May 2008
Paris, May 1968 and French youth was famously manning the barricades. It was a protest which began in the Universities, lead to running battles in the streets, a general strike and the ultimate collapse of the de Gaulle government.
With protest in the air, further demonstrations broke out across Europe while in America they were protesting the Vietnam war. The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia saw a fleeting glimmer of freedom before being crushed by Soviet tanks. In China, Mao was overseeing the worst excesses of the cultural revolution (while Western Maoists ignorantly espoused his doctrine). Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were also assassinated in 1968. Some year.
But back to those Paris barricades. The protests were, as protests generally are, anti-establishment: down with the bosses - i.e. anyone in a suit - who are capitalist pigs all, and the police, the tools of oppression, fascist pigs the lot of them.
(Plus ça change. Today’s protests may be against GM crops, oil wars or the destruction of the planet but the baddies are still the capitalist and “fascist” pigs.)
Of course we know that all this anti-establishment, anti- bourgeois rage is eventually tempered by marriages, mortgages and cleaning ladies.
"I hope that my children
will man their own barricades one day"
Perhaps that’s why we look back with a certain nostalgia on the long-haired, unwashed anger of the moment, the tatty banners with their great slogans.
Although students and CS gas are back on the streets of Paris as I write, it has been a long time since Western Europe was truly gripped by revolutionary fervour. Indeed it can be hard work, in the relatively comfortable, relatively free West to feel truly oppressed.
The great British playwright Tom Stoppard recently recalled how he tried to throw himself into the 60’s protests but having just witnessed tanks rolling into his homeland, Czechoslovakia, found it hard to empathise with the “oppression” in London. In the 1980’s I shared a flat in London with a left-wing South African refugee who, having fled a police force which shot demonstrators dead, found it hard to shout ‘fascist pigs’ at London Bobbies.
But the spirit of revolution has thrived elsewhere. As a foreign correspondent, I was lucky enough to watch crowds dismantling the Berlin Wall by hand and later I met my husband on the barricades surrounding the Russian parliament building, just feet from where Yeltsin was famously clambering on top of a tank in defiance of the right-wing coup attempt. To be part of these crowds was to witness what it means to be alive.
OK, it’s naïve to believe that practical economics and politics don’t play a greater role in the collapse of untenable regimes than a handful of brilliant slogans: Communism couldn’t sustain itself.
And, let’s face it, Nelson Mandela probably didn’t walk free just because we danced along to the Specials’ “Free-ee-ee... Nelson Man-DE-la”.
But let’s not give way entirely to cynicism either. Protest is essential. It is only our refusal to accept the way things are that keeps society alive and moving forward. Questioning the status quo and seeking to overturn it is what makes us intelligent beings.
Stop doing this and we might as well line-up to become delta-minuses in Huxley’s Brave New World.
Which is why my heart still gladdens at the sight of a bunch of angry students clutching (still badly made) placards, bringing traffic to a halt and getting in the way of those of us with deadlines to meet and dinner to get on the table.
At least they are tasting the spirit of revolt and if it’s against the size of their grants today it might be repression in Tibet tomorrow.
So although, like most parents, I bring up my children to respect the teachers and do as they say, I also sincerely hope that they will grow up to question and reject, to stand up and be counted and, if necessary, (peacefully) man their own barricades one day.
Of course the next generation of youth may be too fat to go out onto the streets and have to confine itself to virtual protests online.
But let’s hope the croonings of boy bands being pumped directly into their brains via their iPods doesn’t render them too comatose to care.
As graffiti on the 1968 Paris barricades proclaimed: “We don’t want a world where the certainty that we won’t die from hunger is exchanged for the risk of dying of boredom”.
Long live the revolution!
***********
You may have seen the picture of the English setter in last month’s Noticeboard, “abandoned by owner and looking for a good home”. He was chained up outside the owner’s property which was up for sale when we went to photograph him so, being soppy English animal lovers, we took him back with us to await the flood of calls offering him a good home. And the calls came in - but too late.He is so funny and clever and loveable that, even though the last thing we need is more animals, we couldn’t part with him. He’d been on his chain for three weeks when we collected him. Awful the way the French treat their dogs, isn’t it? Except - his owner was English.
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