#and yet here I am watching French newsreels

[the-paper-apricot]

Café on the Left Bank

I was listening late last night* to the copy of London Town that I found recently, and I was wondering about the song 'Café on the Left Bank', specifically the words

Tiny crowd of Frenchmen round a TV shop Watching Charles de Gaulle make a speech

It's such a precise image that it had to be based on a memory. I searched for speeches made by General de Gaulle in October 1961, when John and Paul were in Paris celebrating John's twenty-first. Sure enough, on the 2nd October 1961, the first day of the autumn session of the French parliament, he made an important address to the French people.

This is probably only of interest to other sleep-deprived weirdos, but here is a French newsreel reporting the speech that they must have seen broadcast in a TV shop window.

L'allocution du Général de Gaulle, Chef de l'Etat le 2 Octobre 1961

The speech addresses the Franco-Algerian war, which was drawing to a close (although only a couple of weeks after their visit there would be a massacre of Algerians in Paris).

*that is to say, at about 3.15AM.