France - a New Kind of Rebellion
Bloch-Michel, Jean
T ALL BEGAN in Nanterre. Those who were surprised by the events of May 1968 would do well to visit the spot where the conflagration broke out. There, between a shantytown perched on a low...
...IN ORDER to understand why it has been clear from the beginning that the revolt in France would not develop into a classic revolution, one need only look at the role that the Communist party has played and no doubt will continue to play...
...The right to dissent and to assume responsibility for one's own decisions, to reject predigested opinions—this was the demand of individuals who wanted to assert themselves as more than just members of a class...
...There is even a sort of egalitarian aspect to this society: both workers and bourgeois see the same films and TV, listen to the same radio programs, read the same newspapers, and often meet each other on the same beaches...
...For the protest this rebellion expressed found its justifications in the course of the act of rebellion rather than in ideology or previous politics...
...But this apparent power is contradicted by an increased dependence in other areas...
...Like the Sorbonne, it is part of the University of Paris...
...On the barricades of the Rue Gay-Lussac Cohn-Bendit made a histor ic speech: "I call upon the working class to join our struggle...
...This article was written early in June several weeks before the French elections...
...Since everyone realized that the government had lost all control over the situation, two proposals were made that can now be seen for what they were...
...The physical layout of Nanterre points up all the social and intellectual distortions...
...But here Gaullism found an ally: the Communist party...
...Do we fully understand what this rediscovered communication means...
...On May 13—against the party that claimed to represent it, against the trade-union organi zation that up to now had represented it best —the working class threw itself into a 24-hour strike...
...From one day to the next, the country's revolutionary forces were demobilized, with the exception of the students who found themselves more and more alone...
...THE REVOLT in France cannot develop into a classical revolution, with one class assuming power at the expense of another...
...Although the most unclear and confused, this form of opposition seems to be the most important...
...Many of them regard what we call the consumer society as their achievement...
...Nanterre is the very model of the kind of blunder that defines a society and a system of government...
...Paris, of course, is not far away...
...It will not be possible, without incurring great risks, to drive the students from their newly acquired position in the running of their universities...
...boys and girls no longer imitate adults...
...WHAT FOLLOWED was a complete break with the student movements and the abandonment of all the political objectives of the strike...
...And so within a few days an old system of higher education crumbled to dust, and the contagion spread...
...Only after the street battles of May 10 and Cohn-Bendit's strike call was the CGT prepared to authorize the creation of a solidarity movement among the workers and these (especially the younger ones) were probably more inspired by indignation at police brutality than by a consciousness of common revolutionary interests...
...The strictly political formulation and the traditional terminology in which they expressed this demand consists of denying their instructors the right to teach them how to become exploiters...
...is or is not the potential of improvement in the STEPHEN S. SCHWAxzscHILD FRANCE —A NEW KIND OF REBELLION (continued from page 292) sudden projected itself before all eyes as an element of order, just like the Minister of the Interior or the CRS.* By exercising what it called its authority, the Gaullist government had gradually and deliberately suppressed all forms of institutionalized democratic life...
...In effect, the Communist party rejected Mendes-France's proposal and kept to its demand for a "gouvernement d'union populaire et democratique," that is, a Communist "people's democracy...
...A few minor rows, more violent perhaps than others but minor rows all the same...
...Although the government had created the political atmosphere that made this revolt possible, there had been no statement of either the rebels' goals or other grievances before the uprising...
...Although all indications were that, in taking those necessarily unpopular decisions, the government would have secured, at the very least, the support of its own majority...
...There are 10 assistants to help instruct 150 ethnology students who work in groups of 15...
...And it would be imprudent not at least to consider giving a similar role to the workers in the management of their factories—even if they no longer demand it...
...Why...
...Nothing is more contagious than the exercise of authority...
...The presence in the new government of a few "leftist Gaullists," put there, one suspects, more as hostages than to signal some inconceivable shift in policy, provides no basis for hope...
...No one will forget how the inevitable wall inscriptions "No posters, as of the 22nd of July, 1881" were replaced by the now famous "No prohibitions, May 1968...
...After so much effort and inventiveness, it is difficult to picture the students next October in barrack-like lycees and silent universities...
...In time, the government, the unions, and the employers signed an agreement that gave the workers unprecedented benefits...
...One must bear this in mind when one tries to analyze the recent events...
...The latter, however, were perhaps among the initiators of the revolt who came up with a concrete program for university reform which, in spite of some excess, is the most intelligent and serious ever seen...
...No one really expected the revolt of the Parisian students, not even the students themselves...
...IT is possible that the very nature of political power as it has been exercised in France since the war is at the root of these events...
...But, even if these demands are utopian (something I shall neither affirm nor deny), at least, they gave forceful expression to a state of mind that will not soon disappear and will have to be taken into account...
...There, between a shantytown perched on a low plateau and low-cost housing developments, extends a great wasteland of empty lots and newly plowed fields...
...To a great extent it is made for them...
...And the more the contagious student rebellion spread, the more displeased was the CGT...
...Thus they are cut off from all contact with students in the sciences—the sort of contact that, in the Latin Quarter, is easily found in university cafeterias, the streets, and leisure-time activities...
...it only means that the unions' distrust of this demand is not without justification...
...only Nanterre with its suburban homes, its factories, shantytown, and sad-looking housing projects...
...The urgent problem the parliamentary democracy of the Fourth Republic could not solve was that of decolonization...
...Under thistion or conduct of my revolution, but I will...
...This spirit gave to the revolution of May 1968 a special character that has not been generally understood...
...Those have taught us that revolutions are the phenomena marking the transition from one socioeconomic stage to another, permitting a social group to gain access to an economic position heretofore closed to it, or to achieve some other goal...
...But this was only a prelude to another strike—a strike such as France had never seen...
...The rows spread to the Sorbonne, and one day the rector of the university, faced with the prospect of yet more serious troubles, called in the police...
...Wright Mills calledstriving for it, are not dependent on existing con-them "crack-pot realists") of Niebuhr's stripe andditions, nor are they fundamentally subject to pru-the empiricist liberals of Arendt's and Talmon'sdential considerations...
...This denunciation had two consequences...
...While it is true that some of the groupuscules participated in the revolt from the beginning (and were quickly absorbed into the general revolutionary movement), these all belonged to groups outside of orthodox Communism: they were Maoists, Trotskyists, Guevarists...
...Besides, whether they rule or are persuaded that they do as consumers, the young must still continue to live in the factory or at the university, in the framework of an oppressive and paternalistic authoritarianism that does not even correspond to their position in their own families...
...But if the society does not wish to be subjected to new uprisings, it will have to satisfy these demands...
...Txis is above all a revolt for freedom, a revolt concerned with the role of the individual in society...
...Indeed, it is an open question whether, under a system that remains capitalist, any form of "codetermination" would not be a hoax—like, for example, that old war horse of the Left Gaullists, the partnership of capital and labor (association capitaltravail) which has long ago been exposed as so much wind...
...Today one can only hope that this enormous effort will be neither destroyed by a government tempted to seek revenge nor minimized by a class of intellectuals who will find it difficult to forgive the students for having surprised them and disproved their prophecies...
...No one considered the consequences of imposing a university on the area's social life...
...The population explosion and the sudden increase in the number of students have now brought to a head problems that have existed for 20 years without any attempt to solve them...
...mension they derive the values, impetus, and evenNow the establishment will not dictate the directhe tactics of revolutionary change...
...The hardening of worker demands merely reflects the fact that the time is opportune for pushing these demands as far as possible...
...Then to get back from the station to the residence halls, one must pass through the shantytown and empty lots...
...Auxiliary police, storm troopers, or peaceful associations of old and new Gaullists...
...This is revolution...
...Access to various commodities is, of course, unequal...
...In the aftermath of the war and the occupation, the great reforms of 1945 were obtained and implemented without the help of a truly democratic process...
...Now the majority was compelled, by a sort of coup de force, to vote for the decrees...
...But the continuing paralysis of the country, the uneasiness of the mass of workers, the confusion of the parties, and the even greater confusion of the government—all this created during the days of May 28 and 29 a political void in which all power seemed to have disappeared...
...In very little time it will reach all youth—a quarter of France's population...
...Let us merely recall that these proposals include changes in the management of the system's funds that would make it less democratic (since those who pay into the system would no longer have any voice regarding the benefits they receive...
...Another aspect of the student rebellion was JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL to become more prominent in the course of the battle: the students did not want their studies merely to equip them to become the leaders of a society they oppose...
...What form, one wonders, will they take...
...The Party reunited the employers and the petits bourgeois who, their confidence regained, felt free to march on the Champs Elysees to shouts of "To Dachau with Cohn-Bendit" and "Renault for office...
...Order and tranquility are returning...
...A revolution that transforms the style of life of one out of four of a country's inhabitants has not failed...
...The fact that many of the young workers who joined the revolt were relatively well off should suffice to prove that—contrary to what the government, the Communist party, and the CGT seem to think—it is not enough to provide the largest number of people with access to comfort and wealth in order to remove all signs of revolt...
...Anddispensation, change, or at least the demand andnow also the "realists" (C...
...Nanterre symbolizes the attitude of a certain technocracy: the indiffer * The "university complex" at Nanterre was builtin 1964...
...THINGS BECOME even more confused once we leave the political realm and try to discover the underlying causes of the upheaval...
...Only the enrages—the supporters of Cohn-Bendit and the Maoist, Trotskyist, and Guevarist groupuscules (the smallest radical splinter groups)— came out with a program, but in such a way that none of them could win more than the handful of supporters that can be found on any campus to support extremist factions...
...Create...
...There is not a single cafe, bistro, or restaurant in the area, nor a single park...
...And so we come to the characteristic of this revolt that seems least understandable at first glance: the students' opposition to a consumer society...
...The revolution was over...
...These continue to flourish, in Nanterre, surrounded by the slum dwellers, and in the Sorbonne, which has become for the students and for many of the young workers a sort of for um, seminar, canteen, and dormitory rolled into one...
...This revolution, whether one approves of it or rejects it, is secure...
...But how to get there, and above all, how to get back...
...At the suggestion of the students, many young workers joined it at the Gare de Lyon...
...Pierre Mendes-France declared himself ready to head a transitional government, on condition that this government received the support of all the forces of the Left, which obviously would have included the Communist party...
...And the working class seemed to respond to this young man whom L'Humanite and Minute (the Communists and Fascists) de scribed as a "German Jewish agitator...
...And so everything was done to create a false milieu, a life that is artificial and hard to bear...
...If we do not quickly bring democracy to the university, and not only to the university but also to business, local communities, and the trade unions, then who will dare imagine the future...
...Those who were surprised by the events of May 1968 would do well to visit the spot where the conflagration broke out...
...The call to deGaulle began with the jolting realization that decolonization could only be accomplished by an authoritative figure that was unassailable JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL from the point of view of classical nationalism...
...After 20 years of thoughtlessness and negligence these problems have become only too real, especially for Nanterre's 4,000 students who 290 June 6, 1968 must squeeze into lecture halls designed to accommodate 100...
...The cabinet minister...
...The fashionable slogan that "all be done for the young" is a case in point...
...The only possible cause for anxiety relates to the Civic Action Committees the government and the Gaullist parties have set up...
...The Gaullist government, seriously threatened only a few days earlier, is not only accepted as a legitimate spokesman, but is actually helped in its work...
...Lazare Station before midnight— too early to enable one to see a movie and return to Nanterre...
...But when wildcat strikes broke out in factories all over the country, the CGT again parted company with the students, whom it called "irresponsible and adventuristic," because it wanted to regain control over a movement which, from the start, had slipped out of its grip...
...The choice today is between the living revolution and the regression to a murderous anachronism...
...And at the same time there was growing irritation with such methods and with the contempt, and sometimes the cynicism, they bespoke...
...the revolts were accomplished not only without the Party's support but often against it...
...The situation continued to develop in a kind of underground manner until one day the students and the workers rebelled...
...It is striking, although this reference to Stirrer is no doubt the work of some isolated group or individual...
...The rector's irresponsible and illadvised decision to call the police into the Sorbonne demonstrates this authoritarianism...
...On May 24, in order to prevent the workers from mixing with the students, the CGT organized its own demonstration...
...One of the walls on the Rue d'Ulm carried this inscription: "L'unique existe...
...or to call into question the structure of the present society, which would result in lowering a living standard that is the product of the society and also the result of working-class victories won over the past century...
...The next day the CGT did switch tactics and proclaimed its solidarity with the students...
...Since decolonization could not come about except by forcing the hand of party leaders on the Right and Left, Gaullism developed a mode of government which holds that all political activity is detrimental to the community...
...Remember that the current explosion started with the student revolts, in which the Communist party took no part...
...This is the surrounding of the "university complex," the lecture halls, residence halls, and annexes— buildings without style, set amidst one of the most sinister urban landscapes imaginable...
...As for the demand for greater responsibility which took the form of a call for "power," it will either be met or we shall soon have to prepare ourselves for new uprisings...
...Instead of enlarging the democratization of government— in national politics as well as on the level of local administration, in business, in the management of public services such as radio and the social security system—power has gradually become concentrated to such an extent that all discussion, all debate, all participation (the word is very fashionable) is now impossible...
...While prophecies in this area are dangerous, this is a question one should at least try to answer...
...During these weeks, while the riots were spreading, a number of things became clearer in the course of the battle...
...Next day's dismissals of leaders of the CGT and the dissension that reached even into the Central Committee of the Communist party showed the seriousness of the crisis...
...There is no bus to Nanterre after nine o'clock in the evening, and the last train for "La Folie Complexe Universitaire" (what a name...
...The revolt has touched institutions that will never be the same...
...In the same way de Gaulle refused to let anyone tell him that the reform of the Securite Sociale was a mistake or that the situation at Nanterre was absurd and untenable...
...not the other way round...
...The fact that they are headed by Roger Frey, who as Minister of the Interior either organized, or allowed, or at the very least covered up the Charonne massacre, is not reassuring...
...And attempts to explain this uprising as nothing more than an outbreak of irrationality in a rational society are incorrect and dangerous...
...But it is important here to recall the circumstances under which those regulations were issued...
...Out of this di-existing situation...
...But the sudden and violent reaction against his decision also reveals a state of mind that an act of this sort by itself could not have set off...
...One need only recall that this kind of consumer society was first opposed in the Scandinavian countries, where people enjoy the greatest advantages and the highest degree of security...
...the lack of foresight, the contempt for people were bound to lead, sooner or later, to rebellion...
...At this time, we still don't know...
...Of course it will try to distort the reforms and will try to avoid carrying them out in their entirety...
...Having been involved in these events—although, like many others, only slightly—what struck me as most remarkable, both about the students and the workers, was how quickly they learned to keep away from the cliches of revolutionary thought and from the groupuscules...
...The situation was complicated by the fact that the Communist party had to wage a campaign against a government with whose foreign policy it was in complete agreement...
...Moreover, at the very core of the "university complex" an explosive and artificial milieu was created...
...And so the "complex" served two distinct categories of students: young people of wealthy families, arriving in the morning and leaving in the evening in their own private cars, and the resident students who live isolated in this desert...
...At the very least, the days of May will leave behind more important traces than a few cut trees and a few torn up streets, more important even than the often serious scars left on the bodies of some young people...
...For the choice is between the kind of reforms that would crown the revolution of May 1968 with victory or a repression and reaction which would lead in the same direction that Greece, Spain, and Portugal seem to be heading...
...Then the revolution got the support of the workers, and the workers now were faced with a choice: either to maintain their present standard of living, and to accept the existing structure of the society —realizing that this structure would be constantly modified, in order to eliminate, without revolutions, the most shocking inequalities...
...In this way, the government demonstrated what it called authority...
...Despite the CGT (Confederation Generale du Travail) which resisted as much as possible, the workers demanded "worker power" in the factories...
...There is a general protest against a society that forcefully maintains institutions which at the same time betray it...
...This included even groups supporting Gaullism...
...In pressing for it, the Party gave the Gaullists a chance to denounce, with justification, Communist subversion...
...Young men and women for the first time are speaking to one another of the serious issues that concern them...
...It allowed "le Parti de la Crainte" (party of fear) to rally behind de Gaulle and thus made possible the demonstrations of May 30...
...It will take even longer to convince him that these new forms of worker management and codetermination will enable him to change his working conditions even more drastically than did the birth of unionism...
...He belonged to one of the groups that went to the factories in defiance of the efforts of the CGT, in order to "politicize" the strikes...
...The student's life is further warped because there is only the single faculty of letters at Nanterre...
...No one can foresee what will come of the newly formed contacts between students and workers...
...Films, newspapers, records, and advertisements display goods to all, as if they were presenting real choices, whereas in fact most people can only dream of obtaining such things as cars, travel, and the like...
...The demand for worker participation in the running of business enterprises has long been eliminated from union platforms...
...This resulted in the joint proclamation of May 13 and in a 24-hour general strike...
...But at the same time this helped its campaign against the Center and the Left whose "Atlanticism" and Europeanism it found as repugnant as did de Gaulle...
...everything happens in broad daylight and out in the open...
...There is a profound irony in the observation that by this decision, perhaps simply a stupid blunder, a university authority has placed France in a revolutionary situation such as the country has not experienced for almost 100 years...
...Whatever difficulties may still stand in the way of ending the strike in particular areas, these obstacles are no longer political...
...And a few professors had trouble giving their courses...
...Again and again we saw the CGT change its position and condemn in the morning groups it had endorsed the previous evening...
...That is why the Communist party and L'Humanite spoke of this uprising with distrust, scorn, and contempt...
...On the evening of May 27 a large number of workers attended a protest meeting at the Charlety Stadium, organized by the stu FRANCE—A NEW KIND OF REBELLION dents and attended by Pierre Mendes-France...
...For adult workers, who are set in their work and have long been accustomed to limiting their demands to bread-and-butter issues, the whole idea of "worker government" is disturbing, incomprehensible, and suspect...
...And a whole section of French society has discovered that its easy conscience and self-satisfaction merely served as a cover for blindness and selfishness...
...It cannot end this way because it is inevitable that sooner or later there will be a conflict between the student organizations and the worker organizations as well as between the young student and worker rebels and the adherents of the existing order, which are quite numerous among the workers...
...It knew that this plan had already been rejected by the conservative half of France and by most of the Left and was therefore unacceptable...
...They must learn to accept and take at its face value what they still regard as the invasion of the irrational in a rational society...
...But the students also have put an end to an old and dusty system of education...
...From the start, the government exhibited the brutality of the weak and the weakness of those who understand nothing...
...Here more than anywhere else this contempt, this violence was felt by people who were particularly ready to be resentful...
...Nanterre got students from the western sector of Paris, Auteuil and Passy, the richest and most bourgeois parts of the city...
...Daniel Cohn-Bendit injured a cabinet minister last December during the inauguration of a swimming pool that remained dry for another six months...
...The apparent lack of realism of these demands has led to the suspicion that the young rebels were only playing among themselves at the comedy, or drama, of revolution, remaining pure and uncontaminated by reality...
...This proposal was to prevent the collapse of the regime from leading to complete chaos and the absence of all responsible governmental authority...
...Under capitalism, giving the workers a responsible voice in the running of their enterprises might limit their ability to press their demands...
...In order to reestablish its hold over the majority, the government then decided, over the objections of parliament, to refuse discussion on these ordinances...
...At a joint action committee meeting of workers and students, I heard a young worker express this state of mind very clearly...
...Even if "worker government" could be secured without sacrifice, it is not at all certain that the workers would want it...
...But one thing is certain: this move caused the situation to explode...
...These are exemplified by the reform of the Securite Sociale (social security regulations), a reform whose repeal the strikers are demanding...
...Who was responsible for this decision...
...It has paved the way for a new and fresh analysis of society with some original ideas that for the first time in many years take into ac count concrete realities which are a part of everyone's experience...
...This Gaullist technique of forcing the hand of the deputies and of the voters (by means of a referendum) brought about the political dichotomy once envisioned by Malraux: the final split of the country into two camps--Gaullists and Communists...
...The workers (especially older workers) are much less aware of the depersonalization that such a society creates than they are of the advantages it confers...
...At no level was debate allowed...
...And all this was achieved with the support of the teaching staff, which for the most part helped the students secure a victory that the administration had done all in its power to prevent...
...The political strategy of crushing the center and liquidating the Social Democrats, of reducing all political activity and confrontations between the forces of progress and reaction, fits exactly into the traditional framework of the Communist party...
...Now they cry out for solution...
...One day it would no doubt be instructive to undertake a serious study of the revolutionary "texts": the anonymous graffiti, tracts and poems...
...Afterwards, the country experienced political instability during a period of rapid economic development...
...No matter what the government may do to erase the traces left by those May days, it will have to undertake educational reforms that must follow the model that students of the university and the lyc6es are now proposing...
...It exists in this society, no matter what advantages people enjoy...
...Industrial society, whatever its form or the course of development by which it is achieved, has created new forms of alienation which have to be examined...
...I will strive for it in any case...
...leaves Paris from St...
...What one sees on this walk is enough to make one understand why the students who live in Nanterre become enrages...
...He had told the strikers simply this: "Today the red flag is flying over your factory, you occupy it, you are responsible for it, and you run it...
...The majority of workers reacted to this new kind of revolution much as they reacted to the early unions...
...Refrigerators, TV, regular vacations, movies, and picture maga JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL zines—these were things that they achieved only after long, hard struggles...
...Every institution every authority was called into question and for a moment disappeared altogether: there was no sovereign power no more state, no more government, and there were no more political parties...
...but a professor of psychology has to lecture to 4,000 students...
...Then something new came to light, something that had perhaps played a role in the birth of this revolt: the Communist party was shown to be so strongly tied to the government that it began to seem like some sort of official institution—the government's ally and accomplice, which all of a (continued on page 363) FRANCE—A NEW KIND OF REBELLION which is not limited by the real...
...What the students are rejecting is not really, as they claim, the consumer society but rather certain characteristics of industrial society from which they feel as alienated as their fellow students in Berlin or New York...
...The days of May were thus in part, FRANCE—A NEW RIND OF REBELLION if not exclusively, what Raymond Aron has called "a revolutionary psycho- or pseudodrama...
...the securitypolice and riot squad...
...The permanent deficit in certain sectors of the Securite Sociale had for a long time called for some action...
...Now I don't have to care cannot accuse me of arrogating to myself divinewhether Marcuse or Graubard is right that therepowers, since I am in fact submitting to them...
...But tomorrow you will be given a pay hike and you will put your red flag in your pocket, return every morning to the factory, and nothing will change...
...Is it all over then and will nothing remain of those days of May 1968...
...This belief gave rise to a constitution and to an exercise of power that had as its basic goal the suppression of all political life in the country...
...As for the rest, when Raymond Aron says that this revolutionary psychodrama is nothing but an enormous "exorcism" ("defoulement") , he obviously thinks that the causes for these events are important—exorcism must have an object and a purpose...
...Joining the students who sought "student power" in the heart of the universities, the workers refused to limit their demands solely to material betterment...
...I take my dreams for reality because I believe in the reality of my desire...
...I will not discuss here the merits of the measures proposed by the government...
...But the government denied it this opportunity and took what steps it deemed necessary by means of administrative decrees...
...adults now imitate them...
...It thereby provoked the opposition to introduce a motion of censure and so endangered the seats of the Gaullist deputies, since a vote for the motion would have led to the dissolution of the chamber...
...BUT WHAT actually happened at Nanterre...
...DeGaulle's denial of all freedom of judgment and discussion, even to his own supporters, has assumed unexpected proportions and has given rise to unexpected consequences...
...Attempts to deal with that problem collided simultaneously with nationalism on the Right and a certain Jacobinism on the Left...
...First of all, on the question of university reform, which extends beyond the problems of higher education to include all types of instruction, the students definitively destroyed those institutions dating back to the twin heritage of Jesuit instruction and Napoleonic administration that still ruled our universities...
...To anyone who knows Nanterre it should come as no surprise that the resident students at Nanterre became enrages and that here the revolt began...
...The rebellion of the young is proof that alienation exists...
...Demands expressed in this manner reflect a desire for happiness rather than for destruction: "If you are a revolutionary, be joyous...
...Pierre Mendes-France is without doubt the one political figure in France who could be accepted by the whole Left, including the students (with the exception of the revolutionary groupuscules whose political influence was, however, insignificant...
...At the same time, however, many of the young feel that these choices, tastes, and habits are imposed on them...
...For years philosophy and literature have taught us that man is alone and that all communication is impossible...
...That the irrational is making inroads on the rational is possible, but what is important here is the reassertion of the human personality in a depersonalized society, the affirmation of the need for society to assume responsibility for and do something about the trivialization and fragmentation of work...
...The Communist party immediately answered this proposal with one of its own (although it was not a real proposal), offered for the sole purpose of eliminating all possibility of a government of the Left, thus defusing the revolution and putting the Gaullist government back in the saddle...
...The government had the power to act in a void and this is precisely how it did act, while increasingly losing touch with a social reality it would have liked to ignore, since that reality could not fail to express itself politically—and political expression was inadmissible...
...they are one of its essential economic supports and greatly benefit from it...
...If all that the revolutionaries of May 1968 had accomplished had been to break, even for a few weeks, this circle of silence in which every individual in our society lives and dies, they would already have provided an unforgettable example...
...What the CRS and police had been unable to do with their grenades and truncheons, the Communist party accomplished with ease by persuading the mass of workers that their demands had been amply met and that the idea of revolution was not a very tempting one...
...Later, one part of the Communist procession rejoined the general demonstration, after the Communist demonstration had been dispersed...
...FRANCE—A NEW BIND OF REBELLION ence, the disregard for human needs, ignorance of the nature of man, and a contempt that does violence to the individual...
...While their studies, on the one hand, and the ambiguous and uncomfortable system of instruction, on the other, have made the students more conscious than others of the new forms of alienation produced by industrial society (an alienation that is also spoken of among some of the younger workers), this awareness is not shared by the majority of the workers...
...And one must say that this battle was waged by all students—be they enrages, groupuscules, or the mass of the protestors and those who gradually came to join them—with admirable generosity, sincerity, and courage...
...It took a long time then for the worker to overcome his fear of society's overt or implied threats against unionized workers and strikers...
...The rector...
...And they are not prepared, for the sake of a rather hazy ideology that does not really affect them, to sacrifice these advantages...
...And everyone knows that the ministers who were JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL sacrificed in the general cabinet reshuffle paid for errors they committed under orders, and not as the result of initiative—an initiative which their servility toward their boss makes hard to believe they would ever exercise...
...And so deGaulle established a government that corresponded in fact to what those who had installed him as President had expected of him...
...The authoritarian form of instruction—based upon paternalistic relations between master and pupil and the centralized, authoritarian and militaristic (particularly in its discipline) administration— was once and for all abolished...
...But we cannot reduce to one simple psychological and psycho-social element a phenomenon whose full implications and consequences we are still unable to foresee...
...At all levels throughout the country there has developed, not authority, but a kind of authoritarianism that some perhaps did not see for what it was, even when they came to exercise it...
...Even so, the efforts of the past weeks, at least, will remain a source of inspiration both for a recasting of the educational system and for further demands in this area...
...That is why this latest French uprising could not lead to a real revolution...
...The consumer society places young people in a most ambiguous position...
...The "university complex" was built at Nanterre because land was available.* No one foresaw what would happen...
...TEN YEARS of this kind of guile and of servility by the majority sufficed to achieve one of the objectives of Gaullism: the suppression of all political life in the country, at least in that institutional setting where it would normally take place...
...These and similar slogans expressed the spirit of the riots...
...Very little really, if one looks back at the sequence of events...
...And this majority, to the extent that it was ever able to express itself, was only too willing to give its support...
...they had to suffer the same contempt shown toward non-Gaullist groups...
...But the revolution of May 1968 was launched by students, a social group that did not and could not make any economic demands...
...It was simply that the conservative forces, which might have opposed them, were too discredited to fight them effectively...
...Because the majority was torn by divi sive factions...
...And it made the whole French revolutionary camp look like a vast movement controlled by the Communist party, at least among the uninformed and those eager to swallow this interpretation...
...The various fashions, the theatre, films, records, radio, and leisure industries depend on their purchases and thus convey the impression that, through their choices, tastes, and habits the young dominate part of society...
...But this does not mean that all forms of codetermination must have this result...
...In the political sphere, the unions, especially the CGT, have pronounced themselves satisfied with the decision to dissolve the Chamber and have placed no obstacles in the way of elections...
...But this revolution corresponds to none of the classical forms of revolt bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century...
...many Gaullists were critical of the government...
...by these authoritarian measures it set up one of the traps into which it was to fall...
...temporary legal measures forbade it...
...For many reasons, among which one should not forget the interests of the Soviet Union, the Communist party is once again giving de Gaulle its full support...
...Without this support, the demonstration of May 30 would perhaps never have succeeded...
...One must also speak of the methods of instruction at Nanterre, which vary according to the subject...
...It was easy to dismiss the slogans of self-management and joint management put forward by the students in purely economic and social terms as utopian...
...But right from the beginning, and for all those who did not eventually succumb to the prefabricated molds of classical revolutionary thought, the protest of the strikers and the students against society, against their masters, and against the rules they worked under and the work they did, was seen as a protest against depersonalization in a hierarchical and compartmentalized society, an unwillingness to regard material demands as the only important ones...
...It began because there had been a spontaneous outbreak, *Compagnie Republicaine de Sbcuritd...
Vol. 15 • July 1968 • No. 4
