Latest update : 2015-05-25
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was born in France to German parents, has been granted French citizenship nearly 50 years after he was expelled from the country for “disturbing the peace” as a leader of the May 1968 student uprising.
Cohn-Bendit had one major wish on his 70th birthday last month: to become French. Just days before, he dropped off an official request for citizenship at the French consulate in Frankfurt, Germany.
It now appears that Cohn-Bendit’s wish has come true.
“I have dual Franco-German citizenship,” he confirmed to AFP on Saturday. “It corresponds well with my identity, with my state of mind.”
He added that he had learned of the news from France’s interior ministry – the very same government body that expelled him from the country in 1968.
Before he was granted nationality, Cohn-Bendit – a former member of the European Parliament (MEP) for France’s Green Party – said he felt like a man caught between two worlds.
“In Germany, I was the most French of the Germans, in France the most German of the French,” he told French magazine Le Point in April.
May 1968
Cohn-Bendit was born in the southern French city of Montauban in 1945 to German-Jewish parents who had fled their homeland to escape the rise of Nazism. He lived in France for 14 years before opting for German citizenship in 1959 as a means to avoid conscription into the French army.
It was a decision that would come back to haunt him years later, after returning to France to attend the University of Nanterre near Paris.
Nicknamed “Danny the red” (“Dany le rouge” in French) for his politics as well as the colour of his hair, Cohn-Bendit was one of the more prominent leaders of the country’s May 1968 student uprising.
As the movement gained momentum, Cohn-Bendit’s political opponents sought to use his foreign nationality against him. “This Cohn-Bendit, because he is Jewish and German, takes himself for a new Karl Marx,” the far-right newspaper Minute wrote, while the head of France’s Communist Party, Georges Marchais, denounced “factions led by the German anarchist Cohn-Bendit”.
But Cohn-Bendit’s fellow student protesters rallied around him, brandishing signs at demonstrations declaring, “We are all German Jews.”
Despite the groundswell of support, France’s government had had enough of “Danny the red”. On May 21, 1968, the interior ministry ordered his expulsion from the country for “disturbing the peace”.
‘Profoundly sad’
For the next 10 years, Cohn-Bendit was considered persona non grata in France.
“I was profoundly sad, suddenly everything stopped. At the same time, the interior minister saved my life, because I was far from all the tensions that emerged [in France] post-’68,” he told Le Point.
By the time Cohn-Bendit’s expulsion order officially expired in 1978, he had remade his life in Germany as a politician. He wouldn’t re-enter the French political scene until 1999, when he ran in European parliamentary elections as a representative for the country’s Green Party. After more than 20 years as an MEP, Cohn-Bendit resigned his position this past April.
Despite taking a step back from political life, there has been much speculation in France that Cohn-Bendit may run for the presidency in 2017 now that he is a citizen. But he has dismissed the rumours, insisting that his decision to become French was a personal one.
“I know there are a bunch of people predicting such a political manoeuvre, but I’m not thinking about it at all,” Cohn-Bendit told AFP. “All the presidential candidates can sleep easy [knowing that].”
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