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
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.
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.”