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HORIA BRATU
revolution didn' t take place in May - or rather, one couldn't have
taken place then.
The indignation of the German taxpayer, on the other hand, is
more easily understandable. His taxes are rising significantly, only
to
enable these students - who already play with material and cultural
advantages which their parents wouldn't have dared dream of - to
devote themselves more to dirtying up their universities than to repaying
their tuition by taking up some useful and lucrative scientific work. On
every side, the reproach heard most frequently the last few months is not
that the students are those most oppressed by the system, but that they
are the least justified in challenging it.
• Now clearly, the Germans weren't opposed merely to a particular
law ; nor were the French simply in favor of university reform (be it of
the most radical kind) .
Reductio ad absurdum:
suppose that, intimi–
dated by the pressure of street demonstrations, the Bundestag had post–
poned the vote on the
lois d'exceptions,
or that M. Peyrefite had drawn
up a whitepaper on uniyers ity reform in the first days of the strike–
would that have prevented the confrontations?
For the street demonstrations questioned even more (or perhaps
even less ) than the structure of government, that classic objective of
classic political movements. Law, order and authority themselves were
being challenged, despite the fact that even their minimal efficiency
promotes some kind of economic and political stability.
In
fact, what
seemed to have been challenged was a terminology, a certain rapport,
or rather a certain rupture between prac tice and theory embodied in
language.
Onl y an overactive imagination cou ld see in today's Germany the
gateway to the revolution. The grand illusion created by the German
press was that we were going to find ourselves suddenly in the presence
of violence. While France was cracking wide open, exploding, founder–
ing, in Germany the winds of hope didn't e\·en blow up a storm. But
perhaps in one way it was more reassuring to get from the German
students a symbolic exercise in nonviolence. Their tolerance, and the
absence of violence, was a demonstration not so much of their impo–
tence in the face of revolution, or of the strength of the conservative
structures, as of a kind of break with the structures themselves, a refusal
to use any brute force, a faith in reason and in the word.
It's true, though, that this faith , carri ed too far, submerged the
German events in a sea of words which cut off the rhythm, the nerve,
the
pathetiqup,
of the slumbering violence of a new world. The bored
