TO BE living in Paris 40 years ago during the May 1968 student riots and nation-wide strikes was a Wordsworthian moment, writes Joe Carroll. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven," the poet wrote, looking back on his experience of living through the early days of the French Revolution.
May '68 never turned into a full-blown revolution but there was a whiff of it during the long nights in the Latin Quarter as the students manned their barricades, took on the tough CRS riot police and tried to burn down the stock exchange, symbol of hated capitalism. As a correspondent for the Guardianand the Sunday Telegraph, I soon found the regular rioting had become my beat. I was also filing radio reports to RTÉ, so life was not so much Wordsworthian bliss as Byronic frenzy.
Only a few weeks before, a columnist for Le Mondewas complaining that France was "bored" - bored with 10 years under General de Gaulle's patriarchal style of government. After the trauma of the Algerian War, France had settled into a kind of torpor relieved by the four-week annual vacances.
A charismatic, red-haired student of French-German parentage, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, helped put an end to the boredom. The revolt he stirred up at the arts faculty of Paris University out in the dreary suburb of Nanterre spread to the Sorbonne in the heart of the Latin Quarter. The revolt began ostensibly over the rule forbidding male students access to the female dormitories, but the reality was that students and workers everywhere were stifled under a web of bureaucracy dating back in some cases to Napoleonic times.
The Nanterre revolt sparked a virtual uprising which within weeks had spread to the whole of France. More than 9 million workers were on strike by May 22nd. And this was the time when the Americans and the North Vietnamese had decided to hold "peace talks" in Paris.
As the student rioting and strikes spread and even doctors and lawyers were marching in the streets, no one really knew why all this was happening. For journalists it was impossible to keep up. We had been given press armbands by the police to distinguish us from the rioters, but they could also make us targets of the frustrated flics, who were getting a bad press. They police were the targets for the heavy cobblestones which the students prised out of the streets.
The Sorbonne courtyard was a big outdoor hospital after each riot, as the police were not allowed to follow the students inside the university. The CS gas hung everwhere. I kept asking the students why they were doing this to themselves and the answer was usually: "I don't know." A non-stop debate on the revolt was going on in the huge Sorbonne amphitheatre. I brought some Irish visitors there one evening and their main memory was of a girl denouncing the teaching system. The only thing she had learned there in three years was "how to make love".
General de Gaulle, back from a state visit to Romania, showed he was as out of touch as his ministers and only made the situation worse by a feeble TV appearance announcing a referendum for greater "participation". Then the General scared everyone by disappearing for two days. Had he gone into exile? The rumours spread and opposition politicians such as Francois Mitterrand began putting themselves forward to fill the political vacuum.
Suddenly de Gaulle was back after conferring with French army generals in West Germany. With a radio broadcast lasting a few minutes he rallied his supporters and called a general election. Gaullists, young and old, flooded into the streets and marched in triumph up the Champs Elysées. On his return, he had told his ministers, "Reforms yes, shitting the bed, no."
I reported this in watered-down fashion to RTÉ and got a letter dated the next day from the Head of News, Jim McGuinness, saying that "it is not customary for us to accuse Heads of State of crudity of expression. Would you please let me know what it was President de Gaulle said. . .since we regard President de Gaulle as a president of a friendly country, we are naturally reluctant to appear to single him out for what might be called hostile treatment."
I explained to Jim that, thanks to the mess de Gaulle referred to, it took his letter three weeks to get to me. The general was apparently not concerned about "hostile treatment" from Ireland, as a year later he sought temporary refuge here after his sudden resignation. He might have won the elections, but he lost the war which Danny the Red had started in Nanterre. Danny is now the respected leader of the Greens in the European Parliament.