The past week saw the cracks within the sovereignty movement opened wide, as the leaders of its many factions began to turn upon each other. It's getting hard to count all the knives in various backs.

At the centre of the tumult stands the perplexed figure of Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois. You remember him: the man who helped depose previous party chief Michel Gauthier, then compounded the humiliation by refusing even to keep him on as house leader.

Since then he must have wished he'd stayed in bed.

The campaign had not been going well for Duceppe from the start, even before the disgraced former Parti Quebecois leader Jacques Parizeau returned with his bombshell revelation that the political and economic "partnership" with Canada peddled by the Bloc was, so far as he was concerned, nothing more than a ruse: that he would have declared independence unilaterally, within hours of a referendum victory. Perhaps he only wished revenge upon the former Bloc leader, now premier, Lucien Bouchard, for foisting the partnership idea upon him in the first place.

But the most immediate victim was Duceppe, who looked like he'd been kneed in the groin. (Actually, he always looks like he's been kneed in the groin.) Since then things have gone from mal to mauvais. As if in a desperate bid to recover the voters' trust, Duceppe has made a number of embarassing statements about the aftermath of a sovereignty declaration -- embarassing mostly because they were true.

First there was the acknowledgment that a Yes vote, contrary to secessionist dogma, would not put an end to the debate: that federalists, in a sovereign Quebec, could always come back with a referendum on rejoining Canada.

More telling still was Duceppe's latest heresy: that the Cree and Inuit of northern Quebec were entitled to claim the right to remain in Canada; that the matter could be decided by an international tribunal; and that a separatist government would never use force to conscript them into seceding.

This brought instant repudiation by other separatist leaders, and for obvious reasons.

The hapless Duceppe had again brought into question one of the most fundamental principles of the cause, that Quebec's territorial integrity was inviolable -- backed, according to PQ intergovernmental affairs minister Jacques Brassard, by the full coercive power of the state. If Canada was divisible, Duceppe seemed to be saying, so was Quebec. Indeed, at one point in the campaign the Bloc leader even suggested his party had a "vision of Canada," as if to suggest that even secession was not quite what he had in mind.

Duceppe's career is over. For his sins, he is to be made to share a stage with the odious Parizeau, an outcast two weeks ago but once again embraced by the movement's leadership, now that the party cannot even count on the support of its hardliners. But that has hardly quelled the bickering. Clement Godbout, leader of the Quebec Federation of Labour, which is already sitting out the election in protest at the Bouchard government's spending cuts, emerged long enough this week to question whether the Bloc was "still pertinent" to the sovereignty cause.

That was shortly after former PQ minister Lise Payette told a party gathering that the campaign squabbling "makes us realize we don't have to look for enemies outside. We have always nourished them inside our own house." It was left to Duceppe to ask, wistfully, why separatists could not be, well, more like federalists. "When I look at what happens with federalist parties," he said, "they disagree on many issues but when it's time to speak up for Canada, they're all there. It should be the same thing for [sovereignists]." There's a reason why it is not. From the start, separatism has always been a supremely opportunistic cause, peopled with more than the usual quota of backstabbers and turncoats. If the whole raison d'etre of your movement is, when things are not arranged entirely to your liking, to cut and run, it should not be surprising to find individual members taking the idea to heart.

For a time, as during the constitutional rounds, it was possible to preserve the myth of the mystic unity of all Quebecers, especially against the supposed monolith of "English Canada." But without that contrivance, the real divergence of interests and ideals -- within the party, as much as the province -- is revealed. The result is a kind of inward partition movement, separatism taken to its logical conclusion: secessionists, seceding from each other.