The Color of Paris, Part Deux: May '68

It’s difficult to pinpoint when the tenor of the year began to change from heady and adventuresome to harsh and unsettling. In February, we began hearing about student unrest on the campus of Nanterre, one of the outlying branches of the University of Paris. Students were angry about over-crowded, rundown conditions at the college, but they were also rising up, as were so many other young people around the world, against “the Establishment,” and a status quo they believed was corrupted by materialism and, most prominently, by American hegemony. Graffiti on Paris walls proclaimed “US = SS,” my first encounter with anti-American sentiment. The French had loved John F. Kennedy and, especially, his wife Jacqueline. But by 1968, with Vietnam raging and Lyndon Johnson no JFK, feelings toward the U.S. had soured, particularly among the French youth and intelligentsia. It was the first time I had seen the U.S. from another country’s perspective, and though it seems unbelievably naïve today—with global news at our fingertips—at the time it was still common for young Americans to remain unaware of others’ cultural and political imperatives even as the whole world was sharply aware of ours.

Anti-American sentiment was heightened when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4. The French had publicly mourned the death of John Kennedy four and a half years earlier. Now, here again, was proof that the U.S. was a dangerous place, a place where heroes could be cut down in their prime by their own people. I was stunned and saddened, and we were grateful to our Hamilton director, Franklin Hamlin, for allowing us time to grieve together at Reid Hall.

Among the other news reports reaching us were stories about the student uprisings at Columbia University, which began about a week before King’s assassination. The student activists had differing agendas. Some were seeking racial equality; others were protesting the university’s involvement in Vietnam War strategy. Youth uprisings like this one had been occurring in other countries—Mexico, Poland, West Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, even the Soviet Union— since early in 1968 and were to continue throughout the spring. But of all the youth protests that occurred around the world during the first half of 1968, the Paris riots in May have become the most romanticized probably because, well, they happened in Paris. Immortalized in books and on film, the student uprising in the City of Light became lasting symbols of student disillusion and alienation.

In France, the riot police are the CRS —the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité—a reserve branch of the French National Police. Dressed in black, from their helmets to their combat boots, the CRS patrol the city in imposing vans equipped with sirens and loud speakers from which they emerge carrying black shields and their dreaded nightsticks, their matraques. Beginning early that spring, the CRS were everywhere. On the busiest corners of the Latin Quarter, they would form a wall, shields up, hands on their matraques, as we hurried past them to our classes, praying not to be noticed and stopped.

The unrest in Nanterre, which at first felt far removed from our lives in Paris, hit home for us during the first week of May. The police had closed the Nanterre campus to punish students for the constant disruptions they were causing. That was on May 2, and the next day, students at the Sorbonne met and declared their solidarity with their Nanterre confrères. To avert the kinds of disruptions that had occurred at Nanterre, the CRS surrounded the Sorbonne campus in the heart of the Latin Quarter. That “invasion,” as students dubbed it, only served to raise hackles and gain support from university faculty, high school students, and other willing protesters around the country, including, eventually, workers’ unions. Madame Robert shared the outrage felt by her son, Edouard, a first-year student at the Sorbonne, and started laying in supplies—food and first-aid—in anticipation of what was ahead.

The first public protest brought an estimated 20,000 students and faculty to the streets on May 6. They were met by the CRS with tear gas, beatings, and arrests. From there, the violent confrontations escalated quickly, and once the students and faculty were joined by the workers’ union, some of whose leaders descended from the provinces and even from beyond French borders, the city felt under siege. All the university branches closed, and students occupied as many academic buildings as they could. Widespread strikes stopped mail and gasoline from entering Paris, uncollected garbage piled up along every city street, there was no public transportation, and even food and bottled water was becoming scarce.

Madame Robert spent her nights pacing the apartment, after delivering food and medical supplies to Edouard and his friends who were among the students occupying university buildings in the Latin Quarter. By that time, gasoline had become so scarce that people were abandoning their cars in the middle of the city streets. Each night, protesters would set fire to uncollected garbage and abandoned cars, and the blare of sirens would go on for hours. Emergency vehicles still had gasoline, but they were having a tough time managing the number of fires and getting close enough amid the clogged streets, so their insistent sirens could be heard throughout the night.

One night, after seeing a movie in the Latin Quarter, I was being seen home by a male American friend, his hair newly long and trendily unkempt. We were used to seeing CRS patrolling the streets, but this time one of the officers stopped us. Grabbing my friend by the collar, he shoved him against a building and asked for his papers. We weren’t in the habit of carrying our passports with us, so my friend had nothing to show except a student ID. It was clear we weren’t French and we weren’t about to light anything on fire, but the officer took the time to puncture our protective American bubble before letting us go. As if this weren’t enough to sober us up, we were shocked beyond belief the next morning to find that the movie theater we had been to the night before had been gutted by a fire. There were no casualties—the theater had closed for the night before it had been burned—but things definitely seemed to be getting out of hand.

Still, nothing could keep us inside, even as the charred skeletons of cars and the reeking garbage turned the city ugly and menacing. One night, friends and I made our way to Montmartre and up the steps to Sacré-Coeur, the highest point of land we could reach on foot. The steps of the basilica had become a regular gathering place for students seeking both camaraderie and an unparalleled view of the fires rising up from every neighborhood in the city below. Food was shared and wine bottles passed around. Now and then, we sang along with the guitars some students brought with them. Two of the most popular songs in France that year were “The Sounds of Silence” and “I Am a Rock.” It was clear by the number of young French guitarists who knew the chords and lyrics by heart that Simon and Garfunkel had captured the alienation angry students were feeling. But even high up over the city, the guitars and raised voices never managed to drown out the sirens’ song.

One particularly warm night, my roommate and I ventured into the Latin Quarter, partly out of curiosity, partly from restlessness. We intended to stop at a café, maybe take in a movie, but things felt volatile and unsafe, so we decided to head home early. As we tried to make our way back across the Seine to the Right Bank, we were blocked by violent eruptions between mobs of protesters and the CRS. We tried to find a way around the violence, but it was too widespread. Desperate to escape the clouds of painful teargas and get home, we started running toward a line of parked taxis. When we told the drivers where we wanted to go, none of them would agree to take us. They said there was no safe route across the river. We rushed on for blocks and ended up knocking on the door of a friend of mine who lived on Boulevard Raspail and also happened to be studying in Paris that year. Her French family let us sleep on the floor of her room. The next day, we walked home amid a scene of the worst devastation we had yet witnessed: paved streets were torn up, trees downed, store windows broken, parked vehicles scorched, streetlights smashed, and garbage strewn everywhere. The walk, over and around the piled debris, was slow and sobering. Even as outsiders, we were beginning to feel vulnerable.

A few days later, I received a pneumatique — a form of express mail sent from post office to post office through a series of underground tubes—summoning me to our neighborhood police station. There was no explanation, just a terse order to appear. Madame Robert insisted on coming with me, as did Edouard. When we arrived at the station, an unsmiling officer held up one of my notebooks. He told us it had been found under a student-erected barricade during the night we had made our running escape from the street violence. Had I been part of the protest? If not, what was my notebook doing there? He had probably seen at first glance that I was not the rabble-rouser he was expecting, but that didn’t prevent him from putting me through the drill. I was worried that Edouard would erupt and turn the moment into a serious confrontation. This guy was not CRS, but even the neighborhood police were beleaguered, exhausted, and understandably ill tempered, and it wouldn’t have taken much to provoke him. To my relief, everyone stayed calm and polite, and we were soon ushered out—courteously but to the end, unsmilingly.

Once the general strikes took hold mid-month, we were not able to send or receive mail from home. My parents called one evening from Connecticut, not realizing it was the middle of the night in Paris. Madame Robert came to wake me, and I was grateful to see she was not annoyed. She knew what my parents were feeling and could forgive their lack of foresight. My mother told me that TV news reports were showing fires throughout the city and violent fights between police and students, and she urged me to come home early. It was hard to convince her that I wasn’t in danger if I stayed away from the hot spots, but I could tell she was comforted just hearing my voice. I wasn’t about to leave Paris in the thick of things, and luckily she and my father didn’t insist.

While the daily street fighting and strikes began to have a more serious impact on me, the political battles remained distant and largely meaningless. At the time, I didn’t realize how close the city was to outright revolution. Later, I would hear about the troops stationed just outside the city limits and the fear on the part of officials that rebels would attack government buildings, resulting in bloodshed on all sides. So when President Charles DeGaulle mysteriously disappeared on May 29, effectively shutting down the government as Prime Minister Georges Pompidou set a search an unprecedented search operation in motion, I responded with little more than amusement. To me, DeGaulle had outlived his self-made legend. His outsized nose was a cartoonist’s dream, and his stentorian speech a mimic’s treasure trove. I didn’t take him seriously—and in that I greatly underestimated him and the mood of the French majority.

It was soon revealed that DeGaulle had fled to Germany, reportedly demoralized and angered by the raging students and workers and ready to quit. He was also worried that he and his family would be attacked in the Elysée Palace by bloodthirsty rebels, perhaps seeing himself in the image of Louis XIV, who moved the royal residence to Versailles in order to escape the dangers of the Paris rabble.

But somehow, over the course of a day, DeGaulle regained his resolve. On May 30, my roommate and I sat in front of the TV with our French family to hear his famous come-to-Jesus speech to the nation. “Françaises, Français…,” he began dramatically. Though he adopted a no-nonsense, at times belligerent tone, he did make some concessions: he dissolved the National Assembly and scheduled a referendum for June 23, during which the people would have the chance to either accept or reject his and his party’s continued leadership. He also said he would work with his trusted advisors to address problems in the French economy and university system that had been at the heart of the protests. DeGaulle’s words—and authoritarian presence— that day did what matraques and teargas had not been able to do: they cooled the anger and halted the violence. The revolutionary balloon had been popped, and a wary, tentative calm ensued.

Yet disturbing events just kept on happening. On June 5, the news reached us that Robert Kennedy had been shot. After he died the following day, Le Monde carried the awful story on its front page, which was entirely framed in black. This news rocked our world in ways that the even Paris riots had not. We were still reeling from the assassination of the 39-year-old Martin Luther King and now we had lost 42-year-old Bobby, a fiery advocate for civil rights. The response of the French people I knew, young and old, added to the hurt. Why would I want to live in such a dangerous place? some wondered. At first this seemed absurd in light of the open warfare we had just witnessed. But we had to acknowledge that throughout all the street violence that had occurred in Paris during the previous month, not one death had been reported. By contrast, more than 40 people had been reported killed in the U.S. during the violent riots that followed King’s death in April.

The national referendum was duly held on June 23, about a week before I was to head to Le Havre and reboard the S.S. France for my return home. Madame Robert surprised me by confessing, sheepishly, that she had voted for DeGaulle, who ended up winning a huge victory for himself and his party. After all her sleepless nights, her terrifying flashbacks, her fears for her son, and her repeated denouncements of DeGaulle’s arrogance and stubborn refusal to alter the status quo, when the moment came, she was more comfortable voting for what she knew than for what she didn’t know. I was stunned, both by her admission and by the overwhelming Gaullist victory. The French went back to work and began planning their summer vacations. It all felt disappointingly anti-climactic in light of the passionate protests I had seen in the streets. It was time to go home.

The S.S. France landed back at Pier 88 in New York at the end of June, and I returned to a world that had gone psychedelic and become bitterly divided. I found the generational rift over Vietnam heartbreaking and the continuing racial conflicts shattering. Scenes of young National Guardsmen clashing with protesters their own age were clear signals that the so-called “youth movement” hid a class divide that was uncomfortable to confront.

Thoughts of Paris resurfaced often, especially in November, when Republican Richard Nixon was elected to the White House. Nixon had run on a “law and order” platform, promising to restore calm to an anxious nation. Both my parents voted for him. Like Madame Robert, they felt they were making the safe choice. And like her, they were responding from their personal experience of the war years and what unchecked violence can do.

Today, as France marks the 50th anniversary of Paris ’68, I’m much older than Madame Robert and my parents were at the time. When I think back on the passion that galvanized a small but visible segment of my generation in France and at home, so many years ago, I do so with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’m sad to have lost the wide-eyed, youthful exuberance that made optimism so natural and imagined positive change to be within reach. On the other hand, I took away from Paris a lifelong aversion to extremism, no matter what side it professes to support, and a mistrust of anyone who relies more on charisma than on reason and empathy. Back then, we over-estimated how much our generation could change the world, and the causes we fought for were undermined at times by the things I found so troubling in Paris: fanaticism, exploitation, self-interest, macho posturing. But the world did change after May ‘68—sometimes because of us, sometimes in spite of us. As someone who came of age in 1968 and is now merely “of age,” my experience rests with the old but my hope lives on in the young. What would be truly radical would be for us to bridge the divide and share what we have—melding knowledge with vision—and change the world together. Now that would be a revolution.