History Essay

In the late sixties in France real wages were on the rise, but large sections of the working class were still suffering from low pay. This was despite foreign trade having tripled. 25% of all workers were receiving less than 500 francs per month. Some unskilled workers were only get- ting 400 francs per month. Unemploy- ment was at half a million, in a period which was considered a post-war boom. Trade union membership had dropped to around 3 million, as opposed to 7 million

in 1945. Not many victories had been won in the preceding years. Michelin boasted that they had only talked to trade unions three times in thirty years. So how did everything change so quickly in the France of 1968?

STUDENT ANGER

Nanterre was a university outside Paris. It was a new souless campus built to ca- ter for the increased influx of students. The place was unlike the throbbing cul-

tural live wire of the famous Latin Quar- ter (Left Bank).

On March 22nd 1968 eight students broke into the Dean’s office as a way to protest at the recent arrest of six mem- bers of the National Vietnam Committee. Among these was a sociology student called Danny Cohn-Bendit. He had been part of a group who organised a strike of 10,000 to 12,000 students in November of 1967 as a protest against overcrowd- ing.

In the preceding 10 years the student population had risen from 170,000 to 514,000. Although the state had provided some funding this was not equal to the huge influx of students it had asked the universities and colleges to take. The to- tal area covered by university premises had doubled since 1962 but the student numbers had almost tripled. Facilities were desperately inadequate and over- crowding was a serious issue.

Paris

A PDF booklet from the Struggle site www.struggle.ws

• A detailed eyewitness account of the Paris revolt first published in 1968

• An anarchist history of the events

In 1968 France was on the verge of a total revolt with 12 million workers on strike, 122 factories occupied, and students fighting against the old moribund system in which they found themselves.

France in 1968

‘68

Six days after the occupation of the Dean’s office the police were called in and the campus was surrounded. 500 stu- dents inside the college divided into dis- cussion groups. Sociology students began to boycott their exams and a pamphlet was produced entitled ‘Why do we need sociologists?’. The students called for a lecture hall to be permanently made available for political discussions.

The lecturers began to split, some in fa- vour of the student demands. The college did provide a room, but by the 2nd of April a meeting of 1,200 students was held in one of the main lecture halls.

MARCH 22nd MOVEMENT

After the Easter break agitation was more rampant. On April 22nd (one month after the occupation) a meeting was held in lecture hall B1. It was attended by 1,500 students and the resulting mani- festo called for “Outright rejection of the Capitalist Technocratic University” and followed this by a call for solidarity with the working class. It was clear that the March 22nd Movement (which had come together as a semi-formal alliance of anti- authoritarian socialist students) was win- ning the battle of ideas in the campus amongst their fellow students.

The college decided to discipline eight of the students involved, including Cohn- Bendit. They were called upon to appear before the disciplinary committee of the Sorbonne on May 3rd. Four lecturers vol- unteered to defend them.

The education strike had not interested the Minister for Education. There were major industrial strikes the preceding year at Rhodiaceta and Saviem. In Rhodiaceta (a synthetic fibres factory in Lyons) a strike took place involving 14,000 workers over 23 days. Manage- ment went on to sack 92 militants at the end of the year and had also resorted to lock-outs. In June of 1967 Peugeot called in riot police during a dispute and two workers were killed.

From March to May 1968 there was a total of eighty cases of industrial action at the Renault Billancourt car plant. It was becoming obvious that “the French did not interest their leaders” as Alain Touraine (a professor at Nanterre who was prepared to defend the student ac- tion) said. These leaders were soon about to be awoken from their oblivious slum- ber.

RED & BLACK Flags drape the ARC De TRIOMPHE

On Friday May 3rd a few students gath- ered in the front square of the Sorbonne. The students were from Nanterre and they were joined by activists from the Sorbonne college itself. The ‘Nanterre Eight’ were about to face charges on the following Monday. The eight and some

colleagues from Nanterre were meeting student activists from the Sorbonne to discuss the impending Monday.

The crowd began to swell and the college authorities panicked. By 4pm the Sorbonne was surrounded by police and the Campagnies Republicaines de Securite (CRS riot police). Students were being arrested by the CRS, on the basis that they were spotted wearing motorcy- cle helmets. News spread rapidly and stu- dents came from all over the city. Fight- ing began to free those who had already been arrested. Such was this battle be- tween students and police that the col- lege closed.

This was only the second time in 700 years that the Sorbonne was forced to close, the other time being in 1940 when the Nazis took Paris.

The National Union of Students (UNEF) and the Lecturers’ Union (SNESup) im- mediately called a strike and issued the following demands

1. Re-Open the Sorbonne. 2. Withdraw the Police. 3. Release those arrested.

These unions were joined by the March 22nd Movement. The original discontent had arisen from overcrowding but it now began to take on a larger perspective.

POLICE RIOT

On Monday May 6th the ‘Nanterre 8’ passed through a police cordon singing the ‘Internationale’. They were on their way to appear before the University Dis- cipline Committee. The students decided to march through Paris. On their return to the Latin Quarter they were savagely attacked by the police on the Rue St. Jacques.

The students tore up paving stones and overturned cars to form barricades. Po- lice pumped Tear Gas into the air and called for reinforcements. The Boulevard St Germain became a bloody battle- ground with the official figures at the end of the day reading: 422 arrests and 345 policemen injured. This day was to go into the annals of ’68 as ‘Bloody Monday’.

A long march followed on the Tuesday and by outmanouvering the police Red & Black Flags were draped from the Arc De Triomphe and the ‘Internationale’ echoed around the streets. The week continued on in a similar fashion and the streets were alive with crowds and talk of poli- tics. By Wednesday public opinion was shifting.

STOMACH FOR A FIGHT

The middle classes were appalled by the brutality dished out to the students by the police and large sections of the work- ing class were inspired by the students’ stomach for a fight against the state. On Friday (May 10th) 30,000 students, in-

cluding high school students, had gath- ered around the Place Defret-Rochercau. They marched towards the Sorbonne along the Boulevard St. Germain. All roads leading off the boulevard were blocked by police armed for conflict.

Fifty barricades were erected by the dem- onstrators in preparation for an attack by the police. Jean Jacques Lebel a re- porter wrote that by 1am “Literally thou- sands help build barricades ...women, workers, bystanders, people in pyjamas, human chains to carry rocks, wood, iron”.

“Our barricade is double: one three foot high row of cobble stones, an empty space of twenty yards, then a nine foot high pile of wood, cars, metal posts, dustbins. Our weapons are stones, metal, etc found in the street.” reported one eye witness.

Radio reporters said that as many as sixty barricades were erected in differ- ent streets. France stayed up to listen to reports on Europe One and Radio Lux- embourg. The government had yielded on two of the three demands but would not release those arrested. There was to be no “Liberez nos comrades! “.

THE BEAT GOES ON

The barricades were attacked by the po- lice. They used tear gas and CS grenades. Students and demonstrators used hand- kerchiefs soaked in baking soda to pro- tect themselves from the nauseous gas- ses. Fighting continued throughout the night. Houses were stormed by the po- lice and people were dragged and clubbed as they were thrown into vans. The po- lice, and in particular the CRS, were most brutal in their treatment of the demon- strators.

There were reports of pregnant women being beaten. Young men were stripped and some had their sexual organs beaten until the flesh was in ribbons. At the end of this battle of the streets there were 367 people injured, and 460 arrested. On Sat- urday morning troop carriers were brought in to clear the barricades and they were booed and hissed as they drove down the Boulevard St Germain.

On Monday May 13th the students were released but the spark had already started the forest fire. The trade unions called a one-day strike and a march was organised in Paris for the same day. Over 200,000 people (a conservative figure) turned up for the march shouting “De Gaulle Assassin”. The leader of the gov- ernment was now singled out as an en- emy by the people. After the march there

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was a call for the crowd to disperse and many did but a large group of students decided that they would occupy the Sorbonne.

COMMUNISTS UP TO THEIR OLD TRICKS

The PCF (French Communist Party) had condemned the Nanterre rebels from the start. Their future General Secretary, Georges Marchais, published an article entitled “False revolutionaries to be un- masked”. In this article he claimed the March 22nd Movement were “mostly sons of the grand bourgeois, contemptuous to- wards the students of working class ori- gin” and predicted that they would “quickly snuff out their revolutionary flames to become directors in Papa’s busi- ness.....”

But by May 8th the when the party lead- ership saw the size of the movement they changed their tune and attempted to take control of the uprising. They saw that the example of the students was now being followed in the workplaces. They thought it better to be seen encouraging action than letting the situation escape their control.

Once again the Communists had mis- judged the situation. The CGT (the Com- munist dominated trade union) leader- ship also started to support workplace action, though only after workers had already taken the lead. Louis Aragon (France’s most famous Communist writer) was sent to address a meeting at the Odeon. Those of the March 22nd Movement who were present jeered and heckled him throughout with satirical cries of “Long live Stalin, father of all people”.

One member of the political bureau Roger Garudy embraced the students’ doctrine of economic self-management, autono- mous councils and decentralisation. Along with extending solidarity with the aims of the students he also applauded the events of the ‘Prague Spring’. He was soon expelled from the PCF.

TRUTH IS WHATEVER SERVES THE PARTY

Mostly, the PCF persisted in classifying the student movement as “an entire ul- tra-left, petty-bourgeois cocktail of Bakunin, Trotskyism and plain adventurism...”. Around this time an anonymous article was published in the party paper ‘L’Humanite’. It’s author claimed that the Minister for Youth had “contacts” with Cohn-Bendit and that money was granted to the March 22nd Movement. This accusation was a com- plete fabrication and the height of some very strange imagination. This, of course, was neither the first nor last time the Communists resorted to this type of tac- tic.

The Sorbonne became transformed over- night as posters of Marx, Lenin, and Mao decorated the old pillars surrounding the front square. Red & Black flags hung alongside the Vietcong flag. Trotsky, Castro and Che Guevara pictures were plastered on walls alongside slogans such as “Everything is Possible” and “It is For- bidden to Forbid”. This picture of the Sorbonne gives a good indication of the confusion of ideologies encompassed within the student movement.

A fifteen person occupation committee was elected on the May 14th and its man- date was limited to 24 hours. The cen- tral amphitheatre was pulsating day and night with political debate. The exami- nation system was condemned as “being the rite of initiation into the capitalist society”. The March 22nd Movement wanted to “eradicate the distinction be- tween workers and managers rather than turn more workers’ sons into managers”.

REVOLUTIONARY COLLECTABLES

The Ecole de Beux Arts (School of Fine Arts) was occupied on May 14th. There were meetings every morning at which themes were chosen. Then posters would be produced via a silk screen production basis. It was most ironic that these post- ers became almost immediately collectors’ items and were soon to be found in the homes of the rich.

The posters were covered with such slo- gans as “Mankind will not live free until the last capitalist has been hanged with the entrails of the last bureaucrat”. “The general will against the will of the gen- eral”. “Commodities are the opium of the people”. Paris was plastered with such posters.

The political atmosphere of the time led to occupations by radical doctors, archi- tects, and writers. Even the Cannes film festival was disrupted in 1968 when “Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut seized the festival hall in support of the national strike movement”.

STRIKES

On the 14th of May the workers of Sud Aviation near Nantes occupied their fac- tory. Then Renault plants at Cleon, Flins, Le Mans and Boulogne Billancourt all went on strike. Young workers at Cleon refused to leave the factory at the end of their shift and locked the manager into his office. The union leadership were stumbling behind the mood of the work- ers. At places like Sud-Aviation the deci- sion to go on indefinite strike was taken by the workers without consulting the union officials.

The CGT leaders had been taken totally by surprise and now were desperately trying not to lose all influence. The work- ers were leading, in their demands and

actions. The union leadership - for a short time - followed like a dog keeping up with its master, as it saw this as the only method to maintaining some influence over the workers.

On May 16th a few thousand students marched to Boulogne Billancourt where 35,000 workers were on strike. The CGT officials locked the factory gates to dis- courage communication. But workers got up on the roof of the factory and shouted greetings and discussions took place though the iron railings. Solidarity was there and it could not be suppressed by a few chains and locked gates.

Industrial Normandy, Paris and Lyons closed down virtually on mass. On May 18th coal production stopped and public transport in Paris halted. The National Railways were next to go out on strike. Gas and electricity workers took over con- trol of their workplaces but continued domestic supplies. Red flags hung from shipyards at St Nazaire which employed 10,000 workers. The weekend of the 19th of May saw two million people on strike and 122 factories were reported to be oc- cupied.

STRIKE WAVE SWEEPS FRANCE

Money withdrawals from banks were lim- ited to 500 francs as the possibility of a Bank of France strike panicked people. Petrol supplies soon dried up as drivers stocked up. By Monday the 20th no cross- channel ferries were in operation and tourists queued for buses or evacuation coaches to Brussels, Geneva, and Barce- lona.

The Citroen factory which employed a lot of immigrant labour from Portugal, North Africa and Yugoslavia was still in opera- tion. On the May 20th as the morning shift headed into work at 6am they were greeted with the sight of a student picket. As the young foreign workers were puz- zling over the students’ leaflets and whether or not to go into work along came a march of colleagues from a nearby fac- tory. Citroen was on strike.

The textile industry and big department stores of Paris joined the snowballing general strike on Tuesday 21st. The air traffic controllers in Orly and French tel- evision (ORTF) had already voted to come out the previous Friday.

On the 20th of May ORTF staff issued the following demands;

1. Forty Hour Week 2. Lower Retirement Age. 3. Abrogation of the anti-strike laws of 1963. 4. Minimum wage of 1000 francs a week. 5. Repeal of the government’s involve- ment in the television station.

Teachers were on strike as of the 22nd, although many attended school in order to keep in contact with school students

as the unions had requested.

NOW IS NOT A GOOD TIME TO DIE

Within a fortnight of the general strike being called, more than nine million workers were out on strike. As one per- son put it “On Wednesday the undertak- ers went on strike. Now is not a good time to die.”

Workers displayed a great ability to lead by example. The gas and electricity work- ers joined the strike but maintained sup- plies apart from a few brief power cuts. Food supplies reached Paris as normal after initial disruptions. The postal work- ers agreed to deliver urgent telegrams.

Print workers said they did not wish to leave a monopoly of media coverage to TV and radio and agreed to print newspa- pers as long as the press “carries out with objectivity the role of providing informa- tion which is its duty”. In some cases print-workers insisted on changes in headlines or articles before they would print the paper. This happened mostly with the right wing papers such as ‘Le Figaro’ or ‘La Nation’.

In some factories workers continued or altered production to suit their needs. In the CSF factory in Brest the workers pro- duced walkie-talkies which they consid- ered important to both strikers and dem- onstrators alike. At the Wonder Batter- ies factory in Saint-Ouen the strike com- mittee disapproved of the reformist line of the CGT and decided to barricade

themselves in rather than talk to the union officials.

A WORKERS’ CITY

In Nantes, the whole movement and events of 1968 were to reach a pinnacle. For a week in May the city and it’s sur- rounding area was controlled by the workers, themselves. The old guardians of power and authority looked on help- lessly as workers took control of their own lives and city. On May 24th road blocks were set up around the city as farmers made a protest of solidarity with the workers and students.

The transport workers took over the road blocks and they controlled all incoming traffic. Petrol supplies were controlled, with no petrol tankers being allowed into the city without the workers’ permission. The only functioning petrol pump was reserved for use by doctors. By circum- venting the middle man, the workers and farmers made it possible to reduce the cost of food. Milk was now 50 centimes as opposed to 80 previously. Potatoes dropped 48 centimes per kilo in price.

To make sure these price cuts were passed on, shops had to display stickers provided by the strike committee saying “This shop is authorised to open. Its prices are under permanent supervision by the unions”. Teachers and students organised nurseries so that strikers’ children were cared for while the schools were closed. Women played a very active role in Nantes organising, not only as strikers but also playing a vital role in commit-

tees dealing with food supplies.

This all too brief week in Nantes is a prime example of the working class seiz- ing control of an area and running it in a socialist manner, even in such difficult circumstances. We can see that the soci- ety created in many ways was an im- provement on the one Nantes unfortu- nately slipped back into after the events of 1968.

PACIFY AND DISSIPATE

De Gaulle, now fearing for the survival of his government and slowly looking at his power disappear, addressed the coun- try on television on May 24th. He spoke of “a more extensive participation of eve- ryone in the conduct and the result of the activities which directly concern them.” De Gaulle asked the people through a referendum as a “mandate for renewal and adaption”.

On the same day the March 22nd Move- ment organised a demonstration. 30,000 marched towards the Palace de la Bastille. The police had the Ministries protected, using the usual devices of tear gas and batons, but the Bourse (Stock Exchange) was left unprotected. This was the time to act and a number of demon- strators armed with axe handles, wooden clubs and iron bars went and set fire to it.

It was at this stage that some left wing groups lost their nerve. The Trotskyist JCR turned people back into the Latin Quarter. Other groups such as UNEF and Parti Socialiste Unife (United Socialist Party) blocked the taking of the Minis- tries of Finance and Justice. Cohn-Bendit said of this incident “As for us, [March 22 Movement] we failed to realize how easy it would have been to sweep all these nobodies away....It is now clear that if, on 25 May, Paris had woken to find the most important Ministries occupied, Gaullism would have caved in at once....”. Cohn- Bendit was forced into exile later that very night.

The students of the March 22nd Move- ment would not have caused the collapse of Gaullism with this occupation, but it would have raised the consciousness of many of the young militant workers who were inspired by the fighting spirit shown by the students. The students’ struggle, although confused, and encompassing many varying ideologies, had been an inspiration. The dynamite was there and the student uprising was the fuse paper.

TO THE MINISTRIES

The occupation of the Ministries would have been one step further along the line towards a social revolution. Of the 12 million workers now on strike only 3 mil- lion were previousely involved in trade unions. The general strike which had paralysed the country saw workers’ de-

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mands far surpass those issued by the union leaders. Expectations had been raised by the wave of agitation that was sweeping across the land.

The occupations of the Ministries could have brought an awareness to people that what could be won here was more than economic agreements with the bosses. The move would have brought the work- ers closer to the realisation that what was at stake here was how the system was run and not just how to tinker with its engine. In every uprising of the sort we witnessed in 1968 there is a need for or- ganised groups to win the battle of ideas and to fuse those ideas into action so that people are aware of what can be gained, what victories are possible.

The student movement, if it had occupied the government buildings, would have taken a step in this direction. The work- ers were inspired by the fight of the stu- dents on the streets of Paris, militant workers would have been inspired by the occupations of the Ministries, and a re- alisation could have swept through France that there was more to be won than pay rises from the bosses.

FIN

By Monday May 27th the Government had guaranteed an increase of 35% in the industrial minimum wage and an all round wage increase of 10%. The leaders of the CGT organised a march of 500,000 workers through the streets of Paris two days later. Paris was covered in posters calling for a ‘Government of the People’. Unfortunately the majority still thought in terms of changing their rulers rather than taking control for themselves.

De Gaulle and his puppets had been so scared by the possibility of revolution that he flew to military airfield at Saint-Dizier and talked with his top Generals, mak- ing sure that he could rely on them if he needed the army’s help to maintain his grip on power. On May 30th he once again appeared on French television abandon- ing his plans for the referendum and promising elections within forty days.

De Gaulle in typical fashion promised tougher measures if, as he put it, “the whole French people were gagged or pre- vented from leading a normal existence, by those elements (Reds & Anarchists) that are being used to prevent students from studying, the workers from work- ing....”. Following De Gaulle’s address the CRS were sent to disperse the remain- ing pickets from workplaces.

By June 5th most of the strikes were over and an air of what passes for normality within capitalism had swept back over France. Any strikes which continued af- ter this date were crushed in a military style operation using armoured vehicles and guns. In isolation those pockets of militancy stood no chance.

SNATCHING DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY

All street demonstrations were banned and once again the PCF sought respect- ability by using its influence to destroy what was left of the action committees. By the end of June the colleges were re- gained and the Red & Black flags were torn down from the front of the Sorbonne.

In this climate of defeat and demoralisa- tion people turned back to the certain- ties of conservatism. In the elections the Gaullists captured 60% of the vote. Their grip on the reins of power was reinforced.

In 1968 you had a system which is repli- cated in most countries in western Eu- rope today. Yet, during the events of May that system was in total turmoil and De Gaulle had forseen that he might have had to use the army to crush the move- ment of people. The streets of France could have flowed with blood like they did in Chile five years later.

Cohn-Bendit and the March 22nd Move- ment aspired to a classless society based on workers’ councils where the division of labour between order-givers and order- takers disappeared. But obviously this vision of a future society was not shared by others on the left and the part they played was to place more obstacles in the way rather than to overcome the ones that already existed.

Where the power of the state has been broken down, the working class led by example, as in Nantes where they showed themselves capable of controlling and managing their city. The most active strikers were more progressive and far sighted than their union leaders. Work- ers showed that there was more to be at- tained than simple demands and inspir- ingly took that fight to the bosses.

STALINISTS WANTED TOTAL CONTROL

Why did France ’68 ultimately fail? There was no co-ordination of ideas or tactics when events reached a crucial stage. The influential PCF believed that their power would increase in the elections and so were hostile to all movements which were outside of their control. The trade union leadership helped pacify the workers by restricting the focus of workers to ‘bread and butter’ demands and away from the wider political issues.

Many people had fine aspirations but not much idea of how to achieve those aims. Too many things were left to chance and the whole movement seemed to stumble on from day to day like a blind man des- perately trying to find the light of free- dom that must exist at the end of the tun- nel. What lessons can we learn from the events of ’68? We saw a developed capi- talist society being brought to the edge of revolt, people questioning the entire

system.

The events took place very rapidly as the working class, fused by the energy and bravado of the students, raised demands that could not be catered for within the confines of the existing system. The gen- eral strike displays with beautiful clar- ity the potential power that lies in the hands of the working class. However, the situation needed more co-ordination and organisation. The workers needed to or- ganise inter-workplace committees, and create a mechanism whereby delegates began to deal with the real problems.

FROM NEGOTIATIONS TO REVOLT

The anti-authoritarian left, though very active, were too weak among striking workers. The various workers on strike could have co-ordinated their action in order to push the state backwards. France was already in turmoil industri- ally and the government was weakening. Workers’ councils and real democracy throughout the workplaces could have led to stronger negotiations and, eventually, outright revolt.

Once the factories went into a position of self-management the state would be los- ing the battle. Self-management never got onto the agenda, for reasons ex- plained above. Shopfloor workers needed a mechanism to represent their views and have an effective democratic decision making process. The union leadership feared and circumvented this. But through democratically elected delegates, factory committees could have raised de- mands which would be impossible for the state to satisfy. It could have posed the question, who should run France ?

We, the working class, must prepare our- selves for the rapid explosion of revolt, so that we do not settle for pay rises when more is to be won. We win pay rises when we can but in France in 1968 the state was more vulnerable and the possibility for a radical change in society was there. We must have the ideas and a system prepared to replace the one we live un- der at present. When our chance comes to knock the bosses from their pedestal we must grab it with both hands. We must destroy and replace the system when it falls into a position of weakness, not just for our own sakes but for the fu- ture of humanity.

Dermot Sreenan

Based on an article published in Workers Solidarity No39, 1993

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Paris May 1968: An eyewitness account

This text is mostly from the original pamphlet published by Solidarity (un-

dated) as "Paris:May 1968 Non a la Bureaucratie Solidarity Pamphlet 30 15p"

For information about Solidarity see http://struggle.ws/disband/solidarity.html

This is an eye witness account of two weeks spent in Paris during May 1968. It is what one person, saw, heard or discovered during that short period. The ac- count has no pretence at comprehensiveness. It has been written and produced in haste, its purpose being to inform rather than to analyse - and to inform quickly.

The French events have a significance that extends far beyond the frontiers of modern France. They will leave their mark on the history of the second half of the 20th cen- tury. French bourgeois society has just been shaken to its foundations. Whatever the outcome of the present struggle, we must calmly take note of the fact that the politi- cal map of Western capitalist society will never be the same again. A whole epoch has just come to an end the epoch during which people could say, with a semblance of veri- similitude, that ‘it couldn’t happen here’. Another epoch is starting: that in which people know that revolution is possible un- der the conditions of modern bureaucratic capitalism.

For Stalinism too, a whole period is end- ing: the period during which Communist Parties in western Europe could claim (ad- mittedly with dwindling credibility) that they remained revolutionary organizations, but that revolutionary opportunities had never really presented themselves. This notion has now irrevocably been swept into the proverbial ‘dustbin of history’. When the chips were down, the French Communist Party and those workers under its influence proved to be the final and most effective ‘brake’ on the development of the revolu-

tionary self-activity of the working class.

A full analysis of the French events will eventually have to be attempted, for with- out an understanding of modern society it will never be possible consciously to change it. But this analysis will have to wait for a while until some of the dust has settled. What can be said from now is that, if hon- estly carried out, such an analysis will com- pel many ‘orthodox’ revolutionaries to dis- card a mass of outdated ideas, slogans and myths and to re-assess contemporary real- ity, particularly the reality of modern bu- reaucratic capitalism, its dynamic, its meth- ods of control and manipulation, the rea- sons for both its resilience and its brittle- ness and - most important of all - the na- ture of its crises. Concepts and organiza- tions that have been found wanting will have to be discarded. The new phenomea (new in themselves or new to traditional revolutionary theory) will have to be recog- nized for what they are and interpreted in all their implications. The real events of 1968 will then have to be integrated into a new framework of ideas, for without this development of revolutionary theory, there can be no development of revolution- ary practice - and in the long run no trans- formation of society through the conscious actions of men.

Peyrefitte, Minister of Education, if not with the Elysee itself. Many students had been arrested, beaten up, and several were sum- marily convicted.

The unbelievable - yet thoroughly predict- able - ineptitude of this bureaucratic ‘solu- tion’ to the ‘problem’ of student discontent triggered off a chain reaction. It provided the pent-up anger, resentment and frustra- tion of tens of thousands of young people with both a reason for further action and with an attainable objective. The students, evicted from the university, took to the street, demanding the liberation of their comrades, the reopening of their faculties, the withdrawal of the cops.

Layer upon layer of new people were soon drawn into the struggle. The student union (UNEF) and the union representing univer- sity teaching staff (SNESup) called for an unlimited strike. For a week the students held their ground, in ever bigger and more militant street demonstrations. On Tues- day, May 7, 50,000 students and teachers marched through the streets behind a sin- gle banner: ‘Vive la Commune’, and sang the Internationale at the tomb of the Un- known Soldier, at the Arc de Triomphe. On Friday, May 10, students and teachers de- cide to occupy the Latin Quarter en masse. They felt they had more right to be there than the police, for whom barracks were provided elsewhere. The cohesion and sense of purpose of the demonstrators terrified the Establishment. Power couldn’t be allowed to lie with this rabble, who had even had the audacity to erect barricades.

Another inept gesture was needed. Another administrative reflex duly materialised. Fouchet (Minister of the Interior) and Joxe (Deputy Prime Minister) ordered Grimaud (Superintendent of the Paris police) to clear the streets. The order was confirmed in writing, doubtless to be preserved for pos- terity as an example of what not to do in certain situations. The CRS charged.. clear- ing the rue Gay-Lussac and opening the doors to the second phase of the Revolution.

Rue Gay-Lussac Sunday May 12

The rue Gay-Lussac still carries the scars of the ‘night of the barricades’. Burnt out cars line the pavement, their carcasses a dirty grey under the missing paint. The cob- bles, cleared from the middle of the road, lie in huge mounds on either side. A vague smell of tear gas still lingers in the air.

At the junction with the rue des Ursulines lies a building site, its wire mesh fence breached in several places. From here came material for at least a dozen barricades: planks, wheelbarrows, metal drums, steel girders, cement mixers, blocks of stone. The site also yielded a pneumatic drill. The stu- dents couldn’t use it, of course - not until a passing building worker showed them how, perhaps the first worker actively to support the student revolt. Once broken, the road surface provided cobbles, soon put to a va- riety of uses.

All that is already history.

People are walking up and down the street,

as if trying to convince themselves that it really happened. They aren’t students. The students know what happened and why it happened. They aren’t local inhabitants ei- ther. The local inhabitants saw what hap- pened, the viciousness of the CRS charges, the assaults on the wounded, the attacks on innocent bystanders, the unleashed fury of a state machine against those who had challenged it. The people in the streets are the ordinary people of Paris, people from neighbouring districts, horrified at what they have heard over the wireless or read in their papers and who have come for a walk on a fine Sunday morning to see for themselves. They are talking in small clus- ters with the inhabitants of the rue Gay- Lussac. The Revolution, having for a week held the university and the streets of the Latin Quarter, is beginning to take hold of the minds of men.

On Friday, May 3rd, the CRS had paid their historic visit to the Sorbonne. They had been invited in by Paul Roche, rector of Paris University The rector had almost cer- tainly acted in connivance with Alain

Original Introduction

* * * * * * * *

In the rue Gay-Lussac and in adjoining streets, the battle scarred walls carry a dual message. They bear testimony to the incred- ible courage of these who held the area for several hours against a deluge of tear gas, phosphorus grenades, and repeated charges of club swinging CRS. But they also show something of what the defenders were striv- ing for ....

Mural propaganda is an integral part of the revolutionary Paris of May 1988. It has be- come a mass activity, part and parcel of the Revolution’s method of self-expression. The walls of the Latin Quarter are the deposi- tory of a new rationality, no longer confined to books, but democratically displayed at street level and made available to all. The trivial and the profound, the traditional and the esoteric, rub shoulders in this new fra- ternity, rapidly breaking down the rigid barriers and compartments in people’s minds.

‘Désobéir d’abord: alors écris sur les murs (Loi du 10 Mai 1968)’ reads an obviously recent inscription, clearly setting the tone. ‘Si tout le peuple faisait comme nous’ (if eve- rybody acted like us....) wistfully dreams another, in joyful anticipation, I think, rather than in any spirit of self-satisfied substitutionism. Most of the slogans are straightforward, correct and fairly orthodox: ‘Libérez nos camarades’; ‘Fouchet, Grimaud, démission’; ‘A bás l’Etat policier’; ‘Gréve Generale Lundi’; ‘Travailleurs, Etudiants, solidaires’; ‘Vive les Conseils Ouvriers’. Other slogans reflected the new concerns: ‘La Publieité te manipule’; ‘Examens = Hiérarchie’; ‘L’art est mort, ne consommez pas son cadavre’; ‘A bás la société de consommation’; ‘Debout les damnés de Nanterre’. The slogan ‘Baisses-toi et broute’ (Bend your head and chew the cud) was obviously aimed at those whose minds are still full of traditional preoccupations.

‘Contre la fermentation groupusculaire’ moans a large scarlet inscription’. This one is really out of touch. For everywhere there is a profusion of pasted up posters and jour- nals: ‘Voix Ouvriére’, ‘Avant-Garde’ and ‘Révoltés’ (for the Trotskyists), ‘Servir le Peuple’ and - ‘Humanite Nouvelle’ (for the devotees of Chairman Mao), ‘Le Libertaire’ (for the Anarchists), ‘Tribune Socialiste’ (for the PSU). Even odd copies of l’Humanite are pasted up. It is difficult to read them, so covered are they with critical comments.

On a hoarding, I see a large advertisement for a new brand of cheese: a child biting into an enormous sandwich. ‘C’est bon le fromage So-and-So’ runs the patter. Someone has covered the last few words with red paint. The poster reads ‘C’est bon la Revolution’. People pass by, look, and smile.

* * * * * * * * *

I talk to my companion, a man of about 45, an ‘old’ revolutionary. We discuss the tre- mendous possibilities now opening up. He suddenly turns towards me and comes out with a memorable phrase: “To think one had to have kids and wait 20 years to see all this....”.

We talk to others in the street, to young and old, to the ‘political’ and the ‘unpolitical’, to people at all levels of understanding and commitment. Everyone is prepared to talk - in fact everyone wants to. They all seem remarkably articulate. We find no one pre- pared to defend the actions of the Adminis- tration. The ‘critics’ fall into 2 main groups:

The ‘progressive’ University teachers, the Communists, and a number of students see the main root of the student ‘crisis’ in the backwardness of the university in relation to society’s current needs, in the quantita- tive inadequacy of the tuition provided, in the semi-feudal attitudes of some profes- sors, and in the general insufficiency of job opportunities. They see the university as unadapted to the modern world. The rem- edy for them is adaptation: a modernising reform which would ‘sweep away the cob- webs, provide more teachers, better lecture theatres, a bigger educational budget, per- haps a more liberal attitude on the campus and, at the end of it all, an assured job.’

The rebels (which include some but by no means all of the ‘old’ revolutionaries) see this concern with adapting the university to modern society as something of a diver- sion. For it is modern society itself which they reject. They consider bourgeois life trivial and mediocre, repressive and re- pressed, They have no yearning (but only contempt) for the administrative and mana- gerial careers it holds out for them. They are not seeking integration into adult soci- ety. On the contrary, they are seeking a chance radically to contest its adulteration. The driving force of their revolt is their own alienation, the meaninglessness of life un- der modern bureaucratic capitalism. It is certainly not a purely economic deteriora- tion in their standard of living.

It is no accident that the ‘revolution’ started in the Nanterre faculties of Sociology and Psychology. The students saw that the so- ciology they were being taught was a means of controlling and manipulating society, not a means of understanding it in order to change it. In the process they discovered revolutionary sociology. They rejected the niche allocated to them in the great bureau- cratic pyramid, that of ‘experts’ in the serv- ice of a technocratic Establishment, special- ists of the ‘human factor’ in the modern in- dustrial equation. In the process they dis- covered the importance of the working class. The amazing thing is that, at least among the active layers of the students, these ‘sectarians’ suddenly seem to have become the majority: surely the best definition of any revolution.

The two types of ‘criticism’ of the modern French educational system do not neutral- ise one another. On the contrary, each cre- ates its own kind of problems for the Uni- versity authorities and for the officials at the Ministry of Education. The real point is that one kind of criticism - what one might call the quantitative one - could in time be coped with by modern bourgeois society. The other - the qualitative one never. This is what gives it its revolutionary potential. The ‘trouble with the University’, for the

powers that be, isn’t that money can’t be found for more teachers. It can. The ‘trou- ble’ is that the university is full of students - and that the heads of the students are full of revolutionary ideas.

Among those we speak to there is a deep awareness that the problem cannot be solved in the Latin Quarter, that isolation of the revolt in a student ‘ghetto’ (even an ‘autonomous’ one) would spell defeat. They realise that the salvation of the movement lies in its extension to other sectors of the population. But here wide differences ap- pear. When some talk of the importance of the working class it is as a substitute for getting on with any kind of struggle them- selves, an excuse for denigrating the stu- dents’ struggle as ‘adventurist’. Yet it is pre- cisely because of its unparalleled militancy that the students action has established that direct action works, has begun to in- fluence the younger workers and to rattle the established organizations. Other stu- dents realise the relationship of these strug- gles more clearly. We will find them later at Censier, animating the ‘worker student’ Action Committees.

But enough, for the time being, about the Latin Quarter. The movement has already spread beyond its narrow confines.

MAY 13 : FROM RENAULT TO THE STREETS OF PARIS

MONDAY, MAY 13. 6.15 am, Avenue Yves Kermen. A clear, cloudless day.

Crowds begin to gather outside the gates of the giant Renault works at Boulogne Billancourt. The main trade union ‘centrales’ (CGT, CEDT and FO) have called a one-day general strike. They are protest- ing against police violence in the Latin Quarter and in support of long-neglected claims concerning wages, hours, the age of retirement and trade union rights in the plants.

The factory gates are wide open. Not a cop or supervisor in sight. The workers stream in. A loudhailer tells them to proceed to their respective shops, to refuse to start work and to proceed, at 8.00 am to their traditional meeting place, an enormous shed-like struc- ture in the middle of the Ile Seguin (an is- land in the Seine entirely covered by parts of the Renault plant).

As each worker goes through the gates, the pickets give him a leaflet, jointly produced by the three unions. Leaflets in Spanish are also distributed (over 2000 Spanish work- ers are employed at Renault). French and Spanish orators succeed one another, in short spells, at the microphone. Although all the unions are supporting the one-day strike all the orators seem to belong to the CGT. It’s their loudspeaker ....

6.45 am. Hundreds of workers are now streaming in. Many look as if they had come to work, rather than to participate in mass meetings in the plant. The decision to call the strike was only taken on the Saturday afternoon, after many of the men had al- ready dispersed for the weekend. Many seem unaware of what it’s all about. I am

TEXT OF CGT POSTER, PLACARDED ALL OVER BOUIOGNE BILLNCOURT

WORKERS BEWARE! For some months the most diverse publications have been distributed by elements recruited in a milieu foreign to the working class. The authors of these articles remain anonymous most of the time, a fact which fully illustrates their dishonesty. They give the most weird and tempting titles to their papers, the better to mislead; 'Luttes Ouvrieres'; 'Servir le Peuple'; 'Unite et Travail'*; 'Lutte Communiste'; 'Revoltes'; 'Voix Ouvriere'; 'Un Groupe d'Ouvriers'. The titles may vary but the content has a common objective: to lead the workers away from the CGT and to provoke divisions in their ranks, in order to weaken them. At night, their commandos tear up our posters. Every time they distribute something at the gates, the police is not far off, ready to protect their distribution, as was the case recently at LMT. Recently they attempted to invade the offices of the Labour Exchange at Boulogne, Their activities are given an exaggerated publicity on the Gaullist radio and in the columns of the bour- geois press. This warning is no doubt superfluous for the majority of Renault workers, who in the past, have got to know about this kind of agitation. On the other hand the younger workers must be told that these elements are in the service of the bourgeoisie, who has always made use of these pseudo-revolutionaries whenever the rise of united-left forces has presented a threat to its privileges. It is therefore important not to allow these people to come to the gates of our factory, to sully our trade union organization and our CGT militants, who are tirelessly exerting themselves in defence of our demands and to bring about unity. These elements always reap a fat reward at the end of the day for their dirty work, and for the loyal services given to the bosses (some now occupy high positions in the management of the factory. This having been said, the CGT (Renault) Committee calls on the workers to continue the fight for their demands, to intensify their efforts to ensure greater unity of the trade union and democratic forces, and to strengthen the ranks of the CGT struggling for these noble objectives. The Trade Union Bureau, CGT, Renault.

* This is a fascist publication. All others are 'left' publications. A typical amalgam technique. (original footnote)

struck by the number of Algerian and black workers.

There are only a few posters at the gate, again mainly those of the CGT. Some pick- ets carry CFDT posters. There isn’t an FO poster in sight. The road and walls outside the factory have been well covered with slo- gans: ‘One day strike on Monday’; ‘Unity in defence of our - claims’; ‘No to the monopo- lies’.

The little cafe near the gates is packed. People seem unusually wide awake and communicative for so early an hour. A news- paper kiosk is selling about 3 copies of l’Humanite for every copy of anything else.

The local branch of the Communist Party is distributing a leaflet call- ing for ‘resolution, calm, vigilance and unity’ and warning against ‘pro- vocateurs’.

The pickets make no attempt to ar- gue with those pouring in. No one seems to know whether they will obey the strike call or not. Less than 25% of Renault workers belong to any union at all. This is the biggest car factory in Europe.

The loudhailer hammers home its message: “The CRS have recently assaulted peasants at Quimper, and workers at Caen, Rhodiaceta (Lyon) and Dassault. Now they are turning on the students. The regime will not tolerate opposition. It will not mod- ernise the country, It will not grant us our basic wage demands. Our one day strike will show both Govern- ment and employers our determina- tion, We must compel them to re- treat.” The message is repeated again and again, like a gramophone record. I wonder whether the speaker believes what he says, whether he even senses what lies ahead.

At 7.00 am a dozen Trotskyists of the F.E.R. (Federation des Etudiants Revolutonaires) turn up to sell their paper Revoltes. They wear large red and white buttons proclaiming their identity. A little later another group arrives to sell Voix Ouvriere. The loudspeaker im- mediately switches from an attack on the Gaullist government and its CRS to an attack on ‘provocateurs’‘provocateurs’ and ‘disruptive elements, alien to the working class’. The Stalinist speaker hints that the sellers are in the pay of the government. As they are here, ‘the police must be lurking in the neighbour- hood’. Heated arguments break out between the sellers and CGT officials. The CFDT pickets are refused the use of the loudhailer. They shout ‘democratie ouvriere’ and defend the right of the ‘disruptive elements’ to sell their stuff. A rather abstract right, as not a sheet is sold. The front page of Revoltes car- ries an esoteric article on Eastern Europe.

Much invective (but no blows) are ex- changed. In the course of an argument I hear Bro. Trigon (delegate to the second

electoral ‘college’ at Renault) describe Danny Cohn-Bendit as ‘un agent du pouvoir’ (an agent of the authorities). A student takes him up on this point. The Trots don’t. Shortly before 8.00 am they walk off, their ‘act of presence’ accomplished and duly re- corded for history.

At about the same time, hundreds of work- ers who had entered the factory leave their shops and assemble in the sunshine in an open space a few hundred yards inside the main gate. From there they amble toward the Ile Seguin, crossing one arm of the river Seine on the way. Other processions leave other points of the factory and converge on the same area. The metallic ceiling is nearly

200 feet above our heads. Enormous stocks of components are piled up right and left. Far away to the right an assembly line is still working, lifting what looks like rear car seats, complete with attached springs, from ground to first floor level.

Some 10,000 workers are soon assembled in the shed. The orators address them through a loudspeaker, from a narrow plat- form some 40 feet up. The platform runs in front of what looks like an elevated inspec- tion post but which I am told is a union of-

fice inside the factory.

The CGT speaker deals with various sec- tional wage claims. He denounces the re- sistance of the government “in the hands of the monopolies”. He produces facts and fig- ures dealing with the wage structure.

Many highly ski1led men are not getting enough. A CFDT speaker follows him. He deals with the steady speed-up, with the worsening of working conditions, with ac- cidents and with the fate of man in produc- tion. “What kind of life is this? Are we al- ways to remain puppets, carrying out every whim of the management?” He advocates uniform wage increases for all (augmenta-

tions non- hiérarchisées). An FO speaker follows. He is technically the most competent, but says the least. In flowery rhetoric he talks of 1936, but omits all reference to Leon Blum. The record of FO is bad in the factory and the speaker is heckled from time to time.

The CGT speakers then ask the work- ers to participate en masse in the big- rally planned for that afternoon. As the last speaker finishes, the crowd spontaneously breaks out into a rous- ing ‘Internationale’. The older men seem to know most of the words. The younger workers only know the cho- rus. A friend nearby assures me that in 20 years this is the first time he has heard the song sung inside Renault (he has attended dozens of mass meetings in the Ile Seguin). There is an atmosphere of excitement, particularly among the younger work- ers.

The crowd then breaks up into sev- eral sections. Some walk back over the bridge and out of the factory. Others proceed systematically through the shops where few hundred blokes are still at work. Some of these men ar- gue but most seem only too glad for an excuse to stop and join in the pro- cession. Gangs weave their way, jok- ing and singing, amid the giant presses and tanks. Those remaining at work are ironically cheered, clapped or exhorted to ‘step on it’, or ‘work harder’. Occasional foremen look on helplessly, as one assembly line after another is brought to a halt.

Many of the lathes have coloured pic- tures plastered over them: pin-ups and green fields, sex and sunshine. Anyone still working is exhorted to get

out into the daylight, not just to dream about it. In the main plant, over half a mile long, hardly twelve men remain in their overalls. Not an angry voice can be heard. There is much good humoured banter. By 11 am thousands of workers have poured out into the warmth of a morning in May. An open-air beer and sandwich stall, out- side the gate, is doing a roaring trade.

www.struggle.ws/pdf.html

MONDAY MAY 13. 1.15pm

The streets are crowded. The response to the call for a 24-hour general strike has exceeded the wildest hopes of the trade unions. Despite the short notice Paris is paralysed. The strike was only decided 48 hours ago, after the ‘night of the barricades’. It is moreover ‘illegal’. The law of the land demands a five-day notice before an ‘offical’ strike can be called. Too bad for legality.

A solid phalanx of young people is walking up the Boulevard de Sebastopol, towards the Gare de l’Est. They are proceeding to the student rallying point for the giant dem- onstration called jointly by the unions, the students organization (UNEF) and the teachers’ associations (FEN and SNEsup).

There is not a bus or car in sight. The streets of Paris today belong to the demonstrators. Thousands of them are already in the square in front of the station. Thousands more are moving in from every direction. The plan agreed by the sponsoring organi- zations is for the different categories to as- semble separately and then to converge on the Place de la Republique, from where the march will proceed across Paris, via the Latin Quarter, to the Place Denfert Rochereau.

We are already packed like sardines, for as far as the eye can see, yet there is more than an hour to go before we are due to proceed. The sun has been shining all day. The girls are in summer dresses, the young men in shirt sleeves. A red flag is flying over the railway station. There are many red flags in the crowd and several black ones too.

A man suddenly appears carrying a suit- case full of duplicated leaflets. He belongs to some left ‘groupuscule’ or other. He opens his suitcase and distributes perhaps a dozen leaflets. But he doesn’t have to continue alone. There is an unquenchable thirst for information, ideas, literature, argument, polemic. The man just stands there as peo- ple surround him and press forward to get the leaflets. Dozens of demonstrators, with- out even reading the leaflet, help him dis- tribute them. Some 6,000 copies get out in a few minutes. All seem to be assiduously read. People argue, laugh, joke. I witnessed such scenes again and again.

Sellers of revolutionary literature are do- ing well. An edict, signed by the organizers of the demonstration, that ‘the only litera- ture allowed would be that of the organiza- tions sponsoring the demonstration’ (see l’Humanite, May 1-3, 1968, p.5) is being enthusiastically flouted. This bureaucratic restriction (much criticized the previous evening when announced at Censier by the student delegates to the Coordinating Com- mittee) obviously cannot be enforced in a crowd of this size. The revolution is bigger than any organization, more tolerant than any institution ‘representing’ the masses, more realistic than any edict of any Cen- tral Committee.

Demonstrators have climbed onto walls, onto the roofs of bus stops, onto the rail- ings in front of the station. Some have loudhailers and make short speeches. All

the ‘politicos’ seem to be in one part or other of this crowd. I can see the banner of the Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionaire, por- traits of Castro and Che Guevara, the ban- ner of the FER, several banners of ‘Servir le Peuple’ (a Maoist group) and the banner of the UJCML (Union de la Jeunesse Communiste Marxiste-Leniniste), another Maoist tendency. There are also banners from many educational establishments now occupied by those who work there. Largo groups of lyceens (high school kids) mingle with the students as do many thousands of teachers

At about 2.00 p.m. the student section sets off, singing the ‘Internationale’. We march twenty to thirty abreast, arms linked. There is a row of red flags in front of us, then a banner 50 feet wide carrying four simple words: ‘Etudiants, Enseignants, Travailleurs, Solidaires’. It is an impressive sight.

The whole Boulevard de Magenta is a solid seething mass of humanity. We can’t enter the Place de la Republique, already packed full of demonstrators. One can’t even move along the pavements or through adjacent streets. Nothing but people, as far as the eye can see.

As we proceed slowly down the Boulevard de Magenta, we notice on a 3rd floor bal- cony, high on our right, an SFIO (Socialist Party) head-quarters. The balcony is be- decked with a few decrepit looking red flags and a banner proclaiming ‘Solidarity with the Students’. A few elderly characters wave at us, somewhat self-consciously. Someone in the crowd starts chanting ‘O-por-tu- nistes’. The slogan is taken up, rhythmically roared by thousands, to the discomfiture of those on the balcony who beat a hasty re- treat. The people have not forgotten the use of the CRS against the striking miners, in 1958, by ‘socialist’ Minister of the Interior Jules Moch. They remember the ‘socialist’ Prime Minister Guy Mollet and his role during the Algerian war. Mercilessly, the crowd shows its contempt for the discred- ited politicians now seeking to jump on the bandwagon. ‘Guy Mollet, au musee’, they shout, amid laughter. It is truly the end of an epoch.

At about 3pm we at last reach the Place de la Republique, our point of departure. The crowd here is so dense that several people faint and have to be carried into neighbour- ing cafes. Here people are packed almost as tight as in the street, but can at least avoid being injured. The window of one cafe gives way under the pressure of the crowd outside.

There is a genuine fear, in several parts of the crowd, of being crushed to death. The first union contingents fortunately begin to leave the square. There isn’t a policeman in sight.

Although the demonstration has been an- nounced, as a joint one, the GGT leaders are still striving desperately to avoid a mix- ing up, on the streets, of students and work- ers. In this they are moderately successful. By about 4-30 p.m. the student and teach-

ers’ contingent, perhaps 80,000 strong, fi- nally leaves the Place de la Republique. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have preceded it, hundreds of thousands follow it, but the ‘left’ contingent has been well and truly ‘bottled-in’. Several groups, understanding at last the CGT’s manoeu- vre, break loose once we are out of the square. They take short cuts via various side streets, at the double, and succeed in infiltrating groups of 100 or so into parts of the march ahead of them, or behind them. The Stalinist stewards - walking hand in hand - and hemming the march in on ei- ther side are powerless to prevent these sudden influxes. The student demonstra- tors scatter like fish in water as soon as they have entered a given contingent. The CGT marchers themselves are quite friendly and readily assimilate the newcomers, not quite sure what it’s all about. The students’ ap- pearance, dress and speech does not enable them to be identified as readily as they would be in Britain.

The main student contingent proceeds as a compact body. Now that we are past the bottleneck of the Place de la Republique the pace is quite rapid. The student group nev- ertheless takes at least half an hour to pass a given point. The slogans of the students contrast strikingly with those of the CGT. The students shout ‘Le Pouvoir aux Ouvriers’ (All Power to the Workers); ‘Le Pouvoir est dans la rue’ (Power lies in the street); ‘Liberez nos camarades’. CGT mem- bers shout ‘Pompidou,demission’ (Pompidou, resign). The students chant ‘de Gaulle, assassin’, or ‘CRS - SS’. The CGT: ‘Des sous, pas de matraques’ (money, not police clubs) or ‘Defense du pouvoir d’achat’ (Defend our purchasing power). The stu- dents say ‘Non a l’Universite de classe’. The CGT and the stalinist students, grouped around the banner of their paper Clarte reply ‘Universite Democratique’. Deep po- litical differences lie behind the differences of emphasis. Some slogans are taken up by everyone; slogans such as ‘Dix ans, c’est assez’, ‘A bas l’Etat policier ’, or ‘Bon anniversaire, mon General’. Whole groups mournfully entone a well known refrain: ‘Adieu, de Gaulle’. They wave their handkerchieves, to the great merriment of the bystanders.

As the main student contingent crosses the Pont St. Michel to enter the Latin Quarter it suddenly stops, in silent tribute to its wounded. All thoughts are for a moment switched to those lying in hospital, their sight in danger through too much tear gas or their skulls or ribs fractured by the trun- cheons of the CRS. The sudden, angry si- lence of this noisiest part of the demonstra- tion conveys a deep impression of strength and resolution. One senses massive ac- counts yet to be settled.

At the top of the Boulevard St. Michel I drop out of the march, climb onto a parapet lin- ing the Luxembourg Gardens, and just watch. I remain there for two hours as row after row of demonstrators march past, 30 or more abreast, a human tidal wave of fan- tastic, inconceivable size. How many are they? 600,000? 800,000? A million?

1,500,000? No one can really number them. The first of the demonstrators reached the final dispersal point hours before the last ranks had left the Place de la Republique, at 7.00 p.m.

There were banners of every kind: union banners, student banners, political banners, non-political banners, reformist banners, revolutionary banners, banners of the Mouvement contre l’Armement Atomique, banners of various Conseils de Parents d’Eleves, banners of every conceivable size and shape, proclaiming a common abhor- rence at what had happened and a common will to struggle on. Some banners were loudly applauded, such as the one saying ‘Liberons l’information’ (Let’s have a free news service) carried by a group of employ- ees from the ORTF. Some banners indulged in vivid symbolism, such as the gruesome one carried by a group of artists, depicting human hands, heads and eyes, each with its price tag, on display on the hooks and trays of a butcher’s shop.

Endlessly they filed past. There were whole sections of hospital personnel, in white coats, some carrying posters saying ‘Ou sont les disparus des hopitaux?’ (where are the missing injured?). Every factory, every ma- jor workplace seemed to be represented. There were numerous groups of railway- men, postmen, printers, Metro personnel, metal workers, airport-workers, market men, electricians, lawyers, sewermen, Bank employees, building workers, glass and chemical workers, waiters, municipal em- ployees, painters and decorators, gas work- ers, shop girls, insurance clerks, road sweepers, film studio operators, busmen, teachers, workers from the new plastic in- dustries, row upon row upon row of them, the flesh and blood of modern capitalist so- ciety, an unending mass, a power that could sweep everything before it, if it but decided to do so.

My thoughts went to those who say that the workers are only interested in football, in the ‘tierce’ (horse-betting), in watching the telly, in their annual ‘conges’ (holidays), and that the working-class cannot see beyond the problems of its everyday life, It was so palpably untrue. I also thought of those who say that only a narrow and rotten leader- ship lies between the masses and the total transformation of society. It was equally untrue. Today the working class is becom- ing conscious of its strength. Will it decide, tomorrow, to use it?

I rejoin the march and we proceed towards Denfert Rochereau. We pass several stat- ues, sedate gentlemen now bedecked with red flags or carrying slogans such as ‘Liberez nos camarades’. As we pass a hos- pital silence again descends on the endless crowd. Someone starts whistling the ‘Internationale’. Others take it up. Like a breeze rustling over an enormous field of corn, the whistled tune ripples out in all directions. From the windows of the hospi- tal some nurses wave at us.

At various intersections we pass traffic lights which by some strange inertia still seem to be working. Red and green alter-

nate, at fixed intervals, meaning as little as bourgeois education, as work in modern society, as the lives of those walking past. The reality of today, for a few hours, has submerged all of yesterday’s patterns.

The part of the march in which I find my- self is now rapidly approaching what the organizers have decided should be the dis- persal point. The CGT is desperately keen that its hundreds of thousands of support- ers should disperse quietly. It fears them, when they are together. It wants them nameless atoms again, scattered to the four corners of Paris, powerless in the context of their individual preoccupations. The CGT sees itself as the only possible link between them as the divinely ordained vehicle for the expression of their collective will. The ‘Mouvement du 22 Mars’, on the other hand, had issued a call to the students and work- ers, asking them to stick together and to proceed to the lawns of the Champ de Mars (at the foot of the Eiffel Tower) for a mas- sive collective discussion on the experiences of the day and on the problems that lie ahead.

At this stage I sample for the first time what a ‘service d’ordrei’ composed of Stalinist stewards really means, All day, the stew- ards have obviously been anticipating this particular moment. They are very tense, clearly expecting ‘trouble’. Above all else they fear what they call ‘debordement’, i.e. being outflanked on the left. For the last half-mile of the march five or six solid rows of them line up on either side of the demon- strators. Arms linked, they form a massive sheath around the marchers. CGT officials address the bottled-up demonstrators through two powerful loudspeakers mounted on vans, instructing them to dis- perse quietly via the Boulevard Arago, i.e. to proceed in precisely the opposite direc- tion to the one heading to the Champ de Mars. Other exits from the Place Denfert Rochereau are blocked by lines of stewards linking arms.

On occasions like this, I am told the Com- munist Party calls up thousands of its mem- bers from the Paris area. It also summons members from miles around, bringing them up by the coachload from places as far away as Rennes, Orleans, Sens, Lille and Limoges. The municipalities under Commu- nist Party control provide further hundreds of these ‘stewards’ not necessarily Party members, but people dependent on the goodwill of the Party for their jobs and fu- ture. Ever since its heyday of participation in the government (1945-47) the Party has had this kind of mass base in the Paris sub- urbs. It has invariably used it in circum- stances like today. On this demonstration there must be at least 10,000 such stew- ards possibly twice that number.

The exhortations of the stewards meet with a variable response. Whether they are suc- cessful in getting particular groups to dis- perse via the Boulevard Arago depends of course on the composition of the groups. Most of those which the students have not succeeded in infiltrating obey, although even here some of the younger militants

protest: “We are a million in the streets. Why should we go home?”. Other groups hesitate, vacillate, start arguing. Student speakers climb on walls and shout:

“All those who want to return to the telly, turn down the Boulevard Arago. Those who are for joint worker-student discussions and for developing the struggle turn down the Boulevard Raspail and proceed to the Champ de Mars”.

Those protesting against the dispersion or- ders are immediately jumped on by the stewards, denounced as ‘provocateurs’ and often manhandled. I saw several comrades of the ‘Mouvement du 22 Mars’ physically assaulted, their portable loudhailers snatched from their hands and their leaf- lets torn from them and thrown to the ground. In some sections there seemed to be dozens, in other hundreds, in other thou- sands of ‘provocateurs’. A number of minor punch-ups take place as the stewards are swept aside by these particular contingents. Heated arguments break out, the demon- strators denouncing the Stalinists as “cops” and as “the last rampart of the bourgeoisie”.

A respect for facts compels me to admit that most contingents followed the orders of the trade union bureaucrats. The repeated slan- ders by the CGT and Communist Party leaders had had their effect. The students were ‘trouble-makers’, ‘adventurers’, ‘dubi- ous elements’. Their proposed action would “only lead to a massive intervention by the CRS” (who had kept well out of sight throughout the whole of the afternoon). “This was just a demonstration, not a prel- ude to Revolution”. Playing ruthlessly on the most backward sections of the crowd, and physically assaulting the more advanced sections, the apparatchniks of the CGT suc- ceeded in getting the bulk of the demonstra- tors to disperse, often under protest. Thou- sands went to the Champ de Mars. But hundreds of thousands went home. The Stalinists won the day, but the arguments started will surely reverberate down the months to come.

At about 8.00 p.m. an episode took place which changed the temper of the last sec- tions of the march, now approaching the dispersal point. A police van suddenly came up one of the streets leading into the Place Denfert Rochereau. It must have strayed from its intended route, or perhaps its driver had assumed that the demonstrators had already dispersed. Seeing the crowd ahead the two uniformed gendarmes in the front seat panicked. Unable to reverse in time in order to retreat the driver decided that his life hinged on forcing a passage through the thinnest section of the crowd. The vehicle accelerated, hurling itself into the demonstrators at about 50 miles an hour. People scattered wildly in all direc- tions. Several people were knocked down and two were seriously injured. Many more narrowly escaped. The van was finally sur- rounded. One of the policemen in the front seat was dragged out and repeatedly punched by the infuriated crowd, deter- mined to lynch him. He was finally rescued, in the nick of time by the stewards. They

more or less carried him, semi-conscious, down a side street where he was passed horizontally, like a battered blood sausage, through an open ground floor window.

To do this, the stewards had had to engage in a running fight with several hundred very angry marchers. The crowd then started rocking the stranded police van. The remaining policeman drew his revolver and fired. People ducked. By a miracle no one was hit. A hundred yards away the bullet made a hole, about 3 feet above ground level, in a window of ‘Le Belfort’, a big cafe at 297 Boulevard Raspail. The stewards again rushed to the rescue, forming a bar- rier between the crowd and the police van which was allowed to escape down a side street, driven by the policeman who had fired at the crowd.

Hundreds of demonstrators then thronged round the hole in the window of the cafe. Press photographers were summoned, ar- rived, duly took their close-ups - none of which, of course, were ever published. (Two days later l’Humanite carried a few lines about the episode, at the end of a column on p.5) One effect of the episode is that sev- eral thousand more demonstrators decided not to disperse. They turned and marched down towards the Champ de Mars, shout- ing “Ils ont tiré á Denfert” (they’ve shot at us at Denfert). If the incident had taken place an hour earlier, the evening of May 13 might have had a very different complex- ion.

——

The Sorbonne ‘Soviet’

On Saturday May 11, shortly before mid- night, Mr Pompidou, Prime Minister of France, overruled his Minister of the Inte- rior, his Minister of Education, and issued orders to his ‘independent’ Judiciary. He announced that the police would be with- drawn from the Latin Quarter, that the fac- ulties would re-open on Monday, May 13, and that the law would ‘reconsider’ the question of the students arrested the pre- vious week. It was the biggest political climb-down of his career. For the students, and for many others, it was the living proof that direct action worked. Concessions had been won through struggle which had been unobtainable by other means.

Early on the Monday morning the CRS pla- toons guarding the entrance to the Sorbonne were discreetly withdrawn. The students moved in, first in small groups, then in hundreds, later in thousands. By midday the occupation was complete. Every ‘tricolore’ was promptly hauled down, every lecture theatre occupied. Red flags were hoisted from the official flagpoles and from improvised ones at many windows, some overlooking the streets, others the big in- ternal courtyard. Hundreds of feet above the milling students, enormous red and black flags fluttered side by side from the Chapel dome.

What happened over the next few days will leave a permanent mark on the French edu- cational system, on the structure of French

society and - most important of all - on the minds of those who lived and made history during that hectic first fortnight. The Sorbonne was suddenly transformed from the fusty precinct where French capitalism selected and moulded its hierarchs, its tech- nocrats and its administrative bureaucracy into a revolutionary volcano in full eruption whose lava was to spread far and wide, sear- ing the social structure of modern France.

The physical occupation of the Sorbonne was followed by an intellectual explosion of unprecedented violence. Everything, liter- ally everything, was suddenly and simul- taneously up for discussion, for question, for challenge. There were no taboos. It is easy to criticize the chaotic upsurge of thoughts, ideas and proposals unleashed in such circumstances ‘Professional revolution- aries’ and petty bourgeois philistines criti- cized to their heart’s content. But in so do- ing they only revealed how they themselves were trapped in the ideology of a previous epoch and were incapable of transcending it. They failed to recognize the tremendous significance of the new, of all that could not be apprehended within their own pre-estab- lished intellectual categories. The phenom- enon was witnessed again and again, as it doubtless has been in every really great upheaval in history.

Day and night, every lecture theatre was packed out, the seat of continuous, passion- ate debate on every-subject that ever pre- occupied thinking humanity. No formal lec- turer ever enjoyed so massive an audience, was ever listened to with such rapt atten- tion - or given such short shrift if he talked nonsense.

A kind of order rapidly prevailed. By the second day, a notice board had appeared near the front entrance announcing what was being talked about, and where. I noted: ‘Organization of the struggle’; ‘Political and trade union rights in the University’; ‘Uni- versity crisis or social crisis?’; ‘Dossier of the police repression’; ‘Self-management’; ‘Non- selection’ (or how to open the doors of the University to everyone); ‘Methods of teach- ing’; ‘Exams’, etc. Other lecture theatres were given over to the Students-Workers Liaison Committees, soon to assume great importance. In yet other halls, discussions were under way on ‘sexual repression’, on ‘the colonial question’, on ‘ideology and mys- tification’. Any group of people wishing to discuss anything under the sun would just take over one of the lecture theatres or smaller rooms. Fortunately there were doz- ens of these.

The first impression was of a gigantic lid

suddenly lifted, of pent-up thoughts and aspirations suddenly exploding, on being released from the realm of dreams into the realm of the real and the possible. In chang- ing their environment people themselves were changed. Those who had never dared say anything suddenly felt their thoughts to be the most important thing in the world - and said so. The shy became communica- tive. The helpless and isolated suddenly discovered that collective power lay in their hands. The traditionally apathetic suddenly realised the intensity of their involvement. A tremendous surge of community and co- hesion gripped those who had previously seen themselves as isolated and impotent puppets, dominated by institutions that they could neither control nor understand. People just went up and talked to one an- other without trace of self-consciousness. This state of euphoria lasted throughout the whole fortnight I was there. An inscription scrawled on a wall sums it up perfectly: ‘Deja dix jours de bonheur’ (ten days of hap- piness already).

In the yard of the Sorbonne, politics (frowned on for a generation) took over with a vengeance. Literature stalls sprouted up along the whole inner perimeter. Enormous portraits appeared on the internal walls: Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, Guevara, a revolutionary resurrection breaking the bounds of time and place. Even Stalin put in a transient appearance (above a Maoist stall) until it was tactfully sug- gested to the comrades that he wasn’t re- ally at home in such company.

On the stalls themselves every kind of lit- erature suddenly blossomed forth in the summer sunshine: leaflets and pamphlets by anarchists, Stalinists, Maoists, trotskyists (3 varieties), the PSU and the non-committed. The yard of the Sorbonne had become a gigantic revolutionary drug- store, in which the most esoteric products no longer had to be kept beneath the coun- ter but could now be prominently displayed. Old issues of journals yellowed by the years, were unearthed and often sold as well as more recent material. Everywhere there were groups of 10 or 20 people, in heated discussion, people talking about the barri- cades, about the CRS, about their own ex- periences, but also about the Commune of 1871, about 1905 and 1917, about the Ital- ian left in 1921 and about France in 1936. A fusion was taking place between the con- sciousness of the revolutionary minorities and the consciousness of whole new layers of people, dragged day by day into the mael- strom of political controversy. The students were learning within days what it had taken

Anarchism and the Spanish Revolution On June 19th 1936 Franco’s coup was defeated in most of Spain by workers who seized arms and stormed the barracks. Most of them were anarchists and they went on to collectivise industry and agriculture in large areas of republican Spain as well as forming militias to fight the fascists. The web page below has 100’s of documents and photos produced at the time and afterwards about this experience, its successes and failures and why it was defeated.

http://struggle.ws/spaindx.html

others a lifetime to learn. Many lycéens [sec- ondary school pupils] came to see what it was all about. They too got sucked into the vortex. I remember a boy of 14 explaining to an incredulous man of 60 why students should have the right to depose professors.

Other things also happened. A large piano suddenly appeared in the great central yard and remained there for several days. Peo- ple would come and play on it, surrounded by enthusiastic supporters. As people talked in the lecture theatres of neo-capitalism and of its techniques of manipulation, strands of Chopin and bars of jazz, bits of La Carmagnole and atonal compositions wafted through the air. One evening there was a drum recital, then some clarinet play- ers took over. These ‘diversions’ may have infuriated some of the more single-minded revolutionaries, but they were as much part and parcel of the total transformation of the Sorbonne as were the revolutionary doc- trines being proclaimed in the lecture halls.

An exhibition of huge photographs of the ‘night of the barricades’ (in beautiful half- tones) appeared one morning, mounted on stands. No one knew who had put it up. Everyone agreed that it succinctly summa- rised the horror and glamour, the anger and promise of that fateful night. Even the doors of the Chapel giving on to the yard were soon covered with inscriptions: ‘Open this door - Finis les tabernacles’, ‘Religion is the last mystification’. Or more prosaically: ‘We want somewhere to piss, not somewhere to pray’.

The massive outer walls of the Sorbonne were likewise soon plastered with posters - posters announcing the first sit-in strikes, posters describing the wage rates of whole sections of Paris workers, posters announc- ing the next demonstrations, posters de- scribing the solidarity marches in Peking, posters denouncing the police repression and the use of CS gas (as well as of ordi- nary tear-gas) against the demonstrators. There were posters, dozens of them, warn- ing students against the Communist Par- ty’s band-wagon jumping tactics, telling

them how it had attacked their movement and how it was now seeking to assume its leadership. Political posters in plenty. But also others, proclaiming the new ethos. A big one for instance near the rain entrance, boldly proclaimed ‘Defense d’interdire’ (For- bidding forbidden). And others, equally to the point: ‘Only the truth is revolutionary.’ ‘Our revolution is greater than ourselves’. ‘We refuse the role assigned to us, we will not be trained as police dogs’ People’s con- cerns varied but converged. The posters reflected the deeply libertarian prevailing philosophy. ‘Humanity will only be happy when the last capitalist has been strangled with the guts of the last bureaucrat.’ ‘Cul- ture is disintegrating. Create! ‘I take my wishes for reality for I believe in the reality of my wishes’, or more simply: ‘Creativity, spontaneity, life’.

In the street outside, hundreds of passers by would stop to read these improvised wall- newspapers. Some gaped. Some sniggered. Some nodded assent. Some argued. Some, summoning their courage, actually entered the erstwhile sacrosanct premises, as they were being exhorted to by numerous post- ers proclaiming that the Sorbonne was now open to all. Young workers who ‘wouldn’t have been seen in that place’ a month ago now walked in groups, at first rather self- consciously, later as if they owned the place, which of course they did.

As the days went by, another kind of inva- sion took place the invasion by the cynical and the unbelieving, or more charitably by those who ‘had only come to see’. It gradu- ally gained momentum. At certain stages it threatened to paralyse the serious work being done part of which had to be hived off to the Faculty of Letters, at Censier, also occupied by the students. It was felt neces- sary, however, for the doors to be kept open, 24 hours a day. The message certainly spread. Deputation’s came first from other universities then from high schools, later from factories and offices, to look, to ques- tion, to argue, to study.

The most telling sign, however, of the new and heady climate was to be found on the walls of the Sorbonne corridors. Around the main lecture theatres there is a maze of such corridors: dark, dusty depressing, and hitherto unnoticed passageways leading from nowhere in particular to nowhere else. Suddenly these corridors sprang to life in a firework of luminous mural wisdom - much of it of Situationist inspiration. Hundreds of people suddenly stopped to read such pearls as: ‘Do not consume Marx. Live it.’ ‘The future will only contain what we put into it now.’ ‘When examined, we will an- swer with questions’ ‘Professors, you make us feel old.’ ‘One doesn’t compose with a so- ciety in decomposition.’ ‘We must remain the inadapted ones.’ ‘Workers of all lands, enjoy yourselves.’ ‘Those who carry out a revolu- tion only half-way through merely dig them- selves a tomb (St. Just)’. ‘Please leave the P.G. (Communist Party) as clean on leaving as you would like to find it on entering.’ ‘The tears of the philistine are the nectar of the Gods.’ ‘Go and die in Naples, with the Club Mediterranee’ ‘Long live communication,

down with telecommunication.’ ‘Masochism today dresses up as reformism.’ ‘We will claim nothing. We will ask for nothing. We will take, We will occupy.’ ‘The only outrage to the tomb of the unknown soldier was the outrage that put him there.’ ‘No, we won’t be picked up by the Great Party of the Working Class.’ And a big inscription, well displayed: “Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father, before me, also fought for wage increases. Now I have a telly, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet all in all, my life has al- ways been a cunt’s life. Don’t discuss with the bosses. Eliminate them.”

Day after day the courtyard and corridors are crammed, the scene of an incessant bi- directional flow to every conceivable part of the enormous building. It may look like chaos, but it is the chaos of a beehive or of an anthill. A new structure is gradually being evolved, A canteen has been organ- ized in one big hall. People pay what they can afford for glasses of orange juice, ‘menthe’, or ‘gronadine’ and for ham or sau- sage rolls. I enquire whether costs are cov- ered and am told they more or less break even. In another part of the building a chil- dren’s crèche has been set up, elsewhere a first-aid station, elsewhere a dormitory. Regular sweeping up rotas are organized. Rooms are allocated to the Occupation Com- mittee, to the Press Committee, to the Propaganda Committee, to the Student- Worker Liaison Committees, to the Com- mittees dealing with foreign students, to the Action Committees of Lyceens, to the Com- mittees dealing with the allocation of premises, and to the numerous Commis- sions undertaking special projects such as the compiling of a dossier on police atroci- ties, the study of the implications of au- tonomy, of the examination system, etc. Anyone seeking work can readily find it.

The composition of the Committees was very variable. It often changed from day to day, as the Committees gradually found their feet. To those who pressed for instant solutions to every problem it would be an- swered: “Patience, comrade. Give us a chance to evolve an alternative The bour- geoisie has controlled this university for nearly two centuries, It has solved nothing. We are building from rock bottom. We need a month or two. . .”

Confronted with this tremendous explosion which it had neither foreseen nor been able to control the Communist Party tried des- perately to salvage what it could of its shat- tered reputation.

Between May 3rd and May 13th every is- sue of l’Humanite had carried paragraphs either attacking the students or making slimy innuendoes about them. Now the line suddenly changed. The Party sent dozens of its best agitators into theSorbonne to ‘ex- plain’ its case. The case was a simple one. The Party ‘supported the students’ - even if there were a few ‘dubious elements’ in their leadership. It ‘always had’. It always would.

Amazing scenes followed. Every Stalinist ‘agitator’ would immediately be surrounded by a large group of well-informed young people, denouncing the Party’s counter-

revolutionary role. A wall paper had been put up by the comrades of Voix Ouvriere on which had been posted, day by day, every statement attacking the students to have appeared in l’Humanite or in any of a dozen Party leaflets. The ‘agitators’ couldn’t get a word in edgeways. They would be jumped on violently). “The evidence was over their, comrade. Would the comrades like to come and read just exactly what the Party had been saying not a week ago? Perhaps l’Humanite would like to grant the student’s space to reply to some of the accusations made against.”

Others in the audience would then bring up the Party’s role during the Algerian War, during the miners’ strike of 1958, during the years of ‘tripartisme’ (1945-1947). Wrig- gle as they tried, the ‘agitators’ just could not escape this kind of ‘instant education’. It was interesting to note that the Party could not entrust this ‘salvaging’ operation to its younger, student members. Only the ‘older comrades’ could safely venture into this hornets’ nest. So much so that people would say that anyone in the Sorbonne over the age of 40 was either a copper’s nark or a stalinist stooge.

The most dramatic periods of the occupa- tion were undoubtedly the ‘Assemblees Gen- erales’, or plenary sessions, held every night in the giant amphitheatre. This was the soviet, the ultimate source of all decisions, the fount and origin of direct democracy. The amphitheatre could seat up to 5,000 people in its enormous hemicircle, surmounted by three balcony tiers. As often as not every seat was taken and the crowd would flow up the aisles and onto the podium, A black flag and a red one hung over the simple wooden table at which the chairman sat. Having seen meetings of 50 break up in chaos it is an amazing experience to see a meeting of 5,000 get down to business. Real events determined the themes and ensured that most of the talk was down to earth.

The topic having been decided, everyone was allowed to speak. Most Speeches were made from the podium out some from the body of the hall or from the balconies. The loudspeaker equipment usually worked but sometimes didn’t. Some speakers could com- mand immediate attention, without even raising their voice. Others would instantly provoke a hostile response by the stridency of their tone, their insincerity or their more or less obvious attempts at manoeuvring the assembly. Anyone who waffled, or remi- nisced, or came to recite a set-piece, or talked in terms of slogans was given short shrift by the audience, politically the most sophisticated I have ever seen. Anyone making practical suggestions was listened to attentively. So were those who sought to interpret the movement in terms of its own experience or to point the way ahead.

Most speakers were granted three minutes. Some were allowed much more by popular acclaim. The crowd itself exerted a tremen- dous control on the platform and on the speakers. A two-way relationship emerged very quickly. The political maturity of the Assembly was shown most strikingly in its

rapid realisation that booing or cheering during speeches slowed down the Assem- bly’s own deliberations. Positive speeches were loudly cheered at the end. Demagogic or useless ones were impatiently swept aside. Conscious revolutionary minorities played an important catalytic role in these deliberations but never sought - at least the more intelligent ones - to impose their will on the mass body. Although in the early stages the Assembly had its fair share of exhibitionists, provocateurs and nuts, the overhead costs of direct democracy were not as heavy as one might have expected.

There were moments of excitement and mo- ments of exhalation On the night of May 13th, after the massive march through the streets of Paris, Daniel Cohn-Bendit con- fronted J.M.Catala, general secretary of the Union of Communist Students in front of the packed auditorium. The scene remains printed in my mind.

“Explain to us”, Cohn-Bendit said, “why the Communist Party and the CGT told their militants to disperse at Denfert Rochereau, why it prevented them joining up with us for a discussion at the Champ de Mars?”

“Simple, really”, sneered Catala. “The agree- ment concluded between the CGT, the CFDT, the UNEF and the other sponsoring organi- sations stipulated that dispersal would take place at a pre determined place. The Joint Sponsoring Committee had not sanctioned any further developments.”

“A revealing answer”, replied Cohn-Bendit, “the organizations hadn’t foreseen that we would be a million in the streets. But life is bigger than the organizations. With a mil- lion people almost any thing is possible. You say the Committee hadn’t sanctioned any- thing further. On the day of the Revolution, comrade, you will doubtless tell us to forego it ‘because it hasn’t been sanctioned by the appropriate sponsoring Committee’. ..”

This brought the house down. The only ones who didn’t rise to cheer were a few dozen Stalinists. Also, revealingly, those Trotskyists who tacitly accepted the Stalinist conceptions - and whose only quar- rel with the CP is that it had excluded them from being one of the ‘sponsoring organiza- tions’.

That same night the Assembly took three important decisions. From now on the Sorbonne would constitute itself as a revo- lutionary headquarters (‘Smolony’, someone shouted). Those who worked there would devote their main efforts not to a mere re- organization of the educational system but to a total subversion of bourgeois society. From now on the University would be open to all those who subscribed to these aims. The proposals having been accepted the audience rose to a man and sang the loud- est most impassioned ‘Internationale’ I have ever heard. The echoes must have reverber- ated as far as the Elysee Palace, on the other side of the River Seine. . .

THE CENSIER REVOLUTIONARIES ...

At the same time as the students occupied the Sorbonne, they also took over the ‘Cen- tre Censier’ (the new Paris University Fac- ulty of Letters).

Censier is an enormous, ultra-modern, steel-concrete-and-glass affair situated at the south-east corner of the Latin Quarter. Its occupation attracted less attention than did that of the Sorbonne. It was to prove, however just as significant an event For while the Sorbonne was the shop window of revolutionary Paris - with all that that implies in terms of garish display - Censier was its dynamo, the place where things re- ally got done.

To many, the Paris May Days must have seen an essentially nocturnal affair: noctur- nal battles with the CRS, nocturnal barri- cades, nocturnal debates in the great am- phitheatres. But this was but one side of the coin. While some argued late into the Sorbonne night, others went to bed early for in the mornings they would be handing out leaflets at factory gates or in the sub- urbs, leaflets that had to be drafted, typed, duplicated, and the distribution of which had to be carefully organized. This patient, systematic work was done at Censier. It contributed in no small measure to giving the new revolutionary consciousness articu- late expression.

Soon after Censier had been occupied a group of activists commandeered a large part of the third floor. This space was to be the headquarters of their proposed ‘worker- student action committees’. The general idea was to establish links with groups of workers, however small, who shared the general libertarian revolutionary outlook of this group of students. Contact having been made, workers and students would cooper- ate in the joint drafting of leaflets. The leaf- lets would discuss the immediate problems of particular groups of workers, but in the light of what the students had shown to be possible. A given leaflet would then be jointly distributed by workers and students, outside the particular factory or office to which it referred. In some instances the dis-

www.struggle.ws/pdf.html

tribution would have to be undertaken by students alone, in others hardly a single student would be needed.

What brought the Censier comrades to- gether was a deeply felt sense of the revo- lutionary potentialities of the situation and the knowledge that they had no time to waste. They all felt the pressing need for direct action propaganda, and that the ur- gency of the situation required of them that they transcend any doctrinal differences they might have with one another They were all intensely political people. By and large, their politics were those of that new and increasingly important historical spe- cies: the ex-members of one or other revo- lutionary organization.

What were their views? Basically they boiled down to a few simple propositions. What was needed just now was a rapid, autonomous development of the working class struggle, the setting up of elected strike committees which would link union and non-union members in all strike-bound plants and enterprises, regular meetings of the strikers so that the fundamental deci- sions remained in the hands of the rank and file, workers’ defence committees to defend pickets from police intimidation, a constant dialogue with the revolutionary students aimed at restoring to the working class its own tradition of direct democracy and its own aspiration to self-management (auto- gestation), usurped by the bureaucracies of the trade unions and the political parties.

For a whole week the various trotskyist and Maoist factions didn’t even notice what was going on at Censier. They spent their time in public and often acrimonious debates at the Sorbonne as to who could provide the best leadership. Meanwhile, the comrades at Censier were steadily getting on with the work. The majority of them had ‘been through’ either stalinist or trotskyist organi- zations. They had left behind them all ideas to the effect that ‘intervention’ was mean- ingful only in terms of potential recruitment to their own particular group. All recognized the need for a widely-based and moderately structured revolutionary movement, but none of them saw the building of such a movement as an immediate, all important

task, on which propaganda should immedi- ately be centred.

Duplicators belonging to ‘subversive ele- ments’ were brought in. University dupli- cators were commandeered. Stocks of pa- per and ink were obtained from various sources and by various means. Leaflets be- gan to pour out, first in hundreds, then in thousands, then in tens of thousands as links were established with one group of rank and file workers after another. On the first day alone, Renault, Citroen, Air France, Boussac, the Nouvelles Messageries de Presse, Rhone-Poulenc and the RATP (Metro) were contacted. The movement then snowballed.

Every evening at Censier, the Action Com- mittees reported back to an ‘Assemblee Generale’ devoted exclusively to this kind of work. The reactions to the distribution were assessed, the content of future leaf- lets discussed. These discussions would usu- ally be led off by the worker contact who would describe the impact of the leaflet on his workmates. The most heated discus- sions centred on whether direct attacks should be made on the leaders of the CGT or whether mere suggestions as to what was needed to win would be sufficient to expose everything the union leaders had (or hadn’t) done and everything they stood for. The sec- ond viewpoint prevailed.

The leaflets were usually very short, never more than 200 or 300 words. They nearly all started by listing the workers grievances or just by describing their conditions of work. They would end by inviting workers to call at Censier or at the Sorbonne. “These places are now yours. Come there to discuss your problems with others. Take a hand yourselves in making known your problems and demands to those around you”. Between this kind of opening and this kind of con- clusion, most leaflets contained one or two key political points.

The response was instantaneous. More and more workers dropped in to draft joint leaf- lets with the students. Soon there was no lecture room big enough for the daily ‘Assemblee Generale’. The students learned a great deal from the workers’ self-discipline and from the systematic way in which they presented their reports. It was all so differ- ent from the ‘in-fighting’ of the political sects. There was general agreement that these were the finest lectures ever held at Censier!

Among the more telling lines of these leaf- lets, I noted the following:

Air France leaflet: “We refuse to accept a degrading modernisation’ which means we are constantly watched and have to submit to conditions which are harmful to our health, to our nervous systems and an in- sult to our status of human beings.... We refuse to entrust our demands any longer to professional trade union leaders. Like the students, we must take the control of our affairs into our own hands”.

Renault leaflet: “If we want our wage in- creases and our claims concerning condi- tions of work to be secure, if we don’t want

them constantly threatened, we must now struggle for a fundamental change in soci- ety... As workers we should ourselves seek to control the operation of our enterprises. Our objectives are similar to those of the students. The management (gestion) of industry and the management of the university should be democratically ensured by those who work there....”

Rhone-Poulenc leaflet: “Up till now we tried to solve our problems through petitions, partial struggles, the election of better lead- ers. This has led us nowhere. The action of the students has shown us that only rank and file action could compel the: authori- ties to retreat.... the students are challeng- ing the whole purpose of bourgeois educa- tion. They want to take the fundamental decisions themselves. So should we. We should decide the purpose of production, and at whose cost production will be carried out.”

District leaflet-(distributed in the streets at Boulogne Billancourt): “The government fears the extension of the move- ment. It fears the developing unity between workers and students. Pompidou has an- nounced that ‘the government will defend the Republic’. The Army and police are be- ing prepared. De Gaulle will speak on the 24th. Will he send the CRS to clear pickets out of strikebound plants? Be prepared. In workshops and faculties, think in terms of self-defence....”

Every day dozens of such leaflets were dis- cussed, typed, duplicated, distributed. Every evening we heard of the response: ‘The blokes think it’s tremendous. It’s just what they are thinking. The union officials never talk like this’. ‘The blokes liked the leaflet. They are sceptical about the 12%. They say prices will go up and that we’ll lose it all in a few months. Some say let’s push all together now and take on the lot’. ‘The leaflet certainly started the lads talking. They’ve never had so much to say. The offi- cials had to wait their turn to speak....’

I vividly remember a young printing worker who said one night that these meetings were the most exciting thing that had ever hap- pened to him. All his life he had dreamed of meeting people who thought and spoke like this. But every time he thought he had met one all they were interested in was what they could get out of him. This was the first time he had been offered disinterested help.

I don’t know what has happened at Censier since the end of May. When I left, sundry Trots were beginning to move in, ‘to politi- cize the leaflets’ (by which I presume they meant that the leaflets should now talk about ‘the need to build the revolutionary Party’). If they succeed - which I doubt, knowing the calibre of the Censier comrades - it will be a tragedy.

The leaflets were in fact political. During the whole of my short stay in France I saw nothing more intensely and relevantly po- litical (in the best sense of the term) than the sustained campaign emanating from Censier, a campaign for constant control of the struggle from below, for self-defence, for workers’-management of production, for popularising the concept of workers coun-

cils, for explaining to one and all the tre- mendous relevance, in a revolutionary situ- ation, of revolutionary demands, of organ- ised self-activity, of collective self-reliance.

As I left Cennier I could not help thinking how the place epitomised the crisis of mod- ern bureaucratic capitalism. Censier is no educational slum. It is an ultra-modern building, one of the show pieces of Gaullist ‘grandeur’. It has closed-circuit television in the lecture theatres, modern plumbing, and slot machines distributing 24 different kinds of food - in sterilised containers - and 10 different kinds of drink Over 90% of the students there are of petty bourgeois or bourgeois backgrounds Yet such is their re- jection of the society that nurtured them that they were working duplicators 24 hours a day turning out a flood of revolutionary literature of a kind no modern city has ever had pushed into it before. This kind of ac- tivity had transformed these students and had contributed to transforming the envi- ronment around them. They were simulta- neously disrupting the social structure and having the time of their lives. In the words of a slogan scrawled on the wall: “On n’est pas la pour s’emmerder” (you’ll have to look this one up in the dictionary).

Getting together

When the news of the first factory occupa- tion (that of the Sud Aviation plant at Nantes) reached the Sorbonne - late dur- ing the night of Tuesday 14 May - there were scenes of indescribable enthusiasm. Ses- sions were interrupted for the announce- ment. Everyone seemed to sense the signifi- cance of what had just happened. After a full minute of continuous, delirious cheer- ing, the audience broke into a synchronous, rhythmical clapping, apparently reserved for great occasions.

On Thursday 16 May the Renault factories at Cléon (near Rouen) and at Flins (North West of Paris) were occupied. Excited groups in the Sorbonne yard remained glued to their transistors as hour by hour news came over of further occupations. Enormous posters were put up, both inside and outside the Sorbonne, with the most up- to-date information of which factories had been occupied: the Nouvelles Messageries de Presse in Paris, Kléber Colombes at Caudebec, Dresser-Duiardin at Le Havre, the naval shipyard at Le Trait....and finally the Renault works at Boulogne Billancourt. Within 48 hours the task had to be aban- doned. No noticeboard - or panel of noticeboards - was large enough. At last the students felt that the battle had really been joined.

Early on the Friday afternoon an emergency ‘General Assembly’ was held. The meeting decided to send a big student deputation to the occupied Renault works. lts aim was to establish contact, express student solidar- ity and, if possible, discuss common prob- lems. The march was scheduled to leave the Place de la Sorbonne at 6pm. At about 5pm thousands of leaflets were suddenly distrib- uted in the amphitheatres, in the Sorbonne yard and in the streets around. They were signed by the Renault Bureau of the CGT.

The Communist Party had been working....fast. The leaflets read: “We have just heard that students and teachers are proposing to set out this afternoon in the direction of Renault. This decision was taken without consulting the appropriate trade union sections of the CGT, CFDT and FO. We greatly appreciate the solidarity of the students and teachers in the common struggle against the ‘pouvoir personnel’ (i.e. de Gaulle) and the employers, but are op- posed to any ill-judged initiative which might threaten our developing movement and facilitate a provocation which would lead to a diversion by the government. We strongly advise the organizers of this dem- onstration against preceding with their plans. We intend, together with the workers now struggling for their claims, to lead our own strike. We refuse any external interven- tion, in conformity with the declaration jointly signed by the CGT, CFDT and FO unions, and approved this morning by 23,000 workers belonging to the factory.’’

The distortion and dishonesty of this leaf- let defy description. No-one intended to in- struct the workers how to run the strike and no student would have the presumption to seek to assume its leadership. All that the students wanted was to express solidarity with the workers in what was now a com- mon struggle against the state and the employing class.

The CGT leaflet came like an icy shower to the less political students and to all those who still had illusions about Stalinism. “They won’t let us get through.’’ “The work- ers don’t want to talk with us.’’ The identifi- cation of workers with ‘their’ organizations is very hard to break down. Several hun- dred who had intended to march to Billancouad were probably put off, The UNEF vacillated, reluctant to lead the march in direct violation of the wishes of the CGT. Finally some 1500 people set out, under a single banner, hastily prepared by some Maoist students. The banner proclaimers ‘The strong hands of the work- ing class must now take over the torch from the fragile hands of the students’. Many joined the march who were not Maoists and who didn’t necessarily agree with this par- ticular formulation of its objectives.

Although small when compared to other marches, this was certainly a most politi- cal one. Practically everyone on it belonged to one or other of the ‘groupuscules’: a spon- taneous united front of Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists, the comrades of the Mouvement du 22 Mars and various others. Everyone knew exactly what he was doing. It was this that was so to infuriate the Communist Party. The march sets off noisily, crosses the Boulevard St Michel, and passes in front of the occupied Odeon Theatre (where several hundred more joyfully join it). It then pro- ceeds at a very brisk pace down the rue de Vaugirard, the longest street in Paris, to- wards the working class districts to the South West of the city, growing steadily in size and militancy as it advances. It is im- portant we reach the factory before the Stalinists have time to mobilize their big battalions....

Slogans such as “Avec nous, chez Renault’’ (come with us to Renault), “Le pouvoir est dans la rue’’ (power lies in the street), “Le pouvoir aux ouvriers’’ (power to the work- ers) are shouted lustily, again and again. The Maoists shout “A biz le gouvernement gaulliste anti-populaire de chomage et de mis’re’’ - a long and politically equivocal slo- gan, but one eminently suited to collective shouting. The Internationals bursts out re- peatedly, sung this time by people who seem to know the words - even the second verse! By the time we have marched the five milks to Issy-les-Moulineaux it is already dark. Way behind us now are the bright lights of the Latin Quarter and of the fash- ionable Paris known to tourists. We go through small, poorly-lit streets, the uncol- lected rubbish piled high. In places dozens of young people join us en route, attracted by the noise and the singing of revolution- ary songs such as ‘La Jeune Garde’, ‘Zimmerwald’, and the song of the Parti- sans, “chez Renault, chez Renault’’ the marchers shout. People congregate in the doors of the bistros, or peer out of the win- dows of crowded fiats to watch us pass. Some look on in amazement but many - possibly a majority - now clap or wave en- couragement. In some streets many Algeri- ans fine the pavement. Some join in the shouting of “CSCRS - SS” “Charonne” “A bás I’Etat policier’’ They have not forgotten. Most look on shyly or smile in an embar- rassed way. Very few join the march.

On we go, a few miles more. There isn’t a gendarme in sight. We cross the Seine and eventually slow down as we approach a square beyond which lie the Renault works. The streets here arc very badly-lit. There is a sense of intense excitement in the air. We suddenly come up against a lorry, parked across most of the road, and fitted with loud- speaker equipment. The march stops. On the lorry stands a CGT official. He speaks for five minutes. In somewhat chilly tones he says how pleased he is to see us. “Thank you for coming, comrades. We appreciate your solidarity. But please no provocations. Don’t go too near the gates as the manage- ment would use it as an excuse to call the police. And go home soon. It’s cold and you’ll

need all your strength in the days to come.’’ The students have brought their own loud hailers. One or two speak, briefly. They take note of the comments of the comrade from the CGT. They have no intention of provok- ing anyone, no wish to usurp anyone’s func- tions, We then slowly but quite deliberately move forwards into the square, on each side of the lorry, drowning the protests of about a hundred Stalinists in a powerful ‘lnternationale’. Workers in neighbouring cafes come out and join us. This time the Party had not had time to mobilize its mili- tants. It could not physically isolate us.

Part of the factory now looms up right ahead of us, three storeys high on our left, two sto- reys high on our right, In front of us, there is a giant metal gate, closed and bolted. A large first floor window to our right is crowded with workers. The front row sit with their legs dangling over the sill. Sev- eral seem in their teens’, one of them waves a big red flag. There are no ‘tricolores’ in sight - no ideal allegiance as in other occu- pied places I had seen. Several dozen more workers are on the roofs of the two build- ings. We wave. They wave back. We sing the ‘Internationale’. They join in. We give the clenched fist salute. They do likewise. Everybody cheers. Contact has been made. An interesting exchange takes place. A group of demonstrators starts shouting “Les usines aux ouvriers’’ (the factories to the workers). The slogan spreads like wildfire through the crowd. The Maoists, now in a definite minority, are rather annoyed. (Ac- cording to Chairman Mao, workers’ control is a petty-bourgeois, anarcho- syndicalist deviation.) “les usines aux ouvriers’’..10, 20 times the slogan reverberates round the Place Nationals, taken up by a crowd now some 3000 strong.

As the shouting subsides, a lone voice from one of the Renault roofs shouts back. “La Sorbonne aux Etudiants’’. Other workers on the same roof take it up. Then those on the other roof. By the volume of their voices they must be at be at least 100 of them, on top of each building. There is then a moment of silence. Everyone thinks the exchange has come to an end. But one of the demonstra- tors starts chanting’. “La Sorbonne aux

ouvriers’’. Amid general laughter, everyone joins in.

We start talking. A rope is quickly passed down from the window, a bucket at the end of it. Bottles of beer and packets of fags are passed up. Also revolutionary leaflets. Also bundles of papers (mainly copies of Server le Peuple - a Maoist journal carrying a big title ‘Vive la CGT’). At street level there are a number of gaps in the metal facade of the building. Groups of students cluster at these half-dozen openings and talk to groups of workers on the other side. They discuss wages, conditions, the CRS, what the lads inside need most, how the students can help. The men talk freely. They are not Party members. They think the constant talk of provocateurs a bit far-fetched. But the machines must be protected. We point out that two or three students inside the factory, escorted by the strike committee, couldn’t possibly damage the machines. They agree. We contrast the widely open doors of the Sorbonne with the heavy locks and bolts on the Renault gates - closed by the CGT officials to prevent the ideological contamination of ‘their’ militants. How silly, we say, to have to talk through these stu- pid little slits in the wall.

Again they agree. They will put it to their ‘dirigeants’ (leaders), No-one seems, as yet, to think beyond this. There is then a diver- sion. A hundred yards away a member of the FER gets up on a parked car and starts making a speech through a loud hailer. The intervention is completely out of tune with the dialogue that is just starting. It’s the same gramophone record we have been hearing all week at the Sorbonne. “Call on the union leaders to organise the election of strike committees in every factory. Force the union leaders to federate the strike commit- tees. Force the union leaders to set up a na- tional strike committee. Force them to call a general strike throughout the whole of the country’’ (this at a time when millions of workers are already on strike without any call whatsoever). The tone is strident, al- most hysterical, the misjudging of the mood monumental. The demonstrators them- selves drown the speaker in a loud ‘Internationale’. As the last bar fades the Trotskyist tries again. Again the demonstra- tors drown him, Groups stroll up the Av- enue Yves Kermen, to the other entrances to the factory. Real contact is here more dif- ficult to establish. There is a crowd outside the gate, but most of them are Party mem- bers. Some won’t talk at all, Others just talk slogans.

We walk back to the Square. It is now well past midnight. The crowd thins, Groups drop into a couple of cafes which are still open. Here we meet a whole group of young workers, aged about 18, They had been in the factory earlier in the day. They tell us that at any given time, just over 1000 work- ers are engaged in the occupation. The strike started on the Thursday afternoon, at about 2pm, when the group of youngsters from shop 70 decided to down tools and to spread into all parts of the factory asking their mates to do likewise. That same morn- ing they had heard of the occupation of

ClÈon and that the red flag was floating over the factory at Flins. There had been a [bit?] of talk about what to do. At a midday meeting tile CGT had spoken vaguely of a series of rotating strikes, shop by shop, to be initiated the following day. The move- ment spread at an incredible pace. The youngsters went round shouting “Occupa- tion! Occupation!’’. Half the factory had stopped working before the union officials realized what was happening. At about 4pm, Sylvain, a CGT secretary, had arrived with loudspeaker equipment to tell them “they weren’t numerous enough, to start work again, that they would see tomorrow about a one-day strike’’. He is absolutely by- passed. At 5pm Halbeher, general secretary of the Renault CGT, announces, pale as a sheet, that the “CGT has called for the oc- cupation of the factor’’. “Tell your friends’’, the lads say. “We started it. But will we be able to keep it in our hands? Ca, c’est un autre probl’me....’’

Students? Well, hats off to anyone who can thump the cops that hard! The lads tell us two of their mates had disappeared from the factory altogether 10 days ago “to help the Revolution’’. Left family, jobs, every- thing. And good luck to them. “A chance like this comes once in a lifetime.’’ We discuss plans, how to develop the movement. The occupied factory could be a ghetto, ‘isolant les durs’ (isolating the most militant). We talk about camping, the cinema, the Sorbonne, the future. Almost until sun- rise.... ‘Attention aux provocateurs’

Social upheavals, such as the one France has just been through, leave behind them a trail of shattered reputations. The image of Gaullism as a meaningful way of life, ‘ac- cepted’ by the French people, has taken a tremendous knock. But so has the image of the Communist Party as a viable challenge to the French Establishment, As far as the students are concerned the recent actions of the PCF (Parti Communiste Francais) are such that the Party has probably sealed its fate in this milieu for a generation to come, Among the workers the effects are more difficult to assess and it would be denature to attempt this assessment. All that can be said is that the effects are sure to be pro- found although they will probably take some time to express themselves. The pro- letarian condition itself was for a moment questioned. Prisoners who have had a glimpse of freedom do not readily resume a life sentence.

The full implications of the role of the PCF and of the CGT have yet to be appreciated by British revolutionaries, They need above all else to be informed. In this section we will document the role of the PCF to the best of our ability, It is important to realise that for every ounce of shit thrown at the students in its official publications, the Party poured tons more over them at meet- ings or in private conversations. In the na- ture of things it is more difficult to docu- ment this kind of slander.

Friday 3 May

A meeting was called in the yard of the Sorbonne by UNEF, JCR, MAU and FER

to protest at the closure of the Nanterre faculty. It was attended by militants of the Mouvement du 22 Mars. The police were called in by Rector Roche and activists from all these groups were arrested. The UEC (Union des Etudiants Communistes) didn’t participate in this campaign. But it distrib- uted a leaflet in the Sorbonne denouncing the activity of the ‘groupuscules’ (abbrevia- tion for ‘groupes miniscules’, tiny groups). “The leaders of the leftist groups are taking advantage of the shortcomings of the gov- ernment. They are exploiting student discon- tent and trying to stop the functioning of the faculties, They are seeking to prevent the mass of students from working and from passing their exams. These false revolution- aries are acting objectively as allies of the Gaullist power. They are acting as support- ers of its policies, which are harmful to the mass of the students and in particular to those of modest origin.’’ On the same day I’Humanité had written: “Certain small groups (anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists) composed mainly of the sons of the big bour- geoisie and led by the German anarchist Cohn-Bandit, are taking advantage of the shortcomings of the government....’’ etc.... (see above). The same issue of l’Humanité had published an article by Marchais, a member of the Party’s Central Committee. This article was to be widely distributed, as a leaflet, in factories and offices:

“Not satisfied with the agitation they are conducting in the student milieu - and agi- tation which is against the interests of the mass of the students and favours fascist pro- vocateurs - these pseudo- revolutionaries now have the nerve to seek to give lessons to the working class movement. We find them in increasing numbers at the gales of facto- ries and in places where immigrant work- ers live, distributing leaflets and other propaganda. These false revolutionaries must be unmasked, for objectively they are serving the interests of the Gaullist power and of the big capitalist monopolies.’’

Monday 6 May

The police have been occupying the Latin Quarter over the weekend. There have been big student street demonstrations. At the call of UNEF and SNESUP 20,000 students marched from Denfert Rochereau to St Germain des Prés calling for the liberation of the arrested workers and students. Re- peated police assaults on the demonstra- tors. 422 arrests, 800 wounded. L’Humanité states: “one can clearly see today the out- come of the adventurous actions of the left- ist, anarchist, Trotskyist and other groups. Objectively they are playing into the hands of the government.... The discredit into which they are bringing the student move- ment is helping feed the violent campaigns of the reactionary press and of the ORTF, who by identifying the actions of these groups with those of the mass of the students are seeking to isolate the students from the mass of the population....’’

Tuesday 7 May

UNEF and SNESUP call on their support- ers to start an unlimited strike. Before dis-

cussions with the authorities begin they insist on:

A. a stop to all legal action against the stu- dents and workers who have been ques- tioned, arrested or convicted in the course of the demonstrations of the last few days! B. the withdrawal of the police from the Latin Quaker and from all University premises, C. a reopening of the closed faculties.

In a statement showing how completely out of touch they were with the deep motives of the student revolt, the ‘Elected Communist Representatives of the Paris region’ de- clared in l’Humanité:

“The shortage of credits, of premises, of equipment, of teachers....prevent three stu- dents out of four from completing their stud- ies, without mentioning all those who never have access to higher education.... This situ- ation has caused profound and legitimate discontent among both students and teach- ers. It has also favoured the activity of irre- sponsible groups whose conceptions can of- fer no solution to the students’ problems. It is intolerable that the government should take advantage of the behaviour of an in- finitesimal minority to stop the studies of tens of thousands of students a few days from the exams....’’. The same issue of l’Humanité carried a statement from the ‘Sorbonne-Lettres’ (teachers) branch of the Communist Party: “The Communist teach- ers demand the liberation of the arrested students and the reopening of the Sorbonne. Conscious of our responsibilities, we specify that this solidarity does not mean that we agree with or support the slogans emanat- ing from certain student organizations. We disapprove of unrealistic, demagogic and anti-communist slogans and of the unwar- ranted methods of action advocated by vari- ous leftist groups.’’

On the same day Georges Séguy, general secretary of the CGT, spoke to the Press about the programme of the Festival of Working Class Youth (scheduled for May 17- 19, but subsequently cancelled):

“The solidarity between students, teachers and the working class is a familiar notion to the militants of the CGT.., It is precisely this tradition that compels us not to toler- ate any dubious or provocative elements, el- ements which criticise the working class or- ganisations’’.

Wednesday 8 May

A big students’ demonstration called by UNEF has taken place in the streets of Paris the previous evening. The front page of l’Humanité carries a statement from the Party Secretariat:

“The discontent of the students is legitimate. But the situation favours adventuring ac- tivities, whose conception offers no perspec- tive to the students and has nothing in com- mon with a really progressive and forward- looking policy,’’ In the same issue, J. M. Ca- bala, general secretary of the UEC (Union des Etudiants Communistes) writes that: “the actions of irresponsible groups are as- sisting the Establishment in its aims....

What we must do is ask for a bigger educa- tional budget which would ensure bigger student grants, the appointment of more and better qualified teachers, the building of new faculties....’’

The UJCF (Union des Jeunesses Communistes de France) and the UJFF (Union des Jeunes Filies Francaises) dis- tribute a leaflet in a number of lycees. l’Humanité quotes it approvingly..

“We protest against the police violence un- leashed against the students. We demand the reopening of Nanterre and of the Sorbonne and the liberation of all those arrested. We denounce the Gaullist power as being mainly (!) responsible for this situation. We also denounce the adventuring of certain irre- sponsible groups and call on the Lycéens to fight side by side with the working class and its Communist Party....’’.

Monday 13 May

Over the weekend Pompidou has climbed down. But the unions, the UNEF and the teachers have decided to maintain their call for a one-day, general strike. On its front page l’Humanité publishes, in enormous headlines, a call for the 24-hour strike fol- lowed by a statement from the Political Bureau.

“The unity of the working class and of the students threatens the regime.... This cre- ates an enormous problem. It is essential that no provocation, no diversion should be allowed to divert any of the forces struggling against the regime or should give the gov- ernment the flimsiest pretext to distort the meaning of this great fight. The Communist Party associates itself without reservation with the just struggle of the students....’’

Wednesday 15 May

The enormous Monday demonstrations in Paris and other towns - which incidentally prevented l’Humanité as well as other pa- pers from appearing on the Tuesday - were a tremendous success. In a sense they trig- gered off the ‘spontaneous’ wave of strikes which followed within a day or two. l’Humanité publishes, on its front pages a

statement issued the day before by the Par- ty’s Political Bureau, After taking all the credit for May 13, the statement continues:

“The People of Paris marched for hours in the streets of the capital showing a power which made any provocation impossible. The Party organizations worked day and night to ensure that this great demonstra- tion of workers, teachers and students should take place in maximum unity, strength and discipline.... It is now clear that the Establishment confronted with the pro- tests and collective action of all the main sections of the population, will seek to di- vide us in the hope of beating us. It will re- sort to all methods, including provocation. The Political Bureau warns workers and students against any adventurous endeav- ours which might, in the present circum- stances, dislocate the broad front of the struggle which is in the process of develop- ing, and provide the Gaullist power with an unexpected weapon with which to consoli- date its shaky rule....’’

Saturday 18 May

Over the past 48 hours, strikes with fac- tory occupations have spread like a trail of gunpowder, from one corner of the country to the other. The railways are paralysed, civil airports fly the red flag. (‘provocateurs’ have obviously been at work!) L’Humanité publishes on its front page a declaration from the National Committee of the CGT:

“From hour to hour strikes and factory oc- cupations are spreading. This action, started on the initiative of the CGT and of other trade union organizations (sic), creates a new situation of exceptional importance.... Long- accumulated popular discontent is now finding expression. The questions be- ing asked must be answered seriously and full notice taken of their importance. The evolution of the situation is giving a new dimension to the struggle.... While multiply- ing its efforts to raise the struggle to the needed level, the National Committee warns all CGT militants and local groups against any attempts by outside groups to meddle in the conduct of the struggle, and against all arts of provocation which might assist the forces of repression in their attempts to

thwart the development of the movement..’’

The same issue of the paper devoted a whole page to warning students of the fallacy of any notions of ‘student power’ - en passant - attributing to the ‘Mouvement du 22 Mars’ a whole series of political positions they had never held.

Monday 20 May

The whole country is totally paralysed. The Communist Party is still warning about ‘provocations’. The top right hand corner of l’Humanité contains a box labelled ‘WARN- ING’’:

“Leaflets have been distributed in the Paris area calling for an insurrectionary general strike, it goes without saying that such ap- peals have not been issued by our democratic trade union organizations. They are the work of provocateurs seeking to provide the government with a pretext for intervention.... The workers must be vigilant to defeat all such manoeuvres....”

In the same issue, Etienne Fajon of the Central Committee, continues the warn- ings..

“The Establishment’s main preoccupation at the moment is to divide the ranks of the working class and to divide it from other sections of the population.... Our Political Bureau has warned workers and students, from the very beginning, against venturing slogans capable of dislocating the broad front of the struggle. Several provocations have thus been prevented. Our political vigi- lance must clearly be maintained....’’

The same issue devoted its central pages to an interview of Mr Georges Séguy, general secretary of, the CGT, conducted over the Europe No 1 radio network. In these live interviews, various listeners phoned ques- tions in directly. The following exchanges are worth recording:

Question: Mr Séguy, the workers on strike are everywhere saying that they will go the whole hog. What do you mean by this? What are your objectives?

Answer: The strike is so powerful that the workers obviously mean to obtain the maxi- mum concessions at the end of such a move- ment. The whole hog for us trade unionists, means winning the demands that we have always fought for, but which the government and the employers have always refused to consider. They have opposed an obtuse in- transigence to the proposals for negotiations which we have repeatedly made. The whole hog means a general rise in wages (no wages less than 600 francs per month), guaranteed employment, an earlier retirement age, re- duction of working hours without loss of wages and the defence and extension of trade union rights within the factory. I am not putting these demands in any particular order because we attach the same impor- tance to all of them.

Question: If I am not mistaken the stat- utes of the CGT declare its aims to be the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. In the present circumstances, that you have yourself referred to as ‘excep-

tional’ and ‘important’, why doesn’t the COT seize this unique chance of calling for its fundamental objectives?’

Answer: This is a very interesting question. I like it very much. It is true that the CGT offer the workers a concept of trade union- ism that we consider the most revolution- ary insofar as its final objective is the end of the employing class and of wage labour. It is true that this is the first of our statutes. It remains fundamentally the CGT’S objective. But can the present movement reach this objective? If it became obvious that it could, we would be ready to assume our responsi- bilities. It remains to be seen whether all the social strata involved in the present move- ment are ready to go that far’’

Question: Since last week’s events l have gone everywhere where people are arguing. I went this afternoon to the Odeon Theatre. Masses of people were discussing there, I can assure you that all the classes who suffer from the present regime were represented there. When I asked whether people thought that the movement should go further than the small demands put forward by the trade unions for the last 10 or 20 years, I brought the house down. I therefore think that it would be criminal to miss the present op- portunity. It would be criminal because sooner or later this will have to be done. The conditions of today might allow us to do it peacefully and calmly and will perhaps never come back. I think this call must be made by you and the other political organi- zations. These political organizations are not your business, of course, but the CGT is a revolutionary organization. You must bring out your revolutionary flag. The workers are astounded to see you so timid.

Answer: While you were bathing in the Odeon fever, I was in the factories. Amongst workers. I assure you that the answer I am giving you is the answer of a leader of a great trade union, which claims to have assumed all its responsibilities, but which does not confuse its wishes with reality.

Caller: I would like to speak to Mr Séguy. My name is Duvauchel. l am the director of the Sud Aviation factory at Nantes.

Séguy: Good morning, sir.

Duvauchel: Good morning, Mr General Secretary. I would like to know what you think of the fact that for the last four days I have been sequestrated, together with about 20 other managerial staff, inside the Sud Aviation factory at Nantes.

Séguy: Has anyone raised a hand against you.

Duvauchel: No. But I am prevented from leaving, despite the fact that the general manager of the firm has intimated that the firm was prepared to make positive propos- als as soon as free access to its factory could be resumed, and first of all to its manage- rial staff.

Séguy: Have you asked to leave the factory?

Duvauchel: Yes!

Séguy: Was permission refused?

Duvauchel: Yes!

Séguy: Then I must refer you to the decla- ration I made yesterday at the CGT’S press conference. I stated that I disapproved of such activities. We are taking the necessary steps to see they are not repeated.

But enough is enough. The Revolution it- self will doubtless be denounced by the

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Stalinists as a provocation! By way of an epilogue it is worth recording that at a packed meeting of revolutionary students, held at the Mutuality on Thursday 9 May, a spokesman of the Trotskyist organization Communiste Internationalists could think of nothing better to do than call on the meet- ing to pass a resolution calling on Séguy to call a general strike!!!

Virtually every layer of French society has been involved to some extent or other. Hun- dreds of thousands of people of all ages have discussed every aspect of life in packed-out, non-stop meetings in every available schoolroom and lecture hall. Boys of 14 have invaded a primary school for girls shouting “Liberté pour les filles’’. Even such tradition- ally reactionary enclaves as the Faculties of Medicine and Law have been shaken from top to bottom, their hallowed procedures and institutions challenged and found want- ing. Millions have taken a hand in making history. This is the stuff of revolution.

Under the influence of the revolutionary students, thousands began to query the whole principle of hierarchy. The students had questioned it where it seemed the most ‘natural’: in the realms of teaching and knowledge. They proclaimed that demo- cratic self-management was possible - and to prove it began to practice it themselves. They denounced the monopoly of informa- tion and produced millions of leaflets to break it. They attacked some of the main pillars of contemporary ‘civilisation’: the barriers between manual workers and in- tellectuals; the consumer society, the ‘sanc- tity’ of the university and of other founts of capitalist culture and wisdom. Within a matter of days the tremendous creative po- tentialities of the people suddenly erupted. The boldest and most realistic ideas - and they are usually the same - were advocated, argued, applied. Language, rendered stale by decades of bureaucratic mumbo- jumbo, eviscerated by those who manipulate it for advertising purposes, suddenly reappeared as something new and fresh. People re-ap- propriated it in all its fullness. Magnifi- cently apposite and poetic slogans emerged from the anonymous crowd. Children ex- plained to their elders what the function of education should be. The educators were educated. Within a few days, young people of 20 attained a level of understanding and a political and tactical sense which many who had been in the revolutionary move- ment for 30 years or more were still sadly lacking.

France, 1968 (original conclusion) This has undoubtedly been the greatest revolutionary upheaval in Western Eu- rope since the days of the Paris Commune. Hundreds of thousands of students have fought pitched battles with the police. Nine million workers have been on strike. The red flag of revolt has flown over occupied factories, universities, building sites, shipyards, primary and secondary schools, pit heads, railway sta- tions, department stores, docked transatlantic liners, theatres, hotels. The Paris Opera, the Folies Berg’res and the building of the National Council for Scien- tific Research were taken over, as were the headquarters of the French Football Federation - whose aim was clearly perceived as being “to prevent ordinary foot- ballers enjoying football”.

The tumultuous development of the stu- dents struggle triggered off the first factory occupations. It transformed both the rela- tion of forces in society and the image, in people’s minds of established leaders. It compelled the State to institutions and of established reveal both its oppressive na- ture and its fundamental incoherence. It exposed the utter emptiness of Govern- ment, Parliament, Administration - and of ALL the political parties. Unarmed stu- dents had forced the Establishment to drop its mask, to sweat with fear, to resort to the police club and to the gas grenade. Students finally compelled the bureaucratic leader- ships of the ‘working class organisations’ to reveal themselves as the ultimate custodi- ans of the established order.

But the revolutionary movement did still more. It fought its battles in Paris, not in some under-developed country, exploited by imperialism. In a glorious few weeks the actions of students and young workers dis- pelled the myth of the well-organised, well- oiled modern capitalist society, from which radical conflict had been eliminated and in which only marginal problems remained to be solved. Administrators who had been administering everything were suddenly shown to have had a grasp of nothing. Plan- ners who had planned everything showed themselves incapable of ensuring the en-

dorsement of their plans by those to whom they applied. This most modern movement should allow real revolutionaries to shed a number of the ideological encumbrances which in the past had hampered revolution- ary activity. It wasn’t hunger which drove the students to revolt. There wasn’t an ‘eco- nomic crisis’ even in the loosest sense of the term. The revolt had nothing to do with ‘un- der-consumption’ or with ‘over-production’, The ‘falling rate of profit’ just didn’t come into the picture. Moreover, the student movement wasn’t based on economic de- mands. On the contrary, the movement only found its real stature, and only evoked its tremendous response, when it went beyond the economic demands within which official student unionism had for so long sought to contain it (incidentally with the blessing of all the political parties and ‘revolutionary’ groups of the ‘Left’). And conversely it was by confining the workers’ struggle to purely economic objectives that the trade union bureaucrats have so far succeeded in com- ing to the assistance of the regime.

The present movement has shown that the fundamental contradiction of modern bu- reaucratic capitalism isn’t the ‘anarchy of the market’. It isn’t the ‘contradiction be- tween the forces of production and the prop- erty relations’. The central conflict to which all others are related is the conflict between order-givers (dirigeants) and order-takers (Èxécutants). The insoluble contradiction which tears the guts out of modern capital- ist society is the one which compels it to exclude people from the management of their own activities and which at the same time compels it to solicit their participation, without which it would collapse. These ten- dencies find expression on the one hand in the attempt of the bureaucrats to convert men into objects (by violence, mystification, new manipulation techniques — or ‘eco- nomic carrots’ and, on the other hand, in mankind’s refusal to allow itself to be treated in this way.

The French events show clearly something that all revolutions have shown, but which apparently has again and again to be learned anew. There is no ‘in built revolu- tionary perspective’, no ‘gradual increase of contradictions’, no ‘progressive development of a revolutionary mass consciousness’. What are given are the contradictions and

the conflicts we have described and the fact that modern bureaucratic society more of less inevitably produces periodic ‘accidents’ which disrupt its functioning. These both provoke popular intervention and provide the people with opportunities for asserting themselves and for changing the social or- der. The functioning of bureaucratic capi- talism creates the conditions within which revolutionary consciousness may appear. These conditions are an integral part of the whole alienating hierarchical and oppres- sive social structure. Whenever people struggle, sooner or later they are compelled to question the whole of that social struc- ture. These are ideas which many of us in Solidarity have long subscribed to. They were developed at length in some of Paul Cardan’s pamphlets. Writing in Le Monde (20 May 1968) E. Morin admits that what is happening today in France is “a blinding resurrection: the resurrection of that liber- tarian strand which seeks conciliation with Marxism, in a formula of which Socialisme ou Barbarie had provided a first synthesis a few years ago.....” As after every verifica- tion of basic concepts in the crucible of real events, many will proclaim that these had always been their views. This, of course isn’t true.’ The point however isn’t to lay claims to a kind of copyright in the realm of cor- rect revolutionary ideas. We welcome con- verts, from whatever sources and however belated. We can’t deal here at length with what is now an important problem in France, namely the creation of a new kind of revolutionary movement. Things would indeed have been different if such a move- ment had existed, strong enough to outwit the bureaucratic manoeuvred, alert enough day by day to expose the duplicity of the ‘left’ leaderships, deeply enough implanted to explain to the workers the real meaning of the students’ struggle, to propagate the idea of autonomous strike committees (link- ing up union and non-union members); of workers’ management of production and of workers’ councils. Many things which could have been done weren’t done because there wasn’t such a movement. The way the students’ own struggle was unleashed shows that such an organization could have played a most impotent catalytic role without automatically becoming a bu- reaucratic ‘leadership’. But such regrets are futile. The non-existence of such a move- ment is no accident, If it had been formed during the previous period it certainly wouldn’t have been the kind of movement of which we are speaking, Even taking the ‘best’ of the small organizations — and multiplying its numbers a hundredfold - wouldn’t have met the requirements of the current situation. When confronted with the test of events all the ‘left’ groups just con- tinued playing their old gramophone records, Whatever their merits as deposi- tories of the cold ashes of the revolution - a task they have now carried out for several decades - they proved incapable of snapping out of their old ideas and routines, incapa- ble of learning or of forgetting anything.

The new revolutionary movement will have to be built from the new elements (students and workers) who have understood the real

significance of current events. The revolu- tion must step into the great political void revealed by the crisis of the old society. It must develop a voice, a face, a paper - and it must do it soon. We can understand the reluctance of some students to form such an organization. They feel there is a con- tradiction between action and thought, be- tween spontaneity and organization. Their hesitation is fed by the whole of their pre- vious experience, They have seen how thought could become sterilizing dogma, organization become bureaucracy or lifeless ritual, speech become a means of mystifi- cation, a revolutionary idea become a rigid and stereotyped programme. Through their actions, their boldness, their reluctance to consider long-term aims, they had broken out of this straight-jacket. But this isn’t enough.

Moreover many of them had sampled the traditional ‘left’ groups. In all their funda- mental aspects these groups remain trapped within the ideological and organi- zational frameworks of bureaucratic capi- talism. They have programmes fixed once and for all, leaders who utter fixed speeches, whatever the changing reality around them, organizational forms which mirror those of existing society. Such groups reproduce within their own ranks the division between order-takers and order-givers, between those who ‘know’ and those who don’t, the separation between scholastic pseudo- theory and real life. They would even like to impose this division into the working class, whom they all aspire to lead, because (and I was told this again and again) “the

workers are only capable of developing a trade union consciousness’’.

But these students are wrong. One doesn’t get beyond bureaucratic organization by denying all organization. One doesn’t chal- lenge the sterile rigidity of finished pro- grammes by refusing to define oneself in terms of aims and methods. One doesn’t refute dead dogma by the condemnation of all theoretical reflection. The students and young workers can’t just stay where they are. To accept these ‘contradictions’ as valid and as something which cannot be tran- scended is to accept the essence of bureau- cratic capitalist ideology. It is to accept the prevailing philosophy and the prevailing reality. It is to integrate the revolution into an established historical order if the revo- lution is only an explosion lasting a few days (or weeks), the established order - whether it knows it or not - will be able to cope. What is more - at a deep level class society even needs such jolts. This kind of ‘revolution’ permits class society to survive by compel- ling it to transform and adapt itself. This is the real danger today. Explosions which disrupt the imaginary world in which al- ienated societies tend to live — and bring them momentarily down to earth help them eliminate outmoded methods of domination and evolve new and more flexible ones. Ac- tion or thought? For revolutionary social- ists the problem is not to make a synthesis of these two preoccupations of the revolu- tionary students. It is to destroy the social context in which such false alternatives find root.

Text history: This text is mostly from the original pamphlet published by Solidarity (undated) as “Paris: May 1968 Non a la Bureaucratie Solidarity Pamphlet 30 15p”. However after correcting 60% of the scan it was pointed out to me that text was already on the Class against Class website. So the last 40% is taken from that site, their text was based on the edition published jointly by Dark Star Press and Rebel Press, 1986. Quite a number of proof- reading corrections were made to this text.

The original solidarity pamphlet also contained a note saying 6,000 copies had already been sold. It also included a review of ‘France: The struggle goes on’ by Tony Cliff and Ian Birchall running to 10 pages of which the note said “the review stressed not only our interpretation of the Paris events, but how it differed from that of the traditional Marx- ists”. This review was apparently published originally in Solidarity, Volume V, number 4. Unfortunately in the pamphlet I have the review is printed onto bright orange paper which is essentially unscannable!

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