THE YOUNGER GENERATION
Reported TIME Correspondent Stanley Karnow from Paris:
AMERICA'S youngsters, born rich or poor, have opportunity, and can take it to guide their own destinies.
Their fathers may be pants cutters, college professors or margarine magnates, but they can run for Vice President, discover vaccines, smash the atom, teach Latin, or, in the Mitty manner, dream violently of heroic adventure.
French youth dares not dream. It must face a reality partly restricted by tradition, partly by history, partly by the failure of its nation's leaders to govern wisely and fairly.
France is a land of rock-bound social strata. Her younger generation is locked at birth into firmly built cellblocks from which escape is virtually impossible and even temporary parole difficult.
To an American, accustomed to noting similarities between youngsters in Maine and California, there are few stereotypes that could easily describe French youth. He is not a crew-cut kid with a souped-up V8. He is not a bronzed three-letter man with his steady blonde on his arm. He is not an eager-eyed young executive in a pink shirt, a dynamic young labor leader with a law-school degree, or a scholarly young physicist reporting confidently to a battery of television cameras.
"In fact," said a young Paris civil servant, "there is no such thing as French youth. There are young students, young farmers, young workers, young merchants -- each part of a class.
Each group lives and grows within the frontiers of its own domain, discouraged from emerging by barriers of money, family, profession, taste or education. Each feels bound more to its class than to its generation." Class boundaries in France are often as rigid as Hindu caste lines. Liberty, fraternity and equality may be chiseled all over public buildings; but the habits and prejudices of an old, well-sifted society are stronger than republican slogans.
The dentist's daughter never elopes with the local garage mechanic. The shoemaker's son rarely rises to a professorship at the Sorbonne. The businessman's boy would never think of devoting his life to farming or even less of entering the civil service. A schoolteacher's child can conceivably become a successful lawyer, and a winegrower's son, with luck and capital, may operate a thriving tractor agency. One can be hopeful -- to a limit.
Yet for all the variety in their background, income, jobs, accent and future, there is a common feeling threading through the different levels of French youth. It is some mixture of disorientation, disgust, disinterest, disappointment and dis enchantment, all resulting in me fiance -- a distrust for the powers that be. There is, lying deep down below the soil, a seed of revolt. It may never burst into violent revolution.
But it wants change.
THE PAST IS NOT ENOUGH
TO YOUTH, brooding, sulky and largely inarticulate, practically everything in France is wrong. The bright hopes of the Liberation have tarnished rapidly. The promising young politicians who led France to freedom have become part of the sticky, self-perpetuating system. Since World War II money has been inflated so badly that thrift is no longer considered a virtue. The army lost face in 1940 and lost its cadres in Indo-China. Patriotism became meaningless during the appeasement days of the '30s, has since been shouted into hollowness by Communists and diehard nationalists. The national economy has been cemented into an immobile Maginot Line for the defense of the nervous and unimaginative: cartels at the top benefit the industrialists, social security and subsidies at the bottom take care of the workman and the farmer.
And in both Russia and the U.S., young France sees mushrooming technological civilizations, and doubts if it can ever catch up to them. Observed Andre Labarthe in the highbrow magazine La Nef: "French youth discovers itself harnessed to a chariot that has been bogged down for 50 years and whose drivers can only look backwards."
Turning back to past glories, especially to the prosperous days of 1900, is a current French fad. To youth this fashion seems only an attempt to camouflage the weaknesses of the present. Whatever his class, the young Frenchman has during the past ten years watched the old institutions crumble, has seen nothing new emerge to take their place. Instead, he has been offered economic stagnation, social emptiness and political hypocrisy, all smothered in flowery oratory and nostalgic festivity.
He wants real leadership badly, and sometimes talks as though he would settle for a "strongman." When former Premier Mendes-France outlined a program to benefit youth last fall, he found a cautious but widespread response. Unfortunately, it didn't last. After Mendes' fall, France's younger generation slid back into collective indifference. Like his elders, the French youngster has come to believe in every-man-for-himself.
Three years ago, in a letter to the Paris daily, Le Figaro, a 22-year-old girl expressed a bitterness that is still prevalent. "Since the Liberation," she wrote, "we have seen all our illusions destroyed, our spirits broken, our hopes deceived. We have given up everything. We believe in nothing. Our only interest is the struggle for our own personal subsistence."
Through no fault of its own, France's younger generation has during the past two centuries been herded behind the demographic eight ball. For 200 years the French population has been getting progressively older. Since the mid-18th century, medical progress has contributed to increasing longevity, while wars and depressions have contributed to reducing the birth rate. In 1775, 7% of the population was over 60; today 16.2% of French people are that old. The median age has risen slowly through the 19th century, is now 35.7 years, the oldest in the world.
EDUCATION'S TOOLS ARE RUSTY
THE French youngster gets his first real taste of frustration when he starts school. France's obsolete educational system (TIME, May 23) is short on opportunity and long on tradition. Of the 2,887,000 youngsters of both sexes between the ages of 15 and 19, fewer than 800,000 are in public or private secondary schools--the majority of them (56%) the sons of comfortable professional and business families. On the next level, agriculture and labor--which represent two-thirds of the French population--send less than 3% of their children to a university.
Even if education were democratized, schools and universirties would not have the physical plant to handle more youngsters. And low teachers' salaries--usually running to less than $130 a month in lycees--have discouraged brighter graduates from going into elementary or secondary education. As a result, the level of student ability is falling seriously. Secondary-school teachers are signaling widespread weakness in basic subjects--spelling, grammar, etc. Latin Quarter habitues are floored by the average student's lack of intellectual curiosity.
"They never discuss anything interesting," insisted a graduate student of religious history. "They simply sit in their cafes and talk about women or sports." Snorted a young tutor: "Students these days are barbarians." Student organizations are agitating for salaries, calculate that 67,000 of the country's 160,000 university students need something like a minimum of $60 a month for room and board.
The Vespa motor scooters along the Rue de la Sorbonne belong to the well-to-do, and they belie the fact that life on the Left Bank these days is not gay and carefree. Students don't live in the hothouse atmosphere of dormitories and campus, going to sorority dances and ragging underlings. They spend their lives plodding between classes, cafes and their tiny rooms, eating minimal meals in canteens and occasionally treating themselves to a movie. "We should have had something like the G.I. Bill of Rights," sighed one 28-year-old graduate. "That would have made us a strong generation."
SECURITY FIRST-AND LAST
THERE is practically no unemployment in France, and at the same time practically no opportunity.
"Culture is what remains when everything else is forgotten," runs an old French proverb. Consequently, upper-bracket tradition has it that youth studies the classics. The liberal professions are overcrowded. Hundreds of philosophy, literature and history majors appear as candidates for a handful of university teaching jobs; openings for scientists outnumber applicants. Complained a government official recently: "We need seven scientists for one philosopher, and we're being supplied with the contrary." A 27-year-old graduate of the topflight Institut d'Etudes Politiques went six months before finding his first job, finally got work as a bank clerk, eventually drifted into journalism, earns less than $200 monthly. "In America you can make money doing something you don't like," he complains. "Here you usually have to do something you don't like, and you don't make any money either.'' More than 40% of France's population lives in rural areas, and some 2,000,000 young men and women work in agriculture. The agricultural pie has been sliced up time and again, until a good-sized farm in France hardly exceeds 50 acres. Such small-farming (although a land reformer's dream) does not make much economic sense and exists largely because of government subsidy--e.g., Napoleon subsidized sugar-beet growers during the British blockade, and they are still subsidized. The eldest son of a farmer can stay around and hope to earn a living from the small acreage, but usually the other children must clear out. Some try to get jobs in the local village as administrators or market workers. Most of them--some 100,000 a year --drift into cities, unprepared to face industrial life, find menial factory jobs as unskilled laborers.
Labor is helpless in France. Both union and management expect the government to solve their disputes for them instead of working out solutions with any basis in economic fact. Internal warfare between Socialists and Communists within the same trade unions injects politics even into everyday grievances.
Many workers want no part of either party and have quit the unions altogether. As the saying goes in labor circles: "The biggest union in France is the disunion of the unaffiliated." Almost 2,500,000 French men and women between the ages of 15 and 30 work in industry, earn pitifully small salaries, live in slums and have little hope for the future. Social security, introduced on a large scale by the Popular Front government in 1936 specifically to benefit workers, has in a paradoxical way also contributed to a split between youth and its elders in the labor movement. The vast wave of agitation for better conditions that swept through the early '30s was largely led by family breadwinners. Today, with allotments for children (ranging from $10 a month for one child under five to $80 for four children), workers with families have gone into a different kind of income bracket from the young bachelors or the young marrieds. If the young workers in the factories want to strike for benefits today, they would have to go it alone. Thus in an odd manner the welfare state has blocked another path for genuine improvement of conditions.
Youngsters start in factories--at half pay--at the age of 14 and tend to become industrial D.P.s. As the head of a young workers' center described them: "Youth at work, in effect, is not in school, not in the family, not in the unions, not in youth movements, not in political parties. It doesn't vote; it doesn't pay taxes. It goes to the movies three times a week, plays the pinball machines in cafes, flits through the dance halls, attends boxing and football matches and jaywalks." STRUGGLE FOR A ROOF
FOR the younger generation in the city, the major preoccupation is the housing shortage (caused principally by rent control imposed to protect the younger generation after World War I). Campaigns are organized for rooms for students, newspapers are filled with appeals for apartments, and common dinner conversation in any milieu invariably turns to talk of the housing shortage. Last year the Paris police department made a sampling of living conditions, concluded that 37.3% of the city's population was living in dwellings judged "insufficient" or "very insufficient." For the younger generation things are even worse: 55.5% of those married between 1950 and 1954 are unsuitably housed. Thousands of youngsters shiver in chambres de bonnes, tiny maids' rooms atop Paris apartment houses, without running water and heat, and only a single toilet for the entire floor.
Even in the most comfortable middle-class families, housing can become a psychological problem for youth. A 25-year-old fashion designer earns $230 a month, a whopping salary for her age. But she must live with her parents. It would cost half her wage to find a furnished flat with the comfort she now has; it would take $3,000 "key money" to get an unfurnished apartment. "It could be worse," she says philosophically, "but it's bad enough. I can't give a party. I can't invite someone in for a drink. If I come home early, my mother worries that I'm unpopular. If I stay out late, she gets concerned about my morals. I'm head and shoulders above most people my age, and I don't enjoy simple independence."
At the other end of the scale is Jean Berard, a 26-year-old railway worker. Berard wanted to get married at 21, after doing his 18-month military service, but he couldn't find a room. He and his fiancee postponed their wedding again and again, eventually decided to go through with it, lived with his or her family for two years. Finally, in desperation, they moved into roomier quarters with an uncle on a chicken farm in the Landes, the sparsely populated coastal stretch between Bordeaux and Biarritz.
Today Berard lives alone in a little furnished room in Paris all week, takes the train south to see his wife every weekend (riding free with a special railway employee pass). After a four-year search, he still cannot find a room with a kitchenette in Paris. Living in a hotel with his wife and eating their meals in restaurants would be too expensive.
He has grown bitter. He is not yet a card-carrying Communist. But he has joined the Red-led Confederation Generate du Travail, and he is swallowing Communist propaganda. The Communists predicted German rearmament, defeat in Indo-China, economic misery. "It's the only party that tells the truth," Berard argues. Deep down, Jean is less a militant pro-Communist than a bitter man protesting. More than anything he would like to be somebody else. "If my parents had money, I would have been a student, and I think I would have been a good one," he says. "I don't want the Russian system in France, but what other party can I vote for? Maybe when other politicians see the Communists growing in strength, they will do something."
A VETO FOR POLITICS
BERARD'S dull, dangerous protest is typical of the logic of some 5,000,000 Communist voters of all ages. But he is a rare bird among youth in that he has, by some kind of thinking process, related his own troubles to a need for political action. Most young Frenchmen refuse to make the connection or simply cannot. Everywhere in France youth's political feelings can be characterized in a single word: indifference.
In Socialist-run Tourcoing, an industrial town with 80,000 inhabitants, the Socialist Youth Federation is the largest political group for younger workers, students and office employees; it has 100 members. The Communists confess to the same trouble among their faithful. Their movement, camouflaged under the name Union of Republican Youth of France, has 100,000 members, many of them uncertain of their political sentiments. "You just can't talk politics directly to youth these days," explains a young Communist leader. "Take an issue like compulsory military service. Of course we're opposed in principle to a large army, but the only way we can arouse the interest of young conscripts is to advocate reducing service from 18 to 15 months." The most striking area of political lassitude is among French students. Twenty years ago, the Latin Quarter was seething with political turmoil. Young Socialists were conspiring at back tables of La Source, royalists were skulking in La Capoulade, making occasional forays into the Boulevard St. Michel to beat up leftists. Today La Capoulade has been redecorated into a neon-lighted sundae palace; La Source is a snack bar.
If the students of the Sorbonne elected their own legislative deputy, how would they vote? Two politically conscious young Frenchmen, familiar with the Latin Quarter, made an educated guess: in 1938 almost everyone would have voted--about half for the extreme right (royalists, Action Franc,aise), about half for the Socialists and Communists. In 1945 virtually everyone would have voted for a Communist. In 1949 some 70% would have voted in a three-way fight among Communists, Catholics and Gaullists. This year only 40% would vote--some for the Communists, a few for an extreme right-wing party, probably most for a pro-Mendes-France combination if it existed. "Before the war you could see that everyone was in the battle," said a student editor. "These days youth is out of it." Shrugged a young girl: "Political opinions? I have none. They wouldn't do any good. Nobody would listen to them, not even those who might agree with me." Youth's indifference parallels the indifference of France's entire population to politics. Writing in the weekly Express, Andre Malraux calls it "the cancer of peoples." "It is false," he wrote recently, "that our workers, our peasants, our industrial leaders do not work. The individual is not affected. It is the collective, civic spirit that is sick. Why? Because to the majority of French, the state appears to be a fraud." FAITH THROUGH GOOD WORKS
IN the mire of youthful indifference and apathy, one group has made noticeable strides since the war: the Catholics.
They are far from overwhelming the younger generation. But they have gone beyond any other movement in attracting France's boys and girls. They have formed worker, farm, student, girls' and children's organizations, currently claim more than 1,000,000 members. In rural areas they often provide the only recreation a farm youth can find. In industrial centers they offer shelter and vocational guidance. They are successful because they are not selling anything, not even religion, in an over-the-counter manner. Like Y.M.C.A.s, most merely contribute facilities without huckstering, unconcerned about making converts.
In a narrow street deep in the bowels of the Latin Quarter, a small band of Augustinian priests and ten student "archangels" devote themselves to stirring up intellectual give-and-take among students. Dressed in student garb they scour the cafes, chattering with habitues, occasionally offering a meal, a bath or just companionship. Once a week they hold open house in their dreary converted hotel. Not more than 25 or 30 youngsters attend for supper and talk. "We're not trying directly to save souls at this point," says one of the student assistants. "We're trying to save minds." Adds handsome, youthful Father Eugene Balm, in command of the project: "If we do just a little good, in 50 years it will have been worthwhile." Youth, like other Frenchmen, will not crusade for Catholicism. But in a recent poll published by Realties, a remarkable 13% declared themselves ready to die for their faith "if exceptional circumstances demanded it." Last week 14,000 Catholic students walked 50 miles from the Latin Quarter to Chartres Cathedral on an annual spring pilgrimage. Even among anticlericals there is religious conformity. Smiled a young Socialist: "We baptized our child. He'll have his first Communion, get married in church and probably be buried by a priest. But mind you, I'm against Catholicism." Except among a small fraction of fervent youngsters, religion has not interfered with sexual morality. In true Latin fashion, the soul and the body are two distinctly different spheres that may touch briefly behind the curtain of a confessional box. "WE DON'T TALK--WE DO" BY Anglo-Saxon standards French youth is immoral. By French standards French youth is realistic. "Over there," said a 23-year-old girl who had attended college in the U.S., "sex is a problem. My sorority sisters never talked about anything else. Here in France we don't talk--we do." French kids mush it up in doorways, in the Metro, in cafes, during mealtime and after coffee. An army private repeated the convenient rule of thumb: "If you kiss a girl on the lips, you go to bed with her. No nonsense." There are, of course, nuances. Among workers and "emancipated" intellectuals, living in sin is acceptable. In the middle class there may be attempts to observe the forms of morality, like the insistence that a young girl come home at night regardless of what she does in the afternoon or evening. In rural areas premarital relationships are common, and pregnancy is a usual prelude to marriage.
Youth's main outdoor amusement in France is sports. Some 500,000 kids play soccer during the summer season, and a warm Sunday afternoon is the signal for thousands of messenger boys and factory workers to slip on their bright-colored jerseys, special riding shoes, twist a spare tire across their shoulders, climb on a bicycle and race through the green countryside with flowers between their teeth. Underwater fishing has grown to such a craze that the French government has been forced to issue submarine hunting licenses to prevent extinction of fish; deep-sea anglers are currently complaining that the Mediterranean has been drained of game. More youngsters, however, are spectators than participants, living on their nerves during the Tour de France and weeping at France's loss of the European Rugby title.
Except for the tiny dance halls in poor neighborhoods where an accordion and a piano grind out traditional rhythms, American jazz is heard everywhere. It is the U.S.'s great cultural export to Europe. Sidney Bechet and Lionel Hampton pack crowds into music halls, and local imitators of the Chicago style, like crew-cut Clarinetist Claude Luter, have become some of youth's few heroes. At the Discotheque, a small record club in Paris' Saint-Germain-des-Pres district, youngsters sit over Scotch whisky (at $1 a shot), dance dippingly to les slows, lindy-hop allegros, sing all the American lyrics aloud and shout at each other in broken English, "My dear, you wonderful!" STILL, THE JOY OF LIVING
DIFFERENT youngsters have different passing heroes, but French youth--like its elders--has had no lasting national hero since the days of Napoleon. Worshiping a celebrity implies homogeneous, collective feeling. French youngsters mostly want to be alone. A student has no dormitory or fraternity experience, a worker has few sentiments of camaraderie with his fellows. Unlike Americans or Russians, the French are too individualistic to take to bosom buddies. The family, not friends, forms the social circle.
Above all, a young Frenchman longs for an automobile as a means of escape. He rarely has one, but will settle cheerfully for a motor scooter on the installment plan. (A Vespa costs $357 cash; if purchased over an 18-month period, it is almost 20% more.) Come vacation time, he takes his girl friend and hitchhikes to the Riviera or Brittany, pitches a tent or lives in a youth hostel (slightly less popular because sexes are separated), swims, explores, cooks his own meals or just lies in the grass.
Wealthier youngsters go in for more elaborate leisure. If he (or his parents) can afford it, a boy will ski for two weeks in the winter, travel abroad for a month in the summer. In almost all social groups, youth, like its elders, is rarely in a hurry to achieve its ambitions, partly because it is imbued with the age-old French penchant for enjoying life, partly because the opportunity line in a static economy is not moving, and there's simply no sense in rushing. A young businessman of 30, secure of his future in the family textile firm, had life mapped out: "In your 20s you find yourself. In your 30s you work hard. In your 40s you taste success, and in your 50s you begin to reap the benefits. But all along the way you must remember to enjoy yourself."
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