🪧 May 3, "It Is Forbidden to Forbid"

 France in 1945 was a victor and a loser at the same time. Four years of Nazi occupation, the shame of Vichy collaboration, the myth of the Resistance. The Fourth Republic rose on this contradictory legacy. Governments collapsed every six months on average. Parliament was fractured. Blood flowed in the colonies. France lost Indochina at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and almost immediately, Algeria caught fire.

The economy told a different story. The so-called Trente Glorieuses — Thirty Glorious Years — had begun. Marshall Plan funds, state-led industrialization, a baby boom. Renault 4CVs filled the streets. Refrigerators and televisions entered ordinary homes. Rural populations poured into cities. The number of university students exploded from around 140,000 in 1950 to over 600,000 by 1968. 📈

De Gaulle's Return and "La Grandeur de la France" ⚜️

In 1958, the Algerian crisis brought the Fourth Republic to its knees. De Gaulle returned. He drafted a new constitution centered on a powerful presidency, founding the Fifth Republic, and won the presidency the following year.

His vision was clear: La grandeur de la France. The greatness of France. A sovereign power walking its own path between Washington and Moscow. France detonated its first nuclear bomb in the Sahara in 1960. It withdrew from NATO's integrated military command in 1966. In 1964, it broke with the Western consensus and recognized the People's Republic of China. The franc grew stronger. The Concorde took shape on drawing boards.

On the surface, glory. Underneath, authoritarianism. State-controlled television and radio shaped the national conversation. De Gaulle was 78 years old. The "France" he invoked grew increasingly distant from the rhythms and instincts of younger generations. 📺

Algeria: The Contradiction Everyone Looked Away From 🩸

The Algerian War (1954–1962) was the deepest wound in postwar French society. For more than a century, Algeria had been considered not a colony but an integral part of France itself. When independence fighters rose, the political establishment tied itself in knots.

Socialist governments intensified repression. The right demanded Algeria stay French forever. De Gaulle initially seemed to embrace the settlers with his famous "Je vous ai compris" — "I have understood you" — but eventually signed the 1962 Évian Accords granting independence. Along the way, the OAS paramilitary tried to assassinate him. And in October 1961, in the heart of Paris, Algerian demonstrators were beaten and thrown into the Seine by police. A massacre buried in silence for decades.

Here is the point: the political establishment tolerated torture, refused to face the end of empire, and preached liberté, égalité, fraternité while bodies floated down the river through the capital. The generation that turned twenty in 1968 had grown up watching that contradiction. ⚖️

The Nanterre Dorms: A Small Spark 🚪

In 1964, a new campus rose on a desolate plot of land outside Paris: Nanterre University. Built to relieve pressure on the Sorbonne. The reality was grim. Concrete blocks beside a shantytown (bidonville), inadequate facilities, more than ten thousand students crammed into tight quarters.

And then there were the dorm rules. Male students could not enter female dorms. The reverse was equally forbidden. Students under 21 could not bring members of the opposite sex into their rooms without parental consent.

In March 1967, students occupied a women's dormitory in protest. In January 1968, Youth and Sports Minister François Missoffe attended the opening of a new swimming pool on campus. A young man approached him and pressed: "Minister, I've read all 600 pages of your White Paper on Youth. There isn't a single line about the sexual problems of young people." Missoffe sneered: "With those kinds of problems, jump in the pool." The young man shot back: "That's exactly the youth policy of fascism."

That young man was Daniel Cohn-Bendit. They called him "Dany le Rouge" — Red Danny. 🔴

The dorm rules looked trivial. They were also a perfect distillation of everything: authoritarianism, patriarchy, control over young bodies and desires, the hypocrisy of the world adults had built. On March 22, Cohn-Bendit and others occupied the administrative tower at Nanterre. The March 22 Movement was born.

May 3: "It Is Forbidden to Forbid" 🪧

In late April, the university disciplined Cohn-Bendit and his fellow activists. On May 2, the dean shut down Nanterre. The students moved to the Sorbonne.

On Saturday afternoon, May 3, around 500 gathered in the Sorbonne courtyard. Debate, speeches, electric tension. The rector called the police. Here came the decisive mistake. For nearly 800 years, an unwritten rule held that police do not enter the Sorbonne. University autonomy was sacred. That rule shattered when the riot police (CRS) marched into the courtyard and dragged students into vans.

Word spread through the Latin Quarter. Other students poured into the streets. "Free our comrades!" Paving stones flew. Tear gas exploded. Hundreds were arrested that night. The Sorbonne was sealed shut.

Soon new lines began to appear on the walls of Paris.

Il est interdit d'interdire. It is forbidden to forbid.

Sous les pavés, la plage. Under the paving stones, the beach.

Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible. Be realistic, demand the impossible.

These were not graffiti. They were a single rejection of everything at once: the comfort of the Trente Glorieuses, the glory of de Gaulle's France, the silence around Algeria, the dorm rules at Nanterre. ✊

Pry up a paving stone, and beneath it lay sand. The line meant something simple and profound: under the hard surface of the established order, another possibility lay sleeping. For a few weeks in May, France caught a glimpse of that beach. 🏖️