In 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle stepped onto Montreal City Hall's balcony and declared "Vive le Québec libre" to the crowd below. Four words detonated a diplomatic crisis, cut short his Canadian visit, and gave the Quebec separatist movement its rallying cry.

The building has a habit of starting over. Constructed in the 1870s in Second Empire style and modelled on the city hall in Tours, France, it was gutted by fire in March 1922, leaving only the outer walls and a stack of scorched municipal records. Rather than demolish the shell, engineers slipped a steel-framed structure inside it and crowned the result with a Mansard roof. It reopened in 1926.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours of Old Montreal use the balcony to trace Quebec's separatist awakening, and connect the building's French-British political legacy to neighbours like Place Vauquelin and Château Ramezay.