1968 - Mark Kurlansky [138]
Throughout de Gaulle’s long career, at the most difficult moments, he had shown a knack for just the right move and just the right words. But this time he was silent. He disappeared completely from public view to his country home, where he wrote, “If the French don’t see where their own interests lie, too bad for them. The French are tired of a strong state. Basically this is it: The French remain by nature drawn to factionalism, argumentativeness, impotence. I tried to help them through this. . . . If I have failed, there is nothing more I can do. That’s just the way it is.”
At last, on May 24, le Grand Charles spoke. Looking tired and old and sounding uncertain, he called for a referendum on his continued leadership. No one wanted the referendum seen as an extralegal invention of the wily old general. While he spoke, rioting began anew in Paris and started up in several other major French cities. In Paris the students from the Latin Quarter had crossed the Seine and were attempting to set the stock exchange building, the Bourse, on fire.
In all the weeks of street violence in France, amazingly, only three people died. Two of them died that night, including one among the hundreds wounded in Paris and a police commissioner in Lyons. Later, a protester chased by the police would jump into the Seine and drown.
The referendum seemed impossible to hold and unwinnable if held. Once again de Gaulle himself seemed to vanish. Improbable as it was, the revolutionaries started to sense victory. At the very least, they were going to overthrow the government. It might already be gone. Both Mitterrand and Mendès-France made themselves available for a provisional government. Then it was discovered that de Gaulle had flown to Germany to the French military command there. Why he did this was uncertain, but many feared he was preparing to bring in the French army. When he returned to France he was the old de Gaulle—domineering and sure of himself, as he had once called Jews. The referendum was to be dropped, the National Assembly dissolved, and new legislative elections called. The nation, he contended, was on the edge of falling into a totalitarian communism, and he was the one alternative who could once again save France. The Gaullists organized a demonstration on the Champs-Élysées as a show of support. The public responded to rebuilding through fresh elections, to de Gaulle once again saving France from disaster. An estimated one million people showed up to march in support of de Gaulle’s call for an end to chaos. The marchers sang the national anthem and in between chanted slogans, among them “Send Cohn-Bendit to Dachau.”
“We are all Jews and Germans.” Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his famous smile. 1968 Paris student silk-screen poster.
(Galerie Beaubourg, Vence)
Cohn-Bendit had heard it before. When he had been arrested, a policeman had pointed a finger at him and said, “My little friend, you are going to pay. Too bad you didn’t die at Auschwitz with your parents because that would have spared us the trouble of what we are going to do today.”
His parents had not been at Auschwitz, but the fact that he was Jewish was never totally forgotten. Only within his own movement did he feel it had never been an issue. Of course, Geismar, Krivine, and so many others were Jewish. Marginal leftist movements in France were accustomed to sizable Jewish participation. A popular French joke asks the question: If the Maoists wanted to have a dialogue with the Trotskyites, what language would they speak? The answer: Yiddish.
The government finally came up with a package satisfying all labor demands, including a two-step 35 percent wage increase. The unions and workers took it happily. Only a handful of younger workers gave a second thought to abandoning the students.
But then de Gaulle did something odd and unexplained: He freed from prison fourteen members of the Secret Army Organization, the OAS, the fanatic group that had tried to stop Algerian independence