Rioting for tradition
Frank Johnson
Paris
itons will be broadly aware that a start-
linglyringly huge march took place in this city on Sunday over something unclear to do with education. That evening, in the Latin Quarter, there was a small, more ex- clusive, riot, devoted to the same subject.
The march was made up of 800,000 peo- ple according to the socialist ministry of the interior, 1,500,000 according to the anti- socialist France Soir, and nearly 2,000,000 according to the apparently still more anti- socialist Quotidien de Paris. I had intended to compromise by calling it the biggest crowd seen in Paris since the one that started the Great Revolution, but a friend reminded me that the best scholarship now says that the crowd that started the Great Revolution was in fact rather small. Cer- tainly, it was generally agreed that Sunday's was as big a crowd as any since the Libera- tion, as big as the left-wing crowd which demonstrated to keep de Gaulle out of power in 1958 and the bourgeois crowd which demonstrated to keep him in power in 1968. The invitations to Sunday even- ing's riot were confined to a few score youths and several hundred riot police.
This controversy is partly to do with the defence of French traditions of academic excellence and discipline in secondary schools. The Anglo-Saxon may observe that, while he sees the point of a march, he does not grasp how concern for academic standards and discipline can be expressed in the form of a riot. In Britain, the notorious Rhodes Boyson riots of the 1970s, caused by the publication of the Black Papers, took the form of violent protests by the education correspondents and plate-glass vice-chancellors, but were largely confined to the quality press. The explanation of this difference between our two countries is that the French traditions of academic ex- cellence and discipline in secondary schools must be seen in the context of the still greater French tradition of riot.
And so, the march over, with most of the marchers safely in coaches and trains back to the provinces, it was possible for us to dine in the Latin Quarter, await nightfall, and stroll back across the Place Saint Ger- main to the steady plop of CS gas canisters. This was my first experience of these weapons. After they have landed a few feet in front of you, it is possible to carry on advancing for quite a few feet more before your eyes stream and the nausea forces you to retreat. Thus it was possible to get far enough ` to discover a blazing barricade across the boulevard. A blazing barricade in defence of traditional teaching methods, and grammar by rote! Technically, that was what it was. Happy the country with such incendiarists. One is always being assured by sophisticates, experienced in the ways of this city, that such riots are 'nothing'. So Parisian disturbances tend to go under- reported. Certainly, it was not the attrition of the British mining strike. And it did in- deed appear to be the essentially 'ritual' rioting of which the sophisticates speak. But it all looked interesting enough to me, and illustrative of Anglo-French differences of emphasis. In Britain, the result of falling educational standards is, after many years, Sir Keith Joseph — not youths, inflamed by the writings of Cox and Dyson, lighting fires in Chelsea.
But the French education controversy is not only about educational standards, it may be objected. It is also about politics. About whether conservatism or socialism should predominate in the schools. So too is the British. But, inspiring though his activities were to many, at no point coule Dr Boyson have summoned 800,000 to 1,000,000 of the middle classes on to the streets of London, followed by a small riot.
In due course, last Sunday evening, a Dock Green-ish riot policeman advised the local equivalent of 'move along there, please' (circulez, s'il vows plait), and we went home. Desultory clashes are said to have continued into the night. The young rioters were not mainly motivated by dis- sent from socialism's critique of traditional teaching methods. They were mainly moti- vated by dissent from socialism. This is an important and under-noticed change from the French past when most young rioters have been socialists. But anti-socialists have to have something to feed on. That I think the editor must have had a touch of the sun'.
something, above all at the moment, is the government's plan for private schools. M. Mitterrand was trapped with this on taking office, exactly in the way that Labour prime ministers are trapped with conference resolutions abolishing the public schools. Because they know that, given a reasonably free social order, private education cannot be abolished, they try to fob the party off with more comprehensives, an end to streaming, no direct grants, more gay studies, etc. M. Mitterrand's minister of education, M. Savary, produced an equivalent plan to subject private schools to greater state control in the form of more inspectors, more say in the curriculum and so on. Uproar from the relevant parents. Opinion polls hugely against government. M. Giscard d'Estaing, M. Jacques Chirac, M. Raymond Barre, Mme Simone Veil, and the other opposition politicians step for- ward as defenders of free choice. Frighten- ed government compromises. Uproar from Left. All now confusion — except that we know that in practice the government will dare exercise very little control over the wretched schools.
What has got the government into this morass is the sheer scale, and strength, of private, mainly Catholic education: nearly 2.5 million pupils in a total of nearly 12.5 million, with many of the parents of the latter children wishing their children were in the former.
So the march was stirringly respectable: miles of properly-dressed middle-aged couples, and their older offspring, from all over France, wearing bright scarves explain- ing that they were from St Joseph's, Brest or wherever. Mgr Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris and the spiritual leader of the struggle, blessed the expedition as it set out. At various points there were loudspeakers over which could be heard, say, the Bishop of Tours impressing on the passing nuns, and teachers of French literature, the need to avoid violence. The aspirants to Caesar's realm — M. Chirac, M. Barre, etc — took care to be prominent. We were issued with sheets containing the slogans. There was: 'Educators, yes: civil servants, no.' There was also 'We are in the street: it's only the start,' which sounds rather lame, but which rhymes in French. A song about liberty, which is the signature tune of the campaign, was constantly sung. It was to the tune of the chorus of Hebrew slaves from Verdi's Nabucco, the organisers ignoring the fact that Verdi was a roaring anti-clerical. Metro stations were closed for hours.
Ancestral passions were at work beneath it all. So much of French politics has been about education. To those traditional causes of clerical and lay has been added the new, Black Paper-ish one about teaching methods, the hidden issue which the government forgot. The French now fear they are producing lots of illiterate, innumerate children. It was about time it happened to them. To some of us Britons it has been irritating to live in the shadow all that conventional brilliance. These wider issues will be the subject of a later piece.
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