1968 - Mark Kurlansky [128]
In 1965 France had its first presidential election by direct ballot—presidents had been appointed by the elected majority in the old system. This first direct ballot contest was also the first television election and the first French election to be tracked by pollsters as well. De Gaulle, to avoid the appearance of complete unfairness, allowed each of the candidates two hours of time on his television channels in the last two weeks of the campaign. The effect of seeing François Mitterrand and Jean Lecanuet on television was tremendous. Most French people had never actually seen a presidential candidate in motion before, except for de Gaulle, who was always on television. The fact that Mitterrand and Lecanuet were on television at all gave them the stature of a de Gaulle. And it was difficult not to notice how young and vigorous the two seemed compared to the General. De Gaulle won the election, but only after being forced to a second-ballot runoff with Mitterrand to gain the required absolute majority. He was not the untouchable monarch he had thought.
In the mid-sixties, prices were rising in France and the government believed inflation threatened the economy. The sudden population growth from the immigration of about one million North Africans, mostly Christians and Jews, contributed to price increases. Unemployment also began to increase.
In 1967 the government decreed a series of measures aimed at redressing economic problems. But to the working class these measures seemed aimed at them. Wages were held down, and the workers’ contribution to Social Security was raised because of the added cost of bringing farmworkers under the system. On a rainy May 1, after fifteen years’ absence, the traditional leftist Communist Party–sponsored May Day demonstration at the Place de la Bastille, where workers with raised fists sang “The Internationale,” was again observed.
With a better standard of living, more French were getting higher education, but they were not happy in their crowded halls of learning. In 1966 students at the University of Strasbourg published a paper, “On the Poverty of Student Life,” which stated:
The student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the priest and the policeman. . . . Once upon a time, universities were respected: the student persists in the belief that he is lucky to be there. But he arrived too late. . . . A mechanically produced specialist is now the goal of the “educational system.” A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking.
In 1958 there were 175,000 university students in France, and by 1968 there were 530,000—twice as many students as Britain had. But France granted only half as many degrees as British universities, because three-fourths of French students failed their courses and left. This was the reason de Gaulle dismissed the student movement at first; he assumed the students involved were simply afraid of facing exams. The universities were horribly overcrowded, with 160,000 students in the University of Paris system alone, which was why, once they started demonstrating, student causes were able to attract such enormous numbers of marchers. Added to these ranks were high school students in the college preparatory lycées, who had the same issues as the university students.
At most of the universities, and especially Nanterre, the physical campus was not a comfortable place to live and study. But also, even more than the American Ivy League, the French university was an absolute autocracy. At a time when the future of France, the future of Europe, new sciences and new technologies, provoked far-reaching debates—which explained the popularity of books