Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (43 page)

Amazed by de Gaulle’s good fortune, and embarrassed by their failure, some members of the OAS came to suspect that this and other attacks had been orchestrated by secret-service agents with the aim of discrediting the OAS and turning the President into ‘a living miracle’. This also appeared to be the view of television commentators, according to Prime Minister Pompidou, who was told of their sarcastic reporting by a friend who owned a television set. How else, the journalists seemed to say, could one explain the rapid capture of the culprits, the self-extinguishing fuse, de Gaulle’s invincibility and all the other minor miracles?

No evidence of secret-service involvement has ever come to light, and even if it had done, it would only have enhanced de Gaulle’s reputation for extraordinary competence and guile. In all the emergencies he had faced in the last twenty years, he had never made a secret of the fact that it was sometimes necessary to deceive the electorate in the interests of the nation. Most of the electorate admired him for saying so. It was commonly believed that without a leader who knew how to fool his enemies, France could never survive in a world of treachery and violence.

F
OUR WEEKS AFTER
the outrage, on the evening of Thursday, 20 September, the funereal form of the living miracle flickered out at the passing traffic at the crossroads in Petit-Clamart. President de Gaulle had decided that the time had come to deliver an important message to the electorate. The irony was probably not lost on the owner of the recently repaired Ducretet-Thomson television showroom: historic broadcasts like this were always good for business.

President de Gaulle sat in the Salon Doré at the É lysée Palace. A cartoonist might have depicted him as a human lighthouse in a storm. His eyebrows plunged and soared like seagulls; his vast hands reached out as though to salvage that fragile infant, the French Republic. Behind him were massed the silent representatives of French culture in their leather bindings.

This bond which unites us is the source of the power that is vested in me, and of the responsibility that comes with that power…

In his apartment in the Rue Guynemer, François Mitterrand was listening to the broadcast with a mixture of rancour and admiration. De Gaulle delivered his address with impressive, agonizing slowness. His tone suggested long deliberation rather than a reaction to passing events. A wave of sympathy had followed the outrage, and de Gaulle was now on the highest pinnacle of his career since the Liberation. No one would accuse him of weakness if he decided to retire to the peace of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and to leave the Élysée to a younger, more vigorous man…

It was perhaps at this point that François Mitterrand found the title of his next book. It would be a searing indictment of Gaullist policies and practice, and of the ‘uncrowned dictator’ himself…

He would call his book ‘
Le Coup d’état permanent
’…

It was, one had to admit, a master stroke. The Senate and a broad coalition of
députés
were opposed to the institution of a ‘Bonapartist’ régime. Too much power would be vested in one man…But the voters, oblivious to the long-term consequences, would inevitably turn out to glorify the living miracle, just as their great-grandfathers had rushed to the ballot boxes to ratify the coup d’état of Napoleon III.

A month later, de Gaulle’s proposal was accepted by almost two-thirds of the electorate. The national elections that followed were a triumph for the Gaullists. There were also some small but significant victories for the anti-Gaullist coalition. In the Nièvre
département
, a man who, only three years before, had–for reasons that remained obscure–prostrated himself on a wet lawn in the Latin Quarter while a Norman peasant fired a machine-gun at his 403, regained his seat in the Assemblée Nationale. He would have to sit out the next few years on the opposition benches, enduring taunts and sly allusions to hired assassins and observatories. But even de Gaulle was not immortal. In five, ten or fifteen years, age would achieve what several thousand guns, bombs and hand-grenades had failed to do. De Gaulle would enter the realm of legend, and the skies over Paris would seem to darken with his death. Then, perhaps, in that twilight, the Fox would finally have his day.

I. A. i.

T
HE CAMPUS OF
Nanterre-Paris X had been built among shantytowns beyond the western edge of the city, on seventy-nine acres of former
terrain militaire
. The origin of the name ‘Nanterre’ is Nempthor, from Nemptodurum, meaning ‘hill-fort of the sacred wood or clearing’. The earth consisted mainly of compacted garbage and builders’ rubble. Cars circulated easily, but not pedestrians. Thirteen thousand students were housed in buildings made of concrete blocks and windows that were always dirty. Some of the rooms looked down on shacks where immigrant workers from Portugal and North Africa lived under sheets of corrugated iron. It was 1967. On beaches in the south of France, naked breasts and perfect tans were a common sight. Women used sun-tan lotion; men lay on their stomachs in the sand. Some people went to naturist colonies in pine forests and formed temporary
ménages
based on sexual excitement and socio-economic equality.

At Nanterre-Paris X, male and female students were housed in separate buildings. They had yet to see the benefits of the Neuwirth Law of 28 December 1967, which legalized the contraceptive pill, but many of them had read or had heard about D. H. Lawrence, the Surrealists, Wilhelm Reich, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Marcuse and Simone de Beauvoir. Publicity campaigns by holiday providers such as Club Méditerranée proved that sexual liberation was available to the salaried, middle-class population independently of ideology. In three or four years, the majority of students at Nanterre would occupy positions assigned to them by the state and, as they had learned to conceptualize the matter, contribute to the exploitation of the proletariat.

Since 1965, women had been allowed to work and to open a bank account without the permission of a father or a husband. Their mothers had been granted the right to vote in 1944. Sexual liberation was only part of what was known as ‘expanding the domain of the possible’. Pregnancy remained a serious risk and abortion was illegal, but a wide range of other options was available. The monthly magazines
Elle
and
Marie-Claire
had already broached the subjects of heavy petting, oral sex, orgasm, love in a physical relationship and the use of ‘beauty products’. Almost half of each issue was devoted to advertising. The models were depicted in positions of sexual availability. Bodies engaged in unorthodox sexual acts could also be discerned in photographs of bottles of mineral water and vermouth. The total wattage available to the average household had more than doubled since before the Second World War, and women were said in the advertisements to have been ‘liberated’ by household electrical items.

The chief impediment to interpersonal sex at Nanterre was a regulation banning male students from female premises. The academic authorities were thought to have imagined nocturnal orgies, though intercourse was just as likely to occur in the early morning when the banging of garbage trucks and the scream of two-stroke motorcycle engines brought the partners to mutual semi-consciousness. It seemed a ridiculous restriction of individual freedom. A concrete tower containing several hundred hypothetically liberated young females, some of whom wore miniskirts and synthetic pullovers, seemed a throwback to the Middle Ages. The Americans were fighting an imperialist war in Vietnam. Radical thinkers were questioning the bases of Western civilization. Some rock stars were not much older than students at Nanterre.

I. A. ii.

I
T WAS IN
M
ARCH
, when the weather improved, that the trouble began. The doors to the girls’ dormitory were locked, but only in a ritual fashion, because the janitorial staff knew that they could be opened with moderate force within thirty seconds. The doors were forced open, and soon afterwards, boys were circulating freely in the girls’ dormitory.

The action was welcomed by most of the professors at Nanterre, because they disapproved of the segregation of students, and the majority of them were sociologists, political scientists and authorities on Romantic and Post-Romantic literature. Apart from radio, television and newspaper reporters, no one beyond the campus gave the dormitory revolt much thought, except of a speculative, mildly pornographic nature. The commonly expressed view at Nanterre was that structures had to be changed on several levels to reflect changing mentalities. Some students decided to postpone their political involvement until they had spent a year or two reading and reflecting; others stressed the need to adapt to what they saw as a public service (the university). It was generally agreed, however, that the academic authorities, who represented the government and the capitalist system, should grant them certain rights. The abrogation of a rule was almost insignificant. It was not as if mind-expanding drugs and gratuitous acts of violence had been legalized.

For a time, instead of creeping through ground-floor windows, boys infiltrated the female blocks without impediment. They brought wine, cigarettes, Tunisian pâtisseries, hot dogs and erections. Some girls became lonelier as a result, and the structure and conduct of discussions changed. Boys were able to generate larger quantities of discourse proportionate to the amount of text they had read. Socially, the change was small. The
ciné-club
was just as well attended. Girls remained more active in the provision of amenities and entertainment than in political committees. It is probably true, as some historians insist, that the dormitory revolt at Nanterre in 1967 should not be seen as the prologue to the more serious events that followed.

I. B. i.

T
HE FOLLOWING YEAR
, 8 January (a Monday) was marked by the opening of an Olympic-size swimming pool at Nanterre by the Minister for Youth and Sport.

In 1968, an Olympic-size swimming pool on a university campus was an overdetermined space characterized by a complex network of social structures and global capitalist tendencies. On one level, it was a place where boys and girls could enact a visual exchange without implicating themselves in a contractual obligation. Swimwear exposed up to nine-tenths of the body, and packaged and commodified the remaining parts. Exchanges took place, however, not in the quasi-natural setting of a beach or a pine forest, but in a refrigerative environment of laminated tiles and chlorinated water. Boys who went to a swimming pool with the thought of picking up girls (a practice known as
draguer
, which means ‘to dredge’ or ‘to trawl’) found their penises reduced to prepubescent dimensions. Moreover, use of the swimming pool implied a certain competitiveness in the interests of the state: health and healthiness, national athletic dominance, and so on. The Minister for Youth and Sport had recently launched his ‘thousand clubs’ policy, which promised to fund places of recreation and to give young people administrative control over the clubs. They would be able to tailor the clubs’ services to local demand by providing ping-pong,
flipper
,
baby-foot
and coffee produced by the high-pressure brewing process. The minister had published a thick report titled
Le Livre blanc de la jeunesse
, in which the positive views of young people were recorded.

I. B. ii.

T
HE OPENING CEREMONY
took place in the evening, after classes. The minister’s speech was interrupted by a red-haired student with an open collar and a cheeky, pugnacious face. He was afterwards known as ‘Dany le Rouge’ and identified as the son of German Jews who had fled to France. ‘M. le Ministre,’ he said, ‘I have read your White Book on Youth. In three hundred pages, there is not one single mention of the sexual problems of young people.’

The Neuwirth Law had come into effect eleven days before. The cost of the pill was not covered by social security, and any woman who had started taking the pill on the day the law was passed was still impregnable. The minister’s retort was not widely reported, because the chief point of interest was felt to be the student’s audacious interruption. ‘With a face like yours,’ said the minister, ‘you must be quite familiar with such problems. I cannot recommend too highly a dip in the swimming pool.’

I. C. i.

T
HE
N
ANTERRE
swimming pool incident, rather than the dormitory revolt, is now thought to be a significant forerunner of the later troubles. Many other acts of rebellion could be cited. For example, during the traditional New Year’s reception, the Dean of Nanterre, his wife and their four guests left their seats of honour to collect food from the buffet when (as the dean recalled twenty-five years later) they noticed four young sociology professors removing their bags and belongings and taking their seats. The dean then remembered the warning given by his friend Raymond Aron, when he had learned that Nanterre was to have a sociology department: ‘By its very nature, this discipline will engender action groups that will create tensions and agitation. Beware of sociologists! They’ll make a mess of everything!’

I. C. ii.

A
S EXAMINATIONS
loomed, rebellious behaviour began to affect the educational process itself. Previously, professors had delivered their lectures to fifteen hundred or two thousand students packed into an amphitheatre. The students scribbled notes, chatted and read the newspaper. One professor likened the experience to ‘talking in the concourse of the Gare Saint-Lazare’. Sometimes, the professors saw their students at an oral examination, and were struck by their ‘encyclopedic ignorance’. Now, lectures were being interrupted by students who demanded the right to speak and then lectured the professor on his pedagogical backwardness and his role as a tool of state repression.

The media took a keen interest in youthful rebellion, and so, before long, television viewers (potentially half the population) were treated to the unusual spectacle of students holding press conferences. The students sat like examiners behind a trestle table, talking into microphones. They blew out clouds of smoke, wagged their fingers at the audience and used terms from sociology and political science which, to many viewers, seemed incongruously professorial. They expressed themselves in the form of questions, to which they supplied the answers, following a rhetorical model to which they were accustomed. ‘Why are we in revolt? Because the ruling class is trying to condition our daily life. Why is it trying to do that? Because Western imperialism is opposed to all forms of popular culture. Why is it opposed to popular culture? Because, in the final analysis, this is a class struggle.’

This form of exposition, commonly used with passive audiences, allowed objections to be answered before they were raised by an antagonist: ‘Are we not members of the bourgeoisie ourselves? Yes, but, as such, we must use our freedom to criticize and, if need be, to overturn the state. What would be the result of such a revolution? The result would be, not the simple
embourgeoisement
of the proletariat and the insertion of the sons of the proletariat into managerial positions, but the abolition of the distinction between labour and management.’

Despite superficial differences, this was roughly in line with Gaullist policy, which, since 1945, had striven to increase the involvement of workers in the running of factories (a practice known as
cogestion
). For the
téléspectateurs
, the interest of such conferences lay in the exciting usurpation of institutional authority, the flouting of generational power structures and in the references to media manipulation, which added a degree of self-reflection and unpredictability not normally seen in government-controlled public broadcasting. Furthermore, whereas representatives of the government and the university were distinguished by drab items of clothing purchased as
ensembles
, the students’ clothing (knitwear, scarves, second-hand jackets, etc.) showed signs of what the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss termed
bricolage
–the improvisational use of manufactured objects for purposes other than those for which they were intended, normally associated with primitive, pre-capitalist societies.

I. C. iii.

O
N
20 M
ARCH
, students protesting against the war in Vietnam smashed the windows of the American Express offices near the Opera and daubed slogans on the walls. Two days after that, six Nanterre students were arrested in a pro-Vietcong demonstration. This confirmed the view of many commentators that ‘
nanterrisme
’ was part of an international youth movement rather than a specifically French phenomenon.