France in Rebellion-Four Articles Freedom or Liberation?

...The Russians speak of an international disciplined party...

...in the case of the Chinese, it was a form of renewed imperialism in Asia...

...It did this because de Gaulle had come to think of the Western Alliance as chiefly the instrument of American power, and because he feels contempt and indifference for generalized partisan theory that transcends national frontiers...

...The truth is that so far "direct democracy" has not really defined itself...

...The General apparently underestimated the independent role of ideas, or overestimated the passivity and contentment of the French people...

...and in the next place oblige it to control itself...

...the workers occupying the factories, and some of these flying the red flag...

...In practice this meant the successful weakening of the United States and the Atlantic Alliance, and correspondingly, an enormous increase of the moral influence of the other side in France...

...The complacency was official, distributed through managed news and the government opinion makers...

...Perhaps the wolf of revolution has been cried so often, that it takes a long time for resistance to develop...

...Indeed the North Vietnamese negotiators were right to feel, as they stated, that Paris was as much one of the capital cities for their side as Warsaw...

...Direct democracy may be a revolutionary weapon when it uses the mass strength of the people, the crowd, but is it had read a few of the works of the revolutionary fathers of America...

...Is this what is now understood by direct democracy...

...you must first enable the government to control the governed...

...What were Ho Chi Mirth's sentiments on the practice of free institutions...

...Gaullism did, whenever it moved beyond the negative stance of anti-Americanism...

...Shouldn't anyone whose politics is based on a belief in the democratic process throw himself completely into this revolution...

...It no longer looked grey and mtimidating in the realities of the police state, as under Stalin...

...These proposals were repeated everywhere in a kind of universal chant, and there was little serious opposition to them...

...Could the Chinese Red Guards and the Guevarist guerrillas be the model heroes of an authentic democracy...

...One is on the verge of doing just that until sober thinking warns that the unnamed, unidentified, unled revolution could have any one of several contradictory results...

...force controlled the Right-wing dictatorship in Greece...

...these people may not be able to imagine their social and historical continuity broken...

...The most articulate and influential spokesmen of the media seemed to have accepted without further argument a set of political propositions running roughly along the following lines: that the combined case of the North Vietnamese, the Cubans and the Guevarist guerrillas was essentially valid—the "third world" was in fact resisting an aggressive imperialism led by the United States...

...These ambitions spelled a role for France that exploited the vulnerable positions of either superpower...

...These moral defenses were dependent, I think, on the meaning and value of the Western Alliance...

...Certainly the words on everyone's lips seem to be democracy and democratization...

...Or these words might be remembered: "In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not protected against the violence of the stronger...

...And the silence from the regime (de Gaulle spoke for the first time on Friday, May 24, exactly three weeks after the start of the upheaval at the Sorbonne), the absence of official counter-measures, was strange...

...In the modern world nationalism certainly survives, but it does not express itself in nationalist slogans...

...In addition, of course, insofar as France itself was concerned, American capitalism and industrial technology was a threat and had to be pushed back across the Atlantic...

...Communism as the Russians practiced it was essentially a form of Russian self-interest...

...long lines of cars before the gas stations remaining open...

...it is in effect constitutional and institutional...

...The workers are to democratize the factories...

...It was here that one got a sense of the ambiguous shape and identity of the "people" in a revolution...

...the banks closing...

...Looking back, though, I realize that the feeling of general satisfaction was in large measure superficial...

...The rapidity with which the rebellion spread through France is almost appalling in retrospect...

...Over the long run, de Gaulle's judgments may prove correct...

...Now it seemed really possible that the revolutionary spirit could not be crushed by the orthodox party apparatus, that it was permanent in the old Trotskyist sense, continuing until its ideal aims were achieved...

...As I listened to the roars of approval and disapproval rising from the students in the amphitheater next to my office, I imagined the fear (or courage) of someone who ventured to speak before such an audience in support of an unpopular cause...

...Whether there is or was anything worth defending in that system is the subject of another argument...

...The above, individually or in various combinations, may partially explain what has been happening, yet one suspects one's sense of reality...

...telephone service cut to a minimum...

...the post-office closed...

...Yet none of them—Americans, Chinese, or Russians—would dream of playing their role on the world stage in terms of direct national ambitions...

...The situation might be summed up as follows: The intellectual and moral fervor has been transcendent here in France these last few days...

...The university structure collapsed before the student revolt, I'Express observed, as swiftly as the French Army before the Germans in 1940...

...more lines in the food stores...

...Perhaps, too, the sense of national family is so strong among the French that revolution is not the terror it is in America...

...What you had prior to May, therefore, was the fully accepted dominance of a basically Left-wing ideology combined with the shrewd game of technocrats and nationalists under the banner of Charles de Gaulle...

...The strongest models for the student action seem to be the Berkeley episode, the non-violent direct action of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., and the Chinese Cultural Revolution...

...The universities are to lose their feudal structure under the mandarin professors and be democratized by the students...

...And can the romanticism which attacks all institutions be trusted to lead people to democracy, Socialism, or any kind of recognizable liberty...

...All this is infectiously hopeful...

...Or finally, perhaps bourgeois Western civilization is so decayed and impotent, that it begs (from les fils de la bourgeoisie themselves) for the traditional sacrifice required to make a new world...

...The students drank a new wine, purged of the rancid taste of orthodox Marxist dogma...

...Soon after the May 3 student riots at the Sorbonne began to spread across the country, the dean and his administrative corps vanished...

...MICHEL DEBRE Gaullist economic policy had demanded sacrifices from wage earners that Britain, say, had failed to make to its evident cost in world competition...

...we sense being witness to historic events, and it is a French talent to establish an historic significance...

...Even while the riots in the Latin Quarter were beginning, the media were celebrating the role of Paris in the Vietnam negotiations, collecting all the credit they could for France as the peacemaker...

...It was not yet clear whether Czechoslovakia was moving back to liberal democracy or forward to Socialist freedom, but the authorization Socialist monolith seemed vulnerable and not the equivocal danger it was 10 years ago, or the paralyzing threat it was under Stalin 20 years ago...

...How will it manifest itself and what will it become...

...For lack of a big enough hall, a general assembly (that is, including everyone) was held practically daily in the lobby, with the students flooding up the stairways and out the doors...

...This revolution was to be truly ultimate and apocalyptic, for its target was not only bourgeois society but the bureaucratic state of an old betrayed revolution...

...The reason for this is not difficult to find if one maintains a respect for the importance of generalized political ideas...

...Every revolution begins with some mode of liberation, whether or not it succeeds in establishing or improving freedom...

...The sense of the affluent life was very strong: the crowding of goods and shoppers in the stores, the throngs of cars on the highways, the general bustle of the pursuit of pleasure and comfort...

...Until May, during a year's stay here I had been struck by the rising curve of the economy and the satisfaction of the government and the greater part of the people with the new vitality and prestige of France...

...Scattered or crowded together, moving restlessly on the fringe or bound tightly at the center, they seemed to share only the dramatic confusion that exists as a limbo between panic and revolutionary exhilaration...

...Imagine, for instance, a situation in the U.S...

...Thus the Americans speak of peace, democracy, and anti-Communism on an international basis...

...Power over French society was falling into American hands, the hands of profit-takers and ambitious imperialists...

...It was passionate and romantic, a new brotherhood of men escaping from the prison of oppressive institutions...

...fighting would begin long before a month had passed, with both the Army and Right-wing vigilantes pouring out to battle...

...Surely in the U.S...

...What de Gaulle offered the French was nationalism, and for it he was willing to sacrifice the active practice of democratic institutions and all the moral defenses that could stand against a revolutionary offensive...

...There was so little evidence of discontent or a dangerous restlessness, the country seemed so absorbed in its growing prosperity and the stability of the de Gaulle regime, that the revolution came like a wildly improbable dream, or like a stage performance in which everyone had his role well-rehearsed...

...But as Hannah Arendt observed in her book On Revolution (which by the way should be required reading for all the Committees of Action in the French universities), liberation and freedom are not the same thing...

...The theory meant nothing to the Gaullists, but the anti-Americanism of the Left was highly serviceable to their ambitions in the world power battle...

...By Harold Kaplan Aix-en-Provence For almost a month I could not go to my office in the big new building of the Faculte des Lettres in Aix without showing an identity card to a student at the door wearing a red armband...

...In any event, the game got away from him...

...The cause of revolution was being given a new moral life...

...To him the political realities in the world are not Communism versus capitalism, or dictatorship versus democracy, but the power interests of national identities...

...with planes, trains and buses stopped completely...

...In the great hall downstairs the affiches were posted everywhere, some giving factual information and some exhorting students in the manner of the Chinese Cultural Revolution...

...But the suspense is also keen...

...Perhaps revolution itself has become a ritualistic practice, without much substance: these events are ceremonial and meant to satisfy an historic nostalgia, as well as abstract Left-wing theory...

...The best one could say is that it is a way for a constituency dissatisfied with the institutions that rule it to seize direct control and declare by the action that power is ultimately from the people, the governed...

...The Western Alliance stood for the legitimate defense of a social system, even a civilization...

...How many knew the Federalist Papers, for instance, which might be quoted aptly these days when once again the world is alive with the electricity of political innovation: "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this...

...Freedom, as Arendt wrote, is an order by which men meet and participate in public affairs...

...In these ways they undoubtedly serve nationalistic interests...

...Harkening back to the tradition of liberal democracy, one wished that the French intellectual Left thoritarian party leaders...

...that this reactionary U.S...

...Then what did Sartre mean when in speaking to the students and praising Cohn-Bendit, the anarchist leader, he exalted ". . . this savage democracy you have created which upsets all institutions...

...and that it had (though there was more argument about this) corrupted the cause of Israel by using it as a tool in the Middle East...

...And he added significantly that the cgt was an institution...

...It expresses itself in political theories which ostentatiously transcend nationalism...

...At the same time the media took up French achievements in the world competition of heart grafting, just as they had expanded the victories of French skiers in the Winter Olympics in expressing the cultural nationalism that has dominated France under de Gaulle...

...Perhaps the extreme gestures not only satisfy the theatrical appetites and the rich sense of historic character in the French, but also are the only way change is accomplished in their system, and everyone accepts that fact...

...No one pointed out that neither the French government nor public opinion was neutral in the Vietnam war, and that the French had long ago accepted the moral right of the Communists in this particular Cold War confrontation...

...Direct democracy in that case was indeed a charade, for its main purpose was to crush dissent, to terrorize the opposition...

...and the students declaring their rule over the universities and demanding the overthrow of the existing society and all of its institutions...

...There appeared to be a governmental vacuum, leaving free space for the movement to grow, for one dramatic gesture of insurrection to follow another...

...What is the difference here...

...On such issues Leftist ideology supplied the theory of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolution, and the Gaullists supplied the strategy of nationalist Realpolitik...

...In other words, it was Michel Debre (the former finance minister, who is now foreign minister), the bankers, and the government planners and technocrats who were most satisfied, not the workers or the average consumer...

...Another aspect of French public life also takes on special significance in the light of the current turmoil: the continuous expression in most organs of the press, radio and tv of some distilled principles of Left-wing thought...

...Meanwhile, under an apparently cynical government openly practicing international Realpolitik and the technocratic economy of abundance, the moral vacuum was being filled, particularly among the students...

...The essence of the matter is that Gaullism cut off the head and arms of the Western Alliance in France...

...call it capitalist or bourgeois or liberal, it meant vaguely what Americans mean when they refer to the free world but it meant something...

...Commissions and leader groups met constantly, and virtually continuous debates went on in the large amphitheaters...

...It was now possible for Jean Paul Sartre to announce at the Sor-bonne, as he did, that this revolution was for Socialism and democracy, and that the slogan should no longer be the dictatorship of the proletariat because that had too often come to mean a dictatorship over the proletariat...

...Removed as a foreign spectator from the excitement of direct action and the ecstasy of direct democracy, one can entertain second thoughts while there is still time for them...

...the short run prospect, however—even assuming his success at the polls next week?is that he will wake up one day to find French national interests being administered by Left-wing ideologues and not by himself...

...What filled it was the message of Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, the gospel of Marcuse and the other intellectual leaders of the American New Left...

...We ask ourselves what is this "new conception of a society based on full democracy, a liaison of Socialism and liberty . . ." that Sartre announced to its student leaders...

...The Chinese speak of an organized international revolution...

...My own guess is that the revolutionary surge of the students came at this time in large part as a response to events in Czechoslovakia...

...But the latter, as far as Western observers could see, was chiefly the demagogic tool of aureally democracy...

...This was the essential message, as translated into public opinion, of Jacques Servan-Schreiber's widely read book, Le Deft Americain...