Paris May 1968: Students and workers unite

Keri Phillips: Welcome to Rear Vision on ABC Radio National. I'm Keri Phillips.

And today we go back to Paris in May, 1968.

STREET SCENES/CHANTING

Reporter: ... and he's gunned down, he's out cold, blood pouring from his stomach, and the students are angry. (GUNFIRE) They've got a group of students cornered in a churchyard; the students are coming out with their hands up ...

Keri Phillips: In the late 1960s, a wave of student protest movements broke out across Europe, the United States and of course, here in Australia. 1968 is often known as the 'year of the barricades' and in France it was literally true. Forty years ago this month, students and police fought pitched battles in the streets of Paris, and when French workers chose to support the students, they brought the country to the brink of revolution. Today on Rear Vision we'll look at the events of May 1968 and why the social and political shockwaves they set off still resonate in France today.

The events began in the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in the western suburbs of the city, where there had been a series of student occupations and strikes over such things as male student visitation rights to the women's dormitories. The administration shut down the university on 2nd May. Protests then spread as the students' grievances were greeted sympathetically elsewhere in Paris. Ian Birchall is a historian, socialist activist and the author of many books and articles about the French Left.

Ian Birchall: There'd been a very rapid expansion in higher education. It wasn't properly funded, with the result there was massive overcrowding in the universities. There was also very antiquated regulations applied to the students. The syllabuses often didn't seem to relate to the needs of students in the second half of the 20th century. And there was also a great concern about international events, particularly about the war in Vietnam, and this led to a whole series of student demonstrations, occupations and so on in the early months of 1968. At the beginning of May, the university, the Sorbonne, was closed down by the authorities and this led to a major demonstration by students which was attacked very brutally by the police, using CS gas, truncheons, and so on. But the students didn't run away, they held their ground and they actually set up barricades in some of the streets in the Latin Quarter in Paris. They tore up the cobblestones with which the roads were still paved, and set up barricades, and they held off the police all night.

Keri Phillips: Many ordinary citizens were shocked by the police brutality in the clashes with students on 10th May, where there were hundreds of arrests and injuries. French workers then made the crucial decision to support the students.

Dr Rainer Horn is the author of 'The Spirit of '68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America'.

Rainer Horn: It was very brutally fought, in particular on the side of the police who of course had all the gear at their support, and massive repression. And this became known in the course of the night; people listened to radio, particularly Radio Luxembourg because the French radio was then quite tightly, well not exactly censored, but just about. And the next morning, this is the morning of the 11th, the key trade union federations, CGT and CFTT, on their own, decided to call for a general strike in opposition to the police brutality of that night of the barricades, to call a general strike for the 13th May '68, together with a mass demonstration in the streets of Paris and in the provinces. So it was a decision autonomously taken by the leading trade union federations in France at that time.

And to everybody's surprise I suppose, this general strike was just about general. It was a one-day general strike, it was limited to one day, the 13th May, but on that day you had huge numbers of people gathering all over France essentially. In Paris itself, which of course is always the most important location for French politics, guesstimates range of the number of participants in the demonstration range from half a million to a million, only no-one knows, it was huge, it was massive, lots and lots of not only students but of course much more importantly, white collar and of course blue collar workers participated not only in the strikes but in that massive demonstration. I think there were about 165 demonstrations in other parts of France, some of them in small towns where the number of demonstrators reached 60,000 in a particular location. I mean it was huge, there was huge mobilisation and this was in a sense the very first link between workers and students, or trade unions and workers and students.

Keri Phillips: As a conciliatory gesture, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou announced the release of prisoners and the reopening of the Sorbonne. But not everybody went back to work. In the provincial town of Nantes, local activists decided to occupy the aircraft factory where they worked.

Rainer Horn: This action in a sense sparked copycat actions by workers in other major and minor factories throughout France in the next days to not only go on strike, but to actually occupy their factory. And so by the next day you had several Renault factories - and Renault-Billancourt and Renault-Cleon were some of the biggest factories in terms of the numbers of people employed in all of France - and in other words you had coming on the tail end of the very successful general strike, it was limited to 24 hours on the 13th May, you had a spontaneously erupting extension of the strike movement, together with factory occupations and so forth and so on. And when this happened, this general strike action, after the 13th May, trade unions of course were trying to put forth demands: what do we ask for, right? You don't go on strike normally without any demands.

And that's a very interesting thing to look at. In most factories of course, some kinds of demands, list of demands were put together, but they were not overly specific, oftentimes. If one tries to put a common denominator to all the various demands, very, very often one of the central demands was something that one could qualify as asking for greater respect at the workplace. Now 'greater respect at the workplace' or 'consideration au travail' in French, is absolutely not quantifiable, so it's not something that lends itself to any kind of trade union management negotiations.

Ian Birchall: You can't say there was one particular political current that dominated. But basically people who were impatient with the idea of parliamentary democracy, who were more and more concerned with the rights of either students or workers, to have more control over their own lives. If you wanted a dominant strain to the political current, it was this idea that people should actually have more control over their own lives, in particular their working lives. Among the students there was a great demand for greater control by students over the running of the universities, over the construction of the syllabuses and so on. In the factories, there was the demand to lessen the power of what were often extremely authoritarian managements that existed in many factories, the extremely authoritarian treatment of workers. There were workers' hostels for example, where workers were not allowed to read newspapers, where they were not allowed to talk to each other during meals and so on. And it was the resentment against this whole authoritarian structure. You know, if you wanted one phrase to sum up the ideas, I suppose it would be anti-authoritarian.

Keri Phillips: One of the most interesting features of these events of May/June in France was that they weren't organised by the leaders of the national organisations representing students and workers.

Rainer Horn: Yes, that's absolutely the case. There was a great degree of spontaneity in there, although of course one should be careful (not) to over-emphasise it. Even in incidents like the very first factory occupation that I mentioned earlier in Sud-Aviation Nantes there were local leaders, so to speak, who were quite instrumental in changing the mood on location so that such a thing could actually happen. In terms of well-known, or relatively well-known national leaders of trade unions, of student organisations, they were not really at the centre or at the forefront of those events. You know the most famous name in a sense that came out of the student 1968 in Paris, France, is the name of Daniel Cohn-Bendit. I don't know if he was 18 or 19, but he was a student in Nanterre , so he was at the centre of it from the very beginning, but he was, you know, I mean just a student, he was not a student leader of any sort. But he in a sense, by his ability to - well he was a very good speaker, he got people to laugh when he gave talks, he was very good at provoking authorities. He became a leader in the course of the struggle which he helped initiate as a simple rank and file person. So he by May, June 1968, he was actually a well-known national student leader. But six months earlier he had been a nobody, a nothing, a simple rank and file student in a branch campus of the University of Paris.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit: We have now to continue the fight, and I think we shall now show how strong we are against such police and government repression. That everybody can do everything what we want, and not what the government wants, because we don't recognise any more this government.

Ian Birchall: The strike did spread to a very great number of areas of society, it wasn't simply factory workers occupying, you had the footballers occupying the headquarters of the National Football Federation, you had radical priests occupying churches, you know the thing really did spread very deeply into French society for a few weeks.

I think the problem was that it was above all the trade union leadership and the Communist party who wanted to contain the movement. They were interested in establishing they were concerned with parliamentary democracy, they wanted to make electoral alliances, and therefore they wanted to show themselves as being responsible and controlling the movement.

Keri Phillips: The French Communist Party had dominated left-wing politics since the end of World War II. In May 1968, it probably had about half a million members. It controlled the main trade union federation, and had over 100 deputies in the French parliament. But since 1958, France had had a conservative government, led by the man who'd brought order out of chaos in France twice before, Charles de Gaulle.

Rick Kuhn is a reader in Political Science at the Australian National University.

Rick Kuhn: This was the era of de Gaulle and his political organisation was the dominant one in the French parliament. He of course was the President. The main opposition parties were the Socialist party and the Communist party. Now the Communist party talked Left, but in the situation of May 1968 which I think one could describe accurately as a pre-revolutionary situation, in those circumstances it played a conservative role. It wanted to shore up its own parliamentary position, rather than to overturn the established order. So these are the dominant organisations, overwhelmingly dominant. Then you have much, much smaller organisations of hundreds, maybe a few thousand members, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of supporters and members in the Communist party, on the far left. These included Anarchists, some of whom were known as Situationists, who saw political life as an aspect of art, and political protesters and artistic and creative kind of a process, you had Trotskyists who were critical of the nature of the Soviet Union, oriented on the working classes' capacity for liberating humanity, but very small organisations. And Maoists who had illusions like the official Communists, not in Russia, but in Chairman Mao and the regime in China. Again, relatively small organisations, compared with the big guns of the official left in France.

Keri Phillips: By the last week of May, 10-million workers, roughly two-thirds of the French work force, were on strike and the country was paralysed. With the government on the brink of collapse, de Gaulle jumped into a plane and flew to Germany.

Ian Birchall: Now there are still conflicting accounts of exactly what happened, but it seems likely that in fact he had panicked and that he was running away. He went to Germany where he met General Massu, who was an old hardline right-wing general who'd played a quite horrific role in Algeria during the war, and Massu apparently gave him a good talking to and said, 'You've got to go back and stand up to the movement'. And de Gaulle came back and then started to rally his forces. Initially, de Gaulle had proposed a referendum which was a device he was very fond of, but he couldn't actually run the referendum for the very simple reason that nobody would print the ballot papers for him. But anyhow, after he came back, first of all he organised his supporters, and there was a very large demonstration, it's said up to a million people in Paris, saying 'Put an end to the strikes. We want restoration of order.' And then he called a general election and then he banned 11 of the small revolutionary groups. So at this point, at the beginning of June, the government came in very hard, and started to push the movement back.

It ended basically with the elections and the return of a right-wing majority. Now in a sense, that seems rather paradoxical that there was such a right-wing majority. Of course remember first of all a lot of the most militant people didn't have the vote, nobody under the age of 21 at that time had the vote. Immigrant workers who played quite an important role, didn't have the vote. Many of the most militant activists were so disillusioned with the way that the Communist party and the trade union leadership had behaved that they simply abstained, and on the other hand, a very large middle class vote, the people who'd been rather alarmed by the events, now felt that it was time for them to come out and help reassert order.

But it's also the case that the electoral system was very carefully manipulated. If you look at the actual figure of votes, it took five times as many votes to elect one Communist deputy as it took to elect a Gaullist deputy, because of the way the constituencies were arranged. So the defeat looked very much bigger, it looked like a catastrophic defeat for the Left in the elections; in fact I don't think the defeat was as big as all that. But clearly, that had an enormous psychological impact. There were still a few people out on strike by the end of June but they fairly soon went back to work.

Keri Phillips: Even though the dust had settled, the entire country had been gripped by two months of widespread civic upheaval, economic paralysis, and vigorous public debate. Was there now a sense in which France had been transformed by these events?

Ian Birchall: No. I mean the system remained in place. In fact the elections held at the end of June gave de Gaulle an increased majority. However, de Gaulle actually was fatally wounded because when he held a referendum early in 1969, he was defeated, and driven into retirement. So they got rid of de Gaulle but de Gaulle in any case was quite an old man. I mean the major structures of the Fifth Republic remained. I think in many factories important shifts were made. I think the more authoritarian managements often found it very hard to be quite as authoritarian as they had been before. The strength of trade union organisations, the strength of workers' organisations in the workplaces was considerably increased. But the kind of radical change that many people had wanted, was not achieved at that stage, no.

Rick Kuhn: I think France was in many respects, a different place. It was still obviously a capitalist society, but workers won significant improvements in wages and conditions, and union recognition, and there was also a large gain in the self-confidence of French workers and French students as well. Of course the fact that the elections were called, and the CGT and the French Communist Party calmed things down again, took the impetus away from the movement of May, and the forces allied with Charles de Gaulle won the elections and there was a great deal of disillusionment. But people still remembered what it was like, and those sentiments and that memory of 1968 is still important today.

LANGUAGE

Translation (Sarkozy): The inheritors of May '68 have damaged political morale. The inheritors have weakened the idea of citizenship by denigrating the law, the State and the nation. Because there are no more rules, no more norms, no morality, no more respect, no more authority. Everything has a price, so everything is allowed.

Rick Kuhn: About a week before his election, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, last year attacked the moral and intellectual permissiveness of May, 1968, which he still regarded as being a source of all sorts of contemporary problems in France and Sarkozy, a conservative neo-liberal, wanted to 'liquidate' the legacy of May 1968 if he was elected.
He hasn't really been able to do that. In October last year there was a very substantial strike wave, especially over cuts in the pension rights of public transport workers, and that strike wave stands in a tradition of large-scale mobilisations by workers against different kinds of government policies.

Rainer Horn: Well, yes, Sarkozy last year famously called that the moment has finally come to put an end to the spirit of '68 once and for all. This made him quite popular amongst a certain crowd, but it also of course brought up the issue that obviously May '68 still has an effect which he's worried about. So I would say his statement really in many ways, is actually one of the best proofs one can come up with that the long-term effect of '68 is really still a factor even in national politics at the very highest level, all the way until today. And to me in a sense, the long term, looking back forty years now that we have the 40th anniversary of 1968, to me the most important consequence in a sense of May '68 is that it brought back on the agenda the possibility of social life being able to be organised in a very different fashion from the way it has, and that market economies, capitalism for short, is not the only possible societal alternative for us today. And obviously for someone like Sarkozy, to harp on this issue 40 years later, is the best possible proof that the spirit of May '68 still lives on.

Keri Phillips: Today the events of May 1968 are commonly seen as the moment when conservative views on authority, religion and morality began to be challenged by liberal views on sexuality, individual freedom and human rights. The way they are remembered 40 years later has undergone a subtle but significant shift.

Rainer Horn: What there is and what there is even in France today, is an increasing attempt to portray the events of May-June '68 as the year of the students, exclusively. As the year of youth revolt. The element which was obviously quite central in France but in other countries as well, of the working class, the societal dimension of '68 is increasingly pushed to the sidelines. There is a distinct tendency in many countries, certainly also in France, to increasingly forget about the radical dimension, the politically radical dimension of '68, and to go towards the commemoration of the sort of cultural rebellion. And of course there are various reasons for this and one would have to go into the personal psychology of the observer, the historian, the journalist who's reflecting on the events 40 years later, to understand the rationales for these strange elisions of the working class dimension of '68. But I think some of this has to do is that if you focus on the sole element of student revolt and youth revolt, then the whole revolt of '68 takes on the character of a momentary kind of fun-filled, up to a point, rebellion without any greater societal consequences.

Ian Birchall: I think there has been a certain amount of rewriting of history in that a great deal of what is written when people refer to '68, you know tends to refer to student riots and so on, and really to brush over the fact that what was really central was this was the biggest general strike in the whole of human history, and that it really showed what happens if the people who do the work in society, the people who produce the goods and drive the trains and buses and generate the electricity and so on, that if they stop work, then the world stops, you know, which is a very powerful lesson and which is still very much relevant today, something that many people would like us not to remember too vividly.

Keri Phillips: Ian Birchall, historian and socialist activist. We also heard today from Dr Rainer Horn, a historian from the University of Warwick, and Rick Kuhn, from the Australian National University in Canberra. And if you'd like to hear an intriguing personal take on 1968, download or stream this week's Radio Eye, where the American author, David Zane Mairowitz remembers his experience of radical politics, street art, free love, sit-ins and other aspects of the turbulent and anarchic sixties.

Keri Phillips: Rear Vision's technical producer is Jenny Parsonage. I'm Keri Phillips.