“Down with the spectator commodity society!”
—GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968
THE SORBONNE TODAY does not look a hotbed of revolutionary fervour, unless you count a few dog-eared posters grouching about how hard it is for students to find accommodation or pay for public transport. The kids I harass in the hall seem resolutely unexcited about the impending anniversary of the 1968 rising, reciting more workaday concerns like passing their exams, finding a job after passing said exams and getting away from another foreign journalist with a “Whither 1968?” angle before he makes them any later for their lectures. The only graffiti to be seen is on the wall of a building across the road from the Sorbonne: a racist slogan daubed by some—surprisingly literate—devotee of elderly buffoon Jean-Marie Le Pen and his crypto-fascist National Front.
It is difficult to find, among memoirs of the period, a clear statement of what the rioters of 1968 were fighting for. There’s not even a lot of agreement about what they were fighting against, and this is perfect. The reason that May 1968 still looms so large in the popular consciousness is precisely that it was so completely, gloriously unreasonable, a splendid and petulant revolt against everything, a delirious reaction against the comforts of a capitalist society where—as René Viénet puts it in his snappily-titled Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68—“we pay to consume, in boredom, commodities we produce in the weariness that makes leisure desirable.”
The Athena-print ubiquity of the graffiti of the period (“I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires”; “Underneath the paving stones, the beach!”) suggests that, at best, May ’68 remains a resilient bridgehead of dissent with modern life and, at worst, that it was a whole lot of fun. Much of the music and images of the counter-culture prevalent at the same time in America dated quickly because they were pitched against the contemporary cause of the war in Vietnam. What happened in Paris in May 1968 continues to inspire and intrigue because it was about nothing in particular and, therefore, about anything you like. What were they rebelling against? What have you got? May ’68 was rock’n’roll without the music.
Indeed, each of the preeminent British rock’n’roll bands of the three decades since ’68 have subscribed rigorously to this creed of defiant, unexplained rejectionism, as if the greatest solace lies in the refusal to offer a constructive argument. The Sex Pistols in the 70s (“I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it”), The Smiths in the 80s (“We may be hidden by rags but we have something they’ll never have”) and Radiohead in the 90s (“We hope your rules and wisdom choke you”) were all, in this sense, French.
“We won’t ask for anything. We won’t demand anything.
We’ll just take and occupy.”
—GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968
THE IRONY IS that for as long as there has been rock’n’roll, the world has been running screaming from French attempts to make it, and generally with good reason. Listening to the French make rock music has the same morbidly compelling appeal as watching pensioners negotiate stone staircases after a frost. No government appointment since Caligula named his horse a senator has provoked as much merriment as the one the French made in the mid-90s, when they created a cabinet post with responsibility for French rock music. David Stubbs, a colleague of mine at Melody Maker at the time, ventured into print with the suggestion that the holder of such a portfolio would be kept about as busy as the Squadron Leader of the Royal Dutch Mountain Rescue Service, and we didn’t get many letters arguing with him.
I put this to Emmanuel Tellier, who writes for the redoubtable Parisian rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles. He also plays in a band called Melville, who really aren’t bad at all, and buys me lunch despite my assault on his nation’s honour, which he defends with good humour.
“Our cultural interests are more diverse than Britain’s,” he argues over the soup. “Here, we think theatre, film, fashion and art are as important as music and football are in Britain. People here have more options for expressing themselves, so they don’t care that our rock music gets laughed at in Britain. And we can get a drink after 11 o’clock.”
Touché. I also drop in on DJ Dmitri from Paris, who lives off the Boulevard de Sebastopol in an apartment crammed with his immense collection of toy robots. He seems less impressed by Paris’s civilised licensing laws, tells me Parisian clubs are terrible, and says he’d rather play in London or Tokyo.
“Music has never been important here,” he shrugs—and it’s true that May ’68 didn’t have a “Blowin’ In The Wind” to call its own. “People here don’t want to be in bands the way they do in Britain. Kids here use the music, but they don’t want to live it.”
Dmitri concedes that the recent international success of French electro-melancholists Air and Daft Punk might change this, but doesn’t sound optimistic. “People here don’t go out to hear music,” he says, glumly. “They go out to talk.”
At the moment, they—which is to say Paris’s wide circle of self-conscious bohemians—are going out to talk in Menilmontant, a neighbourhood a few blocks north of Père Lachaise cemetery, where the tombs are embellished by impressionable Smiths fans inscribing neatly-lettered homage to Oscar Wilde and gormless American college kids daubing fatuous dedications to Jim Morrison, arguably the most overrated person who ever lived.
As tourists and professionals have started moving into the once-hip area around Place de la Bastille, the artists and students have decamped east to Menilmontant, a hilly suburb of cement and immigrants. Rue Oberkampf, the curiously German-sounding street which runs through the area, now houses Café Charbon, Café Mercerie, Le Scherkhan, Le Meccano and any number of other quiet, dimly lit, decorously decorated and altogether agreeable places to get drunk in. Except that the stylishly disheveled Parisians in these places don’t drink, at least not in that race-you-to-nausea way that people do in British pubs. Again, Paris lives up to its clichés: they really do sip at tiny cups of espresso and argue about philosophy. In fact, there are philosophy cafés, where punters are encouraged to stand up and pontificate on the eternal, and which are every bit as ghastly as they sound.
There are also people who clearly are in need of a stiff drink, like the solemn youth in Le Meccano who earnestly informs me that it’s wrong for me to be writing about May ’68 in a magazine that is sold for money.
So when you finish reading this, go out and burn down a bank.
“Be realistic—demand the impossible.”
—GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968
IN AN EFFORT to get closer to the revolutionary soul of Paris, I spend a day revolting, myself. This isn’t difficult—in an average week, Paris hosts around 200 demonstrations. One morning tabloid, La Parisien, carries a daily map of streets likely to be blocked by protests. A short walk from Place de la Bastille, a run-down office block hosts the bases of two of Paris’s uncountable pressure groups, SUD (Solidarity Unity Democracy) and CNT (some species of anarchist, judging by the red and black flags fluttering from the windows). This gloomy Sunday, the rest of France is voting in regional elections. SUD and CNT are staging what they have described to me on the phone as a “manifestation.”
I speak to Pierre of SUD, who claims a national support of some 20,000 for his organisation. Pierre was fourteen years old in 1968, and remembers enjoying the time off when his teachers walked off the job. He explains that SUD wants to help the homeless and the unemployed.
“We want,” he says, “to organise a movement with all who are excluded, and make a junction with the workers.” Next to him, a younger man called Vincent, of a syndicate called Droits Devant, adds that “The government is making one law for the rich and one law for the poor,” and then, in a whisper, “there are lots of police here,” though I can’t see any. He gives me a blue sticker which reads “Plan de relogement pour touts les personnes entrant dans du foyer!” I have no idea what this means, but it sounds damn exciting.
After a bit of milling aroun
d, a crowd of maybe a hundred demonstrators and half as many media walk to the Metro station at Gare de Lyon, where we commit the first insurrectionary act of the day by swarming in through the exit gates, thus skipping the fare. We are, it seems, going to commute to the revolution. As the train proceeds to wherever it is we’re going, someone explains that we’re off to stage an “occupation” as part of a bid to obtain housing for twenty homeless families.
We get off the train at a Metro station somewhere south of the Seine, and are led at a jog up a street past a church, which has already been occupied by illegal immigrants who are demonstrating about something else entirely. They cheer us as we run past, and we cheer them. The few dozen police standing outside the church look bored and annoyed.
Our brisk trot ends a few blocks later, outside an apartment building in the final stages of construction. The demonstrators leading the charge remove the sheet-metal and wooden hoardings and usher everybody in. It’s dark and dusty inside, but there’s a couple of people at the front with torches, so I follow them as far as the first floor landing, watch as the rest of the protestors push past me to the upper floors and onto the roof and decide to leave them to it and go back outside to take the broader view.
The paranoid whispers about police were not the delusions of self-important armchair rebels: a couple of the people who’d been running and shouting alongside us since we left the SUD/CNT offices are now barking into walkie-talkies. Their colleagues are not long in arriving: around a hundred of Paris’s finest, the Compagnies Republicanes de Securité, or CRS. They trot out of three buses and seal the streets around the occupied building. The CRS are the legal response to Paris’s culture of protest, a paramilitary police force equipped with shields, batons, tear-gas, sidearms, rifles and bullets both rubber and metal. Their body armour makes them look like the android bounty hunters that chased Harrison Ford through three Star Wars films, they wear no identifying serial numbers on their uniforms and have a reputation as fearful as their appearance. From the roof, the demonstrators take up the popular May ’68 chant of “CRS—SS!”
A briefly tense and interesting but eventually calm and tedious stand-off ensues. Terms are negotiated. Women and children leave the building. Threats are made. The chief cop on the spot is a young plainclothes officer who looks like he cabbed it here straight from a Paris Fashion Week show. He’s immaculately dressed, in a style best thought of as Suavely Thuggish Chic, and looks like an elongated Jean-Claude Van Damme. I try, with the help of French-speaking Face photographer Franck, to talk to him, but he regards us as if we were stains on his crisply pressed overcoat and continues listening intently to whatever he’s hearing in his earpiece. In front of the rank of CRS troops, one luxuriantly bearded protestor, dressed as a biblical shepherd and carrying a life-size toy donkey over one shoulder, waltzes back and forth with a ghetto blaster playing “If I Were A Rich Man.” The CRS troops ignore him. When I try to speak to him, he ignores me. Someone else explains that he’s just an itinerant fruitcake who turns up at these things, and nobody really knows what he’s on about.
While we wait around to see what, if anything, is going to happen, activists for other causes wander along, distributing leaflets advertising other demonstrations. People who pass by the besieged building react with benign disinterest, apart from those trying to reach their homes on the sealed-off streets. The CRS refuse entry to a young black man who’s trying to get home with his shopping. A few minutes later, to the amusement of all non-CRS parties on the ground, a frail old white couple try to pass the same way. The embarrassed CRS have no real choice but to let them through, along with the young black man, who pauses to express his opinion of the CRS with a passion that transcends any linguistic barriers.
“He said . . .” says Franck.
I got the idea.
Another woman in a car has her path blocked. She erupts in a spectacular fury of honking and swearing for some minutes, before handing over her identification card for inspection.
A few hours later, with occupiers and police having apparently decided to bore each other into submission, I follow the directions on one of the leaflets I’ve been given, and end up at Charonne Metro in the early evening. A crowd of terribly angry young people assembles, and the pattern established earlier is repeated: we pour into the station through the exit doors—the Parisian authorities might think about spending less on riot police and more on ticket inspectors—and are given further instructions as we travel. I talk to Germinal, a twenty-five-year-old philosophy student from the Sorbonne, who explains that we are participating in another “manifestation,” this time organised by AC! (Agir Contre le Chomage, or Action Against Unemployment).
“This is similar to May ’68 in spirit,” he tells me, “but it’s more real. This time, it’s about survival.”
His reply when I ask him what he means by that is less concise.
We emerge alongside the silly, inside-out Pompidou Centre, and sprint a few blocks to the side door of a building, which is kicked open and entered with a great deal of joyful shouting. I walk around to the front of the place to see what they’ve stormed, and can’t help but laugh—it’s the hall in which the Green-Socialist-Communist coalition are planning to hold their post-election piss-up. The occupiers hang from the windows a huge banner demanding a fairer shake for the homeless and unemployed. A blizzard of leaflets is tossed over the street, and a couple of doubtless deserving cases from the Greens have their bewildered gazes up at their ransacked party venue rewarded with mercilessly accurate water bombs.
When the CRS arrive, I notice that a lot of them have come from the occupation I was at earlier, which is only fair enough, as so have a lot of the protestors in the building. Inspector Suavely Thuggish is with them again, still in thrall to his earpiece. There’s a bit of a scuffle when the occupiers try to admit film crews and press through the front door. A few enterprising cops pile in with them and remove several demonstrators, who are—no pun intended, really—frogmarched to a waiting paddy wagon. They paste stickers of anti-government slogans to the insides of the van windows as they are driven away.
“Humanity will be happy the day the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist.”
—GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968
BACK AT MY hotel, I call Rome to speak Angelo Quattrocchi, the Italian author whose lovely, if somewhat florid, memoir of May ’68, The Beginning of the End, is being republished this year as part of the minor boom in situationist nostalgia. Quattrocchi is an excitable sort of indeterminate age (“I refuse to be quantified,” he explains, like a good anarchist) and maintains that 1968 was not an isolated event, but part of a process, and thoroughly, uniquely, French.
“You follow the French revolutions,” he sputters. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité . . . France is aware of what those terms mean, and tries to do something about it. The rest of Europe is becoming more and more inconclusive and consensual, but the French revolution continues.”
France, it’s true, has developed a culture where taking to the streets is not a last resort, but a first response. French governments, in turn, have learnt to fear the streets, and with good reason, as the spectres of many former kings and mayors would attest, if they still had heads to attest with.
“In 1968, we liberated Paris,” Quattrocchi enthuses, “from the banks and the cops—same thing, to me—and we controlled it for fifteen days. To be there, to start a new life without money, was such an exhilarating feeling. People today don’t think. They are told the present is the only possible present. This last generation, patrolled by the media, this cop of the mind, has not had a single original thought.”
Kids today, tch. Before leaving London, I’d met with Tariq Ali, the writer who was banned from several countries for his writings about and involvement in 1968 risings in Britain, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan and America. He is also publishing a book about the momentous year, and also despairs of the generation born since 1968, blaming “television and rave culture.
” Nobody so conservative as an old hippy.
Myself, I’m starting to think that maybe the French are just attracted to drama for its own sake. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: as Europe drifts towards a complacent, centre-right consensus, at least the French are still trying, still clinging to the same wilful belief in the perfectibility of human society that drove them to revolt in 1789 and at regular intervals since. And maybe whatever it is that drives them to bounce bricks off riot police is the same force which has bequeathed us all those exquisitely overwrought films, heroically prima donna footballers and the eternal idea of Paris as a city of possibilities as wide as its boulevards, as grand as its monuments, as provocative as its fist-sized paving stones. We need Paris. We mightn’t be able to live up to living in it, but it’s nice to know it’s there.
“The tears of a philistine are the nectar of the Gods.”
—GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968
IN ANOTHER OVER-DECORATED venue near the Arc de Triomphe, more people gather to fiddle, or at least rap, while Paris burns, or at least while a few of its citizens smoulder with righteous umbrage. I’m at a party in honour of some new record by some new French hip hop group, clutching a glass of watery punch in one hand and a raffle ticket (first prize, tickets to the World Cup final) in the other. The homegrown strain of hip hop is enormous business in France, aided by the 40 percent quota of local product that radio stations must play, and by the fact that the mellifluous cadences of the French language are oddly suited to the genre. Tonight, the extent to which the French have coopted hip hop is obvious: the people in here are wearing the latest American street gear, but there’s only one place in the world where a rap group would furnish a party with vases of fresh flowers and bowls of wax fruit.
Rock and Hard Places Page 22