Seven Ages of Paris (72 page)

With only a couple of hundred supporters, revolt was carried from Nanterre to the Sorbonne by a redheaded firebrand, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the son of affluent German Jews. The date coincided with the opening of the Vietnam peace conference, and it so happened that it was also the tenth anniversary of de Gaulle’s return to power. Ten years of accumulated grievance were now suddenly poured on to the fires of student discontent.

The Sorbonne of that time seemed to have changed little since the age of Napoleon. On returning in 1955 to the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Letters after twenty-seven years’ absence at American and English universities, Raymond Aron was deeply shocked by what he found:

What struck me most was the dinginess of the building and the institution. The chairs, in the tiny offices next to the lecture hall, could have come from the Flea Market. The rooms were grey, dirty, sad …

… The best students continued to take exams and their degrees without ever setting foot in the Sorbonne. The others were left to themselves, except for the help provided by the assistant. The professor, for the most part, did nothing but deliver lectures. My weekly schedule consisted of three hours …

By 1968 the Sorbonne had become bloated: with 130,000 students it was many times larger than Oxford and Cambridge put together.

In sum, with dreadful overcrowding in lecture halls, mandarinisme on the part of the teachers, a total lack of communication between them and their pupils, the absence of any form of pre-selection, over-centralization, excessive bureaucracy, the fossilization of the syllabus and the tyranny of endless examinations, the Paris students of May 1968 had a case. Egged on by their own professors, they then widened their target from establishing student power to turning university revolt into a social and political revolution.

LES ÈVÈNEMENTS

On the afternoon of Friday, 4 May, the head of the Sorbonne, Rector Jean Roche, called in the Paris police. It was an act that violated the sanctuary of the University, maintained over many centuries, and an unpardonable academic error. Roche requested that the police clear the University courtyard of a small, disputatious student meeting which, he feared, might lead to some incident of violence that could disturb the approaching spring examinations. The next day the police in their paniers à salade (armoured vans) moved in, closing the Sorbonne and arresting 500 students. Predictably, the traditionally heavy-handed CRS riot-police detachments overreacted, causing many hundreds of casualties. By a miracle, there were no deaths. Given the heat already generated on the Left Bank streets it is hard to imagine how far insurgent violence might have gone had only a few young students been mowed down by CRS bullets. The students took to the streets, supported by some professors and parents. Initially local inhabitants, espousing their cause, tended the wounded in their own homes in the Latin Quarter, assisted by women taxi drivers. By the Sunday morning, several of the arrested students had been sentenced to years in prison, without right of appeal. At this news the Sorbonne as a whole rose up in a sympathetic outburst of fury. Spreading across the river, students extinguished the flame on the Unknown Soldier’s Tomb (it was alleged that Cohn-Bendit had urinated on it), organized a sit-in around it, and sang the Internationale.

What caught all foreign journalists by surprise in the early days of les événements was their sheer spontaneity. Students took possession of the Sorbonne buildings, brought in a piano, played and sang through the night and slept in the empty classrooms. Around the University and the Boul’ Mich’ they set to digging up the cube-shaped pavés, sawing down ancient plane trees and dragging up burned-out cars to construct barricades—much as their ancestors had done. With lightning speed an atmosphere of exaltation and wild euphoria, evocative of the early days of the Commune, or of 1848, 1830 or even 1789, swept the area. “Nous sommes chez nous!” the students kept chanting, as if that medieval section of old academic Paris were their property to defend—or to destroy. If a youth was found with tar on his fingers it was taken by the police as proof that he had been using paving blocks as ammunition or in a barricade, and he was hauled off to the police vans—a further ominous evocation of the final days of the Commune, when Communards with gunpowder-stained hands had been automatically taken aside and shot. To the deep disgust of academics like Aron and Druon, in the initial euphoria there were numerous cases of professors egging on students, with chemistry teachers even showing them how to make Molotov cocktails. Students were soon demanding to be part of the examination panels, and even to participate in the appointment of professors. New graffiti typifying the attitude towards discipline proclaimed, “It is forbidden to forbid” and “Never work,” superimposed on such hysterical Sartrean appeals for sexual liberation as “I take my desires for reality, because I believe in the reality of desires.”

As the demands escalated, so with alarming swiftness what had started as a student protest edged towards full-scale political revolution, aimed at nothing less than the overthrow of the de Gaulle government. With the arrival of 13 May and the tenth anniversary of the Algiers coup that had brought the General to power, new slogans appeared, and not just on the Left Bank adjacent to the Sorbonne: “Ten years, that’s enough!” and “De Gaulle to the museum!,” while there were cries on the pavements of “De Gaulle assassin!” As a reminder of 1848 there also reappeared the famous banner of “La France s’ennuie!” In support of the students, the left organized an immense march, so dense that its head had reached its destination at Denfert-Rochereau before the end of the march, five kilometres distant at the other side of Paris, had managed to leave the Place de la République. Ominously the streets were empty of police. Students with armbands directed traffic on the Boul’ Mich’, while the government seemed in a state of shock, utterly paralysed, and caught totally unprepared. De Gaulle was in Romania, Premier Pompidou in Afghanistan. A further sign of the shift in public opinion came when the state radio and TV outfit, the ORTF, which for years had broadcast no anti-Gaullist criticism, now joined in the assault.

Meanwhile, at the same time as all this drama was taking place, only a short distance away negotiations were in process to try to achieve peace in Vietnam. Separated by the Seine, delegates of the South were boarded (at American expense) at the Hôtel Claridge on the Champs-Elysées, those from the North at the comfortably bourgeois Lutetia on Boulevard Raspail. Both residences bore the recent stigma of occidental defeat in wartime, while Ho Chi Minh’s representatives at the Lutetia were almost within earshot of the revolt in the Latin Quarter. Certainly they would have smelled the tear gas. The two delegations met in the Majestic (also redolent of past memories), but delegates and journalists alike had the greatest difficulty in reaching it, because a general strike called by the left in support of the embattled students meant there were few taxis, half the normal number of buses and only a quarter of the usual Métro trains. It was perhaps hardly surprising if, reinforcing what Ho had himself witnessed in Paris in 1919—and what the television screens showed them of U.S. campuses in uproar—he and his fellow delegates from Hanoi returned to the Lutetia each evening increasingly persuaded of the imminent collapse of a West brought down by teenage rioters. The conference finally collapsed in the face of the intransigence of the North, a collapse that was to lead eventually to Communist victory. Could it have been otherwise? Was the capital of Vietnam’s old, vanquished oppressor the best site for so crucial a conference? If “Danny the Red” failed at the Sorbonne, it might well be deemed that he had succeeded in Vietnam.

The strike spread like a brush fire in a heat-wave summer. By mid-May three million workers had come out on strike, and a week later the number had risen to ten million. Paris, like the government, was paralysed, with garbage piling up in the streets, no petrol in the pumps and food running short. The Banque de France itself went out on strike, as well as the engravers at the Mint, so banknotes were also running short. It seemed that the only success the Pompidou government could chalk up was preventing Cohn-Bendit from returning to Paris from Germany, where he had gone on a visit. The greatest turn of fortune for a beleaguered regime came, however, when students tried to spread the revolt to the big Renault works at Billancourt. Like the students at the Sorbonne, striking workers occupied the plant (as their fathers had done in 1936), but would not come out to join forces with the students. The age-old Marxist dream of workers and students marching hand in hand to the barricades was thus thwarted. The mighty Communist Party proved to be just as much off balance as the government, and the unions declined to follow the Sorbonne’s lead. The Communists’ aloofness owed a great deal to the bourgeois origins of the striking students—les fils à papa as they scathingly dubbed them. This time the schism was palpably more between generations than classes, between youth and its elders. The CGT even ordered that there be no interruption of electricity supplies. Bleating feebly about a new Front Populaire, the Communists lost their best chance since 1944 of seizing power in France—where, at one point in May, it seemed almost to be theirs for the asking.

As the clock ticked on and the situation in Paris worsened hourly, Parisians waited for de Gaulle to speak, to bring an end to the crisis—but nothing came. In the Assembly Mitterrand made political capital, proposing a caretaker government, and—in clear breach of the constitution—delivering an ultimatum that he would stand as a candidate for the presidency were the crisis not resolved within eighteen days. Pompidou continued to vacillate between repression and conciliation of the Latin Quarter, while in Romania de Gaulle was cheered by students whose Parisian opposite numbers were jeering and barracking him at home.

Evicted from the Sorbonne, students moved in on the nearby Odéon theatre. There, at first, they were welcomed with open arms by its director, the famous actor-manager Jean-Louis Barrault, and his partner, the great Madeleine Renaud, the leading actress of her time. Barrault’s enthusiasm swiftly waned. When he asked the visitors to stop smoking—explaining “C’est un théâtre!”—he was ignored. The insurgents painted “Ex-Odéon” across the safety-curtain and on the walls, and took over the stage, using it as a tribune libre where everybody could orate about their own problem, in a manner sharply evocative of the Commune.

The situation in the Odéon steadily worsened, with between 8,000 and 10,000 people a day surging through the corridors, on the stage and even on to the roof. By the 28th, the costume store had been broken into and, Barrault later wrote, “delivered to veritable destruction, vandalism pure and simple … Twenty years of work soiled, ravaged, annihilated … This time, I burst out in sobs.” Barrault retreated to his quarters to read Rabelais. Eventually CRS in helmets surrounded the Odéon and liberated it. Three months later Barrault was sacked by Malraux’s Ministry of Culture.

REACTION

Like Barrault, many other Parisians were now becoming disenchanted, if not positively alarmed, by the genie-in-the-bottle that had been released. Property and shops were at risk, and towards the end of May sympathy for the “admirable youth” shifted towards revulsion. Thus it was that de Gaulle and Pompidou returned from their leisurely travels in the east to a swiftly worsening crisis. But still the government did virtually nothing to reverse the slide into chaos. During past moments of crisis, de Gaulle had told the nation that it could choose between him and chaos. Now, with growing unease, the French noted they still had him—yet they also had chaos. Paris was alive with rumours, but the most disturbing of these—in the last turbulent week of May—was that he had bolted. It looked like a repeat of what he had done in 1946, when, disgusted by French party politics, he had retreated to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, to (as he put it) son village et son chagrin.

The truth was that, in what seemed like panic, and without telling his Prime Minister, on Wednesday 29 May de Gaulle had indeed flown mysteriously out of Paris, eastwards. On learning of his departure, Pompidou at first believed that the General was following in the footsteps of Louis-Philippe. In fact he had headed for Baden-Baden—to get the support of General Massu and the French army in Germany—but he had departed in deep pessimism and with serious thoughts of resigning. He told Massu, “I cannot fight against apathy, against the desire of a whole people to let itself break apart.” But the ever dependable Massu, reincarnation of a Napoleonic grognard, assured de Gaulle that the army would remain loyal, whatever. The deal was that de Gaulle would amnesty distinguished soldiers like Challe and Salan, currently languishing in jail for their roles in the 1961 Putsch in Algiers, so that the army could be rehabilitated.

The following day de Gaulle returned to Paris, walking tall once more, to make the last powerful radio appeal of his career. A tremendous rallying cry, it came only just in time. The students were about to receive their first martyr, an innocent passer-by called Philippe Mathérion, killed by shrapnel from a CRS stun-grenade, but whose staunchly Gaullist parents managed to keep his death secret for long enough. A killing was possibly all that Paris needed to push her over the brink of revolution. Using crude barrack-room language the President dismissed the students as chie-en-lits (shit-abeds), while in uncompromising terms he accused the Communists of seeking “an international autocracy.” As Raymond Aron saw it, “One fighting speech from an old man of seventy-eight, and the people of France rediscovered the sense of reality, petrol pumps and holidays.” It was to be the last time the old master of language and persuasion would be able to deploy his magic, the last time he would be able to intervene to save his country. But it worked.

That very same evening the Champs-Elysées filled with 100,000 pro-Gaullist counter-demonstrators, a sea of blue-white-red tricolores protesting against the red of anarchy and Communism, assembled with a spontaneity as remarkable as that with which les événements had broken out in the first place. The CRS emerged from their sinister black buses to clear the Sorbonne. There was one more nasty sideshow in the east end of Paris, where up at Belleville a savage fracas took place between Jews and Muslim migrant workers, apparently sparked partly by the Sorbonne revolt and partly by the first anniversary of Israel’s Six-Day War of 1967. Several were killed and fifty shops burned and looted. But by the beginning of June order had been restored, the strikes and stoppages ended.