EPardSg Fresh from the turmoil of the Portland State student strike over the invasion of Cambodia and related matters, I sat typing a play in a tiny French hotel room, windows thrown open to the summer air. A French teacher at the time, I made a beeline for Paris each summer, gulping up the kind of contrasts that so often stimulate writing. Suddenly as I typed, a beam of light began playing across my hands. Looking up toward its source I saw, for the first time, Brice Lalonde, who, appropriately enough, was across the street bending solar energy to his own communication purposes with the aid of a prism. “Are you a writer?” he shouted, elfin-faced, laughing, framed in his Paris rooftop skylight window. “Sure!” I shouted back, already chuckling. “Meet me downstairs for a drink at five!” How could I not? And how could I have known then that the spritely, airborne creature I met would, 10 years later, turn out to be a buster of traditional French political parties, a past and no doubt future candidate for the presidency of France, truly a seeker of a politics new enough and good enough to keep us all airborne safely into the 21st century? Back in those days, Brice, too, was still fresh from that formative granddaddy of an uprising, France’s May 1968, in which the ripple effect from a Pariscentered student/worker strike very surely altered the course of French history. Brice still kept a knotted coiled rope in his room, one end tied to a beam, this makeshift ladder ready to serve as an emergency escape route to the ground six floors below. He talked with a sense of urgency, too, always at a rip-roaring pace. He was especially eager to know the details, language, and preoccupations of the American student movement — Was it essentially Marxist? Had there been Maoists? Were the factional battles as stultifying as they had been in Paris? Had people been non-violent on the barricades or not? And just as importantly — Had there been some sort of quantum leap in the level of human relations, sexual included? In France, nearly everyone talks politics every day, and most people seem to read a daily newspaper geared to their segment of the complex political pie. Students, particularly the intense concentration of Parisian ones, have long been forceful actors in the political scene; it was the powerful French National Union of Students (UNEF) which had initiated the eventually successful move to end the Algerian War. Brice Lalonde, a rather timid student of the classics, had joined the UNEF/Sorbonne just like 40,000 other students at the wildly overcrowded Sorbonne in the early ’60s. By the time Brice became president of the UNEF/ Sorbonne a few years later, the association was huge, volatile, with a thousand factions and tendencies simmering. He was literally forced to learn the ambiguities of leadership, “stuck between the tree and the bark” (as “Gardens and computers* my street and my planet* politics and love* 1*11 take it all!** By Penny Allen H®V27 G®oaD(£] □ O taw ®7®ta®9 fl® ®oo3 3® a {?®G° ta® [jwsdctafflGV ®{? UEPaonG®'? he puts it), representing increasingly militant students on the one hand and interfacing on the other with the Minister of Education and the police. These days, now that Brice is a national figure, the press and some politicians in France occasionally attack him for failing to play the political game by the rules, but it’s really nothing new for him. Back in 1968, with French workers building towards a national strike, Brice and his cohorts bolted from the giant UNEF, which was totally stymied by factional battles. It was Brice and friends who invented and announced the news that the government was closing the universities, thereby igniting an explosive situation, setting free, as it were, 40,000 frustrated and excitable shock troops. As Brice now puts it, the action ruined his reputation as a responsible political person at the time, but it sure helped bring on the glory of May 1968. Three lessons emerged from that era which still shape Lalonde’s thinking as a political figure today. First, it became obvious to him that much of the political action occurring in ’68 did so outside the traditional, Right/Left, ruling class vs. the people axis. To abstract that one level, it meant that there was something newer afoot than the usual contrast and struggle between the idealist world view based on ideas and the materialist world view based on concrete economic reality. Or, to go one step further, maybe there was another kind of political world view besides the marxist class struggle. What it was was not yet clear. Lalonde says, “Philosophers call such things paradigms, which is to say that all science, all fields of thought, politics, whatever ... are organized around certain great ideas which dominate an era. There are many ways to understand, to interpret the world, but it is one particular way, the paradigm, which imposes itself at a given moment in the history of a society, by agreement of its members. And perhaps the paradigm was changing. That concept, which was a liberation, was new in ’68 and has helped enormously since.” The second lesson had to do with the defense of territory, which is a rather old-fashioned notion not formerly included in modern radical political analysis, but is instead an approach which eventually leads to advocacy of localism, neighborhood politics. In May 1968, the territory was the Latin Quarter in Paris and, by extension, the aura of “ideal city” it took on during the Events. “It was extraordinary, an unbelievable solidarity,” says Brice. “I saw people come down to the street in their pajamas to offer their car keys so their cars could more easily be used as part of the barricades. I saw people dangle their transistor radios out the windows so the strikers could hear what was being said about them. And hearing about their actions at the same time they were living them was exactly what they wanted!” The power of the radio to stimulate a certain point of view, almost a territorial point of view, was humorously evoked during Lalonde’s first campaign. And localism is absolutely an essential part of the politics of ecology. The third lesson was sweet, poignant even. The events of May had also been a turning point for human relations, particularly between the sexes, much of it based, according to Brice, on the openness and generosity that came from having known together a moment of extreme dramatic intensity. As he puts it, “A generation had seemingly resolved its problems with sexuality, thereby leaving it free to take up something else.” Brice writes tenderly and touchingly of having been raised in the country by only women in his book Sur la Vague Verte (Riding the Green Wave). He and his sisters thrived in an extended family that was really more like a community than an isolated nuclear family. It is this sort of comfortable community that often surfaces as an ideal whenever Brice focuses on happy times; it was certainly a reality during the Events of May when Clinton St. Quarterly 29
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