The Atlantic and Its Enemies (42 page)

As so often, it was in Italy that the European starting gun was fired. She, much poorer than France, had nevertheless been another European miracle in the sense that her exports boomed. The Italian State was another matter. Parents cared about schools, which were very good, as was the press, but universities were of much less interest, and here Italy, living in the tailwind of a demographic storm, faced a crisis. Student numbers had doubled, from 1959 to 1969, to nearly half a million, while the curriculum remained the same, and there were no textbooks or classrooms. The extension of the school-leaving age to fourteen had gone together (in 1965) with abolition of university entrance examinations. Governments as ever found it easy to economize on education, because at least in the short term it could not mobilize discontent, and headlines as to educational improvements made for good politics. The university system, according to Paul Ginsborg, was therefore in ‘an advanced state of malfunction’: Rome had 60,000 students, Naples 50,000, Bari 30,000 - each institution designed for 5,000. There were too few lecturers, and they also gave few lectures - one per week; and examinations were oral, no poorly paid lecturer wanting to spend time on thousands of scripts. It was true that there was much failure, but a merciful providence decreed that the failures could go on repeating years, perhaps with some part-time job to keep them going. Even middle-class students in the then fashionable subjects of sociology or psychology would easily find that they had no job at the end of it all. Therefore the universities simmered. An absurd cult of ‘Che’ developed from 1967, when the university of Trento was occupied; then came troubles at the Catholic University in Milan and then again at Turin, in opposition to entirely sensible reform. All of this came with the usual paraphernalia of lumpish clothes and ready-made ‘anti’ talk: thus R. D. Laing’s remarks, critical of the family, in
Sanity, Madness and the Family
(1964), had much resonance in family-bound Italy where one graffito read, ‘I want to be an orphan’. Such students could at least claim partnership with ‘the workers’ - a matter generally fanciful elsewhere. One and a half million metalworkers struck; they wanted a forty-hour week and equal wages. Other workers, including state and local government ones, followed, sometimes with a view to keeping their relatively higher wage levels.

France was next. One of the wisdoms of the age was that education produced prosperity. The logic was simple enough: university = knowledge = technology = prosperity.
Sputnik
was in the end a deadly weapon, because it destroyed the Western university. Bureaucrats could brandish statistics of expanding education at each other, quite independently of the deeper factors involved, which were not subject to measurement. All advanced countries therefore saw a vast increase in the number of students, a raising of the school-leaving age, and a proliferation of institutions of higher learning. The number of teachers also increased, though not as fast, and the overall budget rose less fast again. French higher education had been both very exacting and unfair: there had not even been a retiring age for professors until the 1930s and aged, comic figures occupied posts at which the aspiring young resentfully gazed. They, meanwhile, would have to undergo examinations that were not just extremely demanding, but were even competitive, meaning that, to pass, you had to be classed in the top twenty or whichever number the organizers reckoned was needed. It was called
agrégation
, and qualified you to go on with research. Even then, if a place did not fall open, you would have to go and teach in a school. This was not in itself a bad thing, because the highest forms of a French school were themselves, in terms of what was expected, a sort of junior university, and discipline in the class was kept by a special supervisor while the teacher concentrated upon the lessons. There were other routes to success, particularly through the selective ‘Grand Schools’ which were designed to produce an elite - engineers in the Polytechnic, administrators in the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) (others, some fifty, great and small, covered transport, bridges, archives,
etc.
and business schools followed). ENA had been supposed to be classless but in practice, with, somewhat later, business schools, became a near preserve of the bourgeoisie. Young would-be academics worked in the highest two years of a secondary school towards the École Normale Supérieure, which produced schoolteachers. It was a hard life, made tolerable by a sense of mission, and that sense was overtaken by ENA’s. Not surprisingly, the schoolteachers were on the Left. University teachers had similarly undergone an ordeal. There was a diploma that took ten years, and you could be under some old tyrant; if you were lucky, it might be Professor Labrousse, who saw his students on a Sunday morning or a Saturday afternoon. If you were senior you got the less uncomfortable chair, otherwise you were
posé du bout des fesses
far from the professorial desk and hoped for patronage in a system that was generally far from transparent in its workings. Again following a Soviet model, research was partly detached from the university system, with a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) to sort it out, and of course that body was prey to politics. Communists were particularly good at the game, and in time the great historian Fernand Braudel (who had taught once upon a time in a school in Algeria) ran his section of the CNRS like a Valois court, all over you one minute, the trapdoor the next.

Out of the blue in 1968 came troubles that caught world headlines: there was a mass revolt in universities, Paris easily in the lead. The immediate cause was the mishandling of educational expansion. France in 1958 had had a quarter of a million students and ten years later 630,000. Student-staff ratios stood at 15:1 in Germany in the Humanities, but 27.5:1 in Law, whereas in France the figures were close to 60:1. Then again, academic staff was expanded but quality declined: in France there had been 5,600 teachers in 1956 but there were 22,500 in 1967, and their salaries had not kept pace with the times. Nor had buildings. The temper of the times was made concrete in the new university of Nanterre, miles away from the centre of Paris, in an area of migrant shanty dwellings beset by mud and wire. It was hated, as Annie Kriegel remembers:

un horrible cul-de-basse-fosse où grouillaient, aveugles et sourds aux bruits du dehors, des humains anonymes qui se ressemblaient tous par l’accoutrement, la tenue avachie, une langue de bois formée d’onomatopées, de sigles et d’injures ordurières, et des discours insensés.

In all countries, new universities (and hospitals) became bywords for expensive ugliness: they were crammed with students; taught by men and women appointed all of a sudden in great numbers, without regard for quality. The humanities came off least well, and yet the expansion with relatively new subjects, such as economics, sociology and psychology, meant that there were young men and women a-plenty who imagined that they had the answer to everything. It was a terrible cocktail, superbly written up by Richard Davy in
The Times.
The British at that stage could afford to sneer: their universities were still of the older model, and selected students quite rigorously. When, at Cambridge, an attempt was made to occupy the central administrative building, the students had to be told that its functions were quite vague, that a committee met from time to time. The building was occupied, and the reactionaries at Trinity College were mobilized, some of them arriving with hunting shotguns. The occupants had to be protected by the police as they left the building.

Government financing of universities had been generous enough to start with in France, but in the later sixties there were cutbacks, and the education minister, Christian Fouchet, proposed a new system of selection, to cut numbers by one third. He also announced that ‘the university’ should be ‘industrialized’, precisely the language to annoy anyone working in one. There had been student strikes in the French system before, at Nanterre most notably in the previous November, but now the dam burst. One particular grievance was that boys could not spend the night in girls’ residences: the sort of prescription which in the past would just have counted as common sense. Now, perhaps because of the Pill, there was a
climat de saturnales
in places where
l’austérité faisait prime.
It was exploited by a
vedettariat delinquant
with
l’histrionisme dont Cohn-Bendit fut un talentueux prototype.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit was a clever manager of groupuscules that would otherwise have collapsed in squabbling; and he was also well aware that, as de Gaulle challenged the supremacy of the dollar, any sign of trouble in France would be welcome in Washington. Although a fatuous American political scientist had pronounced France to be one of the two most stable countries in the world, the temper was rising outside the glossy world of the new technocracy and the filmset sparkling buildings of André Malraux’s cleaned-up
beaux quartiers.
At Nanterre a minister (of ‘Youth’) called François Missoffe visited in January 1968, to open a swimming pool. There he encountered Cohn-Bendit, who complained that Missoffe’s book on ‘Youth’ had nothing to say of sexual problems. Missoffe said that he was not surprised, given Cohn-Bendit’s looks, that he had sexual problems and that he should dive into the swimming pool to sort them out. It was the start of troubles. The sociology building was ‘occupied’, the administration called in the police, and the ‘Tet Offensive’ in Vietnam supplied the students with an occasion for militancy, complete with denunciations of
l’école des flics et des patrons.
There were counter-attacks by extreme right-wing students (and there were thick rumours, to the effect that the CIA were behind these, because it wanted to destabilize de Gaulle). At any rate there was ‘a mass of manoeuvre’, its strength increased because of the half-hearted attempts at repression by the Nanterre rector. The thing spread, on 3 May, to the Sorbonne itself. There, there was an affray with the police, semi-encouraged by the rector, and eighty of them were injured by flying brickbats. Magistrates sentenced four students to brief terms of imprisonment, and tempers rose, elsewhere, as well as in Paris. By the night of 10/11 May barricades had been put up in the Latin Quarter, the highest - three yards - rather suitably in the rue d’Ulm, where stood the poor old ENS, the teachers’ training school that had produced the grave ancestors of whom these students were a weird offspring. The students attempted to produce their own left-wing ideology.

However, it was sloganeering: ‘the beach lies under the street’, ‘bourgeois medicine does not cure, it repairs’. There was an odd cult of Maoism and the names of sages were invoked, but as Leszek Kołakowski says, 1968 yielded no political thought worth mentioning, and although François Maspéro and others produced a spate of writing, none of it lasts. The extraordinary thing was that France fell into a sort of paralysis for the month of May. This was because the Paris events gained momentum through various other elements, which had nothing to do with them. There were younger workers at the Renault automobile factory outside Paris, just waiting to escape from trade union and Communist control so as to make their own ‘demands’. The order police, the creation of which dated back to the conditions of near civil war in 1947, were quite widely hated, and were made up sometimes of Corsicans who had organized
ratonnades
against Algerians back in 1958: even solid middle-class neighbours of the barricade-manning students would offer them food and drink. There was a sexual element as well - an English homosexual with a white Rolls-Royce drove along the embankment having the time of his life in the back of it and the Communist poet Louis Aragon, whose wife, Elsa Triolet, had died not long before, emerged in pink to cheer on a demonstration on that side of the fence. The television and radio journalists were vastly annoyed at efforts by the State to control their output, and when de Gaulle wanted to make a speech rallying the people, he could only do so under heavy guard, from the top of the Eiffel Tower, with technicians from outside, and - another by nature left-wing group looking for State money - the film-makers set up a ‘States General of the Cinema’ to try to stop the Cannes Film Festival on 18 May. By 21 May 10 million people were on strike. There were of course academics, delighted with their quarter-hour of fame, and even a cohort of high-school pupils ritually joined in. One of them, chased by police, jumped into the river and was drowned when caught in the mud of the Seine. That soul provided the martyr. May the 23rd and 24th saw a further explosion of violence, with burned cars and an attempt to set light to the stock exchange. The automobile workers at Boulogne-Billancourt even turned down a large wage increase and for a time struck revolutionary attitudes.

But this was of course just an accumulation of self-importance and holiday-wanting; Annie Kriegel in her memoirs bubbles over with contempt, and so do many others, whose writings easily outlive the contemporary celebratory literature (the historical echoes, of the ‘June Days’ of 1848, were obvious enough: the outstanding comments on these were made by Tocqueville in his memoirs or by Flaubert in
L’Éducation sentimentale
, mocking the Iberian accent of an international windbag; even Victor Hugo in
Les Misérables
shook his head and thought that, in the end, the rebelling workers would have to be ‘shot down, but respectfully’). Of course the State deserved 1968, because it had expanded education far too fast, and its supposed ‘technocratization of the university’ was leading, quite predictably, to the manufacture of clones - bearded sloganeers and shrieking girls on the one side, besuited briefcase sandwich-lunch know-it-alls on the other. But 1968 was in itself a fiasco, if a sinister one; it would fizzle out unless there were a revolutionary party organized enough to take advantage. It was here that the French Communist Party might have moved. It did not. Lenin had already spoken viciously of left-wing infantilism; the trade unions did not want control to slip into anarchist hands; and in any case de Gaulle had proved very useful to the USSR. He had stood up to the Americans, especially in matters of world finance, and he had disrupted NATO; by a fitting twist, he had even departed on a state visit to Communist Romania when the May events were under way. The French Party therefore did not move. De Gaulle himself staged a theatrical coup, vanishing for three days at the end of the month (he consulted the army in Germany, and got assurances of support, in return for release, from prison, of the military dissidents of 1962). His prime minister, Pompidou, cleverly announced that there would be elections, and the various potential political successors then got busy with campaigning (Mendès France and Mitterrand were both involved, in a cautious way). Students in any case had their exams to think of, and by mid-June the last occupants were cleared from a Sorbonne area that had now become rat-infested. Come the elections, there was an enormous governmental majority - 358 seats out of 485.