The Rest Is History - 354: Paris 1968: The Return of De Gaulle

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Charles de Gaulle was a war hero in the First World War, and, having refused to accept his government’s armistice with Nazi Germany, became the voice of the French Resistance during the Second World War. But how did France’s largest uprising since the Paris Commune come to happen during his presidency? Join Tom and Dominic in the second part of our tour of Paris, as they look at de Gaulle’s role in the events of May 1968, and how he eventually overcame the protests. Read more about Tom and Dominic's trip to Paris, in partnership with Wise: https://wise.com/campaign/restishistory *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the second part of our episode on the events of 1968. And we are literally in Paris. We're in the heart of the Latin Quarter, where the students all kicked off. Today, we're going to continue sitting in the cafe, continue our chat. We're going to be heading off to the Champs-Élysées. And it is all thanks to WISE, the international account that is built to save you money around the world. Whether it's with a card or your phone, you can spend like a local Dominic.

Have I ever said that before? I think I might have done. In 150 countries? Have I mentioned that as well? Always. 150 countries. Brilliant, Tom. So you may remember, dear listeners,

that last time we were talking about the events of May 1968, we were talking about the outbreak of the student protests à Nanterre, outside Paris, about the way in which they spread to the heart of the left bank, to the Sorbonne, the overreaction of the French authorities, the violence of the police,

the violence of the students in response, the sense that the government had lost control, then the wave of strikes, and we ended by saying... And two-thirds of the country is on strike. Two-thirds of the country is on strike. And this sort of sense that...

Well, revolution is in the air, Tom, I suppose you would say. And the man we haven't really talked about very much... It's the general himself. It's the general himself, the president of France. He's been president...

I mean, you quoted that line, didn't you, last time? What's it, 10 years? That's enough. Yeah. That people were chanting. So de Gaulle, he's been in power for 10 years,

but of course his career is so much longer so for those people who don't know de gaulle was born in the northeast of france in lille in 1890 he served with distinction in the first world war he was captured by the germans at verdun at the great kind of symbolic showdown of the of the french and german armies he in 1940, the embodiment of French resistance to the occupation. Of course, he went to England, famously not a great fan of England or the English, I think it's fair to say, Tom. And then he came back, famously, marches down the Champs-Élysées, where we'll be later, in the liberation in 1944, and claims that France has liberated itself. Doesn't want to give any credit to the Americans or British. Any credit at all.

Which is all part of his belief in the glory of France. He knows that's a bit of a fiction, but he thinks it's a necessary fiction for France to be itself. And then he very briefly runs France from 1944 to 1946, but he's impatient with parliamentary politics. He's not cut out for it. And then he disappears into retirement. But then in 1950... Columnie des Egl in the sort of la france profonde yeah it's in the heart of france at colombia this is the place that gives him his mystical connection

to the soul of france to ordinary french men and women and it's partly because he has this supposed mystical connection that in 1958 when france has got itself into a terrible mess in algeria there's a coup effectively the fourth republic is replaced by the fifth republic and de gaulle comes in as a pretty autocratic president because the fifth republic enshrines the president as basically a monarch as a monarch he's filling that king-shaped hole in the French constitution. Exactly, exactly. And de Gaulle is also,

I mean, he's not just the personification of France and French patriotism. He's also the personification of what we talked about last time, which was that paternalistic, patriarchal, sort of quite authoritarian public culture that governs French life more generally.

You know, the general. Everybody looks up to the general, the president. But he has, I mean, famously, he has a certain sense of France. Yeah. And he means that in an almost mystical sense. The idea that there is a French identity that transcends the actual lived reality of people who live in France. Yes.

To a degree. Yes, absolutely. And his sense of France, I think think does not include poets and mime artists long-vading university bill no definitely doesn't involve long hair so you may ask well what's he doing doing all this so his first reaction is that this is just childishness and he says to his ministers uh the 5th of may when a child gets angry and oversteps the mark the best way of calming him down is by giving him a smack so excellent um parenting advice very good parenting advice two days later he's been sent a petition by french nobel prize winners telling him to go easy on the students and to give the students what they want and he is enraged by this and he says to his ministers you seem terrorized

in front of these children do not forget that a minister of the interior must know how if necessary to give the order to fire so he's he's coming out with this very sort of ferocious stuff but actually of course he knows that this will never you know no one's going to act on this and in some ways i think gregor is actually paralyzed he doesn't know what to do he's really out of touch i mean he's actually a very literate and very cultivated man who goes out who's always gone out of his way to read the latest fiction to be up with you know the latest cultural developments but he's in his mid-70s yeah and by the late 1960s for completely understandable reasons he is out of touch with the mood in the in french but also the the swiss are defining themselves against the kind of ideals of of patriotism that de gaulle embodies and that must be bewildering to him absolutely it is

absolutely so as you said he's been off to romania on a state visit he insists on going ahead with this visit to romania well because he's very keen isn't't he, on situating France between the NATO and the Warsaw Pact. And Ceausescu in Romania is a kind of slightly loose cannon. Yeah. I mean, to a degree. And so he's kind of hoping to convert Ceausescu to a Gaullist understanding. I think it's fair to say Nicolae Ceausescu is not a friend of the rest of history. No, not at all.

So, yeah, right, exactly. De Gaulle has been to Romania. He returns to France on the 18th of May. And he says, you know, he's been, when in Romania, by the way,

he hasn't been sleeping. He's been lying awake at night, sort of, full of anxiety about what's going, what on earth is going on in Paris. He returns and he says, this anarchy is absolutely nonsense, and he calls it famously,

chienlit. Which is a dog has shat in the bed basically so it's soiling the bed yeah which is obviously not i mean it's a very famous remark but it's not best calculated to endear him to the student protesters because basically i mean the way of translating i suppose would be to say they're bed wetters they're wetting the bed yeah on the 24th of may he gives a very he decides he's going to break the logjam. He gives this very, very rambling speech, wittering about everybody wants more participation in life. We'll set up councils, all this stuff.

This is no good at all. More protests, people shouting, Adieu de Gaulle in the streets. Now, actually, at this point, he's also got into difficulties because Daniel Kohn-Bendit, Danny the Red, the student radical who's become the face of the sort of the left wing of the student protests. He has been on a speaking tour, you know,

there's that one of those very late 60s speaking tours where he's probably pitching up on panel shows with Mick Jagger and Mary Whitehouse or something. Yeah, editor of the Times. Exactly, exactly. And the French, now you were saying last time he's actually technically a german citizen yeah and he's jewish right so the spectacle of jews being deported from france by the french police is an incredible you know incendiary That is a very raw wound, isn't it? So the government bans him from returning to France.

This inflames the students. So you have yet more violence. The violence is now spreading to the right bank of the River Seine, by the way. Has anyone died? Yes. So two people die in total, I think it's fair to say. One guy is killed by a fragment of a grenade. And the other person, I can't actually remember how he died.

I think he's run over by a van or something. But actually, you know what, Tom? I mean, compared to the commune, Paris Commune. Compared with the Paris Commune. Compared with the repression of the Prague Spring later in the year. Compared with the riots in the US. So the riots that summer that greet the news of the assassination of Martin Luther King, where scores of people die.

I mean, the death toll, the CRS are cracking people's heads, but actually they don't really. So to that degree, they're not behaving like the SS. No, they're not like the SS. I mean, there's an irony here, isn't there? We talked in the last episode about the memory of the Parisian police killing Algerian demonstrators in 1961. You know, that's barely remembered.

It's mentioned in that film Caché that we were talking about. But the events of May 1968 in which effectively... Well, Caché is made by an Austrian director, Hanneke. But it's May 1968. It's the theatre, it's the spectacle of the student occupations that lingers in the memory. But, of course, at this this point if you're a french politician or a police chief you don't know that this is gonna that it's that

it's pure spectacle and you think given france's history this is really running out of control i mean this is going to be the paris commune so it's at this point that the army are making contingency plans to reoccupy the to reoccupy the capital which is what happened with the commune the commune yeah the bloody i mean if that had happened of course you can only imagine what the death toll would be they are planning they're readying troops outside the city to retake the capital now at the same time they're pursuing different tracks so at the same time the government said okay let's talk to the unions let's get the workers back to work now we mentioned this last time they have what's called

the Grinnell Accords which is in the 25th and 26th of May one of the negotiators actually is a friend of the rest of history louche lounge lizard Jacques Chirac yes was he monsieur six minutes well there's different claims right so he's either Mr. 3, 4, 5, or 6 minutes, shower included, which is a reference to his interactions with his lady friends. Exactly. Okay, that's a complete tangent.

Chirac and Co. They negotiate a deal with the unions. We mentioned this last time. They'll get an increase in the minimum wage. They'll get all these sort of goodies. The head of the CGT, the big communist union, Georges Segui,

he goes to Bilanco, to the Renault plant, and says, brilliant news. I've negotiated this fantastic deal. And people say, no, not good enough. You know, at that point,

the mood has become, it's this, the intoxication of protest. Drunk with the sense of its own possibility. I think that's a very good way of putting it, actually. I mean, the references to intoxication may sound that we're being, you know, unfair, too critical. But I think there is always a sense with any protest, with any revolution, that these things acquire a momentum that nobody can quite explain.

Nobody knows what's going on. And great fun. And great fun, exactly so. I mean, that is a key part of it. Well, we're here in May, right? I mean, it's a beautiful day. It's a lovely place. You can absolutely see that people are having a tremendous

time. They're occupying buildings. They're wearing polo necks. They're talking about obscure philosophers. What could be more fun? They are demanding the impossible yeah now the government faced with this and the rejection of its offer to the unions has basically run out of options there is a sort of sense at this point at the end of may that you know nobody knows what's going on nobody knows how it'll be resolved and that de gaulle has shot his bolt

that he is an old man. He is completely irrelevant. François Mitterrand, who had lost the last presidential election to de Gaulle in 1965, he says, there is no more state. You know, the state has failed. I am ready to assume power. His rival on the left, Gaico Pierre Mendez France, he says, I'm also ready to assume power and I'll work with the communists. And the communists at this point, having previously stayed out of it, they now say, right, let's organize a

massive demonstration. So they're jumping on the bandwagon. Yeah. I mean, I know you were surprised when I said this, the communists have never been a fan of all this business. They had always thought this is bourgeois nonsense, but right now they think the government has collapsed. The government has failed. The Fifth Republic is dead. We need to put ourselves in pole position for what comes next. So they plan this big demonstration for the 29th of May. Now, on the night of the 28th of May,

de Gaulle is at the Elysee Palace. He has completely lost control of events. He is in what his biography... And the Elysee Palace is not far from where we're sitting now. No, we could... Well, we'll get a taxi to it later, but we could walk. I mean, the violence has already spread onto the right bank of the river. So it is coming closer and closer to the Elysee. The prospect of people storming the Elysee seems very real. I mean, it's happened before in French history. Well, so the shadow of Versailles, of the storming of the Bastille, I mean, these are

the canonical events in French history. And de Gaulle has a profound sense of French history, as we've mentioned. So that night, his biographer, Julian Jackson, says he spends the night in a state of, and I quote, apocalyptic despair.

He makes three, well, several interesting historical comparisons. First of all, his wife is, by the way, Yvonne, is in floods of tears. She thinks they're going to be lynched. They're going to be guillotined. Who knows what's going to happen? He says to his wife is, by the way, Yvonne, is in floods of tears. She thinks they're going to be lynched. They're going to be guillotined. Who knows what's going to happen? He says to his aides, this is like 1940.

I remember 1940. This is a moment of decision. But he then says to his aides, I don't have the energy anymore to deal with this. I'm an old man. I'm not a young man anymore. The second thing he says to his aides, says the roots of this are deep in france so we as a nation have never recovered from being beaten at waterloo by the english and at sedon by the prussians you know this is deep this is deep stuff tom and then his aides say to him you

we should flee to versailles you know go to versailles get out the city and he says i am not louis philippe who we talked about. The pear. It looked like a pear. The pear-shaped last king of France. We talked about him in our 1848 episode with Chris Clark. He ran away. De Gaulle says, I'm not going to run away.

So he lies awake all night, 29th of May. This is the day that the communists and the big communist union, the CGT, are prepared for a big march um the police are expecting 50 000 the communists claim there are about 400 000 people there marching through paris chanting adieu de gaulle goodbye de gaulle farewell de gaulle it's interesting this is a real turning point in history have they tried to occupy key buildings the communists the communists yeah the police are prepared for that. There probably would have been shooting.

There probably would have been massive street violence. At that point, there would have been a lot of bloodshed and possibly the whole thing could have spiraled massively out of control.

Okay. So that's a huge what if. It's a huge what if. Meanwhile, de Gaulle, he was meant to be meeting his ministers on the morning of the 29th. He postpones the meeting.

He says no meeting. He starts to take all his personal papers, get them all ready to remove them from the Elysee Palace. He says to his son-in-law, who is a man called Alain de Boisieu, he says, I don't want to give the protesters a chance to attack the Elysee. It would be regrettable if blood was shed in my personal defense. I've decided to leave because nobody attacks an empty palace. And he says to his aides, I'm shattered. I'm leaving the capital. I'm going to Colombe, Les Desanglies, which you talked about.

Yeah, his country hideaway. Yeah. He's the soul of France. I'm going to commune with the soul of France at my country house. Meanwhile, he's actually got something up up his sleeve he gets a general to come to him and he says go to baden-baden to the french forces in baden-baden over the border in west germany right so this is like the british army on the rhine the u.s forces in germany france also has been given a portion of west germany to administer in the i mean germany as it was in 1945 exactly and exactly French troops are still in situ there. So there are French troops over the border in West Germany.

And he says, I want you to talk to the guy who's in command of the French troops. He's a man called General Massou. Now, General Massou had been part of the Free French in the Second World War. He'd served in Indochina. He'd served at Suez in 1956. He was a paratrooper commander. Most famously, I mean, people who went to our show, Tom, at the Leicester Square, when we talked about our favorite historical films, those people who were inspired by that to watch the Battle of Algiers will remember Colonel Mathieu,

I think he's called, the paratrooper commander. Very charismatic. In the Battle of Algiers. Well, he is inspired by Jacques Massou. Massou had a breach with de Gaulle over Algeria. He said that de Gaulle had sold out Algeria. But on a personal level, he remains loyal to de Gaulle. They have a shared experience of the liberation. Because of 1940. Out of 1940. And basically, de Gaulle now has sent this guy, General Allende,

to say to Massou, can we rely on you? We need you. We need the troops in Germany. You're going to have to basically march on the capital. Everything's gone out of control. Meanwhile, de Gaulle is still at the Elysee. He has a meeting with Georges Pompidou, his prime minister. There's actually loads of tension between de Gaulle and Pompidou.

Pompidou, it's a bit like the tension between Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill or something. Yeah, or between the king and the Dauphin. The king and the Dauphin. Pompidou basically thinks de Gaulle is a busted flush, wants him to leave on yeah uh to go is very cross with pompadour and thinks he's always sort of undermining him and stuff to go calls in pompadour his prime minister and he says to him i'm old you are young you are the future au revoir je vous embrasse very strange you know pompadour thinks what's going on here then toulle takes off by helicopter with his wife they're going to Colombay to his country house but as soon as they've taken off he tells the pilot something he hasn't told Pompidou or anybody else okay we're not going to Colombia we're actually going

to Baden-Baden we're going to Germany back in Paris Pompidou and co discover that de Gaulle is not going to his country house after all that he he's not going to Colombay. And they're like, what? What's going on? Pompidou is in a complete, everybody's in a complete funk. Well, you would be, wouldn't you? The general has fled. The general has vanished.

You know, we can't find where he is. People are running around shouting, he's fled the country. It's all over. One of Pompidou's friends comes in with a gun for Pompidou and says, you know, you're going to need this. There are people burning documents. There are people

planning their journey out of the city saying, how do we get out? The petrol stations are closed because of the strikes. You know,

we're going to have to take petrol. What happens when the revolutionaries storm the palace? You know, all this sort of stuff. People are trying

to get fake ID cards. It's like the episode we did on um fall of saigon it's absolutely it's very american embassy eventually word comes to pompadour we know where de gaulle has gone he has gone to germany he's gone to baden-barbon de gaulle's helicopter lands at baden-barbon at the military airport at 2 40 p.m meanwhile of course the communists are marching through the city at three o'clock masu who's not been forewarned about this at all really he gets to you know see to go and to go starts the conversation by saying it's finished it's done

everything is screwed and he just goes on this massive rant and he says to masu it's finished i've lost control i don't know what's going on and i think at most you know certainly julian jackson de gaulle's biographer says you know it's masu who says to him who stiffens him it'll be all right it's going to be fine i promise you the troops will be loyal because that's why de gaulle is gone yeah if the army turns against him, it's lost. To test the loyalty of the army, go back to Paris. We are with you.

You can rely on us if the shooting starts. So de Gaulle's still dithering a bit. He thinks, well, will I address the nation from Germany? Will I address the nation from Strasbourg? Eventually decides, no, I will go back to Colombie. He flies back to Colombie. Now, interestingly, part of de Gaulle still fears the worst because his wife, Yvonne, has given the family jewels, the de Gaulle family jewels, to his son and his daughter-in-law,

and they stay in Baden-Baden at the military base. So with the aim of keeping it as a bolt hole should the worst come to the worst should the worst come to the worst they're going to leave paris flee to germany and then who knows anyway in the meantime de gaulle has come back to colombia he is then going to go back to paris and the next day he is going to make his decisive intervention and tom i think not least because a huge mob of tourists have assembled surrounding the cafe they've obviously heard yeah that uh hollywood's tom holland is here or maybe they're about to to engage in some situationist street theater so i think we should go and see the

general because there's a statue of de gaulle okay just by the elise palace on the other side of the river and i think we should uh take a camp to get there because i know you're not a great one for walking and uh what absolutely decides me that that's what we should do is the ease of use of WISE because we are now paying with our digital cards. And if you want to order a physical card, you can get that in just five minutes. I've done that. I've tried. I've got one. Yeah, I did. So either way, whether you are in a shop, whether you're in a cafe as we are now, whether you're online, you always have the right kind of money for the right price.

So let's go and get the cab. And when we come back, we will be on the Champs-Élysées. Allons-y. All right, Tom, we've just jumped into the cab. We were on the left bank, not far from the Sorbonne. We're now on our way across the river, across the Roussaint, onto the right bank. And we're going up to the near the Élys Palace, and the statue of General de Gaulle. And I'm going to pay for the cab journey, and of course that's made much easier for us, Tom, with WISE. Now we're paying with our digital cards, but you can order a physical card in just five minutes.

Now either way, whether you're in-store or online, you've always got the right kind of money for the right price. Right, here we go. Let's use the app. Voilà, monsieur. So easy. Merci. Merci, monsieur. So, Dominic, we have crossed the Seine.

We've left the Rive Gauche behind us. And we've arrived really in the great center of Paris. The Champs-Élysées in the distance. Yes. So we've got a nice quiet spot here, but we can just see the Statue de Gaulle. We were looking at earlier, Tom. So he's this sort of lanky, striding figure. Not unlike yourself, I have to say.

Man of destiny. Yeah. So there's the statue. Now over there, obviously, I don't know why I'm pointing out because the viewers can't or the listeners can't see it. But anyway, for of completeness the elise palace is just a minute or so up there and there's the chance elise stretching into the distance and that's where the great drama is about to unfold tom so so we left it on the evening of the 29th of may didn't we to go back at columbia and the morning of the 30th finds him at the Elysee Palace and his aides come

in and they find him a man transformed he's lost all the sort of ditheriness and the the anxiety and the uncertainty and he seems you know basically that visit to Jacques Massieu and the army once he knows he's got the army he knows he's not going to suffer the fate of Louis Philippe or you know Louis the 16VI or whatever. And they say, well, we've got this big Gaullist demonstration planned, a counter demonstration in answer to the communist demonstration yesterday. Great. And he says, well, I'm going to give a speech in the evening. I've decided I'm going to speak to the French people.

And then this guy called Fokar has a very good suggestion. He says, don't do the speech in the evening. Do the speech before the demonstration to kind of fire up your people your france the other person he meets is george pompidou friend of the show who um his prime minister he says i want you to dissolve the national assembly and let's have elections and to call it's like great let's do it so finally they have some clarity so the first thing is the speech and de Gaulle gives the speech at 4.30 in the afternoon and crucially he doesn't speak on TV.

So he's speaking on radio as he had done in 1940 from London. So what people don't, they don't see a tired old man on television. They hear the voice they associate with broadcast from resistance and resistance with liberation and it's a very short speech it's only four minutes the brevity is important because it's at this time of vacuous slogans demande l'impossible and stuff de gaulle is really clipped and precise he says you know go back to work go back to universities. I'm going to settle this now. I'm dissolving parliament. We will have elections. The choice is very clear.

It is between the intimidation, intoxication, and tyranny of a party that is a totalitarian enterprise, meaning the communists, or it is me. That is the choice. It's a bit kind of, it's a stupid comparison, but it's a a bit britain in 2019 you know there's a sort of a clarity you're with me or you're with them decide you know it's the get brexit done which of course we know didn't turn out to be a recipe for comparing general gold which is bad so it was a ridiculous ridiculous comparison but that's what we're for on the rest of this history anyway he says the choice is very clear. It's me or them. He also says, if there's any more protests that disrupt the elections,

I will not hesitate to use my emergency powers in the Constitution under Article 16 to basically declare a state of emergency and rule as it were by decree. So there's a real sense of like, this is the moment of decisiveness. The general has kind of, you know, stepped up to fulfill his part in the drama as he did in 1940. And for his supporters, this is absolutely the De Gaulle they've been itching to see for weeks, I would say. I mean, Julian Jackson in his biography says it's not just about De Gaulle turning the tide single-handedly. The tide was already beginning to turn because the protests were great fun, but there are people who actually do want petrol. And the shopkeepers in Paris who are sick of having their windows smashed in

and actually would just like to get back to business as usual and all of this stuff. But De Gaulle's speech has an incredible... It's one of those instances in history of a speech having a genuine galvanizing effect, because they're expecting, you know, 300,000 people on the streets, on the Champs-Élysées. Historians disagree about how many there were, but I think many would agree this is probably the single biggest demonstration at that point in Parisian history. Maybe 800,000 people, maybe half a million people. It's hard to know. But they're a huge crowd. They're Nixon's silent majority, Tom. And are they generally older?

They're not all older. There are young people there. Because don't forget, there are a lot of... I mean, do you know what? My French teacher at school, René Filot, he was a Pied-Noir.

His family were Pied-Noirs who'd come from Algeria. Yeah. He was very cool. He wore a polo neck. He changed smokes. So why is he not on the side of the Orage i think

because he loved i tell you who he loved used to say shirak simonom oh you know sirak is my man kind of he loved shirak he despised the uh the radicals of 68 and i think there are an awful lot of people like that there are a lot of conservative students so people are listening on their little radios as de gaulle is speaking. They've gathered in the Place de la Concorde, and they are absolutely, I mean, people describe it as electrifying. You know, they are... Cross of Lorraine, all that kind of thing. The hero of France's past has re-emerged.

And, of course, the other thing, they march down the Champs-Élysées, they fill the Champs-Élysées just a few steps from where we are now. And the point about that is, again, it's the liberation. That's the street down which de Gaulle marched in 1940, and the point about that is again it's the liberation that's the street down which the goal marched in 1940 with and the crowds so so actually i mean the weird thing is you you accused uh well accused i mean you said described um the the students as in a way playing a part from a part in a drama yeah and in a sense the goal is reprising a drama in which he was the star yeah kind of retracing his steps isn't that what politicians do there tom you know yourself from your books on rome of course that's what

yeah augustus but he's he's using the set of triumphs past yeah but it is literal street theater it is it is exactly it is it's genius and, it's so often the way with these sort of, these growing bubbles of kind of revolutionary enthusiasm. It just takes one prick. And suddenly... Which prick is it? Yeah, I was regretting that metaphor as soon as I embarked upon it. I knew you'd enjoy that. The whole mood changes.

I think basically it's a shock for a lot of the students and for the radicals. As is so often the way when all these other people pitch up waving french flags and saying hurrah for the president hurrah for the general they're like what where did all these people come from yeah you know they've crawled out from under their rocks and the other key thing actually which is always so always underestimated in all accounts of revolutions riots and such it's a holiday a holiday is coming it's going to be the whitson holiday weekend and lots of people are going to go to the beach or to

their country houses because it's the beginning of june and actually what happens i i my my extremely mean-spirited thought is that a lot of people hear from their parents that they're going to the holiday they're going to the holiday home. They're like, oh, right, well, that goes. We'll put the revolution on hold. Oh, put the revolution, exactly. And then when they come back, so there's one more night of the barricades on the 10th and 11th of June,

but that's really a bit of a last spasm, I would say. The Sorbonne is cleared by the 13th of June. The next day, a lot of students had occupied the Odeon Theatre and they had said, this is going to be a kind of National Assembly type thing. the police clear that as well. And so what happens in the election when is that? Well so the election de Gaulle frames it brilliantly he says it's me or the communists and the communists ironically who had not been keen on the whole thing yeah he says that is the choice you're on the forces of order against communism. And what about Mitterrand and

Mendes France who had both kind of tried to put themselves at the head? They both lose their seats ironically. So it's the biggest at that point the biggest legislative landslide

in French history. So in the first round 486 seats de Gaulle's party win 353 the communists win 34 and the socialists

win 57. So for the left it is an absolute disaster and actually anticipates what's going to happen in america where nixon wins the presidential election so um 1968 is the year the beatles release revolution and famously they record two versions of it yeah the first of which you know count me in for revolution yeah and then they do one count me out. Right. And in a sense, they are speaking for France.

So, first of all, count me in. Yeah. And then suddenly they change their mind and think count me out. Well, the funny thing is people did opinion polls

and they found that 20% of the French public said they'd like a revolution. I think that's true of all moments in French history. That the fifth of the French public

would like a revolution. Yeah. About the same proportion would have said, you know, I'd take to the streets to oppose it. And the rest, like, you know, don't care, would stay out. And these are the Sandbrook masses.

The Sandbrook masses. The subjects of your books. Yeah. They're thinking about the sound of music. Yeah. Whatever the French equivalent of Bernie-ins are. Absolutely. Yeah.

So from a purely political perspective, I would say, and it won't surprise you or anybody else to hear me say this, that to my mind, the événements of May 1968 are a cul-de-sac. They're a failure. The result is, I mean,

de Gaulle does step down a year later, but he's tired. He was probably going to do that anyway. I don't think that's George Pompidou who takes over.

Yeah. But I mean, after that, what happens? It's not like the left are kind of, you know waiting in the wings so mitan does become president in the 1980s but even metronome i

would argue ultimately turns out to be a much more conservative figure than many people anticipated by and large i would say politically what happens with france is that sort of english or rather british left of center people tend to idealize France and to imagine that it's this kind of social democratic paradise. But actually I would say France is in many ways a remarkably conservative country. I mean, just to give the example of the CRS, the CRS is still out there bashing people over the head at the slightest sign of protest. Yes, but you could advance an argument that the impact of May 68 is actually i mean it may sound a bizarre argument to make but most radically felt in the english-speaking world yeah so i thought i knew you'd make this argument

which is why i went hard on the on the alternative so we talked about foucault in the first part of he's been away but he does come back so i think you i think you do have a sense in the wake of 68 that a lot of the kind of the celebrated french philosophers yeah derrida and lacan and yeah julia christieva and but most famously foucault yeah i'm trying to wonder why did it go wrong why did nothing happen and foucault gets very interested in kind of prisons the state apparatus for repression surveillance surveillance so the famous image that he comes up with in his book, Discipline and Punish, as it's translated into English, comes out in 1975, is this idea, it's actually English, so Jeremy Bentham.

Yeah, the panopticon. The idea that the state is always watching you. So a prison where you are always being surveyed. And he advances the theory that the state constructs these apparatuses to generate what he calls docile bodies yeah so in other words everything that within a state is structured to geld and pacify the revolutionary spirit yes and you you might think that this is exactly the kind of thing the french would go for but i think you're right that by and large foucault is regarded as a bit of a charlatan in france that actually it's in british university no it's in america really it's in america because

in america in as i don't need to tell you in the 70s intellectuals likewise particularly on the left are wondering well what the hell happened how have we ended up with nixon how have we ended up with ford that's very cruel to gerald ford and so they they apply this kind of insight to what they see as the apparatus of repression and i mean america is jailing a lot of people and they're they're often black yeah and so that then feeds into theories about intersectionality and so on that then the possessions with power and oppression power and oppression all the time which which then had a kind of huge impact in 2020 with yeah with um with the black lives matter protests which in a way it has a kind of 68 feel i think well there's an argument isn't it that the spirit of 68 became institutionalized because basically the mime artists and polo necks ended up running cultural

institutions but they're all bourgeois yeah yeah they are of course they are i mean that's the sort of the standard story is of the 68er who just ends up selling out and becoming you know a university bureaucrat or something and i think all of those people i mean effectively they did end up with the levers of cultural power and from the 1980s but i think in in say in the united states or in britain the idea of things like institutional racism, the idea that there are structures that are inherently repressive. Yeah. I think you could trace the origins of that philosophy back to Foucault and back to the way that Foucault is trying to make sense of 68.

Maybe I'm over-egging it. So I think the claims that are made for the influence of 1968 are, well, you know, they lost on the streets, as it were. They lost in the legislative elections, but they won in the long run. They won the battle for culture that are individualistic. Are we talking about France here? France and the West generally, I would say. But I think all of those changes, and in fact, even those arguments about power and oppression and so on,

I think they would have happened even if the students at Nanterre had been able to visit the other people's halls of residence. I don't think it took the street protests and then the moment of excitement to, I think it's slightly false self-congratulation. Well, I know you love to diss this philosophy. I think you can see that

there is a kind of intellectual influence there. And I think also what's interesting is that it does also influence conservatism. Because famously, a British student in May 1968 who looks out of the window at the students ripping up the cobblestones is Roger Scruton. Yes. Who becomes, I mean, he's probably not an influential figure in Britain, but he's a massively influential figure for conservatives in Europe. I mean, he's a huge influence on victor orban yeah on george particularly in eastern europe yeah i mean and yeah because what did he say middle-class hooligans yeah what i saw was an unruly mob of middle-class hooligans when i asked my friends what they wanted all i got back was

ludicrous marxist gobbledygook so that's from his essay why i became a conservative and what roger scrutin does in that essay is he contrasts it with Prague about the experience of going to the Czechoslovakia. Because that's going on at the same time, isn't it? So to my mind actually,

for people in Britain in particular where there is no real 1968, the events of May 1968 in Paris seem so exciting, intoxicating, indelibly French, a sign of all the things that are fun and romantic and glamorous about France,

whereas we in Britain are, you know, driving to and from Milton Keynes or whatever. But actually, in the grand scheme of things, they are eclipsed massively by what happened in Prague. Which is very, very devastating for the moral claims of the Soviet Union and the auto pact and probably communism generally yeah so the mexico olympics there is a terrible massacre in mexico

city which is you know kind of eclipsed in the popular imagination um dozens i think maybe even hundreds of people are massacred and again one of these events of this extraordinary year or indeed in america tom so when martin luther king is assassinated i think we talked about this already i think something like 43 people die in the riots that follow in the the police versus rioters in american cities again by those standards do the events of may 1968 in paris exciting and dramatic and spectacular as they are do they really as we discussed in our episode with Christopher Clarke on the revolutions of 1848, it's because it's Paris.

It's because Paris is the home of revolution. It is. The French Revolution is the primal example of this. And so whatever happens in Paris reverberates across the world. But is this not the last time that ever happened? Don't you think? It seems so.

I mean, France has really swung to the right. I agree. Because don't you think that I said in the first episode, I think that this was the most exciting moment in kind of post-war French history. But actually it's the only moment in French history that most people outside France, in modern French history, have ever heard of.

Because what's happened since then, the Mitterrand presidency, the Chirac presidency, Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron, france in modern french history have ever heard of because what's happened since then the mitoan presidency the sherat presidency sarkozy holland macron i don't think anybody outside france could name a single event that happened in any of those presidencies because actually i mean obviously there have been riots um since 1968 so there was some very very serious urban writing in 2005 that's right i remember 2012 again but they were largely children of immigrants out on the banlieue, the peripherique. And there were kind of soissons-huitards who were trying to speak the language of 68 when they analyzed this. But actually, it meant nothing to the people

who were rioting in 2005. I mean, the language of the revolution and of soissons-huitards meant nothing to the people who were rioting in 2005 i mean the language of the revolution and of special wheat meant nothing to them and actually maybe tom you could say here we are in 2023 you know we're probably the last generation that could make this podcast on this subject and think it's a really big interesting subject because don't you think in generations to come these events will dwindle compared with 1848 with the parents you know, I mean, 1968 as a year still has a kind of glamour. It definitely does. I think it's

Che Guevara, Martin Luther King. Yeah, Robert Kennedy. Exactly. And the music as well. So the music of

1968, I think, provides a soundtrack to it. And Richard Nixon, Tom. Let's not forget, I always like to remind people that

the big winner of 1968 is Richard Nixon. That's how I like to pop it. That's what makes me so popular at dinner parties. Yes.

Right. So we will return to 1968, I think, next year, because we're going to, for the American presidential election, I have all kinds of great notions at my sleeve about American presidential elections, and 1968 is the canonical one. But also, I think we will return to France, the subject of France, in due course, because we have to finish the French off in the Hundred Years' War. We do. And we've talked a lot about the French Revolution.

Yeah. And we're aware that we've only, we've done two episodes on the events of May 1968. We've done one episode on the whole of the French Revolution. So we must maybe come back to Paris. We have loads of French history. And if we do come back to Paris, then we will know what card

and what app to bring. Remind me, Tom, I've forgotten. So, we've been using Wise and Wise brilliantly have created a travel guide to Paris that includes lots of the locations

we've talked about in today's episode. I mean, certainly talks about the Champs-Élysées, we're not far from that now, where we're sitting. And so to learn more about how you can travel

like Dominic Sandbrook, a great historian, and yet spend like a Parisian, you can visit wise.com slash restishistory or click the link

in today's episode description. And on that note, Tom, I'm going to go off down the Champs-Élysées right now to buy a souvenir. Do you know what I'm going to buy? I'm going to buy a little Eiffel Tower.

Are you? Yeah. You're not going to buy a chunk of cobblestones? No'm going to buy? I'm going to buy a little Eiffel Tower. Are you? Yeah. You're not going to buy a chunk of cobblestones? No. Chuck it as a riot policeman.

I might actually buy a little, see if they've got a General de Gaulle effigy or something like that. Of course you are. On that bombshell,

we say merci et au revoir. Au revoir.