I. A. i.
THE CAMPUS OF Nanterre-Paris X had been built among shanty-towns beyond the western edge of the city, on seventy-nine acres of former terrain militaire. The origin of the name ‘Nanterre’ is Nempthor, from Nemptodurum, meaning ‘hill-fort of the sacred wood or clearing’. The earth consisted mainly of compacted garbage and builders’ rubble. Cars circulated easily, but not pedestrians. Thirteen thousand students were housed in buildings made of concrete blocks and windows that were always dirty. Some of the rooms looked down on shacks where immigrant workers from Portugal and North Africa lived under sheets of corrugated iron. It was 1967. On beaches in the south of France, naked breasts and perfect tans were a common sight. Women used sun-tan lotion; men lay on their stomachs in the sand. Some people went to naturist colonies in pine forests and formed temporary ménages based on sexual excitement and socio-economic equality.
At Nanterre-Paris X, male and female students were housed in separate buildings. They had yet to see the benefits of the Neuwirth Law of 28 December 1967, which legalized the contraceptive pill, but many of them had read or had heard about D. H. Lawrence, the Surrealists, Wilhelm Reich, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Marcuse and Simone de Beauvoir. Publicity campaigns by holiday providers such as Club Méditerranée proved that sexual liberation was available to the salaried, middle-class population independently of ideology. In three or four years, the majority of students at Nanterre would occupy positions assigned to them by the state and, as they had learned to conceptualize the matter, contribute to the exploitation of the proletariat.
Since 1965, women had been allowed to work and to open a bank account without the permission of a father or a husband. Their mothers had been granted the right to vote in 1944. Sexual liberation was only part of what was known as ‘expanding the domain of the possible’. Pregnancy remained a serious risk and abortion was illegal, but a wide range of other options was available. The monthly magazines Elle and Marie-Claire had already broached the subjects of heavy petting, oral sex, orgasm, love in a physical relationship and the use of ‘beauty products’. Almost half of each issue was devoted to advertising. The models were depicted in positions of sexual availability. Bodies engaged in unorthodox sexual acts could also be discerned in photographs of bottles of mineral water and vermouth. The total wattage available to the average household had more than doubled since before the Second World War, and women were said in the advertisements to have been ‘liberated’ by household electrical items.
The chief impediment to interpersonal sex at Nanterre was a regulation banning male students from female premises. The academic authorities were thought to have imagined nocturnal orgies, though intercourse was just as likely to occur in the early morning when the banging of garbage trucks and the scream of two-stroke motorcycle engines brought the partners to mutual semi-consciousness. It seemed a ridiculous restriction of individual freedom. A concrete tower containing several hundred hypothetically liberated young females, some of whom wore miniskirts and synthetic pullovers, seemed a throwback to the Middle Ages. The Americans were fighting an imperialist war in Vietnam. Radical thinkers were questioning the bases of Western civilization. Some rock stars were not much older than students at Nanterre.
I. A. ii.
IT WAS IN MARCH, when the weather improved, that the trouble began. The doors to the girls’ dormitory were locked, but only in a ritual fashion, because the janitorial staff knew that they could be opened with moderate force within thirty seconds. The doors were forced open, and soon afterwards, boys were circulating freely in the girls’ dormitory.
The action was welcomed by most of the professors at Nanterre, because they disapproved of the segregation of students, and the majority of them were sociologists, political scientists and authorities on Romantic and Post-Romantic literature. Apart from radio, television and newspaper reporters, no one beyond the campus gave the dormitory revolt much thought, except of a speculative, mildly pornographic nature. The commonly expressed view at Nanterre was that structures had to be changed on several levels to reflect changing mentalities. Some students decided to postpone their political involvement until they had spent a year or two reading and reflecting; others stressed the need to adapt to what they saw as a public service (the university). It was generally agreed, however, that the academic authorities, who represented the government and the capitalist system, should grant them certain rights. The abrogation of a rule was almost insignificant. It was not as if mind-expanding drugs and gratuitous acts of violence had been legalized.
For a time, instead of creeping through ground-floor windows, boys infiltrated the female blocks without impediment. They brought wine, cigarettes, Tunisian pâtisseries, hot dogs and erections. Some girls became lonelier as a result, and the structure and conduct of discussions changed. Boys were able to generate larger quantities of discourse proportionate to the amount of text they had read. Socially, the change was small. The ciné-club was just as well attended. Girls remained more active in the provision of amenities and entertainment than in political committees. It is probably true, as some historians insist, that the dormitory revolt at Nanterre in 1967 should not be seen as the prologue to the more serious events that followed.
I. B. i.
THE FOLLOWING YEAR, 8 January (a Monday) was marked by the opening of an Olympic-size swimming pool at Nanterre by the Minister for Youth and Sport.
In 1968, an Olympic-size swimming pool on a university campus was an overdetermined space characterized by a complex network of social structures and global capitalist tendencies. On one level, it was a place where boys and girls could enact a visual exchange without implicating themselves in a contractual obligation. Swimwear exposed up to nine-tenths of the body, and packaged and commodified the remaining parts. Exchanges took place, however, not in the quasi-natural setting of a beach or a pine forest, but in a refrigerative environment of laminated tiles and chlorinated water. Boys who went to a swimming pool with the thought of picking up girls (a practice known as draguer, which means ‘to dredge’ or ‘to trawl’) found their penises reduced to prepubescent dimensions. Moreover, use of the swimming pool implied a certain competitiveness in the interests of the state: health and healthiness, national athletic dominance, and so on. The Minister for Youth and Sport had recently launched his ‘thousand clubs’ policy, which promised to fund places of recreation and to give young people administrative control over the clubs. They would be able to tailor the clubs’ services to local demand by providing ping-pong, flipper, baby-foot and coffee produced by the high-pressure brewing process. The minister had published a thick report titled Le Livre blanc de la jeunesse, in which the positive views of young people were recorded.
I. B. ii.
THE OPENING CEREMONY took place in the evening, after classes. The minister’s speech was interrupted by a red-haired student with an open collar and a cheeky, pugnacious face. He was afterwards known as ‘Dany le Rouge’ and identified as the son of German Jews who had fled to France. ‘M. le Ministre,’ he said, ‘I have read your White Book on Youth. In three hundred pages, there is not one single mention of the sexual problems of young people.’
The Neuwirth Law had come into effect eleven days before. The cost of the pill was not covered by social security, and any woman who had started taking the pill on the day the law was passed was still impregnable. The minister’s retort was not widely reported, because the chief point of interest was felt to be the student’s audacious interruption. ‘With a face like yours,’ said the minister, ‘you must be quite familiar with such problems. I cannot recommend too highly a dip in the swimming pool.’
Document 1: Conclusions of Le Livre blanc de la jeunesse
The young French person hopes to marry young but worries about bringing children into the world before he has the means to bring them up correctly. His number one objective is professional success. In the meantime, he saves what he can from his modest earnings – the young man hopes to buy a car, the young girl to make her trousseau. The young French person takes an interest in all the big problems of today but has no desire to rush into politics. 72% of young people are of the opinion that the right to vote should not be given to the under-21s. They do not believe that war is imminent, and think that the future depends above all on industrial efficiency, internal order and the cohesion of the population.
I. C. i.
THE NANTERRE swimming pool incident, rather than the dormitory revolt, is now thought to be a significant forerunner of the later troubles. Many other acts of rebellion could be cited. For example, during the traditional New Year’s reception, the Dean of Nanterre, his wife and their four guests left their seats of honour to collect food from the buffet when (as the dean recalled twenty-five years later) they noticed four young sociology professors removing their bags and belongings and taking their seats. The dean then remembered the warning given by his friend Raymond Aron, when he had learned that Nanterre was to have a sociology department: ‘By its very nature, this discipline will engender action groups that will create tensions and agitation. Beware of sociologists! They’ll make a mess of everything!’
I. C. ii.
AS EXAMINATIONS loomed, rebellious behaviour began to affect the educational process itself. Previously, professors had delivered their lectures to fifteen hundred or two thousand students packed into an amphitheatre. The students scribbled notes, chatted and read the newspaper. One professor likened the experience to ‘talking in the concourse of the Gare Saint-Lazare’. Sometimes, the professors saw their students at an oral examination, and were struck by their ‘encyclopedic ignorance’. Now, lectures were being interrupted by students who demanded the right to speak and then lectured the professor on his pedagogical backwardness and his role as a tool of state repression.
The media took a keen interest in youthful rebellion, and so, before long, television viewers (potentially half the population) were treated to the unusual spectacle of students holding press conferences. The students sat like examiners behind a trestle table, talking into microphones. They blew out clouds of smoke, wagged their fingers at the audience and used terms from sociology and political science which, to many viewers, seemed incongruously professorial. They expressed themselves in the form of questions, to which they supplied the answers, following a rhetorical model to which they were accustomed. ‘Why are we in revolt? Because the ruling class is trying to condition our daily life. Why is it trying to do that? Because Western imperialism is opposed to all forms of popular culture. Why is it opposed to popular culture? Because, in the final analysis, this is a class struggle.’
This form of exposition, commonly used with passive audiences, allowed objections to be answered before they were raised by an antagonist: ‘Are we not members of the bourgeoisie ourselves? Yes, but, as such, we must use our freedom to criticize and, if need be, to overturn the state. What would be the result of such a revolution? The result would be, not the simple embourgeoisement of the proletariat and the insertion of the sons of the proletariat into managerial positions, but the abolition of the distinction between labour and management.’
Despite superficial differences, this was roughly in line with Gaullist policy, which, since 1945, had striven to increase the involvement of workers in the running of factories (a practice known as cogestion). For the téléspectateurs, the interest of such conferences lay in the exciting usurpation of institutional authority, the flouting of generational power structures and in the references to media manipulation, which added a degree of self-reflection and unpredictability not normally seen in government-controlled public broadcasting. Furthermore, whereas representatives of the government and the university were distinguished by drab items of clothing purchased as ensembles, the students’ clothing (knitwear, scarves, second-hand jackets, etc.) showed signs of what the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss termed bricolage – the improvisational use of manufactured objects for purposes other than those for which they were intended, normally associated with primitive, pre-capitalist societies.
I. C. iii.
ON 20 MARCH, students protesting against the war in Vietnam smashed the windows of the American Express offices near the Opera and daubed slogans on the walls. Two days after that, six Nanterre students were arrested in a pro-Vietcong demonstration. This confirmed the view of many commentators that ‘nanterrisme’ was part of an international youth movement rather than a specifically French phenomenon.
On returning to Nanterre that evening, militant students filed through a small door marked ‘Entrance reserved for administrative staff and professors’. Pushing past a pair of startled administrators, they climbed to the top floor of the highest building on the campus and entered the Council Chamber. Its dominant position was felt to reflect the authoritarian nature of the educational régime. They sprayed some slogans on the walls (‘Teachers, you are old, and so is the culture you teach’) and passed a resolution. The students agreed to called themselves the 22nd of March Movement, by allusion to Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. Shortly afterwards, they were given an assembly room in which to hold their political meetings and renamed it the Che Guevara Room.
I. D. i.
FOR THE téléspectateurs who saw these images of student revolt, this was indeed, as the commentators insisted, ‘a strange new phenomenon’. The youth of Paris had been subtracted from the city as though by a bureaucratic Pied Piper and placed in a ‘learning factory’. They had been parcelled up and ejected en masse along the line of the Champs-Élysées to land in the former terrain militaire in the far west of the conurbation. Once there, they were fed on predigested information marketed as ‘knowledge’ and dispensed by professors who were little more than vending machines. Most of the students were in their early twenties and came from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth arrondissements of Paris. More than ninety per cent of them were of bourgeois parentage (upper and middle management, liberal professions, civil service), but their parents were either unwilling or not wealthy enough to provide them with better accommodation. A ‘concrete cube’ at Nanterre cost ninety francs a month; an unfurnished room in Paris with no water or gas cost one hundred and fifty francs a month.
I. D. ii.
BECAUSE OF an administrative failure to anticipate the explosion in the student population, the range of activities at Nanterre was comparatively small. There was the ciné-club, the subsidized restaurant, a cafeteria with a hundred seats, the possibility of taking a train to Paris, hitchhiking out to ‘the country’ or cooking a pot of stew in a communal kitchenette and sharing it with friends. Some of the students volunteered to work with children of the shanty towns. They helped them with their French and taught them to recognize parts of speech and the different tenses. Many of their contemporaries were riding Vespas or Vélosolex, buying records, practising macramé and scoubidou to produce items such as key-strings and lampshades; they visited shopping centres and airports, and lived in situations more conducive to the cultivation of sexual or romantic relationships. At Nanterre, friends were either an obtrusive presence or a prophylactic against anxiety and alienation. Services aimed at young people, such as the popular radio programme and magazine Salut les Copains (‘Hi, Gang’), were seen as a form of paternalism and were largely devoid of intellectual content.
The student revolt promised to enlarge the range of activities and to target services more accurately. However, in the absence of capital, these activities were often of a symbolic nature: displaying pictures of Trotsky or Mao Tse-tung, eating sandwiches in a lecture hall, carpeting an office floor with cigarette-ends, organizing political ‘groupuscules’.
Ironically, the student leaders appeared on television not just as ‘people in the news’ but as consumers and objects of visual consumption. They were, to quote the subtitle of Jean-Luc Godard’s film of 1966, Masculin Féminin, ‘the children of Marx and Coca-Cola’. They possessed the marketable qualities of youth, elegance and wit. Their long hair conformed to commercial models of youth such as the Beatles and Alain Delon. Although the students’ ideological referents were specialized and professional – Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, etc. – their sentiments were recognizable as those of the yé-yé songs that dominated the hit parade, which, as yet, showed few signs of the market segmentation that was so noticeable in Britain and America: ‘Il ne restera rien’ (‘There’ll Be Nothing Left’), ‘Je ne sais pas ce que je veux’ (‘I Don’t Know What I Want’), ‘Ma jeunesse fout le camp’ (‘My Youth Is Going Out The Door’). The interviewers tended to ignore the politico-philosophical debate and sought out female students whose faces and clothing corresponded to the tastes of the téléspectateurs. They did not try to belittle or humiliate them, though they did often flirt with them in order to produce a telegenic reaction or to implicate the viewer in the process of seduction.
Document 2
A documentary on Nanterre and ‘nanterrisme’ was screened by the public broadcasting agency, ORTF, on 26 March 1968. It gave a sympathetic view of the range of student opinions, and aroused feelings in the audience that affected initial perceptions of the May revolt. Much of the documentary was filmed in a small, crowded room in which a dozen sociology students were sharing a pot of stew served in two stainless-steel pans and a Le Creuset cooking pot. The atmosphere, at first, was noisy and convivial.
A traditional anthropologist might not have considered the film a particularly valuable document because of the male interviewer’s interference with the principal interviewee – an attractive female student dressed in a thin, striped pullover and a short skirt. She appeared eloquent, affable, rather timid, but keen to answer the questions accurately. The camera showed her face in close-up and made her eyes and mouth the centre of attention. In the cramped conditions, the interviewer occasionally obtruded in the form of a wave of dark hair or a black-sleeved arm suddenly raised to consult a gold wristwatch. The student sat with her bare knees clutched to her chest and appeared to be slightly overshadowed by the interviewer. At first, the hubbub in the room almost drowned out some of her answers, but as the interview proceeded, the room became noticeably quieter.
You’re a student of what?
Last year, I was in sociology; and this year, I’m doing a diploma on demographics. In fact…I’m doing a study of the research that’s been carried out into the fertility of oppressed women.
That’s a very serious subject… Yes. It’s a subject I find really interesting because it’s about women.
You used to live in Reims, I think you told me. Yes, I was living in Reims.
And you’ve been at the hall of residence…
I’ve been here…it’s my second year…When I first got here, in January, I was living here in secret.
How do you mean, ‘in secret’?
With a boyfriend…because I didn’t have a room.
With a boyfriend?
A boyfriend.
Whom you got to know…
Whom I got to know last year…I’ve been with him since last year.
You met him here?
I met him here.
How is it that a young girl from the provinces turns up in Nanterre and…
There are lots of provincials here at Nanterre…You see, you get here, and at first you’re a bit lost…
You didn’t know anyone.
No, I didn’t know anyone. The first month, I spent hardly any time here. I arranged to spend the night with friends in Paris…I didn’t want to live here. It was really frightening.
Why?
First, because I’d never lived in an HLM* like this – these little pigeon-holes and boxes. And I was afraid to live here…As soon as the boys find out there’s a new girl, they pounce on you…
What do you think causes that?
Well, it’s caused by the fact that they’re bored, obviously. They’re looking for something new, that’s all; it doesn’t go any further than that…It’s the problem of…of boredom. When you come out of the restaurant in the evening, you don’t know what to do. You’re fed up. There’s the cafeteria…
And since you first met this boy…you’re still with him.
Yes.
Is that usually the case?
No. It’s very difficult for a couple to succeed.
Why?
Because it’s impossible to live like a couple here. It’s not a normal sort of life. And you can never get away from friends…. There are lots of interchangeable couples. They live together for a week and then they change partners.
Do you think that has to do with Nanterre?
No…I think it has to do with any student residence.
It has to do with living in a hall of residence?
Look, if you have fifteen hundred girls and fifteen hundred boys living face to face, there are going to be problems…problems to do with couples, problems with…I don’t know…
Doesn’t that worry you?
(Quietly.) Yes, it does…
Do you think that the boy you’re living with is sensitive to these problems?
Of course…of course…Especially now that there’s a sort of collective madness and people are leaving…You start out as a well-balanced group of individuals, and then suddenly it all falls apart, and your friends go off just like that.
(Pause.)
Are there evenings when you feel really fed up?
Of course…Just now it’s every evening.
Even though you’re with Jacques?…
(Pause.)
Yes…
The room has now fallen silent. The girl to the left of the interviewee, who at first looked cheerful, seems depressed and uncomfortable. A male student bites his nails and is visibly agitated. No conclusions are drawn from the interview. The scene then changes abruptly, and the documentary ends with four male students in Spanish costume playing gypsy music on guitars and mandolins at the foot of a concrete tower.
Questions and sample answers
That they might invest their youth in hard study and then fail to find a job. (The risk of unemployment remained high.)
Their spending power would be negligible, affecting not only marriage prospects but also lifestyle, and leading eventually to social déclassement.
Social mobility was a mixed blessing. It meant not only that children of the proletariat could aspire to managerial positions, but also that children of the bourgeoisie might find themselves descending into a kind of neo-proletariat.
II. A. i.
ON 2 MAY, as a result of continued protests and damage to university property, the authorities decided to act. Government ministers were afraid that the troubles at Nanterre would spread to other sections of the university. That evening on television, with an air of stern regret, the Dean of Nanterre announced the suspension of classes.
For this complex struggle on the new terrain of public relations, Dean Grappin appeared sadly unprepared, like a gladiator in a minefield. He used sentences, the syntax of which, in order for their meaning to be grasped, called for an unusual degree of concentration. He accumulated nouns and pronouns with which he would have to be heard to have made the proper grammatical agreements before the end of the sentence. He was, in effect, sitting a small public examination set by himself. He concluded his address; the screen turned grey; students continued to make the journey from Nanterre and to file into the chlorinated corridors and amphitheatres of the Sorbonne.
The revolt had now migrated from the wasteland on the western horizon into the most famous, telegenic and overdetermined space in continental Europe: the Paris Latin Quarter and its main commercial artery, the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
Next day, marching into the minefield, the authorities asked the police to evacuate the Sorbonne.
II. B. i.
THE STUDENTS who assembled in the courtyard of the Sorbonne on 3 May were inspired by similar protests at Nantes, Strasbourg, Berlin and Berkeley. Using picks and hammers, they converted parts of the building and its furniture into ‘anti-fascist equipment’ (sticks and stones). They were anticipating an attack by an anti-communist student group called Occident, which had been infiltrated by former terrorist paratroopers of the OAS. Occident members wearing motorcycle helmets and brandishing axe handles were demonstrating a few yards away on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, demanding that the protesters be sent to Peking.
At about four o’clock that afternoon, instead of helmeted fascists spoiling for a fight, the students saw, entering from the Place de la Sorbonne, a battalion of men who would normally have spent Friday afternoon directing traffic, arresting burglars, importuning beggars and expressing admiration for the sexually interesting parts of the bodies of Parisian women and, to a lesser extent, of foreign female tourists.
These policemen, incorrectly identified by the students as members of the CRS,* having little experience of crowd control, performed their task clumsily. They bundled three hundred students into the ‘salad shakers’ (police vans). One of those arrested was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, known as ‘Dany le Rouge’, who was due to appear at a meeting of the University of Paris on 6 May, charged with ‘agitation’.
The university and the government believed that the ‘extremists’ in the Sorbonne represented a minority, and that all the other students were busy in their concrete cubes preparing for examinations, which they were due to sit in three weeks’ time.
II. B. ii.
DESPITE THE increasing use of non-gender-specific clothing and hairstyles, the police successfully distinguished male from female students. Avoiding contact with the female students, they herded the male students into the waiting vans.
What happened next was more significant than it might appear at a distance of forty years. Female students surrounded the police vans and began to chant ‘CRS–SS’, equating the police with the Gestapo (a historically dubious but ear-catching slogan), and ‘Libérez nos camarades!’ To the policemen, the girls were not Trotskyites, Leninists, Stalino-Christians or Maoists; they were child-bearing ornaments and objects of desire. Their use of the noun camarades, which can be either masculine or feminine, reoriented the conflict and induced a dangerous degree of semiotic confusion in the forces of order.
Seven days later, on the first ‘Night of the Barricades’ (see sections III. A.–B.), the police would go on the attack. They charged the poorly made barricades on the Rue Gay-Lussac and unlawfully broke into apartments in pursuit of rioting students. In a street near the École des Mines, a girl wearing almost nothing came rushing out of a building and stopped in the street like a hunted rabbit. She was passed along a line of policemen, beaten up and dragged to a ‘salad shaker’ that was waiting in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques. Local people who witnessed the violence were horrified.
Questions and sample answers
• How had the conflict changed?
The conflict had been radicalized and polarized. The policemen, who were of predominantly proletarian, artisan and petit-bourgeois origin, had reasserted the power of institutional authority over individual, bourgeois self-expression. They did this, however, without the blessing of their bourgeois superiors. The Prefect of Police, Maurice Grimaud, having witnessed the scenes of violence on television, sent a circular to all his agents: ‘Striking a demonstrator who is on the ground is the same as striking oneself.’ It was an aphorism rather than an order, and was evidently greeted with incomprehension or derision.
• Who was at fault?
a) The police, who had offered to allow the students to leave the Sorbonne peacefully but then arrested them as they tried to leave. This gave rise to a violent demonstration, which the police repressed with greater violence, which led in turn to yet more violent demonstrations.
b) No one was at fault. Although the flames of rebellion were fanned by the police, the conscious intentions of individuals and groups were subsumed in a power struggle which was in turn determined by long-term historical trends. The nature of this struggle remained obscure to most of the participants.
• What was the nature of the struggle?
The students had been conducting a form of consumer protest, focused on staff reductions, poor facilities, gender segregation and a law (the Loi Fouchet) that would have restricted access to university education. When the police became aggressors, the students found themselves opposing a rebellion of armed members of the lower classes. This rebellion corresponded more closely to underlying historical trends (monopolization of surplus value by the bourgeoisie, alienation of the proletariat, etc.) and thus became the new focus of agitation.
III. A.
DEMONSTRATIONS took place in Paris on 6, 7 and 8 May. On 9 May, the Government announced that the Sorbonne was to remain closed. On the night of 10 May, barricades appeared at several key points of the Latin Quarter for the first time since 1944.
Although their composition differed from that of their predecessors (cars instead of carriages, café chairs instead of domestic furniture), these barricades were associated by newspaper readers and téléspectateurs with moral rectitude and sexual adventure: Cosette and Marius in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, the bare-breasted ‘Liberty’ figure in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, and countless romantic serials loosely based on episodes of the Paris revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1832, 1848 and 1871.
The barricades offered a seemingly unique opportunity to participate in ‘history’, and their sudden appearance in the Latin Quarter contributed to the media success of the riots. In the short and long terms, they enhanced the attraction of the Latin Quarter as a tourist destination. During a lull in the fighting, a Belgian tour bus stopped next to a crumbling barricade; a young man got out and stood on the barricade with a stone in each hand while his father took a picture.
May ’68 was a revolution with its own theme park. A graffito that appeared on the walls of various public buildings advertised the sites of historical interest even before the historical events had occurred: ‘Ici, bientôt, de charmantes ruines’ (‘Coming soon: picturesque ruins.’)
III. B. i.
PARTLY BY CHANCE, and partly by imitation of guerrilla movements, the students evolved a crude communications network, using bicycles, mopeds, walkie-talkies and transistor radios. With their light-weight footwear, they could out-run booted policemen and were able to dodge about the city in small groups, avoiding road blocks, setting fire to cars and urinating on the flame of the Unknown Soldier. Live reports on the youth-oriented stations Europe 1 and Radio Luxembourg had the effect of coordinating the riots. Radios were placed on windowsills, and the commentaries cascaded down to the streets in stereo. Reporters exaggerated the numbers involved and brought even more people onto the streets.
Despite attempts by politicians and the police to identify ringleaders, there was no recognizable command structure. Confusingly, the students failed to conform to the model of earlier bourgeois protesters (duffle coat, baggy blue pullover, yellow ‘Boyard’ cigarette). The subsequent re-education of the police would concentrate, therefore, on the free-floating signifiers of adolescent bourgeois culture: ‘Eschew all prejudgements! A good policeman does not categorize people according to their clothing or physical appearance: a black leather jacket is not necessarily the costume of a hooligan; a hippie is not always a drug addict; long hair is not the external symbol of delinquency.’* Deprived of these simple keys to social status, many policemen found their duties increasingly difficult to perform.
III. B. ii.
BY NOW (10–11 May), the ‘anti-fascist equipment’ of the Sorbonne occupiers had been upgraded to a more efficient, paramilitary arsenal. The police used tear-gas grenades, stun grenades, water cannon, truncheons, rubber batons and booted feet. The students employed a greater variety of weapons: projectiles, including building rubble, cobblestones and iron bars; catapults; a sand-blaster; planks of wood with protruding nails; smoke bombs and tear-gas produced by chemistry students; Molotov cocktails containing metal pellets or topped up with motor oil to produce an effect similar to that of napalm.
Burning cars – especially the lightweight Simca 1000 and Citroën 2CV – were both defensive and offensive weapons. (The owners of these cars, being sympathetic to the students, covered by insurance and coveting more recent or prestigious models, were not generally opposed to their use in barricades.)
The effectiveness of the students’ weaponry can be gauged by the number of casualties. After the Night of the Barricades, three hundred and sixty-seven people had been injured, of whom two hundred and fifty-one were policemen and other service personnel. Eighteen policemen but only four students were seriously wounded. Sixty cars were destroyed and a hundred and twenty-eight severely damaged. The absence of fatalities, which is still felt to be a remarkable feature of the riots, may reflect a certain degree of ritualism in the use of these weapons. It should be noted, however, that, with road blocks, cratered streets, almost two hundred cars hors de combat and many others safely stored away in underground car parks, inhabitants of the Latin Quarter were less likely to die a violent death in May 1968 than at other times.
III. B. iii.
RITUALISM WAS particularly evident in the use of cobblestones – cubes of blue-grey or pinkish granite from quarries in Brittany and the Vosges weighing approximately two kilograms and laid in fan-shaped patterns by skilled manual labourers to provide a durable and easily repaired road surface. Many were covered with a thin layer of tarmac but could soon be dislodged with a pick or a road-drill. Hurled with sufficient force, a cobblestone could seriously injure even an armoured policeman.
The cobblestones (pavés) were not just weapons, they were symbolic objects, representing the essence of the city (‘le pavé de Paris’ is a metonymical expression with romantic overtones). Furthermore, cobblestones represented the hard, back-breaking labour of the proletariat and the paternalistic provision of undifferentiated communal services by the state. The slogan, ‘Sous les pavés, la plage’,* asserted the underlying truth of individual consumer choice and the freedom to engage in leisure pursuits. (The sand, in fact, was not the geological ‘beach’ beneath Paris but imported industrial sand that was compacted and levelled to provide a smooth base for the stones.)
The commercial availability in 2008 of cobblestones used in the May 1968 revolt suggests that many were collected at the time as valuable commodities and investments. Prices vary according to historical significance and the aesthetic properties of the stone.
Document 3: Cobblestones advertised on eBay.fr in May 2008.
(a) ‘Genuine cobblestone, witness of French history’: 1 euro; 10 euros postage and packing.
(b) 150 cobbles marked ‘Quartier Latin, Mai 68’ in red and blue paint: ‘memorable souvenirs that can be used as book-ends or paperweights’.
(c) ‘Decorative display object’, currently in a flower-bed at Boussu (Belgium): a ‘witness of the events of May 68, which passed through the windshield of my father-in-law’s 2CV, which was parked at the time in the Latin Quarter’. 10 euros.
(d) ‘Parisian cobblestone in its original state, with traces of tar’, collected ‘as a souvenir’ by a fireman on the night of 23–24 May, ‘subsequently used as a book-end’. 27 euros.
IV. A. i.
AFTER THE Night of the Barricades, the conflict could no longer be seen as a simple rebellion against the government and its agencies.
A new protagonist, whose emergence had been anticipated and, it might be said, desired by the students, now appeared on the scene. The CRS had been founded after the Liberation as a special force to fill a gap between the regular police and the army. They were trained in crowd control and mountain rescue. They patrolled motorways in urban areas and served as lifeguards at lakes and beaches.
CRS recruits had a relatively low level of education. Many came from deprived areas where physical violence was a form of personal expression as well as a form of defence. They did not have homes of their own but were housed in special barracks. They were strangers to the areas they policed, partly because, as sons of the proletariat, they might otherwise have found themselves, during a workers’ strike, opposed to members of their own family or clan.
The men of the CRS were poorly paid and unappreciated. Many suffered from social alienation and psychological problems related to insecurity. They compensated for this by developing a tribal sense of loyalty and tradition, sharpened by a perception that the misdemeanours of all the forces of order were blamed on the CRS. In May 1968, they often worked several shifts in a row and were kept on duty overnight, cooped up in armoured coaches parked in side streets.
IV. A. ii.
THIS OSTENSIBLY proletarian and provincial force became ‘the enemy’ to a much greater degree than the bourgeois, Parisian authorities. As usual in such conflicts, propaganda was used to dehumanize the enemy, enabling combatants to overcome moral or aesthetic objections to physical violence. For example, a cartoon in a student paper showed an injured CRS man being prepared for a heart-transplant operation: the heart was to be supplied by an anaesthetized ‘vache’* in the neighbouring bed.
The CRS fostered sympathy for the students by attacking innocent bystanders and allowing their actions to be guided by a simple form of class consciousness. According to one eye-witness, a teacher leaving a bookshop in the Latin Quarter was beaten up by a group of CRS. When the officer in charge ordered his men to stop, observing that the victim looked too respectable to be a student, one of them objected, ‘But, chief, he was carrying books!’
IV. B.
IT WAS NOW that the student revolt revealed its unexpected capacity to redefine market segments. In streets and boulevards that were already saturated with commercial signifiers, the revolt carved out its own niche, and proved that the market’s ability to commodify ideas as well as products had been drastically underexploited. Shops that stood in riot zones sold red bandannas, Che Guevara T-shirts and other revolutionary paraphernalia from the very beginning of the revolt. Students of the École des Beaux-Arts flooded the new market with screen-printed posters and called on striking schoolchildren to help paste them up. Slogans appeared on walls throughout the Latin Quarter and branded the revolt so successfully that these slogans are still being used in 2008 to describe and analyse the conflict.
Document 4: Questions and sample answers.
Analyse the following slogans:
• ‘Sous les pavés, la plage’.
(Related slogan: ‘Je jouis dans les pavés’: ‘I come in the cobbles.’)
The ‘beach’ symbolizes leisure and self-gratification. After a predominantly urban existence as students and then as managers and civil servants, many of the rioters would acquire or rent properties in rural or semi-rural parts of France with access to a lake or a beach, developed and managed for the purposes of recreation, with lifeguards, retail outlets and other amenities. This would form part of a lifestyle associated with certain ideas of freedom, which in turn would be associated nostalgically with the revolt of May ’68.
• ‘Soyez réalistes: demandez l’impossible’: ‘Be realistic: ask for the impossible.’
(Related slogan: ‘Prenez vos désirs pour la réalité’: ‘Treat your desires as reality.’)
A serious-ironic invitation to assert consumer-control over the market and to redefine liberty in terms of personal preference. Cf. ‘Soyez exigeant: demandez le cognac Hennessy!’ (‘Be demanding – ask for Hennessy!’); ‘Parce que je le vaux bien’ (‘Because I’m worth it’). Cf. also the CGT’s* call to workers: ‘Match your desires to reality.’
• ‘Baisez-vous les uns les autres, sinon ils vous baiseront’: ‘Fuck, or be fucked.’
(Related slogans: ‘Déboutonnez votre cerveau aussi souvent que votre braguette’: ‘Unbutton your brain as often as your trousers.’ And: ‘Faites l’amour et recommencez’: ‘Make love and start again.’)
These slogans reflect familiarity with the theories of Reich, Foucault and Lacan. Erotic activity is conceptualized as a form of socio-political competition. The ‘baisez-vous’ slogan, blasphemously derived from John 15:12, would later be applied in other forms to professional activity in business and financial markets.
• ‘Si tu rencontres un flic, casse-lui la gueule’: ‘If you meet a cop, smash his face in.’
(Related slogans: ‘Si tu veux être heureux, pends ton propriétaire’: ‘Happiness is a landlord with a noose round his neck.’ And: ‘Ne dites plus: Monsieur le Professeur; dites: Crève, salope!’: ‘Don’t say, “Professor”, say, “Drop dead, bitch!”’)
These slogans represent an appropriation of proletarian forms of discourse and their rebranding with bourgeois irony. The feminine noun salope, applied to a male, is supposed to intensify the insult. Only the first of these slogans was intended as a practical recommendation.
V. A. i.
ON MONDAY, 13 May, in what appeared to be a victory for student propaganda, workers joined the revolt. The unions were caught off guard and pretended to have called for a one-day general strike. The government itself was in a state of chronic indecision. The student demonstrations had given rise to a mass revolt that directly threatened the power of the unions and the economic well-being of the state. This spontaneous alliance of workers and intellectuals was worryingly reminiscent of the successful revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
The students gathered at the Gare de l’Est and marched along the Boulevard de Magenta. As the demonstration passed in front of the Socialist Party’s headquarters, some elderly socialists appeared on the balcony, displaying a hastily made banner proclaiming ‘Solidarity with the Students’. The students chanted back, ‘Op-por-tun-ists!’ and ‘Bureaucrats – into the street!’ Confused by this anarchic scorn for political tradition and the respect due to age, the socialists shrank back behind the windows in embarrassment. The socialist politician François Mitterrand, however, joined the march and offered himself as a compromise candidate in the event of presidential elections.
At Place de la République, the students joined the workers. The crowd (officially estimated at two hundred thousand) surged along the Rue de Turbigo towards Place du Châtelet and the Left Bank, instead of following the traditional route of workers’ marches (République to Bastille). Several hours would pass before the head of the march reached Place Denfert-Rochereau via the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
V. A. ii.
THE COMMUNIST newspaper L’Humanité had been denouncing the students as ‘dubious elements’ and ‘bourgeois leftists’. The communist-dominated CGT called them ‘pseudo-revolutionaries in the service of the bourgeoisie’. But young workers at the big Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt in the south-western suburbs had been impressed by the students’ spontaneity. Although they thought it odd that anyone should complain about a university education, they empathized with their cheerful anarchy. Some of the young workers had been arriving for work without their blue overalls: some wore leather jackets, others were in shirtsleeves, which was a uniform strictly reserved for the higher ranks of management. They were tired of the unions’ insistence on following ‘the party line’, and had no particular objection to becoming bourgeois themselves.
The demonstration passed through the Temple district, where smiling Algerians, some of whom had seen members of their family murdered by Paris policemen in 1961, joined in the chants of ‘CRS – SS’. Thousands of schoolchildren marched in perfect order, divided into arrondissements, with neatly painted banners calling for ‘Democratic Reform of the Education System’. They passed through the Marais, where militant workers and impoverished bourgeois intellectuals inhabited the crumbling palaces of a forgotten civilization. The activists of the third and fourth arrondissements were used to spending their weekends at the police station after writing the latest issue of their ‘mural newspaper’ on the walls of the Marché des Enfants Rouges on the corner of the Rue Charlot. Many of them had temporary jobs – they worked for construction and removal companies or (as unemployed sociology graduates) conducted surveys for polling organizations – and could barely afford to be on strike.
Having reached an agreement with the police, the CGT stewards controlled the march, which the unions had decreed would be peaceful, and kept a watchful eye on the schoolchildren, the anarchists and the action committees of workers and students. The students chanted, ‘Power to the Workers!’ and, ‘Adieu, de Gaulle!’ The unions’ banners said, ‘Defend Our Purchasing Power’.
V. A. iii.
WHEN THE HEAD of the march reached Denfert-Rochereau at 5.30 p.m., something happened that seemed at the time to be a turning point, though it can now be seen as a confirmation of the essentially bourgeois tendency of the revolt. CGT stewards locked arms and prevented the students from continuing the march. The students had been intending to hold the biggest rally held on the Champ de Mars since Robespierre’s Feast-Day of the Supreme Being in 1794. Loudspeakers told the crowd to disperse, recommending ‘order, calm and dignity’. When the students refused to go home, the CGT stewards knocked them to the ground and tore the banners from their hands.
Only a few thousand students made it to the Champ de Mars. After sitting on the grass by the Eiffel Tower, listening to speeches, the students re-occupied the Sorbonne, while the union leaders went home and prepared for negotiations with the government.
V. B. i.
PARIS NOW entered a period of festive chaos. In spite of the unions, the general strike continued. Soon there were petrol queues, and the streets were reclaimed from Citroëns, Fords, Peugeots, Renaults and Simcas. Parisians rediscovered their city and talked to one another in the street. Deserted railway tracks shone in the sun, and anglers on the Seine and the Canal Saint-Martin were undisturbed by the wash of passing barges. Even Monoprix, whose basement supermarkets had caused something of a retail revolution by staying open on Mondays, remained closed.
After two weeks of general strike, the spectre of a cigarette shortage hung over the city, but the workers and the students stood firm. They organized the manufacture and distribution of cigarettes made from discarded butts, sold in packets of four at a generally agreed price of fourteen centimes.
V. B. ii.
DURING THE strike the protests continued, but there was already an air of anticipated nostalgia about the riots. The night of 23–24 May was called the Second Night of the Barricades. The students had been hoping to commemorate the anniversary of the Paris Commune by torching the Hôtel de Ville, but spies dressed in kaftans and Mao jackets had alerted the authorities, and the police brought out the giant high-speed bulldozer that they had borrowed from the army. Instead, students, workers and the unemployed assembled at the Gare de Lyon and set off in separate groups for the Right Bank, where they set fire to the Bourse and attacked the firemen who came to extinguish the fire.
Impressions of these events would later be treasured as memories of a transcendent experience and recounted many times over to children, grandchildren and researchers: the Doppler shift of sirens, the thump of helicopters surging over rooftops, booted feet marching parallel to the main arteries, the acrid smell of tear gas, the shiny black plastic of capes and truncheons, the slippery sludge of flattened sandwiches. The sense of a priceless, unrepeatable experience was enhanced by the physical transmutation of the students: they looked ragged, sleepless and disreputable. Their faces were covered in talc or masked with handkerchiefs soaked in lemon juice as a defence against the gas. In the swirling clouds of chemicals, the streets of modern Paris looked like parts of the old revolutionary faubourgs or, with a stretch of the imagination, like scenes of the Vietnam War in Paris-Match.
For two hours on the Second Night of the Barricades, large parts of Paris were in the hands of the students. It had often been said that a population brainwashed by television would never have taken the Bastille, because everyone would have rushed home to watch it on the box. But now, as if by accident, the students (or rather, eight million striking workers) had brought the Fifth Republic to the brink of collapse.
In the absence of leaders, they were unable to capitalize on their advantage. That day, and in the days that followed, the CRS and the police, who were terrified of being lynched by angry citizens, grabbed students and schoolchildren as they rode past on bicycles, punctured their tyres and emptied their satchels onto the street. They lined them up against the ‘salad shakers’ and kicked them in the genitals. They arrested people who had dirty hands, dark skin or (remembering Dany ‘le Rouge’ Cohn-Bendit) red hair. For the same reason, they arrested people who had a foreign name or accent. They punched them in the throat and made them walk between lines of CRS who broke their ribs and noses. At Beaujon Hospital, which served as a detention centre, they threatened them with further beatings and prevented them from calling their families or receiving medical attention. Before releasing them, they confiscated one shoe from each detainee.
Traffic lights in the Latin Quarter changed from red to green and seemed to serve a purely decorative function. Towards the end of May, Paris began to resemble the set of a science-fiction film. When the Métro was running, squads of CRS who looked like Martian robots waited for students to emerge from the underground at Cardinal-Lemoine, Mabillon or Maubert-Mutualité. A few enclaves of hedonistic mayhem survived like post-nuclear colonies. The Sorbonne and the Odéon theatre were run by anarchist collectives and overrun by rats. Many of the occupiers were seeing the inside of a university or a theatre for the first time. In the Sorbonne, the smells of incense and patchouli had overcome the disinfectant. The early slogans had disappeared under the tide of anarchist inscriptions and stains. Girls and boys lost their virginity in the corridors. They discovered Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, hashish and LSD. The mood of casual optimism was maintained by student spokesmen who assured everyone that, at the end of the academic year, they would be deemed to have passed the non-existent examinations.
Document 5: Slogans of late May ’68.
‘Examens = servilité, promotion sociale, société hiérarchisée’: ‘Examinations = servility, social advancement and hierarchical society.’
‘Même si Dieu existait, il faudrait le supprimer’: ‘Even if God existed, he would have to be abolished.’
‘Quand le doigt montre la lune, l’imbécile regarde le doigt (proverbe chinois)’: ‘When the finger points at the moon, the idiot looks at the finger (Chinese proverb)’.
‘Réforme, mon cul’: ‘Reform, my ass.’
VI. A. i.
AFTER THREE WEEKS of dazed exhilaration, the end of May ’68 was bound to be an anti-climax.
President de Gaulle had mysteriously disappeared at the height of the general strike. He was rumoured to have gone to Baden-Baden to assure himself of the army’s support in the event of a coup d’état. Meanwhile, the unions negotiated a deal with the government. The minimum wage was to be increased by 36%, the working week reduced to forty hours and the unions were to have more say in the running of factories.
To the union leaders’ astonishment, the proposals were rejected by the rank and file. It was then that President de Gaulle returned to Paris. On 30 May, he sat at his desk in front of a radio microphone and spoke of ‘intimidation, intoxication and tyranny’. He also appeared on television, and his appearance alone was worth a thousand tanks: old man’s ears, sagging, watery eyes like flooded mine shafts, and the long, grey face of a badly weathered municipal statue. The majority of the voting population found this reassuring. The President announced the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale. Legislative (but not presidential) elections were to be held in June.
VI. A. ii.
THE EFFECT was almost instantaneous. Unions abandoned the workers to the CRS and turned their full attention to the election campaign. ‘May ’68’ was glamorous and theatrical. ‘June ’68’ was bloodier and less appealing to the téléspectateurs, especially since most of the key events did not take place in Paris. It was in June that the forces of order, battling against members of their own class, lived up to their reputation. On 11 June, at the Peugeot factory at Sochaux in eastern France, two workers were killed and a hundred and fifty-one were seriously wounded. The government enacted emergency legislation: many left-wing organizations were outlawed, demonstrations were banned and paramilitary Gaullist groups were given carte blanche to ‘encourage’ the workers to end the strike.
VI. A. iii.
ON 14 JUNE, the Sorbonne, the École des Beaux-Arts and the Odéon theatre were cleared out by the police and disinfected by immigrant cleaning women. Citizens who were unaware of the underlying historical process were surprised to learn that the government intended to satisfy the students’ principal demands. In a private meeting with the Dean of Nanterre, the new Minister of Education, Edgar Faure, outlined the new policy of placating the protesters by enhancing their access to capital: ‘Give them money, and they’ll shut up.’
Even as the decrees were being drafted, producers were repositioning their brands to take account of changes in customer engagement. A special edition of Elle magazine (17 June) congratulated female students on their ‘amazing courage’ and stressed the growing importance of interactivity: ‘We want to participate much more closely in your preoccupations of today, and your cares of tomorrow, and to get you to participate in ours.’
Female students had participated mostly by distributing tracts, organizing crèches and by lying unconscious on the ground, being filmed by cameramen. Only a few of them had thrown missiles, and none of them had appeared on television as leaders of the revolt. Their equal treatment by the forces of order, however, had given them a sense of civic importance and consumer rights. A poster produced by the École des Beaux-Arts, titled ‘Beauty is in the Street’, showed a young woman launching a cobblestone rather wildly but with graceful, trousered legs and the flapping skirts of a knee-length duffle-coat. This charming, iconic design anticipated some of the fashions that would be unveiled in the summer collections, notably by Yves Saint-Laurent, who dedicated his range of duffel coats and fringed jackets to the students of May ’68.
VI. B.
‘MAY ’68’ came to stand for personal liberation and the bankruptcy of a paternalistic, gerontocratic system. However, it is important to remember that the biggest manifestation of popular feeling in May ’68 did not involve the students: when General de Gaulle returned to Paris on 30 May, more than half a million people marched up the Champs-Élysées. This huge demonstration of support for the Gaullist régime was organized by Gaullists, but the numbers far exceeded expectations. In the subsequent national elections, the Gaullists won a crushing victory. Left-wing parties had never had such a small share of the vote.
Not long afterwards, the Dean of Nanterre saw huge consignments of furniture and educational equipment arriving on the campus. Gigantic projects of no apparent worth were afoot. Cafeterias and language laboratories sprang up all over the campus, and the builders who constructed them – at vast expense to the government but very little to themselves – joked openly about their imminent early retirement. To a mind unschooled in the dynamics of capital flow and long-term growth, this could only be described as ‘waste’. It was a small comfort to the dean to be told by the Minister of Education that no questions would be asked about education spending until 1970.
Questions
In May 1968, children of the bourgeoisie provoked a proletarian revolt. The revolt took two forms: a) a violent rebellion of the forces of order, which turned them into public enemies; b) a general strike that defied union leaders and led to a split between unions and workers.
The consequences of this were: a) rapid improvement in living conditions and services for the young bourgeoisie; b) the discrediting of non-consumer-oriented educational methods; c) devaluation of age as a marker of social status; d) public endorsement of capitalist aspirations by union leaders; e) the effective eradication of the Communist Party as a major force in French politics.
After May 1968, 62% of French people declared themselves ‘quite satisfied’ with things in general, more satisfied than not with relationships, housing and work, but only slightly satisfied with leisure – perhaps a sign of greater customer awareness. Only 32% described themselves as pessimistic (16% didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t want to think about it). More people aged between fifteen and twenty-one were happy in 1969 than in 1957. 71% felt ‘free’ when making purchases, either because they had sufficient spending power or because the range of products was adequate to their desires. 77% thought themselves lucky to be living in the late 1960s.
In 2008, most people who responded to opinion polls believed that May ’68 had revolutionized French society, especially in the realms of sexual equality and workers’ rights, and that the revolt had made the government more accountable to public opinion. Asked to name the May ’68 slogan most relevant to today’s world, almost half the respondents chose ‘It is forbidden to forbid’, while only 18% voted for ‘Be realistic: ask for the impossible.’