Gaullism in Retreat
ALAN, RAY
Gaullism in Retreat By Ray Alan Toulouse Iam writing this in the south of France, but my envelope will have Spanish stamps on it. This won't be the first time I have sent an article about France...
...Qu'est-ce qu'il fout la-bas...
...some are young men who register at a faculty merely in order to secure a postponement of their call-up, or to use university restaurants or acquire social prestige...
...Every year they have each been sent to different towns or villages...
...in the toilets there is neither paper, hot water, nor soap...
...While some women admit they are anxious, very few men do...
...For the first time in years, people are talking politics in public...
...Here, just as in Paris, the students were the first to disturb the Gaullist peace...
...To please Franco, de Gaulle banned Spanish Republican papers published in Toulouse...
...the number of full-time students is nearer 300,000...
...French universities would have burst at the seams years ago if all registered students had attended them...
...To Basques and Catalans, whose maternal languages are banned in French schools and government offices, his pose as champion of Quebec was not even funny...
...Gaullist megalomania became a bore...
...Here at last was la revanche?the long-awaited return match with the Gaullists and others who organized or exploited the Algiers coup of May 13, 1958...
...They have built new high schools—too many of them like the one in this town, a typical example of the tape a I'oeil so dear to the French cultural establishment...
...The government claims France now has nearly 600,000 students...
...On the external walls are two impressive mosaics: I am told they were expensive...
...French students are struggling for release from conditions of administrative peonage and overcrowding that few American students—in comparable institutions—could conceive...
...Postal workers are playing petanque Ray Alan, a frequent contributor, is a British correspondent who reports from both France and Spain...
...Now, suddenly, Gaullism is in retreat...
...his wife has been a teacher for four...
...The Maoist, Trotskyist and Anarchist elements which led the "cultural revolution" at Nanterre and the Sorbonne were less in evidence in the Midi...
...American students are generally written off here as spoiled kids scared of growing up—hence their childish fascination with dirty words (the so-called Free Speech movement), dope, and other escapist frivolities...
...That French workers, too, have their grievances hardly needs saying...
...A few months later, however, the administration discovered its error and he was transferred to the first-year course...
...The Gaullists were plotting...
...He objected that he had not done the first-year course but his protests were ignored...
...They have built new faculties—like the one at Nan-terre, where the "cultural revolution" started: a crude diploma factory without even a library...
...Although family allowances (based on the number of children in a family) are more generous than elsewhere in Europe, pensions are low and unemployment pay —which less than half the unemployed get—is poor...
...But, important though university and labor grievances were, it was the political possibilities of France's "cultural revolution"—and its almost uncanny timing—that excited the Midi...
...some bank managers are limiting withdrawals...
...and the single corridor is so narrow and the single entrance so badly situated that a traffic jam is inevitable whenever the pupils circulate...
...The educational system here is administered autocratically and often callously, and students and young teachers receive little more consideration than conscripts...
...Across the road the manager of a supermarket has turned up his loud speakers for the strikers' benefit and is dancing a tango with himself as housewives stock up with groceries...
...Their grievances are material not psychiatric...
...No Paris papers," grins the news agent...
...The majority of southern Frenchmen are hoping for profound political changes as well as economic reforms...
...The police are keeping out of the way as industry after industry closes up—even where workers occupy factories and lock up executives...
...Paradoxically, the most worried faces one sees are those of students fretting about disrupted exams and receding diplomas...
...Six million workers do not strike merely to please their union organizers...
...First they fought among themselves—Right and Left battled fiercely in Toulouse until the police intervened—then, hesitantly, they took over their faculties and talked themselves hoarse trying to decide what to do next...
...The two Spanish anarcho-syndicalist weeklies reappeared shortly afterward in French: Their Spanish readers, most of whom understood French, continued to buy them, and for the first time they began to acquire French readers...
...French workers can be as tough and unsentimental when they defy the established order as French policemen are when they defend it...
...They've been abolished...
...was the popular comment on the General's abbreviated Rumanian tour...
...One student told me that when he joined his science faculty he was put in a second-year course...
...CHARLES DE GAULLE (the southern French game of bowls) beside their neatly parked vans, one of which contains shrubs and various gardening tools...
...He is losing money yet he exclaims: "I feel 10 years younger...
...Inside this ultramodern school there is no library, no gymnasium, no laboratory and no staff room...
...Fortunately strikers and police have not clashed...
...Spokesmen for the orthodox Communist party warned students not to be led astray by "extremist dandies," many of whom were the sons of rich parents and in no urgent need of academic qualifications...
...Most students were worried about the exams they must pass to acquire the diplomas they need to obtain jobs (male students are conceded only a limited postponement of their call-up for military service...
...Some service-stations have run out of gasoline...
...It favors workers' control of industry, at factory level, rather than the nationalization advocated by Communists and Socialists...
...And there has been a surprising upsurge of what until recently one was inclined to consider rather old-fashioned syndicalist sentiment...
...The station-master says happily: "Trains...
...Yet the atmosphere is almost festive...
...Telex and cable offices have closed...
...This may, in part, be a consequence of General de Gaulle's flirtation with his neighbor General Franco...
...parachutists were beating up Left-wing billstickers...
...Railroads, airlines and postal services are at a standstill...
...Like many of this regime's cultural achievements, the high school makes one suspect that it was designed more to impress delegations from Mali, Senegal and Iraq than for any serious educational purpose...
...Lecture-hall and library accommodation is inadequate even for 300,000, and until the "cultural revolution" thrust students and progressive teachers together, most students knew their teachers only by sight...
...The student movement in France bears only a remote resemblance to student high jinks in the U.S...
...Just 10 years ago the region was in the grip of an invasion psychosis...
...Most of the remainder are teachers and other employes who attend an occasional lecture in hopes of improving their professional qualifications...
...for him, that academic year was wasted...
...In the background sprawls a hillock of abandoned mailbags...
...This won't be the first time I have sent an article about France from Spain or vice versa, but today the trouble is not censorship...
...After the 1958 coup, de Gaulle's breach with the Right over Algeria caused some satisfaction, but it was cynical and mercurial, and the dreary bias and chauvinism of the official radio and tv network were in the end counterproductive...
...The Midi has suffered more from low wages and unemployment than most other regions...
...The Gaullists claim to have done a lot for education...
...But student grievances were real enough to give the "extremist dandies" an audience...
...the French Army in Algeria was thought to be preparing a landing...
...When American newspapers and magazines bracket American and French university disorders as part of the same international phenomenon, French students howl in anguish...
...Truck-loads of cattle are dying in railroad sidings for lack of attention...
...Not once have they been assigned to the same place, though the administration could have put them together had any human sentiment prevailed in it...
...They were merely sowing wild oats in the bourgeois tradition, the CP cautioned, before receiving a sinecure in Papa's business where they would soon reveal their true colors as enemies of the working class...
...The gap between poor and affluent having widened lately, workers feel they have been cheated of their share of the fruits of economic expansion...
...In some areas even ambulance and hearse drivers are on strike...
...A teacher I know has been in his profession five years...
Vol. 51 • June 1968 • No. 12
