POLITICS-FRANCE: May 1968 – The Moment Of Truth Remembered

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IPS Correspondents

PARIS, May 4 1998 (IPS) - For one week in 1968, France stood on the verge of total revolt. Between May 24-30, more than 120 factories were occupied and 12 million striking workers joined forces with students to challenge the country’s moribund political establishment.

All things seemed possible, recalled Fernan F., then a student of political science: “I remember being stunned, that for one moment during the events, there was a vacuum of power, as if no one was governing France any more.

“It was as if government had suddenly disappeared.” Literally so, in fact. French president Charles De Gaulle briefly fled the city to take refuge with the army, fearful that the students would trap him in the presidential Elysee Palace.

In the run up to May 1968 French higher education had fallen into deep crisis. Student numbers had tripled in the preceding 10 years from 170,000 to 514,000, but facilities had only doubled in size since 1962. Facilities were inadequate and overcrowded.

On Mar. 22, sociology student Daniel Cohn-Bendit and others, part of a group that had organised a strike of 10,000 students the previous November to protest overcrowding, occupied the office of the dean of the University of Nanterre.

Students called for “outright rejection of the Capitalist Technocratic University” and “solidarity with the working class”. When college authorities tried to discipline Cohn-Bendit and seven others there were confrontations between the students and the iron- booted CRS riot police.

Fighting outside Paris’s famed Sorbonne university, closed it for only the second time in 700 years. “I remember listening to a political meeting when the police arrived and arrested everyone there, around 300 of us,” recalled Pierre Rousset, then a geography student active in the Young Revolutionary Communists.

“That was the start of it all. We were eventually released but the movement of May ’68 had begun. I passed the night at the police station and my eye was burned by a grenade blast by the police. For some years, I was a bit blind.”

Three days later, on the day of Cohn-Bendit’s hearing, the marching students were ambushed by the CRS in the Latin Quarter. The students tore up paving stones and overturned cars to form barricades. More than 400 were arrested and 345 police injured.

A week of confrontation followed. But during this time workers outside the universities begin to side with the students.

Then as now, the gap between rich and poor workers was wide. Real wages were rising, foreign trade had tripled, but a quarter of the country’s work force earned just 500 francs (about 70 dollars) a month. Further angered by intransigent managers — the tyre maker Michelin boasted that it had only spoken to the unions three times in 30 years — workers were inspired by the students’ direct action.

On May 13 the authorities caved in, but too late to halt the tide. Workers, not unions, forced a wave of strikes across the nation that was beginning to turn, unplanned, into France’s first General Strike since 1936.

Trade unions and the French Communist Party (PCF) which had initially rejected the student protests, were forced to back the action as 200,000 people marched through Paris. “The PCF was lagging behind the students,” recalled Elizabeth Ackermann, who now works for the party’s Women’s Section, but was then a 19 year old insurance agent.

Rousset admits that the left was taken by surprise. “We did not anticipate the general strike call… before the events of May 1968, we had assumed that plans for a general strike that year had been given up.”

On May 14 the workers of Sud Aviation near Nantes occupied their factory, car makers Renault were shut down, followed by the coal mines, Paris public transport and most of industrial Normandy, Paris and Lyons. Public utility workers occupied their plants but kept up supplies. Textile workers and Paris department store staff struck on May 21, teachers on May 22.

“The demonstrations were massive and millions of people took to the streets,” recalled Rousset. “It was a spontaneous general strike.

“In 1968, there were more wage earners than during the last big strike in France in 1936. Then, France was more rural. In 1968, everyone was on strike. That shook the de Gaulle regime. It was a turning point in many aspects and went beyond our wildest dreams.”

Striking TV staff issued four general demands on behalf of all: a 40 hour week, a lower retirement age, the lifting of a 1963 ban on strikes and a national minimum wage of 1,000 francs a week.

Paralysed by the intensity and breadth of the protests, De Gaulle appeared on TV that night to deliver an incoherent call for order, but authority was slipping from his hands.

“At one point, students could march straight towards the Elysee and not be arrested because of this absence of power,” recalled Fernan. “It was as though politicians had abandoned their responsibilities.”

Yet the chance was missed. May 24 marked the high point of the struggle, with 300,000 protestors marching towards the Palace de la Bastille, the Bourse unprotected, and the Ministries of Finance and Justice ready for the taking — but left untouched.

“As for us,” recalled Cohn-Bendit, as quoted by Irish writer Dermot Sreenan 25 years later, “we failed to realise how easy it would have been to sweep all these nobodies away. It is now clear that if, on May 25, Paris had woken to find the most important ministries occupied, Gaullism would have caved in at once…”

Instead Cohn-Bendit was forced into brief exile that same night. Though the crisis rolled on for several more days, the students’ moment had passed. On Monday, May 27, the government guaranteed a 35 percent increase in the industrial minimum wage and an all- round wage increase of 10 percent.

It did the trick. De Gaulle again spoke to the nation, abandoned the referendum plan and promised a general election in 40 days. Most strikers returned to work, a few militants were swept up by the CRS and all street demonstrations were banned.

In the election that followed a stunned French electorate fell back on the promises of stable Gaullist rule and gave them 60 percent of the vote. Their grip on power was actually reinforced.

For some the only lasting accomplishments of May 1968 are the elegant posters silk screened by the students of the School of Beaux-Arts, who occupied the country’s finest academy on May 14 and turned it into a revolutionary art production line.

The poster slogans emphasised the fact that the May revolt was led by a call for personal freedom, not social change. ‘Your Desires Are The True Reality’; ‘The More I Make Revolution, The More I Want To Make Love’; and so on. It was French traditional values, not French traditional power, that was truly under threat that year.

The view that the students were little more that brick-tossing dilettantes is not new and still lingers. In May 1968 French Communist Georges Marchais, later party leader, damned Cohn- Bendit’s ‘March 22 Movement’ as “sons of the grand bourgeois, contemptuous towards the students of working class origin,” and predicted that they would “quickly snuff out their revolutionary flames to become directors in Papa’s business…”

Even then Fernan thought the events were an occasion for certain persons to “flaunt” themselves. “The student leaders then, are now in positions of power. in 1968, they had convictions but also ambition. Now they have only ambition and lost all conviction.”

Cohn-Bendit is now a German Green Party member of the European parliament, who today happily describes himself as a ‘radical narcissist’. Fellow student leader Alain Geismar now leads policy at the French education ministry, the third leader, Jacques Sauvageot, now heads the School of Beaux-Arts.

Many are disappointed that so little changed. “In 1968, the battle cry was freedom and rights and the feeling was that things can only move forward,” says Ackermann. “Since then society has taken several steps backward. Things have regressed since.”

Fernan feels today’s issues are far more urgent. “Now, I feel more convinced I have to be committed or involved in more concrete causes — like anti-racism, Amnesty International, or against modern kinds of slavery — even if I know that the results will always be disappointing.”

Not so Rousset: “I am happy to have participated in the events of May 1968. I am an unrepentant ’68 person. Many have regretted their participation, but not me.

“In 1968, there was this feeling that there was a global convergence of events,” said Rousset. “There was the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the Prague Spring, the students’ revolt in Mexico, and later on, the First Quarter Storm in the Philippines.

He thinks that feeling is coming back. “There is a sense of new community in the fight against globalisation. The feeling we had in 1968 is emerging once again…

“We have learned through time that no one can tell when another mass movement like in 1968 will happen again,” he mused. “There are a thousand crises that can trigger it off, but which one, no one knows.”