by Robb, Graham
Next day, marching into the minefield, the authorities asked the police to evacuate the Sorbonne.
II. B. i.
THE STUDENTS who assembled in the courtyard of the Sorbonne on 3 May were inspired by similar protests at Nantes, Strasbourg, Berlin and Berkeley. Using picks and hammers, they converted parts of the building and its furniture into ‘anti-fascist equipment’ (sticks and stones). They were anticipating an attack by an anti-communist student group called Occident, which had been infiltrated by former terrorist paratroopers of the OAS. Occident members wearing motorcycle helmets and brandishing axe handles were demonstrating a few yards away on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, demanding that the protesters be sent to Peking.
At about four o’clock that afternoon, instead of helmeted fascists spoiling for a fight, the students saw, entering from the Place de la Sorbonne, a battalion of men who would normally have spent Friday afternoon directing traffic, arresting burglars, importuning beggars and expressing admiration for the sexually interesting parts of the bodies of Parisian women and, to a lesser extent, of foreign female tourists.
These policemen, incorrectly identified by the students as members of the CRS,* having little experience of crowd control, performed their task clumsily. They bundled three hundred students into the ‘salad shakers’ (police vans). One of those arrested was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, known as ‘Dany le Rouge’, who was due to appear at a meeting of the University of Paris on 6 May, charged with ‘agitation’.
The university and the government believed that the ‘extremists’ in the Sorbonne represented a minority, and that all the other students were busy in their concrete cubes preparing for examinations, which they were due to sit in three weeks’ time.
II. B. ii.
DESPITE THE increasing use of non-gender-specific clothing and hairstyles, the police successfully distinguished male from female students. Avoiding contact with the female students, they herded the male students into the waiting vans.
What happened next was more significant than it might appear at a distance of forty years. Female students surrounded the police vans and began to chant ‘CRS–SS’, equating the police with the Gestapo (a historically dubious but ear-catching slogan), and ‘Libérez nos camarades!’ To the policemen, the girls were not Trotskyites, Leninists, Stalino-Christians or Maoists; they were child-bearing ornaments and objects of desire. Their use of the noun camarades, which can be either masculine or feminine, reoriented the conflict and induced a dangerous degree of semiotic confusion in the forces of order.
Seven days later, on the first ‘Night of the Barricades’ (see sections III. A.–B.), the police would go on the attack. They charged the poorly made barricades on the Rue Gay-Lussac and unlawfully broke into apartments in pursuit of rioting students. In a street near the École des Mines, a girl wearing almost nothing came rushing out of a building and stopped in the street like a hunted rabbit. She was passed along a line of policemen, beaten up and dragged to a ‘salad shaker’ that was waiting in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques. Local people who witnessed the violence were horrified.
Questions and sample answers
How had the conflict changed?
The conflict had been radicalized and polarized. The policemen, who were of predominantly proletarian, artisan and petit-bourgeois origin, had reasserted the power of institutional authority over individual, bourgeois self-expression. They did this, however, without the blessing of their bourgeois superiors. The Prefect of Police, Maurice Grimaud, having witnessed the scenes of violence on television, sent a circular to all his agents: ‘Striking a demonstrator who is on the ground is the same as striking oneself.’ It was an aphorism rather than an order, and was evidently greeted with incomprehension or derision.
Who was at fault?
a) The police, who had offered to allow the students to leave the Sorbonne peacefully but then arrested them as they tried to leave. This gave rise to a violent demonstration, which the police repressed with greater violence, which led in turn to yet more violent demonstrations.
b) No one was at fault. Although the flames of rebellion were fanned by the police, the conscious intentions of individuals and groups were subsumed in a power struggle which was in turn determined by long-term historical trends. The nature of this struggle remained obscure to most of the participants.
What was the nature of the struggle?
The students had been conducting a form of consumer protest, focused on staff reductions, poor facilities, gender segregation and a law (the Loi Fouchet) that would have restricted access to university education. When the police became aggressors, the students found themselves opposing a rebellion of armed members of the lower classes. This rebellion corresponded more closely to underlying historical trends (monopolization of surplus value by the bourgeoisie, alienation of the proletariat, etc.) and thus became the new focus of agitation.
III. A.
DEMONSTRATIONS took place in Paris on 6, 7 and 8 May. On 9 May, the Government announced that the Sorbonne was to remain closed. On the night of 10 May, barricades appeared at several key points of the Latin Quarter for the first time since 1944.
Although their composition differed from that of their predecessors (cars instead of carriages, café chairs instead of domestic furniture), these barricades were associated by newspaper readers and téléspectateurs with moral rectitude and sexual adventure: Cosette and Marius in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, the bare-breasted ‘Liberty’ figure in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, and countless romantic serials loosely based on episodes of the Paris revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1832, 1848 and 1871.
The barricades offered a seemingly unique opportunity to participate in ‘history’, and their sudden appearance in the Latin Quarter contributed to the media success of the riots. In the short and long terms, they enhanced the attraction of the Latin Quarter as a tourist destination. During a lull in the fighting, a Belgian tour bus stopped next to a crumbling barricade; a young man got out and stood on the barricade with a stone in each hand while his father took a picture.
May ’68 was a revolution with its own theme park. A graffito that appeared on the walls of various public buildings advertised the sites of historical interest even before the historical events had occurred: ‘Ici, bientôt, de charmantes ruines’ (‘Coming soon: picturesque ruins.’)
III. B. i.
PARTLY BY CHANCE, and partly by imitation of guerrilla movements, the students evolved a crude communications network, using bicycles, mopeds, walkie-talkies and transistor radios. With their light-weight footwear, they could out-run booted policemen and were able to dodge about the city in small groups, avoiding road blocks, setting fire to cars and urinating on the flame of the Unknown Soldier. Live reports on the youth-oriented stations Europe 1 and Radio Luxembourg had the effect of coordinating the riots. Radios were placed on windowsills, and the commentaries cascaded down to the streets in stereo. Reporters exaggerated the numbers involved and brought even more people onto the streets.
Despite attempts by politicians and the police to identify ringleaders, there was no recognizable command structure. Confusingly, the students failed to conform to the model of earlier bourgeois protesters (duffle coat, baggy blue pullover, yellow ‘Boyard’ cigarette). The subsequent re-education of the police would concentrate, therefore, on the free-floating signifiers of adolescent bourgeois culture: ‘Eschew all prejudgements! A good policeman does not categorize people according to their clothing or physical appearance: a black leather jacket is not necessarily the costume of a hooligan; a hippie is not always a drug addict; long hair is not the external symbol of delinquency.’* Deprived of these simple keys to social status, many policemen found their duties increasingly difficult to perform.
III. B. ii.
BY NOW (10–11 May), the ‘anti-fascist equipment’ of the Sorbonne occupiers had been upgraded to a more efficient, paramilitary arsenal. The police used tear-gas grenades, stun grenades, water cannon, truncheons, rubber
batons and booted feet. The students employed a greater variety of weapons: projectiles, including building rubble, cobblestones and iron bars; catapults; a sand-blaster; planks of wood with protruding nails; smoke bombs and tear-gas produced by chemistry students; Molotov cocktails containing metal pellets or topped up with motor oil to produce an effect similar to that of napalm.
Burning cars–especially the lightweight Simca 1000 and Citroën 2CV–were both defensive and offensive weapons. (The owners of these cars, being sympathetic to the students, covered by insurance and coveting more recent or prestigious models, were not generally opposed to their use in barricades.)
The effectiveness of the students’ weaponry can be gauged by the number of casualties. After the Night of the Barricades, three hundred and sixty-seven people had been injured, of whom two hundred and fifty-one were policemen and other service personnel. Eighteen policemen but only four students were seriously wounded. Sixty cars were destroyed and a hundred and twenty-eight severely damaged. The absence of fatalities, which is still felt to be a remarkable feature of the riots, may reflect a certain degree of ritualism in the use of these weapons. It should be noted, however, that, with road blocks, cratered streets, almost two hundred cars hors de combat and many others safely stored away in underground car parks, inhabitants of the Latin Quarter were less likely to die a violent death in May 1968 than at other times.
III. B. iii.
RITUALISM WAS particularly evident in the use of cobblestones–cubes of blue-grey or pinkish granite from quarries in Brittany and the Vosges weighing approximately two kilograms and laid in fan-shaped patterns by skilled manual labourers to provide a durable and easily repaired road surface. Many were covered with a thin layer of tarmac but could soon be dislodged with a pick or a road-drill. Hurled with sufficient force, a cobblestone could seriously injure even an armoured policeman.
The cobblestones (pavés) were not just weapons, they were symbolic objects, representing the essence of the city (‘le pavé de Paris’is a metonymical expression with romantic overtones). Furthermore, cobblestones represented the hard, back-breaking labour of the proletariat and the paternalistic provision of undifferentiated communal services by the state. The slogan, ‘Sous les pavés, la plage’,* asserted the underlying truth of individual consumer choice and the freedom to engage in leisure pursuits. (The sand, in fact, was not the geological ‘beach’ beneath Paris but imported industrial sand that was compacted and levelled to provide a smooth base for the stones.)
The commercial availability in 2008 of cobblestones used in the May 1968 revolt suggests that many were collected at the time as valuable commodities and investments. Prices vary according to historical significance and the aesthetic properties of the stone.
Document 3: Cobblestones advertised on eBay. fr in May 2008.
(a) ‘Genuine cobblestone, witness of French history’: 1 euro; 10 euros postage and packing.
(b) 150 cobbles marked ‘Quartier Latin, Mai 68’ in red and blue paint: ‘memorable souvenirs that can be used as book-ends or paperweights’.
(c) ‘Decorative display object’, currently in a flower-bed at Boussu (Belgium): a ‘witness of the events of May 68, which passed through the windshield of my father-in-law’s 2CV, which was parked at the time in the Latin Quarter’. 10 euros.
(d) ‘Parisian cobblestone in its original state, with traces of tar’, collected ‘as a souvenir’ by a fireman on the night of 23–24 May, ‘subsequently used as a book-end’. 27 euros.
IV. A. i.
AFTER THE Night of the Barricades, the conflict could no longer be seen as a simple rebellion against the government and its agencies.
A new protagonist, whose emergence had been anticipated and, it might be said, desired by the students, now appeared on the scene. The CRS had been founded after the Liberation as a special force to fill a gap between the regular police and the army. They were trained in crowd control and mountain rescue. They patrolled motorways in urban areas and served as lifeguards at lakes and beaches.
CRS recruits had a relatively low level of education. Many came from deprived areas where physical violence was a form of personal expression as well as a form of defence. They did not have homes of their own but were housed in special barracks. They were strangers to the areas they policed, partly because, as sons of the proletariat, they might otherwise have found themselves, during a workers’ strike, opposed to members of their own family or clan.
The men of the CRS were poorly paid and unappreciated. Many suffered from social alienation and psychological problems related to insecurity. They compensated for this by developing a tribal sense of loyalty and tradition, sharpened by a perception that the misdemeanours of all the forces of order were blamed on the CRS. In May 1968, they often worked several shifts in a row and were kept on duty overnight, cooped up in armoured coaches parked in side streets.
IV. A. ii.
THIS OSTENSIBLY proletarian and provincial force became ‘the enemy’ to a much greater degree than the bourgeois, Parisian authorities. As usual in such conflicts, propaganda was used to dehumanize the enemy, enabling combatants to overcome moral or aesthetic objections to physical violence. For example, a cartoon in a student paper showed an injured CRS man being prepared for a heart-transplant operation: the heart was to be supplied by an anaesthetized ‘vache’* in the neighbouring bed.
The CRS fostered sympathy for the students by attacking innocent bystanders and allowing their actions to be guided by a simple form of class consciousness. According to one eye-witness, a teacher leaving a bookshop in the Latin Quarter was beaten up by a group of CRS. When the officer in charge ordered his men to stop, observing that the victim looked too respectable to be a student, one of them objected, ‘But, chief, he was carrying books!’
IV. B.
IT WAS NOW that the student revolt revealed its unexpected capacity to redefine market segments. In streets and boulevards that were already saturated with commercial signifiers, the revolt carved out its own niche, and proved that the market’s ability to commodify ideas as well as products had been drastically underexploited. Shops that stood in riot zones sold red bandannas, Che Guevara T-shirts and other revolutionary paraphernalia from the very beginning of the revolt. Students of the École des Beaux-Arts flooded the new market with screen-printed posters and called on striking schoolchildren to help paste them up. Slogans appeared on walls throughout the Latin Quarter and branded the revolt so successfully that these slogans are still being used in 2008 to describe and analyse the conflict.
Document 4: Questions and sample answers.
Analyse the following slogans:
• ‘Sous les pavés, la plage’.
(Related slogan: ‘Je jouis dans les pavés’: ‘I come in the cobbles.’)
The ‘beach’ symbolizes leisure and self-gratification. After a predominantly urban existence as students and then as managers and civil servants, many of the rioters would acquire or rent properties in rural or semi-rural parts of France with access to a lake or a beach, developed and managed for the purposes of recreation, with lifeguards, retail outlets and other amenities. This would form part of a lifestyle associated with certain ideas of freedom, which in turn would be associated nostalgically with the revolt of May ’68.
• ‘Soyez réalistes: demandez l’impossible’: ‘Be realistic: ask for the impossible.’
(Related slogan: ‘Prenez vos désirs pour la réalité’: ‘Treat your desires as reality.’)
A serious-ironic invitation to assert consumer-control over the market and to redefine liberty in terms of personal preference. Cf. ‘Soyez exigeant: demandez le cognac Hennessy!’ (‘Be demanding–ask for Hennessy!’); ‘Parce que je le vaux bien’ (‘Because I’m worth it’). Cf. also the CGT’s* call to workers: ‘Match your desires to reality.’
• ‘Baisez-vous les uns les autres, sinon ils vous baiseront’: ‘Fuck, or be fucked.’
(Related slogans: ‘Déboutonnez votre cerveau aussi souvent
que votre braguette’: ‘Unbutton your brain as often as your trousers.’ And: ‘Faites l’amour et recommencez’: ‘Make love and start again.’)
These slogans reflect familiarity with the theories of Reich, Foucault and Lacan. Erotic activity is conceptualized as a form of socio-political competition. The ‘baisez-vous’ slogan, blasphemously derived from John 15:12, would later be applied in other forms to professional activity in business and financial markets.
• ‘Si tu rencontres un flic, casse-lui la gueule’: ‘If you meet a cop, smash his face in.’
(Related slogans: ‘Si tu veux être heureux, pends ton propriétaire’: ‘Happiness is a landlord with a noose round his neck.’ And: ‘Ne dites plus: Monsieur le Professeur; dites: Crève, salope!’: ‘Don’t say, “Professor”, say, “Drop dead, bitch!”’)
These slogans represent an appropriation of proletarian forms of discourse and their rebranding with bourgeois irony. The feminine noun salope, applied to a male, is supposed to intensify the insult. Only the first of these slogans was intended as a practical recommendation.
V. A. i.
ON MONDAY, 13 May, in what appeared to be a victory for student propaganda, workers joined the revolt. The unions were caught off guard and pretended to have called for a one-day general strike. The government itself was in a state of chronic indecision. The student demonstrations had given rise to a mass revolt that directly threatened the power of the unions and the economic well-being of the state. This spontaneous alliance of workers and intellectuals was worryingly reminiscent of the successful revolutions of 1830 and 1848.