1968 - Mark Kurlansky [132]
At the time, the city was glutted with international news media trying to cover the Vietnam peace talks, whose delegations, after agreeing on where and with whom, settled down on May 14 to begin arguing about how many doors to the main room—North Vietnam insisted on two—and to continue their discussion on whether to have a square, rectangular, round, or diamond-shaped table—each option affecting the seating arrangements. But just the fact that they were talking sent the markets, especially the New York Stock Exchange, on a sharp rise.
The Nanterre crowd moved into Paris, to the Sorbonne. Cohn-Bendit had found a megaphone, which was to become his trademark. But the rector of the Sorbonne, against the advice of the police chief, had gotten the police to enter the Sorbonne and arrest students. A police invasion of the Sorbonne was without precedent. Also without precedent was the administration’s reaction to the outrage of the students: They closed the Sorbonne for the first time in its seven-hundred-year history. Six hundred students were arrested, including Cohn-Bendit and Jacques Sauvageot, the head of the national student union. Alain Geismar called for a nationwide teachers strike on Monday. This was when de Gaulle, himself enraged, came up with the theory that the movement was led by second-rate students who wanted the schools closed because they couldn’t pass their exams. “These are the ones who follow Cohn-Bendit. These abusive students terrorize the others: one percent of enragés to 99 percent sheep who are waiting for the government to protect them.” An informal leadership was established: Cohn-Bendit, Sauvageot, Geismar. The three seemed inseparable. But they later said that they had had no plan and not even a common ideology. “We had nothing in common,” said Cohn-Bendit. “They had more in common with each other. I had nothing in common with them, not the same history. I was a libertarian; they were from a socialist tradition.”
The official communists, the French Communist Party, were against all of them from the start. “These false revolutionaries ought to be unmasked,” Communist Party chief Georges Marchais wrote. But Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous French communist, sided with the students, giving them a mature, calm, and respected voice at critical junctures. The French government had thought of arresting him, but according to legend, de Gaulle rejected the idea, saying, “One doesn’t arrest Voltaire.”
Cohn-Bendit, unlike his co-leaders, had little discernible ideology, which may be why he was the most popular. His appeal was personal. A stocky little man who smiled unexpectedly and broadly, his red hair sticking out in unkempt tufts, he was at ease with himself. He liked to have fun and had a light sense of humor, but when he spoke, that humor had a sharp, ironic edge and his voice grew as he became impassioned. In a political culture given to pompous rhetoric, he seemed natural, sincere, and fervent.
The government made much of Cohn-Bendit’s German nationality. The Germans were the most noted student radicals of Europe. Cohn-Bendit had had some contact with them, as had other French radicals. He had gone to their February anti-Vietnam rally, and he had even met Rudi Dutschke. In May, when he became widely known as Dany the Red, it was a reference not only to his hair color, but to Dutschke, who was known as Rudi the Red.
But Dany did not see himself as a Rudi, nor was the March 22 Movement anything like the German SDS, which was a highly motivated and organized national movement. The March 22 Movement had no agenda or organization. In 1968 nobody wanted to be called a leader, but Cohn-Bendit made a distinction. “SDS had antiauthoritarian rhetoric,” he said. “But in truth Dutschke was the leader. I was a type of leader. I slowly stepped in because I was saying something at the right moment and the right place.”
He was not unlike other 1968 leaders, like Mark Rudd, who said, “I was the leader because I was willing to take the heat.”
To Cohn-Bendit there was a connection among the