1968 - Mark Kurlansky [131]
They were not a very well liked group. How twenty-five mischief makers were turned into a force of one thousand during the course of the month of March, how this in a matter of weeks became fifty thousand and by the end of May ten million, paralyzing the entire nation, is a testament to the consequences of overzealous government. Had the government from the beginning ignored the enragés, France might never have had a 1968. Looking back, Cohn-Bendit shook his head. “If the government had not thought they had to crush the movement,” he asserted, “we never would have reached this point of a fight for liberation. There would have been a few demonstrations and that would have been it.”
On January 26, 1968, the police came on campus to break up a rally of perhaps three dozen enragés. The students and faculty were angered by the presence of police on the campus. As other protesters around the world would discover that year, the enragés realized, seeing this anger, that they only needed to start a demonstration and the government and their police force would do the rest. By March they were doing this regularly. The dean of Nanterre helped build the tension by refusing to provide larger spaces as their numbers grew. He also further provoked the students by refusing to speak up for four Nanterre students arrested at an anti–Vietnam War demonstration near the Paris Opéra. On March 22, with now about five hundred militants, the enragés in a sudden inspiration borrowed an American tactic and siezed the forbidden eighth-floor faculty lounge, occupying it all night in the name of freedom of expression. The March 22 Movement was born.
On April 17 Laurent Schwartz, one of the world’s most renowned physicists, went to Nanterre on behalf of the government to explain its 1967 university reform program. The students shouted him down, declaring that he was an antirevolutionary and should not be allowed to speak. Suddenly Cohn-Bendit, the affable redhead with a smile so bright it was featured on revolutionary posters, took a microphone. “Let him speak,” said Cohn-Bendit. “And afterwards, if we think he is rotten, we will say, ‘Monsieur Laurent Schwartz, we think you are rotten.’ ”
It was a typical Cohn-Bendit moment, spoken with charm and a minimum of authority at exactly the right moment.
The critical day that would escalate everything, May 2, was one of pure farce. The University of Paris decided on the exact same mistaken tactic as the administrators at Columbia, attempting to deflate the student movement by disciplining its leader. Cohn-Bendit was ordered to appear before a disciplinary board in Paris. This angered the Nanterre students, who decided they would disrupt classes by protesting with loudspeakers. But they had no such equipment, and Pierre Grappin, the increasingly helpless and frustrated dean of Nanterre, refused to give them access to the school’s loudspeakers. The students, believing themselves to be “direct action revolutionaries,” a concept popularized by Debray among others, simply went into his office and took the equipment. The dean, seeing the opportunity for some direct action of his own, locked his office doors, incarcerating the students inside. But it was a short-lived triumph because the windows were open and the students escaped with the equipment.
De Gaulle was growing anxious about law and order on the streets of Paris because the Paris peace talks on resolving the Vietnam conflict were due to begin. He had ordered extra contingents of the special antiriot police, the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the CRS, to Paris. At the request of Grappin, the Ministry of Education shut down Nanterre, an extraordinary decision that shifted the action from an obscure suburb