, this culture came under increasing scrutiny. Jean Drapeau rose to power on a reformist and anti-corruption platform, offering a different vision for the metropolis, which he enacted during his two tenures as mayor, from 1954 to 1957 and 1960 to 1986. Concerned with respectability and moral order, the municipal administration believed that by regulating the night it could transform Montreal from a crime-ridden city into an internationally renowned global destination of a different sort. Civic leaders and the police force supported one another in efforts to “clean up” the city, particularly in preparation for major international events like Expo 67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics, with regulations that mirrored trends seen elsewhere in Canada and the United States.

Caron examines the technocratic framework behind Drapeau’s agenda, while also contending with the pushback from residents, tourists, labour activists, artists, queer Montrealers, and sex workers. The result is a well-rounded study of the organization of private and public space, the perception of proper behaviour, as well as the transformation of the city’s administration and police force. Montreal After Dark stands out for the quality and diversity of its research. Caron mined municipal and provincial archives, including court records, as well as the archives of Radio-Canada/CBC, the Archives Gaies du Québec, the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives, and others. The book’s in-depth archival research from a range of sources and sites combines with a multi-level analysis, anchored in the international literature on urban reform in the postwar era. Caron is adept at making the link between the Montreal experience and continental, or global, trends. Convincing its readers that the struggle to control the city played out at night, Montreal After Dark provides a novel window to study questions of power and control in urban contexts. The book is a welcome addition to the fields of urban history, women, gender, and sexuality studies, and the history of the state.