The 1968 American and Israeli Color Revolution in France: Part One

Thalassocracy against De Gaulle

Pierre-Antoine Plaquevent contends that foreign intelligence networks and media influence converged in 1968 to weaken De Gaulle’s pursuit of national sovereignty.

Read part two here.

On May 14, 1968, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou addressed the National Assembly regarding the student uprising. In his speech, he declared that the movement included “determined individuals, equipped with significant financial means, with materials suited for street fighting, clearly dependent on an international organization, and I do not think I am taking any risk in suggesting that this organization aims not only to create subversion in Western countries but also to disturb Paris precisely at the moment when our capital has become the meeting place for peace in the Far East [the Vietnam War]. We will have to concern ourselves with this organization, to ensure that it cannot harm either the nation or the Republic.”

What did the future President of the Republic mean by the term “international organization”? Other senior members of the government also suggested that the student agitation was the product of deeper intentions, involving strategic forces seeking to destabilize the French state. Thus, the Minister of the Economy and Finance, Michel Debré, would later write in his memoirs: “Foreign money, notably Chinese, flowed into this turmoil, primarily to counter movements supported by the Russians. There were also the constant Israeli intrigues, cleverly orchestrated, with the aim of weakening the General [de Gaulle], condemned since the press conference where he had taken a stand against Israel’s policy.”¹

On the other side of the barricades, we can quote the writer Morgan Sportès, then a Maoist activist, who also sheds light on the background of this genuine anti-Gaullist color revolution that May ’68 represented: “What the sympathetic and, to some extent, naïve Cohn-Bendit does not boast about is that since March 1968 he was followed step by step by Paris Match and RTL, among others, who transformed him into a ‘revolutionary star.’ Photo reports on Cohn-Bendit in his kitchen, making coffee; or playing with his brother’s children; or, the height of irony, a double-page spread showing him in a jacket, carrying a ‘wandering Bolshevik’s suitcase’ in front of the Brandenburg Gate, with the caption: ‘And now he goes to preach anarchy throughout Europe.’ This, mind you, in Match, a ‘leftist rag’ if ever there was one!!! It was in Match’s car, a Citroën ID 19, that Cohn-Bendit left France in mid-May 1968, and it was in Match’s car that he re-entered it—his red hair dyed black. A real commedia dell’arte!”

Moreover, Sportès recalls the time when Cohn-Bendit bragged about being approached by the CIA: “In June 1968, Cohn-Bendit declared to Hervé Bourges: ‘It seems that the CIA has taken an interest in us lately: certain American newspapers and associations, subsidiaries and intermediaries of the CIA, have offered us large sums of money; needless to say, we turned them down…’”²

For the historian and journalist Éric Branca, this underground influence of the CIA was very real and took the form of manipulations of public opinion, reminiscent of methods used in today’s color revolutions across other theaters of operation: “The most striking example is the rumor, devised in 1966 by communications agencies linked to the State Department, according to which De Gaulle would not be content to send home the GIs stationed on our territory, but was preparing to order the repatriation of the bodies of American soldiers who had fallen in 1944 for the liberation of France! The terrible image of these Frenchmen digging up corpses foreshadowed the equally monstrous lie fabricated in 1991 by similar agencies to discredit Saddam Hussein, whose soldiers supposedly unplugged the incubators of newborns in Kuwait City…”³

To understand why Freudo-Marxist subversion and the American “deep state” converged in May 1968 to destabilize General de Gaulle’s regime, one must recall both the geopolitical context of the time and the political work accomplished by De Gaulle then. General de Gaulle positioned France as a balancing power among the three great geopolitical forces of the time: (1) the USA/NATO; (2) the USSR/Warsaw Pact; and (3) the Non-Aligned Movement (which included countries refusing the geopolitical bipolarity of West vs. Socialism).

Within this non-aligned policy, De Gaulle also directly confronted Euro-globalism as embodied at the time by figures such as Jean Monnet. De Gaulle was not anti-European, but his vision of Europe was not supranational; above all, it was a Europe with a defined geographical limit and historical coherence. Two visions of Europe thus clashed: the national vision defended by De Gaulle and the supranational, “Euro-globalist” vision of Jean Monnet—and, more broadly, that of technocracy and internationalist finance. This was also the period when France, now a nuclear power, sought to embody a “third way” between capitalism and communism—even in the economic domain. For example, in August 1967, when the French government legislated on employee profit-sharing, “the participation of employees in the fruits of expansion became mandatory in companies with more than 100 employees.”⁴

Above all, it was a period of major international tension with the “Six-Day War” (1967), a crisis during which De Gaulle denounced Israel’s expansionist attitude and delivered his famous press conference in which he referred to the Jews as “an elite people, self-assured and domineering.” This statement earned him many attacks, including from conservative figures such as Raymond Aron, who wrote an entire book on the issue titled De Gaulle, Israël et les Juifs (De Gaulle, Israel and the Jews). In it, he commented on De Gaulle’s speech as follows: “General de Gaulle has, consciously and deliberately, opened a new period in Jewish history—and perhaps in the history of antisemitism. Everything becomes possible again.”

It was an essay in which the accusation of Gaullist antisemitism served as a thread running through Aron’s unusually harsh remarks, quite unlike his usual measured style: “Why did General de Gaulle solemnly rehabilitate antisemitism? To indulge in the pleasure of scandal? To punish the Israelis for their disobedience and the Jews for their occasional anti-Gaullism? To solemnly forbid any inclination toward dual loyalty? To sell a few more Mirages to Arab countries? Was he striking at the United States by striking the Jews? (…)”

These positions can also be explained by the role Raymond Aron played as a conduit for Atlanticist strategic interests in Europe, notably within the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), founded in West Berlin in 1950 and headquartered in Paris. This politico-cultural organization aimed to counter the communist bloc’s influence on culture and intellectual debate—and was funded by the CIA.⁵

It should be recalled that up until the 1960s, France had been an unwavering supporter of the Zionist state, backing it at key moments in its history—such as during the 1956 Suez Crisis against the nationalist Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser, or through clandestine technical support for Israel’s nuclear weapons project. It was General de Gaulle who ended this nuclear cooperation in order to reorient French foreign policy towards a rebalancing among the various power poles of the time.

France, having survived the debacle of 1940 and World War II and suffering recurrent political crises under the Fourth Republic, was now, under De Gaulle, attempting to craft a policy of strength based on nuclear deterrence and political realism—for instance, by considering Russia and China in the long term, beyond their respective ideological systems. This policy was marked by a rejection of the bipolarity inherited from the Yalta system (from which France had been excluded) and, above all, by the strengthening of France’s internal institutions. Despite the tragic abandonment of the pieds-noirs and the harkis—which remains its main stain—the Fifth Republic, as De Gaulle was shaping it, constituted a distinctly French “third way” and an attempt at national restoration carried out through legality and political intelligence.

That France posed a serious problem for American hegemony over the West. Moreover, De Gaulle’s policy of balance in the Middle East was a hindrance to Israel’s expansionism. The national-Gaullist state thus represented an antagonistic political regime that needed to be destabilized by every possible means. Yet, in the context of full employment and economic growth at the end of the 1960s, how could one attack—or even topple—so solid an adversary as France, theoretically an ally in the same camp against the USSR? Moreover, an ally that had earned the historical legitimacy of the “crusade of democracies” against fascism through its wartime Gaullism? It was at this point that new methods of weakening a state came into play—new political technologies still in their infancy at the time, but which would later be systematized with the effectiveness we know today.

For example, the use of student protest movements directed and supported by political actors whose interests—or origins—linked them to foreign powers.

Left-wing Zionism and the Open Society against De Gaulle

I have already discussed in my studies the figure of Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Foundations and executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 1993 to 2012. Aryeh Neier was previously one of the founders of the group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most important student organization among the radical left in 1960s America. His trajectory is, in many respects, significant and representative of an entire generation of political leaders of the student left who gradually climbed the social ladder—moving from direct action and radical protest to political influence within major NGOs or more traditional political institutions.

The same happened in France: the majority of the most publicized leaders of May ’68 went, as Guy Hocquenghem put it, “from the Mao collar to the Rotary Club,” according to the title of his book, in which he noted: “It was not the right, but leftism, that killed communism and discredited the left for ten years after May ’68, through years of patient subversion.”⁶

As in the United States, the French leaders of May ’68 went on to have successful careers in politics (Daniel Cohn-Bendit), intellectual life (Alain Finkielkraut), the media (Serge July), or in the sphere of humanitarian interventionism à la Soros (Bernard Kouchner).

Again, as in the United States at the same time, many of the French leaders of May ’68—who would later become major figures of the Open Society in France—were Jewish activists who imagined themselves replaying, a generation later, a mythical and fantasized anti-fascist struggle. It was a simulacrum of student anti-fascism facing the historical and genuine anti-fascism of General de Gaulle and the French Communist Party.

Among them, we may cite:

• the most emblematic, Daniel Cohn-Bendit;

• Alain Geismar, “Secretary General of the SNE Sup,⁷ then active member of the Proletarian Left”;

• Henri Weber (who died in 2020 of coronavirus), future Socialist Party official, co-founder with Alain Krivine of the Trotskyist movement JCR (Revolutionary Communist Youth), ancestor of the LCR (Revolutionary Communist League) and later the NPA (New Anticapitalist Party);

• Robert Linhardt, “head of the UJCML (Union of Marxist-Leninist Communist Youth)”;

• Benny Lévy, a central figure of French Maoism under the pseudonym Pierre Victor, “leader of the Proletarian Left, co-founder of Libération and personal secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre,” who, according to his biographer, went “from Mao to Moses”; [16]

• and also, among others, “André Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner, Alain Finkielkraut.” [17]

(Translated from the French)

1. Michel Debré, Memoirs, volume 4, Gouverner autrement, 1962–1970 (Governing Differently, 1962–1970), Albin Michel, 1993.

See also: Éric Branca, L’Ami américain, Washington contre de Gaulle, 1940–1969 (The American Friend: Washington Against De Gaulle, 1940–1969); Perrin, 2017.

2. Ibidem, and also the radio reports by Jean-Pierre Farkas: 1968 le pavé (1968: The Pavement), PHONURGIA NOVA, 1998. Recorded in 1968.

3. See also: Éric Branca, L’Ami américain, Washington contre de Gaulle, 1940–1969 (The American Friend: Washington Against De Gaulle, 1940–1969); Perrin, 2017.

4. See also: “La société ouverte contre la France” (The Open Society Against France) in Soros et la société ouverte, métapolitique du globalisme (Soros and the Open Society: Metapolitics of Globalism) (Culture & Racines, 2020).

5. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War; Granta Books, 1999.

6. Lettre ouverte à ceux qui sont passés du col Mao au Rotary (Open Letter to Those Who Went from the Mao Collar to the Rotary Club), Guy Hocquenghem, Agone, 2003.

7. Secretary General of the SNE Sup refers to the head of the Syndicat National de l’Enseignement Supérieur, France’s main union for higher education teachers and researchers.