HAPPENINGS
525
paper on the reform of llledical education which, a5 they put it,
accomplished more in those six weeks than the administration had been
able to accomplish in ten yearsY Everywhere there was a sense of
participation, of community, of a kind of collective movement and
purpose in refreshing contrast to the authoritarian and hierarchical
system of influence and personal prestige which has characterized higher
education in France.
The revolution turned up one personality, it is true, in
Dany le
Rouge
(Danny the Red) , a German sociology student from Nanterre
named Daniel Cohn-Bendit who was the leader of the original
enrages.
But as Cohn-Bendit himself took pains to point out in a number of
press conferences, personalities were unimportant, indeed to take any
notice of them would have been to fall into the well-known ideological
heresy. In Germany after it was all over he said, without regret, "Six
months ago nobody had heard of Cohn-Bendit, six months from now
everybody will have forgotten him." Viewed from a democracy whose
electoral processes are almost entirely built on the cult of personality
(which makes it well-nigh impossible to take a genuinely historical
view of anything at all) this may just seem like personal modesty - in
itself, be it noted, a personal virtue, and one which the cult of per–
sonality knows well how to exploit. But it can also be seen as reflecting
a genuine and fundamental conviction that what happened in Paris was
history,
transcending any of the participants in it. In virtue of that fact
(no t because of the violence or the barricades) it qualified as revolu–
tional"y for those involved. And the failure - as the participants see it,
the betrayal - of the revolution may indicate that Western democracy
has succeeded, at least for the time being, in bringing history to a
standstill. It is not an encouraging thought.
Peter Caws
U. S.
POSTAGE PAID FROM CHICAGO
Monday afternoon, twenty-four hours after the Democratic
Convention began, I told a writer-friend not to come to Chicago, that
the street scene she anticipated wouldn't come off. Tom Hayden, Rennie
11. Comite de synthese des etudiants en medecine de Paris,
Livre blanc de
la rlforme,
tome 1, Paris, multilith, dated 14-6-68.
