May 1968, particularly in France, was a historical and cultural moment characterised by intense debate around questions of desire, authority and repression. The police, and more generally the notion of policing, formed an important element in such debate. The brutality with which the riot police treated demonstrators appeared as synecdoche for the Gaullian 'state apparatus' and by extension for the repressive policing of desire in bourgeois society. Kristin Ross points out how '[i]n the immediate aftermath of '68, years that saw a veritable hypertrophy of the French state in response to a palpable panic among the elites, French theory became populated with police figures.' (Ross, 2002 : 24). Examples of this include the post-1968 work of Donzelot (La Police des familles) and Foucault (Surveiller et punir, La Volonté de savoir). May 1968 had of course wanted to be rid of the policing whose operations were analysed in such texts. Slogans such as 'Soyons réalistes, demandons l'impossible!'/'Let's be realistic and demand the impossible!' , 'Jouissez sans entraves'/'No restraints to our ecstasy!' - the term being understood primarily in an erotic sense) and 'Tout état est policier'/'Any state is a police state' distil the maximalist politics of desire that were so important in 1968 and its aftermath. Yet those politics were inevitably oxymoronic, for an unpoliced desire - which is perhaps to say a desire outside any kind of polis - would probably not be recognizable as desire at all. This is what underpins Foucault's denunciation, in La Volonté de savoir, of what he terms the 'repressive hypothesis,' the view that society's policing of sexuality led to its muting and marginalization rather than, as Foucault maintains, the proliferation of discourses about it. Lacan's stress on the inescapability of the Law and the 'Nom/n du 'Père' had long implied as much. The doxa of the 1968 streets, however, had more to do with Marcuse and Reich than with Foucault or Lacan, holding as it did that the bourgeois state, particularly its Gaullist avatar, maintained its power by repressing and forcibly rechannelling the desires of its subjects. That avatar of the 'repressive hypothesis' was to find one of its most powerful and convincing illustrations in the Gabrielle Russier affair on which Mourir d'aimer is based. Gabrielle Russier was a sixth-form teacher in Marseille, a divorced thirty-two-year-old mother of two, who on the May barricades fell in love with one of her students, the seventeen-year-old Christian Rossi. Christian's parents were academics at the university of Aix-en- Provence, where Gabrielle was a strong candidate for a lectureship. They were also long-standing Communist Party members who had displayed strong far-Left sympathies in May, though it is not clear whether or not they had left the Party as a result. The Trotskyist Rouge, the only far-left publication to devote space to the affair, observed with cutting judiciousness that 'Christian's father was a Stalinist, all in favour of the French family. In May, like many others, he thought of himself as a leftist. After May, he became a father and a teacher once more.' (15/9/69). While Christian was old enough to consent to sexual relations, he was still a minor (the age of majority in France at the time was twenty-one, reduced to eighteen in 1974), which meant that his parents had effective control over his place of residence and personal relationships. They filed a suit against Gabrielle - something which ironically would have been impossible had the genders been reversed, for the law states that in the case of a sixteen-year-old woman 'the offence is disregarded' - which led to a court order forbidding her to have contact with Christian. Breaches of this led to her being twice imprisoned, and when the case came to trial in April 1969 she received a one-year suspended jail sentence. The prosecution appealed against this on the ground that it was too lenient, and would have enabled her to benefit from the amnesty traditionally granted by a newly-elected President - significantly, a sentence of a year and a day would have been the minimum required to secure her dismissal. Faced with not only continuing personal harassment but the likely loss of her career, Gabrielle committed suicide at home in Marseille on 1 September 1969.

The affair provoked a national outcry, leading to the publication of three books, including Gabrielle's Lettres de prison, and to protests from such figures as writers Benoîte Groult and Marcel Jouhandeau as well as the Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod. In 1971 it was also to inspire a successful feature film - André Cayatte's Mourir d'aimer, starring Annie Girardot. Many of the protests, significantly, saw the case as 'the continuation of May by other means.' Thus, the dissident Communist writer (and friend of Gabrielle's) Raymond Jean states in his introduction ('Pour Gabrielle') to her Lettres de prison that 'it was precisely against such a view of pedagogic relationships grounded in authority that the whole May 1968 movement was directed..' (Jean, 1973 : 35). Most extraordinary, however, was President Georges Pompidou's response to a (planted) question at his press conference of 22 September. Asked for his comments on the case, Pompidou replied, with evident emotion : 'I shall not tell you everything I thought about this case, nor even what action I took. As for what I felt, like a great many people .. Well, "Let those understand who will, my remorse (...) was the reasonable victim with her gaze like a lost child, like those who died because they were loved." That's from an Éluard poem.' (Winock 1987 : 365). So indeed it was - a poem written by a Communist Party member as a homage to those women who had their heads shorn at the Liberation because they had had German lovers, and thus a subversive as well as a culturally highly respectable denunciation of the policing of desire.

Pompidou's remarks were much discussed, and their intensity and allusiveness undoubtedly contributed to keeping the case in the public eye long after its tragic denouement. The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant devoted an essay to the affair, published along with the English translation of Russier's Prison Letters as 'Things Overlooked Before,' and recently reissued in French under the title 'Gabrielle Russier : une affaire française'/'Gabrielle Russier : a French affair.' Gallant's cross-cultural position is worthy of note here. Born in Montreal, but a native speaker of English, she has lived for upwards of forty years in Paris, so that the cross-cultural comparison she proffers at the beginning of her essay is a strongly-rooted one. What I shall seek to do here is to interrogate the different attitudes towards the policing of desire that the Russier case and Gallant's comments on it highlight, and to speculate on how the affair might be yet again differently viewed and treated - notably in the United States - if it were to occur today.