The same day workers occupy the “Sud Aviation” factory and two days later the “Reno” factories. Transportation stopped, communications did not work, radio and television. A furious De Gaulle returns on May 18th. On May 24th he appears on television with a bleak six minutes long speech from which it is clear that the general is tired and frightened. The same day in Paris took place a new grandiose demonstration. Hundreds of thousands walk with the slogans “De Gaulle on resignation!” In the Latin Quarter fights again, it smells gas, hundreds of arrested. The 28th May in the hotel “Continental” the leader of the leftists Francois Mitterand made public a proposition about the creation of a temporary government headed by Mendes-France, Mitterand – president, ten ministers, not excluding the communists. Mendes-France supported the students-revolutionaries from Nanterre and Sorbonne. On May 29th De Gaulle disappears after not coming to the meeting of the Council of ministers. He somehow ends up in Baden-Baden, on the base of the French occupying troops. On May 30th he returns to Paris. Appears on the radio: “I took a decision. I stay.” France, frightened by the barricades and the black flags goes to the electoral urns on June 23-30, the Gaullists have acquired an extra 97 seats and have now 358 mandates out of 485 in the National Council. One of the ministers-Gaullists said after the elections: “The party was won but it is over with the general.” Students could also have said that “the party is won” because they were over with the general. Though De Gaulle left his post only the 27 April 1969, it were the students who threw him down, even though themselves turned out to be unable to take the power. It is against the old de Gaulle and the old France that was directed the rising of the students. The efficiency of their rebellion was acknowledged. Jean-Raymond Tourneau ascertains in his book “General’s May”: “The feeling of bitterness has reached an extreme limit with him… And here with one movement a few madmen from Nanterre were able to do a thing in which failed the specialists of the psychological war in 1958, the creators of the barricades in 1960, the rebels of 1961 and the leaders of the OAS in 1962.” It is another thing that the students removed De Gaulle but not the Gaullists. The next president became the ex-premier minister of De Gaulle – Georges Pompidou.
“A few madmen” turned out to be in many countries of Europe in those years, not only the German red haired student Kohn-Bendit was mad. In Germany leads the student leader Rudi Duchke. His fate is tragic (at a time when Khon-Bendit has degenerated in an old fat grumbler, became vice-mayor of Hamburg, and later deputy of the European parliament and a centrist of course) – he was shot during the same fateful year by a rightist worker-alcoholic. Duchke was paralyzed, in 1980 died in a bathroom, already a deputy from the “Greens”. In America the hippies were rebelling, the democratic convention in Chicago ended with many thousands of fightings and the trial of Jerry Rubin and his friends. In 1968 in California revolutionary murders took place, carried out by Charles Manson and his commune. Even the socialist Prague tried to rebel in 1968. The rising in Prague bore a student character at the beginning, but we, the Russians, took it as an attempt of the Czechs to leave the socialist camp and the Russian tanks interfered.
For the sake of justice it should be said that the “smogists”, “The Youngest Society of Geniuses” started to rebel in Moscow already in 1965-1966. Many thousands of large auditoriums collected their poetic appearances. They also tried to carry out political actions. There was their barefoot demonstration to the western Germany embassy, there was the list of “ the literary dead”, nailed to the door of the Central House of Men of Letters. Their leader was Leonid Gubanov, deceased at 37 from the consequences of alcoholism. But few people know that very noticeable dissidents as well came from the ranks of SMOG: Vladimir Bukovsky (at a time he was worth a high price. The ChK exchanged him for the president of Chili’s communist party Luis Corvalan), Vadim Delone (he participated with Gorbanevskaia in the demonstration against the leading of soviet troops in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, later died in Paris), less noticeable dissidents V. Batchev and Kuchev. Repressions hit SMOG already in 1966. When I arrived in Moscow, the 30th September 1966 I immediately found the smogists and took up with them (this episode is described in my book “A stranger in Troubled Times”). However then in Russia Brejnev’s (after Kruchnev’s thaw) reaction was already raging to the outmost: I remember that V. Batchev and the painter of SMOG N. Nedbailo were in exile in the Krasnoyarski region.
In 1969 the campus of the university town Berkley that is in California rebelled. The late professor Simon Karlinski told me that revolutionary students came in his class, he taught Mayakovsky to students from the Slavic faculty, furious with the fact that he did not fulfill the order to stop the classes. Karlinsky took up on the students, stating that he was reading a lecture about a revolutionary poet. The committee members had to agree with him: “Go on, comrade!”
The 60s were actually years of youth. It was fashionable to be young. And for the first time the young people put themselves as an age group against the harsh, (“square people” as they were called in those times) fathers. Movies with the young she-devil Brigit Bardo were coming out, Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie “Blow Up” with the young principal character – a successful cool young guy-photographer (a fashionable profession at that time) with girls-models was highly popular. The 60s were also the years of an unprecedented rising of young rock bands: Beatles and Rolling Stones drove their fans to madness. People around were talking about the culture of youth.
However, nowhere did a revolution succeed. In China the letting lose of the was stopped by Mao himself. The Confucius in him won over the revolutionary. Not instantly, but already in the beginning of the 70s the Hunveybins were gradually driven out of cities to the province where they quietly faded, growing rice and raising pigs. The Chinese bureaucracy suffered losses (western sources name crazy numbers ranging from 1 to 9 million victims of the cultural revolution, however they cannot be trusted. “Bombard the Headquarters!” had for its goal not the elimination of bureaucrats, but the removal of power from them), but survived. Five times submitted to public humiliations Deng Xiaoping returned, he was returned to power from the country where he took care of horses. Mao died in 1976.
In Paris Pompidou became president and after him Giscard d'Estaing also a Gaullist. They restored just for one month the vacillating power of the middle age. Sometimes one can hear that, supposedly, Guy Debord and his collective of “situationists” were the ideologists of May 1968. This does not correspond to reality. Arguable is even simply the influence of the “situationists” on these events. Maybe a ridiculously small part of the lightest slogans: such as “Under the pavement the beach!” is apparently “situationalistic”. Not Guy Debord nor Kurt Vangheim were the leaders or ideologists of May 1968 in Paris. Just as Herbert Marcuse was not a leader though his book “One Dimensional Man” was read but nothing from the influence of a rather heavy and rather “high brow” Marcuse’s philosophy in the events of may 1968 in Paris and later revolts in Prague, in Germany and in the USA is not traceable. Rather they were spontaneous, hardly realized unrests of the most able-bodied and ready for military service people about their role in the life of society. A role submitted to the older age. And the impetus and the example was given by Mao, the wise Mao, De Gaulle already testified (I discovered a book about De Gaulle in the prison library and a citation from De Gaulle “The striving for the Chinese Cultural revolution”. – confirmed my own earlier enounced opinion), that Hunveybins are the fathers of the student revolt in Paris in May 1968.