The debate post expresses the writer’s opinions.
In 1970 I visited Paris for the first time. I met a nice girl my age called Christiane Jacqueline who walked around with me one day and showed me the city. The 1968 uprising was fresh in my mind and I remember her teaching me a song from that time, which the students had sung to a well-known folk tune.
This verse appeared to me again now that the police are once again fighting life-threateningly with protesters who are hardly motivated only by a two-year increase in the retirement age.
Sånn omtrent gikk sangen: “Going through the Sorbonne with my cobblestones going through the Sorbonne with my cobblestonesI met a CRS’e with his Baton deceaseeh-eh-eh, with my cobblestones.”
Thus: “As I passed the Sorbonne University with my cobblestones, I met a CRS with his club – And then there was a fight.”
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But the students also wrote slogans like beautiful, short poems on the house walls: “Under the cobblestones: Stranda!”
I remember the next day, not far from the Sorbonne, I saw a large, gray police car coming on two wheels around a bend. It stopped abruptly, and out of the back doors came about half a dozen members of these Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the security and riot police, who in full rear with clubs and other weapons at hand ran around a corner.
It was a rather unpleasant sight.
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It was then also a reminder of a couple of features of French society that we Norwegians have the hardest time coming to terms with and which have now been demonstrated again for several weeks: There is a very large distance between the governing and the governed outside the local level, and a tradition of using extremely harsh methods in attempts to control crowds.
Perhaps we would understand a little more if the Norwegian media did not so heavily prioritize the USA and Great Britain and even Germany before France – because so embarrassingly few Norwegian journalists know any French.
This is a slice of café-au-lait with croissant France, yes.
A version of the post was first published on the writer’s Facebook wall and is reproduced with permission.
