Two Demonstrations Later

Demonstration of January 29, 2009

It is hard for Americans to understand how entirely Universities here depend on the government. In the US, with a history of just a few hundred years, there are so many famous universities and colleges that were founded and have thrived without government support, that the idea of a country so educated and so old where all the education is undertaken by the government, is outlandish. State and Federal support have been important to many American universities. Military contracts have sometimes created unbalanced budgets and been the targets of protests, but the universities and colleges have always had various sources for their funding, and with that variety, a good deal of wiggle room for negotiation whether it be in the face of a bossy state legislature, alumnae or students. That is not the case here where everything comes from one source. In all this time, didn’t someone have another idea? How about the Catholic Church? In a “lay” country with a proper separation of church and state, shouldn’t Catholic institutions have some kind of autonomy? Even at the Catholic schools, the salaries are mostly paid by the government, and if the buildings are the least bit historical, the roofs are repaired by the government, and so on and on. Did this start with Louis XIV? Did it start with Julius Caesar? Napoleon—all powerful intelligent men with a knack for top down organization. It’s an important question, but it isn’t my subject. And I certainly don’t want to irritate my French colleagues and friends by finding one or two rules about France that explain it thoroughly the way great Frenchmen, starting before Alexis de Tocqueville and never stopping after, have explained the US. My friends and colleagues here feel a thousand pressures and impulses that result in frustrating headlong rush of confrontation that we are suffering through. I can explain a readable few of those impulses by describing the strike and Paris in the strike, and that is all I intend to do here.

The personal in the monumental

I personally have been in two marches now in this strike cycle. The first took place on January 29, a cold day. My socks were too thin and I had the remains of the flu. The number of strikers was immense, over two million across France. That’s more than 3% of the whole population. Let’s call it 3.3%. What would that be in the States? Ten million? Is that the entire population of L.A. and its environs, Riverside, Irvine, Huntington Beach, and all the rest? Isn’t that all five boroughs of New York City with a bit of Northern New Jersey and Connecticut thrown in? Can anyone imagine all those people in the streets with their personal worries but united by a cause?

The personal and the monumental, that’s a theme of strikes. You are something tiny in something huge. Hugeness counts. The strike has to be too big for the Paris Boulevards. It has to overflow the wonderfully ordered spaces and make heavy going of getting from one monument to the next. It announces that something isn’t working. So if it is successful, you don’t move. But that brings us to the personal again. I had cold feet and rotten insides and at times had to listen to stupid slogans shouted in an accelerating rhythm reminiscent of something known as a locomotive cheer at my school. And we got nowhere, except from the sunny side of the Place de la Bastille to the shady side, a mistake, as far as I was concerned.

We danced a bit to keep warm. There is always a sound truck and disco music from someone else’s youth. And then there is talk. A linguistics friend explained the appeal of a poster that said “Obama, yes we can. Sarkozy, no weekend.” The explanation started with the crude contrast of the optimistic slogan of the new President of the United States with the memory of the unspeakably uninspiring prospect of working harder to gain more (travailler plus pour gagner plus) that in part won the presidency for Sarkozy here, a year and a half ago. But it’s the off homonym effect that does the trick. Weekend and we can with a French accent and flat intonation is almost the same sound. But erasing the difference between the rising can and the falling end sends American ears reeling delighted into the world of Chico Marx during one of his nuts dialogues with Groucho. That was the highpoint of the afternoon.

The importance of going somewhere

We did not get anywhere. The big industrial unions came before us in the march. They bring out the huge numbers and sound trucks and balloons and matching flags and printed banners, so I guess they deserve to go first. Their complaint is about “pouvoir d’achat,” which is to say the shrinking buying power of pay. Certainly that is related to our complaint in a general basket of woe. Certainly we all have a tendency to look at the bank bailout here—a staggering shift of the nation’s resources to institutions that seem already in control of a staggering proportion of those same resources—and wonder why them and not us? But beyond a general discontent, I am not sure how our professor cause is linked to their worker cause.

Of course, all I know about their complaint is what I read in the papers and see on TV. I suppose all they know about our complaint comes from the same sources. With disinformation flowing at a fast rate—the highly respectable Le Monde printed a fancifully low number for the hours a year we teach along with a ridiculously low number, 70, for the number of professors on strike in the country—we probably know nothing about each other. So we wait in the Place de la Bastille, while this or that group of the CFDT and the CGT march up the Boulevard Beaumarchais, and hope for the best. Not a good political plan, I think.

In the end, I only got a few hundred yards up the boulevard. I gave my end of my banner to a friendly biologist and took my cold feet and aching body home to two hot baths. I saw the strike on TV. Some of it had gotten all the way to the Place de l’Opera. And someone had lit fires there. I couldn’t tell what was burning, but it was smoky and nasty and some people were milling about. The fires were no more menacing than a burning leaf pile in a gutter in the suburb where I went to school, but the camera person had gotten down low to film the fire showing flames as high as the third floor windows of the famous buildings around the Tony Garnier’s theater. Paving stones and people walking brought a proper scale to the picture and so in the end it all just looked dirty and disorganized. No one on TV mentioned the professors on strike, let alone the bi-cultural “Yes we can. No weekend.” Aside from the huge number, two million, reduced in the TV report by the accompanying official police estimate to one million, the story seemed easily to fall into the category of one more nonsensical Paris strike. What news story could possibly make sense of professors or workers involved with some fires in front of the beautiful Opera house?

Demonstration of February 5, 2009

My second demonstration was last Thursday, February 5, exactly a week after the first. Maybe this will become a pattern. This one was just professors. That seemed a good thing because we would not vanish into the larger, if impressive, organization of the big unions. We need them, and I hope we can be useful to them, but it is good to have our own demonstration that represents our own specific problems. Last Thursday was also warm and sunny and my wife, also a university professor, came with me. The flu was definitely over. Signs on the small scale of demonstration experience looked good for the afternoon.

My bunch of faculty and students started at our building near Place de la Bastille and crossed the Seine on my favorite bridge, Pont Sully Morland—it’s the one with the tremendous view of the spider-leg end of Notre Dame that’s in so many post cards—to Jussieu. Jussieu? Jussieu is a giant modern university building that my university, Paris 7, used to share with another university, Paris 6 (yes, my readers, the names are as bad as that, and yes you can ask yourselves how would anyone organize a fundraiser around such minimal bureaucratic identities? There will be no Bull-dogs, no Tigers, no Trojans, no Huskies, Buckeyes, Ducks, Cardinal or Crimson for us and our tens of thousands of students). The ugly building has a big space in front with a fountain and a metro station, a good place for a demonstration.

Going somewhere is important and so is the route

From Jussieu, the planned march would take us to the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in the rue Descartes. “Excellent,” said my friend the linguist, “we will go to the street named for the man who taught the French to think logically, and in no other way!” He was referring to an unflattering caricature of French thinkers who, having perfected the method inherited from René Descartes, rigidly consider only one answer possible to any complex question.

The route made sense, in the manner of Paris demonstration routes where geography, history and people in the streets join to make a nuanced political message. It may have made sense in a psychological way too. Circling around the target ministry may soften up the minister inside the way American Indians circling George Custer may have worn him down a bit. As a way of getting from one place to another, however, it made no sense at all. From Jussieu we took the rue Linné to the rue Geoffroy St. Hilaire, turned sharp right into the rue Censier and crossed the wide end of the rue Monge. We turned right again into the rue Claude Bernard and then right into the rue d’Ulm. We walked up to the Panthéon and around it to the right to arrive at the ministry in the rue Descartes, another right turn. Even without a map, you can tell from all those right turns that we went in a spiral, not in a line.

Reading the Route

But here’s how it makes sense: the professors of the 21st century carry their complaints from Jussieu, which was built as a result of the huge demonstrations, and near revolution, of May 1968, through streets, which, with the exception of rue d’Ulm, which was named for a battle, carry the names of French scholars from all the centuries, to the seat of government responsible for their wellbeing, progress and good work. The government is thus reminded of the triumphs of French learning, while being menaced with the memory of May 1968.

May 1968 looms large in this picture. The French university system was hugely expanded then to accommodate a growing student population with growing aspirations. After 1968, the University of Paris was no longer synonymous with the Sorbonne, but became the Universities of Paris 1 through 13. Those numbered universities are not just some sign of a breakdown in bureaucratic imagination, but, in a sense, commemorate a great moment when the government of France committed itself to higher public education for more than just a small elite.

Our route would take us past Censier, the campus of Paris 3, also known as Sorbonne Nouvelle, one of several universities split off from the expanded Sorbonne after 1968. Then we walked up the rue d’Ulm, location of the École Normale Supérieure, where Jean-Paul Sartre and many of my colleagues and my wife were part of the tiny and very select and very privileged student body. At the École Normale (in fact there are several of them around the country), the students actually get paid by the government. There is a small faculty that gives them courses, and they have resources and a reputation to invite people of interest. They ship the students around the world to interesting campuses as well. My wife didn’t go to the one in the rue d’Ulm, it was only for men in her day, but she got into the women’s one and became a civil servant for Éducation Nationale at the age of twenty. They sent her to Stanford, which is partly how we met. Now that you have to work over 40 years to get a full pension, it is hard to imagine anyone in the academic world where you need a couple of advanced degrees before you have a permanent job, except these wunderkind whose careers sometimes start in their teens, working long enough. I myself will have to work till I’m well over 70. After the rue d’Ulm, our route will skirt the Pantheon, which is the huge, domed, neo-classical building that Louis XV built to the Glory of God and in thanks for recovering from an illness in 1744. He built it to hold the remains of St. Geneviève, the Patron saint of the city, but it wasn’t completed till the Revolution of 1789 was well underway, so its purpose was changed. Now, it holds the bodies of the great men and women of France. From that place, laden with all this history and symbolism, so many scientists, so many writers, we would arrive finally at the ministry.

At Jussieu, we took a little time to sort ourselves out. My wife is a professor at the University of Paris 3, or Sorbonne Nouvelle, and we spent the rest of the afternoon between her department and mine. It was warm and collegial. There was much talk of the “I have been hoping to meet you for years because I so admired your article,” variety. I met a distinguished colleague who greeted me with great, if funereal elegance: “It is always a pleasure to see you, even on so bleak an occasion.” But then we looked behind us, down the southern sloping rue d’Ulm at the splendid city in the sun, and did not feel bleak in the least. A wag said, “We are marching to our own funeral,” but he is the least funereal of men. We sometimes made a great noise, “that’s right, it will scare them,” but mostly we strolled along talking like professors freed from footnotes and evidence.

There were some funny stories. A colleague of mine, we’ll call her Lapierre, said that her father always refused to go near demonstrations. “You never know with a crowd, someone might shout, ‘down with Lapierre,’ and then were would I be?” I thought of a pillow attack my freshman dorm made on a neighboring dorm that stopped when a professor with a stentorian voice said “what do you intend to do with that?” My friend dropped the brick he had been about to hurl through a window, and looked at the ground shamefaced. I guess somewhere I agree with Monsieur Lapierre: anything can happen in a crowd. It needn’t all be bad. An English woman, married to a French professor said that it was her first demonstration, she had always felt alienated or frightened, “but what a lovely walk, I’ve never seen the Panthéon from this angle because of the traffic.” A mother walking her small child home from school, said to him, “You’ve already seen a demonstration?” the way you would calm a horse or dog that had shied at something new, but that he or she better get used to. She led him right into it either to inoculate him to its effects or as early revolutionary training.

Strikes and Lieux de Mémoire

When we were in the rue d’Ulm I told the story about the street that Pierre Nora tells. He is the historian and editor of the monumental volumes of French History wrapped in his concept, and published under his title, Lieux de Mémoire. In his notion, the past history of certain places gives a cultural background to lives that were once dominated by the nearly unconscious seasonal, religious, or dynastic rituals of the “Longue Durée,” the historical concept that concentrated French minds a generation before Nora. Nora pointed out that with written history, less and less of our culture remains as lived memory. With computers, we risk becoming amnesiacs ourselves, except at certain places that call forth the history of events and motivations and where we find ourselves innovating our actions or following historic models, like proper conscious modern people, but only to a point, because it is the place and its history that offer certain choices and not others.

In Pierre Nora’s story he was walking with his uncle in the street on a dark winter night. They walked to or from some entirely ordinary event in the life of a numerous family that had long lived in the neighborhood. Was he twelve years old, fifteen? In any case he was young and an adolescent or arriving at adolescence. His uncle required him to kneel in the snow before the gates of the École Normale Supérieure. “This is where you will go to school when you are old enough, here is where you will contribute, with so many others, to the glory of French Letters.” Nora dutifully prepared for the competitive entrance exams, but he was not accepted. His entire career can be seen as revenge for that early failure. His volumes are probably the most important event in French history writing in the last thirty years, and they include beautiful rich articles by all the people who got into the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) when he didn’t. That is certainly how my ENS, Ulm, historian boss of many years, spoke of Pierre Nora. “Poor Pierrot, he didn’t get in.” Of course Nora’s energy and originality may be the saving grace or silver lining of that failure. He tells the story with sufficient self-mocking irony to let you take it either way.

When we passed the École, there were about fifteen of the present occupants there to greet us, some suspended on the iron railings by one hand and balanced on the low wall that supports the rails on one foot. They had a well-organized chant and a banner that said who they were, as if anyone else would be hanging like that in that place. The banner said they were on strike, but they did not budge from their perch to join us. Their position as employees of the state, and as the pre-chosen elite of research, puts them in a very ambiguous position when the universities strike. In 1968, however, the students at Ulm made their elegant building a nerve center of the movement. They must have relinquished their hold on those iron railings at some point. But at some point just before that, they probably swung suspended between the choices offered by the historic place.

When we got to the Panthéon, students yelled that Valérie Pécresse, that’s the minister of education, should go straight to her reward in that pale cold sepulcher of great French thinkers, and leave us alone. “Not bad,” said my wife. Some yelled briefly, “Sarko, Sarko, les jeunes auront ta peau.” [Sarkozy, Sarkozy, the young will have your hide.] “That will do it,” said my wife. “No government can stand to be thought of as against its own youth.”

Paris: nostalgia and romance

We had had enough by the Panthéon, and it was the end of the planned itinerary, so we peeled off to go to a café. Something else had happened to my wife and me too. We were overcome with a kind of romantic warmth. We had courted in just these streets in the academic year 1986-1987, the season of the demonstrations against the reforms of Minister Devaquet. Devaquet au piquet ( Devaquet go stand in the corner), is what the high school students (it was their turn that time) had shouted. One night we had drunk weak rum punch and rattled cans of rice to samba rhythms, and sung about butterflies and Brazil in a club near the Panthéon. We had emerged to find the street full of burnt up automobiles, set alight by our first kiss. So like people in a Paris movie, we went to a café hand in hand. It was in fact the café where we had our first Paris rendez-vous, months before that kiss. We drank tea and talked about our children and watched the riot police scampering about outside blocking our view of the Luxemburg Gardens.

Paris: here and now

The riot police ran this way, then that way. I thought of Henry David Thoreau: “behold a marine [read riot policeman], such a man as an American [or French] government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts…” What had happened to these fellows to make them huff and puff in their body armor? There was a great roar. “That makes them afraid. We should make more noise,” said my professor wife. We were back in today and with the demonstrators.
We went outside. Our demonstration had not disbanded, as announced, in front of the ministry or at the Panthéon. It had continued. It had innovated, it was on a riff or in a groove or had jumped the rails. Anyway, it was marching in good order down the rue de la Sorbonne. We could see our colleagues and students a couple of hundred yards away across the place de la Sorbonne. The riot police had to contain them somehow. This was driving them to do all that undignified, armor rattling trotting. How to contain the demonstration, yet not confront it? The police took up a position at the Boulevard St. Michel edge of the Place de la Sorbonne. They looked determined.
But it did them no good. There are many streets that lead out to the boulevard from the Sorbonne, and the demonstration took one. Then it was in the boulevard. Schools were letting out. Businesses were closing. The traffic was building up to its twice-daily crisis and one of the main arteries of Paris was blocked. The van of the demonstration reached the Boulevard St. Germain. It turned left, the first left turn all day, I think, and walked into the traffic of the six lane boulevard that serves the most expensive parts of Paris, where most of the ministries and embassies are. It terminates at the Palais Bourbon or Assemblée Nationale, where the parliament sits. Two great arteries were now blocked. And it was colleagues and students from my small department that were wading through the cars with their delirious bi-cultural signs, “Obama: yes we can. Sarkozy: no weekend.”

But hold on. They had gotten too far ahead. The rest of the demonstration, huge, filling the Boulevard St. Michel, a demonstration not before seen properly in the small streets named for mere scholars and scientists, was now pressing to the edges of the canyon of buildings named for the Arc Angel and dragon slayer. Pressure mounted calmly the way it would in a Baldwin locomotive or the engines of the Titanic. Pressure built but resulted in no movement forward and no turning left. The demonstration edged into the intersection with the Boulevard St. Germain. People sat down. The secretary of my department (secretary is hardly the word, adjutant general, quartermaster, shadow government) was on the phone. My zealous colleagues had gone up the Boulevard St. Germain against traffic to the Odéon, the neo-classical state theater. They had gotten lost and were returning. Why didn’t the demonstration turn left and follow them. “It should,” said my wife, who understands the media and knows that TV will show nothing less than a disaster of traffic and students menaced by cars. “We’ll see some student find a political vocation. He’ll shout something decisive and march at the traffic. She’ll clamber onto her boyfriend’s shoulders and wave us all into the proper direction.”

It didn’t happen. One bus got through. “I can take that home,” said my wife. “Let’s stay and see what happens next.” I said, still hoping for that student, I guess. Wondering if any light boned and inspired girl had had the forethought to attach herself to a really strong and steady boy.

Masses of professors and students backed up in the Boulevard St. Michel were waiting patiently for just that. It might have happened. “Wait till the media get here,” someone said. But a demonstration has to go somewhere. Many people were on phones. Someone took charge enough to turn the demonstration with the traffic to the right. We marched along for a while. It is the way home. Our children would need to eat. We would have to oversee their homework. And then, for us, all the tension had gone out of the day. Oh, I’m glad that all those people didn’t march against traffic. One overly impatient driver, a crushed student: that would be terrible. But the demonstration longed for something decisive and didn’t get it. The strike will go on. Sarkozy is nowhere near negotiating. “There was a massive strike against your government last week. There were strikes today…” said one of the newscasters interviewing the President of the Republic in the evening. “There are many strikes in France,” he replied, like any jaded tourist or foreign businessman who has had trouble getting to the airport, but has gotten what he wanted from the trip anyway. That was it for us on the news. Sarkozy occupied most of prime time answering questions from tame journalists.

“Too bad about my colleagues and the Odéon,” I said to my wife. “Why the Odéon anyway, it’s a dead end, up a side street off the Boulevard St. Germain. It’s a nice building, one more monument, but it’s on the way nowhere.”
“1968 started there,” she said. “It was a good choice. This government hates 1968 and they fear it. But the better choice would have been to arrive at the end of the Boulevard St. Germain where the Assemblée Nationale is. That would have blocked traffic for plenty of time. The media would have come. There are elections in a few months. With internet and Youtube the young vote. Coucou, they could have said. Are you with us or not? No representatives can afford to be against the young.”

Of course, our students are just learning how to get history, geography, people in the streets, memory and place to mean something. And it has been a good long time since professors did anything of the kind too. We have a definite advantage over the government, at least one that makes me feel good. “Sauvez nos profs,” said one of the crude banners, made with melted crayons on a bed sheet. “That one touches me the most,” said my wife.