by Tony Judt
The student riots and occupations had set the spark to a nationwide series of strikes and workplace occupations that brought France to a near-standstill by the end of May. Some of the first protests—by reporters at French Television and Radio, for example—were directed at their political chiefs for censoring coverage of the student movement and, in particular, the excessive brutality of some riot policemen. But as the general strike spread, through the aircraft manufacturing plants of Toulouse and the electricity and petro-chemical industries and, most ominously, to the huge Renault factories on the edge of Paris itself, it became clear that something more than a few thousand agitated students was at stake.
The strikes, sit-ins, office occupations and accompanying demonstrations and marches were the greatest movement of social protest in modern France, far more extensive than those of June 1936. Even in retrospect it is difficult to say with confidence exactly what they were about. The Communist-led trade union organization, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) was at first at a loss: when union organizers tried to take over the Renault strike they were shouted down, and an agreement reached between government, unions and employers was decisively rejected by the Renault workers, despite its promise of improved wages, shorter hours and more consultation.
The millions of men and women who had stopped work had one thing at least in common with the students. Whatever their particular local grievances, they were above all frustrated with their conditions of existence. They did not so much want to get a better deal at work as to change something about their way of life; pamphlets and manifestos and speeches explicitly said as much. This was good news for the public authorities in that it diluted the mood of the strikers and directed their attention away from political targets; but it suggested a general malaise that would be hard to address.
France was prosperous and secure and some conservative commentators concluded that the wave of protest was thus driven not by discontent but by simple boredom. But there was genuine frustration, not only in factories like those of Renault where working conditions had long been unsatisfactory, but everywhere. The Fifth Republic had accentuated the longstanding French habit of concentrating power in one place and a handful of institutions. France was run, and was seen to be run, by a tiny Parisian élite: socially exclusive, culturally privileged, haughty, hierarchical and unapproachable. Even some of its own members (and especially their children) found it stifling.
The ageing De Gaulle himself failed, for the first time since 1958, to understand the drift of events. His initial response had been to make an ineffective televised speech and then to disappear from sight.167 When he did try to turn what he took to be the anti-authoritarian national mood to his advantage in a referendum the following year, and proposed a series of measures designed to decentralize government and decision-making in France, he was decisively and humiliatingly defeated; whereupon he resigned, retired and retreated to his country home, to die there a few months later.
Pompidou, meanwhile, had proven right to wait out the student demonstrations. At the height of the student sit-ins and the accelerating strike movement some student leaders and a handful of senior politicians who should have known better (including former premier Pierre Mendès-France and future president François Mitterrand) declared that the authorities were helpless: power was now there for the taking. This was dangerous talk, and foolish: as Raymond Aron noted at the time, ‘to expel a President elected by universal suffrage is not the same thing as expelling a king.’ De Gaulle and Pompidou were quick to take advantage of the Left’s mistakes. The country, they warned, was threatened with a Communist coup.168 At the end of May De Gaulle announced a snap election, calling upon the French to choose between legitimate government and revolutionary anarchy.
To kick off its election campaign the Right staged a huge counter-demonstration. Far larger even than the student manifestations of two weeks before, the massed crowds marching down the Champs Elysées on May 30th gave the lie to the Left’s assertion that the authorities had lost control. The police were given instructions to re-occupy university buildings, factories and offices. In the ensuing parliamentary elections, the ruling Gaullist parties won a crushing victory, increasing their vote by more than a fifth and securing an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly. The workers returned to work. The students went on vacation.
The May Events in France had a psychological impact out of all proportion to their true significance. Here was a revolution apparently unfolding in real time and before an international television audience. Its leaders were marvelously telegenic; attractive and articulate young men leading the youth of France through the historical boulevards of Left Bank Paris.169 Their demands—whether for a more democratic academic environment, an end to moral censorship, or simply a nicer world—were accessible and, despite the clenched fists and revolutionary rhetoric, quite unthreatening. The national strike movement, while mysterious and unsettling, merely added to the aura of the students’ own actions: having quite by accident detonated the explosion of social resentment, they were retrospectively credited with anticipating and even articulating it.
Above all, the May Events in France were curiously peaceful by the standards of revolutionary turbulence elsewhere, or in France’s own past. There was quite a lot of violence to property, and a number of students and policemen had to be hospitalized following the ‘Night of the Barricades’ on May 24th. But both sides held back. No students were killed in May 1968; the political representatives of the Republic were not assaulted; and its institutions were never seriously questioned (except the French university system, where it all began, which suffered sustained internal disruption and discredit without undergoing any significant reforms).
The radicals of 1968 mimicked to the point of caricature the style and the props of past revolutions—they were, after all, performing on the same stage. But they foreswore to repeat their violence. As a consequence, the French ‘psychodrama’ (Aron) of 1968 entered popular mythology almost immediately as an object of nostalgia, a stylized struggle in which the forces of Life and Energy and Freedom were ranged against the numbing, gray dullness of the men of the past. Some of the prominent crowd pleasers of May went on to conventional political careers: Alain Krivine, the charismatic graduate leader of the Trotskyist students is today, forty years on, the sexagenarian leader of France’s oldest Trotskyist party. Dany Cohn-Bendit, expelled from France in May, went on to become a respected municipal councilor in Frankfurt and thence a Green Party representative in the European Parliament.
But it is symptomatic of the fundamentally apolitical mood of May 1968 that the best-selling French books on the subject a generation later are not serious works of historical analysis, much less the earnest doctrinal tracts of the time, but collections of contemporary graffiti and slogans. Culled from the walls, noticeboardsand streets of the city, these witty one-liners encourage young people to make love, have fun, mock those in authority, generally do what feels good—and change the world almost as a by-product. Sous le pavé, as the slogan went, la plage. (‘Under the paving stones—the beach’). What the slogan writers of May 1968 never do is invite their readers to do anyone serious harm. Even the attacks on De Gaulle treat him as a superannuated impediment rather than as a political foe. They bespeak irritation and frustration, but remarkably little anger. This was to be a victimless revolution, which in the end meant that it was no sort of revolution at all.
The situation was very different in Italy, despite superficial similarities in the rhetoric of the student movements. In the first place, the social background to Italy’s conflicts was quite distinctive. The extensive migration from south to north in the course of the first half of the decade had generated, in Milan, Turin and other industrial towns of the north, a demand for transport, services, education and above all housing that the governments of the country had never managed to address. The Italian ‘economic miracle’ arrived later than elsewhere, and the transition out of an agrarian s
ociety had been more abrupt.
As a consequence, the disruptions of first-generation industrialization overlapped and collided with the discontents of modernity. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers—typically from the south, many of them women—were never absorbed into the established unions of skilled male workers in the industrialized north. Traditional worker/employer tensions were now multiplied by disputes between skilled and unskilled, unionized and unorganized workers. The better-paid, better-protected, skilled employees in the factories of FIAT, or the Pirelli Rubber Company, demanded a greater say in management decisions—over shift hours, wage differentials and disciplinary measures. Unskilled workers sought some of these goals and opposed others. Their main objection was to exhausting piece rates, the unrelenting pace of mechanized mass production lines, and unsafe working conditions.
Italy’s post-war economy was transformed by hundreds of small engineering, textile and chemical firms, most of whose employees had no legal or institutional recourse against their bosses’ demands. The Italian welfare state in the 1960s was still a rather rough-and-ready edifice that would not reach maturity until the following decade (in large part thanks to the social upheavals of the Sixties), and many unskilled workers and their families were still without workplace rights or access to family benefits (in March 1968 there was a nationwide strike to demand a comprehensive national pension scheme). These were not issues that the traditional parties and unions of the Left were equipped to address. On the contrary, their main concern at the time was the dilution of the old labor institutions by this new and undisciplined workforce. When semi-skilled women workers sought backing from the Communist trade union in their complaints about accelerated work-rates they were encouraged instead to demand higher compensation.
In these circumstances, the chief beneficiaries of Italy’s social tensions were not the established organizations of the Left, but a handful of informal networks of the ‘extra-parliamentary’ Left. Their leaders—dissident Communists, academic theoreticians of worker autonomy, and spokesmen for student organizations—were quicker to identify the new sources of discontent at the industrial workplace and absorb them into their projects. Moreover, the universities themselves offered an irresistible analogy. There, too, a new and unorganized workforce (the massive influx of first-generation students) faced conditions of life and work that were deeply unsatisfactory. There, too, an old élite exercised untrammeled decision-making power over the student masses, imposing workload, tests, grades and penalties at will.
From this perspective, administrators and established unions and other professional organizations in schools and universities—no less than in factories and workshops—shared a vested, ‘objective’ interest in the status quo. The fact that Italy’s student population was drawn overwhelmingly from the urban middle class was no impediment to such reasoning—as producers and consumers of knowledge, they represented (in their own eyes) an even greater threat to power and authority than the traditional forces of the proletariat. In the thinking of the New Left it was not the social origin of a group that counted, but rather its capacity to disrupt the institutions and structures of authority. A lecture hall was as good a place to begin as a machine shop.
The protean adaptability of Italian radical politics in these years is well captured in the following set of demands circulated in a liceo (secondary school) in Milan: the goals of the student movement, it declared, were ‘the control and eventual elimination of marks and failures, and therefore the abolition of selection in school; the right of everyone to an education and to a guaranteed student grant; freedom to hold meetings; a general meeting in the morning; accountability of teachers to students; removal of all reactionary and authoritarian teachers; setting of the curriculum from below’.170
The late-Sixties cycle of protests and disruptions in Italy began in Turin in 1968 with student objections to plans to move part of the university (the science faculty) to the suburbs—an echo of the protests taking place in suburban Nanterre at exactly the same time. There was a parallel, too, in the subsequent closure, in March 1968, of the University of Rome following student riots there in protest of a parliamentary bill to reform the universities. But unlike the French student movements, the Italian student organizers’ interest in the reform of academic institutions was always secondary to their identification with the workers’ movement, as the names of their organizations—Avanguardia Operaia or Potere Operaio (‘Workers’ Vanguard’, ‘Workers’ Power’)—suggest.
The labor disputes that began in the Pirelli company’s Milan factories in September 1968 and lasted through November 1969 (when the government pressured Pirelli into conceding the strikers’ main demands) furnished an industrial counterpoint and encouragement to the student protesters. The strike movement of 1969 was the largest in Italian history, and had a mobilizing and politicizing impact upon young Italian radicals out of all proportion to France’s brief, month-long protests of the previous year. The ‘hot autumn’ of that year, with its wildcat strikes and spontaneous occupations by small groups of workers demanding a say in the way factories were run, led a generation of Italian student theorists and their followers to conclude that their root and branch rejection of the ‘bourgeois state’ was the right tactic. Workers’ autonomy—as tactic and as objective—was the path of the future. Not only were reforms—in schools and factories alike—unattainable, they were undesirable. Compromise was defeat.
Just why ‘unofficial’ Italian Marxists should have taken this turn remains a matter of debate. The traditionally subtle and accommodating strategy of the Italian Communist Party left it exposed to the charge of working inside ‘the system’, of having a vested interest in stability and thus being, as its left-wing critics charged, ‘objectively reactionary’. And the Italian political system itself was both corrupt and seemingly impermeable to change: in the parliamentary elections of 1968 the Christian Democrats and Communists both increased their vote, and every other party came nowhere. But while this might account for the disaffection of the extra-parliamentary Left, it cannot fully explain their turn to violence.
‘Maoism’—or at any rate, an uncritical fascination with the Chinese Cultural Revolution then in full swing—was more extensive in Italy than anywhere else in Europe. Parties, groups and journals of a Maoist persuasion, recognizable by their insistence upon the adjective ‘Marxist-Leninist’ (to distinguish them from the despised official Communists), sprung up in quick succession in these years, inspired by China’s Red Guards and emphasizing the identity of interests binding workers and intellectuals. Student theorists in Rome and Bologna even mimicked the rhetoric of the Beijing doctrinaires, dividing academic subjects into ‘pre-bourgeois remnants’ (Greek and Latin), the ‘purely ideological’ (e.g. history) and the ‘indirectly ideological’ (physics, chemistry, mathematics).
The putatively Maoist combination of revolutionary romanticism and workerist dogma was incarnated in the journal (and movement) Lotta Continua (‘Continuous Struggle’)—whose name, as was often the case, encapsulates its project. Lotta Continua first appeared in the autumn of 1969, by which time the turn to violence was well under way. Among the slogans of the Turin student demonstrations of June 1968 were ‘No to social peace in the factories!’ and ‘Only violence helps where violence reigns.’ In the months that followed, university and factory demonstrations saw an accentuation of the taste for violence, both rhetorical (‘Smash the state, don’t change it!’) and real. The most popular song of the Italian student movement in these months was, appropriately enough, La Violenza.
The ironies of all this were not lost on contemporaries. As the film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini remarked in the wake of student confrontations with the police in Rome’s Villa Borghese gardens, the class roles were now reversed: the privileged children of the bourgeoisie were screaming revolutionary slogans and beating up the underpaid sons of southern sharecroppers charged with preserving civic order. For anyone with an adult memory of the recent Italian past,
this turn to violence could only end badly. Whereas French students had played with the idea that public authority might prove vulnerable to disruption from below, a caprice that Gaullism’s firmly-grounded institutions allowed them to indulge with impunity, Italy’s radicals had good reason to believe that they might actually succeed in rending the fabric of the post-Fascist Republic—and they were keen to try. On April 24th 1969, bombs were planted at the Milan Trade Fair and the central railway station. Eight months later, after the Pirelli conflicts had been settled and the strike movement ended, the Agricultural Bank on the Piazza Fontana in Milan was blown up. The ‘strategy of tension’ that underlay the lead years of the Seventies had begun.
Italian radicals in the Sixties could be accused of having forgotten their country’s recent past. In West Germany, the opposite was true. Until 1961, a post-war generation had been raised to see Nazism as responsible for war and defeat; but its truly awful aspects were consistently downplayed. The trial that year in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, followed from 1963 to 1965 by the so-called ‘Auschwitz trials’ in Frankfurt, belatedly brought to German public attention the evils of the Nazi regime. In Frankfurt, 273 witnesses attested to the scale and depth of German crimes against humanity, reaching far beyond the 23 men (22 SS and 1 camp kapo) on charge. In 1967, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich published their hugely influential study of Die Unfähigkeit zu trauen (‘The Inability to Mourn’), arguing that the official West German recognition of Nazi evil had never been accompanied by genuine individual recognition of responsibility.