We cannot be surprised, for openers, to learn that Parizeau's preferred exit strategy was a unilateral declaration of independence: that is to say, a revolutionary edict, repudiating Canadian sovereignty and Canadian law.

That was the explicit policy under Bill 1, the law declaring Quebec to be an independent country following a referendum win. Even after he was prevailed upon to attach the offer of a political and economic "partnership" with the rest of Canada, neither Parizeau nor Bouchard ever renounced the UDI option. The agreement between them, on which the referendum question was based, said only that negotiations would continue for up to a year, or until they proved fruitless, whichever came first. Then let the revolution begin.

So the only mild surprise is in the timing. In fact, Parizeau seems inclined to have moved even faster than the "week or 10 days" he is being credited with.

That was the supposed timetable for France to recognize Quebec's independence: Parizeau actually writes of proclaiming the new republic "in the hours or days" that followed a Yes victory. Yet here again, we should scarcely be astonished. Parizeau had always known that secession could never be negotiated; he must equally have known that a unilateral break, if it were to have any chance of succeeding, would have to be effected with lightning speed: a "first strike" that would, he hoped, make it a fait accompli by morning.

Even then, it would depend upon utter paralysis in Ottawa: the longer it was delayed, and the firmer the government of Canada's resistance, the more the odds would stack against the rebels. It is one thing to declare independence.

It is quite another to make it stick, in the political, legal and economic chaos that would follow.

Parizeau obviously knew this: everything we have learned since the referendum, of the videotaped address he had prepared, the contingency plan for the dollar, the approaches to foreign embassies and Canadian army officers, has confirmed the truth of his famous remark before the event: that Quebecers, having voted Yes to "partnership" with the rest of Canada, would be trapped like lobsters in the separatist pot. And if it were clear to Parizeau, it could not fail to have been to the wide-eyed innocents who now disavow all knowledge of the plot, and pretend they would have stopped it had they known.

Are we to believe, after all, that Parizeau intended to carry out this putsch all by himself? Did he have no allies for such a risky undertaking, with all the meticulous planning and immensely complicated sequence of acts it would entail? Is it really possible that he did not consult Landry or Bouchard, or that if he had, that he could have expected to impose his will not only on the government of Canada, but his own movement?

For that matter, it is impossible to believe the Prime Minister could not as easily have guessed all this. If nothing else, he knew that he had no intention of sitting down to negotiate the breakup of the country, no matter what the result of the referendum. In which case Chretien, by participating, was just as surely lying to Quebecers as Parizeau, each acting, for his own purposes, as if it were a genuine exercise in democracy, and not the pretext for a putsch that it really was.

We see now, if any doubted, just what we are up against: how high the stakes, and how ruthless our adversaries. There remains only to ask: what is Parizeau up to? It may have been obvious to those who know him that he was lying, but why admit it to the rest of the world? First, it is clear he means, by exposing his own duplicity, to scotch the Bouchardist "partnership" option, once and for all. He has always loathed it intrinsically, and feared the leverage such negotiations would give the federal government -- assumng the feds even agreed to negotiate. But I think he has a new, more urgent reason to want to push it off the table.

Until now -- until October 30, 1995, to be precise -- it was possible to imagine holding a referendum on a partnership question, without the legitimacy of the exercise being challenged in advance. That is no longer the case. For some months, the federal government has been signalling that it will refuse to recognize the results of any vote on such a misleading question. So long as the partnership proposal remains on offer, then, Bouchard has handed federalists the means to delegitimize, perhaps even boycott, the next referendum.

Without it, they could only contest the result after the fact. That, or call into question the very foundation of the referendum itself: that is, to deny that Quebecers have a right to secede, unilaterally or otherwise. But since that is what we should have been doing all along, perhaps this is a blessing.