I was an eye-witness of the battle of the Latin Quarter in the early hours of Saturday morning.
It might have been in the days of the Paris Commune. The barricades of paving stones topped by red flags, and enveloped in dense clouds of smoke; the occasional burst of a red signal flare against the dark sky; the flames shooting up from the burning vehicles; the occasional loud explosion; the lines of helmeted black uniformed police praetorians charging slowly, the shouting, waving, singing student insurgents, the strains of the "Marseillaise" and the "Internationale" breaking now and then through the din, the first aid teams rushing to the rescue with stretchers-it all had the makings of a terrifyingly realistic historical reconstruction, barring the actual shooting to kill. But it was no make believe.
I had spent the earlier part of the night wandering up the Boulevard St. Michel, where little groups of students clustered round transistor radios, listening to progress reports on the negotiations in the study of M. Jean Roche, the rector of the Sorbonne, with six delegates, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the students of Nanterre, now promoted to an official role: and of the conference at the Ministry of the Interior between M. Louis Joxe, the acting Prime Minister, and several members of the Government.
The police, reinforced this time again with contingents of the C.R.S., the special riot squad, effectively sealed off all the approaches to the Sorbonne, their vans set across the streets leading up to it. Within the forbidden perimeter, there was a deathly stillness, broken only by the occasional sound of a revving engine, or the crackle of a short-wave radio issuing situation reports. The glint of a helmet and the shine of a black police macintosh were occasionally caught in a street light.
At the top of the Boulevard St. Michel, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, battle lines were drawn up. Members of the students' union, linking arms, kept the demonstrators clear of the police, and avoided clashes: But soon, there was a disturbing bustle of activity on the students' front, and the sound of iron implements against stone. "They are tearing up the roadway and building barricades", a policeman remarked to me. "There will be trouble before the night is out."
I moved from behind the police barrage, with two hose trucks in position, at the bottom of the Rue Gay-Lussac, down the Boulevard St. Michel, where boys and girls (almost as many of the latter) by no means all of the beatnik type, formed a human chain passing on paving stones to the big barricades drawn across the thoroughfare. Parked cars made up its core and on top of them, any material or trash that came to hand.
Students worked at it with extraordinary intensity. One group had even got hold of a compressor and automatic drill from a building site and set it working to cheers of onlookers. People in night attire peered down from the windows of neighbouring blocks of flats. One barricade was already over 6ft. high, and students were driving nails through boards and setting them in position on the glacis in front of it, to burst the tyres of police trucks when the assault came.
At 2.30 a.m., things began to move on the front of the "representatives of order", as they are called in French officialese. Instructions had obviously come from on high to clear the barricades at whatever cost. Senior officers held order groups; the troops adjusted the chinstraps of their helmets, and their goggles; tightened their grip on their long night sticks, and checked their tear gas grenades. Then they moved on, in columns of companies, down the boulevard towards the barricades.
I watched them from the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens. Two red flares went up, presumably to coordinate the attack with the other companies of police elsewhere. Slowly, inexorably, they pressed on. Then a halt was called, and a broadside of tear gas grenades crashed into the first barricade, some aimed at point-blank range at the students. The acrid smoke soon filled the air, and the attacking police, in spite of goggles, coughed and spat and wept. Behind the barricade, where an occasional figure throwing a fire bomb or paving stone appeared, ghostlike, through the smoke, things must have become quite untenable. "It's no ordinary tear gas", a French newspaper colleague remarked, as whiffs of it blew back our way. "It's got chlorine in it. It's the kind of stuff the Americans use in Vietnam."
The first barricade fell without much trouble. The second, at the corner of the Rue Gay-Lussac, was a tougher proposition. Tear gas grenades crashed upon it, and some incendiaries too (the Luxembourg television team categorically said so in a roundup later yesterday morning), which set fire to the cars wedged in its midst. There was a pause. Then people on the upper floors of apartment houses on the other side of the street from the gardens began throwing flower pots, stones, and anything that came to hand on to the police massed below, causing them to scatter rather sheepishly.
But retribution was swift. The grenade throwers were aimed at the darkened windows, and the targets pointed out, as shot upon shot was fired directly into dwellings. Some ricocheted against the walls or iron shutters to fall back on the attackers. Even behind the police lines, the air had become almost unbreathable. "The inhabitants of the Latin Quarter are with the students. They can't stand the police", my French colleague added.
After a moment's hesitation the offensive resumed. More tear gas as new supplies were rushed up to the front. Some students, with great bravery, occasionally rushed across the street to throw a fire-bomb, or drove another car into the fray to act as a buffer. But they could not stop the progress of more numerous, better-equipped forces. When the police had reached one barricade they seized the paving stones and showered them on its defenders, before capturing the obstacle and pursuing their mopping up operations as flat dwellers showered water on the students to give them some relief from the tear gas. I heard later that they had given refuge in hallways and flats themselves to the students who scattered before the police. These boys and girls may not have known what they were fighting for, but they certainly fought with the energy of despair.
A few hours later I returned to the scene of battle. The approaches to the Sorbonne were a spectacle of desolation. The roads were up in many places, bus stop signs torn down, shop windows shattered. In the Rue Gay-Lussac, where the fighting had lasted until after five, some 40 burnt-out cars littered the roadway. Fresh reinforcements of police stood at street corners, controlling movement, and little groups of students, red-eyed from lack of sleep and tear gas, argued passionately and surveyed the battlefield. Their mood was obviously ugly.
"Come and see what those wretches were firing at the boys", a woman said to me as she dragged me into her shop to show me canisters of tear gas. "The foreign press must know, for ours will not tell the truth."
The upshot of the wildest night Paris has lived since the days of the liberation was as follows: 367 injured, 22 of them seriously (four students and 18 police), 60 cars burnt out, 128 damaged, not to speak of broken shop windows, torn up streets, and the rest.
.lcThe street-battles in Paris between students and police changed the universities forever. After 1968, university life became much more informal. School-like discipline was abolished, students began to wear what they pleased, and to live and work how they wanted.
