Front Quebecois (Cinco De Mayo)

The Front Quebecois (English: Quebecois Front), known as FQ or FQS, was a Quebecois separatist and nationalist paramilitary and political organization active from the early 1960s until it was formally disbanded in 1995 following the independence of Quebec, although it ceased to function as a cohesive organization after the arrest of several of its leaders in 1992 by the Canadian government. Despite confusion over their names, the Front Quebecois is distinct from the Front Liberation Quebec (FLQ), which was a Marxist separatist movement that held the Ottowa government as illegitimate and favored an independent Marxist Quebec as opposed to a federal Marxist Canada.

The FQ led an armed terror campaign starting in the 1970s, attacking Canadian institutions with an explicit position of not attacking Francophone civilian targets in Quebec proper. Its most devastating attack was at an Ottawa pub in 1980, where FQ gunmen entered the establishment and slaughtered ten off-duty Canadian soldiers and wounded thirty-one other patrons before fleeing the scene. The "Ottawa Pub Massacre" significantly changed Quebecois attitudes towards the organization - while many Quebecois, including anti-Communist Anglophones, had previously been sympathetic to its cause, the brutal maiming of many civilians in Ottawa turned large segments of the population against it. The FQ further alienated the Quebecois population in 1981 and 1982 when it targeted Anglophone Protestants in Sherbrooke, leading to accusations that it was a religious sectarian movement. Generally, the FQ was associated with the ultra-right.