The New York Review Abroad by Robert B. Silvers Read Free Book Online Page A

would be engaged in such activities as making consumer reports. They realized that sociology instead of being an instrument of bourgeois society, could be turned against it to make a revolution and construct a new society. Here the beginnings of an ideology of the students are implicit.

    Inevitably perhaps, the students are unself-critical. They do not notice inconsistencies in their own attitudes, even when, to an outsider, it must seem that these could be disastrous. This struck me when I heard a student who had organized the revolt at Strasbourg University describe his experiences to a great gathering in the Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne. He spoke about the professors with whom the students had to deal with that kind of contempt which is current among some students. He told how he had been asked by someone why he had not explained things adequately to the authorities at his university, and how he had answered: “because one does not enter into discussions with people who are non-existent.” People you do not talk to because they are non-existent! Whatever justification theremight be for adopting this attitude when confronted with the stuffed geese of Strasbourg, I could not help wondering as I listened how it would work out in the “direct democracy.” Supposing—I thought—our student from Strasbourg goes to a factory or to a village where there are peasants, is it not likely that he will meet a few people with attitudes not altogether dissimilar from those he encountered at Strasbourg—people “who understand nothing,” (
qui n’ont rien compris
): that was another of his phrases for describing those who did not agree with him? And had not one heard all this before? Did not the Soviets start off very willing to talk to anyone and everyone who agreed with them, and then make the horrible discovery that there were still bourgeois elements floating around, and that there were very recalcitrant peasants, people who understand nothing, people finally whom one stops talking to—or just stops talking? At this point the phrase “On
ne parle pas avec des gens qui n’existent pas
” begins to acquire a sinister ring.
    The students are, I emphasize, conscious of these dangers and do not wish to repeat them. I wonder what might happen if someone wrote on the walls of the Sorbonne: “The streets of Hell are paved with good intentions.” If it were written there, I wonder how long it would last. I noticed that they are very good at deleting.
    CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH CANNOT LIVE TOGETHER
    As I left the Odéon Theatre one evening two youths looking more like Dickensian street urchins perhaps than students called to each other: “Why doesn’t he cut his hair?” “Perhaps he should tear it out with his nails!” “Perhaps it’s a wig!” Respect for white hairs is certainly not one of the dues paid in Paris this May.
    Usually, though, the old just feel invisible as the blacks were supposedto do in America. “The young make love, the old obscene gestures,” a slogan in the anarchist magazine
L’Enragé
runs. They have read
Romeo and Juliet
it seems, but not
Antony and Cleopatra
.
    I observed to a contemporary that I enjoyed, on the whole, my invisibility. He said: “I thought that too until I went one day with my twenty-year-old son to the Sorbonne. I sat there quietly, and as I had to slip out early was specially grateful to be a ghost. But directly I had gone another student came up and said to my son: ‘
Qui était ce vieux con avec toi?
’ ”
    One night I am at the Odéon, Jean-Louis Barrault’s old-style
avant garde
theater which the students have “liberated” and made open for completely unplanned marathon discussions which go on almost till daybreak. The scene is like the sixth act of some play in the Theater of Cruelty in which the audience have rung down the curtain and taken over the house for their own performance. And they find themselves much more entertaining than Ionesco and Beckett, I am