Aftermath - Joe

When I began this project, as I talked about it with people, I discovered that many take “1968” very personally. They have strong feelings about what I should be researching, what was important about the year, and what a potential course should look like. They would say, “Oh, you have to deal with Vietnam,” or they would tell me exactly where they were. Other years may be blurry for them, but 1968 sticks in the memory.

And, in France, it continues to resonate and ripple through the culture. During the presidential elections, Nicholas Sarkozy said “il faut liquidier 1968.” (It’s necessary to do away with 1968.) During the World Cup, when France’s poorly-performing team refused to practice and didn’t make it out of the first round, the captain Thierry Henry met with Sarkozy. European Parliament member, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the ’68 protests, offered the comment that the French president would meet with striking soccer players, but not striking teachers.

Now, as Sarkozy attempts to raise the retirement age, the streets again are full of protesters in places like Paris and Nanterre. Once again the garbage is going uncollected, gas deliveries have been disrupted, and the business of the country has ground to a halt Sounding at least a little like DeGaulle. Sarkozy has pledged “to guarantee order,” and punish “troublemakers.”

Although some have been surprised at the number of students joining the protests, the political analyst Jerome Sainte-Marie, notes that “young people have built a general abhorrence at all levels toward Sarkozy” and “there is also the idea in France that you must participate at least once in your life in a social movement.”

Insides and Outsides - Joe

If you go to the Sorbonne when it is closed, or any of the major schools in Paris, including Ecole des Beaux Arts, you will find it difficult to find a single piece of information about it. The hours, administrative offices, course schedules, anything. Even when the doors are open, you usually need to know where to go. There are rarely maps, directions, etc. In fact, at the Sorbonne, there is no graffiti, no posters, no announcements of bands, nothing that would indicate a college; the walls are remarkably blank. Ironically, once you enter the Ecole des Beaux Arts, there is graffiti everywhere, but it consists primarily of tags

Despite frequent claims to be “open” to all, these buildings can be off-putting. Sometimes it can be difficult to even figure out where the entrance may be. The design itself suggests, if you don’t know, you shouldn’t be there.

Even those buildings which are supposedly open to the public have a design which controls access. Supposedly the Francois Mitterand national library, which consists of four towers, is meant to resemble open books. Instead the four towers make it look like a castle, and, for me, it strikes echoes of the Bastille. It’s imposing with its entrances underground. Even when a person has figured out how to get inside, access is limited until she or he has registered, gotten a reader’s id (for a fee), and negotiated a system of turnstiles.

Educational reforms in the wake of the Mai protests were supposed to increase access; the architecture itself suggests this has not happened. And while there exists a stereotype now of students taking to the streets and marching around outside, inside the university, on a structural level, few changes would seem to have been made. The issues that originally impelled the students to protest – over-crowded classrooms, lack of resources, increasing tests, a class structure, a sense of disconnection and irrelevance – still dominate.