Paris, May 1968

AS I LAY ASLEEP in Italy … Though not exactly Italy, but Herefordshire. David Wordsworth (a remote descendant of the poet) and I had decided to do some walking in the English countryside, and we agreed on the Golden Valley, partly because he also wanted to visit his mother and little (half) sister. His father had been an officer in the British army in India who had shot through when David was very young; he had had no contact with him since. There was a regular reviewer in the Guardian and elsewhere called Christopher Wordsworth whom David once said he thought was some kind of cousin. It emerged that it was in fact his father, and later on they got together and were on good terms, sometimes going fishing together.

So after visiting his mother, we got on the road to the Golden Valley. It was very beautiful countryside, lush, in the full bloom of spring. The valley itself was fascinating because along it had once run a railway, which by now with rails removed looked like a wide green road. Most of the farmers whose land bordered onto it had illegally incorporated it into their grazing land, so it was intersected by fences and populated by sheep, but still from a distance had the aspect of a road.

We walked for several days, camping overnight (it was late April and the nights were still pretty cold), and eating and drinking at a pub when one presented itself. Some of the time we left the paths entirely and wandered across hills, never quite getting lost; a few times we made camp and cooked. Far from the picture of the old stories of country walking, there were few rustics in sight and the local produce usually came prepackaged for supermarkets everywhere. On occasion it was possible to find something worthwhile—at a local butcher there was spring lamb, which was delicious even if crudely cooked.

I had been unable to resist taking a small radio, and the news from France got me more and more interested. I had been reading Le Monde fairly regularly and knew that there was a certain amount of discontent amongst the intellectuals, and of course the climate of thought was changing all over Europe. The French Situationists were an interesting group, a kind of anarchists but unlike the fusty old English anarchists they were saying new things. Then there were the Dutch kabouters, with their proposals for white bicycles (available to everyone for picking up and leaving at will), white wives (similarly), and white policemen (uniformed social workers carrying supplies of contraceptives to be handed out on demand). They were amusing—and there was a great deal of humour in the ferment. These were the beginnings of the revolutionary year of 1968 which echoed around the world (but not, I think in Australia—well behind the revolutionary times)—across Europe, in North America (where it mainly took the form of the anti-Vietnam War movement), and in Mexico.

And there was I, huddled in a sleeping bag in the Golden Valley listening to the reports of the rumblings in Paris, which partly centred around the dismissal of Henri Langlois from the directorship of the Cinemathèque. Langlois was a large, shambling man, none too clean, who had built up the Cinemathèque collection of films over years, running it virtually as a one-man show. It was sometimes said that he even stored cans of film in the bath. The Cinemathèque was really the school of the Nouvelle Vague cinema, which numbered among its famous names Truffaut, Godard and the like. They were also linked to the enormously influential journal Cahiers du Cinema, originally edited by the great communist film critic Andre Bazin. (Many years later when my daughter was studying film at Sydney University she discovered a book of his pieces in English translation amongst the books in the garage. She was being forced to read the rubbish of Jacques Derrida, and realised that a good bit of what he was saying was plagiarised from Bazin. Naturally she did not mention this in her essay—she would only have been marked down.)

The Cinemathèque recycled old films, especially American film noir and westerns, continually; most of the many film addicts in Paris got their basic education there. Not many of them spoke English well enough to fully understand the dialogue—it is probable that the whole auteur theory developed from this fact, with a consequent emphasis being laid on visual elements, the mise en scène of the director, rather than the acting and screenplay.

Langlois was considered to be some kind of national treasure by the film industry, and especially by critics and directors. A clumsy move to remove him (there was reason to think that his amateurism was indeed allowing much precious film stock to deteriorate) raised a storm which got plenty of media attention. The timing was particularly bad since it happened in the run-up to the Cannes film festival, when everyone was talking about cinema. The directors, critics, actors and everybody who was anybody in the French film industry began to protest at Cannes, the protest rapidly escalated, and such was the uproar and chaos that the festival was cancelled. This was the beginning of “les evènements”.

I WAS GETTING MORE and more excited at the reports of all this, and finally, as we walked on over the Welsh border to Caerphilly I could stand it no longer, and got on the train back to London. There I went straight to the old Red Lion just off Fleet Street, where a number of Australian journalists used to drink, started talking about it, and fired up Ken Brass, then with the Sydney Sun. We decided right then that we had to have a look. By then the French trains were all on strike, so we decided to take our bikes, get the train to Dover and cross over on the boat to Calais, thence to bike down to Paris.

Ken seemed to have convinced the Sun that part of the expedition was about cycling lyrically through northern France in the springtime. I tried unsuccessfully to con some expenses out of Vic Carroll at the Financial Review, for which I had done some writing while at the Moscow Narodny Bank, but he wasn’t biting—I suspect to his later regret. So the only thing I wrote during the evènements was a longish enthusiastic piece which I picked out on a French typewriter keyboard and entrusted to a bullshitting young American who claimed to be an anarchist to take back with him as he was going to London—it was destined for Anarchy or Freedom. But they never saw it, and I was told later it appeared under his name in some American journal.

It turned out to be quite a good idea to cycle, as we were able to realise that the climate outside Paris was one of total indifference to the excitements of Paris. We made good time, despite stopping for excellent meals at the cafés routiers, the truckies’ caffs, which at that time had not yet been ruined by Pommy tourists, slept at local inns a couple of nights and rolled into Paris early in the afternoon. This involved another element of serendipity. We went through the town/suburb of St Germain en Laye (about thirteen kilometres from central Paris), and noticed that the army, complete with tanks and troop carriers, was encamped there. Clearly the authorities were prepared for real civil unrest in Paris, but were keeping the heavies out of sight.

This was on May 12, 1968. We had missed the great confrontation of the evening of May 11, in which students confronted the Compagnies Republicaines de Sécurité (the dreaded CRS) in the rue Gay-Lussac, near the Sorbonne, when barricades were erected and paving stones dug up and flung at the cops. This was the high point for most of the émeutes. As I discovered in the next day or so, no one was aware of the presence of the army in the forest of St Germain.

Ken and I rode our bikes right into the Latin Quarter and booked into a little hotel I knew from previous visits (especially that to the first great Picasso retrospective of 1966 in the Grand and Petit Palais), in the rue de la Harpe, just off the Boulevard St Michel and between the Bde St Germain and rue St Severin. We began walking around and looking at the evidence, and reading the posters which were already proliferating (many of them visually brilliant, and emanating from the Ecole des Beaux Arts), including one from the French Masons, which I translated for Ken, myself in partial and him in total ignorance of the difference between French and English (and Australian) masonry. Not that the readers of his despatches, which he began phoning through as soon as he could, would have known themselves.

Again it was remarkable how normal everyday commercial life remained despite the excitement. All the cafes were open and flourishing, as were the restaurants and shops. The newspapers were partially on strike, and the best of them for reportage of what was going on was Le Combat, the daily founded originally as an illegal resistance organ by Albert Camus (while Sartre and de Beauvoir were taking it easy by avoiding any real resistance activity and having a good time under the Occupation). Whether Le Monde managed to publish regularly during all this I am not sure. The printing union was of course communist, and most of the commo unions—chiefly public sector and media unions—were on strike.

The streets around the Latin Quarter were electric—everywhere little knots of discussants would form spontaneously. The “Etats Generaux” (echoing the 1789 revolution) more or less spontaneously came into being in the occupied Theatre de l’Odeon in the Place of the same name, and I began to realise the endless capacity of French intellectuals for lengthy debates and meaningless wordy projects and reconstructions of institutions in verbal terms. There were also what the Americans, and their Australian imitators, came to call “teach-ins” going on in a number of places, most notably the major lecture theatre at the Sorbonne, renamed the “Amphitheatre Lee Harvey Oswald”.

We decided to take a look at what was going on at the big Renault automobile factory at Boulogne-Billancourt on the bank of the Seine opposite the Sevres factory and the heights of St Cloud, and cycled out there. The communists had commandeered the factory and were playing games much like the students. We introduced ourselves at the gates as correspondents for the Australian commo weekly Tribune, and they let us in to look around and observe the incessant meetings and harangues. My French was too imperfect to make much of this, but the atmosphere of febrile excitement was unmistakable. When we’d had enough of this we repaired to one of the neighbourhood cafes and drank white wine to excess—such that we both fell off our bikes on the way back when we encountered old tram lines running along the road.

Another expedition was to the new university campus at Nanterre, which was the stamping ground of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Dany le Rouge, the cheeky red-haired kid strongly influenced by his anarchist elder brother who led the student defiance of the university authorities there, and who became one of the leaders of the overall student revolt. (I met him once, before his expulsion from France; and years later happening to be on the spot at a kind of revival of student revolt in the face of another wave of governmental reforms of the universities, where there was a giant demo outside the National Assembly and confrontations with the CRS, there he was again, laughing with delight but making no effort to interfere.) We were able to go even into the university council room—littered with papers, untidy but unwrecked—the whole campus was virtually deserted.

BUT THE GREATEST LIGHT on the whole évenements was that shed by our visit the same day to the “suburb” of Nanterre, across the highway from the university. At that time it was a bidonville, a shanty-town, with classic Third World shacks of cardboard, hessian and hammered petrol tins (bidons), linked by mud tracks sometimes bridged by planks, its population seeming largely composed of North African immigrants. I had never before seen anything as appalling. At the time it led me to reflect that it must have been one of the inputs into the Nanterre student revolt—how could anyone receiving the privilege of a university education (despite the frequent criticisms of overcrowding in the Parisian universities) be other than radicalised by the contrast between that and what was on the other side of the road? Later I began to conclude that in fact the spoiled children of the Parisian middle classes set their own issues well before the interests of the poverty-stricken across the road.

The existence of the Nanterre University itself—the main building was pretty good—was evidence that the government of the time was making a serious effort to deal with the explosion of the Baby Boomers into the university system, which was fee-free and open as far as the university generally, as distinct from the Grandes Ecoles, was concerned. This visit to Nanterre gave me a perspective on what I later saw in the Sorbonne (and, even later, at Vincennes). Much of the revolt in Paris by the students was against the “god-professors”, the authoritarian father figures who dominated the system, as was the case elsewhere also. It was the Spock generation in full voice.

This was something the French Left never really understood. But it was summed up in one of the many witty slogans disseminated in the flowering of poster art at the time—“Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho” (I am a Marxist, Groucho faction). Others included “Sous le pavé, le plage” (Underneath the paving stones is the beach—in other words, keep digging them up and throwing them at the cops and a better world will come) and “Il est interdit d’interdire” (It is forbidden to forbid).

I was pretty broke, and could not afford to stay for long at the hotel in the rue de la Harpe, even though in those days it was very cheap. So having discovered the set-up at the Sorbonne and met a few of the anarchists I moved into the anarchist “permanence”—they had taken over the library of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where there was a kind of gallery around the library (rather like the galleries around the beautiful main reading room of the then Public Library of New South Wales, now the Mitchell reading room of the old wing of the State Library). There I slept in my sleeping bag and got to know many of the anarchists, who were amongst the more rational of the enthusiasts for the “revolution”.

My favourite was an ageing alcoholic called Arsène, a firebrand of the old style, who looked back to the days of the Bonnot gang with admiration. Later on he was to lead a group to try to disrupt Sunday mass at the church near the anarchist camp where I was with Bernard, my Madagascan-Chinese mate, and his girlfriend. But at this time he was one of the leaders of the little group of anarchists who, unlike most of the students, ventured across the Pont St Michel onto the Right Bank and up to the Bourse, which they attempted rather pathetically to put to the torch. The CRS sent them back to the Left Bank with a flea in their collective ear. Through this group I established contact with the anarchists involved with their newspaper Le Monde Libertaire (now a much-diminished monthly) and their guru, the monkey-like Maurice Joyeux, whom it was impossible to take seriously. It was around this time that I first heard the great anarchist chanteur Leo Ferré, when he sang his song about the évenements along the lines of “Paris, enfin debout”—Paris, at last standing up straight (after years of abject submission to Gaullism). He as always had his chimpanzee companion Pépé with him.

I circulated around the Sorbonne and surrounding districts, meeting many of the students and attending quite a few meetings of the “Etats Generaux”. Despite the frequent confrontations with the CRS there was little real violence. The CRS were essentially country bumpkins recruited to operate in Paris precisely because they had no common bonds of sympathy or class with the middle-class students who confronted them. Whenever there was a confrontation or demo of any kind in the offing they were driven to surrounding back streets in special buses, where they waited for hours in total boredom and growing irritation, drinking rough red wine, so that by the time they were released and set on the students they were drunk and angry.

Despite this, and their brutality when given a chance, there was little serious violence. There was one case of a student being killed in a bagarre near the rue Monsieur le Prince (at the top end, nearest the Luxemburg Gardens); in fact the only other casualty was the student who, running away from the CRS across the Pont St Michel, jumped into the Seine and drowned. Despite the deliberative and demonstrative provocation of the CRS by the students there was remarkably little serious violence. It was observing this that I began to realise how much of what was going on was sheer theatre, or psychodrama.

The procession, or défile, along the Boulevard Montparnasse, was the event which moved me most. This was when one of the government ministers criticised Dany Cohn-Bendit as “just a German Jew”. Unlike his elder brother who taught at a provincial university Dany had not got around to adopting French citizenship (the family were indeed German Jews who had escaped the Nazis); shortly afterwards he was expelled from France back to his “native” Germany. There was a huge procession of students westwards along the Bde Montparnasse, carrying signs saying, “Nous sommes tous des Juifs Allemands”—we are all German Jews. This was the best and purest of the sentiments of May 1968. There are some famous photos of this défile, the best-known being of the front rank with a pretty girl in full “Marianne” mode riding on the shoulders of a couple of powerful males and brandishing a flag.

There were other mass demos, including that of the Right, the Gaullists, who organised a monster procession on the Right Bank, down the Champs Elysées, which far outnumbered the demos of the Left Bank. But like them (apart from the ridiculous anarchist sally against the Bourse) it carefully avoided crossing the Seine. Thus it was becoming clearer and clearer how theatrical the whole business was.

THE NEXT BIG DEMO was that of the CGT, the communist trade union federation. This was highly organised, and moved through their territory to culminate in the Place de la Republique in the middle of their city heartland. (Their real heartland in the Paris region was of course on the fringes, St Denis—this was a heartland which they shared with fascism, which was just a variant of communism without Moscow loyalties. The famous pre-war communist leader of this area was Jacques Doriot, who swapped over to the fascists, and took his working-class constituency with him, with hardly a pause. Later on, of course, with the collapse of communism, the racist and authoritarian commos moved over en masse to support Le Pen and his neo-fascists. What better demonstration of the essential identity of fascism and communism could one ask for?)

The CGT demo was very disciplined, with marshals wearing armbands at intervals of only a few metres on either side. It was made perfectly clear that there was to be no disorder. This was the high point of the power of the communists at this time, when many people were anticipating a coup, or a power-sharing ultimatum to de Gaulle. There was enormous enthusiasm at the demo, which included many people who were not communists. With mounting excitement everyone approached la Republique. But then, having waved their banners and shouted their slogans—they were told to go home. End of demo, nothing more for today. It was an enormous anti-climax. It became clear that the party had decided not to challenge the government. This was of course good sense—but the spirit of the time was not about good sense. As the faithful trooped off in the direction of their metro stops or whatever, there was a growing feeling of bitterness.

This was about the time when de Gaulle disappeared. No one seemed to know where he was, and what was happening. I was aware of the army units in hiding in the forest of St Germain, and expected that the government had been prepared for confrontation. Indeed, as later emerged, de Gaulle had flown to Mulhouse, the army base in the east, near the German border, to assure himself of the loyalty of the armed forces. Then he returned, and it was announced that he would address the nation on radio—at about 4 p.m. Everybody clustered around to hear him—I was in a group in the Café St Severin, down the bottom of the Boul’Mich.

The atmosphere again was electric. And the President began to speak. It was amazing. He scolded the nation, scolded the naughty children. Enough, he said, of the “chie en lit”—there was some debate in the following morning’s papers as to exactly what this folksy phrase meant, but it meant, in effect, “shitting in bed”. In other words, stop shitting in your own nest. Go home and stop all this. Like a balloon when the neck is released, the whole thing deflated. You could almost hear the air whistling out as the tension collapsed. Like ashamed, naughty children, people began dispersing. This was the real end of the “revolution”.

THEREAFTER, things calmed down. After all, summer was approaching, and the poverty-stricken students and the revolting younger academics were all lining up their holidays in Sardinia, Cuba, or wherever there was plenty of sun and sand. In these last days I got to know “les Katangais”. This was a small group of mercenaries who had fought in various places in Africa, including Katanga in the days when the Congo was on the point of collapsing. (Documented to some extent in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s book Katanga and Back, the fruit of his time working for an already corrupt and venal United Nations, which I had read not long before leaving Australia.) They were a fairly nasty bunch of thugs, probably murderers, who had holed up in the cellars of the Sorbonne with their molls when it was wide open. They were interesting, but not the kind of people you would want to get too close to.

Clearly their intentions were criminal (I don’t know about their acts while they were there); but this acquaintance meant that I got to see much more of the deep cellars of the Sorbonne than one normally would—I spent hours exploring these sinister and fascinating areas, still fortunately electric lit. I have often regretted that I never took one of the tours of the Parisian sewers. I am sure that when the flics finally re-entered the Sorbonne it was primarily to clean out this rats’ nest of criminals—they didn’t much care about the harmless students, who in any case preferred to remain above ground.

And I got to know a young girl, Bernadette N, whose parents were academics—the father a professor of something—with an apartment near the Montparnasse station. Many academics had apartments in or near the Quartier Latin, and became hopelessly besotted as they surveyed their demonstrating children and the brutal—but not murderous—CRS. As elsewhere, many of the parents of the Baby Boomers became similarly besotted with the turmoil and the low-level ideologising of the sixties. Bernadette was attractive, rather waif-like, and spoke good English (much less common, I later realised at Vincennes, than one would have thought). So I invited her to visit me whenever she came to England, giving her Chris’s address. Months later she turned up in London and stayed for a couple of nights with Chris—who took pity on her. She had become skinny with bad skin, dressing in a sloppy, revealing but unattractive manner, and was clearly on hard drugs. Quite a few of the revolting kids went that way.

I took the opportunity when the transport was all working again to contact Stephen Marris at the OECD—he had already contacted me in London about the possibility of a job with them, knowing of my work with the MNB—I cannot recall the details. In any case I went along to the Chateau de la Muette, or rather the much less impressive annexe in rue Franqueville, and talked to him. He offered me a job with them—which since I did not really want to go to the University of Manchester (to which I had been appointed as a lecturer in economics to begin in October) I took pretty seriously. So arriving in the month of August—the worst possible time to be in Paris, when everybody who is anybody is on holidays, especially most of the good standard quality restaurateurs (fermé pour les vacances was the sign that greeted one at every turn)—I stayed in a cheap hotel near the old markets off Bde St Germain, and commuted by bus to the 16e. In the evenings I fended off the clumsy pickup attempts by American girls.

One day I was in my office at rue Franqueville and went down for an afternoon coffee and picked up the early edition of Le Monde, which arrived about 3 p.m. There was the news about the Russians invading Czechoslovakia, bringing an end to the bright hopes of the Prague Spring. I was shocked and deeply moved. As soon as I could respectably get out of there I rushed back to the Quartier, expecting the streets to be alive with excitement and protest; something had to be done. Not at all. All was quiet, nobody gave a shit. The bourgeois Left, along with the proletarian Left, were on holidays. What, me care? It was from that date that my disillusionment with the Left really began. And when they all got back from holidays, what did they do about the Soviet tanks? Rien de rien. SFA.

And you have to remember that this was when Sartre had gone really mad and thrown in his hand with the Maoists; he had always favoured ignoring—“Il ne faut pas désesperer Billancourt”—the realities of Soviet brutality (like the Gulags, which he never forgave Camus for talking about; years before, in 1954-55, when I was still at high school I used to borrow books from the American information library at their Margaret Street consulate—this was before the stupid McCarthyist push caused them to purge much of their best stuff—and had read David Dallin’s book about the Gulags, so had no real illusions about them). Sartre was now in favour of terrorism into the bargain.

The Trotskyites still brandished the flame of revolution—absurdly and futilely. The rest of the Left played games. But while they were playing, the members of the French government were pretty busy, and Edgar Faure was drafting his Loi d’Orientation on reform of the educational system, and the experimental centre at Vincennes was being set up, as a campus of the University of Paris like Nanterre. But I did not know anything about Vincennes at that stage.

Despite their pusillanimous behaviour and indifference to the realities of Eastern Europe (the “Third World” was different—you could be as romantic as you liked about faraway places populated by illiterate peasants) the whole French middle classes were greatly changed by the évenements, radicalised in the way the anti-Vietnam War movement radicalised a generation of Anglophone youth. Some of the French intellectuals recovered after a few years, and began to re-evaluate both communism and Marxism. These were the “Nouveaux philosophes”, like Bernard-Henri Levy. But the impact on the universities was immense. Some of this was symbolic, in that from May 1968 it became almost de rigueur for students and profs to tu-toyer each other. The old forms of respect were abandoned. As Raymond Aron, the great friend and rival of Sartre all their lives, called it, the whole affair was a “psychodrama”. But with very real and permanent effects.

Certainly de Gaulle and his government took it very seriously. Virtually all the practical demands of the students were met, but of course practical demands were not what the movement was really all about. To become and remain a “soixante-huitard”, a sixty-eighter, was a spiritual and emotional conversion, and many people still live with it, no matter how old and comfortable they become. They are like the “RSL of the anti-Vietnam War movement”, sitting around reminiscing about the great days, condemning the disrespectful attitudes of the youth, bemoaning the fact that their sacrifices and heroism are now forgotten or no longer taken seriously, constantly reproaching the parties of the “Left” for backsliding, expressing irrational hatred of business and “reactionary” political parties.

P.P. McGuinness edited 100 editions of Quadrant, from the March 1998 issue to the January-February 2008 issue.