Andrée Ferretti, a pioneer and radical figure in the Quebec independence movement, died last week in Montreal. His death has just been announced by his family. She was 87 years old.
Born Andrée Bertrand in 1935 in the Villeray district of Montreal, then very working-class, she embraced the cause of independence in 1956 by taking public lessons on Saturdays from history professor Maurice Séguin. At the same time, she met the poet Gaston Miron and the bookseller Febo Ferretti who was to become her husband.
The young idealist joined the Rally for National Independence (RIN) in 1963 and became a candidate for the party in 1966 in the riding of Laurier, where she faced a certain René Lévesque.
She became vice-president of the RIN the following year but left the movement in March 1968 to protest against the merger of the RIN with the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association, a rapprochement that would create the Parti Québécois, which she did not consider independentist enough. . She was imprisoned for almost two months during the October Crisis under the War Measures Act.
She ended up rallying to the Parti Québécois in 1973 and was heavily involved in the YES camp in the first referendum on sovereignty in 1980. The defeat, which she described as “capital”, was nevertheless followed by other years of struggle for the political project of his life.
Andrée Ferretti was a graduate in philosophy and she led a career as an author marked by this intellectual training. His “short, chiseled” style has been used to produce essays, numerous short stories and several novels including Revival in Pagania (1987), his first, proposing an imaginary dialogue between Hypathie d’Alexandrie and Hubert Aquin. pure and hardthe title of his last book published in 2015 by XYZ could serve as his epitaph.
Further details will follow.
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