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PARTISAN REVIEW
papers and preparing to lock their doors, presumably until someone took
over. A handful of anti-Gaul list political figures - Mitterrand and
Mendes-France prominent among them - announced that they would be
available to form something like a Committee of Public Safety and engi–
neer a transition to ... what? Nobody knew, least of all the students, who
were still happily tearing up cobblestones and staging parades but unable
to agree on anything much else. Except, as proclaimed in the graffi ti one
saw on the walls of the Odeon, the Sorbonne, and just about everywhere
on the Left Bank, e.g., DOWN WITH EXAMS, and LET IMAGINA–
TION TAKE POWER, and IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID. At this
point de Gaulle disappeared for a few days - by helicopter to General
Massu's HQ in Germany, it turned out later, as if Massu could help in the
event of an actual insurrection in Paris. Then he returned and, on May
30th, made a Gaullian speech on television, at last, and dissolved the
National Assembly. Previously he had suggested a referendum on "partic–
ipation," a vaguely corporatist social policy, long ago inscribed in the
Gaullist program. This idea had gone over like a lead balloon; the oppo–
nents of the Fifth Republic rejected it on the grounds that a referendum
would be plebiscitary and undemocratic; and, worse, the public largely
ignored it. But no one could object to the impeccably Republican idea of
electing a new legislature. This was the signal the country was waiting for
- a new deal, yes, but no more disorder. May '68 was coming to an end.
Although the students began their movement in April and a few of the
strikes lasted well into June, the shorthand reference became "May '68."
As we say "the Sixties ." It was first, simply, "the events" in the hour-by–
hour media coverage of the colorful street scenes, but then, in the instant
books which hastened to instruct us on what had really happened and
what it all meant and in a whole literature which appeared thereafter, it
was and remains May '68 - a psychodrama, perhaps, during which noth–
ing really happened, except in people's heads.
Of course what happened in people's heads was not without impor–
tance; only deplorable, terminally confused. But I don't propose to get
into all that now. Suffice it to say that the old French reputation for lucid–
ity and clarity, already compromised by Sartre
&
Co. in the days of PARIS
FRANCE, was just about laid to rest by May '68. It had a peculiarly
dreamlike quality, maybe this was what Aron meant; and it elicited a riot
of interpretation by the phenomenologists, structuralists, Lacanian psy–
choanalysts
et al.,
who wrote all those books. None of them, instant or
otherwise, and I must have bought a few, seems to have survived in our
library, which we've been unpacking down here in sunny Toulouse.
Except one, of course - the remarkable prose poem my daughter Leslie
published ten years later,
L'Excfs-L'Usine,
about her experience as a facto-
