by Geert Mak
Now he lies amid the families of Colombey, his grave marked by a simple marble cross, beside Anne and his wife Yvonne. During his funeral on 12 November, 1970, the myth became fused with the village, once and for all. The men in the café show me a photograph: it shows them with rusty wheelbarrows, preparing the big grave. The places at the funeral were reserved for the family, the old companions in arms and the town council of Colombey. ‘But still, 40,000 people came to our village that day. And the boys here turned a pretty penny! They sold little bags of earth, supposedly from the cemetery, for five francs apiece! What a day!’
Pilgrims are allowed to leave their own tribute against the wall of the graveyard. It is full of crosses of Lorraine and marble plaques reading ‘Regrets’. And there is always a sentry standing guard. ‘Always?’ I ask the gendarme on duty. ‘Yes, day and night.’ ‘Even after almost thirty years?’ ‘Yes, but of course, it's the general!’
If de Gaulle had not been de Gaulle, if he had not been that theatrical, brilliant, stubborn spirit, would France be a different place? The trust placed in him by the French of which he spoke so proudly in 1940 was only so much hot air; he imagined it, and only received it once the war was almost won. But as a role model, as father of the fatherland, he restored the self-respect of the French as no one else. That process repeated itself when the French Empire fell apart, when the nation's pride was deeply hurt by the humiliations in Indochina – where 20,000 French soldiers were killed – the Suez conflict, and when the Algerian question cut the nation to the quick.
In Algiers in October 1954, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) began a national uprising that led to countless attacks on French targets; gradually the French – its army under the command of General Jacques Massu – became entangled in a violent, urban guerrilla war.
In 1958, under the title La Question, the European-Jewish Algerian Henri Alleq, editor of the Alger Républicain, published a detailed report of his arrest and interrogation by French police: the continuous hitting and kicking, the electrodes attached to ears and mouth, the partial drownings, the barbed wire in the mattress, the salt water to quench his thirst, the drugs to make him talk.
This dealt yet another blow to the national self-image: many French people felt deeply ashamed. Their own soldiers were applying methods associated with the Gestapo.
In spring 1958 the already divided Fourth Republic was shaken to its foundations; under Massu's leadership, an ultra-right-wing coup was in the offing. French paratroopers based in Algeria were made ready to be dropped in Paris, de Gaulle was called in to restore order, and what finally happened was reminiscent of the Second World War: the French rebels in Algeria called on de Gaulle to save their cause, de Gaulle used them to consolidate his own power, and in the end there was little or no heed paid to their demands.
On 1 June, 1958, de Gaulle was appointed prime minister. Within three months the country had a new constitution which placed the most important executive powers in the hands of the president. De Gaulle's Fifth Republic was born. Four years later, Algeria gained independence.
In essence, de Gaulle's utopia was a nineteenth-century one: a regal France within a Europe of self-aware ‘fatherlands’ from the Atlantic to the Urals, led by the French-German axis and excluding Britain and America, and with a gradual thawing of relationships with the East. But when Warsaw Pact troops put a brutal end to the Prague Spring in August 1968, the general was forced to abandon his dream.
But even more dramatic were the events that had taken place three months earlier, when it turned out that France possessed neither the internal equilibrium nor the economic power needed for European leadership. In fact, in May 1968 it seemed that de Gaulle's political role had been played out. One last time he brought all his theatrical talents to bear, one last time he succeeded in restoring calm to the country; at the same time, however, he realised better than anyone else that 1968 had sounded the death knell for the rule of classic French father figures, and certainly for that of this self-appointed father of the fatherland.
The French May Revolution of 1968 was more than a student revolt, it was also the most massive wave of industrial action in French history, a rebellion by ten million French men and women against the bosses, against the state, against the constraints of ordinary life. It was a popular movement, and no one had seen it coming. On 29 April, 1968, the weekly L'Express ran a cover story under the title ‘France's Number One Crisis: Housing’. In an article bearing the headline ‘Students: The New Hussars Don't Have Much Luck’, a journalist wrote: ‘Perhaps, here in France, we are all growing a little bored.’
Two weeks later, on Saturday, 11 May, the official tally drawn up after a single night of fighting in the streets was: 367 wounded, 460 arrests, 188 damaged or burned-out cars, dozens of barricades. That day L'Express spoke of ‘a storm over Paris’ and the appearance of ‘more rioters than the Fifth Republic has ever seen.’
Just as generals are fond of winning the war that is over, governments always have a way of dealing definitively with revolutions past. On place Jussieu, one finds their memorial: a graceful university complex with, remarkably enough, its principal administration building constructed on poles. The entire complex has only one entrance, and the whole thing can be sealed off with an impenetrable barrier at the push of a button. It is a true masterpiece from the drafting tables of architectural agency Paranoia, Inc; here a Maginot Line has been thrown up for all time against the imagination that once, briefly, ruled these streets.
Nine months after 1967's Summer of Love, the European and American young people who – with the exception of the Germans – had preached peace and freedom took to the barricades with stones in their hands. During winter 1967–8, everything happened at once. In January, Vietnamese guerrillas penetrated Saigon during the Tet Offensive. America turned out to be anything but invincible. With each passing month, the demonstrations in Europe and the United States grew in size and number. On 1 March, 200 people were injured in battles on Rome's Spanish Steps, including almost 150 policemen. Spain followed: on 28 March, General Franco closed Madrid University indefinitely in response to illegal demonstrations against the regime, and a month later the country witnessed four days of heavy rioting. In Nanterre, the student administration building was occupied on 22 March under the leadership of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, signalling the start of the 22 March Movement. On 4 April, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. One week later, Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head and barely survived. In Berlin, thousands of students marched down Kurfürstendamm carrying pictures of the Spartacist martyrs of 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Two people were killed in the streets of Munich. On 6 June, American presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated. On 30 June, after fierce rioting, a state of emergency was declared in the Californian university town of Berkeley.
Meanwhile, the spring which had come to Prague that year was a historic one. In January, orthodox Communist Party leader Antonín Novotný was replaced by the amiable Alexander Dubžcek, who immediately loosened the reins: press, radio and television were allowed to criticise the regime freely, persecuted writers and intellectuals were granted amnesty, and plans were made to reform the economy along Western lines. The impending thaw became visible in the streets of Prague, in the length of men's hair, the cautious miniskirts, the home-made pop music, the screening of Western movies such as Cleopatra (featuring Elizabeth Taylorová) and Viva Maria! (with Brigitte Bardotová). The opposition paper Literární Noviny, which reappeared under the name Literární Listy, published an essay by playwright Václav Havel about true democracy: ‘Democracy is not a matter of faith, but of guarantees’ which allow ‘a public and legal competition for power’. All 250,000 copies of the magazine sold out within a few hours.
The demonstrations in Berlin and Paris elicited, at most, a vague sympathy among the students of Prague. They had other things on their minds: their ‘socialism with a human face’ was under increasing pressure from a ranting an
d raving Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who had succeeded Khrushchev in 1964. On the night of 21 August, 1968, he drummed up half a million soldiers from five ‘socialist brother states’ to invade Czechoslovakia. When Soviet spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov was asked in 1987 to explain the difference between the Prague Spring and his boss Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, his reply was: ‘Nineteen years.’
A Parisian friend of mine once told me that, right before another storm blew in, he had walked past the cordons of riot police in the streets of the capital and saw behind their visors, to his amazement, not the faces of robots but of tired, middle-aged men, probably with teenage children at home. We were sitting in the evening sun in front of Café Flore, one of the revolutionary road houses of that day. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the people here haven't really changed. They're just acting in a different play.’
Run, comrade, the old world's on your heels.
Forbidden to forbid.
Power to the imagination.
Count your hard feelings and be ashamed.
Be realistic, demand the impossible.
Beneath the paving stones lies the beach.
The memory of May 1968 may be preserved in such lovely one-liners, but the actual daily practice of the celebrated Parisian revolution was a fairly chaotic one. During those May evenings in the Latin Quarter, one former student demonstrator said he had felt more or less like Stendhal's protagonist Fabrice del Dongo during the Battle of Waterloo: events were happening all around, but he barely understood what was going on. At first the revolt had been little more than a prolonged and massive series of street skirmishes, prompted largely by the violence displayed by the police. That had begun as early as 22 March at Nanterre, where demonstrators had been badly beaten, and on 3 May, when students still committed to non-violence were thrashed out of the Sorbonne. After that, day by day, the fighting in the streets of Paris escalated, until finally the boulevards were filled with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators.
At the same time, there was the imagination, the dream that briefly ruled the streets. The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom has described how, sitting at the feet of a lady who launched into the ‘Internationale’ every ten minutes, he watched a demonstration pass by:‘A never-ending procession, filling both sides of the boulevard, students, Spanish workers, hospital personnel in white, setters, printers, drivers, hotel employees, teachers, all groups with their own songs, of all ages, often arm in arm, an incredible number of women and girls among them, everything that fills the pavements of Paris, a happy crowd that finally merges into itself like a river.’ Later he went to the Odéon, where a packed auditorium was in the midst of self-examination. ‘A young man in the centre aisle of the theatre is leading the talk. It remains glorious: someone speaks from one of the golden theatre boxes, the lovely and serious, the faces – no longer bored – at last turn in that direction, the arguments flow back and forth in the longest conversation in the world which has been going on for days, around the clock.’
As a young reporter for a student paper, I went with a colleague to Paris to report on the revolt. I remember a truck full of students tearing down the Champs-Élysées waving red flags, a classroom at the Sorbonne where girls passed out bread and sausage donated by sympathetic Parisians, the plush and the gold leaf of the packed Odéon, and a Spanish Gypsy family that put on shows in front of the theatre with a dancing monkey and a goat in culottes. Red flags, trucks, free food: if this wasn't a revolution, we didn't know what was. I found a few of my old notes from the weekend of 18 May.
Concerning the atmosphere in the occupied Sorbonne: ‘The lack of sleep begins to assume major forms. ‘In view of the rising number of nervous crises and depressions, the auxiliary services organisation asks you to sleep at least five hours a night. Comrades, people can only contribute to a revolution when they sleep and eat regularly.’ Beethoven, Chopin and jazz that sounds like Erroll Garner is playing in the hall. A boy with a clarinet tries to play along, everyone claps, a drunken clochard dances in circles.’
Concerning the uneasy contacts between students and workers: ‘After the fifteen-kilometre walk, the reception at Renault-Billancourt was a disappointment: the students were not allowed onto the grounds. Great excitement when a number of workers finally came to the Sorbonne. A whole series of rooms was set aside for the commission ouvriers-étudiants, volunteers were summoned to enter into discussions with the workers, collections were held for the strikers, yet relations remained strained. At midday, there were a total of five people on the above-mentioned committee. These differences are, of course, not hard to explain: judging from the wall posters, the workers’ demands are largely material; those of the students are increasingly immaterial, or even anti-material.’
Concerning the night: ‘In the nursery, a boy with a harmonica is trying to play the children to sleep. The press centre is packed. Exhausted girls type new mimeographs and manifestos all the time. In a bottle, in the midst of all the mess, is a red rose.’
On Sunday, 19 May, the Committee for the Defence of the Republic distributed the first pamphlets calling for resistance to the ‘rabble-rousers in the factories, workshops, offices and faculties’. Gaullist assault groups were being formed everywhere. One of my notes mentions a counter-demonstration by the extreme right, a group of about 750 people marching by with banners reading ‘á bas l'anarchie’ and ‘Pas de communisme’. At the time, we considered it a meaningless incident. Yet this was the start of the counter-revolution, and the end of the revolt.
On Wednesday, 22 May, the French parliament rejected a motion calling for the government to step down. De Gaulle promised a referendum. François Mitterand came forward as an alternative candidate for ‘the new left’. Negotiations between the trade unions, employers and the government began at the end of that week. The only problem was that the unions and the student organisation had little or no control over their own members. In the Latin Quarter, the fighting between police and demonstrators was grimmer than ever. During the entire May Revolution, 8 people were killed and almost 1,800 injured – including a considerable number of policemen.
On Wednesday, 29 May, after weeks of studied silence and absence, de Gaulle finally took the initiative. His countermove began with a brilliant bit of theatre. First he suddenly ‘disappeared’, and that mysterious manoeuvre drew attention away from the events in Paris. In fact, he had gone in deepest secrecy to Baden-Baden, to assure himself of the support of his old rival, Massu, and the rest of the French Army staff in Germany. At 4.30 p.m. the next day he held the most important radio speech of his career. In it, de Gaulle succeeded once more in enchanting the French. Within the space of four and a half minutes he was able to fill the power vacuum everyone had been talking about, to resuscitate the danger of ‘totalitarian communism’ and to move his Gaullists out onto the streets.
On place de la Concorde, an estimated million French citizens demonstrated with flags and portraits of the president; one day later the first strikers went back to work. In early June, the French revolt dwindled as suddenly as it had arisen. The front of ten million striking workers diminished within two weeks to a million. On 16 June the Sorbonne was cleared, four days later the last barricade was removed from the Latin Quarter. The elections brought a landslide victory for the Gaullists: they received 358 of the 458 seats in the assembly. It was insane: the most massive and inspirational revolution of the 1960s had ultimately resulted in a parliament more conservative than the general's old order.
‘You know,’ one of the leaders of May 1968 told me later, ‘there was a moment when [we] could have seized power. Everyone was in a panic, and de Gaulle was about to step down. The fact that we never seriously thought about that, not even for an instant, says a great deal. People weren't really out for power. They wanted the power to criticise, the power to prove themselves right, but not the power to run things on a daily basis, to get their hands dirty. And that pattern kept repeating itself.’
He himself had become an adviser o
n social facilities for disadvantaged neighbourhoods, all over Europe. ‘I still come across ordinary students from 1968 all the time, they work as aldermen, as project leaders, and they're always on the move. But their leaders were actually quite arrogant. The real work, normal power, they thought that was beneath them.’
Yet France would never be the same after 1968. The May Revolution had knocked de Gaulle's paternalistic regime off its pedestal. The general's power had always resided in his ability to mobilise all Frenchman against a common enemy: the Germans in 1940, the Algerian ultras in 1958. But, in the unclear situation of 1968, that no longer worked. There was no common enemy; the people in question were often the children of de Gaulle's own constituency. One had to apply tact and compromise, and that is where he failed. The criticism from the farmers and the merchants, his traditional supporters, grew rapidly throughout that summer and beyond. Finally de Gaulle tried to save his own skin one last time with an ‘all or nothing’ bid. He linked his political future to an insignificant referendum about regional relationships. On 27 April, 1969, his proposals were defeated by a tiny majority, and he drew his own conclusions. Under his successor Georges Pompidou, who was elected president in June, various reforms in the spirit of May 1968 were introduced anyway, now without furor.
General de Gaulle was finally at liberty to meet with a political leader who he had always held in great – if unspoken – admiration: Francisco Franco. The two men dined together on several occasions, but it did not result in a lasting friendship. When push came to shove, the theatrical de Gaulle remained a democrat, albeit a formal and primitive one. He was not, like Churchill, a man of the substantive democracy, of the heated democratic debate, of the democratic compromise. He sought the people's mandate, then went on to regard that as a licence to act as he saw fit. In that way he prefigured later Southern European leaders like Silvio Berlusconi and José María Aznar. But whatever else he was, he was not a dictator who tried to bend the press and the courts to his own will.