by Andre Brink
In a different kind of society it might still have been possible to achieve change without violence. But any reasonable person must realise that ‘the correct channels’ for peaceful change in our society have become hopelessly blocked. No existing political party in the country offers space for the needs and aspirations of the youth any longer. The impossible bureaucracy in which both capitalism and communism have become bogged down offers only the possibility of slow suffocation. The time has come to spell out that this revolt which has been raging in the streets of Paris over the last few weeks is directed just as passionately against the totalitarian communism of Moscow as the imperialism of the US or the outdated despotism of a Franco or a de Gaulle.
The essential characteristic of today’s ‘unorganised’ society, as one of the ‘prophets’ of the present revolt, Herbert Marcuse, has pointed out, is that it has become a society of consumers: we are required more and more, like people attending a national festival in South Africa, to sit back and expect to be fed. The positive, creative influence of the individual hardly exists any longer: throughout his university education the student is required to conform; the labourer no longer has any relation with the product he helps to produce. This danger, already signalled so clearly by Marx, has become a strangling reality.
All of this has been aggravated by what Ortega y Gasset, approaching it from the opposite end, characterised as ‘the revolt of the masses’: our overcrowded world simply no longer has space for the individual. This also means that ‘domestic affairs’ no longer exist: what happens in South Africa or Bolivia or Biafra or Vietnam is of immediate relevance to the rest of the world. Every European is intensely concerned by the slightest convulsion in the Third World – which explains why this revolt in Paris is directed as much against the disgrace of Vietnam as against the constipation of the French education system.
It is not only the fact of exponentially increasing numbers in the world that is important, but everything linked to it, including increasing longevity, which forces the young generation to wait that much longer before they can assume a place in society. Considering that people younger than twenty-five in many countries form fifty per cent of the population and that they are all constrained in a system in which they have no effective say, it is only natural that their frustration should have reached boiling point. And the members of this young generation have assimilated their world much faster than their predecessors: through the mass media they have become more fully informed about this world. They have fewer inhibitions – and more urgency. Thanks to the Pill their patterns of sexual behaviour have changed irrevocably. And it is this generation, that has matured so much faster and is prepared to assume responsibility for it, that is now being treated like children.
Previously, they would simply have been expected to shut up: and they would not have been aware of the general extent of their frustration. But now they have full access to the mass media. They know. And for that reason their resistance has become so spectacular and impressive. Which is why they find their inspiration in the awareness, as Éluard has said, that they are no longer a handful, but a crowd.
Every state has learned to allow a certain measure of protest. But this small space for manoeuvring becomes, itself, part of the system of containment against which today’s rage is directed. And now it must break out. It is only understandable that in the process today’s young generation should align themselves morally with the Third World, which still comprises Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’.
This goes beyond a ‘political’ surface. The present generation is appalled by the top-heavy overload of laws and institutions and regulations and procedures that stifle all initiative and all long views of the future. That is why they feel the urge to rush in and start doing something about it on their own. They may not have a ‘programme’; they may not even know exactly where they are going. But for the moment it is enough to know, and to articulate, that this world is no longer acceptable. Across its chaos and its sordidness, they hurl the defiant, outraged ‘No!!!’ of Antigone. They are no longer content to ‘play the game’: they are opting out. They are the ones who have to live in tomorrow’s world: at the very least they demand a say in it.
It is illuminating to look at the heroes’ gallery of today’s generation: Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, the charismatic Che Guevara. It is easy to raise objections against these names, but these objections make no difference to the fact of the role they are playing in the present winter (or early spring) of discontent. What all of them have in common in the eyes of the youth of the world includes: resistance against obsolete social and political structures; a readiness to fight against imperialism (even if old Mao has been doing quite well constructing his own form of imperialism); a focus on social change, whether one agrees with the specific forms or direction of such change or not. It involves, in short, concepts of ‘continuing revolution’, mostly derived from Trotsky, and philosophically expressed in Camus’ notion of l’homme révolté – the conviction that the human being can only manifest her or his humanity by ceaselessly rebelling against everything that threatens that humanity. It is not a rebellion by virtue of what still has to be attained or achieved, but by virtue of a quality which already exists within the individual and has to be affirmed.
I rebel, therefore we are, argues Camus. In this resides the remarkable awareness of responsibility, the social dimension, the altruistic commitment, of the new revolution. But at the same time it is, of course, an absurd revolt, because it can never finally ‘achieve’ a ‘result’: it can only, ceaselessly, redefine itself in the process of moving forward. New structures emerge within the act of destruction itself. Which suggests that much of it, especially when it is seen from the outside, may appear romantic or misguided. But I must confess that what I have witnessed over the past two weeks – the way in which students have organised their entire microcosm, avoiding unnecessary violence or damage, the way in which they have drawn an entire community into their movement – has unexpectedly provided me with the vision of a new world which may just be becoming visible on the horizon, and a new kind of human being who is no longer as inconceivable as it might have seemed until only days ago.
The new generation has seen all the horrors that threaten a true globalism – and surely, globalism (provided it never ceases to respect the local and the individual as its starting points) is the only ‘politics’ in a world that has to cope with the actual population explosion. These horrors can all be reduced to the two containing systems of race and class: and this is why our Parisian revolt, like that of the young generation in other countries, primarily targeted the manifestations of these two systems. Which is why it also, intimately and immediately, concerns South Africa.
This was the Paris I returned to on Monday night, 6 May. The streets in and around the Latin Quarter looked like a battlefield: there were buses overturned on the pavements; in the boulevard Saint-Germain the wrecks of four burnt-out cars were still smouldering; the whole area was heavy with the smell of tear gas.
A mass meeting had been organised for the following evening on the place Denfert-Rochereau, a joint venture arranged by students and labour organisations – something that had rarely, if ever, happened before. Tension was building up, and yet there was a carnival atmosphere in the streets. In many places impromptu barricades had been erected, setting up lines of police and young protesters opposite each other. What struck me was how similar they were in many respects, apart from the overall age difference. The demonstrators: the keen youths barely out of school, overeager for ‘adventure’; the scholarly types with thick-rimmed glasses fascinated by the opportunity of turning philosophical concepts into practice; the hormone-driven youngsters in search of a quick fuck; the labourers in blue overalls, treating it either as a picnic or a serious engagement with the normally invisible representatives of the power establishment; the solemn ones waiting for apocalypse and epiphany; the light-hearted ones in search of fun and spectacle.<
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Opposite the slowly moving masses churning towards Denfert-Rochereau, the phalanxes of police: a study in endless contrasts – the eager youngsters straining at the bit like untrained young horses; the older, battle-hardened, cynical men awaiting their orders with grim patience; those leering at passing girls who swing their long hair and their tantalising short skirts; those with eyes bloated from lack of sleep.
It was indicative of my outsidership at that stage that I was unable to remain part of the demonstration until its climax: I had a theatre ticket and did not want to miss my show. A mere week later I would not even think of playing hookey. As it turned out, the mass meeting did not lead to any climax: the demonstrators dispersed peacefully, all the bistro terraces filled up with young people clustered in grave discussion or drinking to what had happened, or not happened, or might yet happen. But it was clear, by the time I came back from the theatre, that nothing had been resolved. And throughout the rest of the week one could sense a huge confrontation gradually and irresistibly gathering momentum.
On the Thursday, at a massive sit-in in front of the Sorbonne, there was an attempt at a rapprochement between the demonstrators and the Parti Communiste, after the unexpected alliance between workers and students which got the party’s knickers in a knot. It led to the venerated old poet Aragon being sent to address the young generation that had previously been among his greatest supporters and admirers. Not this Thursday.
I have never witnessed such a public humiliation and rejection of a previously admired figure. His attempts at explaining the reluctance of the PC to enter the fray earlier (that is, before most of the large French factories went on strike in sympathy with the students), were roundly booed. ‘Thirty years of betrayal cannot be wiped out by a ten-minute speech!’ shouted his unruly audience. And when Aragon left, he was a broken old man, his proud white mane subsided into thatch, his broad shoulders bowed.
Then came the mass meeting on Friday afternoon, the 10th, once again on the place Denfert-Rochereau. It turned into a surprisingly festive occasion and at the end of it we turned back peacefully, some 30–40,000 students and young workers streaming down the boulevard Saint-Michel, singing and laughing and shouting slogans, happily resolved on ‘occupying’ the Latin Quarter for as long as it took – that is, until the police cordons around the university had been withdrawn. In the meantime, Cohn-Bendit and a group of students and professors – including two Nobel laureates – left for discussions with the rector to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the impasse. The overall mood was so light-hearted that I could not foresee anything menacing or even interesting developing from it; and I strolled to the neighbouring sixth arrondissement to visit a woman I had met only recently. She was from Trinidad, a passionate person with strong political convictions and it was, at least partly, her unmitigated rage against South Africa that had intrigued me. She was small and slight, with long black hair and the body of a dancer. At our first meeting she’d insisted on telling my fortune from her Tarot cards, which from the outset was such a transparent ploy (‘You’ve just met a young dark woman from a remote part of the world who is going to play a dramatic role in your future’) that I should immediately have been warned. Oscar Wilde: I can resist anything, except temptation. And Marion was intriguing, and attractive, enough to keep me cautiously interested. Moreover, she was not a person to take no for an answer. Nor was I in a mood to turn such an opportunity down. But it soon became clear that this would never work out, and so we did the unwise thing and decided to be ‘friends’. Still, this evening went particularly well, with engaging, even hectic conversation and some good wine and calypso interspersed with Mozart; and it was well past midnight before I returned to the Latin Quarter.
My journal continued:
During the few hours of my absence everything had changed. Impossible to get home via the boulevard Saint-Germain, so had to cut along the rue Monsieur-le-Prince. From there, all along the boul’ Mich’, up along the rue Soufflot and then the rue Saint-Jacques, students building barricades. Many of them as young as fourteen or fifteen. Amazing organisation: while scores of them are digging up paving stones or breaking down traffic signs, the awnings in front of shops, anything they can lay hands on, others are reinforcing the barricades. Even cars are pushed or dragged into the constructions. Hundreds of young men and women standing in rows to pass on the building material. Facing each barricade, a narrow no-man’s-land, then the rows of armed police with helmets and shields. Here and there a brief, angry altercation. But everywhere there are monitors ready to intervene. ‘Au travail! Pas de provocation!’ Working, working like ants or bees. I’m trying to get through with a manuscript Marion has given me under my arm. It takes a hell of a detour, up in the rue Gay-Lussac, over several barricades. Then along the rue d’Ulm, yet another barricade, past a cordon of police to the rue Saint-Jacques, a last barricade, then into our rue Malebranche. The police have drawn their cordon in an irregular circle all around the Sorbonne. What has happened is that the student barricades have now started forming a second circle around the first, concentric to the inner one. Dante would have approved. I leave the manuscript and collect my camera. Just in case.
From time to time students break into song. The Marseillaise, the Internationale. Some start chanting: CRS – SS! They are quickly stopped by the marshals. Something is building up, building up, in spite of the exuberance on the surface.
Minutes later news comes that the Cohn-Bendit delegation has left the rector’s office empty-handed.
‘Then we stay right here where we are!’ a chorus of voices goes up on the nearest barricade.
By this time scores of people who have gone out for the evening have become trapped between the two armies: the barricades are too high to scale, and the police refuse to let them through. Among them are a number of old people and small children. Many of them simply sit down on the kerbs or on thresholds, or lean against walls, shivering in the night cold, perplexed and scared.
Fifty metres from there an ominous motion ripples through the police. Not much: just a momentary stiffening, a tensing. Almost immediately afterwards the first volley of tear-gas grenades explodes, sending clouds of dirty yellow gas billowing across the street. The attack on the rue Le Goff has begun. Within minutes it is repeated in the rue Saint-Jacques, where I have taken up my position in the dark doorway of our wine shop. Further off, in all the adjacent streets, the volleys are reproduced. Like Guy Fawkes gone wrong.
The students have started singing the Marseillaise.
The slight night wind is forming small gusts and flurries. For a while the smoke is driven back towards the police. Their black cordon wavers, withdraws a little distance, then reforms. There are a few moments of utter silence as the two armies hover. Ten, twenty metres from me, to my right, from the top of the high students’ barricade, suddenly, a hand is stretched out and a small shred of crumpled paper – a sweet wrapper? a shopping list? a phone number no longer needed? – comes fluttering into the dark street, swerves and sways erratically, then lands on the dirty cobblestones. No one even seems to notice it. Yet there is something momentous about it.
And as if it was a sign – the decisive signal – all hell breaks loose.
From behind the police lines two black trucks suddenly emerge from the night – the lines open to let them through – and move very slowly, like monstrously out-of-scale metal insects, towards the students’ barricade. The youthful mass erupts in shouts and screams as it lets loose a barrage of stones. From the upper windows on either side of the street onlookers start pelting the police with whatever comes to hand: the contents of rubbish bins, flower vases, chamber pots. Without warning, the two trucks start spraying huge jets of water into the crowd, sending scores of bodies flying backwards. At the same time volley after volley of incendiary bombs are shot and hurled at them. The sky has become a churning mass of yellow-black smoke through which red and orange flames are flickering. The awning of the vegetable shop has caught fire. It is
doused again by the water cannons. In a black swarm of outsize commando ants what seems like thousands of police are now swarming up and over the barricade. More and more of the fire bombs explode. In the rue Gay-Lussac, barely a hundred metres away, the first few cars have been set alight by the police bombs, exploding like rolling thunder that causes the whole area to shudder.
As barricade after barricade is taken, the students fall back, setting fire to all the cars they come across, trying to stem the advance of the police.
On every barricade, and through most of the open windows overlooking the street, radios are blaring, all of them tuned in to the same station. Professor Monod is speaking. We recognise his voice from meetings during the past few days. He is pleading with the police to allow the people trapped between the armies to escape, to evacuate their wounded. Every few minutes the programme is interrupted to broadcast emergency messages for doctors and nurses, requests for medicine, bandages, ambulances –