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If French workers felt deprived, French students felt, as students seem to the world over these days, ignored, ill tutored by their educational system, and dismayed by the quality of their society. To the students, the university stands for everything archaic in French life. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, leader of the Independent Republicans, explained last week that what the students really hated could be summed up in "two mediocre leitmotifs: the pursuit of material goods and the stultifying masques of conformity."
In politics, De Gaulle rewrote France's constitution, gave the country a strong President with an arsenal of emergency powers and thus assured it of the decisive executive that all previous French republics lacked. But the pendulum perhaps swung too far, in reducing France's National Assembly to an impotent debating club. Only once in ten years did it force the resignation of a government. That was in 1962, when Assembly Deputies rejected De Gaulle's proposal for popular election of the President, because they felt that this would further curtail the Assembly's influence. De Gaulle took the issue to a nationwide referendum, which he won, as he has won them all—so far.
In all his policies, De Gaulle showed a lofty disdain for public opinion, and indeed for the people. Last summer, for example, he pushed through the Assembly a law providing for profit sharing among workers in French factories. Whatever the plan's merits in theory, nobody but De Gaulle himself thought it was a good idea. As Raymond Aron of Le Figaro wrote: "This measure has been imposed by a single man on ministers and high-ranking officials who were unanimously opposed to it, on organizations of business leaders who were ferociously hostile, and on reticent or indifferent labor unions."
The regime at times banned books and dragged Frenchmen who offended the dignity of the President into court. One victim was Novelist Jacaues Laurent, who was fined $1,200 in 1965 for accusing François Mauriac of writing "an idolatrous biography" of De Gaulle. Nothing angered De Gaulle's critics more, though, than his high-handed use of the state TV monopoly for propaganda. Both in Paris and the provinces, the state network rarely gave leaders of opposition political parties the chance to appear on TV.
The Gaullist era seems to have blighted part of the nation's culture—although De Gaulle alone cannot be entirely to blame. The government, in fact, has subsidized artists and brought lively repertory theater to the provinces through the maisons de culture. But behind the splendid facades of Paris, which were so thoroughly scoured creme and clean on the orders of Cultural Minister Andre Malraux, France became something of a petits bourgeois prude. Movies that were too sexy were forbidden export licenses, since they would damage the image of France abroad. In the early 1960s, Lui, the French imitation of Playboy, was not allowed to display the female nipple. The details, trivial in themselves, were symptoms of a deeper cultural malaise.