Nanterre

Of course, the city hall of Limoges was burned down.

And then while all this is happening, while all this is taking place, Emmanuel Macron, the president, was at a Celine Dion concert at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, which is, you know, I don't know, about seven miles down the road from Paris.

It's not very far.

He's in a Celine Dion concert while his country is burning down.

And, and so these things did reflect a globalization, uh, just as the Algerian War, one of the arguments that I made, which is Matt Connolly's argument, uh, is, is that the, the Algerian War reflected the globalization of, you know, technology and newspapers and, and, uh, the, the rebels getting the newspapers on their side about French torture.

Well, the globalization of, of, of, of news, uh, you know, with, uh, got live from Vietnam and all this business, uh, me- it meant that issues, uh, the, the murder of Martin Luther King and, and, and the Americans plunging more and more money and more and more bodies into, uh, i- in, into wars, uh, in other places had ramifications, uh, from Nanterre, which I'll talk about in a minute, which is the university to the we- one of them to the west of Paris, and the, and the Sorbonne, uh, which is, you know, had been there for centuries and centuries and centuries, since the medieval period in the Latin Quarter.

So, you know, the problem seemed...

D- did generate simplistic answers that if you thought hard and you went out and worked, that you could abolish the excesses of capitalism, you could abolish the excesses of the state, and that it would be a more reasonable world, wouldn't it? That the Lyndon Johnsons, uh...

And as now, as in the issues now- Ah, there wasn't light at the end of the tunnel because compounding the fact that there weren't jobs, unless you were in one of the grandes écoles, that is the big fancy schools, unless you were an ENARC or one of these people in the administration school that was gonna just slide into some party post in a Gaullist government, ah, you know, what was there at the end? And you also had this, this extraordinary ambiguity, ah, you know, in thinking about this or ambivalence, because if you were basically against the sort of technological super-powered society of, of, of, of fast cars, ah, and, uh, the Americanization of, of, uh, European culture, if you believe strongly against that, you know, what kind of job is there gonna be at the end of the tunnel for you? You can't be a professional militant, you know, your entire life.

What are you gonna do? And the people, by the way, who were, who invested their careers or lost their careers in this mobilization, uh, were toast because they refused to sit for their exams, ah, and they committed professional suicide right on stage because they did it.

And it all starts with a lot of them, Daniel, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was a militant when he was expelled from the University of, of Nanterre, ah, ah, because of, of, of his militancy.

So there was a lack of jobs, particularly for those people studying the life of the mind, ah, studying, uh, arts, literature, history.