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Legitimacy.”
For the sense of disillusion set in quickly after May ′68. This was also something about which I wanted to write. Contemporary historians now describe it in terms of the Arab oil crisis, the economic depression in Europe, the rise of right-wing governments and the advent of the first mass unemployment since the 1930s. We saw it in more immediate and human terms: communes that went broke, free unions that became bad marriages, university faculties that became hotbeds of rivalry and fruitless dispute, artistic spirits who became addicts and breakdowns, travellers who came home sick and sorry, women who became exhausted, one-parent families, a world of little presses and alternative newspapers that dropped into oblivion, and a Paris where the Bourse remained and Les Halles was destroyed.
How to make sense of all this? And how not to betray the light? As Hazlitt, once more, wrote of William Godwin, the author of Political Justice (1793), the most radical of all the English revolutionary tracts:
Fatal reverse! Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at twenty and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814? … Were we fools then, or are we dishonest now? Or was the impulse of the mind less likely to be true and sound when it arose from high thought at warm feeling, than afterwards, when it was warped and debased by the example, the vices, and follies of the world?
I was soon in France again myself. For a moment I saw fragments of the great événements, though already the carnival was in chaos and the millennial hopes in retreat, the visions of those banners against the blue spring sky, those great roaring crowds, those nightly barricades, scattered by violence and confusion and confrontations with intense personal fear.
One night, coming out of the place de la Sorbonne on to the boul’ Mich, my hands full of books and papers, I was caught up in a sudden CRS sweep. It was raining lightly, a sweet-scented summer rain, and the CRS coaches—dark-green, with grilled windows, and rows of doors opening simultaneously, like a train pulling into a rush-hour station—came skidding up on to the pavements, lights flashing and klaxons blaring. A few yards away a girl in blue lycée overalls, painted with Maoist signs, was knocked to the ground and a mass of leaflets spilled out of her canvas shoulder-bag. Hesitatingly, I took a step towards her, and found myself jammed against the iron fence that runs along the site of the old Cluny monastery, where Peter Abelard used to lecture before he met Héloïse. The pressure on my chest was from the barrel of an automatic rifle.
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