too many Daves

Amid the heady news coming out of Iran today, one of my favorite bloggers — Andrew Sullivan — wrote, “The last time a news event gave me chills like this was the Soviet coup. It ended the regime.”

I do not mean to imply that those two sentences sum up Sullivan’s thinking on the subject. He blogged exhaustively and intelligently about Iran, its elections, and the resulting street protests and crackdowns all day.

Rather, I quote Sullivan because what he wrote so neatly summarizes the sense of possibility inspired by footage of protests in a nation so many of us lazily imagine to be peopled entirely by obedient zealots.

Which brings me to the reason I’m writing this post. While I understand where Sullivan’s “chills” are coming from, where the aforementioned sense of possibility is coming from, I’m not feeling it myself. Instead, my thoughts keep drifting back to a term paper I wrote for an undergrad course at Berkeley way back in 1993. This surprises me. A lot. On the relatively rare occasions that my thoughts drift back to college, I’m not usually thinking about term papers. But today I am.

Why?

Because somewhere deep in my brain I remembered researching, thinking, and writing about the May 1968 uprisings in France. Specifically, I remembered writing this rollercoaster chronology …

May 13, 1968 — exactly ten years since de Gaulle’s rise to power — marked the transformation of May 1968 from a student movement to a mass movement.  Hundreds of thousands and possibly a million people took to the streets of Paris in support of the students.  Demonstrations spread to other French cities. The movement began to run on its own energy as the largest strike in French history spread across the country without anyone formally calling for it. Eventually, almost 10 million workers would take part and demand democratization of the workplace as well as higher pay and better conditions.  The strike ground daily life in France to a halt as garbage went uncollected, gasoline was no longer available, the mail was not delivered, and the metro stopped running.

On May 24, as France slipped further into paralysis, de Gaulle spoke to the French people to no avail — the strikes continued.  On May 29, the French leader left the country for an unknown destination.  In the face of the hesitancy and apparent impotence of their leader, the masses began to truly believe in their power to bring down de Gaulle’s government.

This elation was short lived.  De Gaulle, it turned out, had been in Germany to shore up the support of the French armed forces stationed there.  He returned to France confident and decisive.  He reasserted his authority via radio — the medium of communication he had used during the war.   He dissolved the National Assembly and called for new elections in late June. 1 million pro-de Gaulle Parisians took to the Champs-Elysées to show their support for the embattled president.  The reaction seized the momentum.

In the weeks that followed, the movement was forced to wind down.  Paris returned to normal as strikers returned to work.

Now, I do not pretend for even a millisecond to know enough to draw intelligent parallels between Tehran in 2009 and Paris in 1968. I’m not predicting anything. I’m certainly not suggesting that May 1968 means Iranians should roll over and give up on insisting upon fair elections.  Rather, I am — in the best and worst traditions of blogging — merely thinking aloud here. And mainly, I guess, I’m hoping that some smart, idealistic person in Iran already knows about all this and has devised plans for steering the protests safely around all the hazards that thwarted May 1968.