1968 - Mark Kurlansky [136]
The police peeled the posters off the walls. Soon collectors were peeling them off the walls also, and pirated editions were being sold, which angered the art students. “The revolution is not for sale,” said Jean-Claude Leveque, one of the art students. The atelier turned down an offer of $70,000 from two major European publishers. In the fall both the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum in New York had shows of the atelier’s work. The Jewish Museum’s show was entitled Up Against the Wall, once more using the ubiquitous LeRoi Jones quote.
They not only talked, they sang. The students sang “The Internationale,” which is the anthem of world communism, the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, and many things they did not support. It would have seemed strange to the students of Poland and Czechoslovakia, but to the French this song—written in the 1871 Commune, an uprising against French authoritarianism—is simply a song of antiauthoritarian revolt. The Right retaliated by singing the French national anthem, “The Marseillaise.” Since these are two of the best anthems ever written, having huge crowds singing them through the wide boulevards of Paris was always stirring and having each group identify itself by anthem was ideal for television.
Cohn-Bendit, Sauvageot, and Geismar were invited for a debate with three television—and therefore state-employed—journalists. In a prerecorded message, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, an aging Gaullist with the practiced political skills and soon-this-could-all-be-mine hunger of a Hubert Humphrey, explained that viewers were about to meet three of the horrible revolutionaries. The journalists were intense, the frightening revolutionaries were relaxed and pleasant. Cohn-Bendit smiled.
“We destroyed them,” Cohn-Bendit said. “I started to realize that I had a special relation with the media. I am a media product. After that they just came after me. For a long time I was the media’s darling.”
Though state television did cover what was happening, there were glaring omissions, major events that did not make it on the air. But the journalists were growing tired of having their shows canceled, and caught up in the spirit of the time; on May 16, television reporters, cameramen, and drivers went out on strike.
By then something had happened that was only dreamed about in other student movements, which often failed because the students had no other groups joining them. On May 13, the anniversary of de Gaulle’s return to power, all of the major trade unions called for a general strike. France was shut down. There was no gasoline for cars, and Parisians walked the empty streets talking, debating, having a wonderful time that they would always remember.
In Morningside Heights, Columbia students were thrilled, as were students at the University of Warsaw, in Rome, in Berlin, at the Autonomous National University of Mexico, at Berkeley. The French had done it—students and workers hand in hand.
In reality, nothing of the sort had happened. Though some of the younger workers, in disagreement with the unions, were sympathetic to the students, their unions, especially those backed by the Communist Party, were not. Perhaps the students had created the opening for a long overdue explosion, because the workers too had become increasingly angry with the Gaullist regime. The workers did not want revolution, they did not care about the students’ issues, other than the overthrow of de Gaulle. They wanted better working conditions, higher salaries, more paid time off.
“The workers and the students were never together,” said Cohn-Bendit. “. . . They were two autonomous movements. The workers wanted a radical reform of the factories—wages, etc. Students wanted