October 1970 (18 page)

Ambulances were parked in front of the Sorbonne. A line of overturned, blackened cars stretched along the rue Gay-Lussac. Protesters had torn up trees and built barricades all around the Latin Quarter, and fought off the forces of law and order until six o'clock in the morning. They'd thrown bricks at the riot police, and the police had charged at them with billy clubs swinging, and blood was running in the streets. It looked as though the police had also used the kind of grenades known as crickets, which gave off a disabling nerve gas. And the students, joined by the young unemployed and the broke and homeless denizens of the suburbs, had returned the police fire with Molotov cocktails and blasts of sand jets from compressors stolen from the work crews trying to take down the façade.

Just before we left Montreal, someone gave us the address of a Parisian willing to rent us a room for next to nothing. His place was on Saint-Germain, between the Café Mabillon and the Café de Cluny. One bed. One dresser. One heater. Cold water and Turkish toilets at the end of the hall. We took it. It gave us front-row seats to the arrival of the revolution.

In the morning, François let me sleep in and went down to the Café Flore to nibble on a croissant and drink a cup of coffee served in a cup the size of a thimble. I found him immersed in the novel
A Sentimental Education
and pulled up a chair and asked him the obvious question:

“Seen Jean-Paul Sartre yet?”

It didn't get a rise from him.

“He doesn't come here any more
 . . .
”

We'd read in the paper that Sartre had addressed the students in the occupied Sorbonne. Rumour had it that the author of
Nausea
, taking his place at the podium, had found a message to him scribbled on a piece of paper:
SARTRE, BE BRIEF
! Our spies reported that the “little father,” Charles de Gaulle, had also talked about “democracy run wild” and “a liaison between socialism and liberty.”

“You know,” François said, holding up
A
Sentimental Education
, “the events taking place under our noses will go down in history and will find their place in the books exactly like those of 1848.”

“What happened in 1848?”

“The July Revolution, of course!”

“I thought that was in 1789
 . . .
”

“That was only the first. They never really stopped after that. They have an average of one a century.”

François read
L'Humanité
, which in those days was calling for a GGI, an unlimited general strike. Pompidou had reopened the university, but the unions and student associations were still out and a huge cortège stretched from Place de la République to Place Denfert-Rochereau. This time, there were almost as many workers as there were students, all marching under the banners with arms linked. The floodgates were opened: factory workers were out, strikes were spreading like a contagion over the entire the country.

Once again, the red and black flag waved above the Sorbonne. The lecture halls were full to bursting with young men and women working to upset the establishment, to have their say, to hand the reins of power on to someone else. They were making placards, printing tracts and manifestos and broadsides, forming human chains, smoking unfiltered Gitanes, electing committees, representatives, delegates, naming those responsible, voting for programs and resolutions, picking up followers from the extreme left, from the far right, and bottling them all up in Paris with such
 . . .
You'd see them with their feet sticking out of sleeping bags, couples making love or just talking quietly about the importance of approaching the question of sexual politics from a dialectic perspective.

I met a girl from the Britanny Liberation Front, but it didn't work out. I lacked nerve. I hadn't yet understood that the trick was to lay it on as thick as possible. I was more the laid-back type. Everywhere you looked you saw kids with their hair falling down over their eyes holding cigarettes like they were characters in a Truffaut film.

“The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love,” shouted one signpost. Another, in blood-red letters two feet high: “Fuck Who You Want!” Easy for them to say.

One day I saw the Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, the Place de la Madeleine, and the Eiffel Tower. After that, in the early evening, I met up with François at the Old Navy. He was almost finished
A Sentimental Education
. The night before, the General had addressed the nation. All of France had tuned in. And all of France agreed: “He doesn't have a clue what's going on.” Pathetic.

“It's bizarre, though, don't you think?” François said.

“What is?”

“Less than a year ago he was announcing Quebec's liberation from the balcony at City Hall. And now he's the incarnation of the most reactionary power. What do you make of that?”

“That maybe Malraux should step down.”

“You're forgetting Chevalier's theory: Malraux doesn't exist.”

“I'll drink to that,” I said, and ordered two more espressos.

One of François's friends dropped by, someone he'd recently met. He looked interesting. As though lurking behind his eyes was the missing link between the post-war hip cat and the hippie. Mick Jagger with half the testosterone, give or take. Quite androgynous. His name was Luc Goupil, and he was French from France, a Quebecker by adoption, and was now living in London. He was part of the first wave of the FLQ. He had been arrested in 1963 for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at a barracks. Imprisoned. He wasn't yet twenty years old. When he got out, he went underground.

“So, you think the Communists are going to take over?” he asked us.

“Civil war. Anything's possible,” replied François. It was the phrase we'd been hearing everywhere: Anything's possible.

“I like that,” Goupil drawled.

“The Americans would never allow it,” I said.

Goupil leaned over the table and looked at me earnestly.

“The Americans?” he said. “They love all this shit
 . . .
The old General said he wanted his own nuclear bomb, and look what he gets: a bomb up his ass!”

He laughed.

“I hear that Pompidou is complaining that his usual sources aren't reporting to him, his pools of spies aren't keeping him up to date with what's happening. Poor Pompy
 . . .
What does he expect? Students are hard to keep an eye on, hard to infiltrate. You agree?”

I was beginning to understand François's fascination with the guy. With Goupil, a conversation always seemed to be taking place on two levels at the same time.

“What do you mean? That the French secret service
 . . .
”

“The secret service works for the secret service, and if their interests happen to correspond with the interests of the government, then so much the better. The Communists don't have a snowball's chance in hell of seizing power, but in the meantime the Old Camel has a nice little revolution on his hands. Nothing too serious. But the next time he'll think twice before pulling out of NATO,” Goupil said with a gracious smile. And ordered drinks. And more drinks.

Long before dawn I managed to drag myself toward the exit.

“Stay with us, Gode,” Goupil said. “We're going to get some breakfast — stuffed crêpes smothered in Calvados.”

“Makes my stomach heave just thinking about it,” I said. “I'm going to bed
 . . .
”

But we ordered one for the road. We drank to our little maid's room on Saint-Germaine-des-Prés, and to the health of maids in general, to their disappearance in a classless society of the future, and also to the health of Karl Marx, who liked maids well enough.

On the afternoon of May 29, hundreds of thousands of people marched from the Bastille to the Saint-Lazare station. Jean-Luc Godard was rumoured to be among the demonstrators, as was Aragon, and, of course, Elsa. The union and Communist leaders had signed the Grenelle Agreement with the government, but their members were refusing to vote in the factories, and the country's equilibrium was hanging by a thread. De Gaulle was finished. Power seemed to be up for grabs, at the business end of a rifle, ideally one with a flower in the barrel. If you could believe the rumours, groups of citizens were arming themselves and forming militias, waiting only for the order to switch to the offensive and liberate the Sorbonne and the Odéon. But de Gaulle had not had his last word. The French were cattle, and the Old Camel still had a trick or two up his sleeve. Under complete secrecy, he had himself helicoptered to the general headquarters of the French occupational forces in Germany, where he met with General Massu. Later, it was revealed that he'd envisaged a reconquest of France, starting with Alsace, to prevent the ripe fruit of power from falling into the Communist hands. He'd even considered borrowing combat helicopters from the Americans.

The next day, I took the subway to l'Étoile so I wouldn't have to say later that I'd been to Paris without seeing the Arc de Triomphe. I'd really had it up to here with everything, and I was flying home. Put it down to home sickness. I wanted to be in my own house. But first I would walk down the Champs-Élysées. And as I walked, I heard a noise crescendoing ahead of me, in the distance.

Traffic had stopped. Motorcycles roared past bearing policemen, there was a nervousness in the air, a wind charged with electricity whistled down the most beautiful avenue in the world, and, like an idiot, I continued walking down the middle of the street toward Place de la Concorde, because the cars had all disappeared. I was walking into the teeth of the parade! In one moment, flowing into Place de la Concorde and completely filling the vast avenue, pouring in from every direction, a million French citizens, from veterans in wheelchairs to young hippies in miniskirts, they formed a compact mass several kilometres long and moving toward the Arc de Triomphe. And there I was, stuck in the middle of them. I froze. The crowd was coming toward me like a tsunami. I waited until it was thirty metres from me before moving out of the way, and it was then that I saw him, arm in arm with the Gaullist big shots who'd begun the walk, singing “
Allons enfants de la patrie
 . . .
”
at the top of his lungs. Malraux.

RED SQUARE, MOSCOW,
MAY 1, 1946

FOUR ENORMOUS PORTRAITS,
OF MARX,
Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, dominated the paved square where Marshal Koniev's T-34s, the heroes of the defence of Moscow, passed by in a continuous parade. With a low rumbling and a metallic clatter, these were the tanks that pierced the Panzer flanks at Stalingrad and Koursk. On the platform, the Little Father of the People, looking old and sunk into himself but still capable of annihilating ten million human beings with a snap of his fingers, showed the impassiveness, the almost cadaverous rigidity, that is the proper comportment of Soviet dignitaries below the exhortations and official slogans on the flurry of banners and insignia.

More impressed than he was willing to admit, the young Canadian military attaché turned to General Guillaume, his counterpart at the French embassy. “I sure wouldn't want to have to order my troops to dig in before these bloody things
 . . .
”

The Frenchman smiled. At thirty-two, General Bédard still had the impetuosity of youth.

“But you know what?” added the Canadian. “The Allied High Command made a mistake. A very big mistake
 . . .
”

And he went on to elaborate.

“Three years ago,” Bédard continued, “Europe could still have been saved. The Allied strategy should have been to stabilize the Italian Front and throw massive troops through the Balkans into Europe. With the help of the Turks, we could have marched on Vienna and stopped the Communists from getting into the heart of Europe. Now it's too late
 . . .
”

General Guillaume continued to smile.
Ah, these Canadians
 . . .

“My dear Jean-B, you Anglo-Americans always think you know what's good for Europe. But the truth is that your deaths and ours were nothing compared to the twenty-five million who died in the Soviet Union. The Reds paid a high price for the spoils of Yalta.”

“Behind the spoils of Yalta, as you put it, lies the shadow of a new terror creeping over our dear old civilization, and now there's nothing to stop it. The Red Army occupies half the continent. Marxist tyranny threatens the Acropolis. And by the way, I'm not Anglo-American. I'm French-Canadian.”

“My apologies, my dear sir. But I still find you unduly pessimistic
 . . .
”

“There is only one buffer left between Paris and the Mongolian hordes: the American troops. If I were you, I'd pray that they don't pull out too soon.”

“You're forgetting the atomic bomb
 . . .
”

“Stalin is going to want one for himself.”

“Jean-B, my friend, you mistake them. These marshals, with their chests wallpapered with ribbons and medals, are walking museums. Under their uniforms, they are still peasants.”

“Maybe, but they brought back French masterpieces and syphilis from Berlin, didn't they? And a few German scientists, as well. They already have their own program for producing heavy water, did you know that?”

“We'll see. But meanwhile, what a show!”

“Yes, they seem to have pulled out all the stops. And the day they receive their orders to roll on to the Atlantic, you'll find yourself cosying up with the British once again!”

General Guillaume erupted in a frank and friendly laugh.

“Please don't take offence, but you remind me of our collaborators, with their famous Christian rampart against Bolshevism.”

General Bédard said nothing. General Guillaume drew his attention to the parade.

“Look! The famous Katiouchas,” he said, indicating the esplanade. “Stalin's Organs.”

They watched them approach in silence, pulled by trucks, the celebrated multi-barrelled rocket launchers that were the terror of the German, Romanian, and Italian infantries. They didn't know it, but they were witnessing the end of the myth of the Second World War.