1968 - Mark Kurlansky [137]
De Gaulle, faced with a nationwide crisis, left for a four-day trip to Romania. It seemed strange that with Paris closed down by student revolutionaries, de Gaulle would disappear to Romania. Christian Fouchet, the minister of the interior, had questioned him on the choice, and de Gaulle had said that the Romanians would not understand if he canceled. Fouchet respectfully argued that the French would not understand if he didn’t. The next morning, as the ministers saw him off and his country’s situation was being reported on the front page of most major newspapers in the world, de Gaulle declared, “This trip is extremely important for French foreign policy and for détente in the world. As far as the student agitation is concerned, we aren’t going to accord it more importance than it deserves.”
De Gaulle tended to focus on the things he was good at. The student problem was something he did not understand at all. On the other hand, Romania had showed an increasing independence from the Soviet bloc, and de Gaulle, who dreamed of leading a third movement between the two superpowers—“a Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals,” he liked to say—was, for good reasons, very interested in Romania. Even with the nation in a crisis, foreign policy took precedent over domestic. While he was gone, Pompidou was in charge. The prime minister prided himself on his formidable negotiating skills, and he worked out an accord in which most of the student demands were met. He freed those who had been arrested, reopened the Sorbonne, and withdrew the police. This simply allowed the students to reoccupy the Sorbonne in the same way they had been holding the Odéon theater, with an endless French deluge of words. But while the students were having their wonderful debates, ten million workers were on strike, food shops were becoming empty, traffic had stopped, and garbage was piling up.
Both Pompidou and de Gaulle understood that the student problem was separate from the worker problem. To them, the student problem was a perplexing phenomenon, but the worker problem was familiar ground. The Gaullists completely abandoned their economic policy, offering the workers a 10 percent pay increase, a raise in the minimum wage, a decrease in work hours, and an increase in benefits. The minister of finance and architect of economic policy, Michel Debré, was not consulted on the offer and resigned when it was announced. But the strikers quickly rejected the offer anyway.
De Gaulle, looking older than he ever had before and completely confused, cut short his Romania trip and returned to France, saying unfathomably, “La réforme, oui. La chienlit, non.” Chienlit is an untranslatable French word referring to defecating on a bed—a big mess. This led to Beaux Arts posters with a silhouette of de Gaulle and the caption “La chienlit, c’est lui”—The chienlit, it is he.
The French government decided to deport Cohn-Bendit, who was a German national. Grimaud, the prefect of police, was not in favor of the move because he recognized that Cohn-Bendit was a stabilizing force among the students. It was late enough in the game that the government should have realized that their provocations kept the movement alive. But they did not see that.
Another issue was that the image of deporting a Jew back to Germany stirred ugly memories. During Nazi occupation, seventy-six thousand Jews had been delivered by the French police to the Germans for deportation to death camps. The France of the 1960s had still not made peace with its 1940s, was still caught between the facts of disgraceful collaboration and de Gaulle’s myth of heroic resistance. May 1968 was filled with Nazi imagery, most of it unfair. The CRS was called the CR SS. One Beaux Arts poster showed de Gaulle removing his mask and revealing himself to be Adolf Hitler, another showed the cross of Lorraine twisted into a swastika. On Cohn-Bendit’s expulsion, the slogan of the student movement instantly became “We Are All German Jews”—chanted even by Muslim students. The phrase appeared on