Son of Calepin: The French Scene

Extract

When I was saying goodbye to Michel Butor on the southbound platform of Durham station some months ago, I asked him if he did not feel that student activity on the violent left, in France and elsewhere, had already reached a peak, and that what students really expected from teachers was not discussion towards reform, but a reason for order. There was, he replied, nothing more repugnant to him than the teaching of order to the young (I was very much reminded of Camus’s embarrassed proclamation to a group of students when asked to address them on some serious topic, I would rather preach passion to you’) and the only valid thing to tell them was to explore and risk. I had been full of Camus and limits when I asked the question, having only a few months before lectured on L’Homme révolté to an audience of African students on Camus’s depiction of the pitfalls of millenarian revolution, its constant history of over-reaching and failure; and I had been roundly rebuked by nearly all the expatriate professors—European and American—on the staff of that African university: in their view, what might have been a careful indication of ‘brakes’ in Britain or Europe could be only a counsel of cowardly despair in modem Africa, where the first lesson needed was revolt.

Butor clearly felt this about France, too, but whatever one’s views about the events of May, 1968, and the legend it has left behind it, in the most conspicuous case of Nanterre it seems to me that the reasonable limits of revolt were crossed long ago.