1968 - Mark Kurlansky [139]
Still, it seemed a great many French were even more suspicious of the alternatives on the Left. On June 23 the Gaullists won 43 percent of the vote, and after the second round a week later they won an absolute majority in the assembly. The Gaullists had outperformed their most optimistic predictions. The Left had lost half their assembly seats, and the students with their New Left remained, as before, unrepresented.
Demonstrations at Berkeley to support French students and oppose de Gaulle turned into two nights of rioting until police enforced a curfew and state of emergency on the entire city of Berkeley. Annette Giacometti, widow of the sculptor Alberto, stopped plans for an extensive retrospective of her husband’s work at Paris’s Orangerie in the fall. She said she was protesting “police repression of students and workers, expulsion of foreigners and foreign artists.” Several other artists also sent letters to the Ministry of Culture canceling shows.
Alain Krivine said, “De Gaulle was the smartest politician France ever produced. De Gaulle understood the communists. He understood Stalin. Mitterrand was a de Gaulle with little feet. Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand, Chirac—they are all little de Gaulles—they all try to copy him. In ’68 he knew the communists would accept having the elections. Not the referendum. The referendum was a little tactical error. No one wanted it. But once he proposed elections, it was over. He never understood the students, but in the end that wasn’t important. He saved the Right in 1945, and he could do it again in ’68.”
De Gaulle had shown that he was still a brilliant politician. But he would never again have the same prestige and would simply fade away. He later admitted, “Everything slipped through my fingers. I no longer had any hold over my own government.” His role as the enfant terrible of world affairs was greatly diminished by his domestic crisis. His dream of dictating solutions to everything from Vietnam to Quebec independence to the Middle East, once a bit overambitious, now appeared completely improbable. The foreign editor of Le Monde, André Fontaine, wrote that the General was “no longer in a position to give everyone advice.”
Never above spite, de Gaulle took his revenge on both the print media, which had been critical of him, and the state television, which had gone on strike. With increased support in the assembly, he decided to allow commercials on one of his two television stations. On October 1, before the evening news, viewers learned about a garlic cheese, a stretch-proof sweater, and the pleasures of powdered milk. At first, only two minutes a day of commercials would be allowed, always before the evening news, but gradually this was to be expanded. He also cut more than a third of the television news positions.
By late summer de Gaulle had found a way to disarm the next leftist uprising. As far back as the year 1185, the cobblestone pavement in the Latin Quarter had proved an effective weapon—at that time against royalists. In 1830 cobblestones were used again, and again in the revolution of 1848, and then by the Commune in 1871 when they first sang “The Internationale.” The students who hurled them in 1968 had learned their history. One of the Beaux Arts posters of 1968 showed a paving stone and was captioned “Under 21 years old, here is your ballot.” But this was to happen no more. In August de Gaulle ordered the cobblestone streets of the Latin Quarter