1968 - Mark Kurlansky [130]
In 1964 he went to America, the dreaded land of the Rosenberg execution, and attended a memorial service in New York City for SNCC volunteers killed in Mississippi. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had both been from New York City. “I was very impressed with the atmosphere,” Cohn-Bendit said. “These two white Jewish guys who went to Mississippi. How dangerous. That was something different than what I was prepared to do.”
It was in March 1968, while France was still bored, that Nanterre began to heat up. According to the Ministry of the Interior, small extremist groups were agitating in order to imitate radical students in Berlin, Rome, and Berkeley. This point of view was often repeated by Alain Peyrefitte, the minister of education. There was an element of truth to this. The minuscule Trotskyite group JCR, la Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire—the Revolutionary Communist Youth—had become suddenly influential, and its twenty-seven-year-old leader, Alain Krivine, had not only worked with Rudi Dutschke in Berlin, but had also closely followed events on American campuses through the American Socialist Workers Party, a fellow Trotskyite organization.
It is significant that what was to emerge as the most important group was the least ideological. It was called le Mouvement du 22 Mars—the March 22 Movement. Its leader was Cohn-Bendit. Its cause was unclear. As in other countries, the people who emerged in France in 1968 were not joiners, were suspicious of political organizations on the Right and the Left, and tried to live by an antiauthoritarian code that rejected leadership. They rejected the cold war, which had always said that everyone had to choose one or the other, and they rejected de Gaulle, who always said “Stay with me or the communists will come to power.” They agreed with what had been expressed in the Port Huron Statement: They wanted alternatives to the cold war choices that were always presented to them.
“The Liberation missed a great opportunity, and soon the cold war froze everything,” said Geismar. “You had to choose your side. 1968 was an attempt to create a space between those sides, which is why the communists opposed these 1968 movements.”
In the mid-sixties the Paris métro stop at Nanterre still said “Nanterre à la folie,” which indicated that Nanterre was the country home of a Paris aristocrat. From that beginning it had gone on to become a comfortable middle-class Parisian suburb with houses on cobblestone streets. Then factories moved in, and in the middle of the factories, almost indistinguishable from them, the University of Nanterre was built, surrounded by the barrackslike homes of North African and Portuguese immigrants. The sterile dormitory rooms had large glass windows that, like a good window at Columbia, looked out on the slum. While Sorbonne students lived and studied in the heart of the beautiful city, in a medieval neighborhood of monuments, cafés, and restaurants, Nanterre students had no cafés and nowhere to go. Their only space was a dormitory room in which they were not allowed to change furniture, cook, or discuss politics, and nonstudents were not allowed. Women were allowed in men’s rooms only with parental permission or if they were over twenty-one. Men were never allowed in women’s rooms. Habitually, women visited men’s rooms by sneaking underneath a counter.
Nanterre was supposed to be one of the more progressive schools, where students were encouraged to experiment. But in reality the autocratic university system made reform no more possible at Nanterre than at any other university. The only difference was that at Nanterre heightened expectations made for a particularly disappointed and embittered student body. Attempts to reform the university in 1967 further frustrated students, leading a few with political activist backgrounds to form a group called the enragés—a name that originated in the French Revolution