The New York Review Abroad (6 page)

During the first half of May a good many Parisian intellectuals, as well as many students, seemed to think of the student revolt as part of a larger revolution which had already happened in France. Of course it is not that, and the realization that the university revolt is threatened has added urgency to the debate about “organization” and “direct
democracy.” The students are reluctant to discuss the Bolsheviks and the anarchists of the Spanish Republic who also said they wanted direct democracy. Or, reminded of this, they take refuge in the idea that theirs is an unprecedented generation. To recall the failures of previous revolutions is to seem in their eyes patronizing, paternalistic. The London
Times
in an editorial pointed out as a weakness of the students that they did not appear to have read George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
. But they would not want to read it and if they did read it would find there nothing which they thought applied to their case.

Perhaps because they are so insulated in the Sorbonne, without their being literary, they yet keep on reminding one of behavior and characters in literature. There is something about their movements which reminds one of
The Lord of the Flies
, with a thuggish Katanga “Committee of Sudden Intervention” ready to emerge from the cellars to produce a final fall. And when one has stepped into the Sorbonne one often seems to be in the world of
Alice Through the Looking Glass
where all the values of the circumambient trafficking world outside are reversed.

THE EXPLOSION OF TALK

In a classroom there is a discussion going on about the nature of work in the consumer society. The room is crowded and contains older as well as young people. The discussion is dominated by two young men, one of whom, in the well of the classroom, is evidently a worker. He has a lean face with jutting features and bristly straw-colored hair emphasizing the line of the back of his head which seems almost continuous with his neck. He talks about work, which, he says, in all circumstances must be hard and boring. The opposite of work, he says, is pleasure, and he describes, quite exhibitionistically,
his own holidays which are spent, it seems, in driving about the country on his motorcycle and laying as many girls as he can pick up. Obviously this is the opposite of what is meant by work.

He is confronted by a student standing a few feet above him. He is small and dark and vigorous and has in his eyes and on his lips an expression like that of the blind made miraculously to see in a cartoon of Raphael. He says that work is joy if you are one of a group, a collective (any backward echoes of that remark are suppressed by his smile). Joy is participation, it is release from the self. He describes holidays that he and his companions have made together where they have done a great deal of work. The individual must not be like the bourgeois intellectual, alienated and separate, existing in no “social context,” but that of other intellectuals like himself; nor must he be a cog in a machine. He must be in society like a fish in the water.

The worker interrupts and says, You are not talking about work, you are talking about sport. Sport is not work, it is the free development of the individual. Work means taking orders from someone set above you. The student says that in the revolution, automation will replace the kind of work which is slavery. Work will then consist of participation. There will be no oppression of power because there will be a constant toing and froing between those at the base of society and those at the top, a vital current. Machines will function but the goods and services they produce will be a means for leading a life of better value, and not ends which prove that the individual owns things or acquires status. He says the students and the workers combining together could achieve this kind of society: not the intellectuals who are void because they reflect problems peculiar to them, outside the context of society. To be truly revolutionary, you have to experience reality.

This discussion was naïve. Often at the Sorbonne and the Odéon one heard things worse than naïve, chaotic and stupid and dull, and
one longed to hear a professor talk for half an hour about Racine. There was wisdom though perhaps in the relief of talking simply as an act, like action painting. Talk, uninhibited, crude, theoretical, confessional, has overtaken Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, and other cities. It is the breaking out of forces long suppressed. Not just the Sorbonne and the Censier, the Beaux Arts, the Odéon, were filled with talk but also the streets themselves. Another part of the French revolutionary tradition had emerged—the idea of joining forces with others in the streets—
dans la rue!
In the Rue de Rennes I find myself standing in a group of shoppers and shop assistants outside a closed Monoprix. A frustrated shopper is saying indignantly, “Where will all this end? In communism, universal poverty.” “Not at all,” says a natty black-coated worker, “Communism means
more
refrigerators,
more
television sets,
more
automobiles.
Le communisme, c’est le luxe pour tous
.”

This definition shows how difficult it is for the students—conscious, many of them, of themselves as bourgeois, and seeking for a world in which material things are subservient to other human values—to get on with the workers, most of whom, of course, want consumer goods. The relation of the French students to “
les ouvriers
” is not unlike that of the American students to the Negroes. It cannot be seen just politically, but as a love affair in which the guilt-conscious whites and bourgeois are trying to win the members of what they regard as a wronged class to their own ideas of what are real values.

Not that the students want altogether to dispense with washing machines and refrigerators. Their attitude is shown in a document of thirty theses drafted at the Censier by a group called
Les Yeux Crévés
. It begins by defining the students as a privileged class, not so much economically as because “we alone have the time and possibility to become aware of our own conditions and the condition of society. Abolish this privilege and act so that everyone may become
privileged.” It goes on to say that students are workers like everyone else. They are not parasites, economic minors. They do not condemn “
en bloc
” the consumer society. “One has to consume, but let us consume what we have decided to produce.… We wish to control not only the means of production but also those of consumption—to have a real choice and not a theoretic one.”

It is significant that the movement of the students at the Sorbonne—called the movement of the
22 Mars
—started among sociologists at the newly built extension of the University in the desolate industrial suburb of Nanterre. A long declaration by Cohn-Bendit and some of his colleagues, in
Esprit
(the May number), depicts the sociology students as seeing sociology as a statistical account of existing society, the result of American influence. The very few sociology students who would get jobs after they left the university would be engaged in such activities as making consumer reports. They realized that sociology instead of being an instrument of bourgeois society, could be turned against it to make a revolution and construct a new society. Here the beginnings of an ideology of the students are implicit.

Inevitably perhaps, the students are unself-critical. They do not notice inconsistencies in their own attitudes, even when, to an outsider, it must seem that these could be disastrous. This struck me when I heard a student who had organized the revolt at Strasbourg University describe his experiences to a great gathering in the Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne. He spoke about the professors with whom the students had to deal with that kind of contempt which is current among some students. He told how he had been asked by someone why he had not explained things adequately to the authorities at his university, and how he had answered: “because one does not enter into discussions with people who are non-existent.” People you do not talk to because they are non-existent! Whatever justification there
might be for adopting this attitude when confronted with the stuffed geese of Strasbourg, I could not help wondering as I listened how it would work out in the “direct democracy.” Supposing—I thought—our student from Strasbourg goes to a factory or to a village where there are peasants, is it not likely that he will meet a few people with attitudes not altogether dissimilar from those he encountered at Strasbourg—people “who understand nothing,” (
qui n’ont rien compris
): that was another of his phrases for describing those who did not agree with him? And had not one heard all this before? Did not the Soviets start off very willing to talk to anyone and everyone who agreed with them, and then make the horrible discovery that there were still bourgeois elements floating around, and that there were very recalcitrant peasants, people who understand nothing, people finally whom one stops talking to—or just stops talking? At this point the phrase “On
ne parle pas avec des gens qui n’existent pas
” begins to acquire a sinister ring.

The students are, I emphasize, conscious of these dangers and do not wish to repeat them. I wonder what might happen if someone wrote on the walls of the Sorbonne: “The streets of Hell are paved with good intentions.” If it were written there, I wonder how long it would last. I noticed that they are very good at deleting.

CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH CANNOT LIVE TOGETHER

As I left the Odéon Theatre one evening two youths looking more like Dickensian street urchins perhaps than students called to each other: “Why doesn’t he cut his hair?” “Perhaps he should tear it out with his nails!” “Perhaps it’s a wig!” Respect for white hairs is certainly not one of the dues paid in Paris this May.

Usually, though, the old just feel invisible as the blacks were supposed
to do in America. “The young make love, the old obscene gestures,” a slogan in the anarchist magazine
L’Enragé
runs. They have read
Romeo and Juliet
it seems, but not
Antony and Cleopatra
.

I observed to a contemporary that I enjoyed, on the whole, my invisibility. He said: “I thought that too until I went one day with my twenty-year-old son to the Sorbonne. I sat there quietly, and as I had to slip out early was specially grateful to be a ghost. But directly I had gone another student came up and said to my son: ‘
Qui était ce vieux con avec toi?
’ ”

One night I am at the Odéon, Jean-Louis Barrault’s old-style
avant garde
theater which the students have “liberated” and made open for completely unplanned marathon discussions which go on almost till daybreak. The scene is like the sixth act of some play in the Theater of Cruelty in which the audience have rung down the curtain and taken over the house for their own performance. And they find themselves much more entertaining than Ionesco and Beckett, I am afraid. The performance itself—the debates for which there are no subjects set—can be chaotic, and I am often sorry for the student chairmen who stand in the aisle yelling “
Silence! N’interrompez pas! Un peu de l’ordre! Discipline!
”