H.J. KAPLAN
27
ry worker, when she left the Ecole Normale Superieure and attempted to
"join the people," like the Narodniks in pre-Bolshevik Russia, together
with other talented young dreamers - who would soon awaken to a huge
hangover, alas.
May '68 ended, in fact, as abruptly as it had started - with a public
demonstration - not of students, this one, skirmishing with the riot police,
but of the hi therto silent majori ty, hundreds of thousands of Parisians
who assembled their columns and banners on the Place de la Concorde,
behind Andre Malraux and a handful of other stalwarts, and marched up
the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe - presumably to deposi t a
wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and to declare that the cri–
sis was over.
Finita fa cammedia.
Malraux made one of his shaman-like
speeches. De Gaulle was back in command, and the country was back, or
going back, to work. The effect of the elections - whether or not they
enhanced the Gaullist majority, as they in fact enormously did - would be
further to legitimize the constitution adopted in 1962; and in the fullness
of time an Education Ministry headed by the prestigious Edgar Faure
would address the problems of the University.... What few of us realized
at first, however, was that the aging General took little, if any, satisfaction
in what he might - earlier in his life - have seen as a triumph and a vin–
dication. His "certain idea of France" was looking a bit ragged along the
edges. He knew that he owed the survival of his regime, in part at least, to
Pompidou's success in containing the riots in the Latin Quarter without
killing anyone, and buttering up the trade unions without ruining the
economy; and partly to the fact that the Russians, as Massu had apparent–
ly been told by his colleague, the Soviet commander in Germany, had
instructed their French agents to veto the Mitterrand-Mendes-France ini–
tiative, because Pierre Mendes-France had compromised himself with the
anti-Communist Left. So the French learned again what they had forgot–
ten since the Stalin-Hitler pact - that living with Fascists might be all in
a day's work for the Moscow bureaucrats, but they would brook no rivals
on the Left. The whole affair was demeaning,
fa chien-lit,
as de Gaulle
called it, a picturesque and very Gaullian word for a "screw-up." He was
terminally tired, fed up, preparing to call ita day.
