CHAPTER 12
A man is not either stupid or intelligent, he is either free or not free.
—Written on a wall of the Faculté de Médecine,Paris, May 1968
To be free in 1968 is to take part.
—On a stairwell in the school of Science Politique,Paris, May 1968
Certain French students, having found out that students in other countries have shaken up and smashed everything, want to do the same.
—ALAIN PEYREFITTE, French minister of education,explaining events, May 4, 1968
AS SPRING CAME to rainy Paris, France’s leader, the seventy-eight-year-old general, a man of the nineteenth century, with his near absolute power, ruling under the constitution he had written himself ten years earlier, promised stability, and delivered it.
The not quite octogenarian, not quite king, entertained fantasies of monarchy, in fact invited the pretender to the French throne, Henri Comte de Paris, to his palace for talks from time to time—the bethroned president with no crown playing host to the king with no throne. While de Gaulle had little tolerance for opposition, he acted as though he had moved beyond politics and its constant search for supporters to a kind of inevitable permanence. In 1966, ensconced in his palace’s regal Salles des Fêtes, he was asked about his health and answered, “It is quite good—but don’t worry, I shall die sometime.”
On March 15, 1968, while Germany, Italy, Spain, the United States, and much of the world was exploding, Le Monde journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté wrote a now famous editorial in which he said, “France is bored.” Around this same time, de Gaulle was smugly declaring, “France is in a satisfactory situation, whereas the Germans are having their political difficulties, the Belgians their language problems, and the British their financial and economic crisis.” He continually emphasized that the French should be pleased with this dull peace that he had given them.
While de Gaulle infuriated the rest of the world, a poll released in early March by the conservative French newspaper Le Figaro showed that 61 percent of the French approved of his foreign policy, whereas only 13 percent disapproved. Of course, disapproving of de Gaulle could be complicated in France, as François Fontievielle-Alquier, a respected journalist, found out when he was brought to court in March 1968 on an eighty-seven-year-old law against criticizing the president. Prosecutors cited twelve passages in his new book, Re-Learn Disrespect, that fell under “attacks on the honor” of the head of state. The law passed on July 29, 1881, provided for prison sentences up to three years or fines from 100 to 300,000 francs ($20 to $60,000 at 1968 exchange rates) for “offenses” in the form of “speeches, shouts, threats uttered in public places, writings, articles in the press.”
This was the three-hundredth time the law had been invoked since de Gaulle became president. In one case a man was fined 500 francs for shouting, “Retire!” as de Gaulle’s car passed.
If the French said they were pleased with de Gaulle’s foreign policy, almost no one else was. His peculiar brand of nationalism seemed to threaten most international organizations. The year 1967 had been particularly difficult, or at least a year in which he had been particularly difficult. He withdrew French forces from NATO, a formerly French-based organization, and threatened the survival of the European Common Market when for the second time he blocked British entry to the group. His famous statement after the Six Day War about Jews being a “domineering” people alienated French and American Jews and Gentiles. He even alienated Canadians by endorsing Québécois separatism from the town hall balcony in Montreal while on a state visit to Canada.
“It is clear to everyone that in de Gaulle the United States is dealing with an ungrateful four-flusher whose hand should have been called years ago,” Gordon McLendon of Dallas said on his eight radio stations. Throughout the United States there were calls for boycotting French products. When a Gallup poll asked Americans to rate which countries they liked, France was near the bottom of the list, beating only Egypt, Russia, North Vietnam, Cuba, and the People’s Republic of China. In a poll in which the British were asked to pick the most villainous man of the twentieth century, Hitler came in first but was followed by Charles de Gaulle, who beat out Stalin. In fourth place was British prime minister Harold Wilson. The usually good-humored West German foreign minister, Willy Brandt, said in early February that de Gaulle was “obsessed with power,” though he was quickly forced to apologize for the remark.
Nor did all criticism come from outside of France, despite de Gaulle’s tendency to prosecute. French of the next generation, the generation of John Kennedy, who should have been taking over, were anxious for their turn. This included fifty-two-year-old socialist François Mitterrand, who was still in line behind sixty-one-year-old Pierre Mendès-France, the leftist former head of government who had earned the contempt of the Right when he withdrew the French military from France’s Vietnam war. But there were also new faces. While America’s New Left was reading translations of Camus, Fanon, and Debray, France also produced a book for the establishment. A 1967 bestseller in France, Le Défi Américain by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the publisher of the slightly left-of-center weekly newsmagazine L’Express, was translated into English and in 1968 became an American bestseller known as The American Challenge. Servan-Schreiber looked to a post–de Gaulle era and his ambitions for himself in that world. His one run for elected office in 1962, a campaign for a National Assembly seat, was disastrous. But if political careers are launched with books, this one had a rare success. In France in its first three months it broke all postwar sales records. Servan-Schreiber’s thesis was that in the next thirty years the United States would become so dominant that Europe would be little more than a colony. The European Common Market, despite the fact that on July 1, 1968, customs between member countries would cease, was failing to move forward fast enough and would disintegrate from lack of momentum.
The message of this book, often quoted in 1968 by European diplomats and entrepreneurs, was that Europe would have to become like America or would be eaten up by it. American companies, with $14 billion invested in Europe, were taking over. He warned that in the next thirty years they would all be living in what was called “the post-industrial society.” He added, “We should remember this term, for it defines our future.” Among the other prescient predictions: “Time and space will no longer be a problem in communications” and “The gap between high and low salaries in the post-industrial society will be considerably stronger than today.” But he also endorsed the widespread belief in 1968 that by the end of the century Americans would be awash in leisure time. In thirty years, Servan-Schreiber predicted, “America will be a post-industrial society with a per capita income of $7,500. There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation.”
He quotes a White House expert predicting, “Well before 1980, computers will be small, powerful, and inexpensive. Computing power will be available to anyone who needs it, or wants it, or can use it. In many cases the user will have a small personal console connected to a large, central computing facility where enormous electronic memories will store all aspects of knowledge.”
The book was a warning: “America today still resembles Europe—with a fifteen-year head start. She belongs to the same industrial society. But in 1980 the United States will have entered another world, and if we fail to catch up, the Americans will have a monopoly on know-how, science, and power.”
Servan-Schreiber foresaw, though his timetable was a little fast, the dangers of America as a singular superpower. “If Europe, like the Soviet Union, is forced out of the running, the United States will stand alone in its futuristic world. This would be unacceptable for Europe, dangerous for America and disastrous for the world. . . . A nation holding a monopoly of power would look on imperialism as a kind of duty, and would take its own success as proof that the rest of the world should follow its example.”
To Servan-Schreiber there was little time and one major obstacle in the path of France’s and Europe’s modernization: a septuagenarian nineteenth-century general. “De Gaulle is from another time, another generation,” said the forty-four-year-old editor who had flown a fighter for Free France during World War II. “He is irrational in a time that cries for rationality.” Even the General’s favorite pose, of the World War II hero, was wearing thin. Servan-Schreiber said, “I disapprove of heroes. Children who worship Batman grow up to vote for heroes. I hope that after de Gaulle the Europeans will be sick of heroes.”
Servan-Schreiber represented a middle generation of Frenchmen, tired of the elderly de Gaulle but distrustful of the new youth culture. “I want my sons to grow up to be citizens of something that is important. I don’t want them to be second class. A twenty-five-year-old with nothing to be proud of does stupid things like becoming a hippie or going to Bolivia to fight with the guerrillas or putting up a Che Guevara poster on his wall.” Bored and suffocating France had two generation gaps: one between the World War II generation and their children, and the other between General de Gaulle and most of France.
De Gaulle’s ten-year-old Fifth Republic and the protest movement that was about to consume the society where nothing was happening, both had their roots in Algerian independence. The French colony of Algeria, home to de Gaulle’s Free French government-in-exile for a time during the war, began demanding its independence as soon as the war ended. It was the struggle of Algeria that inspired the writing of Frantz Fanon and greatly shaped the anti-imperialist movement of the 1960s. Mendès-France, who decolonized Indochina and Tunisia, could not get the political muscle to let go of Algeria. Although almost constant local resistance continued from the moment France took over in 1848, a million Frenchmen lived there, many for generations, and the French considered Algeria to be theirs. The French army, humiliated by the Germans and then humiliated by the Vietnamese, felt Algeria to be their final and non-negotiable stand.
At this point France was supposed to have been through with de Gaulle. After World War II he had considered it his mission to “save” France from the Left. In order to do this, he fostered the myth of the brave France resisting the Nazi occupier. In reality the bulk of the French resistance had been communist, and remembering this, a great many French were inclined to vote communist. De Gaulle offered an alternative and continued insisting for the rest of his life that he was the only alternative to a communist-run France. In the late 1940s the French had decided to take that chance and drove him from power. Though he managed to challenge the socialist governments with a contentious opposition, by 1955, at age sixty-five, he had officially retired from politics, ending a distinguished career.
But in 1958 plots and counterplots were whispered in France and Algeria, and France was faced with the real possibility that the socialist government would be overthrown by a right-wing military coup. The army, commanded in Algeria by General Raoul Salan, would not back a French government that would let go of Algeria, and the socialists could not be trusted. How much de Gaulle was behind all of this plotting remains a mystery. A number of his known associates were clearly involved, but de Gaulle managed to stay removed from the intrigue. As head of one of several French factions during World War II, he had become skilled at this kind of international maneuvering. Now the retired general simply let it be known that if France were to need him, he would be available. There was enough suspicion of de Gaulle that the legislature openly questioned him on whether his intentions were democratic. “Do you think that, at the age of sixty-seven, I am going to begin a career as a dictator?” de Gaulle responded.
Even when the government had decided to step down and turn over the reins to the General, it was difficult to convince the National Assembly, the powerful lower house of legislature, to approve the deal. André Le Troquer, the socialist president of the National Assembly, would not accept de Gaulle’s terms—adjournment of the parliament and the writing of a new constitution—and instead demanded that the General appear before the assembly. De Gaulle refused, replying, “I shall have nothing else to do but to leave you to have it out with the parachutists and return to the seclusion of my home to shut myself up with grief.” With that he returned to his retirement home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. But it was clear that only a de Gaulle government could prevent a military coup attempt. The legislators agreed to his terms, including the power to write a new constitution.
France had turned to him to end the Algerian crisis, not to reform the French state. Few modern monarchs and no democratic heads of state have enjoyed the degree of absolute power that de Gaulle granted by constitution to the president of the Fifth Republic, who, for the foreseeable future, would be himself. The president has the right to override parliament either by calling for a referendum or by dissolving parliament. The president also sets the agenda for the legislature, decides what bills are to be discussed and what version of them. He can block proposals to reduce taxes or increase spending. If a budget is not passed in seventy days, the president has the right to decree one.
On September 4, 1958, the General had officially launched his new constitution, standing in front of an enormous twelve-foot-high V. It was the Roman numeral five for the Fifth Republic that he was launching, but it was also the old World War II symbol for victory. De Gaulle never missed a chance to refer to his favorite myth, that he had single-handedly saved France from the fascists. Of course, to a new gen-eration the V was the peace symbol, which stood for nuclear disarmament. De Gaulle, dreaming of a French hydrogen bomb, didn’t know about antinuclear youth, nor did he want to know about the young people on the streets of Paris protesting his constitution with signs denouncing it as “fascism.” The police attacked the youths, who fought off several police assaults by erecting makeshift barricades.
But one of the reasons de Gaulle could step into office on his terms was that he was walking into a situation few would want, one even worse than that in which Lyndon Johnson would find himself in 1968. France was in the midst of a bitter and hated colonial war. The torture and other atrocities with which the ruthless and determined independence movement was fought tarnished the reputation of France, a nation still struggling to recover its good name from German occupation. In 1968 Lyndon Johnson knew that if he chose to end the Vietnam War, the war’s supporters and the military would accept his decision. But for de Gaulle to end the Algerian war, he would have to face a possible rebellion. Not ending it could produce a similar result.
France had a growing antiwar movement capable of mounting sizable demonstrations, many of which met with brutal police response. A wide range of French people opposed the war, including some veterans. Servan-Schreiber was an outspoken opponent of the Algerian war. After serving there, he wrote a book, Lieutenant in Algeria, for which he was unsuccessfully court-martialed.
Alain Geismar, a French Jew, was nineteen years old when de Gaulle came to power. His father had died fighting the Germans, and his grandfather had been deported to a concentration camp. He had spent the first years of his life in hiding in France. He was shaped by these experiences. “During the Algerian war I found a number of Nazi characteristics in the army of my country,” he recently said. “It was a much smaller scale. There was not mass genocide. But there was torture and there were ‘regroupment’ camps. In 1945 we had been told that it was over. But in 1956 I found that it was not over.”
The Algerian war helped radicalize French youth. In 1960, during the height of the Algerian protest movement, leftist students took over the student organizations that had been dominated for many years by right-wing students. Geismar became active in protesting the Algerian war and was one of the organizers of an October 1961 demonstration in Paris. The police opened fire on Algerian demonstrators. “I saw them shooting Algerians,” said Geismar. Afterward bodies were found in the Seine, though it was never determined how many were killed. The incident was not discussed openly in France until the 1990s.
In 1962 de Gaulle finally succeeded in ending the Algerian war. Algeria became independent, and France entered one of its few periods of peace and stability in the twentieth century. In 1963 the French sixties began when Europe 1, a popular radio station, announced a free concert in Paris’s Place de la Nation and, to everyone’s surprise, thousands of young people showed up. Both records and live music, primarily American and British, played continually for most of the night. France was used to its July 14 balls in which people danced to songs like “Sur Les Ponts de Paris,” and “La Vie en Rose,” played on an accordion, but an all-night free rock concert in the open air was something very new.
France started experiencing considerable economic growth in the sixties. Between 1963 and 1969 real wages grew by 3.6 percent—enough growth to turn France into a consumer society. Suddenly Frenchmen had automobiles. Indoor toilets were being installed, although by 1968 still only half of Paris homes had them. François Mitterrand spoke of “the consumer society that eats itself.”
The French were also buying televisions and telephones, though the installation service on phones was slow and France still lagged behind most of Europe in televisions. Neither of the channels, with their government-managed offerings, was found very interesting, though both had the advantage of being free of commercials. But the French were beginning to learn of the power of television. The first station, black and white only, did not begin broadcasting until 1957. The civil rights movement, the American war in Vietnam, and protests against that war were all seen in a large number of French living rooms where the French war in Indochina had never been seen. De Gaulle used this new tool, completely in his hands as president, fairly well, not only in controlling the coverage of his presidency, but in stage-managing and timing personal appearances. “De Gaulle is in love with television,” said Servan-Schreiber. “He understands the medium better than anyone else.” Owners of print media were furious that de Gaulle was threatening to allow commercials on television, which they saw as a ploy to drain advertising away from the print that could criticize him and into state-owned television.
In 1965 France had its first presidential election by direct ballot—presidents had been appointed by the elected majority in the old system. This first direct ballot contest was also the first television election and the first French election to be tracked by pollsters as well. De Gaulle, to avoid the appearance of complete unfairness, allowed each of the candidates two hours of time on his television channels in the last two weeks of the campaign. The effect of seeing François Mitterrand and Jean Lecanuet on television was tremendous. Most French people had never actually seen a presidential candidate in motion before, except for de Gaulle, who was always on television. The fact that Mitterrand and Lecanuet were on television at all gave them the stature of a de Gaulle. And it was difficult not to notice how young and vigorous the two seemed compared to the General. De Gaulle won the election, but only after being forced to a second-ballot runoff with Mitterrand to gain the required absolute majority. He was not the untouchable monarch he had thought.
In the mid-sixties, prices were rising in France and the government believed inflation threatened the economy. The sudden population growth from the immigration of about one million North Africans, mostly Christians and Jews, contributed to price increases. Unemployment also began to increase.
In 1967 the government decreed a series of measures aimed at redressing economic problems. But to the working class these measures seemed aimed at them. Wages were held down, and the workers’ contribution to Social Security was raised because of the added cost of bringing farmworkers under the system. On a rainy May 1, after fifteen years’ absence, the traditional leftist Communist Party–sponsored May Day demonstration at the Place de la Bastille, where workers with raised fists sang “The Internationale,” was again observed.
With a better standard of living, more French were getting higher education, but they were not happy in their crowded halls of learning. In 1966 students at the University of Strasbourg published a paper, “On the Poverty of Student Life,” which stated:
The student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the priest and the policeman. . . . Once upon a time, universities were respected: the student persists in the belief that he is lucky to be there. But he arrived too late. . . . A mechanically produced specialist is now the goal of the “educational system.” A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking.
In 1958 there were 175,000 university students in France, and by 1968 there were 530,000—twice as many students as Britain had. But France granted only half as many degrees as British universities, because three-fourths of French students failed their courses and left. This was the reason de Gaulle dismissed the student movement at first; he assumed the students involved were simply afraid of facing exams. The universities were horribly overcrowded, with 160,000 students in the University of Paris system alone, which was why, once they started demonstrating, student causes were able to attract such enormous numbers of marchers. Added to these ranks were high school students in the college preparatory lycées, who had the same issues as the university students.
At most of the universities, and especially Nanterre, the physical campus was not a comfortable place to live and study. But also, even more than the American Ivy League, the French university was an absolute autocracy. At a time when the future of France, the future of Europe, new sciences and new technologies, provoked far-reaching debates—which explained the popularity of books such as The American Challenge—students had no opportunity to talk about any of this. There was no dialogue, inside or outside classrooms, between professors and students. Decisions were handed down without any discussion. In May the walls of the Sorbonne were scrawled with the message “Professors, you are as old as your culture.” To laugh about the age of French culture was a new kind of iconoclasm.
But the teachers and professor were not given a voice, either. Alain Geismar, who had become a young physics professor and director of le Syndicat National de l’Enseignement Supérieur, the National Union of Professors of Higher Education, the SNE.Sup., recently said, “The young generation had a sense that they did not want to live like the generations before. I reproached the generation of the Liberation for having missed the opportunity to modernize society. They just wanted to put things back the way they were. De Gaulle had done the resistance, he had done the liberation, he had ended the war in Algeria, and he did not understand anything about the young people. He was a great man who had grown too old.”
In chemistry it is found that some very stable elements placed in proximity to other seemingly moribund elements can spontaneously produce explosions. Hidden within this bored, overstuffed, complacent society were barely noticeable elements—a radicalized youth with a hopelessly old-fashioned geriatric leader, overpopulated universities, angry workers, a sudden consumerism enthralling some and sickening others, sharp differences between generations, and perhaps even boredom itself—that when put together could be explosive.
It began with sex, back in January when France was still bored. Students at the University of Nanterre, an exceptionally ugly four-year-old concrete campus where eleven thousand students were crowded on the edge of Paris, raised the issue of coeducational dormitories, and the government ignored them. François Missoffe, the government minister of youth, was visiting Nanterre when a small red-haired student asked him for a light for his cigarette. Cigarette lit and smoke exhaled, the student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the more outspoken and articulate students at Nanterre, said, “Monsieur le Ministre, I read your white paper on youth. In three hundred pages there is not one word on the sexual issues of youth.”
The minister responded that he was there to promote sports programs, which was something he suggested the students should take more advantage of. To his surprise, this did not brush off the redheaded student, who instead repeated his question about sexual issues.
“No wonder, with a face like yours, you have these problems: I suggest you take a dip in the pool.”
“Now there’s an answer,” said the student, “worthy of Hitler’s youth minister.”
That exchange alone made Cohn-Bendit known to almost every student in Paris simply as “Dany.” The brief nondialogue between student and government was a formula that was to be repeated over and over on an ever escalating scale until all of France was shut down and Dany was famous around the world as Dany le Rouge—Dany the Red.
He had been born in newly liberated France in 1945 to German Jewish parents who had survived the war hiding in France. His father had fled when Hitler came to power, because he was not only a Jew, but an attorney known for defending leftist dissidents. After the war he returned to his work in Frankfurt. Being a surviving Jew returning to Germany was a strange and isolating experience. Dany stayed for a while in France with his mother, an educator. But they were not particularly comfortable in France, with its history of collaboration and deportations. Every few years they switched from one country to the other. Dany was brought up to identify with the radical Left. He has said that the first time he felt Jewish was in 1953, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of spying for the Soviets, were executed in the United States. In Germany he and his brother would guess the age of passersby and speculate on what they had been doing during the war. He was horrified when he visited his dying father in a deluxe sanitarium and heard businessmen loudly clicking heels in the old German style of obedience.
In 1964 he went to America, the dreaded land of the Rosenberg execution, and attended a memorial service in New York City for SNCC volunteers killed in Mississippi. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had both been from New York City. “I was very impressed with the atmosphere,” Cohn-Bendit said. “These two white Jewish guys who went to Mississippi. How dangerous. That was something different than what I was prepared to do.”
It was in March 1968, while France was still bored, that Nanterre began to heat up. According to the Ministry of the Interior, small extremist groups were agitating in order to imitate radical students in Berlin, Rome, and Berkeley. This point of view was often repeated by Alain Peyrefitte, the minister of education. There was an element of truth to this. The minuscule Trotskyite group JCR, la Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire—the Revolutionary Communist Youth—had become suddenly influential, and its twenty-seven-year-old leader, Alain Krivine, had not only worked with Rudi Dutschke in Berlin, but had also closely followed events on American campuses through the American Socialist Workers Party, a fellow Trotskyite organization.
It is significant that what was to emerge as the most important group was the least ideological. It was called le Mouvement du 22 Mars—the March 22 Movement. Its leader was Cohn-Bendit. Its cause was unclear. As in other countries, the people who emerged in France in 1968 were not joiners, were suspicious of political organizations on the Right and the Left, and tried to live by an antiauthoritarian code that rejected leadership. They rejected the cold war, which had always said that everyone had to choose one or the other, and they rejected de Gaulle, who always said “Stay with me or the communists will come to power.” They agreed with what had been expressed in the Port Huron Statement: They wanted alternatives to the cold war choices that were always presented to them.
“The Liberation missed a great opportunity, and soon the cold war froze everything,” said Geismar. “You had to choose your side. 1968 was an attempt to create a space between those sides, which is why the communists opposed these 1968 movements.”
In the mid-sixties the Paris métro stop at Nanterre still said “Nanterre à la folie,” which indicated that Nanterre was the country home of a Paris aristocrat. From that beginning it had gone on to become a comfortable middle-class Parisian suburb with houses on cobblestone streets. Then factories moved in, and in the middle of the factories, almost indistinguishable from them, the University of Nanterre was built, surrounded by the barrackslike homes of North African and Portuguese immigrants. The sterile dormitory rooms had large glass windows that, like a good window at Columbia, looked out on the slum. While Sorbonne students lived and studied in the heart of the beautiful city, in a medieval neighborhood of monuments, cafés, and restaurants, Nanterre students had no cafés and nowhere to go. Their only space was a dormitory room in which they were not allowed to change furniture, cook, or discuss politics, and nonstudents were not allowed. Women were allowed in men’s rooms only with parental permission or if they were over twenty-one. Men were never allowed in women’s rooms. Habitually, women visited men’s rooms by sneaking underneath a counter.
Nanterre was supposed to be one of the more progressive schools, where students were encouraged to experiment. But in reality the autocratic university system made reform no more possible at Nanterre than at any other university. The only difference was that at Nanterre heightened expectations made for a particularly disappointed and embittered student body. Attempts to reform the university in 1967 further frustrated students, leading a few with political activist backgrounds to form a group called the enragés—a name that originated in the French Revolution and literally means “angry people.” There were only about twenty-five enragés, but they forced lectures to stop in the name of Che Guevara and created whatever mayhem they could dream up. Like Tom Hayden, they believed that the problems of the universities could be solved not by reforming the school system, but only by completely changing society.
They were not a very well liked group. How twenty-five mischief makers were turned into a force of one thousand during the course of the month of March, how this in a matter of weeks became fifty thousand and by the end of May ten million, paralyzing the entire nation, is a testament to the consequences of overzealous government. Had the government from the beginning ignored the enragés, France might never have had a 1968. Looking back, Cohn-Bendit shook his head. “If the government had not thought they had to crush the movement,” he asserted, “we never would have reached this point of a fight for liberation. There would have been a few demonstrations and that would have been it.”
On January 26, 1968, the police came on campus to break up a rally of perhaps three dozen enragés. The students and faculty were angered by the presence of police on the campus. As other protesters around the world would discover that year, the enragésrealized, seeing this anger, that they only needed to start a demonstration and the government and their police force would do the rest. By March they were doing this regularly. The dean of Nanterre helped build the tension by refusing to provide larger spaces as their numbers grew. He also further provoked the students by refusing to speak up for four Nanterre students arrested at an anti–Vietnam War demonstration near the Paris Opéra. On March 22, with now about five hundred militants, the enragés in a sudden inspiration borrowed an American tactic and siezed the forbidden eighth-floor faculty lounge, occupying it all night in the name of freedom of expression. The March 22 Movement was born.
On April 17 Laurent Schwartz, one of the world’s most renowned physicists, went to Nanterre on behalf of the government to explain its 1967 university reform program. The students shouted him down, declaring that he was an antirevolutionary and should not be allowed to speak. Suddenly Cohn-Bendit, the affable redhead with a smile so bright it was featured on revolutionary posters, took a microphone. “Let him speak,” said Cohn-Bendit. “And afterwards, if we think he is rotten, we will say, ‘Monsieur Laurent Schwartz, we think you are rotten.’ ”
It was a typical Cohn-Bendit moment, spoken with charm and a minimum of authority at exactly the right moment.
The critical day that would escalate everything, May 2, was one of pure farce. The University of Paris decided on the exact same mistaken tactic as the administrators at Columbia, attempting to deflate the student movement by disciplining its leader. Cohn-Bendit was ordered to appear before a disciplinary board in Paris. This angered the Nanterre students, who decided they would disrupt classes by protesting with loudspeakers. But they had no such equipment, and Pierre Grappin, the increasingly helpless and frustrated dean of Nanterre, refused to give them access to the school’s loudspeakers. The students, believing themselves to be “direct action revolutionaries,” a concept popularized by Debray among others, simply went into his office and took the equipment. The dean, seeing the opportunity for some direct action of his own, locked his office doors, incarcerating the students inside. But it was a short-lived triumph because the windows were open and the students escaped with the equipment.
De Gaulle was growing anxious about law and order on the streets of Paris because the Paris peace talks on resolving the Vietnam conflict were due to begin. He had ordered extra contingents of the special antiriot police, the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the CRS, to Paris. At the request of Grappin, the Ministry of Education shut down Nanterre, an extraordinary decision that shifted the action from an obscure suburb to the heart of Paris.
At the time, the city was glutted with international news media trying to cover the Vietnam peace talks, whose delegations, after agreeing on where and with whom, settled down on May 14 to begin arguing about how many doors to the main room—North Vietnam insisted on two—and to continue their discussion on whether to have a square, rectangular, round, or diamond-shaped table—each option affecting the seating arrangements. But just the fact that they were talking sent the markets, especially the New York Stock Exchange, on a sharp rise.
The Nanterre crowd moved into Paris, to the Sorbonne. Cohn-Bendit had found a megaphone, which was to become his trademark. But the rector of the Sorbonne, against the advice of the police chief, had gotten the police to enter the Sorbonne and arrest students. A police invasion of the Sorbonne was without precedent. Also without precedent was the administration’s reaction to the outrage of the students: They closed the Sorbonne for the first time in its seven-hundred-year history. Six hundred students were arrested, including Cohn-Bendit and Jacques Sauvageot, the head of the national student union. Alain Geismar called for a nationwide teachers strike on Monday. This was when de Gaulle, himself enraged, came up with the theory that the movement was led by second-rate students who wanted the schools closed because they couldn’t pass their exams. “These are the ones who follow Cohn-Bendit. These abusive students terrorize the others: one percent of enragés to 99 percent sheep who are waiting for the government to protect them.” An informal leadership was established: Cohn-Bendit, Sauvageot, Geismar. The three seemed inseparable. But they later said that they had had no plan and not even a common ideology. “We had nothing in common,” said Cohn-Bendit. “They had more in common with each other. I had nothing in common with them, not the same history. I was a libertarian; they were from a socialist tradition.”
The official communists, the French Communist Party, were against all of them from the start. “These false revolutionaries ought to be unmasked,” Communist Party chief Georges Marchais wrote. But Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous French communist, sided with the students, giving them a mature, calm, and respected voice at critical junctures. The French government had thought of arresting him, but according to legend, de Gaulle rejected the idea, saying, “One doesn’t arrest Voltaire.”
Cohn-Bendit, unlike his co-leaders, had little discernible ideology, which may be why he was the most popular. His appeal was personal. A stocky little man who smiled unexpectedly and broadly, his red hair sticking out in unkempt tufts, he was at ease with himself. He liked to have fun and had a light sense of humor, but when he spoke, that humor had a sharp, ironic edge and his voice grew as he became impassioned. In a political culture given to pompous rhetoric, he seemed natural, sincere, and fervent.
The government made much of Cohn-Bendit’s German nationality. The Germans were the most noted student radicals of Europe. Cohn-Bendit had had some contact with them, as had other French radicals. He had gone to their February anti-Vietnam rally, and he had even met Rudi Dutschke. In May, when he became widely known as Dany the Red, it was a reference not only to his hair color, but to Dutschke, who was known as Rudi the Red.
But Dany did not see himself as a Rudi, nor was the March 22 Movement anything like the German SDS, which was a highly motivated and organized national movement. The March 22 Movement had no agenda or organization. In 1968 nobody wanted to be called a leader, but Cohn-Bendit made a distinction. “SDS had antiauthoritarian rhetoric,” he said. “But in truth Dutschke was the leader. I was a type of leader. I slowly stepped in because I was saying something at the right moment and the right place.”
He was not unlike other 1968 leaders, like Mark Rudd, who said, “I was the leader because I was willing to take the heat.”
To Cohn-Bendit there was a connection among the movements of the world, among the student leaders, but it did not come from meetings or exchanges of ideas. Most of these leaders had never met. “We met through television,” he said, “through seeing pictures of each other on television. We were the first television generation. We did not have relationships with each other, but we had a relationship with what our imagination produced from seeing the pictures of each other on television.”
De Gaulle by late May became convinced that there was an international plot against France, and there were rumors of foreign financing. The CIA and the Israelis were among the suspects. De Gaulle said, “It is not possible that all of these movements could be unleashed at the same time, in so many different countries, without orchestration.”
But there was no orchestration, not internationally, not even within France. Cohn-Bendit said of the events of May, “It all happened so fast. I didn’t have time to work. The situation provoked decisions.” All Dany the Red or the thousands of others on the streets of Paris were doing was reacting spontaneously to events. Geismar, Cohn-Bendit, Krivine—all the leading figures as well as rank-and-file participants have remained consistent on this point. There were no plans.
The way things were happening recalled the early 1960s situationist movement that began in poetry and turned political. They called themselves situationists, after the belief that one had only to create a situation and step back and things would happen. This was the situationists’ dream come true.
Cohn-Bendit admitted, “I was surprised by the intensity of the student movement. It was absolutely exciting. Every day it changed. Our personas changed. There I was, the leader of a little university, and in three weeks I was famous all over the world as Dany the Red.”
Every day the movement got bigger and bigger by an exact formula. Each time the government took a punitive step—arresting students, closing schools—it added to the list of student demands and the number of angry students. Each time the students demonstrated more people came, which brought more police, which created more anger and ever larger demonstrations. No one had any idea where it was going. Some of the more orthodox radicals, such as Geismar, were convinced that this was the beginning of a revolution that would change French or European society by pulling up the old ways by the roots. But Cohn-Bendit, with his big smile and easy manner, had no idea of the future. “Everyone asked me, ‘How will this end?’ ” Cohn-Bendit recalled. “And I would say, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
On Monday, May 6, one thousand students turned out to see Cohn-Bendit report to the disciplinary board at the Sorbonne. In almost equal numbers, a contingent of the CRS was present, wearing dark combat helmets, dark goggles, and the occasional long black trench coat and carrying large shields. When they attacked, nightsticks raised in the air, they looked like a menacing invasion by extraterrestrials.
Cohn-Bendit and several friends walked by them and through the crowd of a thousand demonstrators, who seemed to be parted by Dany’s smile. He waved and chatted, always a jovial radical.
The government, repeating its same mistakes, banned demonstrations for the day, which of course caused many. The students swept through the Latin Quarter and across the Seine and back and arrived hours later at the Sorbonne to confront the CRS. Finding an impressively large contingent waiting for them, they passed behind the school and started up the medieval rue Saint-Jacques when suddenly a club-whirling mass of CRS charged them. The demonstrators backed off in silence.
Between them and the CRS was an open no-man’s-land on the wide street, where about two dozen bodies of injured demonstrators lay writhing on the cobblestones. For a moment it seemed no one knew exactly what to do. Suddenly, consumed with anger, the demonstrators attacked the CRS, lining up, some digging up cobblestones, others passing them bucket-brigade style to the front line, where others ran into clouds of tear gas and threw the stones at the CRS. They then retreated, overturning cars to throw up barricades. Charge after charge by the incredulous CRS, who were used to ruling the streets, was driven back. Some of these determined and orderly combatants may have wanted for years to see these shock troops of the government forced into retreat.
François Cerutti, a draft dodger from the Algerian war who ran a popular leftist bookstore frequented by Cohn-Bendit and other radicals, said, “I was completely surprised by 1968. I had an idea of the revolutionary process, and it was nothing like this. I saw students building barricades, but these were people who knew nothing of revolution. They were high school kids. They were not even political. There was no organization, no planning.”
The fighting drew in thousands of demonstrators, and by the end of the day the government reported 600 wounded protesters and 345 wounded policemen. As another week wore on, there were more demonstrations, with protesters carrying the red flag of communism and the black flag of anarchy. Sixty barricades had been erected. Neighborhood people who viewed from their windows these young French people bravely fending off an army of police went to the barricades to give food, blankets, and supplies.
The prefect of police, Maurice Grimaud, was beginning to lose control of his force. Generally credited with trying to restrain the police, Grimaud had been appointed to his position six months earlier. He had never wanted the job. Having been director of national security for four years, he felt that he had done all the police work he wanted in his career. He was a bureaucrat, not a policeman. He saw his force completely shocked by the violence and insistence of these people. “Fights would begin which continued until very late at night,” said Grimaud, “and were especially severe, not just because of the number of demonstrators, but because of a degree of violence that was completely surprising and which astonished the police officials.” To the police, the 1968 movement had grown directly out of the anti–Vietnam War movement, which they had been confronting for a number of years. But this was different. Not only were the police becoming frustrated, they were getting hit on the head by cobblestones the size of large bricks. Every day they grew angrier and more brutal. Le Monde printed this protester’s description from May 12 in the Latin Quarter: “They lined us up back to the wall, hands over our heads. They started beating us. One by one we collapsed. But they continued brutally clubbing us. Finally they stopped and made us stand up. Many of us were covered with blood.” The more brutal the police became, the more people joined the demonstrators. However, unlike in the Algerian demonstrations earlier in the decade, the government was resolved not to open fire on these children of the middle class, so miraculously there were no deaths from night after night of furious combat.
Cohn-Bendit was as surprised as the police by the students. But he could not control it. “Violent revolt is in the French culture,” he said. “We tried to avoid an escalation. I thought that violence as a dynamic was destroying the movement. The message was getting lost in the violence, the way it always does. The way it did with the Black Panthers.” This was said by a mature Cohn-Bendit in reflection, but he was by no means a clear voice of nonviolence at the time. He admitted under police questioning to having been involved in the printing and distribution of a diagram explaining how to make a Molotov cocktail, but he explained to them that the flyers had been intended as a joke, which may have been true. 1968 humor.
French television, expressing the state’s viewpoint, emphasized the violence. But so did foreign television. Nothing made for better television than club-wielding CRS battling stone-throwing teenagers. Radio and print were drawn to the violence, too. Radio’s Europe 1 had its correspondent on the street breathlessly reporting, “It’s absolutely extraordinary what’s happening here, right in the middle of Saint Germain, three times the demonstrators charged and three times the CRS retreated, and now—this is extraordinary—live, the CRS is charging!” It was a tonic for a population that had grown bored. Today, most photographs and film footage available from that time are of the violence. To the average French participants, however, it wasn’t about violence at all, and that is not what they most remember. It was about a pastime for which the French have a rare passion: talking.
Eleanor Bakhtadze, who had been a student at Nanterre in 1968, said, “Paris was wonderful then. Everyone was talking.” Ask anyone in Paris with fond memories of the spring of 1968, and that is what they will say: People talked. They talked at the barricades, they talked in the métro; when they occupied the Odéon theater it became the site of a round-the-clock orgy of French verbiage. Someone would stand up and start discussing the true nature of revolution or the merits of Bakuninism and how anarchism applied to Che Guevara. Others would refute the thesis at length. Students on the street found themselves in conversation with teachers and professors for the first time. Workers and students talked to one another. For the first time in this rigid, formal, nineteenth-century society, everyone was talking to everyone. “Talk to your neighbor” were words written on the walls. Radith Geismar, then the wife of Alain, said, “The real sense of ’68 was a tremendous sense of liberation, of freedom, of people talking, talking on the street, in the universities, in theaters. It was much more than throwing stones. That was just a moment. A whole system of order and authority and tradition was swept aside. Much of the freedom of today began in ’68.”
In a frenzy of free expression, new proverbs were created and written or posted on walls and gates all over the city. A sampling from out of hundreds:
Dreams are reality
The walls are ears, your ears are walls
Exaggeration is the beginning of inventions
I don’t like to write on walls
The aggressor is not the person who revolts but the one who conforms
We want a music that is wild and ephemeral
I decree a permanent state of happiness
A barricade closes the street but opens a path
Politics happens on the street
The Sorbonne will be the Stalingrad of the Sorbonne
The tears of philistines are nectar of the Gods
Neither a robot nor a slave
Rape your alma mater
Imagination takes power
The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution. The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.
Sex is good, Mao has said, but not too often
I am a Marxist of the Groucho faction
There were occasional, though not many, references to other movements such as “Black Power gets the attention of whites” and “Long live the Warsaw students.”
Or one statement, written on a wall at Censier, may have expressed the feelings of many that spring: “I have something to say but I am not sure what.”
For those who had some additional thoughts, too wordy to write on a wall—though some did write whole paragraphs on buildings—if they had access to a mimeograph machine, they could print one-page tracts and pass them out at demonstrations. Once the symbol of radical politics, the mimeograph machine—with its awkward stencils to type up—had its last hurrah in 1968, soon to be taken over by photocopy machines. There were also the French movement newspapers—a large tabloid of a few pages called Action and another, smaller tabloid, Enragé, which for its special June 10 issue on Gaullism ran an illustration of a floor toilet, the kind most in use in France at the time, with the cross of Lorraine, the symbol of Gaullism, for the hole and the tricolored French flag for the toilet paper. Demonstrators quickly found themselves with piles of paper to read or browse.
The art schools, the École des Beaux-Arts and École des Arts Décoratif at the Sorbonne, established the atelier populaire, producing in May or June more than 350 different silk-screen poster designs a day with simple, powerful graphics and concise slogans in the same vein as those on the walls. It remains one of the most impressive outpourings of political graphic art ever accomplished. A fist with a club accompanies Louis XVI’s famous line often used to characterize Gaullist rule, “L’état, c’est moi”—I am the state. The shadow of de Gaulle gags a young man, with the caption “Be young and shut up.”
The police peeled the posters off the walls. Soon collectors were peeling them off the walls also, and pirated editions were being sold, which angered the art students. “The revolution is not for sale,” said Jean-Claude Leveque, one of the art students. The atelier turned down an offer of $70,000 from two major European publishers. In the fall both the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum in New York had shows of the atelier’s work. The Jewish Museum’s show was entitled Up Against the Wall, once more using the ubiquitous LeRoi Jones quote.
They not only talked, they sang. The students sang “The Internationale,” which is the anthem of world communism, the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, and many things they did not support. It would have seemed strange to the students of Poland and Czechoslovakia, but to the French this song—written in the 1871 Commune, an uprising against French authoritarianism—is simply a song of antiauthoritarian revolt. The Right retaliated by singing the French national anthem, “The Marseillaise.” Since these are two of the best anthems ever written, having huge crowds singing them through the wide boulevards of Paris was always stirring and having each group identify itself by anthem was ideal for television.
Cohn-Bendit, Sauvageot, and Geismar were invited for a debate with three television—and therefore state-employed—journalists. In a prerecorded message, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, an aging Gaullist with the practiced political skills and soon-this-could-all-be-mine hunger of a Hubert Humphrey, explained that viewers were about to meet three of the horrible revolutionaries. The journalists were intense, the frightening revolutionaries were relaxed and pleasant. Cohn-Bendit smiled.
“We destroyed them,” Cohn-Bendit said. “I started to realize that I had a special relation with the media. I am a media product. After that they just came after me. For a long time I was the media’s darling.”
Though state television did cover what was happening, there were glaring omissions, major events that did not make it on the air. But the journalists were growing tired of having their shows canceled, and caught up in the spirit of the time; on May 16, television reporters, cameramen, and drivers went out on strike.
By then something had happened that was only dreamed about in other student movements, which often failed because the students had no other groups joining them. On May 13, the anniversary of de Gaulle’s return to power, all of the major trade unions called for a general strike. France was shut down. There was no gasoline for cars, and Parisians walked the empty streets talking, debating, having a wonderful time that they would always remember.
In Morningside Heights, Columbia students were thrilled, as were students at the University of Warsaw, in Rome, in Berlin, at the Autonomous National University of Mexico, at Berkeley. The French had done it—students and workers hand in hand.
In reality, nothing of the sort had happened. Though some of the younger workers, in disagreement with the unions, were sympathetic to the students, their unions, especially those backed by the Communist Party, were not. Perhaps the students had created the opening for a long overdue explosion, because the workers too had become increasingly angry with the Gaullist regime. The workers did not want revolution, they did not care about the students’ issues, other than the overthrow of de Gaulle. They wanted better working conditions, higher salaries, more paid time off.
“The workers and the students were never together,” said Cohn-Bendit. “. . . They were two autonomous movements. The workers wanted a radical reform of the factories—wages, etc. Students wanted a radical change in life.”
De Gaulle, faced with a nationwide crisis, left for a four-day trip to Romania. It seemed strange that with Paris closed down by student revolutionaries, de Gaulle would disappear to Romania. Christian Fouchet, the minister of the interior, had questioned him on the choice, and de Gaulle had said that the Romanians would not understand if he canceled. Fouchet respectfully argued that the French would not understand if he didn’t. The next morning, as the ministers saw him off and his country’s situation was being reported on the front page of most major newspapers in the world, de Gaulle declared, “This trip is extremely important for French foreign policy and for détente in the world. As far as the student agitation is concerned, we aren’t going to accord it more importance than it deserves.”
De Gaulle tended to focus on the things he was good at. The student problem was something he did not understand at all. On the other hand, Romania had showed an increasing independence from the Soviet bloc, and de Gaulle, who dreamed of leading a third movement between the two superpowers—“a Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals,” he liked to say—was, for good reasons, very interested in Romania. Even with the nation in a crisis, foreign policy took precedent over domestic. While he was gone, Pompidou was in charge. The prime minister prided himself on his formidable negotiating skills, and he worked out an accord in which most of the student demands were met. He freed those who had been arrested, reopened the Sorbonne, and withdrew the police. This simply allowed the students to reoccupy the Sorbonne in the same way they had been holding the Odéon theater, with an endless French deluge of words. But while the students were having their wonderful debates, ten million workers were on strike, food shops were becoming empty, traffic had stopped, and garbage was piling up.
Both Pompidou and de Gaulle understood that the student problem was separate from the worker problem. To them, the student problem was a perplexing phenomenon, but the worker problem was familiar ground. The Gaullists completely abandoned their economic policy, offering the workers a 10 percent pay increase, a raise in the minimum wage, a decrease in work hours, and an increase in benefits. The minister of finance and architect of economic policy, Michel Debré, was not consulted on the offer and resigned when it was announced. But the strikers quickly rejected the offer anyway.
De Gaulle, looking older than he ever had before and completely confused, cut short his Romania trip and returned to France, saying unfathomably, “La réforme, oui. La chienlit, non.” Chienlit is an untranslatable French word referring to defecating on a bed—a big mess. This led to Beaux Arts posters with a silhouette of de Gaulle and the caption “La chienlit, c’est lui”—The chienlit, it is he.
The French government decided to deport Cohn-Bendit, who was a German national. Grimaud, the prefect of police, was not in favor of the move because he recognized that Cohn-Bendit was a stabilizing force among the students. It was late enough in the game that the government should have realized that their provocations kept the movement alive. But they did not see that.
Another issue was that the image of deporting a Jew back to Germany stirred ugly memories. During Nazi occupation, seventy-six thousand Jews had been delivered by the French police to the Germans for deportation to death camps. The France of the 1960s had still not made peace with its 1940s, was still caught between the facts of disgraceful collaboration and de Gaulle’s myth of heroic resistance. May 1968 was filled with Nazi imagery, most of it unfair. The CRS was called the CR SS. One Beaux Arts poster showed de Gaulle removing his mask and revealing himself to be Adolf Hitler, another showed the cross of Lorraine twisted into a swastika. On Cohn-Bendit’s expulsion, the slogan of the student movement instantly became “We Are All German Jews”—chanted even by Muslim students. The phrase appeared on posters for a demonstration protesting his deportation at which tens of thousands marched.
Throughout de Gaulle’s long career, at the most difficult moments, he had shown a knack for just the right move and just the right words. But this time he was silent. He disappeared completely from public view to his country home, where he wrote, “If the French don’t see where their own interests lie, too bad for them. The French are tired of a strong state. Basically this is it: The French remain by nature drawn to factionalism, argumentativeness, impotence. I tried to help them through this. . . . If I have failed, there is nothing more I can do. That’s just the way it is.”
At last, on May 24, le Grand Charles spoke. Looking tired and old and sounding uncertain, he called for a referendum on his continued leadership. No one wanted the referendum seen as an extralegal invention of the wily old general. While he spoke, rioting began anew in Paris and started up in several other major French cities. In Paris the students from the Latin Quarter had crossed the Seine and were attempting to set the stock exchange building, the Bourse, on fire.
In all the weeks of street violence in France, amazingly, only three people died. Two of them died that night, including one among the hundreds wounded in Paris and a police commissioner in Lyons. Later, a protester chased by the police would jump into the Seine and drown.
The referendum seemed impossible to hold and unwinnable if held. Once again de Gaulle himself seemed to vanish. Improbable as it was, the revolutionaries started to sense victory. At the very least, they were going to overthrow the government. It might already be gone. Both Mitterrand and Mendès-France made themselves available for a provisional government. Then it was discovered that de Gaulle had flown to Germany to the French military command there. Why he did this was uncertain, but many feared he was preparing to bring in the French army. When he returned to France he was the old de Gaulle—domineering and sure of himself, as he had once called Jews. The referendum was to be dropped, the National Assembly dissolved, and new legislative elections called. The nation, he contended, was on the edge of falling into a totalitarian communism, and he was the one alternative who could once again save France. The Gaullists organized a demonstration on the Champs-Élysées as a show of support. The public responded to rebuilding through fresh elections, to de Gaulle once again saving France from disaster. An estimated one million people showed up to march in support of de Gaulle’s call for an end to chaos. The marchers sang the national anthem and in between chanted slogans, among them “Send Cohn-Bendit to Dachau.”
“We are all Jews and Germans.” Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his famous smile. 1968 Paris student silk-screen poster.
(Galerie Beaubourg, Vence)
Cohn-Bendit had heard it before. When he had been arrested, a policeman had pointed a finger at him and said, “My little friend, you are going to pay. Too bad you didn’t die at Auschwitz with your parents because that would have spared us the trouble of what we are going to do today.”
His parents had not been at Auschwitz, but the fact that he was Jewish was never totally forgotten. Only within his own movement did he feel it had never been an issue. Of course, Geismar, Krivine, and so many others were Jewish. Marginal leftist movements in France were accustomed to sizable Jewish participation. A popular French joke asks the question: If the Maoists wanted to have a dialogue with the Trotskyites, what language would they speak? The answer: Yiddish.
The government finally came up with a package satisfying all labor demands, including a two-step 35 percent wage increase. The unions and workers took it happily. Only a handful of younger workers gave a second thought to abandoning the students.
But then de Gaulle did something odd and unexplained: He freed from prison fourteen members of the Secret Army Organization, the OAS, the fanatic group that had tried to stop Algerian independence by murdering numerous Algerians, French officers, and French officials. Some of these men, including Raoul Salan and Antoine Argoud, both French army officers, had been involved in numerous plots to assassinate de Gaulle between 1961 and 1964. Why were these men out? Had de Gaulle made some kind of deal in Germany to maintain the backing of the military? The answer has never been uncovered, but at the time of this uncelebrated tenth anniversary of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, his act reminded the French public of the clandestine deals with Salan and the Algerian officers that had brought him back to power in 1958.
Still, it seemed a great many French were even more suspicious of the alternatives on the Left. On June 23 the Gaullists won 43 percent of the vote, and after the second round a week later they won an absolute majority in the assembly. The Gaullists had outperformed their most optimistic predictions. The Left had lost half their assembly seats, and the students with their New Left remained, as before, unrepresented.
Demonstrations at Berkeley to support French students and oppose de Gaulle turned into two nights of rioting until police enforced a curfew and state of emergency on the entire city of Berkeley. Annette Giacometti, widow of the sculptor Alberto, stopped plans for an extensive retrospective of her husband’s work at Paris’s Orangerie in the fall. She said she was protesting “police repression of students and workers, expulsion of foreigners and foreign artists.” Several other artists also sent letters to the Ministry of Culture canceling shows.
Alain Krivine said, “De Gaulle was the smartest politician France ever produced. De Gaulle understood the communists. He understood Stalin. Mitterrand was a de Gaulle with little feet. Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand, Chirac—they are all little de Gaulles—they all try to copy him. In ’68 he knew the communists would accept having the elections. Not the referendum. The referendum was a little tactical error. No one wanted it. But once he proposed elections, it was over. He never understood the students, but in the end that wasn’t important. He saved the Right in 1945, and he could do it again in ’68.”
De Gaulle had shown that he was still a brilliant politician. But he would never again have the same prestige and would simply fade away. He later admitted, “Everything slipped through my fingers. I no longer had any hold over my own government.” His role as the enfant terrible of world affairs was greatly diminished by his domestic crisis. His dream of dictating solutions to everything from Vietnam to Quebec independence to the Middle East, once a bit overambitious, now appeared completely improbable. The foreign editor of Le Monde, André Fontaine, wrote that the General was “no longer in a position to give everyone advice.”
Never above spite, de Gaulle took his revenge on both the print media, which had been critical of him, and the state television, which had gone on strike. With increased support in the assembly, he decided to allow commercials on one of his two television stations. On October 1, before the evening news, viewers learned about a garlic cheese, a stretch-proof sweater, and the pleasures of powdered milk. At first, only two minutes a day of commercials would be allowed, always before the evening news, but gradually this was to be expanded. He also cut more than a third of the television news positions.
By late summer de Gaulle had found a way to disarm the next leftist uprising. As far back as the year 1185, the cobblestone pavement in the Latin Quarter had proved an effective weapon—at that time against royalists. In 1830 cobblestones were used again, and again in the revolution of 1848, and then by the Commune in 1871 when they first sang “The Internationale.” The students who hurled them in 1968 had learned their history. One of the Beaux Arts posters of 1968 showed a paving stone and was captioned “Under 21 years old, here is your ballot.” But this was to happen no more. In August de Gaulle ordered the cobblestone streets of the Latin Quarter paved over in asphalt.
On June 17 the last of the students who had been occupying the Sorbonne for more than a month left. They were faced with offers for book contracts. At least thirty-five books on the student uprising were signed up by the day the last rebel left the Sorbonne. Typically, the first one published was a collection of photographs of street violence. Cohn-Bendit had been right—when there is violence the message gets lost. But many other books followed, including books by and about Cohn-Bendit. In his book Le Gauchisme—Leftism—with the subtitle Remedy for the Senile Illness of Communism, he began with an apology: “This book has been written in five weeks. It has the blemishes of such speed, but the publisher had to get the book out before the market was completely flooded.” With typically edged Cohn-Bendit humor he also wrote,
In the market system, capitalists are ready to prepare their own deaths (as capitalists, naturally, and not as individuals) in divulging revolutionary ideas that could in the short term earn them money. For this, they pay us handsomely (50,000 DM in the account of Dany Cohn-Bendit before having written a single line), even though they know that this money will be used to make Molotov cocktails, because they believe that revolution is impossible. Here’s to their readers to fool them!
Revolution may be possible, but it didn’t happen in France in 1968. Classic Marxists insist that revolutionaries have to slowly build their bases and develop their ideology. None of this happened that year. There was simply an explosion against a suffocatingly stagnant society. The result was reform, not revolution. It was only the students who had wanted revolution. They had not sold the idea to the workers or the larger society, which, to paraphrase Camus’s comment in the early 1950s, so longed for peace that they were willing to accept inequities. The universities became slightly more democratic; teachers and students could talk. The society left the nineteenth century and entered the late twentieth century, but for Europe this turned out to be a time of tremendous materialism and little of the spiritualism for which the young students had hoped.
Cohn-Bendit thought he would be able to return to France in a few weeks, but it was ten years before he was allowed back in. “It saved me,” Cohn-Bendit said of his expulsion. “Becoming so famous so quickly, it is difficult to find yourself. In Germany I had to reconstruct myself.”
In September, while the Frankfurt Book Fair was honoring Léopold S. Senghor, president of Senegal, to the strings of a Mozart quartet inside a Frankfurt church, thousands were outside being pushed away by police water cannons while shouting, “Freidenspreis macht Senghor Weiss”—The freedom prize makes Senghor white, it whitewashes him. The students were protesting this peace award going to a leader whose regime was extremely repressive to students. While bottles and rocks flew and the police tried to contain the crowd, a small redheaded man, the reconstructed Dany the Red, leaped over the metal police barricades and was beaten a few times with a rubber truncheon on the way to being arrested.
When it was time for Cohn-Bendit to appear before a judge, he realized that by coincidence, it was the same week as the scheduled trial in Warsaw of the Polish student movement leaders Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski. Such things had been watched closely back in Paris, especially championed by Alain Krivine and the JCR, who would frequently chant in demonstrations, “Free Kuroń and Modzelewski.” Back in the days when police breaking onto a campus was unthinkable in France, the Trotskyites used to circulate this joke: Who are the best-educated police in the world? The answer: The Polish, because they are always going to the university.
When Cohn-Bendit went before the judge in a Frankfurt courtroom crowded with his young followers and the judge asked his name, Cohn-Bendit sensed that he had the moment and the audience. He answered in a clear, loud voice, “Kuroń and Modzelewski.”
“What?” said the judge. “Who?” he demanded, looking as if he were trying to decide if Cohn-Bendit was a lunatic.
“What?” muttered his young supporters. “Who? What did he say?”
Cohn-Bendit realized that no one in the courtroom, including the judge, knew who Kuroń and Modzelewski were. He had to explain that they were Polish dissidents, about the open letter and the student movement, and that their trial was this week. By the time it was all clear, the moment had been lost. Nothing kills drama like a thorough explanation, as Abbie Hoffman had pointed out.
“May ’68: the beginning of a long struggle.” 1968 Paris student silk-screen poster.
(Galerie Beaubourg, Vence)