Fred Vermorel in Paris, May 1968

The day before I left for Paris, in September 1967, I paid a final visit to the Tate Gallery. I lingered by the Pre-Raphaelites. When would I see them again? Then I went into a nearby cafe and sent Malcolm and Vivienne a farewell letter. I inserted a recent cutting from the Guardian. It concerned a murder case in which the only clue was 'three long blond hairs'.

On the night ferry over I tried to rehearse a spirit of exile by straying on the windswept deck. This fantasy was nearly spoiled by the remarkable coincidence that travelling on the same ferry was a woman who had worked at Hermann Baur's lingerie firm. She kept winking at me. But I turned my back and maintained my reverie until the Gare du Nord.

In Paris I booked into a Left Bank hotel, and set about registering at the Sorbonne. In order to do this I had to fulfil a number of bureaucratic obligations - standing in line and so on. I was also confronted with a number of problems to do with my eligibility for grant aid, and my dual (French-British) nationality.

I began terrorizing the French in a way I found very effective. I discovered that a show of Anglo-Saxon hooliganism so completely threw them that they would accede to almost anything. Thus I began storming in front of queues, bursting into offices, refusing to leave until my case had been heard - immediately! - pestered officials, reducing some to fury and others to tears, and generally carried on in the vein of Arthur Rimbaud.

Looking back; I suppose the apparition of this rather pretty young man, with an English accent, and a set of uncompromising demands, must have seemed quite sexy, and rather amusing - more of a frisson than your average day at the office.

I also think that at that point in '67 the French had not caught on to the anarcho principles circulating in my milieu in London, and had no defence against a solitary youth who knew his Bakunin and James Dean and wasn't taking any fucking shit from any fucking bastards.

I enrolled on my course, which was called French Civilization (a university university entrance course for foreigners). I listened to the debates on Radio Sorbonne and attended lectures. I explored the bookshops, and frequented the Cinematheque.

But the French students seemed dull, and so very nice. I wrote glumly in this vein to Malcolm.

Then I went to my first Parisian demo. This was a routine anti-American Vietnam march. London demos like this had always annoyed me - the cunning way the police marched alongside you, anaesthetizing fervour and absorbing the chants of `Ho! Ho! Ho ! Chi Min!' in comforting lines of bobbing black helmets. British protesters also seemed to 'march' with a finger up their arses. Was that any way to topple capitalism?

My group had often tried to inject malice and vandalism. The only time we really succeeded was at a march to Rhodesia House, when the police miscalculated and the way was suddenly open down the Strand to South Africa House. In the scrimmage which followed only missiles were wanting. I saw one person hurl a dustbin into a plate-glass window, while a fusty old gent excitedly used his rolled-up umbrella to poke in side windows. I was reduced to smashing similar windows with my elbow. I think I managed three before I had to scarper. That was an occasion we celebrated later in Lyons Corner House.

But this French demo was something else. As it began there were no police in sight, only several hundred demonstrators and a lowering atmosphere. Suddenly a row of CRS riot police, helmeted, goggled and carrying riot shields, and looking like sinister shiny black insects, came into view stretched across the Boulevard St-Germain. Then they opened fire.

In those days, as all through the '68 events, the CRS useda variety of weapons. Blast bombs were so shockingly loud that you could see everyryone in the vicinity of an explosion jump at least a foot into the air with shock. Then there were missiles which sprayed on impact a yellow powder which filled your throat and lungs with a burning so painful you could hardly breathe to run away. (Veterans could sornetimes neutralize these powder bombs because in the second or so between one landing and exploding it was possible to run up and cover it with a dustbin lid.) Then there were tear-gas bombs, thrown or fired with abandon. Helmeted demonstrators responded to this barrage with a hail of stones and bricks, attacking the police lines with staves.

All this was new to me. It seemed to portend the revolution. These Frogs knew how to pick a fight with the cops. Perhaps I should stay after all.

But trouble was brewing for me at the Sorbonne. For I had unwittingly besotted two members of staff. The first was my lecturer in French grammar, a spindly and agile homosexual of about fifty. He would dart about the streets in the rain, impatiently brushing away people's umbrellas. I took up the invitation of extra lessons at his flat. However, when these lessons got to the stage of a hand clasped to my knee, I lost the map of what to do next. I carried on going to his lectures while avoiding his recriminating eye, but felt increasingly uncomfortable. I just didn't want to go to bed with him.

Nor did I wish to sleep with a woman in her late twenties who worked in the student accommodation bureau. She had also become infatuated with me. We went out to cafes together, and she was earnest and wonderfully chic, and more attractive than a brat like me deserved. But I chafed at the time I was 'wasting' which could have been spent finishing Oblomov, or catching a rare Prevert brothers movie at the Cinematheque. It didn't fit my plans at that time to be in love. I had come to Paris to fill my head, not my bed.

In retrospect, I think my very intransigence may have attracted these two. Perhaps it was a challenge to get through to me, or perhaps they enjoyed trying. They failed. Partly because I was sublimely and obdurately unaware that there was any problem. Get through to what? What for? But they had their revenge.
This woman had found me a comfortable attic flat near the Etoile, attached to the apartment of a wealthy old biddy who delighted in making friends of foreign students. The flat was rent-free, but the price was company. This was the kind of small talk a genius abhorred. I recall increasingly uneasy conversations and long silences. Soon she
began avoiding me. This suited me fine. (I recall closing the final page of Breton's Nadja in this garret with the full moon piercing through my window. I knew then that I was in Bohemia.)

At the time I was penniless and used to forage in neighbour's dustbins for scraps of food. Perhaps this got back to my landlady. Nor did it help when I put up a homeless Italian painter for a few weeks. Giorgio was every bit as glowering as myself. But she couldn't evict me; it was winter and I was protected under French law.

The next bit happened like a dream. One Saturday morning three important-looking men turned up at the flat. One of them introduced himself as the 'director' of the Sorbonne. He announced that I was 'a problem'. Two members of his staff had complained about my inconsiderate selfishness. One was now taking professional counselling. My landlady had asserted that I was 'terrorizing' her and that my presence was preventing her from 'enjoying' her property. I had, moreover, flouted Sorbonne regulations and circumvented procedures.

In fact, he said, there were only two other students at the Sorbonne, who had caused him as much trouble. I asked for their addresses.

But he was not there to be amused. He had come to eject me from the flat and from the Sorbonne. He offered me my fees back immediately in cash, waving a wad of notes in front of me, a handsome sum for a starving boy, but only if I would promise Io leave the flat immediately and never enter the Sorbonne again.

Of course I took the money. And my revenge a month later, when I entered the Sorbonne as one of its occupiers, part of an entire generation which had suddenly become 'a problem'.

Paris was a private city of circles of people which hardly touched or mixed. Mostly you met the interesting people by chance in hotels as you criss-crossed the Left Bank looking for better or cheaper accommodation, or you struck up conversations in cafes. In this way I met an American writer, an assiduous drug-taker, who showed me the novel he was working on. It was sub-Burroughs tosh. But he introduced me to a network of Americans in Paris who supported themselves by dubbing foreign movies - mostly Italian 'spaghetti westerns' or propaganda films from the Eastern bloc. We would drive out to a suburban studio to make crowd noises, scream with terror or perform bits of dialogue. I played the part of Lenin's brother on his deathbed in a Soviet biopic of Lenin, passing on the revolutionary message in gasps and wheezes - a communist death-rattle.

I also associated with a network of Italians and South Americans. I met Ana, an Argentinian, petite and fiery, who was, she proudly claimed, the daughter of a doctor who , had once 'known' Fidel Castro (or was it Che Guevara?) in Buenos Aires. I flirted with Ana and we travelled with a group of Spanish anarchists to Madrid at Easter 68 in a car garishly decorated with anti-police slogans. Surprisingly we were let through the Spanish border (Franco was then still in power) with only a flicker of Guardia Civil's eyebrow. They must have thought it was a student prank.

Loosely connected to such emigre circles were gangs of French working-class drop-outs. These I first encountered through the dosshouses I sometimes resorted to. In those days. in those days there was no social security for young French males. If you were destitute the government gave you fifty francs (£5), and told you to fuck off and earn a living. Not surprisingly, many young men turned to petty crime, forming gangs, which often inhabited a particular hotel, each room being illicitly occupied in shifts.
One such group was headed by Jacques, a self-proclaimed anarchist. Jacques was a choleric and burly teenager who led his gang on daring shoplifting forays in high-class supermarkets. I joined in several of these and learned about shopping bags with false compartments and the art of creating a diversion. The contrast between the poverty of Jacques' gang and the feasts they nightly gorged on was comical. Jacques was a gourmet, and insisted on stealing only the finest foie gras, the plumpest steaks, the choicest wines. All this was fried up and decanted back at the hotel, where Jacques would pass round fags and joints and poetize about the collapse of capitalism, which he predicted would be sudden and bloody.

The existence of such groups and their inclination to anarchistic ideology helped to precipitate the unexpected ferocity of events in Paris. It was when such young people - who had nothing to lose - collided on the streets with members and affililiates of the Situationist Internationale and their various offshoots - people who were out to lose everything - that events spiralled out of the control of institutions and pseudo-institutions, from the students' union to the various `revolutionary' groups like the Trots or the Maoists, all of whom tried in vain to wrest madness back into a semblance political discourse.

Paris in May '68 was an ideological 'slippage', a vertigo of discourses which projected political non-sense centre stage.

I began working as a porter in the Paris fruit and vegetable market, which in those days was still in the inner-city district of Les Halles. Lorries arrived in the narrow streets every night from all over Europe. The area was also thronged with prostitutes touting Iorry drivers for a quick shag in nearby hotels, and gaggles of gourmets in search of the select restaurants the area was renowned for.

While I did this work I stayed in a hotel which was also a brothel. I aimed to get home when business was dying down and the creak of stairs, door banging, and occasional arguments had abated. Before retiring I would select a cafe for a vin rouge and a smoke, often to a background of 'A Whiter Shade of Pale', the lugubrious jukebox hit of that spring.

One early morning I walked into a cafe. I ordered my rouge and lit a Gitane at the counter. Then I realized the place was full of French prostitutes and Algerian pimps. They were all dressed up in a nightmarish version of Sunday best. The pimps were in creamy suits and white or fawn shoes with exotic ties over button-down shirts. The girls, halfway between tarty provocation and the sort of finery I've only otherwise seen on Jewish women coming out of synagogues on Saturday, or on West Indian women at church or for weddings: costumes of an incandescent pastel.

The tables had been pushed back, clearing the floor. A pimp sauntered over to the jukebox, and a tango came on. A number of pimps and girls got up and began to tango with the mean dexterity appropriate to this dance. Their moves mimicked the slavish defiance of the whore and the disdainful dandyism of the pimp. (Later I learned that the tango had originated in Argentinian brothels precisely as a dance between prostitutes and pimps.) I asked the barman what was going on. It was the wedding of a pimp and one of his girls. By now I was getting the odd glare and left as inconspicuously as l could.

I became aware of the crisis in French education through reports in the newspapers about events at Nanterre and elsewhere. Soon demonstrations started in Paris itself. I was quickly bored with the liberationist rhetoric of these initial student protests, which in themselves were destined to go no further than the Grosvenor Square 'riot' of '67 - less a revolution than a rugby scrimmage.

What initially made the difference in Paris was the misjudgement of the French authorities, who alternately panicked and prevaricated. And then, with lightning ruthlessness, the situationist-influenced groups and their hooligan allies catalysed this misjudgement and precipitated the 'events'.

When, after the first round of student protests, the Sorbonne was closed down it became a geographical focus for protest. Because of its position, sprawling behind boulevards and winding approach roads, and because the CRS continually broke these demonstrations into smaller groups, the whole of the Left Bank around the Sorbonne over a period of weeks became a battleground, with paving stones and tear-gas canisters flying, and scuffles and running battles which affected everyone, including cafe customers and shoppers. Gradually this radicalized the area against the police presence.

More and more working-class youths began to turn up from their suburbs, out of curiosity and in the hope of giving the police a good bashing. Knocking over cafe tables and chasing the CRS down cobbled streets was more fun than hanging out in St Denis. So these youths, to whom the Latin Quarter had hitherto been exotic territory, began to map out and claim the area.
This was not at all to the students' liking. They were often openly dismayed and resentful at this sudden incursion of louts oblivious to liberal idealism and polysyllabic rhetoric. These were not the mythical 'workers' which marching students invoked in their chants. The students were also perturbed at the ease and panache of the street fighting of these newcomers, and their lack of proportion and propriety.

While students might hurl missiles at the CRS, they knew the boundaries. Theirs was a legitimate protest. Their violence was retroactive and protesting, rather than aggressive. They declared they would not be provoked by the authorities into 'going too far'. They felt themselves to be victims of a terrible misunderstanding which would eventually be cleared up in the light of rational debate.

But these freeloaders, the hooligans, were not playing this essentially middle-class game. They were not calling Papa's bluff in the knowledge of an eventual share in the patrimony. In fact they didn't give a toss for Papa or his sons or daughters and, moreover, they were just beginning to have a really smashing time.

This clash culminated on the night of the barricades, Friday 10 May. All that day protesters had been marching round the Sorbonne, chanting and skirmishing with the CRS. However, Papa was beginning to lose his nerve, and plans were afoot to dissolve the crisis and effect a tearful reconciliation. The CRS that day were relatively restrained, and rumours were rife about secret talks at the Ministry of Education. After which, vindication and the reopening of the Sorbonne. And then everyone could knuckle down to exams and get ready for the summer break. Reality would resume its normal service.

But in the event these talks, which were being reported live on transistor radios carried by students, took so long that a delicate and fateful 'situation' arose. For the CRS had cordoned off a section of the Latin Quarter adjacent to the Sorbonne. Into this free zone, over a period of several hours, filtered several thousand protesters, sightseers and miscreants.

Everyone was anticipating a student victory that evening. So at first there was a relaxed and comradely atmosphere. After a while, however, we all became apprehensive. Would it not be wise to make some kind of protection, in case of a sudden CRS attack? Cars were shunted into the middle of some streets. Was this enough protection? Cafe tables and chairs and debris from building sites were added to what then suddenly became perceived as versions of the famous revolutionary barricades - echoing the French Revolution itself, not to mention the Paris Commune of 1871. As the evening wore on, these barricades began to be fortified in some streets with makeshift piles of paves - cobblestones. By now many of the students had begun to be openly concerned that things were indeed 'going too far'.

Because the hooligans, sons of the street and veterans of building sites, seeing these isolated and rather amateurish barricades, now understood this interesting game, but knew they could do it better - properly. Quite suddenly, all over this area of the Latin Quarter, barricades began to go up in earnest - real barricades - five, then six, then seven or more feet high.

As this was happening I saw several confrontations between students and barricade builders. One student, for example, remonstrated with a group of louts who were digging up paves. The bespectacled idealist admonished the gang for 'adventurism'. He then picked up the loose stones one by one and 'hid' them in a wastebin.
At one point a column of Maoists turned up, marching in 'military' formation down the Boulevard St-Michel. They took one look at these barricades, denounced them as 'counter-revolutionary' and marched off - to hoots and whistles of derision.

By now it was too late to stop - the night was out of control. And after a while it became such fun that everyone forgot why they were supposed to be there and joined in anyway. Fuck the Students' Union - let's live a little!

A building site was gleefully looted for weapons and barricade material. Someone started up a cement-mixer. Someone else was using a pneumatic drill to excavate paves. People formed chains stretching down streets, passing debris and paves to the barricade builders. Side-streets became denuded, resembling soft, sandy passages. ('Under the paving stones is the beach.')
Some people had broken into an office and were showering passers-by with documents and letters while sitting on a window ledge drinking wine. Residents began coming out in their dressing-gowns to offer refreshments and advice, or to shake hands with revolutionaries. One elderly lady set out a flask of hot coffer with mugs on a car bonnet. A man in a first-floor flat threw open his windows and played a record of the 'Internationale'. In a courtyard people were transforming milk bottles into petrol bombs, as dextrously as if on a production line, then stacking them in crates.

By about midnight we knew we had reached the famous situationist 'point of no return'. We were boxed into the Latin Quarter, physically and mentally, the prisoners of a cultural logic - the unfolding of a historical 'moment', a text which had to be recited and enacted to whatever bitter end awaited us. For we were trapped by the enormity of what we had done - the barricades themselves looked awesome. Was this a monster we had conjured from history? Would this be a fight to the death? Was this IT - the revolution?

The neighbourhood had been transformed into surreality, and we began looking at one another oddly. We talked as if what we were saying meant something else - something we couldn't quite grasp or formulate. It was as if we were collectively rubbing our eyes. Was this Paris? What year was this? Surely not the 1960s. This was nothing like modern life. An urban area had become suffused with a fantasmic atmosphere, resembling the makeshift and fragile decor of a Jean Cocteau film.
But better than a film - we were in it. The imaginary had burst its banks.

I remember my vivid conclusion: Paris belongs to me. For the first time during my stay I felt organically linked, and profoundly at home, in these streets. This was my place and all around were my people. Surely now, from this delirious moment, in this strangely recreated and labile space, anything was possible.

But we were also apprehensive. We started looking around for staves and other weapons. I found an iron bar and tucked it in my waistband. It seemed that negotiations had, in any case, stalled. No way out. We were now awaiting the police onslaught.

It began just after 2 a.m.

The street fighting that night has always suggested to me a metaphorical link between a riot and a collective orgasm. It is not often admitted, but rioting is serious fun, like making love to a city - an exhilaration only matched in my experience by the first time I heard the finale to Bach's St Matthew Passion.

As the CRS approached they were met with showers of paves and petrol bombs. They advanced along many streets simultaneously, taking barricade after barricade, the barricade defenders only abandoning their vantage-points at the last moment, to retreat to the next barricade, which they began defending all over again.

Many cars were set on fire - a beautiful sight.

For part of that night I was in the Rue Gay Lussac, which, unknown to me, was also the street defended by members of the Situationist Internationale. They put up a cruel and exact defence, firing ball-bearings from catapults, ambushing CRS in courtyards,exploding cars just as the CRS reached them, hurling petrol bombs so accurately and so far that they ignited several police vehicles.

That night was all explosions - the sharp ones of tear-gas guns and canisters, the dull thuds of petrol tanks exploding, the jolting of blast bombs. There were fires everywhere, running figures and shouting, metallic clatterings, and in the distance the ever-advancing CRS: hard and shiny little objects. We longed for just one rifle to pick them off - perhaps next time ...

But inexorably they pushed us back, squeezing us tighter and tighter, until we realized it was all up. Where to go now? Suddenly it was said that the student hostel of the Ecole Normale was a sanctuary. We fled inside. I ended in a student bedroom with about a dozen others - all strangers. Someone wisecracked about my iron bar: `If only your mother could see you now!' We waited until the commotion and the explosions outside subsided. As dawn broke we cautiously left, one by one, aghast at the destruction all around, smouldering, ugly and black, and uncanny in the light of day.
I later learned that several hundred of us had taken refuge in the Ecole Normale. The police had realized this and tried to enter and arrest us. They had been prevented by the director of the Normale - an extremely important personage in France, who had rung the Minister of the Interior to ensure our safety.

After that night the 'events' of May and June began in earnest. As is well known, a wave of occupations and strikes began, and gradually turned into a national strike which effectively closed France down. Universities, schools, shops, theatres, factories all went on strike, and people occupied their places of work.

Student union officials and trade union organizers as well as various leftist ideologists worked frantically to transform this escalating holiday into a series of understandable grievances into a series of coherent demands - to absorb it into current and comprehensible politics. But this was not easy.

For what, after all, did people want? They weren't sure, and began asking questions and framing problems which had never previously found a popular or radical articulation. Were we not all profoundly bored? Was modernization really such a good idea? Did we actually desire consumer goods? Paris became a talking shop, a massive, unrestrained, continuous and chaotic version of Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. People would begin arguing in the street for no apparent reason. Soon a crowd would form around the disputants. Then members of the crowd would begin separate arguments, and themselves become the focus of yet more spectators, who in turn became participants.

Rioting became a nightly occurrence on the Left Bank and spread to all parts of the city. And when one night I heard that rioting had I started in, of all places, Montmartre, and that prostitutes and pimp, had been seen shoulder to shoulder, building barricades and taking on the CRS, I knew the entire city had gone nuts. I also sensed that soon the government would have to act decisively, or else concede defeat. And it was in fact shortly after the Montmartre riots that De Gaulle had Paris ringed with tanks, preparatory to a possible military intervention.

It never came to that. Because the French went on holiday. As July approached, and it was announced that all students that year would pass all their exams - no need to sit them - and as all workers were awarded blanket and generous pay rises, people began talking about continuing the revolution, well, maybe next term, and
certainly after the holidays - but in any case the struggle would continue even on the beaches of Biarritz or Cannes!

And the whole thing ended not with a whimper, but an ice-cream cone.

But the repercussions were considerable. Particularly in spreading a situationist mood into culture at large, a mood which later emerged as a commodified situationist chic, through the Sex Pistols and Punk, and which then transmogrified into an ideology of mischief and carnivalesque misbehaviour through all that other 'angry' music.

As soon as he realized the dimensions of what was happening in France, Malcolm tried to join me. I made several excited calls from phone booths in the Latin Quarter, one of them in the Boulevard St Michel with a riot as background, with suggestions about travel and accommodation. But Malcolm was frustrated by the rail and air strikes which had isolated and paralysed France. In early May I had received a letter from Malcolm addressed to my poste restante in the Boulevard St-Germain: 'Fred, coming over Saturday or Friday, that is 17th or 16th May [he never made it] ... have been in contact with Henry a lot. Want very much to see the Louvre exhibition of GOTHIC ART! Have begun to paint but must be careful of my own ... [the sentence peters out] been taking photos, mucking about with film, drawing every day. Beginning to feel for the greats: MASACCIO! Must see his frescos (tribute money!) in Florence this Summer. I have begun to see and BEGIN to understand Cezanne! (Bernini is marvellous). The Rennaisance was fantastic. Joe [his and Vivienne's son] is so sensitive his movements are something that reveal his specialness. Want to see you.'

Malcolm eventually arrived in Paris after the 'events', en route to a holiday in the South of France, where he was joined later by Vivienne. I took him on a car tour of the Left Bank battlefields. People were still jumpy and there were CRS loitering menacingly. I insulted a group of them: 'Wankers!', and so on. They suddenly rushed the car with batons flailing. The driver swerved in the middle of the boulevard, did an abrupt U-turn, and shot off with Malcolm screaming: 'Get the fuck out of here!'

Afterwards Malcolm assisted me in attempting to recover a 1940s tweed waisted overcoat I'd bought in the flea market, and a precious cache of posters, leaflets and pamphlets I'd collected throughout the revolution. When the Swedish painter I'd stored all this with told me she'd chucked it out that very morning, Malcolm helped me to smash her windows. We could hear her screaming inside.