1968 - Mark Kurlansky [127]
France had a growing antiwar movement capable of mounting sizable demonstrations, many of which met with brutal police response. A wide range of French people opposed the war, including some veterans. Servan-Schreiber was an outspoken opponent of the Algerian war. After serving there, he wrote a book, Lieutenant in Algeria, for which he was unsuccessfully court-martialed.
Alain Geismar, a French Jew, was nineteen years old when de Gaulle came to power. His father had died fighting the Germans, and his grandfather had been deported to a concentration camp. He had spent the first years of his life in hiding in France. He was shaped by these experiences. “During the Algerian war I found a number of Nazi characteristics in the army of my country,” he recently said. “It was a much smaller scale. There was not mass genocide. But there was torture and there were ‘regroupment’ camps. In 1945 we had been told that it was over. But in 1956 I found that it was not over.”
The Algerian war helped radicalize French youth. In 1960, during the height of the Algerian protest movement, leftist students took over the student organizations that had been dominated for many years by right-wing students. Geismar became active in protesting the Algerian war and was one of the organizers of an October 1961 demonstration in Paris. The police opened fire on Algerian demonstrators. “I saw them shooting Algerians,” said Geismar. Afterward bodies were found in the Seine, though it was never determined how many were killed. The incident was not discussed openly in France until the 1990s.
In 1962 de Gaulle finally succeeded in ending the Algerian war. Algeria became independent, and France entered one of its few periods of peace and stability in the twentieth century. In 1963 the French sixties began when Europe 1, a popular radio station, announced a free concert in Paris’s Place de la Nation and, to everyone’s surprise, thousands of young people showed up. Both records and live music, primarily American and British, played continually for most of the night. France was used to its July 14 balls in which people danced to songs like “Sur Les Ponts de Paris,” and “La Vie en Rose,” played on an accordion, but an all-night free rock concert in the open air was something very new.
France started experiencing considerable economic growth in the sixties. Between 1963 and 1969 real wages grew by 3.6 percent—enough growth to turn France into a consumer society. Suddenly Frenchmen had automobiles. Indoor toilets were being installed, although by 1968 still only half of Paris homes had them. François Mitterrand spoke of “the consumer society that eats itself.”
The French were also buying televisions and telephones, though the installation service on phones was slow and France still lagged behind most of Europe in televisions. Neither of the channels, with their government-managed offerings, was found very interesting, though both had the advantage of being free of commercials. But the French were beginning to learn of the power of television. The first station, black and white only, did not begin broadcasting until 1957. The civil rights movement, the American war in Vietnam, and protests against that war were all seen in a large number of French living rooms where the French war in Indochina had never been seen. De Gaulle used this new tool, completely in his hands as president, fairly well, not only in controlling the coverage of his presidency, but in stage-managing and timing personal appearances. “De Gaulle is