Flâneuse
Page 18
* * *
In 1848, Sand wanted to do more than just watch as history unfolded: she believed she understood the people at every level of society, as well as their leaders, and this was her chance to make a difference in people’s lives. To live in ethical cooperation with your fellow creatures, she believed, you have to join the collective project. As the unofficial minister of propaganda, she would take a major role in shaping the new government’s message. She threw herself assiduously into the life of public service, providing input on who should be named to various cabinet positions, and Ledru-Rollin, the new minister of the interior, actually listened to her. She started her own journal, La Cause du Peuple, and wrote articles for the new government’s Bulletin de la République, in which she exhorted the people of France, no matter where they lived, to pay attention to what was happening in Paris. ‘Citizens,’ she wrote, ‘France is embarking on the greatest endeavour of modern times: the foundation of the government of all the people, the organisation of democracy, the republic of all rights, of all interests, of all intelligences, and of all virtues…!’5
She saw, and tried to make her readers see, how much was riding on the upcoming elections. She met with the legendary statesman de Tocqueville in those early months of the new Republic, and he recalled, in his memoirs, her telling him: ‘Try to persuade your friends, monsieur, not to push people into the streets by unsettling or irritating them; in the same way I want to counsel patience to those on my side; because – believe me – if a battle breaks out, you will all perish.’6
With the new government, it seemed as if women would have the opportunity to advance their own goals, calling for economic independence, childcare, the right to employment. They wanted more from this revolution than to see real women with real needs abstracted into allegories for the nation, bare-breasted Mariannes promising liberté for all except those who resembled her. But most men still agreed with the novelist and pamphleteer Claude Tillier: ‘Who ever saw a political idea dwelling under a gauze bonnet?’ Few nineteenth-century men, it seemed, could agree with the utopian Socialist Charles Fourier, who declared: ‘The degree of emancipation of women is the natural measure of general emancipation,’7 or applaud Victor Hugo’s 1853 statement, at the funeral of Louise Julien, who was imprisoned and exiled for protesting Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état: ‘If the 18th century proclaimed the rights of man, the 19th proclaims the rights of women.’
Flaubert gently mocked the feminists in Sentimental Education (1869), in the form of the spinster Mademoiselle Vatnaz, for whom ‘the emancipation of the proletariat was possible only through the emancipation of women’. She wanted ‘the admission of women to all types of employment, investigation into the paternity of illegitimate children, a new legal code, and either the abolition of marriage or at the very least ‘a more intelligent regulation of the institution’. And if these rights were not granted, Mademoiselle Vatnaz avers, ‘they would have to conquer force by force. Ten thousand citizenesses, armed with good muskets, could make the Hôtel de Ville tremble.’8
Still, Sand herself could not stand up for women’s rights independent of anyone else’s. A few women’s groups asked Sand to run for office, and she refused. ‘Society has much to gain by the entry of some of our sex into the administration of public affairs,’ she wrote, but ‘the mass of poor, uneducated women would have nothing to gain by it’. This is hard to swallow. Universal male suffrage was put into law for the first time since the Revolution, and though the writer Delphine de Girardin, who wrote under the male pseudonym ‘the Vicomte de Launay’, militated for women to be included (‘In their fine promises for universal suffrage, they forgot women’), others, like Sand and her friend Marie d’Agoult, who also wrote under the male pen name Daniel Stern, thought women’s suffrage should be gradually attained, rather than suddenly introduced. Society would have to be fundamentally reorganised, Sand believed, before women could profit from that power. Once women had won equality in the home, then they could seek equality in the outside world. Sand worried, in a letter from April 1848, that women were making themselves look ridiculous by asking for the vote; it was too much, too soon.
It was France that Sand defended, a Socialist France with opportunities for all. But Paris was the city where she stood up for her own rights, and saw others, as well, rise up for theirs. Like Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau, Sand was inspired by ‘the ardour of the crowds’; the stirring of revolution made her aware of ‘the consciousness of a vast love, a sublime, all-embracing tenderness, as if the heart of all mankind were beating in [her] breast’.9 Of all the places Sand wrote about, and dreamt about, it was in Paris – workaday, dirty, infuriating, beautiful Paris – that a new world had the best chance of being realised.
Things did not turn out as Sand had hoped. The elections that were held just after the Fête de la Fraternité, on 23 April, were disappointing. The people she championed did not turn out to vote, and the new assembly ended up nearly as conservative as the old one. A Socialist state was not to be. Sand’s ambivalent stance towards the feminists didn’t matter for long; the feminist clubs that formed in those early months were outlawed on 28 July. The few advances made on behalf of the workers – notably in the form of workshops providing employment – had been eliminated by June. So the people rose up again. It took two days for the army to quell the uprising.
Sand burned out as a politician very quickly. Within a year or so, the inefficacy of politics got to be too much for her; she was too pragmatic, and yet too idealistic.10 She would always prioritise diplomacy. As conflict and conservatism reigned, Sand retired from politics and left Paris. She was running out of money, and afraid her son would be arrested because of his involvement in the rebellion. She framed her concern with the way the rebellion had got out of hand in terms, once again, of her limited freedom of movement in the city: ‘All during the month of March I could come and go on my own in the whole city, at any hour, and I never met a worker, a ruffian, but he stepped out of my path on the sidewalk, and did so with an affable air of goodwill. By the 17th of May I could barely step out of my home in broad daylight accompanied by friends: “order” reigned!’11 Her stance on the Commune in 1871 would be held against her by Socialists for generations to come. ‘Poor people!’ she said. ‘They will commit excesses, crimes, but with what a vengeance will they be crushed!’ Paris became, in Sand’s words, ‘a hideout for bandits of all stripes, oppressing a troop of cowards and imbeciles, who will finish by destroying the haven they’ve sullied!’
Perhaps she resented the Commune because it represented ‘a return of the citoyen [citizen] to the detriment of the promeneur [walker]’.12 The newly reorganised, aestheticised, sanitised city was presented in the media as having been under threat by the figure of the Communard. But the figure of the female revolutionary was depicted as even more threatening. For the flâneur, the street may have become a ‘de-politicised space’, but for the flâneuse, this was neither possible nor desirable. During the Commune, a specious report from an American journalist, in which he claimed to have seen women throwing the nineteenth-century equivalent of Molotov cocktails into the basements of Parisian buildings, led to the creation of the figure of the petroleuse, or ‘woman who sets things on fire’. Revolutionary women were perceived by their contemporaries to be totally uncontrollable, much more dangerous than any group of men. At one point during the French Revolution, women were outlawed from publicly gathering in groups of five or more. Sand would have been aware of all of this, and it fed her outrage that women did not have the same freedoms as men, in private or in public. ‘There is but one sex,’ she wrote to Flaubert. ‘A man and a woman are so close to being the same thing that I hardly understand the many distinctions and subtle arguments on which society feeds in this matter.’13
Sand’s contribution to the revolution of 1848 is still not appreciated in its subtlety. She recognised that both the people and their government had constructed airtight mythologies to justify their actions, and under
stood that the clash of polarities was not the way forward. She occupied some third space of protest and mediation, as she demonstrated in her dealings with the Prefect of Police.
She should have taken the women’s side; she should have lent her name to their cause. Maybe if she had, she’d be remembered with less ambivalence. But she stayed behind no lines; she cut across all perspectives.
* * *
I was in Paris when it happened. Slowly people began to gather in a park near Wall Street, to hold meetings, to put up tents, to protest the abuses and greed of the financial system. Soon they had a library, a kitchen, a place to charge your phone, a first-aid tent. Whose streets? Our streets! they cried. Hundreds of people were living in Zuccotti Park. They managed to point out better than any speech, any exposé, any op-ed, what was wrong with the US, where 40 per cent of the nation’s wealth is owned by 1 per cent of the population. We, the 99 per cent, have been plunged into a shitty economy by the 1 per cent, who are making money off of us, every minute more. New York used to be a vibrant, diverse place; now it’s become a sandpit for corporate interests. It was stirring to see the videos of the people’s microphone, waves of rhetoric rippling back through the bodies of the crowd, and the protesters marching across the Brooklyn Bridge, then being arrested by police.
The Occupy movement’s ideals were beautifully captured in that early poster of a ballerina balancing in attitude on the charging bull statue in front of the New York Stock Exchange – the bullishness of the market charging over all the other components of a life, from the arts to health care to housing; the dancer a triumph over the market. Her pose reminds us that it’s all supposed to be a question of balance, from the branches of government through the economy to the complicated urban ballet we all take part in every day. What is our one demand? the poster asked, and no one ever said, definitively, what it was. It was more interesting to leave the answer open.
The answer was also, somehow, impossible to articulate; it was bigger than words – that’s why it needed a trespassing kind of movement. But that physical openness created space for authoritarianism to storm in and declare it illegal. The police cracked down on the tent city, confiscating books, arresting people for loitering, especially those wearing Guy Fawkes masks, citing an 1845 New York City law banning masked gatherings in public. The attacks spread to Occupied spaces across the country, from cities to universities, and we all watched on our computers, horrified, as campus police pepper-sprayed undergraduates at close range. And although the police intimidation was all too real, by a certain point genuine disgust at police tactics was overshadowed by performative outrage, like someone laughing too quickly at a joke. No one was innocent of the charge of playing politics.
* * *
Watching the tents being disbanded from Paris, where Occupy didn’t really take off (‘We’re always protesting,’ my French friends said, ‘and anyway who wants to live in a tent?’), reminded me of the energy and the failures of the ‘events’ of May 1968. What starts off peaceable never ends that way, and then it’s over and everyone moves on. All that remains is legacy.
As far as mythologised collective uprisings go, you can’t do much better than 1968 in Paris. It all began at Nanterre University, a modern campus in the western suburbs of Paris, built in the mid-1960s. Within a few years, it would earn the nickname ‘Nanterre Rouge’ for its radical leftist activities; the nickname persisted nearly forty years later, when I went to teach there, and found a campus dotted with brutalist cement buildings, many of which have by now fallen into disrepair, some propped up on iron columns under which walkways have been created, others set back from the asphalt by steps which do not invite undergrads to congregate, eat lunch and flirt. It’s very modern, but not very nice. And in the mid-1960s, the rules were as draconian as the architecture.
In March 1968, a group formed called Les enragés (‘the Angry Ones’) to protest the fact that male students weren’t allowed to stay the night in the female dorms. The minister of sport was visiting the campus to inaugurate a new swimming pool, and a feisty student called Daniel Cohn-Bendit interrupted his speech to hassle him about a recent report published by the minister of youth: ‘400 pages on the young and not a word about sexuality!’14 Cohn-Bendit was almost expelled and became a folk hero to the students; they protested in his defence until the university was shut down, and then they went to protest in the Latin Quarter, in the heart of Paris (‘Latin Quarter meeting place, Latin Quarter vicarious myth,’ writes Antonio Quattrocchi in his iconic account of the events) and got themselves arrested while other students occupied the Sorbonne, always the Sorbonne, ‘Sorbonne mater dolorosa where the dark ancient rites of initiation and consecration are performed. Sorbonne mater dulcissima, where the golden fruits of scholarly minds blossom in secluded cloisters, well protected from the winds of history and the infinite infections of vulgarity. Sorbonne the citadel. Sorbonne the fortress.’15 The rector of the university closed it down, and allowed the police to come in and disperse the students. After several days of marching and skirmishing with police, the students’ leader, with Daniel Cohn-Bendit at his side, articulated their demands in a voice hoarse from shouting: Amnesty for all demonstrators. Reopening of the universities. And the disappearance of all police from the Sorbonne.
A week after the students’ protests began, the unions declared a general strike for Monday 13 May. One by one, that week, the factories went on strike. On Thursday, at the Renault factory just outside Paris, one young worker (this is Quattrocchi’s account) said ‘I have had enough’, and got up from his machine. One by one his colleagues joined him, and within half an hour their workshop was empty.16
That’s all it takes: one person to stand up and say I’ve had enough. Revolutions are made by individuals. Pass the pavé.
But of everything I’ve read and seen about 1968 – from academic studies to popular films – it’s Mavis Gallant who best captures Paris during that eventful time, not only because her descriptions are so vivid, but because she refuses to romanticise what’s happening around her. Gallant observes 1968 from an ironic distance, which is, I think, the only ethical way for a writer to respond. The barricades, for instance – they are not the spontaneous expressions of resistance thrown up by students, she and a friend realise through investigation; the rocks are too big to have been dug up from the pavement, they must have been carried by truck.17 She sees through the pose everyone is frenetically trying to maintain: the high school students who don’t really know why they’re marching but beg to stay out late; the well-meaning marchers who talk to Gallant, a foreigner, ‘as if I were a plucky child recovering from brain fever in a Russian novel. Turned out she thought I was an Algerian, and that was her way of showing she wasn’t racist.’ There are the people in the neighbourhood who create a false siege mentality, claiming there is no bread and milk in the Sorbonne neighbourhood, which a quick call to a friend proves isn’t true, and the violence of the counter-protesters, the wealthy bourgeois out on the Champs-Elysées shouting ‘France for the French!’ Gallant writes that the Place Maubert is like ‘one of those dumps that smoulder all the time, with a low fire that you can smell for miles. Blackened garbage, singed trees, a burned car. Don’t want to see more. Walk down the Seine. Keep turning my ankles – so many holes in the ground, and so many stray wood, stone, and iron things. Nothing has a shape or a name.’18 With the piles of garbage everywhere, the whole city looks like it’s been knocked over, like a giant overturned garbage can.
Even still, in the black-and-white footage you can find on the Internet, it looks amazing. People clustered on balconies. Students up on the Lion de Belfort with 30,000 people massed around in the Place Denfert-Rochereau. You watch the video and hear what it sounded like, and it sounds just like a march today. The din of far-off traffic and voices. Someone beating on a drum like the regular chugging of a train. Someone blowing a whistle with an insistent staccato beat. The increasing roar of the crowd as it gets closer. The sing-song cry of the sire
ns. The chant: lib-ér-ez! nos! ca-ma-rades! People silhouetted against the smoke, in balletic leaps as they hurl paving stones, running away from the police, getting into fistfights. Masses and masses of people, walking together with arms linked. A shot of hands waving in the air, punctuating their demands, like something out of Fosse, here and there a cigarette between the fingers. Imagine that. A revolutionary gesture with your smoking hand.19 People on the balconies up and down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, excited without understanding why. Gallant recognises that this kind of civil disobedience so easily becomes a form of entertainment. In the early days of the student uprising, Gallant describes the atmosphere as ‘Electric, uneasy, but oddly gay. Yes, it is like a holiday in a village, with the whole town out on the square’; as the crisis dragged on through the month of May, ‘Everyone enjoyed the general strike so much that no one has gone back to work, from the sound of it.’20 Flaubert noticed this feeling as well. ‘There was a carnival gaiety in the air, a sort of camp-fire mood,’ he wrote of the revolution in February 1848; ‘nothing could have been more enchanting than Paris in those first days.’21 He captures the performance of certain values that such an uprising makes necessary, certain words to pronounce, like a Shibboleth, to prove your stripes: ‘it was necessary to criticize the lawyers all the time, and to use the following expressions as often as possible: “Contribute one’s stone to the building … social problem … workshop”.’22 The same in 1968, the same in 2011; all that changes is the vocabulary. Gallant laments the inauthenticity of her era: ‘Everything tatty, a folklore now – China, Cuba, Godard’s films. Our tatty era.’23
And we look to 1968 for authenticity, just as they looked to the Communards. And to whom did the Communards look?
To 1848.
* * *
There are two elements of the protest: the march and the barricade. The forward movement and the resistance. A demonstration can’t become a protest without the forces of order saying no to their no. Both play their part. The barricade is a symbol of revolution, but the police kettle is just another kind of barricade. The very things that stir our heart in a revolution may be co-opted by the forces of order – or the other way around. Gallant sees a man beating with a stick ‘the three-plus-two rhythm that used to mean “Al-gé-rie fran-çaise” but now stands for “CRS S-S”’: ‘Algeria for the French’ or ‘CRS = SS’; the blind imperialism of the French in Algeria, or resistance to authority: the same catchy beat.24