Sweet 68 at last

My birthday struck me as a good moment for some reflections on age. Specifically, that there are ages it’s more fun to reach than others. Just because of the numbers involved, I mean.

For instance, I enjoyed 63, because I’d liked being 21, so I thought three times more might well be three times better. 64 was good because of the Beatles. But now I’m 68, and that’s a magic number, because of the events ’68, the May-June days and all that, French students battling with police and France in a revolutionary blaze.

Iconic image: police v protesters in Paris

Not that it ever was, really. I remember hearing Maurice Grimaud, then ‘Préfet de Police’ or Police Chief of Paris, explaining, as he was about to retire many years later, that he could never understand all the myths around May-June ’68. In his view, the police never lost control. The fighting was always restricted to the relatively small district of the Latin Quarter, the old University neighbourhood, and it led to  no deaths. Not much of a revolution, he seemed to be suggesting.

It was only as the message permeated up the chain of command that it became more terrifying. Grimaud was calm. The ‘Préfet’ or main central government official for Paris, was worried. The Interior Minister was scared. The Prime Minister was terrified. And the President of the Republic, Charles de Gaulle at that time, was in a blind panic and ran off to Baden-Baden in Germany. There he joined up with the French occupation forces, ready to mount a new Resistance to retake France, just as he had in 1940 after the French surrender to the Nazis.

He was met in Baden-Baden by the commander of the French forces, General Jacques Massu. There’s an apocryphal story about de Gaulle walking up to him and grasping his hand.

“Hey, Massu,” the story has him saying, “as big a fool as ever?”

“Hello, General,” Massu replied, “as big a Gaullist.”

Massu apparently told de Gaulle that he had no business being in Baden-Baden and packed him off back to where his duty required him, in Paris.

As for the disturbances, they died down. There were some reforms, mostly in the university sector, most of them since rolled back. Back then, it was all exciting, suggesting long and uplifting visions of radical change into the future. We still hadn’t had Tricky Dicky Nixon, Nicolas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, Maggie Thatcher or, worst of all, Donald Trump to put any dreams of that kind firmly back on the backburner.

Now ’68 is just a part of the mythical background of our lives. But for a moment it was a much more present part of mine. I didn’t get to Paris for the first time until the spring of 1969, but even then, in the yard behind the youth hostel where my school group stayed, there was a huge pile of cobble stones building up, as the Paris authorities got rid of the old cobbles that had proved such useful missiles for the students to fling at the police.

At least my age this year will remind me of those heady times each time I think of it. For now, and in the middle of a lockdown with no visitors or restaurants, it’s started more quietly, with a great meal prepared for me by Danielle. It involved fish cooked in breadcrumbs, because I’d expressed a preference for Wiener Schnitzel and then decided that, no, I wouldn’t have meat but might prefer fish. As Danielle pointed out, cooking fish in breadcrumbs was a great compromise between the two.

Wiener Fischel

It was excellent.

I also have a cake (of course). With just one candle. I can’t remember what the age is, but at a certain point you stop getting a candle for each year. A single candle seems right, anyway. 

After all, it marks one more year down and another starting.

One candle for one more year