Some wagered heavily on the ’60s. Of course, there was a specific favorite year—1968—invented, filmed, and made into legend. To be young during 1968, who wouldn’t choose that?
It turns out that the French themselves would not choose it. The ’60s were a troublesome time, the colonies were leaving, Algeria was lost in 1962, clashes with those who considered you an oppressor rather than a patron. To whom you thought you were a patron. Paris in the ’60s was nice for magazine articles, cinema, and a two-week vacation, but in the end a person always chooses to live in more nondescript times. Nondescript times are the most convenient for life. In fact, the ’60s had no real chance at all.
I presume that 1968 did not exist in 1968. Nobody back then said, Hey, man, that stuff we’re living through now, it’s the great ’68, which’ll go down in history. Everything happens years after it has happened . . . You need time and a story for that which has supposedly already taken place to happen . . . with a delay, just as photos were developed and images appeared slowly in the dark . . . Most likely 1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid.
One of the most curious movements to crop up alongside the referendum would be called “A Moveable Feast”—after Hemingway’s memoir of the 1920s, set in the capital of the world. The Paris of cafés in the Latin Quarter, of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, of La Closerie des Lilas, La Coupole, La Rotonde, Saint-Michel . . . the home of Miss Stein, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, which Joyce himself liked to stop into, the Paris of Fitzgerald, Pound . . . I’ve always loved that book, and if I could, I surely would have voted for that decade. The movement itself had been founded by a group of young writers. But when it came down to it, not everyone wanted to live in a moveable feast. A feast is good for feasting but inconvenient for life. It raises a racket, you can’t sleep, as one woman, an elderly landlady in the central quarters, said in the news reports. Besides that, the problem was that the movement mainly staked its bets on just one city, never mind that it had been the capital of the world. But France was large and provincial—the fishermen of Breton, the farmers and apple-pickers of Normandy, the quiet towns in the south of France didn’t care a fig about the orgies of some scribblers who meandered from café to café, trading women and rolling around without a penny to their names in cheap hotels. The lost cause of a lost generation. The movement would end up getting around four percent of the vote, which was not at all negligible, perhaps it equaled the exact number of writers at that moment in France.
Supporters of Marine Le Pen chose a strategy that turned out to be misguided. In the beginning they decided to boycott the referendum, which actually lost them quite a bit of time, without bringing them any particular ratings. They only joined in at the very end of the campaign and to everyone’s surprise they supported the Gaullist wing that chose the late ’50s as the decade to return to. De Gaulle was nevertheless the strongest defender of a great and autonomous France, the man was legendary for standing up to the big dogs and championing a “Europe of Nations.” Their man, par excellence.
So many things influenced the choice, irrational and personal things above all, that when the results showed the victory for those who voted for the early ’80s, that sweet timelessness of the outgoing Giscard d’Estaing and the incoming Mitterrand, analysts needed some time to explain why this was logical.
In the end, victory went to those who had been young and active then. The 1960s came in as a very close second, only about three percentage points behind, perhaps due above all to the current anarchist movements which were gaining strength and which wanted another chance to throw the cobblestones of 1968.
Only Le Pen’s nationalists would announce that they refused to accept the election results. They declared their intention to block any decision on the case in the European Parliament.
4.
Spain, with its long experience of being unhappy in its own way, would have an easier time of it. When you’ve got a civil war that overflows into the Franco regime, you can bracket off half a century without a second thought, leaving far fewer years to choose from, which makes things much easier. And if at the beginning of the century you get rid of the first few decades due to the Spanish flu, the Rif War, and the dictatorship of General de Rivera, the situation becomes simple indeed. The ’80s were brilliant years, wild years, one Madrileno said in a news report. After the Franco decades, as cold and gloomy as a ground floor, you suddenly step outside, the sun is shining, the world has opened up, waiting for you to experience everything you’ve missed out on, the sexual revolution and all those other revolutions, in one fell swoop.
Others claimed that they had never lived better than in the ’90s. The post-Franco transition was already over, things had fallen into place, the economy was surging. There was more money than work, there was a future . . .
I didn’t have the right to open a bank account or to have a driver’s license, I couldn’t even get a passport without my husband’s permission, one woman shouted during a discussion in which some elderly gentleman made so bold as to suggest that under Franco things had been calm, and hinted at the Spanish economic miracle of the ’60s.
In the end, Spain chose the “release” of the ’80s with La Movida Madrileña, Almodóvar, Malasaña . . . The first bare tits in post-Franco cinema, sometimes justified, sometimes not. I remember how, when these films finally reached us (we must’ve been seventeen or eighteen), we would make bets that by the second minute there would be nude scenes, that’s why we loved Spanish cinema.
In any case, there was not a civil war during the referendum, as some observers had predicted (the support for Franco was much lower than anticipated) and Spain happily returned to the fiestas of the 1980s.
Once I ended up in Madrid toward the end of a warm September, after midnight on a square filled with young people, beer drinkers, fire eaters, weed smokers, guitar players, laughing groups of friends . . . A scene that would have fit well in at least several centuries. On my way home late that night, I caught glimpses of young men and women calmly pissing in the alleyways, right on the sidewalk between the cars. That’s what Madrid smelled like, beer and urine, and there was joy in that smell.
Portugal, by analogy, after a long, cold regime that ended in the Carnation Revolution, would choose the mid-1970s as a new beginning, when the intoxication of 1974 was still alive. But also when the memory of Estado Novo, Salazar, and his heir Caetano was still fresh and could be counted as part of the unhappiness of being Portuguese. A myth, which had united people for several centuries after the Great Age of Discoveries, and which had only grown stronger after the Great Losses of the Newly Discovered Territories.
I remember how as kids we would play a game called “Nations.” We would stand in a circle and everyone would pick a country according to a special rhyme (round and round the globe does spin, now which country are you in? . . .), then we’d all scream, “Let it be, let it be . . .” France, for example. We’d all run away, then France would shout, “Stop,” and would have to say how many steps it would take to reach one of the other countries. If you guessed the right number of steps, you conquered the foreign territory. There were steps of different sizes—giant steps, human steps, mouse steps, ant steps, and I can’t remember what else. A simple game, in which the most important thing seemed to be which country you chose. We all pushed and shoved to get to be Italy, Germany, France, the U.S., or even “Abroad.” The girl I was secretly in love with always chose Portugal. Thus I duly chose Spain, so as to be near her. In any case, Portugal didn’t have any other neighbors and that geographical location spared me inevitable jealousy. I recall now how well that country fit her.