The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) was a Quebec separatist terrorist group which aimed to establish an independent and socialist Quebec. Founded sometime in the early 1960s, the FLQ conducted a number of attacks between 1963 and 1970, which totaled over 160 violent incidents and killed eight people and injured many more. These attacks culminated with the Montreal Stock Exchange bombing in 1969 and the October Crisis in 1970, the latter beginning with the kidnapping of British Trade Commissioner James Cross. In the subsequent negotiations, Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte was kidnapped and murdered by a cell of the FLQ. Public outcry and a federal crackdown subsequently ended the crisis and resulted in a drastic loss of support for the FLQ, with a small number of FLQ members being granted refuge in Cuba.

FLQ members practised propaganda of the deed and issued declarations that called for a socialist insurrection against oppressors identified with Anglo-Saxon imperialism, the overthrow of the Quebec government, the independence of Quebec from Canada and the establishment of a French-speaking "workers' society" in Quebec. Up to 1970, it gained the support of many left-leaning students, teachers and academics, who engaged in public strikes in solidarity with the FLQ during the October Crisis. After the kidnapping of Cross, nearly 1,000 students at Université de Montréal signed a petition supporting the FLQ manifesto. This public support largely ended after the group announced they had executed Laporte, in a public communique that ended with an insult to the victim. The KGB, which had established contact with the FLQ before 1970, later forged documents to portray them as a CIA false flag operation, a story that gained limited traction among academic sources before declassified Soviet archives revealed the ruse. By the early 1980s, most of the imprisoned FLQ members had been paroled or released.