1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  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 of
ten

  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.”