“I arrived on a clear warm spring evening. I was in my apartment eating a picnic supper when repeated explosions began rattling my quiet neighborhood. My friend Sarah Plimpton happened to phone me. She was pleased I was back and quickly realized I had no clue to what was happening. She offered to give me a tour. She arrived a few minutes later, and we walked the two blocks to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where a seemingly endless crowd of cheerful, mostly young people was proceeding at a lively clip toward (Sarah told me) the Chamber of Deputies. We had slipped into the cortege. Slogans were chanted, by a few at first, quickly taken up by many. A frequent one that night was ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands!,’ which Sarah explained (never mind!). At the corner of Rue de Lille everyone came to a halt. The CRS had stopped our progress with so-called ‘defensive grenades’ — the ones with tear gas. Sarah: ‘This happens every day. They watch us building barricades and getting ready to march, and as soon as we start, they charge. Very strange!’ Our fellow-marchers’ high spirits were not dampened by this failure.
“During the days that followed I rarely noticed any sense of failure. For one thing, everybody was having too good a time. Everybody was full of confidence as well. They felt they were winning. After all, they controlled a big part of the Left Bank. The CRS (‘Republican’ riot police) always pulled back from their tear-gas victories during the night. And whatever happened, people seemed to be learning all the time, taking in new ideas and passing them along as fast as they could. Naturally there were the leftist clichés about class war and solidarity with the unions, but mostly the slogans celebrated individual joy and celebration. Something new had shown up. It was my cousin, Tam, who let me in on the secret. Among the usual competitors for revolutionary authority — dissident communists, Trotskyists, feminists, radical Catholics, anarchists — a movement known as the Situationists, mainly working behind the scenes, had somehow secreted their succulent, subversive vaccines into the mind and soul of this new rebellion.
“The Situationists were best known for their practice of deviation, which meant putting objects or activities to uses for which they hadn’t been intended — my favorite example was an American porn film in which all the lines of dialogue had been replaced with maxims from the Little Red Book of chairman Mao. The main target of the movement wasn’t late capitalism or neo-fascism, it was hierarchy of any kind. All previous revolutions had overthrown one hierarchy only to replace it with another just as bad and often worse. It wasn’t enough to get rid of capitalist hierarchies, all social and political hierarchies had to be axed as well. (The PCF, the French communist party, which was run by Stalinists, did not take the Situationists to their bosom.) The only way to make sure this happened was for revolutionary action to become permanent. Direct democracy was the rule of the day, which was perhaps why everybody involved in the May outbreak was having so much fun. If you came up with a great idea, you found you had the power to make things happen, at least until somebody with a better idea came along.
“Here’s how I got involved. When I landed in Brussels, I rented a Mini Cooper. Knowing of the gas shortage in France (service stations had shut down as part of the general strike), I filled up the back seat and trunk with seven full jerry cans. Once I’d settled into life in Paris — one or two demos were enough to make me want to join the party (and I don’t mean the PCF!) — I wondered what kind of a contribution I could make. It would have to be inconspicuous; foreigners caught tossing paving stones were bundled out of the country within hours. Perhaps my little car and a respectable supply of gas might be useful. One morning I went to the Censier branch of the Sorbonne to offer my services — that’s where the student-workers action committee was headquartered.
“When I walked into the main building I was treated to a surprise. The high walls of the entrance hall had been painted from floor to ceiling with blackboard paint. Lines of text had been chalked over the entire surface. They were full of new ideas for the ‘ongoing revolution’ and instructions for applying them. The language was elegant and sharp. I took out my little camera hoping to record some of it. I was promptly stopped by a young man nearby: no photographs. I told him these perishable sentences were too good to lose. He said he understood, but what was written on the walls wasn’t meant for the ages, it was meant for today and today only. True enough — when I came back the next day, all the words I’d seen had been erased and new ones equally inspiring had taken their place. I felt a slightly horrified respect for the volunteers who’d given up a night’s sleep to get this work done. That was Situationism in action.
“The student-workers committee asked me to drive a couple of their members to factories a hundred kilometers or so from Paris. These were places where no reliable information about the uprising was available. I made five of these trips over the next ten days. We had only a few hours at our destinations to spread the good word, not enough to have had much effect — the ‘unions’ in these factories were usually set up by management, with in-house security systems to get rid of troublemakers. But what happened in the car on the way out
