1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  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 bac
kgrounds 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 enragés realized, 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.