Marching on Tuesday, February 10

Did the Minister Blink?

On Monday night, February 9, the radio reported that Valérie Pécresse, minister of higher education and research, had withdrawn the reform, the one that would double most professors’ teaching load and maybe let a precious few do some research. “Precious few?” Another goal of the government is to reduce the numbers of employees at universities by about half. I can do the arithmetic like you. If you took half the professors and gave them half the teaching they now do in order to do research, the number of hours in front of students for the teaching half would have to be more than tripled, to keep things even, and that can’t be done without turning the professors into video displays. So very few people will be able to have the research status.

A bit later in the evening, the word was that there would be a period to think about how the decree would be applied, but it would be applied next September not matter what. Tuesday evening, on television, she was holding firm to her reform, though David Pujadas, the newscaster for the state television station, stumbled over the words, as if he had read it both ways during the day and remembered other words from yesterday. Is she wavering? This cannot be good for her career. Sarkozy likes backbone, at least in others. Of course he ran off to Baghdad to say that France is important and that as the US withdraws from Iraq, French businesses should line up for contracts. He could have said that from his own front steps. But his being there and not here meant that he wasn't around to fire Pécresse in time to keep us from voting to continue the strike. So what is he trying to achieve by letting us continue? Will he let us completely ruin ourselves by losing a semester for our students, then step in, dissolve the public universities, which we have already closed down, found new private Universities and hire us all back but without tenure or pensions? Private universities funded by the state, you ask? There are odder things.

An Allegory Sets Out

Tuesday’s march was odd, and makes me think paranoid thoughts. The number of students and faculty in the boulevards was huge: 50,000, according to us. The police number is lower, but everyone agrees that the demonstration was big. Across France other cities had their demonstrations as well, so 100,000 altogether. Remember, this is a movement of professors who would rather shelter from courants d’air in libraries. We made more noise this time. It rained, but there were drums, flags, and ambiance. All that was fine.

We started in from of the Sorbonne. That should have been fine too. We marched towards the Assemblée Nationale, quite as though my wife’s thoughts from last week had found their echo in the heads of all the organizers. “The University, led by Wisdom takes its Complaints to the Seat of Representative Government” could be an allegorical painting with a bare breasted woman marching along representing knowledge accompanied by frolicking and naked undergraduates. At my Alma Mater, Stanford, at the very same moment, students have been protesting sweatshirts with the university logo made in sweatshops. They really do appear stark naked with the legend, "No sweatshirt/no sweatshop" in magic marker where a logo might go. What a great university! What a great climate! Here in Paris we must content ourselves with imagining oil-paintings: a sunbeam lights up the Sorbonne dome in the background. Isn’t that the painting that hangs next to the “Wreck of the Medusa” at the Louvre?

In the hierarchy of the Universities of Paris, 1 through 13, the Sorbonne means something. Paris 1 through 5 consider themselves to be at the top of this ladder of respect. The hierarchy is reflected in names and geography. Paris 1 is also called Panthéon Sorbonne. Paris 2 is also called Panthéon Assas. Paris 3 is Sorbonne Nouvelle. Paris 4 is Paris IV-Sorbonne. Paris 5 is Paris V Descartes but has a wing of the Sorbonne building. None of this would make sense on a sweatshirt, but they all cling to the heart of the old Latin Quarter and that is what matters here. Three of them lay claim to the Sorbonne by name and three (not the same three) occupy space there. Two of them make a claim to the Panthéon, which can be interpreted as an aspiration—many great thinkers have ended up in that tomb—but not as a working address. I can only guess at the significance of the Roman numerals.

The Sorbonne is in fact a building or an idea, but not a university. It has courtyards like a French palace and there is a handsome domed chapel in the middle of it that in non-religious, modern France, serves as an exhibition space. In pre-revolutionary France and in the days of the counter-reformation, when the oldest parts were built, the chapel served as the spiritual nerve center of what was essentially a clerical training ground preparing young men for the church but also for administration. Cardinal Richelieu, one of the inventors of the French State administration, the embodiment of Church and State indivisible and as one flesh, and the heavy of the Three Musketeers—d’Artagnan and his friends dueled and drank, but eventually learned to serve France and Richelieu, not the king and queen—is buried, or rather entombed there (he’s well off the ground in a huge curving marble coffin, decorated, with a statue of himself, bigger than life size, reclining, but undead, on his final resting spot).

All those universities want a piece of that aura and living past (undead past), so they are willing to share the name or address. We want that aura too. In 1968 the students occupied the Sorbonne and held congresses in its amphitheaters. Last Tuesday, the “forces of order” were out in large numbers to keep that from happening again. We did not really start at the Sorbonne, but near it, in the rue Soufflot. Maybe I am too pessimistic. Maybe I am too American to take struggling over symbols of the past with the right degree of irony. But when you should be starting at the Sorbonne, and then don’t, it seems bad. It was better to start at Jussieu, one of the post-revolutionary, 1968 buildings, lower on the hierarcy, and really start there.

The route negotiated between the demonstration organizers and the Préfecture de Police did not take us directly to the Assemblée Nationale. The quickest route would have been down the Boulevard St. Michel to the Boulevard St. Germain then left against the traffic, to the Assemblée that faces the Place de la Concorde from the left side of the Seine. That route would have taken us past a succession of fashionable shops and cafés in a crowded part of town: the Lipp, the Deux Maggot, the Flore. But instead we went up the Boulevard St. Michel against the usual sense of the traffic, to the Boulevard Montparnasse then all the way to the Boulevard des Invalides from which we would have had to come back, along the Seine to the Assemblée, a very long way. The police send demonstrations where they please apparently, the sense of the traffic be damned. But why this route?

The route started out in a part of Paris any American tourist will know. I amused myself taking pictures of Ernest Hemingway’s haunts with my department’s clever signs quoting him quoting John Donne. It’s either in A Moveable Feast or The Sun Also Rises, or both, that the Hemingway-like character, or Ernest Hemingway himself, drinking and feeling sorry for himself at the Closerie des Lilas, looks at the statue of Marshal Ney and thinks of lost causes. Then there’s the Dome, and the Select and the Rotonde and the Coupole, all cafés with literary associations, and good for a demonstration.

An Allegory led into the Desert by the Forces of Order

Things took a sinister turn at about the Dome. Across the street from it is the Boulevard Raspail with Honoré de Balzac’s statue in it. I had to wait for my wife to meet me there. She eventually found me, but not till I had stood in front of the riot police long enough to appreciate how thoroughly they had blocked that route back to the Boulevard St. Germain and the Assemblée Nationale.

By the time we got to the Boulevard des Invalides, the purpose of the route from a police point of view, had become clear. There are some big old institutions along the way, but nobody lives there. No one is on the sidewalks. You might as well be demonstrating under the old West Side Highway on a weekend. Why bother? The Invalides itself, of course, is a military site. Usually there are tourists, but not in the rain and not in the outlying structures we walked along. We passed low buildings where once crippled soldiers lived and now some obscure military function takes place. On the side away from the Invalides, the long handsome streets lead to ministries and embassies. The CRS had blocked them more seriously than they had blocked the Boulevard Raspail. They had jammed heavy metal grids twenty feet tall between the houses. The armored men stood behind those grids and behind them they had parked their trucks in long ranks with only alleys, one man wide, between. Each thoroughfare had become a police labyrinth. Suppose we rioted and threw our tens of thousands against the grids. Suppose we got through. The police could smack one demonstrator at a time in the narrow spaces created by those trucks. We might have the boulevard with the golden dome of the Invalides in sight, but no one was looking. They had the narrow streets that led to the ministries and the Assemblée.

Giving Significance to an Allegory who cannot reach her Goal

Symbolically, I can turn this to our favor, though I am not sure what good it will do. Back when Baron Haussmann expanded the system of Paris boulevards in the 1850s and 1860s, he had revolutions in mind. He made the boulevards wide and straight, cutting through the twisted streets of old neighborhoods to allow artillery and cavalry to move through the city. The cannon could destroy any barricade the insurgents might build in narrow places. Tragically, so the analysis goes, in 1871, in the bloodiest Paris uprising, the communards retreated away from Haussmann’s boulevards into the northeast of Paris around the Père Lachaise Cemetery where Haussmann’s plans had never reached. Having vastly overrun his funds he was fired in 1869. There was no possibility of sufficient profits from his operations in the humbler neighborhoods anyway. The communards felt safe barricaded in their narrow streets, but they were surrounded. And during a bloody week in May, 1871, the French army advanced block by block and massacred them. Usually the dead are numbered at 20,000, though some say 10,000 and some say 100,000. Through the 1920s, the forces of order controlled the boulevards. Strikers were restricted to a narrow strip of sidewalk in front of their place of work.

Since 1935 and the the Front Populaire, however, it is the demonstrators who have taken possession of the Boulevards with wall to wall displays of numbers and determination. And now we have the government huddled behind the barricades in the rich parts of town, when once revolutionaries sheltered in the poorer quarters. It is a bit of irony, but not much comfort when your demonstration, even led by Wisdom dressed for winter and accompanied by well behaved students, cannot reach the Seat of Representative Government.

The Flesh and Blood and Vocal Importance of Reaching the Assemblée Nationale

We learned later that Valérie Pécresse was defending her reform while we were demonstrating. Had we been shouting in the square next to the Assemblée, it would have been hard for her to maintain, along with the newspaper, Le Monde, that only a handful of mal content professors were raising objections and that the reforms could be carried out. But how could we get there? For the last two kilometers of our route we had been in a wide corridor without spectators and without exit. The portable fences (twenty feet high, no less!) and parked trucks and armored police stood in force across the Boulevard at the Varenne metro station. Old hands said the only thing to do was disperse. The sound trucks supplied by unions said we had been successful and now could go home. It did not look like success. It did not look like anything. A week before at the Panthéon, the demonstration had set out on a new route. The police were having none of that on Tuesday. We could go back to and invade the Sorbonne, maybe, but it was a long way, and we would have to march into ourselves for two kilometers.

My wife and I took the metro at Varenne to Champs-Élysées Clemenceau. There we changed for the number 1 line that would take us under the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre, and eventually home near La Bastille. We learned that the metro stations around the Assemblée Nationale had been blocked including Concorde, which is across the Seine from it. The police had taken no chances. There was no way in the world that our allegory was going to succeed on Tuesday.