1968 - Mark Kurlansky [135]
Eleanor Bakhtadze, who had been a student at Nanterre in 1968, said, “Paris was wonderful then. Everyone was talking.” Ask anyone in Paris with fond memories of the spring of 1968, and that is what they will say: People talked. They talked at the barricades, they talked in the métro; when they occupied the Odéon theater it became the site of a round-the-clock orgy of French verbiage. Someone would stand up and start discussing the true nature of revolution or the merits of Bakuninism and how anarchism applied to Che Guevara. Others would refute the thesis at length. Students on the street found themselves in conversation with teachers and professors for the first time. Workers and students talked to one another. For the first time in this rigid, formal, nineteenth-century society, everyone was talking to everyone. “Talk to your neighbor” were words written on the walls. Radith Geismar, then the wife of Alain, said, “The real sense of ’68 was a tremendous sense of liberation, of freedom, of people talking, talking on the street, in the universities, in theaters. It was much more than throwing stones. That was just a moment. A whole system of order and authority and tradition was swept aside. Much of the freedom of today began in ’68.”
In a frenzy of free expression, new proverbs were created and written or posted on walls and gates all over the city. A sampling from out of hundreds:
Dreams are reality
The walls are ears, your ears are walls
Exaggeration is the beginning of inventions
I don’t like to write on walls
The aggressor is not the person who revolts but the one who conforms
We want a music that is wild and ephemeral
I decree a permanent state of happiness
A barricade closes the street but opens a path
Politics happens on the street
The Sorbonne will be the Stalingrad of the Sorbonne
The tears of philistines are nectar of the Gods
Neither a robot nor a slave
Rape your alma mater
Imagination takes power
The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution. The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.
Sex is good, Mao has said, but not too often
I am a Marxist of the Groucho faction
There were occasional, though not many, references to other movements such as “Black Power gets the attention of whites” and “Long live the Warsaw students.”
Or one statement, written on a wall at Censier, may have expressed the feelings of many that spring: “I have something to say but I am not sure what.”
For those who had some additional thoughts, too wordy to write on a wall—though some did write whole paragraphs on buildings—if they had access to a mimeograph machine, they could print one-page tracts and pass them out at demonstrations. Once the symbol of radical politics, the mimeograph machine—with its awkward stencils to type up—had its last hurrah in 1968, soon to be taken over by photocopy machines. There were also the French movement newspapers—a large tabloid of a few pages called Action and another, smaller tabloid, Enragé, which for its special June 10 issue on Gaullism ran an illustration of a floor toilet, the kind most in use in France at the time, with the cross of Lorraine, the symbol of Gaullism, for the hole and the tricolored French flag for the toilet paper. Demonstrators quickly found themselves with piles of paper to read or browse.
The art schools, the École des Beaux-Arts and École des Arts Décoratif at the Sorbonne, established the atelier populaire, producing in May or June more than 350 different silk-screen poster designs a day with simple, powerful graphics and concise slogans