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 a
nd 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.
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