My May 1968: Part Two (letter to my mother)

University of Lyon during 1968 student occupation. Photo by George Garrigues

                     

  Part Two  (letter to my Mother)

by Carol Rose

                                                        May 12, 1968

Dearest Mother,

You have, as usual, been very faithful and I not.   Nothing from you,  however, since the postal service has closed down.   Actually I need to find some way to get this letter mailed.

This city has been going through a week of great excitement much of it centered here in the  neighborhood… (many parents of adult children have been calling to quiet their fears which were groundless.)  Last evening about 6 big demonstrations culminated in a mass demonstration of  around 600,000 workers  and students which filed by our house 15 abreast for hours straight, singing the International  and shouting slogans such as CRS - assassins (the riot police force), DeGaulle assassin, libérer nos camarades!  Among these comrades were the numerous neighbors in the courtyard who have small children such as mine.    Just behind our friend Marianne”s house, on the rue St. Jacques,  there were two story barricades consisting of cars, taxi signs and general debris built high by the students under the impatiently watchful eyes of the CRS police, chaffing at the bit as the students manufactured homemade weapons such as clubs and boards studded with nails.  Leaning against supports, the pointed ends of the nails marked off spaces for ordinary pedestrians to walk   No workers amongst this crowd!  The CRS police looked like black beetles armed as it were with black shields, wearing shiny black slickers, the whole topped with black helmets, shotguns hanging on their shoulders and machine gun like weapons slung over their backs to be used to shoot tear gas bombs at the rioters. 

 One of the most amazing phenomena of the past week was the scene on Rue Gay Lussac where spectators from their balconies overlooking the street  watched their cars being burnt up yet cheering the students on to more exploits.  They threw all sorts of things like pressing irons downwards onto the heads of the policemen below who were protected by resistant helmets.  That was the most violent evening but on all the other nights those incredibly scary riot police who are kept  like wild animals in closed garrisons outside of Paris and brought out for emergencies, were allowed  or ordered to beat up anyone in the neighborhood on foot.  A friend’s Norwegian au pair woman was standing in a doorway next to a 70ish year old man on an empty street.  She thought that, as a foreigner, she needn’t flee when a group of CRS came up the street,  descended on her and the old man, beat them up on the legs and head, then for good measure, dropped a tear gas canister at their feet.   Of course, you won’t believe it but the students were the provoked rather than the provokers.  By the following Monday night, the government seems to have understood that it was more prudent to allow the demonstrations to take place without the intervention of the CRS. 

This week, even with a half a million demonstrators, there were no incidences of violence.  Had there been CRS intervention in our Denfert Rochereau neighborhood, the quarter would have been besieged and the whole city in revolution.  For the moment, all is quiet and the government seems to have agreed to the demands of the demonstrators so perhaps the crisis is over for the moment.  We shall see…

Other than all of the excitement, Tom’s Father as here bringing lovely clothing for the children.   We lodged him in the Montparnasse neighborhood in a hotel which was far below his usual standards but he did not complain.  As we drove there, I was concerned about the effect of the lingering tear gas in the air.  He has difficulty breathing as it is.  I was relieved when he left this atmosphere.   He was remarkably touched by his little grandchildren.  I have never before seen him as tender.  Also he took us out to an excellent dinner in a restaurant we could not have afforded.  When I remarked about the pleasure this gave me, he said “you enjoy it if you do not have to do it regularly”.  I did enjoy it indeed.  So strange to be in an elegant restaurant on the right bank while the left bank was besieged and boiling over.  

We had the May 9 third birthday party for Clarissa amidst a violent argument between our neighbors and friends  which broke out before the blowing out of her three candles,  Claire and François were   arguing for the demonstrators and Marianne and Daniel were violently against.  Claire and François, our near neighbors, have been out demonstrating for weeks getting alternately arrested at night and released from the City Hall prison while their four small children wake up parentless every morning.   Daniel, who owns a mattress factory in the suburbs, finally declared  forfeit;  he said he was “an enraged capitalist monster”, leaving us all in the garden, went inside the house and watched television the rest of the afternoon.  Their friendship which was old and intimate thus has broken up violently.   I wonder if they will ever get back together.  Meanwhile all of the children played around the courtyard as far away as they could from the wrangling adults.   Following this dispute, Daniel decided his children should leave Paris to go to his family’s Normandy house.   We were where we were of course but at no moment did I feel myself in any danger.  It helped being inside a courtyard.

The following week,  invited to a dinner party overlooking the Luxembourg gardens,  Daniel was present, and the hosts were investors who, judging from the valuable paintings on the walls, must be successful ones   The conversations of the evening centered around the social situation. Daniel loudly announced sarcastically that his solution to his workers’ demands was to tell them he would honor them:  raise their salaries, shorten their work week and add vacation days,  then close up or sell the factory to an American capitalist firm. 

 What to do about their children who had already been sent out to the countryside to escape the riots and noxious gasses which wafted over from the Latin Quarter?   They decided  they would just leave them in their country houses with the servants until the crisis would be over.  After all,  most public schools were not open anyway.  As a matter of fact, as I was the closest parent to the school given that the Ecole Alsacienne drew kids from all over the city, transportation being totally disrupted, I agreed to shepherd a number of them to our house until they could be picked up.   The scary CRS troops were stationed between us and the school.   Taking my courage in hand, at the Montparnasse/Denfert intersection, I walked towards their lines daily, announcing that I was fetching the children from their school.  They broke ranks to let me pass.  I do not know if you have ever seen how little children here leave school.  Crowds of Mothers, each holding a sack of croissants or pains au chocolate, push and shove to call out their child’s name while being seen and recognized by the person in charge.  As it happened the first day, it was the headmistress supervising the operation.  I called out my names:  Two Roses, one Artichoke( (sic), one Forest, one Turnip (Navet).  She began to laugh at my “grocery” list which will be repeated as long as this crisis goes on.  So our little crowd of children, gobbling down their croissants, went up the street to the intersection where they were astonished by the armed, fierce looking lines of CRS.   Spontaneously, a space opened for us to pass without my even asking.  This made an impression on me which transformed them into human beings.

As for us, Tom did return from his  sailing adventure with the motley crew of Dean Weston’s boat.  They are to sail back to Tanzania.    He again went back to work and seems still to be the only one doing so from the Left Bank.   Perhaps one day, due to his efforts, we will have the capital to buy an apartment.

 So much for now,  I have someone who will mail this off to you from Belgium as there is no postal service here in France.      much love    carol 

 ***

Part Three   Epilogue My May 1968 in long perspective

Most surprislngly,  we are living in another century, now 50 years have passed and I am still thinking about that ancient time which caused me to question so many things without knowing what was to come, where we were to live, should we stay in France, should we stay married…

To fo go back a few paces,  we were to move to New York so that my husband could be vetted by his partners who scarcely knew him.  We had the promise that we would return to Paris within 18 months.   We did return and moved back into the same house in the courtyard whose geography had remained unchanged but whose population was entirely different.  The neighbors with the four children had separated. She had gone off with a young lover, bought a farmhouse in a deserted part of the Sarthe with the four young children: three boys and a girl.  He, broken hearted, retreated to an ashram in India from which he had to be repatriated by his parents.  He was near death but gradually recovered.   His brother who was on an intellectual track before 1968, became a carpenter.  The anarchists marriage broke up.  He had been the up and coming anthropologist being mentored and supported by the major French anthropologist.  She had left the courtyard but without the three children whom he had sequestered.  Just before we left the courtyard for good, he was proudly walking up and down carrying the new baby whom he had made with a south american indian woman.  He had forbidden their mother to have contact with her children.  She had found a more ordinary lover.   Our children and these three were friends even though every contact with them caused us invasions of scabies.  I intervened with their Father and he agreed to let them come with us to the country.   Their world had collapsed, joy no longer there.  

The Yugoslavian wife with baby, abandoned the child to the French husband who was to bring him up alone.  The subsitized students to whom we paid our rent married and moved on.  The great grandparents died.  We were given notice that the ambassador wanted his part of the duplex back by the end of the year so we had to move out. That was that really as over the next twenty years, I did not set foot back there and did not care to see them.  Our friends Daniel and Marianne broke up because he had an affair with the new au pair.  She had caused another couple of her friends to divorce.  It was truly an epidemic all around us.  The changes were upon us but we remained together in a new neighborhood, in a new courtyard where we had found a tiny worker s house we could afford.  So we five squeezed in and made do.  

Read Part One
****

About the author 

Carol Rose has lived in Paris since 1965 subsequent to a Fulbright stint in 1956-57.