Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (47 page)

For two hours on the Second Night of the Barricades, large parts of Paris were in the hands of the students. It had often been said that a population brainwashed by television would never have taken the Bastille, because everyone would have rushed home to watch it on the box. But now, as if by accident, the students (or rather, eight million striking workers) had brought the Fifth Republic to the brink of collapse.

In the absence of leaders, they were unable to capitalize on their advantage. That day, and in the days that followed, the CRS and the police, who were terrified of being lynched by angry citizens, grabbed students and schoolchildren as they rode past on bicycles, punctured their tyres and emptied their satchels onto the street. They lined them up against the ‘salad shakers’ and kicked them in the genitals. They arrested people who had dirty hands, dark skin or (remembering Dany ‘le Rouge’ Cohn-Bendit) red hair. For the same reason, they arrested people who had a foreign name or accent. They punched them in the throat and made them walk between lines of CRS who broke their ribs and noses. At Beaujon Hospital, which served as a detention centre, they threatened them with further beatings and prevented them from calling their families or receiving medical attention. Before releasing them, they confiscated one shoe from each detainee.

Traffic lights in the Latin Quarter changed from red to green and seemed to serve a purely decorative function. Towards the end of May, Paris began to resemble the set of a science-fiction film. When the Métro was running, squads of CRS who looked like Martian robots waited for students to emerge from the underground at Cardinal-Lemoine, Mabillon or Maubert-Mutualité. A few enclaves of hedonistic mayhem survived like post-nuclear colonies. The Sorbonne and the Odéon theatre were run by anarchist collectives and overrun by rats. Many of the occupiers were seeing the inside of a university or a theatre for the first time. In the Sorbonne, the smells of incense and patchouli had overcome the disinfectant. The early slogans had disappeared under the tide of anarchist inscriptions and stains. Girls and boys lost their virginity in the corridors. They discovered Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, hashish and LSD. The mood of casual optimism was maintained by student spokesmen who assured everyone that, at the end of the academic year, they would be deemed to have passed the non-existent examinations.

Document 5: Slogans of late May ’68.

VI. A. i.

A
FTER THREE WEEKS
of dazed exhilaration, the end of May ’68 was bound to be an anti-climax.

President de Gaulle had mysteriously disappeared at the height of the general strike. He was rumoured to have gone to Baden-Baden to assure himself of the army’s support in the event of a coup d’état. Meanwhile, the unions negotiated a deal with the government. The minimum wage was to be increased by 36%, the working week reduced to forty hours and the unions were to have more say in the running of factories.

To the union leaders’ astonishment, the proposals were rejected by the rank and file. It was then that President de Gaulle returned to Paris. On 30 May, he sat at his desk in front of a radio microphone and spoke of ‘intimidation, intoxication and tyranny’. He also appeared on television, and his appearance alone was worth a thousand tanks: old man’s ears, sagging, watery eyes like flooded mine shafts, and the long, grey face of a badly weathered municipal statue. The majority of the voting population found this reassuring. The President announced the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale. Legislative (but not presidential) elections were to be held in June.

VI. A. ii.

T
HE EFFECT
was almost instantaneous. Unions abandoned the workers to the CRS and turned their full attention to the election campaign. ‘May ’68’ was glamorous and theatrical. ‘June ’68’ was bloodier and less appealing to the
téléspectateurs
, especially since most of the key events did not take place in Paris. It was in June that the forces of order, battling against members of their own class, lived up to their reputation. On 11 June, at the Peugeot factory at Sochaux in eastern France, two workers were killed and a hundred and fifty-one were seriously wounded. The government enacted emergency legislation: many left-wing organizations were outlawed, demonstrations were banned and paramilitary Gaullist groups were given carte blanche to ‘encourage’ the workers to end the strike.

VI. A. iii.

O
N
14 J
UNE
, the Sorbonne, the École des Beaux-Arts and the Odéon theatre were cleared out by the police and disinfected by immigrant cleaning women. Citizens who were unaware of the underlying historical process were surprised to learn that the government intended to satisfy the students’ principal demands. In a private meeting with the Dean of Nanterre, the new Minister of Education, Edgar Faure, outlined the new policy of placating the protesters by enhancing their access to capital: ‘Give them money, and they’ll shut up.’

Even as the decrees were being drafted, producers were repositioning their brands to take account of changes in customer engagement. A special edition of
Elle
magazine (17 June) congratulated female students on their ‘amazing courage’ and stressed the growing importance of interactivity: ‘We want to participate much more closely in your preoccupations of today, and your cares of tomorrow, and to get you to participate in ours.’

Female students had participated mostly by distributing tracts, organizing crèches and by lying unconscious on the ground, being filmed by cameramen. Only a few of them had thrown missiles, and none of them had appeared on television as leaders of the revolt. Their equal treatment by the forces of order, however, had given them a sense of civic importance and consumer rights. A poster produced by the École des Beaux-Arts, titled ‘Beauty is in the Street’, showed a young woman launching a cobblestone rather wildly but with graceful, trousered legs and the flapping skirts of a knee-length duffle-coat. This charming, iconic design anticipated some of the fashions that would be unveiled in the summer collections, notably by Yves Saint-Laurent, who dedicated his range of duffel coats and fringed jackets to the students of May ’68.

VI. B.

‘M
AY
’68’ came to stand for personal liberation and the bankruptcy of a paternalistic, gerontocratic system. However, it is important to remember that the biggest manifestation of popular feeling in May ’68 did not involve the students: when General de Gaulle returned to Paris on 30 May, more than half a million people marched up the Champs-É lysées. This huge demonstration of support for the Gaullist régime was organized by Gaullists, but the numbers far exceeded expectations. In the subsequent national elections, the Gaullists won a crushing victory. Left-wing parties had never had such a small share of the vote.

Not long afterwards, the Dean of Nanterre saw huge consignments of furniture and educational equipment arriving on the campus. Gigantic projects of no apparent worth were afoot. Cafeterias and language laboratories sprang up all over the campus, and the builders who constructed them–at vast expense to the government but very little to themselves–joked openly about their imminent early retirement. To a mind unschooled in the dynamics of capital flow and long-term growth, this could only be described as ‘waste’. It was a small comfort to the dean to be told by the Minister of Education that no questions would be asked about education spending until 1970.

Questions

 


How did the student revolt of May ’68 lead to the biggest popular demonstration of support for an existing regime in the history of France?


 


 


Did everyday life change as a result of May ’68?


 


 


Were the students right to see examinations as the tool of a repressive, hierarchical society?


 


 


Summarize the conclusions according to the foregoing analysis.


 

Describe the legacy of May ’68 in the light of public opinion polls.

Gan, 1972–1977

I
T WAS A SCENE
that might have come from a comic book–some preposterous, graphic assemblage imposed on the city by a megalomaniac
bande dessinée
artist with a limitless budget and a nasty sense of humour.

The Finance Minister had just emerged from a meeting in the Louvre. He glanced along the avenue to the west-north-west; his jaw dropped, and he said to himself, ‘What the hell is
that
?!’

Something thin and vertical bisected his eye. Then a memory attached itself to the ghastly image, and he thought: ‘It was, yes, supposed to be big, but not
that
big…’ (Too tall for the artist to fit it onto one eyeball.)

Seen from behind, he was quite tall himself: buttress-shouldered, with light tracery around the neck, delicately cupola’d with baldness; early English rather than flamboyant. But
that
…(It seemed to come out of the top of his head.) No one could possibly miss it. He stood at one end of the sacred alignment where Parisians took their bearings: Louvre, Obelisk, Arc de Triomphe–civilization’s compass needle. The historic Grand Axis was a thin straight line at the centre of the globe: in one direction, the Great Pyramid of Giza; in the other, the island of Manhattan. And now, just up the road–that hulking great tower: La Tour GAN–so tall it would never look exactly perpendicular.

The
bande dessinée
artist might have drawn it in between one frame and the next.

Rising in the west, it reduced the Arc de Triomphe to the size of a mousehole. It redefined horizons and called the shots on perspective. In his mind’s eye, he saw a long, thin shadow fall across Paris, turning the city into a passive sundial. Even before the building was finished, the drawings were coming to life: the scratchy trees, a gratuitous bird, a woman with a pram, businessmen in shiny blue suits and vertically striped shirts, resembling the building they worked in–in effect, fittings.

Corporate aspirations were written all over its glassy facade. Anyone who saw those three enormous letters at the top of the tower might have mistaken them for the name of the city. Gath, Ashkelon, Athens, Babylon, Gan. Groupe des Assurances Nationales.

Faced with this towering obscenity, the Minister of Finance–already considering his options–cast his mind back to 1960 and the Rue Croulebarbe…
Croulebarbe
: it sounded like a name from a fairy tale. No. 33 Crumblebeard Street had set the pattern for the next twelve years. First, the project was a drawing on a display board in a refitted Second Empire drawing room. An innocuous address identified it as a normal part of the city. The architects talked of ‘integration’, as though the monster were to make its home in a convivial and accommodating neighbourhood of the sort depicted in children’s books: the chequered tablecloths of a restaurant, a cat snoozing under a concierge’s knitting, the casual intimacy of clothes hanging in the
blanchisserie-pressing
. Next, there was a hole in the ground with men and machines moving about inside it. And then, suddenly, it shot up like an elevator, the living-cubes materializing around it as it went, from one floor to the next, in a single day.

The friendly neighbourhood was gone for good. As for the monster, there were no words to describe it–or very few: a steel tube, a blank panel, then another steel tube followed by a window, in a row of eight panels and eleven windows, with minor variations, multiplied vertically by twenty-three.

It had more glass in it than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Standing outside 33, Rue Croulebarbe, you could see the setting sun in both directions. Now, after twelve years of
urbanisme
, it seemed a midget by comparison.

As Minister of Finance, he had been present at most of the meetings. There had been much talk, he recalled, about transparency: transparent government, transparent buildings. (He could see through the men who sat around the table.) Symbols and metaphors would be brought to life. Why? This was the talk.

He had serious reasons to doubt the transparency of glass. Twelve years after the scandal of Crumblebeard Street, a man couldn’t walk through Paris without seeing himself everywhere. The city had never been so opaque. Pairs of Parisians everywhere, and every paired pedestrian a self-hating Narcissus.

It was time to draw the line. And he was the man to draw it…Or his name was not Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

F
IVE YEARS LATER
, after becoming President of the French Republic, he drew the line at twenty-five metres, which was for the centre of the city, and for the periphery he set it at thirty-seven metres. This was thirteen and nineteen heights of Giscard respectively–excluding the Eiffel Tower, the Tour Montparnasse, three or four other towers and the rest of La Défense and the Front de Seine, which were already under way. Twenty-five and thirty-seven metres were the new vertical dimensions of the city, and it was a highly popular measure. Almost everyone could see the point of it.

The Black Prince,
#
1

N
ORTHERN
P
ARIS
at night: the slag-grey hills of Belleville, Ménilmontant and Charonne, overgrown with aerials and chimneys. A lopsided building somewhere near the Porte des Lilas.

A window on the fourth floor, under the eaves: a young woman sleeps under a wind-blown sheet, dappled by the moonlight or the yellow streetlamp.

Sounds come through the open window. Something like the wail of a tom cat–
Nyeeooowww!!!
–draws a ribbon of sound around the outskirts of the city, marking its perimeter. She stirs on the bed, and moves her legs as if to release the tension. For a moment, she is out there with him on the motorbike.

There are no lights on in the building but it has patches of dirt or shade that almost look like human faces. A man walks past on the pavement below with no discernible features on his face. He turns a corner, slowly, as though he has a long way to go. His shoes are expensive but well worn. The artist shows him leaving a faint trail of white dust.

Quai de Béthune, 1971

W
HEREVER
G
ISCARD
looked in Paris, he saw the works of his predecessor: Pompidou the banker, Pompidou the poetry-lover, Pompidou the President; some might have said the visionary. The chortling, two-faced peasant who kicked him out of the Ministry of Finance.–‘
Pom-pi-dou
’, like the peeping of a car horn.

If he hadn’t died in 1974, after less than five years in office, who knows what he might have done?

Pompidou came from the land of the Arverni, where volcanic plugs jut out of the landscape like ancient, eroded skyscrapers, and the granite pastures are so bleak that an unsilenced engine is like the song of the skylark or the bleating of a calf. When he drove his car in Paris, he wanted buildings to disappear, which, in a sense, they did. He said, ‘It is up to the city to adapt itself to the automobile, not the other way around. We must renounce an outmoded aesthetic.’ His body had already adapted: he had a driver’s sagging hips and jittery legs.

In 1971, the architects who had won the competition to design the Centre Beaubourg came to see him at the É lysée. First, they saw the President of the French Republic in a suit; then he went away, changed into something more casual and came back smoking a Gauloise, saying, ‘I’m glad I’m not an architect. It must be the most difficult job in the world–all those building regulations!’

He did not pretend to be an expert, though he did have opinions. Asked about modern urban architecture, he said, ‘Without towers, it can’t exist.’ The reporter from
Le Monde
looked through the windows of the President’s office and saw the skyline changing as he spoke. ‘Like it or not,’ said Pompidou, ‘you can’t get away from towers.’ Then he added, as though in confidence, ‘And I know I shouldn’t say this, but the towers of Notre-Dame…they’re too short!’

His wife Claude was better on the details. It was she who decided that the largest ventilation components of the Centre Beaubourg (the roof-top cooling towers and the street-level air intakes) should be white instead of blue.

T
HE
P
OMPIDOUS
lived in what, to judge by the coffered entrance door with its lions’ heads and wreaths, was a beautiful old town-house on the Île Saint-Louis, at 24, Quai de Béthune. Three hundred years before, property speculators had developed the Quai de Béthune and renamed it Quai des Balcons for marketing purposes. Parisians who passed that way in their powdered wigs thought the exclusive waterfront development an eyesore: balconies spoiled the classical simplicity of the facades and induced the wives of rich financiers to display themselves like prostitutes. In 1934, one of the balconied houses was bought by Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics millionairess. She tore it down and replaced it with a characterless mansion boasting a fashionable porthole window. All that remained of the original building was the entrance door. This was no. 24, where the Pompidous lived.

The Île Saint-Louis was so quiet in the evenings that one could almost believe that there were still toll-keepers on the bridges and chains to prevent anyone from reaching the island after dark. Next door, at no. 22, Baudelaire had lived as a young dandy with his hookah and his coffin-bed and the old paintings that he bought on credit from a curiosity shop on the island. Pompidou was an admirer of Baudelaire, and of poetry in general. ‘I remain convinced’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘that the face of a young girl and a soft, supple body are among the most moving things in the world, along with poetry.’ His anthology of French poetry included several poems from
Les Fleurs du Mal
.

It was some weeks after the judging of the architectural competition and the first excavations for the Beaubourg, which sent tremors to the most distant parts of Paris (but not to the Île Saint-Louis).

Pompidou and Baudelaire looked out of their respective windows, smoking cigarettes, blowing thought-bubbles of smoke towards the Left Bank. Only the Rue Poulletier and one hundred and thirty years separated them. The silvery wake of a river rat pushing through sewage could be seen under both windows.

Baudelaire gazed at the ‘watery suns and muddled skies’ above the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève and thought of his mulatto girlfriend’s ‘lying eyes’. He saw the branch of the Seine where the water burbles under the Pont de Sully. He saw the grubby barges and laundry boats, and imagined himself in a city of canals where ‘vagabond vessels from the ends of the earth have come to satisfy your slightest desire’.

Next door, Pompidou imagined things that no one had ever imagined in that location: a forest of high-tensile steel and cross-bracing girders blotting out the view; a multi-lane overpass soaring through the rooftops, and space-age cars that seem to bulge and contract like tigers as they take the swerves. Where lovers strolled and beggars dreamed, he saw a limited-access freeway, just like the one that already runs along the Right Bank–the Voie Georges-Pompidou–and a thousand windscreened faces shooting out of an underpass, stunned by a sudden vision of beauty (golden domes, turrets, etc.) until a screech of brakes jerks them back to the present.

The Black Prince,
#
2

P
OMPIDOU FLICKS
his burning cigarette onto the street below. A faceless man walks along the
quai
. His black shoe extinguishes the butt as he passes. He wears a long coat, from which small amounts of what looks like builders’ rubble trickle out onto the pavement. He reaches the other side of the island and looks up towards the hunched suburbs and the Saturn Vs of the Sacré-Cœur. The clouds are red. Wailing sounds arc over the sky. Somewhere in the hills near the Porte des Lilas, the young woman sits up in bed.

She thinks of the time when she fell asleep on the saddle, resting her head on her lover’s back, leaning on the black leather. Through the bow of his shoulder, she could feel every bump and tremor, every syncopated rumble of the tarmac. His stillness never worried her. He said, ‘Danger comes from other people.’

They were already in their mid-twenties, which made it seem as though everything had gone very quickly. At high speed, the changes came slowly and easily–a slight bulge yielding, a readjustment of their twinned bodies. He always said, ‘When something changes, it has to be rediscovered.’

Seven hours from now, he would try to break the record, which stood at twelve minutes and a few seconds. He would see a Paris that no one had ever seen before, because everything looks different at speed. She slips back under the sheet and stretches out. She dreams of falling asleep on the bike, waking up in a favourite part of Paris: the leafy banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, the Place du Tertre, the Forum des Halles. A false dawn floods the room with yellow light.

Beaubourg, 250
BC–AD
1976

T
HAT NIGHT
, Louis Chevalier had walked all the way from the heights of Belleville to the Île Saint-Louis, then back across the river to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. On a map devoid of other markers, his trail would have suggested a network of capillary paths that had grown up haphazardly, or constrained by ancient habits and accidents of geography. He had walked for five miles, through two thousand years of history. Now, he stood on a tiny hill of debris, staring at the ‘Plateau Beaubourg’.