The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by Norman Stone

  Out of the blue in 1968 came troubles that caught world headlines: there was a mass revolt in universities, Paris easily in the lead. The immediate cause was the mishandling of educational expansion. France in 1958 had had a quarter of a million students and ten years later 630,000. Student-staff ratios stood at 15:1 in Germany in the Humanities, but 27.5:1 in Law, whereas in France the figures were close to 60:1. Then again, academic staff was expanded but quality declined: in France there had been 5,600 teachers in 1956 but there were 22,500 in 1967, and their salaries had not kept pace with the times. Nor had buildings. The temper of the times was made concrete in the new university of Nanterre, miles away from the centre of Paris, in an area of migrant shanty dwellings beset by mud and wire. It was hated, as Annie Kriegel remembers:

  un horrible cul-de-basse-fosse où grouillaient, aveugles et sourds aux bruits du dehors, des humains anonymes qui se ressemblaient tous par l’accoutrement, la tenue avachie, une langue de bois formée d’onomatopées, de sigles et d’injures ordurières, et des discours insensés.

  In all countries, new universities (and hospitals) became bywords for expensive ugliness: they were crammed with students; taught by men and women appointed all of a sudden in great numbers, without regard for quality. The humanities came off least well, and yet the expansion with relatively new subjects, such as economics, sociology and psychology, meant that there were young men and women a-plenty who imagined that they had the answer to everything. It was a terrible cocktail, superbly written up by Richard Davy in The Times. The British at that stage could afford to sneer: their universities were still of the older model, and selected students quite rigorously. When, at Cambridge, an attempt was made to occupy the central administrative building, the students had to be told that its functions were quite vague, that a committee met from time to time. The building was occupied, and the reactionaries at Trinity College were mobilized, some of them arriving with hunting shotguns. The occupants had to be protected by the police as they left the building.

  Government financing of universities had been generous enough to start with in France, but in the later sixties there were cutbacks, and the education minister, Christian Fouchet, proposed a new system of selection, to cut numbers by one third. He also announced that ‘the university’ should be ‘industrialized’, precisely the language to annoy anyone working in one. There had been student strikes in the French system before, at Nanterre most notably in the previous November, but now the dam burst. One particular grievance was that boys could not spend the night in girls’ residences: the sort of prescription which in the past would just have counted as common sense. Now, perhaps because of the Pill, there was a climat de saturnales in places where l’austérité faisait prime. It was exploited by a vedettariat delinquant with l’histrionisme dont Cohn-Bendit fut un talentueux prototype. Daniel Cohn-Bendit was a clever manager of groupuscules that would otherwise have collapsed in squabbling; and he was also well aware that, as de Gaulle challenged the supremacy of the dollar, any sign of trouble in France would be welcome in Washington. Although a fatuous American political scientist had pronounced France to be one of the two most stable countries in the world, the temper was rising outside the glossy world of the new technocracy and the film-set sparkling buildings of André Malraux’s cleaned-up beaux quartiers. At Nanterre a minister (of ‘Youth’) called François Missoffe visited in January 1968, to open a swimming pool. There he encountered Cohn-Bendit, who complained that Missoffe’s book on ‘Youth’ had nothing to say of sexual problems. Missoffe said that he was not surprised, given Cohn-Bendit’s looks, that he had sexual problems and that he should dive into the swimming pool to sort them out. It was the start of troubles. The sociology building was ‘occupied’, the administration called in the police, and the ‘Tet Offensive’ in Vietnam supplied the students with an occasion for militancy, complete with denunciations of l’école des flics et des patrons. There were counter-attacks by extreme right-wing students (and there were thick rumours, to the effect that the CIA were behind these, because it wanted to destabilize de Gaulle). At any rate there was ‘a mass of manoeuvre’, its strength increased because of the half-hearted attempts at repression by the Nanterre rector. The thing spread, on 3 May, to the Sorbonne itself. There, there was an affray with the police, semi-encouraged by the rector, and eighty of them were injured by flying brickbats. Magistrates sentenced four students to brief terms of imprisonment, and tempers rose, elsewhere, as well as in Paris. By the night of 10/11 May barricades had been put up in the Latin Quarter, the highest — three yards — rather suitably in the rue d’Ulm, where stood the poor old ENS, the teachers’ training school that had produced the grave ancestors of whom these students were a weird offspring. The students attempted to produce their own left-wing ideology.

  However, it was sloganeering: ‘the beach lies under the street’, ‘bourgeois medicine does not cure, it repairs’. There was an odd cult of Maoism and the names of sages were invoked, but as Leszek Kołakowski says, 1968 yielded no political thought worth mentioning, and although François Maspéro and others produced a spate of writing, none of it lasts. The extraordinary thing was that France fell into a sort of paralysis for the month of May. This was because the Paris events gained momentum through various other elements, which had nothing to do with them. There were younger workers at the Renault automobile factory outside Paris, just waiting to escape from trade union and Communist control so as to make their own ‘demands’. The order police, the creation of which dated back to the conditions of near civil war in 1947, were quite widely hated, and were made up sometimes of Corsicans who had organized ratonnades against Algerians back in 1958: even solid middle-class neighbours of the barricade-manning students would offer them food and drink. There was a sexual element as well — an English homosexual with a white Rolls-Royce drove along the embankment having the time of his life in the back of it and the Communist poet Louis Aragon, whose wife, Elsa Triolet, had died not long before, emerged in pink to cheer on a demonstration on that side of the fence. The television and radio journalists were vastly annoyed at efforts by the State to control their output, and when de Gaulle wanted to make a speech rallying the people, he could only do so under heavy guard, from the top of the Eiffel Tower, with technicians from outside, and — another by nature left-wing group looking for State money — the film-makers set up a ‘States General of the Cinema’ to try to stop the Cannes Film Festival on 18 May. By 21 May 10 million people were on strike. There were of course academics, delighted with their quarter-hour of fame, and even a cohort of high-school pupils ritually joined in. One of them, chased by police, jumped into the river and was drowned when caught in the mud of the Seine. That soul provided the martyr. May the 23rd and 24th saw a further explosion of violence, with burned cars and an attempt to set light to the stock exchange. The automobile workers at Boulogne-Billancourt even turned down a large wage increase and for a time struck revolutionary attitudes.

  But this was of course just an accumulation of self-importance and holiday-wanting; Annie Kriegel in her memoirs bubbles over with contempt, and so do many others, whose writings easily outlive the contemporary celebratory literature (the historical echoes, of the ‘June Days’ of 1848, were obvious enough: the outstanding comments on these were made by Tocqueville in his memoirs or by Flaubert in L’Éducation sentimentale, mocking the Iberian accent of an international windbag; even Victor Hugo in Les Misérables shook his head and thought that, in the end, the rebelling workers would have to be ‘shot down, but respectfully’). Of course the State deserved 1968, because it had expanded education far too fast, and its supposed ‘technocratization of the university’ was leading, quite predictably, to the manufacture of clones — bearded sloganeers and shrieking girls on the one side, besuited briefcase sandwich-lunch know-it-alls on the other. But 1968 was in itself a fiasco, if a sinister one; it would fizzle out unless there were a revolutionary party organized enough to take advantage. It was here that the French Comm
unist Party might have moved. It did not. Lenin had already spoken viciously of left-wing infantilism; the trade unions did not want control to slip into anarchist hands; and in any case de Gaulle had proved very useful to the USSR. He had stood up to the Americans, especially in matters of world finance, and he had disrupted NATO; by a fitting twist, he had even departed on a state visit to Communist Romania when the May events were under way. The French Party therefore did not move. De Gaulle himself staged a theatrical coup, vanishing for three days at the end of the month (he consulted the army in Germany, and got assurances of support, in return for release, from prison, of the military dissidents of 1962). His prime minister, Pompidou, cleverly announced that there would be elections, and the various potential political successors then got busy with campaigning (Mendès France and Mitterrand were both involved, in a cautious way). Students in any case had their exams to think of, and by mid-June the last occupants were cleared from a Sorbonne area that had now become rat-infested. Come the elections, there was an enormous governmental majority — 358 seats out of 485.

  France had been there before, and such majorities made for what had been called the ‘unrepeatable Chamber’ (Chambre introuvable) — a reactionary majority so large as to threaten moderate and sensible voices within the government itself. But in this case, the boys and girls of 1968 had understood how to deal with a bureaucracy: a box-ticking culture which would run scared, and politicians in any event knew perfectly well that education brought cantankerous postbags and endless self-important lecturing, for no political gain. The government resolved on compromise and consultation; in other words, ran away. The politicians had been terrified, and simply gave in to demands for ‘autonomy’ and the rest; from that day to this, the universities in France have had to admit anyone with the right paper qualifications, themselves a very debased currency. French higher education survived with the ‘Grand Schools’; the state universities became, as Besançon said, ‘third world’ and vast damage was done to the cultural resonance of which French governments were enamoured. This coinage, worldwide, was now debased.

  Not much noticed at the same time, there was another university crisis which portended far more than the circus of May 1968 in Paris. In all of the university disturbances, there was one that took a lead for perversity, and it was not to do with left-wing infantilism. The University of Louvain in Belgium had a very long and sometimes outstanding history. Its official history (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a noble book, and an epitaph. Humanism and its greatest figure, Erasmus, had flourished there. In the eighteenth century it had somewhat fossilized, students having to discuss (in Latin) such questions as ‘Did Adam and Eve pay each other compliments in the state of innocence?’ There was an inflation, and the window-cleaners had to be paid in gold; the clerical elite flourished while the juniors were starvelings. In 1794 came one of the great scenes of university reform, when, after their victory at Fleurus, revolutionary generals in their twenties occupied the place, stabled horses in its precincts, eventually, in 1797, abolished it, and exiled the Rector to French Guyana. It was restored in the nineteenth century and became a greatly respected Catholic university. In Belgium at that time French was the language for educated people, although Louvain itself stood in a Flemish hinterland. The university was an elite place of the old-fashioned sort, with a considerable intellectual and social life, ‘characters’ abounding; as such it attracted envy and resentment, but its products spoke for themselves, and Louvain was a leading European university with much international resonance. Its library was famous. With the student expansion, there were by 1960 more Flemish-speaking students than French, and some of them demanded Flemishization (‘Netherlandization’ as it was called, though almost no one thought of joining up with the Dutch, who had no objections to the use of French, a world language). In fact the halls of residence had already been ‘Netherlandized’ in part in the fifties, and some classes were already ‘parallel’. But nationalism of this sort was an itch only made worse by scratching. There was a further problem, that French-speaking (or French-leaning) parents at the university naturally wanted French-language schools in the town itself. There were demonstrations against these supposed ‘caste schools’ and it did not help that the university hospital doctors used French, sometimes unable to understand a distraught Flemish peasant mother with a sick child. In fact the doctors took a lead in what followed, and some of them made a property fortune out of the scouting of planning laws (the town acquired the usual hideous academic concrete). The real problem in Flemish eyes was that nearby Brussels, cosmopolitan and French-speaking, would spread like an oil slick (tache d’huile) and Frenchify a corridor to Louvain. In 1965 there were Flemish demonstrations to the effect of ‘All Walloons Out’ and Flemish students solemnly turned their backs on the procession of professors coming out of St Peter’s Church at the start of the academic year. The most that can be said for all of this is that at least no-one was killed, though there were some bruises. The Rector, Mgr Honoré Van Waeyenbergh, lost control, and though the bishops solemnly said in 1966 that the idea of two Catholic universities, one French and one Flemish, was absurd and expensive and impossible, they could not control the situation either. In January 1968 the French section was transferred to another concrete place at Woluwe, a suburb of Brussels, and has hardly been heard of again. Neither has the new Flemish university, which now, quite absurdly, uses English to express its international character. This time round, there would be no Fleurus, no horses stabled in ancient colleges, no deans sent to Guyana, but a great institution had died just the same.

  But the fall of French at Louvain was only a small piece of a far larger picture: the wrong road taken in 1968. The European university also died, becoming, as the German equivalent of George Orwell, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, said, a ‘karst’. A brilliant French commentator, Marc Fumaroli, wrote an essay in 1992, ‘The Cultural State’, lamenting what had happened: France, he said, was turning into a huge version of Venice as she stood in the 1790s, before Napoleon had annexed her: wonderful architecture, many displays that impressed the tourists, but an air of deadness just the same. The State had built up an empire over Culture, studding Paris with grands travaux — a new opera house at the Bastille, a new and huge library, various ‘culture houses’, including a glass pyramid at the Louvre, the largest museum in the world, and ancient palace of the kings of France. There were enormous exhibitions and shows, and many references to ‘spaces of culture’ or ‘places of culture’. The greatest of these was the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, in 1989. It was supposed to represent the Rights of Man, but the best thing that came out of it was another clever book, René Sédillot’s Le Coût de la Révolution française. Yes, France had had a revolution in the name of equality and liberty, but she had then lost her leading position in Europe, being overtaken by England and Germany. Still, in the 1950s, French civilization had attracted vast numbers of foreigners, and in the 1960s the Fifth Republic began to support it more lavishly than ever before as a national asset. The results were supposed to impress foreigners with the grandeur of France, and the monuments of Paris were scraped clear of centuries of grime, to look like filmsets. However, the effects of state patronage bore out what Charles Fourier had said a century before: ‘What the State encourages, withers; what the State protects, dies.’