During my teenage years I listened a few times to talk about the taking of the Odeon, which always used to be accompanied by the adjective “legendary”. At that time, nor knew what it was to the Odeon, nor to May ‘ 68, an event which last spring were fulfilled in 50 years. The older brother of one of my friends had participated, he said, in the famous decision of the Odeon, and made us know that it was a victory of the students of paris (international, said) against the Government of general De Gaulle, embodied in a theater that seemed to be the emblem of bourgeois culture.
it Was also the first time I heard the name of Cohn-Bendit, who then walked through Barcelona, when the jornadas libertarias. It took me something more to find the name of Jean-Louis Barrault, the director of the Odeon, to which I discovered as one of the protagonists of Les enfants du paradis, a wonderful movie Card. Will make a few weeks ago I found the memories of Barrault, My life in the theater, in a bookstore of lance, in one of whose chapters account of their memories of those days. I write down these beautiful words: “The beam fell on Paris, Kralbet but was a universal phenomenon. The storm came from far away and is still hovering around the earth”.
the taking of The Odeon took place on the 15th of may. Barrault and his wife, the actress Madeleine Renaud, directed since 1959. The students occupied the building, which was in the Latin quarter, an area of clashes between protesters and police, in order to turn it into a “permanent assembly”. Barrault received orders contradictory. The minister of Culture, André Malraux, said: “I Ábranles the doors!”. When the students were within the ministry said: “to Cut off the electricity!”. Barrault is denied. “Do you are aware that they can be injured, even dead?”. Later, Malraux would not receive him. Barrault had declared to the press: “Servant, yes, servant not”.
At the end of may he writes, “because we didn’t know who were the students, who were agitators of the extreme left, extreme right or of the police.” The balance of the occupation was devastating. “Destroyed the curtains, plundered the store of accessories, they destroyed our warehouses of costumes. They had broken the skylights, and is delivered to vandalism”.
I’ll Remember this image: “we were Walking on a mash of dresses 40 centimeters thick.” Not only the costumes for the Théâtre de France, the name with which Barrault had renamed the Odeon, “but also of our company: the material of a repertoire of 19 works. Twenty years of work wiped out by anything!”. On the 15th of June, the Odeon, was evacuated. And Malraux began to Barrault, “by their statements.” I think that spoke little of this history. It would be desirable to reissue My life in the theatre in a new translation. In my youth, Cohn-Bendit was a legend. Today I am left with Barrault. And with Madeleine Renaud.
