by Annie Ernaux
She is visited by fleeting images of her parents in the small Normandy town, her mother taking off her work coat to go to evening prayer, her father coming up from the garden with a spade over his shoulder, a slow-moving world that continues to exist, more surreal than a film and far removed from the world in which she lives, modern and cultivated, forward-moving—toward what is difficult to say.
Between what happens in the world and what happens to her, there is no point of convergence. They are two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received than forgotten, the other all static shots.
At every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we’re told to think—no less by books or ads in the Métro than by funny stories—are other things that society hushes up without knowing it is doing so. Thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things. Then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognized at last, while underneath other silences start to form.
Later, journalists and historians would love to recall the words of Peter Viansson-Ponté in Le Monde a few months before May ’68: France is bored! It would be easy to find bleak photos of oneself, full of undatable gloom, of Sundays in front of the TV watching Anne Marie Peysson, and one would be sure things had been that way for everyone—frozen, uniformly gray. And television, with its fixed iconography and minimal cast of actors, would institute a ne varietur version of events, the unalterable impression that all of us had been eighteen to twenty-five that year and hurled cobblestones at the riot police, handkerchiefs pressed to our mouths. Bombarded by the recurrent camera images, we suppressed those of our own May ’68, far from notorious—the deserted Place de la Gare on a Sunday, no passengers, no newspapers in the kiosks—or glorious—one day when we were afraid of lacking money, gas, and especially food, rushing to the bank to withdraw cash and filling a cart to overflowing at Carrefour, from an inherited memory of hunger.
It was a spring like any other, sleet in April, Easter late. We’d followed the Winter Olympics with Jean-Claude Killy, read Elise, or The Real Life, proudly changed the R8 for a Fiat sedan, started Candide with the eleventh graders, and paid only vague attention to the unrest at Paris universities, reported on the radio. As usual, we thought, the student rebellion would be quelled by the authorities. But the Sorbonne closed, the written exams for the CAPES were canceled, and students clashed with police. One night, we heard
breathless voices on Europe 1. There were barricades in the Latin Quarter, as in Algiers ten years earlier, Molotov cocktails and wounded. Now we were aware that something was happening and did not feel like returning to life as usual the next day. We met by chance and talked, indecisive, and then came together. We stopped working, for no specific reason and with no demands to make, but simply because we’d caught the bug, and when the unexpected suddenly occurs, there is nothing to do but wait. What would happen the next day we didn’t know or try to find out. It was another time.
We who had never really come to terms with working and did not really want the things we bought, saw ourselves in the students, only a few years younger, who threw cobblestones at the riot police. On our behalf, they hurled years of censure and repression back at the State, the violent suppression of the demonstrations against the war in Algeria, the racist attacks, the banning of The Nun, and the unmarked black Citroën DS’s of the police. They avenged us for our fettered adolescence, the respectful hush of lecture halls, the shame we felt at sneaking boys into our residence rooms. Our allegiance to the blazing nights of Paris was rooted in our crushed desires, the degradations of submission. We regretted we had not seen all this before, but felt lucky it was happening at the start of our careers.
Suddenly, the 1936 we knew from family stories was real.
We saw and heard things we had never seen or heard in our lives, or even thought possible. Places such as universities, factories, and theaters, whose functions were determined by age-old rules and which admitted only specified populations, were now open to all. There, we talked, ate, slept, loved, did everything except the thing for which the place had been intended. Institutional, sanctified spaces were a thing of the past. Professors and students, young and old, company executives and manual workers conversed. Miraculously, hierarchies and distances dissolved into words. We were through with carefully phrased remarks, refined and courteous language, measured tones and circumlocutions, the distance with which, we now realized, the people in power and their flunkies—one needed only watch Michel Droit—imposed their domination. Lively voices spoke with brutal frankness and cut each other off with no apology. Faces expressed anger, contempt, and pleasure. The freedom of attitudes and energy of bodies took one’s breath away. If this was revolution, it started there, resplendent, in the expansion and release of bodies that settled themselves anywhere they wanted. When de Gaulle resurfaced—where had he been, we’d hoped he was gone for good—and spoke of chienlit13 with a grimace of disgust, without knowing the meaning we saw the aristocratic disdain for revolt, which he reduced to a word conveying both excrement and copulation, a bestial squirming, the instincts broken free.
We were unconcerned by the absence of an emergent labor leader. With their paternalistic air, the Parti Communiste and union leaders continued to determine needs and desires. They rushed to negotiate with the government, which showed virtually no sign of life, as if there were nothing better to be sought than increased purchasing power and a lower retirement age. At the close of the Grenelle Agreement, as we listened to them pompously outline, in words we’d forgotten three weeks earlier, the “measures” to which the State had “consented,” we felt a chill come over us. We began to hope again when the working-class “base” rejected the abdication of Grenelle and Mendès France at Charléty Stadium. The dissolution of the Assembly and the announcement of elections plunged us into doubt again. When we saw the somber crowd unfurl down the Champs-Élysées with Debré and Malraux, whose inspired and ravaged features no longer saved him from servility, arm-in-arm with the others in a false and cheerless brotherhood, we knew the end had come. There were two worlds and we had to choose between them; it was a fact that could no longer be ignored. Elections were not a choice but simply restored the notables to their former positions. In any case, 50 percent of the young people were not yet twenty-one and couldn’t vote. The General Confederation of Labor and the Parti Communiste ordered people back to the lycées and factories. Their spokesmen with their slow, gravelly faux-peasant diction had well and truly shafted us. They were earning the reputation of “objective allies of the State” and Stalinist traitors, an image borne for years to come by union representatives in the workplace, the target of all attacks.
Exams were resumed, trains ran, gasoline flowed anew. People could again go on vacation. In early July, provincial visitors crossing Paris by bus between train stations felt the bump of cobbles, put back in place as if nothing had happened. On their return a few weeks later, they crossed a smooth tarred surface that no longer bumped beneath the wheels, and they wondered where all the tons of cobblestones had gone. It seemed that more had happened in two months than in the ten previous years, but not for us. We hadn’t had time to do anything. At some point, we didn’t exactly know when, we had missed something, or just let it drop.
Everyone had started to believe in a violent future. It was a matter of months, a year at most. Things would heat up in the autumn, and the spring too, people said (until we eventually stopped thinking about it, and later, coming across an old pair of jeans, we thought, “These did May ’68”). Some hoped and worked toward “May Redux” and a new society. Others obsessively feared and resisted it, threw Gabrielle Russier in prison, sniffed out “Leftists” in all young men with long hair, applauded the new antidemonstration law, and condemned everything. In the workplace, people fell into two categories, the strikers and non-strikers of May, ostracized in equal m
easure. “May ’68” became a way of ranking individuals. When we met someone new, we wondered which side they’d been on, though no matter what the camp, the violence had been the same, and we forgave ourselves nothing.
We who had remained with the Parti Socialiste Unifié to change society now discovered the Maoists and Trotskyists, a vast quantity of ideas and concepts surfacing all at once. Movements, books, and magazines popped up everywhere, along with philosophers, critics, and sociologists: Bourdieu, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Chomsky, Baudrillard, Wilhelm Reich, Ivan Illich, Tel Quel, structural analysis, narratology, ecology. From Bourdieu’s Inheritors to the little Swedish book on sexual positions, everything moved toward a new intelligence and the transformation of the world. Awash in languages hitherto unseen, we didn’t know where to start and wondered how we’d remained unaware of it all until now. In a month we made up for years of lost time. It moved and reassured us to see de Beauvoir, in her turban, and Sartre again, older but as pugnacious as ever, though they had nothing new to teach us. André Breton, unfortunately, had died two years too soon.
Now, everything once considered normal had become the object of scrutiny. The family, education, prison, work, holidays, madness, advertising, every aspect of reality was questioned, including the word of the critic, who was ordered to probe his own origins, where are you coming from, buddy? Society had ceased to function naïvely. Buying a car, marking a paper, and giving birth all had meaning.
We had to know everything about the planet, the oceans, the crime of Bruay-en-Artois. We had a stake in every struggle, Allende’s Chile, Cuba, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia. We evaluated systems and looked for models in an all-encompassing political reading of the world. The key word was “liberation.”
Individuals, whether or not they were intellectuals, were entitled to speak and be heard. They needed only represent a group, a condition, an injustice. The fact of having experienced something as a woman, homosexual, class defector, prisoner, farmer, or miner gave one permission to speak in the first person. To think of oneself in collective terms brought a certain exaltation. People spontaneously took the floor, prostitutes and striking workers. Charles Piaget, the factory worker from Lip, was better known than the psychologist of the same name whom our teachers had dwelled upon when we were in Philo (never suspecting that one day, the name Piaget would mean nothing to us but a luxury jeweler advertised in magazines at the hairdresser’s).
Boys and girls were together everywhere now. Prize-giving, compositions, and school pinafores were things of the past, numerical scores replaced with letters from A to E. Students kissed and smoked in the schoolyard, declared essay topics retarded or cool!
We experimented with structural grammar, semantic fields, isotopes, and Freinet’s Modern School Movement. We abandoned Corneille and Boileau for Boris Vian, Ionesco, the songs of Boby Lapointe and Colette Magny, Pilote magazine and comic-strip books. We wrote a novel or journal that drew on the hostility of colleagues who in ’68 had holed up in the staff room, and of parents who raised Cain because we taught Catcher in the Rye and Les petits enfants du siècle.
We emerged in an altered state from two-hour debates on drugs, pollution, or racism, and in our heart of hearts felt we’d taught the students nothing. Were we not pedaling next to the bicycle? And for that matter, was school of any use at all? No sooner had we addressed one question than another leapt into our heads.
In order to think, speak, write, work, exist in another way, we felt we had nothing to lose by trying everything.
1968 was the first year of the world.
On learning of the death of General de Gaulle one morning in November, at first we could not believe it—so we had really believed he was immortal!—and then realized how little we’d thought about him over the past year and a half. His death marked the end of the time before May ’68, years that were far behind us now.
Yet as the days went by, marked by the ringing of school bells and the voices of Albert Simon and Madame Soleil on Europe 1, flank steak with fries on Saturdays, Kiri le clown and Annick Beauchamp’s A Minute for Women in the evenings, we perceived no evolution. Perhaps in order to feel it, one needed to stop for a moment, for example, to gaze at the tableau formed by the lycée students sitting on the ground, in the schoolyard, in the sun, after the death of the factory worker Pierre Overney, killed by a security guard at Renault. It was a moment whose distinct flavor was that of a March afternoon, or so we’d thought, but which became, when the time behind us had turned into history, an image of the first sit-in.
The shames of yesteryear were no longer valid. People made fun of guilt, we are all Judeo-cretins, denounced sexual frustration; uptight was the ultimate insult. Parents magazine taught frigid women to stimulate themselves with their legs spread in front of a mirror. In a leaflet distributed in lycées, Dr. Carpentier encouraged students to masturbate to fight boredom in class. Touching between adults and children was exonerated. All that had been forbidden, unspeakable, was now recommended. We got used to seeing genitals onscreen but held our breath to contain our emotion when Marlon Brando sodomized Maria Schneider. To improve our erotic skills we bought the little red Swedish book with photos of all the possible positions, and went to see Anatomy of Love. We planned to try a threesome someday. But we could not bring ourselves to do what used to be considered indecent exposure, walk naked in front of the children.
The discourse of pleasure reigned supreme. You had to feel pleasure while reading, writing, taking a bath, defecating. It was the alpha and the omega of human activities.
We reflected on our lives as women. We realized that we’d missed our share of freedom—sexual, creative, or any other kind enjoyed by men. We were as shattered by the suicide of Gabrielle Russier as by that of a long-lost sister, and were enraged by the guile of Pompidou, who quoted a verse by Éluard that nobody understood to avoid saying what he really thought of the case. The Women’s Liberation Movement had arrived in the provinces. Le Torchon Brûle was on the newsstands. We read The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, Stifled Creation by Suzanne Hörer and Jeanne Socquet with the mingled excitement and powerlessness one feels on discovering a truth about oneself in a book. Awakened from conjugal torpor, we sat on the ground beneath a poster that read A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle and went back over our lives. We felt capable of cutting ourselves loose from husband and kids, and writing crude, raw things. Once we were home again, our determination faded. Guilt welled up. We could no longer see how to liberate ourselves, how to go about it, or why we should. We convinced ourselves that our man wasn’t a male chauvinist pig. We were torn between discourses, the ones that advocated equal rights for the sexes and attacked “the law of the fathers” versus the ones that promoted everything “female”: periods, breast-feeding, and the making of leek soup. But for the first time, we envisaged our lives as a march toward freedom, which changed a great many things. A feeling common to women was on its way out, that of natural inferiority.
We would not remember the day or the month, only that it was spring and one had read from first to last, in Le Nouvel Observateur, the names of 343 women who stated they’d had illegal abortions—so many, yet we’d been so alone with the probe and the spurting blood. Even if to do so would be frowned upon, we knew, we added our voice to the others that called for free access to medical abortion and the abolishment of the law of 1920. We printed leaflets on the high school photocopier and slipped them into mailboxes after dark. We went to see Histoires d’A, escorted pregnant women to a private apartment where, free of charge, activist doctors performed abortions by vacuum aspiration. A pressure cooker to disinfect the equipment and a bicycle pump with reversed valve was all it took. Dr. Karman had made it simpler and safer to perform the work of the backstreet abortionists—“angel-makers,” les faiseuses d’anges. We provided addresses in London and Amsterdam, exhilarated to be working undercover, as if renewing our tie
s with the Resistance and the suitcase-carriers of the Algerian War. The lawyer Gisèle Halimi was radiant in the glare of flashbulbs on leaving the Bobigny trial after defending Djamila Boupacha. She too represented this tradition, just as the supporters of Let Them Live and Professor Lejeune, who displayed fetuses on television to horrify people, represented that of Vichy. One Saturday afternoon thousands of us marched on the spot with banners, under a blazing sun. We raised our eyes to the cloudless sky of the Dauphiné and told ourselves it was up to us to stop, for the very first time, thousands of years of blood-soaked deaths of women. So who could forget us?
Individuals made the revolution to measure, according to their age, occupation, social class, interests, and old feelings of guilt. Reluctantly they obeyed the orders to celebrate, enjoy without hindrance, and be intelligent, for one must not die stupid. Some smoked grass, lived in communes, went to Kathmandu, joined an Établissement14 group and entered Renault as factory workers, while others spent a week in Tabarka, read Charlie Hebdo, Fluide Glacial, L’Écho des Savanes, Tankonalasanté, Métal Hurlant, La Gueule Ouverte, stuck flower decals on their car doors, and in their rooms hung posters of Che and the little girl burned by napalm. They wore Mao suits or ponchos, moved onto the floor with cushions, burned incense, went to see the Grand Magic Circus, Last Tango in Paris, and Emmanuelle, renovated a farmhouse in Ardèche, subscribed to Fifty Million Consumers, where they’d first read about pesticides in butter, went braless, left Lui magazine lying on tables in plain view of the kids, who were asked to call them by their first names, like school chums.