Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  The closest they had come to hitting ‘the Big Target’ was one of the operations code-named ‘Chamois’. (This was the name used by the OAS for any operation requiring a long-range rifle.) On the evening of 20 May, a search of an apartment in one of the new blocks that had been built on the site of the former Vel’ d’Hiv at 13, Rue du Docteur-Finlay turned up a package labelled ‘Algiers–Paris Orly’. It contained a bazooka and three rockets. The secret services knew the target–de Gaulle–but not the place and the time. The OAS had discovered that, between eight and nine o’clock every evening, the old painter who lived above the antiques shop at 86, Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré closed his shutters for the night. The windows of his living room looked directly through the gateway opposite and, in a slightly descending line, at the entrance of the Élysée Palace. On 23 May, de Gaulle was to receive the visit of the President of Mauritania. The protocol for such visits never varied. When the visitor’s car entered the courtyard, de Gaulle emerged from the palace and stood still at the top of the steps for at least ninety seconds. On 21 May, the plot was discovered; on 22 May, the painter closed his shutters and went to bed as usual; and on 23 May, de Gaulle stood on the steps and welcomed the Mauritanian President into the É lysée Palace.

  THAT WEDNESDAY EVENING, after leaving the É lysée at 7.55 p.m., the motorcade slid through the August evening traffic, crossed the Pont Alexandre III and headed into the low sun and the south-western suburbs. Seven minutes later, it left the city at the Porte de Châtillon. With an occasional blast of sirens, it would cover the next eight kilometres at over 70 kph before turning sharp right for the aerodrome.

  At that moment, seven and a half kilometres down the road, the owner of the Ducretet-Thomson television showroom in Petit-Clamart was winding down his steel security grating before going to collect his car from the garage.

  Trapped between the outer suburbs and the girdle of expressways, Petit-Clamart consisted of the jumbled remnants of every phase of its development since the days when it was a zone of quarries and vegetable fields. There were some pebble-dash houses, an Antar station, some shops and vacant lots. Village life–what remained of it–was represented by a few clumps of privet hedge, a pot of geraniums and a birdcage on a sooty windowsill. Petit-Clamart was not a place where anyone stopped on purpose, which is why the owner of the showroom was surprised later on not to have noticed the car that was parked across the road in the Rue du Bois.

  The car was a Citroën ID. Two hundred metres up the avenue, in the direction of Paris, a Peugeot 403 was parked on the pavement. On the other side of the road, a yellow estafette faced south-west, its rear windows pointing towards Paris. Together, the three vehicles formed a triangle. The time was 8.08 p.m. A man had just rattled open the sliding door of the estafette and was urinating behind a hedge, his head turned in the direction of Paris. A few cars went past with their wipers on. The light rain made the evening unusually gloomy for August, and some of the cars in the distance coming from Paris had turned on their headlights.

  He ran with his trousers still undone, shouting something at the van. ‘Itt vannak!’ He hooked his hand on the edge of the door and swung himself in, still yelling, ‘ITT VANNAK!’, which is Hungarian for ‘They’re here!’

  The motorcade was approaching the crossroads at 90 kph, sounding its sirens like an express train. A driver who was heading for Paris pulled over and saw a barrier of tiny flames crackle across the road before he felt his index finger leap off the steering wheel. Alain de Boissieu shouted to his parents-in-law, ‘Get down!’ a split second before the men in the 403 and the estafette opened fire. Television screens exploded in the showroom. In the Trianon café, which was closed for the season, bullets punctured the vinyl seats. For a second or two, the scream of accelerating engines drowned out the racket of four M1s, an MP40 and two FM24/29 machine-guns.

  Immobilized by the crossfire, de Gaulle’s DS would be exposed to the direct fire of the gunmen who were waiting at the corner of the Rue du Bois. This was the plan that had been worked out in the apartment at Meudon with toy cars on a table.

  Their machine-guns juddering in their hands, they saw the outriders swerve and surge; they saw the flickering imperfections of a scene suddenly sprayed with bullets; they saw the flash of chrome and lacquered fuselage as the DS, driven by the man who had accelerated through the wall of flames near Pont-sur-Seine, shot past with a slur of tyres and roared into the sunset, leaving Petit-Clamart looking even tattier than usual.

  Three minutes later, President de Gaulle stepped out of the DS onto the runway at Villacoublay. Little cubes of glass trickled from his suit onto the tarmac. His wife said, ‘I hope the chickens are all right.’ She was thinking of Thursday’s lunch, which was in the boot of the DS, but the policemen thought she was referring to them, since a poulet is a ‘cop’. De Gaulle, who was never effusive, thanked his driver and his son-in-law, and said calmly, ‘It was a close thing this time.’ He seemed more upset by what appeared to be the pitiful ineptitude of the OAS: ‘Ils ont tiré comme des cochons.’ (‘They couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces.’)

  Less than an hour later, the estafette was found in the Bois de Meudon. The machine-guns were still inside it, along with a bomb that was supposed to have destroyed the evidence. The fuse had been lit but for some reason had gone out. Most of the conspirators were rounded up within a fortnight and only ‘the Limp’ was never caught. At the crime scene, the investigators found a hundred cartridges scattered about the crossroads. It seemed incredible that only one person had been hurt. (The driver bound for Paris had to have his index finger bandaged.) About ten bullets had hit the car, and most of them had been fired too low to do much damage. Despite the mole in the É lysée, no one had told the killers that the presidential DS was equipped with bullet-proof tyres and hydraulic suspension. Even so, they seem to have suffered almost unbelievable bad luck. Two of the machine-guns had jammed, and ‘the Limp’ had had to change his clip in mid-volley.

  Amazed by de Gaulle’s good fortune, and embarrassed by their failure, some members of the OAS came to suspect that this and other attacks had been orchestrated by secret-service agents with the aim of discrediting the OAS and turning the President into ‘a living miracle’. This also appeared to be the view of television commentators, according to Prime Minister Pompidou, who was told of their sarcastic reporting by a friend who owned a television set. How else, the journalists seemed to say, could one explain the rapid capture of the culprits, the self-extinguishing fuse, de Gaulle’s invincibility and all the other minor miracles?

  No evidence of secret-service involvement has ever come to light, and even if it had done, it would only have enhanced de Gaulle’s reputation for extraordinary competence and guile. In all the emergencies he had faced in the last twenty years, he had never made a secret of the fact that it was sometimes necessary to deceive the electorate in the interests of the nation. Most of the electorate admired him for saying so. It was commonly believed that without a leader who knew how to fool his enemies, France could never survive in a world of treachery and violence.

  FOUR WEEKS AFTER the outrage, on the evening of Thursday, 20 September, the funereal form of the living miracle flickered out at the passing traffic at the crossroads in Petit-Clamart. President de Gaulle had decided that the time had come to deliver an important message to the electorate. The irony was probably not lost on the owner of the recently repaired Ducretet-Thomson television showroom: historic broadcasts like this were always good for business.

  President de Gaulle sat in the Salon Doré at the É lysée Palace. A cartoonist might have depicted him as a human lighthouse in a storm. His eyebrows plunged and soared like seagulls; his vast hands reached out as though to salvage that fragile infant, the French Republic. Behind him were massed the silent representatives of French culture in their leather bindings.

  Françaises, Français…You and I have lived through so much toil, tears and blood, we have known the same hopes, the same passions an
d the same triumphs, that there exists between us a unique and special bond.

  This bond which unites us is the source of the power that is vested in me, and of the responsibility that comes with that power…

  In his apartment in the Rue Guynemer, François Mitterrand was listening to the broadcast with a mixture of rancour and admiration. De Gaulle delivered his address with impressive, agonizing slowness. His tone suggested long deliberation rather than a reaction to passing events. A wave of sympathy had followed the outrage, and de Gaulle was now on the highest pinnacle of his career since the Liberation. No one would accuse him of weakness if he decided to retire to the peace of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and to leave the Élysée to a younger, more vigorous man…

  …In spite of everything, personal liberty has been preserved. The grave and painful problem of decolonization has been solved. Enormous labours lie ahead of us, for a nation that continues to live continues to progress. But no one seriously believes that progress can occur if we renounce our solid institutions. The nation would be cast into the abyss…

  It was perhaps at this point that François Mitterrand found the title of his next book. It would be a searing indictment of Gaullist policies and practice, and of the ‘uncrowned dictator’ himself…

  The keystone of our régime is the presidency. It follows that, instead of being chosen by a relatively small constituency of elected representatives, the President must receive his mandate directly from the people…

  He would call his book ‘Le Coup d’état permanent’…

  I have therefore decided to propose that henceforth the President be elected by universal suffrage…

  It was, one had to admit, a master stroke. The Senate and a broad coalition of députés were opposed to the institution of a ‘Bonapartist’ régime. Too much power would be vested in one man…But the voters, oblivious to the long-term consequences, would inevitably turn out to glorify the living miracle, just as their great-grandfathers had rushed to the ballot boxes to ratify the coup d’état of Napoleon III.

  A month later, de Gaulle’s proposal was accepted by almost two-thirds of the electorate. The national elections that followed were a triumph for the Gaullists. There were also some small but significant victories for the anti-Gaullist coalition. In the Nièvre département, a man who, only three years before, had–for reasons that remained obscure–prostrated himself on a wet lawn in the Latin Quarter while a Norman peasant fired a machine-gun at his 403, regained his seat in the Assemblée Nationale. He would have to sit out the next few years on the opposition benches, enduring taunts and sly allusions to hired assassins and observatories. But even de Gaulle was not immortal. In five, ten or fifteen years, age would achieve what several thousand guns, bombs and hand-grenades had failed to do. De Gaulle would enter the realm of legend, and the skies over Paris would seem to darken with his death. Then, perhaps, in that twilight, the Fox would finally have his day.

  EXPANDING THE DOMAIN OF THE POSSIBLE

  I. A. i.

  THE CAMPUS OF Nanterre-Paris X had been built among shantytowns beyond the western edge of the city, on seventy-nine acres of former terrain militaire. The origin of the name ‘Nanterre’ is Nempthor, from Nemptodurum, meaning ‘hill-fort of the sacred wood or clearing’. The earth consisted mainly of compacted garbage and builders’ rubble. Cars circulated easily, but not pedestrians. Thirteen thousand students were housed in buildings made of concrete blocks and windows that were always dirty. Some of the rooms looked down on shacks where immigrant workers from Portugal and North Africa lived under sheets of corrugated iron. It was 1967. On beaches in the south of France, naked breasts and perfect tans were a common sight. Women used sun-tan lotion; men lay on their stomachs in the sand. Some people went to naturist colonies in pine forests and formed temporary ménages based on sexual excitement and socio-economic equality.

  At Nanterre-Paris X, male and female students were housed in separate buildings. They had yet to see the benefits of the Neuwirth Law of 28 December 1967, which legalized the contraceptive pill, but many of them had read or had heard about D. H. Lawrence, the Surrealists, Wilhelm Reich, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Marcuse and Simone de Beauvoir. Publicity campaigns by holiday providers such as Club Méditerranée proved that sexual liberation was available to the salaried, middle-class population independently of ideology. In three or four years, the majority of students at Nanterre would occupy positions assigned to them by the state and, as they had learned to conceptualize the matter, contribute to the exploitation of the proletariat.

  Since 1965, women had been allowed to work and to open a bank account without the permission of a father or a husband. Their mothers had been granted the right to vote in 1944. Sexual liberation was only part of what was known as ‘expanding the domain of the possible’. Pregnancy remained a serious risk and abortion was illegal, but a wide range of other options was available. The monthly magazines Elle and Marie-Claire had already broached the subjects of heavy petting, oral sex, orgasm, love in a physical relationship and the use of ‘beauty products’. Almost half of each issue was devoted to advertising. The models were depicted in positions of sexual availability. Bodies engaged in unorthodox sexual acts could also be discerned in photographs of bottles of mineral water and vermouth. The total wattage available to the average household had more than doubled since before the Second World War, and women were said in the advertisements to have been ‘liberated’ by household electrical items.

  The chief impediment to interpersonal sex at Nanterre was a regulation banning male students from female premises. The academic authorities were thought to have imagined nocturnal orgies, though intercourse was just as likely to occur in the early morning when the banging of garbage trucks and the scream of two-stroke motorcycle engines brought the partners to mutual semi-consciousness. It seemed a ridiculous restriction of individual freedom. A concrete tower containing several hundred hypothetically liberated young females, some of whom wore miniskirts and synthetic pullovers, seemed a throwback to the Middle Ages. The Americans were fighting an imperialist war in Vietnam. Radical thinkers were questioning the bases of Western civilization. Some rock stars were not much older than students at Nanterre.

  I. A. ii.

  IT WAS IN MARCH, when the weather improved, that the trouble began. The doors to the girls’ dormitory were locked, but only in a ritual fashion, because the janitorial staff knew that they could be opened with moderate force within thirty seconds. The doors were forced open, and soon afterwards, boys were circulating freely in the girls’ dormitory.

  The action was welcomed by most of the professors at Nanterre, because they disapproved of the segregation of students, and the majority of them were sociologists, political scientists and authorities on Romantic and Post-Romantic literature. Apart from radio, television and newspaper reporters, no one beyond the campus gave the dormitory revolt much thought, except of a speculative, mildly pornographic nature. The commonly expressed view at Nanterre was that structures had to be changed on several levels to reflect changing mentalities. Some students decided to postpone their political involvement until they had spent a year or two reading and reflecting; others stressed the need to adapt to what they saw as a public service (the university). It was generally agreed, however, that the academic authorities, who represented the government and the capitalist system, should grant them certain rights. The abrogation of a rule was almost insignificant. It was not as if mind-expanding drugs and gratuitous acts of violence had been legalized.

  For a time, instead of creeping through ground-floor windows, boys infiltrated the female blocks without impediment. They brought wine, cigarettes, Tunisian pâtisseries, hot dogs and erections. Some girls became lonelier as a result, and the structure and conduct of discussions changed. Boys were able to generate larger quantities of discourse proportionate to the amount of text they had read. Socially, the change was small. The ciné-club was just as well attended. Girls remained more active in the provision of amenities
and entertainment than in political committees. It is probably true, as some historians insist, that the dormitory revolt at Nanterre in 1967 should not be seen as the prologue to the more serious events that followed.

  I. B. i.

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR, 8 January (a Monday) was marked by the opening of an Olympic-size swimming pool at Nanterre by the Minister for Youth and Sport.

  In 1968, an Olympic-size swimming pool on a university campus was an overdetermined space characterized by a complex network of social structures and global capitalist tendencies. On one level, it was a place where boys and girls could enact a visual exchange without implicating themselves in a contractual obligation. Swimwear exposed up to nine-tenths of the body, and packaged and commodified the remaining parts. Exchanges took place, however, not in the quasi-natural setting of a beach or a pine forest, but in a refrigerative environment of laminated tiles and chlorinated water. Boys who went to a swimming pool with the thought of picking up girls (a practice known as draguer, which means ‘to dredge’ or ‘to trawl’) found their penises reduced to prepubescent dimensions. Moreover, use of the swimming pool implied a certain competitiveness in the interests of the state: health and healthiness, national athletic dominance, and so on. The Minister for Youth and Sport had recently launched his ‘thousand clubs’ policy, which promised to fund places of recreation and to give young people administrative control over the clubs. They would be able to tailor the clubs’ services to local demand by providing ping-pong, flipper, baby-foot and coffee produced by the high-pressure brewing process. The minister had published a thick report titled Le Livre blanc de la jeunesse, in which the positive views of young people were recorded.