NarrativeIn the archives of the “World”. Today, a rare testimony from the writer and columnist Michel Cournot. When the Germans entered Paris in June 1940, he was 18 years old. In November, he took part in the spontaneous demonstration of students marching on the Champs-Elysées to support de Gaulle. An unexpected, extravagant gesture. A moment of happiness and hope.
ON November 11, 1940, in one of the courtyards of the Lycée Henri-IV, during morning recess, a boy took my right hand, put something in it, said “pass” and walked away.
It hadn’t taken three seconds. I hadn’t seen him approach. I looked at him from behind: he wasn’t from the class.
I had in my hand a packet of leaflets, the size of ballot papers, printed black on white. They called for a demonstration of high school students at the Etoile, the same evening, at 6 p.m.
Recess was coming to an end. I ran into the classroom and put a flyer on each of the tables. I had a lot left, I put them in my pocket.
The tables were of a simple model, without racks below. I could have put the leaflets on the benches, it would have been more discreet, but we had nothing to fear from the professor. His name was René Maublanc, he was a man with gray hair, long and thin, of extreme delicacy of appearance, of discreet elegance, who began each class with the complete report of the news from the radio. English in the morning, then introduced us to Plato and Descartes with clarity and passion. He was a member of the Communist Party and made no secret of it.
I had put a leaflet on his table too. He smiled taking it, he thought it was a joke. His smile ceased. He looked around the classroom, said: “Are you doing me the honor of being a high school student tonight?” » That was all, we understood that he would be there.
A need to scream
There, once seated and recovered from my surprise, the intrepidity of the project appeared to me. The occupation of the country was only in its early days, but already when a month earlier we had landed, late for the start of the school year, with five of my brothers and sisters, at the Gare d’Austerlitz, returning from Toulouse, where the exodus had taken us, we had found, stuck on the tiles of the metro station, red posters announcing executions.
The evening promised to be less gloomy. Tonight, we were going to fuck the shit up
I only thought about it for a moment. I had been missing parades and street disorder for eighteen months. They had been common before the war. The monômes of baccalaureate holders, each month of June, were immense, then. And, from 1934 to 1938, there was a constant tension in the street, in which the young people found themselves involved. From the Popular Front to Munich, there had only been a moment. The children of those years were growing up in a nervous town.
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