Seven Ages of Paris (71 page)

Then came François Mitterrand, whose hideous new “people’s opera” at the Bastille (begun in 1985) would dig as big a hole in Paris finances as any of those dug for dealing with the motor car. (“What is the difference between the people’s opera and the Titanic?” went a joke at the time. Answer: “The orchestra on the Titanic actually played.”) A poll conducted among Parisians in 1990 ranked the Centre Georges Pompidou as the first monument they wished to see pulled down, the Bastille Opéra the second.

HUBRIS

During Malraux’s years of power, many great art retrospectives were held in Paris: Delacroix’s centenary; “Douanier” Rousseau; and Picasso vigorously alive, the war forgotten, eulogized in the Grand Palais in 1966 in a kind of monumental autobiography. In 1961 Braque turned eighty and was honoured with a special postage stamp; he died two years later and was accorded a spectacular send-off in front of a gleaming white Cour Carrée at the Louvre. In the salerooms a record price of seven million francs was paid for a Cézanne. Nineteen-sixty-five saw a massive exhibition of the “hidden paintings” from Leningrad and Moscow with its breathtaking Matisses. By the following year, as the Vermeer exhibition in the Orangerie closed, still with huge queues, Janet Flanner was left gasping in the New Yorker that it was “as if Paris were intoxicated with art and still could not satisfy her thirst.”

In the theatre the situation was perhaps a little less exciting. Ionesco, hitherto relatively unknown, had his first three-act play, La Soif et la faim, performed at the Comédie Française in 1966. Above the Odéon Jean-Louis Barrault created, in “a broom cupboard,” a minuscule hundred-seat theatre called the Petit Odéon. Jean Cocteau had died in 1963, and a year later Malraux was left grumbling that, whereas a century before some 3,000 people every evening went to the theatre, now three million sat at home watching television. “You can put unimportant things on the screen,” he observed gloomily. “Make no mistake about it, modern civilization is in the process of putting its immense resources at the service of what used to be called the Devil.”

Earlier in 1964 another powerful grumble was heard about French culture, on a theme close to the General’s heart. Paris bookshops were filled with a wittily written book on a most serious subject by a professor of literature at the Sorbonne, René Etiemble—Parlez-vous franglais? It slated the insidious creeping into the sacred language of such barbaric usages of les Anglo-Saxons as le weekend, le booking, le snack, le quick and un baby Scotch sur les rocks. Not without reason, the learned professor complained that:

Since the Liberation, our blood has become much diluted … The vocabulary of the young generation that will be twenty years old in 1972 is already one-fourth composed of American words. At twenty these young people will not be able to read Molière, let alone Marcel Proust.

Apart from resolving the sex of the automobile, what was the Académie doing? Swiftly the fear of franglais had been followed up by the opening of the new American-style Drugstore in Saint-Germain, right opposite Sartre’s fortress at the Flore. Throughout Paris there were more and more snack bars, hamburgers, novels in translation, and blue jeans on both sexes. And James Bond’s Goldfinger was to create something of a vogue in a city feeling once more that it was beginning to lack excitement.

Perhaps a more encouraging sign, however, that Paris was moving with the times was, in December 1962, the award of the Prix Goncourt to three women writers. Another historic turnaround was the fate of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, so savagely attacked on its first performance half a century earlier. Not only did the new Maurice Béjart production in 1964 bring a Paris audience to its feet, applauding and shouting for half an hour, but three years later Malraux would select it, instead of Beethoven, as background music for a Gaullist rally. Meanwhile Paris was wildly excited at the rediscovery, on some musty shelf of the Bibliothèque Nationale, of the original manuscript of Don Giovanni. In 1964, Callas brought the house down with her Tosca; less enthralling was Paris’s first subjection to music by Stockhausen. In the film world, during the early days of the Fifth Republic all Paris was seduced by the magical Brazilian rhythms of Black Orpheus; there was Truffaut’s sombre, autobiographical Quatre cents coups, and the no less traumatizing Hiroshima mon amour. Briefly the new Surrealist talent of Robbe-Grillet, exponent of the nouveau roman, became the toast of the town—and of the Cannes Film Festival. And of course there were Roger Vadim and the pouting Brigitte Bardot to make ageing blood vessels pound.

Josephine Baker returned; so did that venerable old trouper Maurice Chevalier, forgiven his wartime indiscretions. There was Yves Montand, usually clad in his workers’ overalls, with his lachrymose “Feuilles mortes.” But more heart-rending always was the tiny figure in the plain black dress of Edith Piaf, who had done so much to cloak a glum Paris in the 1940s with the warm light of “La Vie en rose,” going on to enchant the wide world beyond her Montmartre with “Milord” and the paras’ favourite, her tragic, autobiographical “Je ne regrette rien”:

Farewell to love with its tremolo.

I start again at zéro …

When Piaf died in 1963, within a few hours of her friend Cocteau, all Paris grieved. Forty thousand turned up to accompany her remains to her simple grave in Père Lachaise. Meanwhile women in Paris’s oldest profession, who had always found a sympathetic friend in Piaf, were suffering a hard time under de Gaulle, doubtless influenced by the sternly moral “Tante Yvonne.” Determined to clean up Paris, he reactivated a draconian 330-year-old law which threatened, with the forfeiture of his property, any landlord who allowed prostitutes to work on his premises. Business was badly hit. On another level conventional morality was under siege by Mitterrand, in opposition, seizing on France’s archaic attitudes to family planning and contraception, long a taboo subject, and making them political issues. With joy the Paris gossip columnists leaped on the young pro-Pill generation, which was jeering at its Catholic opponents as les lapinistes, the rabbit clan, devoted to a culture of excessive fertility.

By the mid-1960s, despite all the material benefits that his regime had brought about, what de Gaulle dubbed the “snarlers and grousers” were soon raising their voices in anticipation of the end of the Fifth Republic and an electoral replacement of the solitary ruler in the Elysée. Could it be that the General had served his purpose? That once again in its history France s’ennuyait? As he once acidly remarked, “One can’t impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 different kinds of cheese.” The presidential elections of 1965 ended with de Gaulle gaining only 44 per cent of the votes, on a heavy poll. Humiliatingly for him, there had to be a second ballot. Ten and a half million votes had gone to the new star on the now united left, François Mitterrand, who had suddenly proved himself a most effective orator. The next political blow to de Gaulle came at the beginning of 1967, when his protégé, the brilliant young énarque economist Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, launched a new splinter Gaullist party. It had considerable success in the parliamentary elections, which reduced de Gaulle’s majority to a dangerously small margin of just one seat. Yet still the barometer looked set fair. At his twice-yearly press conference in the Elysée in November 1966, de Gaulle was able to declare, “We have nothing dramatic to say today. In contrast to the past, France right now is not living in any drama.” There was a certain smug, unspoken comparison to Lyndon Johnson’s America, crippled as it was by the nightmare of Vietnam. At the press conference in November 1967, one correspondent dared enquire about “après Gaullisme.” The seventy-seven-year-old President replied with considerable verve, “Everything always has an end, and everyone eventually comes to a finish, though for the moment that is not the case … Après de Gaulle might begin tonight, or in six months, or even a year,” he continued. “However, if I wanted to make some people laugh and others groan, I could say that it might just as likely go on as it is now for ten years, or even fifteen. But, frankly, I don’t think so.”

What a shock lay in store for him, and Paris, just a few brief months away.

TWENTY-ONE

*

Les Jours de Mai

One fighting speech from an old man of seventy-eight, and the people of France rediscovered the sense of reality, petrol pumps and holidays.

RAYMOND ARON, THE ELUSIVE REVOLUTION, P. 157

PROBLEMS AT THE SORBONNE

The tremors started abroad; nevertheless it was in Paris—most unexpectedly—where the major eruption would take place. It was not, explained the director of the Odéon Theatre, Jean-Louis Barrault, “a French affair, but a universal phenomenon. The lightning, in May, fell in Paris, that’s all. The storm, it seemed to me, came from afar, and continued to rumble all round the world.” Call it sunspots or what you will, a kind of global madness was to set its stamp on 1968, the year of violent student revolt and of assassination. It determined the defeat of America in Vietnam and the fall of de Gaulle in Paris. It also displayed the fissures that were to bring the whole Soviet monolith toppling two decades later. Some of those caught up in it likened 1968 to that other year of revolution, 1848, when old political structures across Europe collapsed like the walls of Jericho—not least in Paris, where that easy-going, liberal King, Louis-Philippe, was brought down.

On 31 January 1968, the Vietnam peace talks that had been due to begin shortly in Paris were pre-empted by the Viet Cong seizing advantage of the traditional New Year’s Tet celebrations to launch a co-ordinated series of attacks on South Vietnamese cities. Initially the American forces were taken by surprise, and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon was actually occupied by suicide squads for six hours. Large numbers of aircraft were destroyed on runways, and briefly it looked as if the Viet Cong had won. But the U.S. forces reacted with vigour, recapturing the old capital of Hué and inflicting a clear-cut defeat on the Communists. None of this was seen in America, however, nor did Americans want to see it. A much greater impact was made by the filming of the public execution of a young Viet Cong suspect; while President Johnson’s decision to send another 50,000 troops to Vietnam was taken as a sure sign that Tet had been a Communist victory. Campuses across the U.S. burst into flame. It was the moment “middle America” lost heart: the war in Vietnam seemed to be going nowhere. The following month America was stunned by the announcement that President Johnson, worn down by Vietnam and by anti-war protest, would not be a candidate in the 1968 presidential elections. Richard Nixon announced that he would run. Meanwhile Czechoslovakia saw the launch of the Prague Spring as Alexander Dubcˇek astonished the world by relaxing press censorship and arresting the Chief of Police. For a few rapturous weeks it looked as if the Czechs would regain the freedom they had lost twenty years previously.

In Paris the year began with visual delight as the populace was enthralled by the Ingres Exhibition at the Grand Palais and its sensual grandes odalisques, their opulent expanses of flesh greeted as a welcome relief from a lean decade of abstract art. There was also a new Jacques Tati film, Playtime, topically chronicling a desperate and loony quest through the Montparnasse skyscraper, a cultured, nineteenth-century-minded Frenchman lost in twentieth-century imported architecture. It flopped. More successful as a protest against the same phenomenon was Servan-Schreiber’s Le Défi américain, an immediate bestseller that proclaimed a dread of American cultural domination. This dread was echoed in Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, Weekend, its two unappealing lovers caught up in a nightmare world of traffic jams—rated by the critics as le plus dingue, the craziest Godard movie to date. Anti-Americanism was bolstered by noisy Vietnam demonstrations in Paris, sparked by the carnage at Hué—and given added point by the news of the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee. About the same time, in Germany, a left-wing student leader called Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head by a gunman claiming that he wished to emulate the King killing. Dutschke survived, but the shooting triggered off student riots across Germany. In Paris the Seine rose to flood level, once again. Premier Pompidou was able to declare comfortably that there was “no opposition capable of overthrowing us, much less capable of replacing us.” On a more inspiring note was the exhibition of “European Gothic,” in the new, magnificently refurbished Pavillon de Flore of the Louvre. Aptly, in view of what lay just ahead, it focused Parisian minds on the glorious beginnings of Abélard’s Sorbonne, in a spring of precocious sunshine.

Since Napoleon’s reforms of a century and a half previously, the Sorbonne had largely reverted to its time-honoured slumbers. With his massacre of the Left Bank, Haussmann had begun the modernization of the University buildings, but it had taken to the end of the nineteenth century to complete in the form, ugly beyond belief, that existed until 1968. About the most exciting thing to happen there had been a major explosion accidentally set off in the Place de la Sorbonne in March 1869 by an inventor called M. Véron Fontaine, which killed Fontaine himself and six others and extensively damaged neighbouring buildings. In 1908,
Mme.
Curie demonstrated in the Sorbonne laboratories the precursor of an even deadlier new form of explosive—radium—and became the first woman to lecture in its halls.

Then, sixty years later, in the glorious month of May 1968, the Sorbonne truly exploded.

It had all begun back in February at Nanterre, a new and particularly drab suburban campus of graffiti-covered concrete surrounded by mud. Started as an overflow for the overwhelmed Sorbonne, it already had more than 12,000 students in inadequate accommodation, with only 240 professors and assistant professors. There was a lack of warm food, and canteen queues could last an hour and a half, so there was plenty of time for revolutionary chat. On graduation students were faced with either no jobs, or dreary ones. Thus it was not unnatural that, if revolt were to break out in Paris, it should be at Nanterre. Against regulations, bored bourgeois youths established themselves in the same quarters as the girls. To call in the police to evacuate a student dormitory was clearly out of all proportion to the breach of collegiate discipline, but on 4 May Nanterre was placed in suspension. Helpfully the Gaullist Minister of Education told the residents there to take a cold bath.