His daughter’s phone call came around two in the morning—he’d kept the television on; the two public TV channels were showing and analyzing, analyzing and showing, what was going on in Paris.
“Don’t worry, Daddy. I’m all right. I should pass the telephone to the person next to me, so I’ll explain later.”
He tried to ask her something, but she’d already hung up.
He couldn’t sleep at all the entire night. The protests had lasted much longer than he had imagined they would. The talking heads on TV were as surprised as he was. Everything had exploded from one moment to the next, without warning. But they tried to demonstrate calm and make sense of the confrontations between police and students using the pompous explanations of sociologists, politicians, analysts, a few policemen, a few students, and the like.
Finally, the adrenaline had left his blood and he’d collapsed, exhausted, on the couch. When he opened his eyes it was already morning, time to go to work, but someone on the television—it had been on the entire night—was warning people not to leave the house; the “anarchists” had occupied the universities and metro stations, closing streets and blocking traffic. Violating the fundamental rights of every citizen, someone added.
He called in to work; no one answered. He called the headquarters, and someone who had spent the night there because he lived in the suburbs and had no way to get home told him it was useless to try to move around the city. Almost no one, only those who lived close to the office, had managed to make it in.
“It will all be over today,” said the anonymous voice on the other end of the line. Jacques asked to talk to his boss, but like many others, his boss hadn’t gone to work either.
The chaos and the conflicts hadn’t ceased as expected. On the contrary, the situation worsened when people saw the way the police were treating the students.
The Sorbonne, symbol of French culture, had been occupied, and professors there had joined the protests or been expelled from the premises. Several committees had been formed with aims that would be either carried out or abandoned, the TV said, by this point showing more sympathy for the students.
The stores in his neighborhood were closed, except for one run by an Indian man—and there was a line of people out the door. He patiently joined the line, listening to the others around him: “Why doesn’t the government do anything?” “Why do we pay such high taxes only to find the police so inept at a moment like this?” “This is all the fault of the Communist Party.” “This is all happening because of the way we raised our kids, they think they have the right to turn against everything we taught them.”
That sort of thing. The only thing no one was able to explain was why it all was happening.
The first day passed.
Then the second.
The first week came to an end.
And everything got worse and worse.
His apartment was situated on a tiny hill in Montmartre, three subway stations from his office. From his window, he could hear the sirens and see the smoke rising from burning tires. He stared endlessly at the street as he waited for his daughter to arrive. She showed up three days later, took a quick shower, grabbed some of her clothes—since they were at his apartment—ate whatever she could find, and left again, repeating, “I’ll explain later.”
What he’d thought would be a fleeting moment, a contained fury, ended up spreading over all of France; employees kidnapped their bosses, and a general strike was declared. Most factories were occupied by workers—just as had happened a week earlier with the universities.
France came to a standstill. The problem was no longer the students—who seemed to have changed their focus and now waved flags emblazoned with FREE LOVE or DOWN WITH CAPITALISM, or OPEN BORDERS FOR ALL, or THE BOURGEOISIE DON’T UNDERSTAND A THING.
The problem now was the general strike.
The TV was his only source of information. That was where he saw, to his surprise and horror, after twenty hellish days, the president of France finally appear to tell his countrymen that he would organize a referendum proposing “cultural, social, and economic renewal.” If he lost, he would resign. General Charles de Gaulle, he who had survived the Nazis, he who had put an end to the colonial war in Algeria, he who was admired by all.
What de Gaulle had to propose meant nothing to the workers, who had little interest in free love, open borders, that sort of thing. They thought of only one thing: a meaningful increase in wages. Prime Minister Georges Pompidou met with union leaders, Trotskyites, anarchists, socialists, and only then did the crisis begin to wane—when everyone was face-to-face, each group making different demands. This division was the government’s doing.
Jacques decided to take part in a pro–de Gaulle demonstration. All of France watched in horror. The demonstration, which spread to nearly every city, brought together an enormous number of people, and those who had launched what Jacques never stopped calling “anarchy” soon recoiled. New labor agreements were signed. The students, who no longer had any demands, slowly returned to classes—overcome with the sensation that their victory meant absolutely nothing.
At the end of May (or beginning of June, he couldn’t remember), his daughter finally came back home and told him they had achieved everything they wanted. He didn’t ask her what it was they wanted, and she didn’t elaborate, but she looked tired, disappointed, frustrated. Restaurants were opening once again. They had a candlelight dinner and avoided the subject entirely. Jacques wasn’t about to tell her he’d gone to a rally in support of the government. The only comment he took seriously, very seriously, was when she said:
“I’m tired of this place. I’m going to travel and live far away from here.”
In the end, she gave up on the idea; first she needed to “finish her studies,” and Jacques understood that those who desired a prosperous, competitive France had won. True revolutionaries weren’t the least bit worried about graduating and earning a diploma.
Ever since that day, he’d read thousands of pages full of explanations and justifications offered by philosophers, politicians, editors, journalists, et cetera. They cited the closing of a university in Nanterre earlier that month, but that couldn’t have been the reason for the fury he’d witnessed the few times he had dared to leave the house.
He never saw a single line that could bring him to conclude: “Ah, that’s what started it all.”
The second—and defining—transformative moment was a dinner in one of Paris’s finest restaurants, where he would bring special clients—potential buyers for their countries and cities. France had already turned the page on May 1968, though its flames had spread to other locations across the globe. No one wanted to revisit these events and if a foreign client dared to ask about them, Jacques would discreetly change the subject, arguing that “the newspapers always exaggerate.”
And the conversation would end there.
He was a good friend of the restaurant’s owner; they were on a first-name basis, which impressed his clients—part of the plan, by the way. He would walk in, the waiters would take him to “his table” (which was always changing according to how busy it was, but his guests didn’t know this). A glass of champagne was immediately served to each of the guests, the menus delivered, the orders taken, the expensive wine (“Same as always, right?” the waiter would ask, and Jacques would nod), and the conversation was always the same (leaving those who had just arrived wondering if they ought to go to the Lido, the Crazy Horse, or the Moulin-Rouge; it was incredible how Paris was reduced to these three destinations in foreigners’ minds). There was no talk of work during a business dinner unless it came at the end, when an excellent Cuban cigar was offered to everyone at the table. The final details were worked out among people who thought they were extremely important when in reality the sales department had everything ready and only needed the proper signatures, as was always the case.