Rock and Hard Places (29 page)

The mob who razed the Bastille did more than burn down an old and ugly building. They instituted a municipal tradition of revolt that would dominate their city for the next two centuries—and counting—and which would ensure that Paris dominated the imagination of the planet. The reason that Paris is so often and so lyrically celebrated in film, theatre, fashion, music, holiday brochures and all our received wisdoms about romance is the lingering sense that in Paris, as nowhere else, the world can be turned upside down.

AFTER GETTING OFF the train at Gare Du Nord and dumping my bags, I get a taxi to the Sorbonne, Paris’s 750-year-old university. In 1998, of all years, these tatty beige halls will get used to visitors. Thirty years ago, the Sorbonne was the epicentre of a rebellion remarkable even by the standards of 1968—a year, like 1989 or 1917 or 1871 or 1848, in which the prevailing institutions of the world suddenly looked less like rigid structures and more like a spaghetti-western film set: facades held up by wires, hooks, pulleys and the crossed fingers of those who’d erected them. In 1968, in Vietnam, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan and Great Britain, from the LSE to the Élysées, things stopped making sense.

On May 2nd, 1968, following weeks of protest by students outraged both by events in Vietnam and a rule that prohibited cohabitation between male and female students—the debate over their priorities has never been entirely resolved—the university in Nanterre, in the western suburbs of Paris, was closed by the Ministry of the Interior, acting under the orders of President Charles de Gaulle. The evicted students, led by ginger-haired German agitator Daniel Cohn-Bendit, marched into the centre of Paris and occupied the Sorbonne. Barricades were erected. Slogans were painted. Flags were waved. Speeches were made. Fists were shaken.

Given time, the students might all have got bored and hungry and gone home, but De Gaulle didn’t wait to find out. On May 3, police were dispatched to clear the Sorbonne, a task they carried out with what might tactfully be described as excessive enthusiasm. As the students took control of Paris’s Latin Quarter, the public mood shifted from bemusement to anger at the heavy-handedness of the government—few things are more sacred to Parisians than the right to protest. On May 10, the “Night Of The Barricades,” 100,000 students and sympathisers rioted. There were 500 arrests and 370 injuries—though it has recently emerged that a student who died two weeks later did so as a result of wounds inflicted by a police stun grenade, and that his Gaullist parents were persuaded to comply in a cover-up for fear that a martyr could have ignited full-scale revolution.

France’s trade unions, under pressure from their members, and sensing an opportunity to bend the government over a barrel, took the side of the students. A general strike on May 13 brought 250,000
workers onto the streets. De Gaulle, the most colossal figure of the French twentieth century, was rattled. He embarked on a bafflingly-timed state visit to Romania—where, just over twenty-one years later, his host, Nicolae Ceausescu, would demonstrate that he’d taken on board several unhelpful lessons from the De Gaulle technique of charming a restive public.

When De Gaulle returned to his collapsing capital, he delivered an ineffectual address to the nation, sulked for a bit and then vanished. While his government wondered where he’d got to, De Gaulle was staging another eerie preview of his friend Ceausescu’s demise, making a farcical flight by helicopter to assure himself of the support of his military. The differences were that De Gaulle flew to Baden-Baden in Germany, not Tirgoviste in Romania, and that De Gaulle’s generals encouraged him to return to Paris and assert his authority, rather than dragging him to a barracks wall and shooting him. On May 30, half a million pro-government demonstrators marched down the Champs Élysées and reclaimed Paris. The ghosts of the Paris Commune, and of the French Revolution, had been vanquished, but only just.

THE SORBONNE TODAY does not look a hotbed of revolutionary fervour, unless you count a few dog-eared posters grouching about how hard it is for students to find accommodation or pay for public transport. The kids I harass in the hall seem resolutely unexcited about the impending anniversary of the 1968 rising, reciting more workaday concerns like passing their exams, finding a job after passing said exams and getting away from another foreign journalist with a “Whither 1968?” angle before he makes them any later for their lectures. The only graffiti to be seen is on the wall of a building across the road from the Sorbonne: a racist slogan daubed by some—surprisingly literate—devotee of elderly buffoon Jean-Marie Le Pen and his crypto-fascist National Front.

It is difficult to find, among memoirs of the period, a clear statement of what the rioters of 1968 were fighting for. There’s not even a lot of agreement about what they were fighting against, and
this is perfect. The reason that May 1968 still looms so large in the popular consciousness is precisely that it was so completely, gloriously unreasonable, a splendid and petulant revolt against everything, a delirious reaction against the comforts of a capitalist society where—as René Viénet puts it in his snappily-titled
Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68
—“we pay to consume, in boredom, commodities we produce in the weariness that makes leisure desirable.”

The Athena-print ubiquity of the graffiti of the period (“I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires”; “Underneath the paving stones, the beach!”) suggests that, at best, May ’68 remains a resilient bridgehead of dissent with modern life and, at worst, that it was a whole lot of fun. Much of the music and images of the counter-culture prevalent at the same time in America dated quickly because they were pitched against the contemporary cause of the war in Vietnam. What happened in Paris in May 1968 continues to inspire and intrigue because it was about nothing in particular and, therefore, about anything you like. What were they rebelling against? What have you got? May ’68 was rock’n’roll without the music.

Indeed, each of the preeminent British rock’n’roll bands of the three decades since ’68 have subscribed rigorously to this creed of defiant, unexplained rejectionism, as if the greatest solace lies in the refusal to offer a constructive argument. The Sex Pistols in the 70s (“I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it”), The Smiths in the 80s (“We may be hidden by rags but we have something they’ll never have”) and Radiohead in the 90s (“We hope your rules and wisdom choke you”) were all, in this sense, French.

THE IRONY IS that for as long as there has been rock’n’roll, the world has been running screaming from French attempts to make it, and generally with good reason. Listening to the French make rock music has the same morbidly compelling appeal as watching pensioners negotiate stone staircases after a frost. No government appointment
since Caligula named his horse a senator has provoked as much merriment as the one the French made in the mid-90s, when they created a cabinet post with responsibility for French rock music. David Stubbs, a colleague of mine at
Melody Maker
at the time, ventured into print with the suggestion that the holder of such a portfolio would be kept about as busy as the Squadron Leader of the Royal Dutch Mountain Rescue Service, and we didn’t get many letters arguing with him.

I put this to Emmanuel Tellier, who writes for the redoubtable Parisian rock magazine
Les Inrockuptibles
. He also plays in a band called Melville, who really aren’t bad at all, and buys me lunch despite my assault on his nation’s honour, which he defends with good humour.

“Our cultural interests are more diverse than Britain’s,” he argues over the soup. “Here, we think theatre, film, fashion and art are as important as music and football are in Britain. People here have more options for expressing themselves, so they don’t care that our rock music gets laughed at in Britain. And we can get a drink after 11 o’clock.”

Touché. I also drop in on DJ Dmitri from Paris, who lives off the Boulevard de Sebastopol in an apartment crammed with his immense collection of toy robots. He seems less impressed by Paris’s civilised licensing laws, tells me Parisian clubs are terrible, and says he’d rather play in London or Tokyo.

“Music has never been important here,” he shrugs—and it’s true that May ’68 didn’t have a “Blowin’ In The Wind” to call its own. “People here don’t want to be in bands the way they do in Britain. Kids here use the music, but they don’t want to live it.”

Dmitri concedes that the recent international success of French electro-melancholists Air and Daft Punk might change this, but doesn’t sound optimistic. “People here don’t go out to hear music,” he says, glumly. “They go out to talk.”

At the moment, they—which is to say Paris’s wide circle of self-conscious bohemians—are going out to talk in Menilmontant, a neighbourhood a few blocks north of Père Lachaise cemetery, where the tombs are embellished by impressionable Smiths fans inscribing neatly-lettered homage to Oscar Wilde and gormless American college kids daubing fatuous dedications to Jim Morrison, arguably the most overrated person who ever lived.

As tourists and professionals have started moving into the once-hip area around Place de la Bastille, the artists and students have decamped east to Menilmontant, a hilly suburb of cement and immigrants. Rue Oberkampf, the curiously German-sounding street which runs through the area, now houses Café Charbon, Café Mercerie, Le Scherkhan, Le Meccano and any number of other quiet, dimly lit, decorously decorated and altogether agreeable places to get drunk in. Except that the stylishly disheveled Parisians in these places don’t drink, at least not in that race-you-to-nausea way that people do in British pubs. Again, Paris lives up to its clichés: they really do sip at tiny cups of espresso and argue about philosophy. In fact, there are philosophy cafés, where punters are encouraged to stand up and pontificate on the eternal, and which are every bit as ghastly as they sound.

There are also people who clearly are in need of a stiff drink, like the solemn youth in Le Meccano who earnestly informs me that it’s wrong for me to be writing about May ’68 in a magazine that is sold for money.

So when you finish reading this, go out and burn down a bank.

IN AN EFFORT to get closer to the revolutionary soul of Paris, I spend a day revolting, myself. This isn’t difficult—in an average week, Paris hosts around 200 demonstrations. One morning tabloid,
La Parisien
, carries a daily map of streets likely to be blocked by protests. A short walk from Place de la Bastille, a run-down office block hosts the bases of two of Paris’s uncountable pressure groups, SUD (Solidarity Unity Democracy) and CNT (some species of anarchist, judging by the red and black flags fluttering from the windows). This gloomy Sunday, the rest of France is voting in regional elections. SUD and CNT are staging what they have described to me on the phone as a “manifestation.”

I speak to Pierre of SUD, who claims a national support of some 20,000 for his organisation. Pierre was fourteen years old in 1968, and remembers enjoying the time off when his teachers walked off the job. He explains that SUD wants to help the homeless and the unemployed.

“We want,” he says, “to organise a movement with all who are excluded, and make a junction with the workers.” Next to him, a younger man called Vincent, of a syndicate called Droits Devant, adds that “The government is making one law for the rich and one law for the poor,” and then, in a whisper, “there are lots of police here,” though I can’t see any. He gives me a blue sticker which reads “Plan de relogement pour touts les personnes entrant dans du foyer!” I have no idea what this means, but it sounds damn exciting.

After a bit of milling around, a crowd of maybe a hundred demonstrators and half as many media walk to the Metro station at Gare de Lyon, where we commit the first insurrectionary act of the day by swarming in through the exit gates, thus skipping the fare. We are, it seems, going to commute to the revolution. As the train proceeds to wherever it is we’re going, someone explains that we’re off to stage an “occupation” as part of a bid to obtain housing for twenty homeless families.

We get off the train at a Metro station somewhere south of the Seine, and are led at a jog up a street past a church, which has already been occupied by illegal immigrants who are demonstrating about something else entirely. They cheer us as we run past, and we cheer them. The few dozen police standing outside the church look bored and annoyed.

Our brisk trot ends a few blocks later, outside an apartment building in the final stages of construction. The demonstrators leading the charge remove the sheet-metal and wooden hoardings and usher everybody in. It’s dark and dusty inside, but there’s a couple of people at the front with torches, so I follow them as far as the first floor landing, watch as the rest of the protestors push past me to the upper floors and onto the roof and decide to leave them to it and go back outside to take the broader view.

The paranoid whispers about police were not the delusions of self-important armchair rebels: a couple of the people who’d been running and shouting alongside us since we left the SUD/CNT offices are now barking into walkie-talkies. Their colleagues are not long in arriving: around a hundred of Paris’s finest, the Compagnies Republicanes de Securité, or CRS. They trot out of three buses and seal the streets around the occupied building. The CRS are the legal response to Paris’s
culture of protest, a paramilitary police force equipped with shields, batons, tear-gas, sidearms, rifles and bullets both rubber and metal. Their body armour makes them look like the android bounty hunters that chased Harrison Ford through three
Star Wars
films, they wear no identifying serial numbers on their uniforms and have a reputation as fearful as their appearance. From the roof, the demonstrators take up the popular May ’68 chant of “CRS—SS!”