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.