…One Less Scene

I realize that pavement is wrong, but I still love it. I love the way it smells in the rain, and I love the way it disappears under the tires. Mostly I love the history that it reveals; it has a way of saying “we go here”. Recently I read a book called “Prelude to Revolution, France in May 1968″ by Daniel Singer, about the French student uprising and general strike. An interesting paragraph on page 127 has a wonderful homage to pavement stones:
“That evening St.-Germain-des-Pres was no place for tourists. The Flore, the Deux Magots, the Mabillon- these well-known coffeehouses were in the range of fire. That night St. -Germain was not Greenwich Villlage nor Chelsea; it was a battlefield. The police could neither cope nor understand. Their forces were impressive and armed to the teeth. There was a time when, faced with such a black armada, the sudents would have turned and run. Now fear was turned into passionate determination, and they tended to run forward. In daring hands the cobblestone was a match for the hand grenade. Le Pave- the new hero of May, the Parisian paving stone, small enough to fit the hand, heavy enough to hurt, provided munition for the fighter and a brick for his barricade. It was also the symbolic stone thrown against the edifice of the established disorder.”

It’s one of the more uplifting books I’ve read in a while, but also sad because it reaffirms my personal theory that today’s counterculture is flagging a little, and also journalists like Daniel Singer are in short supply. This is a newspaper man that used to write for the Nation, who is unabashedly Marxist and deeply critical of the douchebag political establishment of his day. He’d probably be reduced to writing for the International Socialist Worker these days, or hopefully the resplendent but marginal Real Change.
Another paragraph, after the student uprising has finally been crushed by the brutal gendarmes:
“Superior force had prevailed. By 5 a.m., most barricades in and around Rue Gay-Lussac had fallen. By 6, though there were still pockets of resistance, particularly near the hilly area around the Mouffetard Market, Daniel Cohn-Bendit broadcast an appeal to his friends to break off so as to avoid a slaughter. The battle was over, but not the mopping up. The cruel manhunt went on. The policemen, rifle or gun in hand, barged into private homes and dragged out refugees whom they clubbed into Black Marias. The image that sticks in the mind is of a young woman, dragged naked into the street and then into a distant van by representatives of law and order who were yelling ‘We’ll teach you, you whore.’ For many of the prisoners arrest was only the beginning of a ghastly ordeal.” p. 142.