E
École Polytechnique massacre
The Event The murders of fourteen women by a
misogynistic twenty-five-year-old man
Date December 6, 1989
Place École Polytechnique, University of
Montreal, Montreal, Quebec
Marc Lépine engaged in a premeditated massacre of women
college students because he believed them to be feminists.
This gender-related attack profoundly influenced univer-
sity students, especially women, as well as feminists of all
ages across Canada. They demanded that measures be
taken to improve the safety of Canadian women, including
strengthening gun-control laws; some also spoke out
against what they saw as the misogynistic culture that had
produced Lépine.
The shooting spree at École Polytechnique, also
called the Montreal Massacre, occurred at the end of
the autumn semester, 1989, when Marc Lépine en-
tered the school and began shooting female stu-
dents and staff. Late in the afternoon of December
6, Lépine moved rapidly through the engineering
building, finding young women and shooting them
with a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle, or stab-
bing them with a hunting knife. In a grim parallel to
gender-related killings in other parts of the world,
Lépine targeted a fourth-year engineering class,
forcing the men to leave the room, lining the women
up against a wall, and executing them. As he killed
these six female students, he ranted against “femi-
nists,” demonstrating his extreme hatred and resent-
ment of women.
Lépine eventually killed fourteen women: Gene-
viève Bergeron (aged twenty-one), Hélène Colgan
(aged twenty-three), Nathalie Croteau (aged twenty-
three), Barbara Daigneault (aged twenty-two), Anne-
Marie Edward (aged twenty-one), Maud Haviernick
(aged twenty-nine), Maryse Laganière (aged twenty-
five), Maryse Leclair (aged twenty-three), Anne-Marie
Lemay (aged twenty-seven), Sonia Pelletier (aged
twenty-eight), Michèle Richard (aged twenty-one),
Annie St-Arneault (aged twenty-three), Annie Tur-
cotte (aged twenty-one), and Barbara Klucznik Wida-
jewicz (aged thirty-one). With the exception of
Laganière, who was a member of the university’s
staff, all these young women were students, most of
them in the engineering department. In addition to
murdering these students, Lépine injured approxi-
mately a dozen other individuals, including a few
men, before finally turning his rifle on himself and
committing suicide. The police arrived on the scene
after Lépine was dead, prompting a reevaluation of
police response protocols.Post-Massacre Events The high death toll of the
massacre and the youth of Lépine’s victims shocked
the Montreal community and all Canadians. It was
the worst single-day massacre in Canadian history, a
statistic that was soon noted by the national media.
An additional issues of concern was the fact that the
gunman had used a high-powered semiautomatic
weapon that he had obtained legally after paying a
paltry licensing fee. Women across the nation drew
attention to Lépine’s hatred for women, especially
feminists, as well as the ease with which he had car-
ried out his attack given the delayed police response.
All of these issues had significant implications for
women’s safety in public settings.
Media accounts of the massacre interpreted the
event through two divergent lenses. Some reporters
discussed it as a symptom of a larger social problem:
They asserted that the cause of the massacre could
be directly attributed to the fact that violence against
women was still relatively socially acceptable in Can-
ada, and they saw the crime as arising from system-
atic sexual inequities in Canadian society. Other
writers for the Canadian mainstream media es-
chewed this approach: They focused instead on the
mental health and psychology of the killer, suggest-
ing that one pathological individual was solely re-
sponsible for the massacre. In this vein, many report-
ers wrote about Lépine’s unhappy childhood and
the physical abuse he suffered during his first seven