Spirit of May 68 endures in Paris

I made my first trip to Paris after finishing my Leaving Cert in 1975. Arriving by ferry, I hitchhiked from Le Havre to the edge of the city, and took the Metro. I remember emerging from the Metro at Place Saint-Michel and feeling like a swimmer surfacing after 17 years underwater. The air was hot, with crowds of young people lounging around – but what struck me immediately was the large numbers of police vans and the blue-uniformed CRS, the special riot police. The atmosphere was tense and electric: had some terrible thing just happened, and was I arriving in the middle of a revolutionary riot? No, this was just business as usual. I realised that here the state was sometimes a precarious thing, which needed simple brute force to maintain it.

This precariousness of order was brought home to me again on June 13th, 2016. I arrived in Paris early for a medical appointment in the suburb of Neuilly. Afterwards we caught a bus which would take us across the city to the Centre Culturel Irlandais in the Latin Quarter. England was playing France that day in the Euro 2016, and the city was braced for a possible terrorist attack. In addition there was a mass demonstration against the government reforms of labour laws. When we reached the edge of the city, the bus stopped and we were informed that because of the worsening situation, no traffic was allowed into the city. We would have to take the Metro.

Stormed Bastille

It was like entering Dante’s inferno. The platform was thronged with people, many of them heavily armed police and soldiers, looking nervously around. We finally squeezed into a carriage. At one end, there was a tightly grouped bunch of young anarchists dressed in black, intent on their mission, avoiding eye contact, holding up beer cans in their fists like torches. At the other end was a knot of sweaty English football fans, shouting loudly in barely comprehensible dialects. The atmosphere was febrile, there was a feeling in the air that anything could happen, that the state was barely in control, and order could disintegrate. Above us, rioters were attacking the Necker children’s hospital. It was easy to imagine what the atmosphere must have been like in the July 1789 French Revolution, before the storming of the Bastille. It seemed a very Parisian sensation.

At one end, there was a tightly grouped bunch of young anarchists dressed in black, intent on their mission, avoiding eye contact, holding up beer cans in their fists like torches

Paris has been here often enough. In 1848, and again in 1871, in the chaotic aftermath of war, the people of Paris took control and established the short-lived Commune. In his brilliant and controversial book, Army in the Shadows, the historian Robert Gildea describes the chaotic situation after the liberation of Paris in August 1944, when the German army had left the city and the communist -led resistance jostled for power with de Gaulle's Free French. He describes how old men wandered round the quartier, joyfully singing songs from the 1871 Commune.

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Strike and anarchy

The event we call May 68 started on May 2nd when the University of Paris closed down the campus at Nanterre. This escalated into student and worker occupations, a general strike and anarchy, which resulted in President de Gaulle secretly fleeing the country at the end of the month. But the revolution fizzled out and order was eventually restored. Culturally, it would have a huge impact on the growing counterculture around the world, from The Rolling Stones' Street-fighting Man to slogans like "Be realistic – demand the impossible!" But its biggest influence, perhaps, was on those people who lived through it. Many of my friends and acquaintances in Paris were teenagers in May 1968, and the experience marked them. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive! There are moments when, briefly, another reality seems possible, and if you have experienced that, you will never be quite the same. Like everyone else, they are weighted down by decades of career and family, the everyday struggle in a society which remains bizarrely rigid and hierarchical, and yet the possibility of that messianic awakening never completely leaves them.

Fifty years later, many things in France don’t seem to have changed. Macron, like Obama, may be one of those politicians loved more outside his own country than in it. Few, if any, of my friends supported him (“A banker!”) And yet, his election didn’t seem to induce in them the despair and depression which have become prevalent among my Trump-hating American friends. Macron’s complete control of government is met with a shrug. At the back of their minds, perhaps, is the notion that they have a red button to push: if his government goes too far, they can always take to the streets and bring down it down. It may not be strictly democratic, or even realistic, but, somehow, it has a whiff of freedom about it, and it is that freedom, or the possibility of freedom, which makes Paris what it is.

Michael O’Loughlin is a writer and poet