by Robb, Graham
The students gathered at the Gare de l’Est and marched along the Boulevard de Magenta. As the demonstration passed in front of the Socialist Party’s headquarters, some elderly socialists appeared on the balcony, displaying a hastily made banner proclaiming ‘Solidarity with the Students’. The students chanted back, ‘Op-por-tun-ists!’ and ‘Bureaucrats–into the street!’ Confused by this anarchic scorn for political tradition and the respect due to age, the socialists shrank back behind the windows in embarrassment. The socialist politician François Mitterrand, however, joined the march and offered himself as a compromise candidate in the event of presidential elections.
At Place de la République, the students joined the workers. The crowd (officially estimated at two hundred thousand) surged along the Rue de Turbigo towards Place du Châtelet and the Left Bank, instead of following the traditional route of workers’ marches (République to Bastille). Several hours would pass before the head of the march reached Place Denfert-Rochereau via the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
V. A. ii.
THE COMMUNIST newspaper L’Humanité had been denouncing the students as ‘dubious elements’ and ‘bourgeois leftists’. The communist-dominated CGT called them ‘pseudo-revolutionaries in the service of the bourgeoisie’. But young workers at the big Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt in the south-western suburbs had been impressed by the students’ spontaneity. Although they thought it odd that anyone should complain about a university education, they empathized with their cheerful anarchy. Some of the young workers had been arriving for work without their blue overalls: some wore leather jackets, others were in shirtsleeves, which was a uniform strictly reserved for the higher ranks of management. They were tired of the unions’ insistence on following ‘the party line’, and had no particular objection to becoming bourgeois themselves.
The demonstration passed through the Temple district, where smiling Algerians, some of whom had seen members of their family murdered by Paris policemen in 1961, joined in the chants of ‘CRS–SS’. Thousands of schoolchildren marched in perfect order, divided into arrondissements, with neatly painted banners calling for ‘Democratic Reform of the Education System’. They passed through the Marais, where militant workers and impoverished bourgeois intellectuals inhabited the crumbling palaces of a forgotten civilization. The activists of the third and fourth arrondissements were used to spending their weekends at the police station after writing the latest issue of their ‘mural newspaper’ on the walls of the Marché des Enfants Rouges on the corner of the Rue Charlot. Many of them had temporary jobs–they worked for construction and removal companies or (as unemployed sociology graduates) conducted surveys for polling organizations–and could barely afford to be on strike.
Having reached an agreement with the police, the CGT stewards controlled the march, which the unions had decreed would be peaceful, and kept a watchful eye on the schoolchildren, the anarchists and the action committees of workers and students. The students chanted, ‘Power to the Workers!’ and, ‘Adieu, de Gaulle!’ The unions’ banners said, ‘Defend Our Purchasing Power’.
V. A. iii.
WHEN THE HEAD of the march reached Denfert-Rochereau at 5.30 p.m., something happened that seemed at the time to be a turning point, though it can now be seen as a confirmation of the essentially bourgeois tendency of the revolt. CGT stewards locked arms and prevented the students from continuing the march. The students had been intending to hold the biggest rally held on the Champ de Mars since Robespierre’s Feast-Day of the Supreme Being in 1794. Loudspeakers told the crowd to disperse, recommending ‘order, calm and dignity’. When the students refused to go home, the CGT stewards knocked them to the ground and tore the banners from their hands.
Only a few thousand students made it to the Champ de Mars. After sitting on the grass by the Eiffel Tower, listening to speeches, the students re-occupied the Sorbonne, while the union leaders went home and prepared for negotiations with the government.
V. B. i.
PARIS NOW entered a period of festive chaos. In spite of the unions, the general strike continued. Soon there were petrol queues, and the streets were reclaimed from Citroëns, Fords, Peugeots, Renaults and Simcas. Parisians rediscovered their city and talked to one another in the street. Deserted railway tracks shone in the sun, and anglers on the Seine and the Canal Saint-Martin were undisturbed by the wash of passing barges. Even Monoprix, whose basement supermarkets had caused something of a retail revolution by staying open on Mondays, remained closed.
After two weeks of general strike, the spectre of a cigarette shortage hung over the city, but the workers and the students stood firm. They organized the manufacture and distribution of cigarettes made from discarded butts, sold in packets of four at a generally agreed price of fourteen centimes.
V. B. ii.
DURING THE strike the protests continued, but there was already an air of anticipated nostalgia about the riots. The night of 23–24 May was called the Second Night of the Barricades. The students had been hoping to commemorate the anniversary of the Paris Commune by torching the Hôtel de Ville, but spies dressed in kaftans and Mao jackets had alerted the authorities, and the police brought out the giant high-speed bulldozer that they had borrowed from the army. Instead, students, workers and the unemployed assembled at the Gare de Lyon and set off in separate groups for the Right Bank, where they set fire to the Bourse and attacked the firemen who came to extinguish the fire.
Impressions of these events would later be treasured as memories of a transcendent experience and recounted many times over to children, grandchildren and researchers: the Doppler shift of sirens, the thump of helicopters surging over rooftops, booted feet marching parallel to the main arteries, the acrid smell of tear gas, the shiny black plastic of capes and truncheons, the slippery sludge of flattened sandwiches. The sense of a priceless, unrepeatable experience was enhanced by the physical transmutation of the students: they looked ragged, sleepless and disreputable. Their faces were covered in talc or masked with handkerchiefs soaked in lemon juice as a defence against the gas. In the swirling clouds of chemicals, the streets of modern Paris looked like parts of the old revolutionary faubourgs or, with a stretch of the imagination, like scenes of the Vietnam War in Paris-Match.
For two hours on the Second Night of the Barricades, large parts of Paris were in the hands of the students. It had often been said that a population brainwashed by television would never have taken the Bastille, because everyone would have rushed home to watch it on the box. But now, as if by accident, the students (or rather, eight million striking workers) had brought the Fifth Republic to the brink of collapse.
In the absence of leaders, they were unable to capitalize on their advantage. That day, and in the days that followed, the CRS and the police, who were terrified of being lynched by angry citizens, grabbed students and schoolchildren as they rode past on bicycles, punctured their tyres and emptied their satchels onto the street. They lined them up against the ‘salad shakers’ and kicked them in the genitals. They arrested people who had dirty hands, dark skin or (remembering Dany ‘le Rouge’ Cohn-Bendit) red hair. For the same reason, they arrested people who had a foreign name or accent. They punched them in the throat and made them walk between lines of CRS who broke their ribs and noses. At Beaujon Hospital, which served as a detention centre, they threatened them with further beatings and prevented them from calling their families or receiving medical attention. Before releasing them, they confiscated one shoe from each detainee.
Traffic lights in the Latin Quarter changed from red to green and seemed to serve a purely decorative function. Towards the end of May, Paris began to resemble the set of a science-fiction film. When the Métro was running, squads of CRS who looked like Martian robots waited for students to emerge from the underground at Cardinal-Lemoine, Mabillon or Maubert-Mutualité. A few enclaves of hedonistic mayhem survived like post-nuclear colonies. The Sorbonne and the Odéon theatre were run by anarchist collectives and overru
n by rats. Many of the occupiers were seeing the inside of a university or a theatre for the first time. In the Sorbonne, the smells of incense and patchouli had overcome the disinfectant. The early slogans had disappeared under the tide of anarchist inscriptions and stains. Girls and boys lost their virginity in the corridors. They discovered Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, hashish and LSD. The mood of casual optimism was maintained by student spokesmen who assured everyone that, at the end of the academic year, they would be deemed to have passed the non-existent examinations.
Document 5: Slogans of late May ’68.
‘Examens = servilité, promotion sociale, société hiérarchisée’: ‘Examinations= servility, social advancement and hierarchical society.’
‘Même si Dieu existait, il faudrait le supprimer’: ‘Even if God existed, he would have to be abolished.’
‘Quand le doigt montre la lune, l’imbécile regarde le doigt (proverbe chinois)’: ‘When the finger points at the moon, the idiot looks at the finger (Chinese proverb)’.
‘Réforme, mon cul’: ‘Reform, my ass.’
VI. A. i.
AFTER THREE WEEKS of dazed exhilaration, the end of May ’68 was bound to be an anti-climax.
President de Gaulle had mysteriously disappeared at the height of the general strike. He was rumoured to have gone to Baden-Baden to assure himself of the army’s support in the event of a coup d’état. Meanwhile, the unions negotiated a deal with the government. The minimum wage was to be increased by 36%, the working week reduced to forty hours and the unions were to have more say in the running of factories.
To the union leaders’ astonishment, the proposals were rejected by the rank and file. It was then that President de Gaulle returned to Paris. On 30 May, he sat at his desk in front of a radio microphone and spoke of ‘intimidation, intoxication and tyranny’. He also appeared on television, and his appearance alone was worth a thousand tanks: old man’s ears, sagging, watery eyes like flooded mine shafts, and the long, grey face of a badly weathered municipal statue. The majority of the voting population found this reassuring. The President announced the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale. Legislative (but not presidential) elections were to be held in June.
VI. A. ii.
THE EFFECT was almost instantaneous. Unions abandoned the workers to the CRS and turned their full attention to the election campaign. ‘May ’68’ was glamorous and theatrical. ‘June ’68’ was bloodier and less appealing to the téléspectateurs, especially since most of the key events did not take place in Paris. It was in June that the forces of order, battling against members of their own class, lived up to their reputation. On 11 June, at the Peugeot factory at Sochaux in eastern France, two workers were killed and a hundred and fifty-one were seriously wounded. The government enacted emergency legislation: many left-wing organizations were outlawed, demonstrations were banned and paramilitary Gaullist groups were given carte blanche to ‘encourage’ the workers to end the strike.
VI. A. iii.
ON 14 JUNE, the Sorbonne, the École des Beaux-Arts and the Odéon theatre were cleared out by the police and disinfected by immigrant cleaning women. Citizens who were unaware of the underlying historical process were surprised to learn that the government intended to satisfy the students’ principal demands. In a private meeting with the Dean of Nanterre, the new Minister of Education, Edgar Faure, outlined the new policy of placating the protesters by enhancing their access to capital: ‘Give them money, and they’ll shut up.’
Even as the decrees were being drafted, producers were repositioning their brands to take account of changes in customer engagement. A special edition of Elle magazine (17 June) congratulated female students on their ‘amazing courage’ and stressed the growing importance of interactivity: ‘We want to participate much more closely in your preoccupations of today, and your cares of tomorrow, and to get you to participate in ours.’
Female students had participated mostly by distributing tracts, organizing crèches and by lying unconscious on the ground, being filmed by cameramen. Only a few of them had thrown missiles, and none of them had appeared on television as leaders of the revolt. Their equal treatment by the forces of order, however, had given them a sense of civic importance and consumer rights. A poster produced by the École des Beaux-Arts, titled ‘Beauty is in the Street’, showed a young woman launching a cobblestone rather wildly but with graceful, trousered legs and the flapping skirts of a knee-length duffle-coat. This charming, iconic design anticipated some of the fashions that would be unveiled in the summer collections, notably by Yves Saint-Laurent, who dedicated his range of duffel coats and fringed jackets to the students of May ’68.
VI. B.
‘MAY ’68’ came to stand for personal liberation and the bankruptcy of a paternalistic, gerontocratic system. However, it is important to remember that the biggest manifestation of popular feeling in May ’68 did not involve the students: when General de Gaulle returned to Paris on 30 May, more than half a million people marched up the Champs-É lysées. This huge demonstration of support for the Gaullist régime was organized by Gaullists, but the numbers far exceeded expectations. In the subsequent national elections, the Gaullists won a crushing victory. Left-wing parties had never had such a small share of the vote.
Not long afterwards, the Dean of Nanterre saw huge consignments of furniture and educational equipment arriving on the campus. Gigantic projects of no apparent worth were afoot. Cafeterias and language laboratories sprang up all over the campus, and the builders who constructed them–at vast expense to the government but very little to themselves–joked openly about their imminent early retirement. To a mind unschooled in the dynamics of capital flow and long-term growth, this could only be described as ‘waste’. It was a small comfort to the dean to be told by the Minister of Education that no questions would be asked about education spending until 1970.
Questions
How did the student revolt of May ’68 lead to the biggest popular demonstration of support for an existing regime in the history of France?
Did everyday life change as a result of May ’68?
Were the students right to see examinations as the tool of a repressive, hierarchical society?
Summarize the conclusions according to the foregoing analysis.
In May 1968, children of the bourgeoisie provoked a proletarian revolt. The revolt took two forms: a) a violent rebellion of the forces of order, which turned them into public enemies; b) a general strike that defied union leaders and led to a split between unions and workers.
The consequences of this were: a) rapid improvement in living conditions and services for the young bourgeoisie; b) the discrediting of non-consumer-oriented educational methods; c) devaluation of age as a marker of social status; d) public endorsement of capitalist aspirations by union leaders; e) the effective eradication of the Communist Party as a major force in French politics.
Describe the legacy of May ’68 in the light of public opinion polls.
After May 1968, 62% of French people declared themselves ‘quite satisfied’ with things in general, more satisfied than not with relationships, housing and work, but only slightly satisfied with leisure–perhaps a sign of greater customer awareness. Only 32% described themselves as pessimistic (16% didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t want to think about it). More people aged between fifteen and twenty-one were happy in 1969 than in 1957. 71% felt ‘free’ when making purchases, either because they had sufficient spending power or because the range of products was adequate to their desires. 77% thought themselves lucky to be living in the late 1960s.
In 2008, most people who responded to opinion polls believed that May ’68 had revolutionized French society, especially in the realms of sexual equality and workers’ rights, and that the revolt had made the government more accountable to public opinion. Asked to name the May ’68 slogan most relevant to today’s world, almost half the respondents chose ‘It is forbidden to forbid’, while only 18% voted for ‘Be realisti
c: ask for the impossible.’
PÉRIPHÉRIQUE
Gan, 1972–1977
IT WAS A SCENE that might have come from a comic book–some preposterous, graphic assemblage imposed on the city by a megalomaniac bande dessinée artist with a limitless budget and a nasty sense of humour.
The Finance Minister had just emerged from a meeting in the Louvre. He glanced along the avenue to the west-north-west; his jaw dropped, and he said to himself, ‘What the hell is that?!’
Something thin and vertical bisected his eye. Then a memory attached itself to the ghastly image, and he thought: ‘It was, yes, supposed to be big, but not that big…’ (Too tall for the artist to fit it onto one eyeball.)
Seen from behind, he was quite tall himself: buttress-shouldered, with light tracery around the neck, delicately cupola’d with baldness; early English rather than flamboyant. But that…(It seemed to come out of the top of his head.) No one could possibly miss it. He stood at one end of the sacred alignment where Parisians took their bearings: Louvre, Obelisk, Arc de Triomphe–civilization’s compass needle. The historic Grand Axis was a thin straight line at the centre of the globe: in one direction, the Great Pyramid of Giza; in the other, the island of Manhattan. And now, just up the road–that hulking great tower: La Tour GAN–so tall it would never look exactly perpendicular.