Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (46 page)

CRS recruits had a relatively low level of education. Many came from deprived areas where physical violence was a form of personal expression as well as a form of defence. They did not have homes of their own but were housed in special barracks. They were strangers to the areas they policed, partly because, as sons of the proletariat, they might otherwise have found themselves, during a workers’ strike, opposed to members of their own family or clan.

The men of the CRS were poorly paid and unappreciated. Many suffered from social alienation and psychological problems related to insecurity. They compensated for this by developing a tribal sense of loyalty and tradition, sharpened by a perception that the misdemeanours of all the forces of order were blamed on the CRS. In May 1968, they often worked several shifts in a row and were kept on duty overnight, cooped up in armoured coaches parked in side streets.

IV. A. ii.

T
HIS OSTENSIBLY
proletarian and provincial force became ‘the enemy’ to a much greater degree than the bourgeois, Parisian authorities. As usual in such conflicts, propaganda was used to dehumanize the enemy, enabling combatants to overcome moral or aesthetic objections to physical violence. For example, a cartoon in a student paper showed an injured CRS man being prepared for a heart-transplant operation: the heart was to be supplied by an anaesthetized ‘
vache
’
^*
in the neighbouring bed.

The CRS fostered sympathy for the students by attacking innocent bystanders and allowing their actions to be guided by a simple form of class consciousness. According to one eye-witness, a teacher leaving a bookshop in the Latin Quarter was beaten up by a group of CRS. When the officer in charge ordered his men to stop, observing that the victim looked too respectable to be a student, one of them objected, ‘But, chief, he was carrying books!’

IV. B.

I
T WAS NOW
that the student revolt revealed its unexpected capacity to redefine market segments. In streets and boulevards that were already saturated with commercial signifiers, the revolt carved out its own niche, and proved that the market’s ability to commodify ideas as well as products had been drastically underexploited. Shops that stood in riot zones sold red bandannas, Che Guevara T-shirts and other revolutionary paraphernalia from the very beginning of the revolt. Students of the École des Beaux-Arts flooded the new market with screen-printed posters and called on striking schoolchildren to help paste them up. Slogans appeared on walls throughout the Latin Quarter and branded the revolt so successfully that these slogans are still being used in 2008 to describe and analyse the conflict.

Document 4: Questions and sample answers.

Analyse the following slogans:

•
‘Sous les pavés, la plage’
.

(
Related slogan
: ‘
Je jouis dans les pavés
’: ‘I come in the cobbles.’)

• ‘
Soyez réalistes: demandez l’impossible
’: ‘Be realistic: ask for the impossible.’

(
Related slogan
: ‘
Prenez vos désirs pour la réalité
’: ‘Treat your desires as reality.’)

• ‘
Baisez-vous les uns les autres, sinon ils vous baiseront
’: ‘Fuck, or be fucked.’

(
Related slogans
: ‘
Déboutonnez votre cerveau aussi souvent que votre braguette
’: ‘Unbutton your brain as often as your trousers.’ And: ‘
Faites l’amour et recommencez
’: ‘Make love and start again.’)

• ‘
Si tu rencontres un flic, casse-lui la gueule
’: ‘If you meet a cop, smash his face in.’

(
Related slogans
: ‘
Si tu veux être heureux, pends ton propriétaire
’: ‘Happiness is a landlord with a noose round his neck.’ And: ‘
Ne dites plus: Monsieur le Professeur; dites: Crève, salope!
’: ‘Don’t say, “Professor”, say, “Drop dead, bitch!”’)

These slogans represent an appropriation of proletarian forms of discourse and their rebranding with bourgeois irony. The feminine noun
salope
, applied to a male, is supposed to intensify the insult. Only the first of these slogans was intended as a practical recommendation.

V. A. i.

O
N
M
ONDAY
, 13 May, in what appeared to be a victory for student propaganda, workers joined the revolt. The unions were caught off guard and pretended to have called for a one-day general strike. The government itself was in a state of chronic indecision. The student demonstrations had given rise to a mass revolt that directly threatened the power of the unions and the economic well-being of the state. This spontaneous alliance of workers and intellectuals was worryingly reminiscent of the successful revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

The students gathered at the Gare de l’Est and marched along the Boulevard de Magenta. As the demonstration passed in front of the Socialist Party’s headquarters, some elderly socialists appeared on the balcony, displaying a hastily made banner proclaiming ‘Solidarity with the Students’. The students chanted back, ‘Op-por-tun-ists!’ and ‘Bureaucrats–into the street!’ Confused by this anarchic scorn for political tradition and the respect due to age, the socialists shrank back behind the windows in embarrassment. The socialist politician François Mitterrand, however, joined the march and offered himself as a compromise candidate in the event of presidential elections.

At Place de la République, the students joined the workers. The crowd (officially estimated at two hundred thousand) surged along the Rue de Turbigo towards Place du Châtelet and the Left Bank, instead of following the traditional route of workers’ marches (République to Bastille). Several hours would pass before the head of the march reached Place Denfert-Rochereau via the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

V. A. ii.

T
HE COMMUNIST
newspaper
L’Humanité
had been denouncing the students as ‘dubious elements’ and ‘bourgeois leftists’. The communist-dominated CGT called them ‘pseudo-revolutionaries in the service of the bourgeoisie’. But young workers at the big Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt in the south-western suburbs had been impressed by the students’ spontaneity. Although they thought it odd that anyone should complain about a university education, they empathized with their cheerful anarchy. Some of the young workers had been arriving for work without their blue overalls: some wore leather jackets, others were in shirtsleeves, which was a uniform strictly reserved for the higher ranks of management. They were tired of the unions’ insistence on following ‘the party line’, and had no particular objection to becoming bourgeois themselves.

The demonstration passed through the Temple district, where smiling Algerians, some of whom had seen members of their family murdered by Paris policemen in 1961, joined in the chants of ‘
CRS–SS
’. Thousands of schoolchildren marched in perfect order, divided into
arrondissement
s, with neatly painted banners calling for ‘Democratic Reform of the Education System’. They passed through the Marais, where militant workers and impoverished bourgeois intellectuals inhabited the crumbling palaces of a forgotten civilization. The activists of the third and fourth
arrondissement
s were used to spending their weekends at the police station after writing the latest issue of their ‘mural newspaper’ on the walls of the Marché des Enfants Rouges on the corner of the Rue Charlot. Many of them had temporary jobs–they worked for construction and removal companies or (as unemployed sociology graduates) conducted surveys for polling organizations–and could barely afford to be on strike.

Having reached an agreement with the police, the CGT stewards controlled the march, which the unions had decreed would be peaceful, and kept a watchful eye on the schoolchildren, the anarchists and the action committees of workers and students. The students chanted, ‘Power to the Workers!’ and, ‘Adieu, de Gaulle!’ The unions’ banners said, ‘Defend Our Purchasing Power’.

V. A. iii.

W
HEN THE HEAD
of the march reached Denfert-Rochereau at 5.30 p.m., something happened that seemed at the time to be a turning point, though it can now be seen as a confirmation of the essentially bourgeois tendency of the revolt. CGT stewards locked arms and prevented the students from continuing the march. The students had been intending to hold the biggest rally held on the Champ de Mars since Robespierre’s Feast-Day of the Supreme Being in 1794. Loudspeakers told the crowd to disperse, recommending ‘order, calm and dignity’. When the students refused to go home, the CGT stewards knocked them to the ground and tore the banners from their hands.

Only a few thousand students made it to the Champ de Mars. After sitting on the grass by the Eiffel Tower, listening to speeches, the students re-occupied the Sorbonne, while the union leaders went home and prepared for negotiations with the government.

V. B. i.

P
ARIS NOW
entered a period of festive chaos. In spite of the unions, the general strike continued. Soon there were petrol queues, and the streets were reclaimed from Citroëns, Fords, Peugeots, Renaults and Simcas. Parisians rediscovered their city and talked to one another in the street. Deserted railway tracks shone in the sun, and anglers on the Seine and the Canal Saint-Martin were undisturbed by the wash of passing barges. Even Monoprix, whose basement supermarkets had caused something of a retail revolution by staying open on Mondays, remained closed.

After two weeks of general strike, the spectre of a cigarette shortage hung over the city, but the workers and the students stood firm. They organized the manufacture and distribution of cigarettes made from discarded butts, sold in packets of four at a generally agreed price of fourteen centimes.

V. B. ii.

D
URING THE
strike the protests continued, but there was already an air of anticipated nostalgia about the riots. The night of 23–24 May was called the Second Night of the Barricades. The students had been hoping to commemorate the anniversary of the Paris Commune by torching the Hôtel de Ville, but spies dressed in kaftans and Mao jackets had alerted the authorities, and the police brought out the giant high-speed bulldozer that they had borrowed from the army. Instead, students, workers and the unemployed assembled at the Gare de Lyon and set off in separate groups for the Right Bank, where they set fire to the Bourse and attacked the firemen who came to extinguish the fire.

Impressions of these events would later be treasured as memories of a transcendent experience and recounted many times over to children, grandchildren and researchers: the Doppler shift of sirens, the thump of helicopters surging over rooftops, booted feet marching parallel to the main arteries, the acrid smell of tear gas, the shiny black plastic of capes and truncheons, the slippery sludge of flattened sandwiches. The sense of a priceless, unrepeatable experience was enhanced by the physical transmutation of the students: they looked ragged, sleepless and disreputable. Their faces were covered in talc or masked with handkerchiefs soaked in lemon juice as a defence against the gas. In the swirling clouds of chemicals, the streets of modern Paris looked like parts of the old revolutionary
faubourgs
or, with a stretch of the imagination, like scenes of the Vietnam War in
Paris-Match
.