Une petite leçon d'histoire

Exhibit A, the Sorbonne:

Exhibit B, the Sorbonne:

Take a wild guess which building houses my classes!

Yeaaaaah, sixties' architecture, that's the ticket. Abuse my eyes with your surfeit of squares, your linoleum surfaces, and your palette de couleurs à l'hôpital (hmm, no, putting it in French doesn't make it any better).

But I thought--I thought--romantic French education, where did you go?!

Oh, you disappeared? After May of 1968? When a bunch of angry students threw their chairs into the street so hard that Charles de Gaulle fled the city? Oh, sorry, that was 2006, the chair incident? My apologies. But  we really do have a load of enraged lit majors to thank for the major upheaval in French society that followed? Cool beans.

Take that, ma! And you said my liberal arts degree was worthless.

To continue in a more serious vein, if I am capable of such a thing, 1968 was a big year in French history. Far too big for me to do it proper justice, given my tendency to crack bad puns at the expense of historical credibility, but here goes anyway.

Our story begins in March, when a group of left-wing activists, artists, and students of the Universty of Nanterre held a sit-in protesting class discrimination and political bureaucracy. After the administration called in the police to surround the building, their conference disbanded peacefully enough, but their discontent remained. After a few weeks of strife between the university and its students, the administration decided to threaten a few of these malcontents with expulsion and, oh, shut the school down. Upon hearing this, their student compatriots at the Sorbonne had a little protest of their own, to which the administration responded just as favorably, by calling in the police.

Which about 20,000 students, teachers, and young workers protested, in a massive march called by the student and teacher unions on the Arc de Triomphe. So off came the gloves and on came the riot gear: tear gas, barricades, and hundreds more student arrests followed. By mid-May almost every union in Paris was protesting in some capacity, the Sorbonne had been declared a "people's university," and the city had basically shut down. De Gaulle mysterious disappeared in the middle of failed negotiations--having fled to a military base in Germany, it turns out--to which 500,000 French responded by marching through the streets waving flags and bidding him a fond adieu.

The irony of all this is that within a month--after the National Assembly had been dissolved, new elections called, and de Gaulle restored shame-faced to his magisterial seat--the Gaullists won the greatest parliamentary victory in French history. And in 1970, the Sorbonne was divided into thirteen universities, one of which, forty years later, I now call my own: Paris 3, or the Sorbonne Nouvelle.

But what it lacks in aesthetic qualities it makes up for in aesthetic theory, which I shall talk about at a later date. In the meantime I will be curled up in the library of Paris IV, the old Sorbonne, pretending that I picked out the crown moldings myself.

All images thanks to Wikipedia.