THE FOURTH WORLD
PART
WHAT HAPPE NE D IN PARIS
Paris, July 14, 1968
The annual parade is over, rather thinly covered on televi–
sion because the journalists of the O.R.T .F . have not yet returned to
work . Their strike, the last remnant of the May revolution, ended a
few days ago without the assurances of freedom in reporting for which
they had held out.
1
After the final performance of a run of Beckett's
Endgame
a t a Montmartre theater last night the principal actor held a
collection box for the journalists. The sensation of an ending has been
strong in Paris in the last weeks; as the police have occupied the few
remaining buildings still held by students (or, in the language of the
right, as the students have evacuated them) and the cleaning men
with their
grattoirs
have taken down all the posters, only a few slogans
in spray paint here and there, and some asphalt patches in the street
around the Sorbonne where the
paves
were torn up and used for am–
munition, give outward evidence of anything's having happened at
al1.
2
For the crowd on the Champs Elysees this morning it was all
finished ; France was back to normal, and there as usual taking the
salute was De Gaulle.
"De Gaulle
-
mon Dieu, faites qu'il creve!"
(De Gaulle - oh
God, make him drop dead! ) This agonized appeal could be seen scrawl–
ed up at the Odeon, and it must have reflected the feelings of many par–
ticipants in the demonstra tions. For to the youth of France De Gaulle
is what Johnson is (or was) to the youth of America, the infuriating
symbol of a materialistic and chauvinistic society with enormous power
but without a soul, a society so closed upon itself that only violence can
hope to make any significant change in it. The remarkable thing about
the May revolution is that it did in fac t
com e
within a hair's breadth
1.
Most of them were subsequently fired.
2. D uring the summer all the streets in the Latin Quarter were asphalted,
and the iron grills around the bottoms of the trees - also handy weapons –
were all removed.
