What happened at Villiers-le-Bel was that you got

your basic cop car, coming along,

and it wasn't rolling aggressively,

it was about fifty kilometers an hour, and these two young

North-African extraction youths, without helmets,

didn't yield to the car. They were on a scooter,

sort of essentially a motorcycle, not a big one but a

scooter. And, so, they hit the car on

the left side and unfortunately they were both killed.

And then the police stayed a bit and made calls but the calls

that they made were more, "we have something spinning out

of control," it's not about how are these two kids who--and you

see, they left it there for two

days, they circled it all away. So, you still see these little

guys' tennis shoes and you see--you can see traces of their

having expired. And, so, Villiers-le-Bel,

which is about eighteen kilometers north of Paris--it's

near Roissy, it's near Sarcelles,

where there was a lot of trouble before,

it's near Gonesse; it's in the Val d'Oise--went up

in flames basically, and unfortunately a lot of

people were hurt in the fighting.

And yesterday they burned, somebody stupidly burned the

library, and the library is not associated with the

flics, with the cops,

it's not associated with the State even, it is the municipal

library where lots of kids go and study in the municipal

library. And, so, this was just la

connerie, this is not possible to do

stuff like that. But, anyway,

part of the problem is that Sarkozy denigrated the people in

the suburbs as racaille, as scum, by implication,

that--and was Minister of the Interior during the big

troubles, a couple of years ago;

which I'm going to talk about on Wednesday,

the troubles, which started in

Clichy-sous-Bois. But there's a lot of--in

Toulouse where there had been trouble two years ago,

now it's happening in Toulouse, too, but I didn't--I'll watch

it this afternoon. It's a problem,

it's going to be a big problem for awhile.

And what makes it a little more scary is that this wasn't an

incident, where there have been incidents where the police

are--the police systematically control people of color,

systematically, in France, systematically.

I go through Barbès-Rochechouart,

which is a metro stop famous for the first place that

somebody shot and killed a German officer during Vichy

and--or the Gare de Lyon. I was in the Gare de Lyon,

not the other day but at the end of November--or for that

matter after Sarkozy was elected;

you go to the Gare de Lyon metro stop and all of a sudden

you turn the corner and then you've got ten policemen there,

controlling people. I've lived--I've spent half my

life in France for the last thirty years.

I have never been controlled, not once, not once.

And I've been with people going through, and you turn the

corner, and all of a sudden you've got all the police there.

And who do they pick out? They don't pick out whites

carrying little academic briefcases, they pick out

everybody, practically, who is young and who is not

white. And so this rubs people the

wrong way, to say the least, and it's part of the way this

works in the suburbs. And, so, this incident,

which involved a police car, was not coming in and sort of

saying "up against the mall MF" and all this but,

"let's see your papers." Because that's what happens,

and I've seen that happen. It was just unfortunately these

two policemen--who weren't doing anything wrong,

they were just--it was a banal trip through a banal suburb--

happened to hit these two kids who were not wearing helmets and

so they were killed. But this is--who knows what's

going to happen in this. But this is part of when you

see La Haine, hate, you see--that's the best

translation simply of it is hatred or hate.

And to understand how people in the suburbs feel you have to

understand the relationship between both--and I'm going to

do this again, in more detail;

I better get to what I'm doing today.

But that it's not just young people with not much of a

future, it also is, mostly has to do with

under-privileged and under-appreciated minorities

pitted against the CRS, the national kind of military

police, as well as the municipal police.

And of course what the government of Chirac did was

take away all the money virtually for voluntary

associations that are bridges to helping integrate people into

the communities in which they live and into the State in which

they live. But ce n'est pas

évident, comme on dit en

français, it's just--oh,

well, there we go. How did we get on that?

We got on that because it's important to talk about.

Allez. So, today I'm going to talk

about Charles de Gaulle. In November 1970,

ça passe vite, les temps,

I was a student in Paris, just a little older than you,

and living in an eleven-franc-a-night hotel,

on rue Monsieur le Prince--that was about two dollars a night.

My hotel room wasn't worth that, actually,

but it was kind of an interesting place to live

for--again, I was living in Limoges for a

lot of the year too. I went to the Archives one day

about--get there early, which I always do,

and this little man who was a World War Two veteran who had

lost most of his arm in the war, who would check my ID,

but he knew me so there was no problem--my wife used to come in

looking for me, when she was my wife,

carrying our baby and the groceries, and it's all very

décont racté,

very informal; it's not that way any more.

And he said, "we're going to close because

the general, il est mort"--the general is dead.

And Charles de Gaulle died, had died.

And I, I think, infuriated my Gaullist friend

by saying that he died of boredom watching French TV;

but he was off in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises,

and he had died at age--he must've just been eighty;

wasn't he eighty when he died, do you remember?

You don't remember, but anyway I think he was

eighty when he died. And, so, later my Gaullist

friend, who's a lawyer, a Parisian lawyer,

called me up and said, "look, why don't we go down to

Notre Dame and go to the Mass?" De Gaulle didn't want to have a

Mass, and I didn't particularly want to go down to Notre Dame

and go to the Mass for Charles de Gaulle,

but he said that it'll be--it's a historical event,

we should be there, you should see it.

And so I went down, we went down at three in the

morning and waited in line, and then they'd flown in all

these people. Haile Selassie was there,

that was kind of amazing to see Haile Selassie,

and the odious Richard Nixon was there and all these leaders,

with rather minimum security. This was not in a high security

time. You could see people who were

carrying machineguns up on the towers, you could see people in

the cathedral up--I was about the only person anyone saw get

frisked, going in.

They looked at me and said we want to check you out;

so they checked me out, with the long hair and all

that. But we got in there,

and it was a moment of--as a moment of history,

and it was something to see. His influence on French life

and the memory of French life can hardly--the collective

memory, of collective memory in French

life, can hardly be underestimated;

yet it was so long ago that he died, and the party that bore

his name disappeared, that even if someone like

Sarkozy or, before him, Jacques Chirac,

would go to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises,

this village in the Haute-Marne, in the east of

France, to have their picture taken in front of his tomb with

the Croix de Lorraine--de Gaulle seems like a long time ago.

But what he did in 1958 is of course to rescue the French

State and to define, in his own personage,

a certain idea of France that he represented.

And to borrow a Catholic image, de Gaulle who was born in

Lille, right near, as I said the other day,

right near the fortress--Lille is a pretty Catholic town--he

was not himself a practicing religious man,

but I suppose it's a religious image that I somehow have

retained in the back of my mind from the days at a good old

Jesuit high school in Portland, Oregon, that he saw himself as

the mystical body of France, that somehow the whole,

that is his body, his personage,

his very being, was bigger than all of the

parts that constituted the body of France,

and that he represented France with his very existence,

and that this was how he wanted to be remembered.

And when he leaves power in 1969, after a rather obscure

election, plebiscite really, that that image still was

retained. There are really three elements

that represented his image and the myth of Charles de Gaulle

after World War Two. That he was the providential

figure who through his own determination had saved France

and its honor after the blowout of May/June 1940;

that as his voice crackled over the BBC on the 18th of June,

1940, a date that's still commemorated every year when

there's a Gaullist in power and a mayor of France such as Chirac

there's always a little event to commemorate that;

that he had restored the integrity of France.

My friend Bob Paxton, as I reminded you the other

day, argued that Pétain might have saved the French

State but he did not save the French nation;

he destroyed it by destroying liberty, fraternity,

equality, and what that means. That Charles de Gaulle had

restored the integrity of France, had restored the

sovereignty of French over their own political existence,

which is obvious, and the republic itself,

by being involved in the creation of the Fourth Republic,

but then repudiating the way it was established,

wanting centralized executive authority and all of that,

and then would go off pouting to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises.

That he'd then he'd reunified the nation after the civil war

that was Vichy. But, again, with a Gaullist

twist is that everybody had basically resisted,

or wanted to resist, that they were always ready

with the gun nearby to go and kill the German when they could

and to restore France, and that hardly anyone had

collaborated. So, this was sort of the

Gaullist take on this. And that he had restored the

centralized state--not after World War Two,

because the Fourth Republic was this sort of swinging door

ministry; it's rather like the Third

Republic--which as in the case of the Third Republic gave the

illusion that French political life was more unstable than it

was, because the deputies of the

Fourth Republic, like the deputies of the Third

Republic, it was a club where the same

people were re-elected time and time again from the same

constituencies. But de Gaulle's thing was that

the only form of government that could restore the integrity of

France and end the factions of parliamentary quarrels,

and quarreling, and he hated the communists,

of course, was a strongly centralized government.

And for that he had to wait, as you now know,

until cinquante-huit, until 1958,

with a constitution written for him by Michel Debré,

who personified Gaullism itself,

and whose son is an important figure in contemporary France.

This is very important for de Gaulle's view of France,

is that he had freed France, in his mind,

from the anarchy of political parties that were quarreling,

a parliamentary government that he didn't think had worked,

that was incapable of restoring the "grandeur" of France--a word

to which he returned constantly; more about that in