For a few weeks in May ’68 in Paris, students and workers united in a wave of strikes and demonstrations that seemed poised to overturn the old order. Peter Lennon was in the thick of things
I don’t remember the precise incident that made it clear to me that this time, this particular turmoil was quite different from any of the other tussles between police and students that had become commonplace that decade in Paris. Maybe it was the spectacle of the entire Latin Quarter turning into a Greek Forum to which the elders, reversing the classical order, came timidly to seek wisdom from the young.
Everything was turned on its head, and the new order seemed simply a normality we had overlooked for too long. Imagination was in power; unnerving democracy on the loose. Students would direct traffic (at least in daylight), while riot-police vans submissively waited in line.
On May 20, I arrived back at the Gare du Nord from the Cannes Film Festival to find Paris gloriously still. It became plain I was dream-walking in history. Only human beings were stirring: trains, Metro, buses, every service from petrol stations and supermarkets to garbage collections were standing at ease, waiting for the New Dawn.
Paris was under a different kind of occupation from the baleful one still in furtive living memory – it was occupied by a benign philosophical movement with absurd muscle. The nation was being given time to reflect in that darlin’ way of Sean O’Casey’s Cap’t Boyle: What is the stars? What is society? What is the moo-en? And can we have it?
The answer appeared to be, “Why not?” You would have had to be dense to believe that this was just another swinging Sixties protest. Those who huddled in their state chambers, council rooms or confederation headquarters, trying to get their political train sets moving again in the old way, were in a growing panic: power had somehow slipped from their grip.
“Insaissisable!” declared the exasperated General Charles de Gaulle. The situation was indeed ungraspable.
Unrest at the Sorbonne had been chronic for some time. Bombastic senior professors exercised magisterial authority, while overcrowding was so farcical that, as early as 1964, one young professor deliberately held a class on the street, remarking, prophetically, that he might as well since they would all be out on the street soon. The Gaullist government had just laid the first stone for a new overspill faculty in the suburbs. “When are they going to lay the second one?” the students asked, sarcastically.
Inadvisedly, as it turned out, the government did keep its promise this time. The new faculty was completed and opened at Nanterre, and it was here, on March 22, that the May events really began. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a 25-year-old student of French birth but German nationality, led the first protest at the faculty. The students were infuriated that 19th-century regulations had been mechanically imposed on a modern faculty.
In addition, already ashamed of France’s barbaric handling of the Algerian war, they now directed their indignation against United States involvement in Vietnam.
Another factor politicised them: their faculty had been built beside one of the shameful bidonvilles that had come to characterise certain Parisian suburbs. The route to classes was an animated lecture on the consumer society’s dumping ground for those with no spending power.
Locked out of Nanterre by the authorities, Cohn-Bendit and his Movement of March 22 descended on Paris to join the demonstrations that were taking place in the forecourt of the Sorbonne. On May 3, the rector, Jean Roche invited the police in to clear the Sorbonne – and the battle of the Latin Quarter began.
To call it a student revolt is a convenience that overlooks the fact that, from the beginning, teachers and professors were at the forefront. One of the three celebrated “student” leaders, Alain Geismar (28) was a lecturer in physics and president of the higher-education teachers’ union. The third was Jacques Sauvageot (25) acting president of the students’ union.
But none of these was a leader in the conventional sense; they simply surfed the waves of revolt that became increasingly more fierce and unfettered until they sailed away into territory far beyond the reach of customary politics. “Imagination in power,” declared the students. “Take your dreams for reality.”
It happened that I had had some practice in taking my dreams for reality. The previous year, I had persuaded Raoul Coutard, master-cameraman of the nouvelle vague, to shoot a cin verit film on Ireland for me.
I was a junior Guardian correspondent and had never owned a camera in my life. But this kind of astounding leap from spectator to film writer/director was possible then (so long as you didn’t look down as you leaped).
So we set off for Dublin on a trail that I had no way of knowing would circle back to the heart of a French revolution. The theme of the film, Rocky Road To Dublin, was wonderfully apposite: what do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it? The answer was: you abandon it to the priests and the venal politicians. The film was finished in March 1968, in time to be chosen for the Cannes Film Festival in May.
It was the last film to be shown in the festival that year. Events in Paris caught up with us. When the lights went up at the end of our projection, Franois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lelouch came into the auditorium and announced the bourgeois Cannes Festival was finito.
Now there was a new kind of spectacle on the Croisette: the starlets vanished; busy revolutionaries paraded instead; nervously ingratiating waiters began to refuse tips; foreign film critics ran for cover as best they could through Switzerland or Monaco. And there was new-style, all-night debauchery: cineastes and students packed into the salles of the Palais, without sleep, talking their way towards a social paradise.
If the students – as astounded as anyone by the extent of their success (nine million workers eventually came out in parallel protests) – needed any guidance, it was about what the future might hold for them. There it was in Rocky Road To Dublin: don’t worry, you won’t have to bear the burden of success – they’ll snatch it back from you soon enough.
Not inclined to miss this thrilling discouragement, the students “adopted” the film. I was shanghaied to Nice University with Milos Forman and Louis Malle to explain the pitfalls of revolution. The print was parted from my anxious grasp, shot up to Paris and put out on a new revolutionary film-distribution circuit.
It played to tear gas in the Sorbonne amphitheatres and to fisticuffs in the Facult de Droit on rue d’Assas – at one point there was a kind of Mexican wave of brawling across the auditorium. Then we projected it on to a sheet for the car workers occupying the Renault factory at Billancourt. The CRS (riot police), not being film literate, were very kind and let us in and out without bother.
In happy freefall, it was impossible not to be convinced that this was a desirable style of life, and I’m still convinced that this dislodging of authority was beneficial.
No rules were needed: be realistic, the slogan told us, demand the impossible. And the method? Under the paving stones – the beach. Here was political education without a party line. There wasn’t any party to join; no cliques or factions to contend with.
The anally-retentive “Chinoise”, a tiny Maoist groupuscule, was no more equipped to deal with pure anarchy than the Gaullists or Communists. The Katangais, initially spoken of with fear, turned out to be just a bunch of layabouts who were turning the Sorbonne into a dosshouse. Sauvageot booted them both out.
From May 13, students occupied the Sorbonne. Under a red flag, they said: “This university is open to everyone, students and workers.” What the students were doing was making a psycho-drama of all the radical, liberal Marcusian, Marshall Herbert McLuhanesque babble of the Sixties and letting it loose in the playground.
But there was another message, pointing to the follies that society had come to accept. Weekends were notorious for slaughter on the motorways. “A single non-revolutionary weekend,” a banner declared, “is infinitely more bloody than a month of permanent revolution.”
It was being taken for granted that the adult world had been found out and discredited. But only car owners, short of petrol, seemed inconvenienced. They felt obliged to ferry hitch-hikers around the city. It was symbolic that those who had no property now had the greatest mobility.
The city settled into a routine. With the Sorbonne under the control of the students, there were symbolic occupations everywhere. Not only were the car factories occupied, radical doctors occupied the Medical Association, young architects dissolved their association, actors closed theatres, writers occupied the Socit des Gens de Lettres, kids occupied the lyces and scolded their teachers. Even some priests in the Latin Quarter declared themselves revolutionary – sans-calottes, so to speak. The Bourse was set ablaze (and quickly doused).
The daytime air in the Latin Quarter was permanently prickly with the residue of CS gas. But the students ignored it, going about their tasks planning, organising with the hurried urgency with which the young undertake their first executive tasks. It was only at night that the streets around the Sorbonne were a no-go area for police.
In daytime, the police had duties as binmen, nibbling desultorily at the barricades and shifting carcasses of cars that were barnacled with rusty burns, as if they had been dredged from some fiery sea.
After dark, the fiery sea erupted. The lines of riot police would begin to thicken on the Place St Michel and at the Luxembourg Gardens, and the dark-blue vans spewed out their consignments of booted raiders.
After an unnatural stillness, you could hear the boots pounding out of the shadows. A picket line of students would start hurling paving stones. Some students, with a wild courage I could never understand, wearing pullovers with neither helmets nor clubs, often took on the CRS directly in quick skirmishes. Then, if they were lucky, they managed to skip back behind the barricades, which were often 3m high.
The two children of Maurice Grimaud, prefect of police, Pierre Yves and Marianne marched with the demonstrators. The students tactfully kept them away from banners demanding “Mort Grimaud”. At dawn, they would pass through the lines of CRS guarding the Palais de Justice on their way home to papa.
The inability of the government, or the communist or socialist parties, to comprehend what they were dealing with was evident in crass blunders. When an attempt was made to discredit Cohn-Bendit (deported, but reappearing in a wig), dismissing him as a German Jew (he was actually born in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, the same village as the wife of the prefect of police), thousands of students marched the streets chanting, “We are all German Jews.”
The rift between the generations was made plain not only by this readiness to be identified with Jews (the French bourgeoisie were notoriously anti-Semitic), but a willingness to declare oneself German.
By May 20, a sense of happy optimism had grown exponentially. We could not know that we had only 10 days left. On May 24, De Gaulle appeared on television using the only trick left in his pack: the promise of a referendum.
The students watched this orator with his absurd mannerisms, visibly a disarticulated puppet from some ancient regime, and took to the boulevards again. There are two chants that in memory still bring a shiver of pleasure. One, the students’ requiem chant, as they marched towards the Chambre des Dputs that night, waving white handkerchiefs or sheltering candles: “Adieu De Gaulle, adieu De Gaulle, adieu.” The other, the broken rhythm of the revolutionary chant: “Ce n’est qu’un debut/ continuons le/combat [This is only a beginning/continue the/fight].”
Faced with a spectacular demonstration uniting the communists and the Confdration Gnrale du Travail, in which the students would play a major part, and the possibility of Mends-France and Franois Mitterrand joining forces, the government began to panic.
By Tuesday, May 28, the Elyse Palace was anticipating catastrophe. Philippe Alexandre, in L’Elyse en pril, gave the inside story. There was a rumour that the demonstrators planned to take the Hotel de Ville.
“If they do, then nothing stops them coming right to l’Elyse,” De Gaulle said. “The peasants will enter into the dance.” On the morning of the 29th, after a sleepless night, De Gaulle rang his prime minister. At the end of the brief, routine conversation, he said to the startled prime minister: “I embrace you.”
Around 11.15, De Gaulle, with his wife, slipped out of the Elyse by the back garden door, ostensibly going to his home at Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. Then he disappeared.
Consternation. The minister for the army and the minister for the interior could not believe that neither of them, nor the prime minister, knew where he had gone. Then, to their horror, they discovered he had sought refuge in Germany.
In Paris, the electrifying news that De Gaulle had fled the country stunned the students, who were now, for the first time, facing the possibility of actually taking their dreams for reality. Momentarily, a kind of paralysis of triumph seized the city.
De Gaulle had two reasons for escaping: he was afraid of being trapped in the Elyse. But also, as Maurice Grimaud told me later, “like the figure in classical literature who needed to touch ground to regain his strength, he had to go back to his roots – which was the army”. He went to General Massu, who was stationed with French troops at Baden-Baden.
On May 30, De Gaulle was back. Shrewdly avoiding television, he turned to radio, drawing on his own myth and recalling the spirit of wartime patriotism, to appeal to the people of France. He declared he would dissolve the government and hold elections. The silent majority was tired of agitation and apprehensive about coming shortages. They responded to the leader.
Up to half-a-million Gaullists, most of them bussed in from the provinces, led by Andr Malraux, the writer and, at the time, minister of culture, flooded the Champs Elyses, marching arm-in-arm, 20 deep, to the Arc de Triomphe.
Sporadic rioting continued in France into June; the Sorbonne was not cleared until the 16th, but the spirit of May collapsed overnight. For all the classical images of savage riot police, and of students heaving stones and burning cars, violence was not the dominant characteristic of May ’68 in France.
There was certainly massive brutality by the police. The student unions, UNEF and SNE Sup, published a dossier, Le Livre Noir des Journes de Mai, which records violence on students or passers-by: old, young, women with infants. In one deposition, a nurse told how she was taken to the Odon commissariat, where she witnessed young girls being “stripped and tortured”. It was this kind of savagery that won the students the support of the population.
But given the standards of the time, the month-long uprising was remarkably free of extreme violence (no deaths in May, three in June, two of them accidental).
The standard had been set six years previously by the then-prefect, Maurice Papon, when his police were given licence to batter to death eight communist demonstrators at the Metro station, Charonne.
Papon’s police had slaughtered hundreds of Algerians during the infamous October demonstrations. If, in May ’68, the police had still been under the control of Papon, May would have been a bloodier story and might well have ended in civil war. (Papon was convicted in April this year of complicity in crimes against humanity for his role in the mass deportation of Jews. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail, but is currently at liberty pending his appeal.)
The saviour of the students and workers turned out to be the most unlikely of candidates: the prefect of police, Maurice Grimaud, successor to Papon. It was he who rejected pressure to fire on the demonstrators and continually urged his men to show restraint.
I remember seeing this little sparrow-hawk figure in the Latin Quarter at night, only casually guarded, calming the students and his own men. It was he who persuaded De Gaulle of the folly of attempting to retake the Sorbonne as early as May 19, at the paroxysm of passions.
A month later, Grimaud led an incident-free clearance of the Sorbonne and the occupied Odon theatre.
Paris had been the epicentre of a global, youthful unrest unique in history. In the past, governments had always been aware that youth was adventurous and brave, but they had only harnessed these qualities to waste them on war. In the Sixties, as Eric Hobsbawn put it in his book, The Age Of Extremes, students throughout the world “stood at an awkward angle to the rest of society”.
The awkwardness was created by as yet uncorrupted and inexperienced mentalities – energetic, intelligent and magnanimous – for once sensing their power, clashing with those who ran a world of exploitation, hypocrisy, injustice and repression.
The world had never been run differently and would continue to be run this way. But, for a brief period, a brave idealism almost ruled.
Some years later, I met Grimaud, then retired, and asked him what he felt during the May Events. “A kind of joy,” he said. “I was interested in living through events which, at every moment, I had a feeling were important. Government had broken down. I found the experience invigorating, a tonic.”
That was the spirit of May ’68 in Paris; not violence, but joy.