Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  I. B. ii.

  THE OPENING CEREMONY took place in the evening, after classes. The minister’s speech was interrupted by a red-haired student with an open collar and a cheeky, pugnacious face. He was afterwards known as ‘Dany le Rouge’ and identified as the son of German Jews who had fled to France. ‘M. le Ministre,’ he said, ‘I have read your White Book on Youth. In three hundred pages, there is not one single mention of the sexual problems of young people.’

  The Neuwirth Law had come into effect eleven days before. The cost of the pill was not covered by social security, and any woman who had started taking the pill on the day the law was passed was still impregnable. The minister’s retort was not widely reported, because the chief point of interest was felt to be the student’s audacious interruption. ‘With a face like yours,’ said the minister, ‘you must be quite familiar with such problems. I cannot recommend too highly a dip in the swimming pool.’

  Document 1: Conclusions of Le Livre blanc de la jeunesse

  The young French person hopes to marry young but worries about bringing children into the world before he has the means to bring them up correctly. His number one objective is professional success. In the meantime, he saves what he can from his modest earnings–the young man hopes to buy a car, the young girl to make her trousseau. The young French person takes an interest in all the big problems of today but has no desire to rush into politics. 72% of young people are of the opinion that the right to vote should not be given to the under-21s. They do not believe that war is imminent, and think that the future depends above all on industrial efficiency, internal order and the cohesion of the population.

  I. C. i.

  THE NANTERRE swimming pool incident, rather than the dormitory revolt, is now thought to be a significant forerunner of the later troubles. Many other acts of rebellion could be cited. For example, during the traditional New Year’s reception, the Dean of Nanterre, his wife and their four guests left their seats of honour to collect food from the buffet when (as the dean recalled twenty-five years later) they noticed four young sociology professors removing their bags and belongings and taking their seats. The dean then remembered the warning given by his friend Raymond Aron, when he had learned that Nanterre was to have a sociology department: ‘By its very nature, this discipline will engender action groups that will create tensions and agitation. Beware of sociologists! They’ll make a mess of everything!’

  I. C. ii.

  AS EXAMINATIONS loomed, rebellious behaviour began to affect the educational process itself. Previously, professors had delivered their lectures to fifteen hundred or two thousand students packed into an amphitheatre. The students scribbled notes, chatted and read the newspaper. One professor likened the experience to ‘talking in the concourse of the Gare Saint-Lazare’. Sometimes, the professors saw their students at an oral examination, and were struck by their ‘encyclopedic ignorance’. Now, lectures were being interrupted by students who demanded the right to speak and then lectured the professor on his pedagogical backwardness and his role as a tool of state repression.

  The media took a keen interest in youthful rebellion, and so, before long, television viewers (potentially half the population) were treated to the unusual spectacle of students holding press conferences. The students sat like examiners behind a trestle table, talking into microphones. They blew out clouds of smoke, wagged their fingers at the audience and used terms from sociology and political science which, to many viewers, seemed incongruously professorial. They expressed themselves in the form of questions, to which they supplied the answers, following a rhetorical model to which they were accustomed. ‘Why are we in revolt? Because the ruling class is trying to condition our daily life. Why is it trying to do that? Because Western imperialism is opposed to all forms of popular culture. Why is it opposed to popular culture? Because, in the final analysis, this is a class struggle.’

  This form of exposition, commonly used with passive audiences, allowed objections to be answered before they were raised by an antagonist: ‘Are we not members of the bourgeoisie ourselves? Yes, but, as such, we must use our freedom to criticize and, if need be, to overturn the state. What would be the result of such a revolution? The result would be, not the simple embourgeoisement of the proletariat and the insertion of the sons of the proletariat into managerial positions, but the abolition of the distinction between labour and management.’

  Despite superficial differences, this was roughly in line with Gaullist policy, which, since 1945, had striven to increase the involvement of workers in the running of factories (a practice known as cogestion). For the téléspectateurs, the interest of such conferences lay in the exciting usurpation of institutional authority, the flouting of generational power structures and in the references to media manipulation, which added a degree of self-reflection and unpredictability not normally seen in government-controlled public broadcasting. Furthermore, whereas representatives of the government and the university were distinguished by drab items of clothing purchased as ensembles, the students’ clothing (knitwear, scarves, second-hand jackets, etc.) showed signs of what the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss termed bricolage–the improvisational use of manufactured objects for purposes other than those for which they were intended, normally associated with primitive, pre-capitalist societies.

  I. C. iii.

  ON 20 MARCH, students protesting against the war in Vietnam smashed the windows of the American Express offices near the Opera and daubed slogans on the walls. Two days after that, six Nanterre students were arrested in a pro-Vietcong demonstration. This confirmed the view of many commentators that ‘nanterrisme’ was part of an international youth movement rather than a specifically French phenomenon.

  On returning to Nanterre that evening, militant students filed through a small door marked ‘Entrance reserved for administrative staff and professors’. Pushing past a pair of startled administrators, they climbed to the top floor of the highest building on the campus and entered the Council Chamber. Its dominant position was felt to reflect the authoritarian nature of the educational régime. They sprayed some slogans on the walls (‘Teachers, you are old, and so is the culture you teach’) and passed a resolution. The students agreed to called themselves the 22nd of March Movement, by allusion to Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. Shortly afterwards, they were given an assembly room in which to hold their political meetings and renamed it the Che Guevara Room.

  I. D. i.

  FOR THE téléspectateurs who saw these images of student revolt, this was indeed, as the commentators insisted, ‘a strange new phenomenon’. The youth of Paris had been subtracted from the city as though by a bureaucratic Pied Piper and placed in a ‘learning factory’. They had been parcelled up and ejected en masse along the line of the Champs-É lysées to land in the former terrain militaire in the far west of the conurbation. Once there, they were fed on predigested information marketed as ‘knowledge’ and dispensed by professors who were little more than vending machines. Most of the students were in their early twenties and came from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth arrondissements of Paris. More than ninety per cent of them were of bourgeois parentage (upper and middle management, liberal professions, civil service), but their parents were either unwilling or not wealthy enough to provide them with better accommodation. A ‘concrete cube’ at Nanterre cost ninety francs a month; an unfurnished room in Paris with no water or gas cost one hundred and fifty francs a month.

  I. D. ii.

  BECAUSE OF an administrative failure to anticipate the explosion in the student population, the range of activities at Nanterre was comparatively small. There was the ciné-club, the subsidized restaurant, a cafeteria with a hundred seats, the possibility of taking a train to Paris, hitchhiking out to ‘the country’ or cooking a pot of stew in a communal kitchenette and sharing it with friends. Some of the students volunteered to work with children of the shanty towns. They helped them with their French and taught them to recognize parts of s
peech and the different tenses. Many of their contemporaries were riding Vespas or Vélosolex, buying records, practising macramé and scoubidou to produce items such as key-strings and lampshades; they visited shopping centres and airports, and lived in situations more conducive to the cultivation of sexual or romantic relationships. At Nanterre, friends were either an obtrusive presence or a prophylactic against anxiety and alienation. Services aimed at young people, such as the popular radio programme and magazine Salut les Copains (‘Hi, Gang’), were seen as a form of paternalism and were largely devoid of intellectual content.

  The student revolt promised to enlarge the range of activities and to target services more accurately. However, in the absence of capital, these activities were often of a symbolic nature: displaying pictures of Trotsky or Mao Tse-tung, eating sandwiches in a lecture hall, carpeting an office floor with cigarette-ends, organizing political ‘groupuscules’.

  Ironically, the student leaders appeared on television not just as ‘people in the news’ but as consumers and objects of visual consumption. They were, to quote the subtitle of Jean-Luc Godard’s film of 1966, Masculin Féminin, ‘the children of Marx and Coca-Cola’. They possessed the marketable qualities of youth, elegance and wit. Their long hair conformed to commercial models of youth such as the Beatles and Alain Delon. Although the students’ ideological referents were specialized and professional–Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, etc.–their sentiments were recognizable as those of the yé-yé songs that dominated the hit parade, which, as yet, showed few signs of the market segmentation that was so noticeable in Britain and America: ‘Il ne restera rien’ (‘There’ll Be Nothing Left’), ‘Je ne sais pas ce que je veux’ (‘I Don’t Know What I Want’), ‘Ma jeunesse fout le camp’ (‘My Youth Is Going Out The Door’). The interviewers tended to ignore the politico-philosophical debate and sought out female students whose faces and clothing corresponded to the tastes of the téléspectateurs. They did not try to belittle or humiliate them, though they did often flirt with them in order to produce a telegenic reaction or to implicate the viewer in the process of seduction.

  Document 2

  A documentary on Nanterre and ‘nanterrisme’ was screened by the public broadcasting agency, ORTF, on 26 March 1968. It gave a sympathetic view of the range of student opinions, and aroused feelings in the audience that affected initial perceptions of the May revolt. Much of the documentary was filmed in a small, crowded room in which a dozen sociology students were sharing a pot of stew served in two stainless-steel pans and a Le Creuset cooking pot. The atmosphere, at first, was noisy and convivial.

  A traditional anthropologist might not have considered the film a particularly valuable document because of the male interviewer’s interference with the principal interviewee–an attractive female student dressed in a thin, striped pullover and a short skirt. She appeared eloquent, affable, rather timid, but keen to answer the questions accurately. The camera showed her face in close-up and made her eyes and mouth the centre of attention. In the cramped conditions, the interviewer occasionally obtruded in the form of a wave of dark hair or a black-sleeved arm suddenly raised to consult a gold wristwatch. The student sat with her bare knees clutched to her chest and appeared to be slightly overshadowed by the interviewer. At first, the hubbub in the room almost drowned out some of her answers, but as the interview proceeded, the room became noticeably quieter.

  You’re a student of what?

  Last year, I was in sociology; and this year, I’m doing a diploma on demographics. In fact…I’m doing a study of the research that’s been carried out into the fertility of oppressed women.

  That’s a very serious subject… Yes. It’s a subject I find really interesting because it’s about women.

  You used to live in Reims, I think you told me.

  Yes, I was living in Reims.

  And you’ve been at the hall of residence…

  I’ve been here…it’s my second year…When I first got here, in January, I was living here in secret.

  How do you mean, ‘in secret’?

  With a boyfriend…because I didn’t have a room.

  With a boyfriend?

  A boyfriend.

  Whom you got to know…

  Whom I got to know last year…I’ve been with him since last year.

  You met him here?

  I met him here.

  How is it that a young girl from the provinces turns up in Nanterre and… There are lots of provincials here at Nanterre…You see, you get here, and at first you’re a bit lost…

  You didn’t know anyone.

  No, I didn’t know anyone. The first month, I spent hardly any time here. I arranged to spend the night with friends in Paris…I didn’t want to live here. It was really frightening.

  Why?

  First, because I’d never lived in an HLM* like this–these little pigeon-holes and boxes. And I was afraid to live here…As soon as the boys find out there’s a new girl, they pounce on you…

  What do you think causes that?

  Well, it’s caused by the fact that they’re bored, obviously. They’re looking for something new, that’s all; it doesn’t go any further than that…It’s the problem of…of boredom. When you come out of the restaurant in the evening, you don’t know what to do. You’re fed up. There’s the cafeteria…

  And since you first met this boy…you’re still with him.

  Yes.

  Is that usually the case?

  No. It’s very difficult for a couple to succeed.

  Why?

  Because it’s impossible to live like a couple here. It’s not a normal sort of life. And you can never get away from friends…. There are lotsof interchangeable couples. They live together for a week and then they change partners.

  Do you think that has to do with Nanterre?

  No…I think it has to do with any student residence.

  It has to do with living in a hall of residence?

  Look, if you have fifteen hundred girls and fifteen hundred boys living face to face, there are going to be problems…problems to do with couples, problems with…I don’t know…

  Doesn’t that worry you?

  (Quietly.) Yes, it does…

  Do you think that the boy you’re living with is sensitive to these problems?

  Of course…of course…Especially now that there’s a sort of collective madness and people are leaving…You start out as a well-balanced group of individuals, and then suddenly it all falls apart, and your friends go off just like that.

  (Pause.)

  Are there evenings when you feel really fed up?

  Of course…Just now it’s every evening.

  Even though you’re with Jacques?…

  (Pause.)

  Yes…

  The room has now fallen silent. The girl to the left of the interviewee, who at first looked cheerful, seems depressed and uncomfortable. A male student bites his nails and is visibly agitated. No conclusions are drawn from the interview. The scene then changes abruptly, and the documentary ends with four male students in Spanish costume playing gypsy music on guitars and mandolins at the foot of a concrete tower.

  Questions and sample answers

  What did the students fear?

  That they might invest their youth in hard study and then fail to find a job. (The risk of unemployment remained high.)

  What might the consequences have been?

  Their spending power would be negligible, affecting not only marriage prospects but also lifestyle, and leading eventually to social déclassement.

  How were the students affected by the increasing social mobility of the late 1960s?

  Social mobility was a mixed blessing. It meant not only that children of the proletariat could aspire to managerial positions, but also that children of the bourgeoisie might find themselves descending into a kind of neo-proletariat.

  II. A. i.

  ON 2 MAY, as a result of continued protests and damage to university property, the authorities decid
ed to act. Government ministers were afraid that the troubles at Nanterre would spread to other sections of the university. That evening on television, with an air of stern regret, the Dean of Nanterre announced the suspension of classes.

  For this complex struggle on the new terrain of public relations, Dean Grappin appeared sadly unprepared, like a gladiator in a minefield. He used sentences, the syntax of which, in order for their meaning to be grasped, called for an unusual degree of concentration. He accumulated nouns and pronouns with which he would have to be heard to have made the proper grammatical agreements before the end of the sentence. He was, in effect, sitting a small public examination set by himself. He concluded his address; the screen turned grey; students continued to make the journey from Nanterre and to file into the chlorinated corridors and amphitheatres of the Sorbonne.

  The revolt had now migrated from the wasteland on the western horizon into the most famous, telegenic and overdetermined space in continental Europe: the Paris Latin Quarter and its main commercial artery, the Boulevard Saint-Michel.