“May-68 is commemorated in all sauces, what is your point of view?
I didn’t do 1968. I drove barricades home at the end of the night. The existing footage from 1968 only proves the existing lies. Indeed, the images received from May-68 do not tell me much. A student revolt? No. It was the first wildcat general strike in history or, perhaps, the biggest since 1905 in Russia. It was a proletarian and revolutionary movement. Cohn-Bendit and Alain Geismar had no control whatsoever. It is normal for these people to end up in the shoes of city councillors; they weren’t important. What mattered was what was happening in the street, the heads and bodies of hundreds of thousands of people who did things at that time. I don’t care about anything that is part of the “Malet & Isaac” of May-68. I remember with interest my grocer who, when the counter-revolution returned, began to block: she could no longer remember the price of things. The same had been very exalted and said some time before: “Listen sir, there is only one solution, there should be a guillotine at every street corner.” 1968 was the people in the good sense of the word. And not the people of the famous phrase: “When I hear the word people, I wonder what evil blow is being prepared against the proletariat.”
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The people I saw throwing washing machines and flower pots at the cops on April 10 were in the streets and holding out. And the people of the suburbs held the street and the territory by distributing the green spaces a little differently, if only by cutting down the trees and slowing down automobile traffic considerably.
Images are what remains when we have completely forgotten what we have experienced. Of course, an image can be used to remember an emotion, but you still have to have lived. Or else, it’s the mysteries of art. Maybe someone can relate May-68 or something in May-68 and provoke an emotion: to make you feel the intoxication in which you were.
Jean-Patrick Manchette: “Writing with artistic pretensions seems to me an abjection”
You were present on April 10 in the 18e district after the police blunder which cost the life of Makomé M’Bowolé?
Being alone, with my stupid look and a banana in my hand, I started walking around the crossroads. I turned on the wrong side so that my buttocks came into contact with the bumpers, I started a traffic jam all by myself. I also went to tell the CRS:
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“Mr. Officer, where am I throwing this? The neighborhood kids look like they stole all the trash cans.
– Move on, do what you want.
“But I can’t throw her down.
“Yeah, fuck it up.”
So I put my skin on the floor and I spread it like a starfish. If they had called me, there would have been an incident right away because there were fifty laughing guys on the sidewalk twenty meters away, I then decided to found Banana: “Brigands Anarchistes Neither Anorexiques Nor Aphasiques” or “Hardened Bisons Neither Anxious Nor Agoraphobes”, or even “Alcoholic Bite Neither Antiphysical Nor Ataraxic”. That’s what we want… Two of the founding partners have withdrawn. Melanie White (his wife Mélissa, Editor’s note) after six hours, saying: “It’s a symptom, not an organization” and Cherokee (Jean Echenoz) because he didn’t like organizations. There remains Goémond, Sylvie Cretonne and Puig Antich Kid. We also have a sympathizer, Serge Q. (Serge Quadruppani), who, being prosecuted for provocation, apology for the crime of arson and incitement of soldiers to disobedience and other trifles, and as responsible for the publication of “Mordicus” cannot, or does not want, to be part of Banana for now. I offered him to be part of our mass organization which will be the MBS: Mouvance Banana Split. Usually, it’s the cops who invent movements. This time, the Banana group invents its own movement.
We are for direct democracy, the eating of bananas, and all the power to the workers’ councils; and for the rest, we’ll see. »
© The Round Table 2023
Behind enemy lines. Interviews 1973-1993by Jean-Patrick Manchette, The Round Table, 304 pages, 24 euros (in bookshops on March 16)Jean-Patrick Manchette: “Writing with artistic pretensions seems to me an abjection”
