In Europe

‘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 callingfor 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 ona daily basis, to get their hands dirty. And that pattern kept repeating itself.’
    He himself had become an adviser on 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