France in Rebellion-Four Articles And from Toulouse
ALAN, RAY
...And from Toulouse By Ray Alan Toulouse Posters proclaimed "Long live anarchy!" and there were portraits of Marx, Bakunin and other grandfatherly figures. Someone had defaced a fresco—the sort...
...Half a dozen Spaniards unfurled a big red-and-black banner—that of the anarcho-syndicalist cnt...
...They both offer the same dead end, the same mass brutaliza-tion...
...He was an elegant, expensively-dressed young man and as he drove off in his imported sports car I wondered what contact he had with the working class...
...Perhaps membership in the Communist party makes one an honorary proletarian...
...No wonder they lost the Civil War," a Frenchman said...
...A municipal official tried to comfort frustrated couples...
...There is no real discussion and no student participation in university government...
...His mouth was the shape of a circumflex, his face grey...
...But we must do so as peacefully as possible...
...Capitalism and Soviet Communism are Tweedledum and Twee-dledee...
...Like the Sorbonne, the University of Toulouse, second biggest in France, had been taken over by its students and renamed I'Universite critique...
...We must therefore use our opportunities constructively . . ." The students are a neat, decent looking crowd...
...In Russian universities, for example, there is an insatiable demand for information about Bakunin and Anarchism . . ." In a cafe across the square a young assistant professor was sneering at a group of students who were distributing leaflets...
...The huge 18th-century City Hall looked as forlorn as a castle under siege while the arcaded square in front of it filled with demonstrators: 4,000-5,000 students, 3,000-4,000 workers, a wavering fringe of onlookers...
...The Communist party and the Communist-led General Federation of Labor had denounced Daniel Cohn-Bendit and other leaders of the student revolt as "Leftist adventurers," and even drawn attention to Cohn-Bendit's German-Jewish origins...
...But there were many bright-eyed Spaniards in the crowd milling through the City Hall...
...student power, if it were representative, would be retrogressive...
...its owner was more probably a pig...
...but it could not marry people...
...A skull hanging on a wall was labelled "Crane de crs...
...No crs were to be seen...
...He is one of the most active Communist organizers in his faculty...
...They liked his foreign policy...
...They were shouted down...
...With him was a young man who had recently arrived, a few steps ahead of the police, over the Pyrenees...
...The crowded amphitheater where I spent my first hour with them smelled of soap...
...The courtyard of the Mairie is packed with crs...
...beards have more to do with acne than with Anarchism...
...But at present most students are drawn from bourgeois families...
...The only enclave of long hair, clotted beards and miscellaneous fetidness in Toulouse is over at the Beaux Arts...
...The longer you delay opening a barrel," he said, "the better its contents...
...We have to be ready both for provocateurs and for the crs," they explained, fearful of the brutal riot police who beat up students and sometimes newspapermen and bystanders during last month's demonstrations in Paris...
...and its secretary, Georges Seguy, became a daily performer on the state broadcasting network...
...It's odd that the Beaux Arts attract so many people who are the reverse of beaux . . ." The assembly in the amphitheater voted in favor of a march on the City Hall...
...In France, even Anarchists are traditionalists...
...But it was a low-browed skull even for the genus crs...
...De Gaulle to the museum...
...But," I asked, "isn't the Anarchist flag black-and-red...
...After some hesitation, the Army provided conscripts to dig graves and conduct rough-and-ready burials...
...A great door opened two inches to allow student delegates to demand immediate occupation of the building and municipal support for the university revolt and striking workers...
...Several hundred people whistled and booed...
...During the night Right-wing students of the allegedly neo-fascist Occident movement scaled the facade of the City Hall, tore down the red and black flags and substituted a tricolor...
...The crowd began to get restless...
...A few years ago a big proportion of French students supported the French-Algeria movement, even the oas [the Right-wing terrorist organization]," continued the young professor...
...This doesn't mean students are hopeless, of course...
...Everywhere, at all times, the great majority of students are conservative, even reactionary...
...We cannot achieve anything positive without first throwing everything into the melting-pot: We must criticize, contest, question everything—not only our university but the society that produced it...
...As the time for the march on the City Hall drew near, the cgt and uec (Communist students' union) declared that they wanted no part in it and announced a demonstration of their own to be held on the morrow...
...We must occupy it," a student leader said, "in order both to strengthen our own position and to demonstrate the hollowness and irrelevance of de Gaulle's regime...
...They can be educated...
...and, as education is democratized and more workers' children reach the faculties, our party will progress in the university...
...The authorities pay them to discredit the student movement?15,000 old francs [$30] a day...
...Next year they may well be waving fascist banners...
...The students' leaders and workers' delegates went upstairs to talk to the Mayor...
...On the edge of the crowd I met the editor of an Anarchist monthly...
...Did you read what Herbert Marcuse told Le Monde the other week [April 11...
...Two men wanted violent action...
...Even after the strike movement had spread throughout France the cgt tried hard to limit it to the industrial plane, refusing to associate with calls for political changes...
...A Socialist said: "This morning the Communists were ready to march with us...
...They must have received a counterorder from Paris...
...Scruffiness and exhibitionist bohemianism are out...
...They think we're too innocent to spot them...
...During the last few years the Communists had settled down happily in the role of de Gaulle's loyal opposition...
...A professor answered: "The black flag is the old Anarchist flag of Bakunin's day...
...They're provocateurs," a student told me...
...It took a series of defections and prods from its rank and file to persuade the cgt leadership to commit itself to the anti-Gaullist movement...
...Two or three of them wanted to raise it high above their heads, but the others said the authorities would consider this a challenge: It should be displayed discreetly at breast-height...
...Some of them even call themselves Communists...
...then it shut again...
...A set of "theses," spread over two walls, begins: "We students are a privileged minority in that we have the leisure and opportunities denied the workers to study the problems of society...
...After all, most of them are in their 20s...
...They can't be a revolutionary force because they have no real contact with the working class...
...Many people had a feeling of anti-climax, though...
...I remarked on this to a teacher...
...Thinking people everywhere are beginning to realize this and look for an alternative...
...The Mayor is a moderate Socialist a la Guy Mollet...
...The crowd sang the International and chanted slogans: "De Gaulle resign...
...What were they, then...
...For his part, de Gaulle felt free to concentrate on foreign affairs, confident that the Communists would not disturb the domestic scene so long as he flirted with Moscow...
...A few people applauded and cried: "Vive le Stade toulousain...
...Someone had defaced a fresco—the sort of fresco that acquires interest only after it has been defaced—with the words "Death to de Gaulle...
...The following morning the City Hall was closed, except for the registration of births and deaths...
...She said: "Our students don't go for kid stuff like long hair and I'm-emancipated-so-I-don't-need-to-wash-my-neck...
...A middle-aged worker with a pipe in his mouth climbed 30 feet up the Ionic front of the city hall to plant red and black flags on its balcony...
...Now they call themselves Anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Castroists and so on...
...The red flag is just folklore...
...As they argued, the banner bobbed up and down...
...But he went on to announce his acceptance of the demonstrators' demands...
...Agents of the dst (the French political police) had called on leading Spanish Leftwingers in Toulouse in mid-May to warn them not to associate with the French students1 and workers' movements...
...Other students prepared banners and red and black flags—red for two or three fashionable varieties of Marxism, black for Anarchism...
...Red-and-black are the colors of a Toulouse football team...
...De Gaulle's sudden attack on "totalitarian Communism" on May 30 showed signs of the kind of bitterness that is produced by a soured entente...
...Because," explained a student, "the French educational system is autocratic in its administration and dogmatic in its methods...
...It's the black flag that really scares the bourgeoisie," a young Anarchist said...
...They think they can teach us how to be revolutionaries," he said...
...Why critique...
...At last a window opened and the Mayor and three or four councilors came onto the balcony...
...It is pervaded by a militaristic respect for hierarchy...
...Bourgeois kids in search of excitement...
...They were both neatly-dressed, clean-shaven men...
...Students put on their crash helmets...
...The revolutionary students and workers who had camped inside the building were all asleep...
...A pale bearded youth told me anxiously: "It'll be a massacre...
...he cried...
...Comrades...
...Within five years," the editor told me, "there will be scenes like this all over Europe—even in societies as conservative as England and Russia...
...But not," someone observed, "if it has already been tampered with...
...Members of the orthodox (pro-Moscow) Communist party were a minority among the student revolutionaries—a mistrusted minority...
...A few minutes later the great doors of the City Hall were flung open and the crowd pushed through them into the inner courtyard of the building...
...How could we stay home...
...Red and black flags waved impatiently...
...This is the sort of thing we dream about," one of them said...
...After the assembly, several students tried on crash helmets...
...and the unimaginative orthodoxy of his economic ministers won them recruits...
...The walls of the Faculty of Letters, which seems to be the center of the melting-pot, are bedecked with heart-warming quotations of the kind one preserved in notebooks and worked, a little nervously, into essays when one was a teenager...
...A student remarked: "The taking of the Bastille must have been something like this...
...Toulousains who died or wished to get married had been stranded (municipal services are essential in both extremities...
Vol. 51 • June 1968 • No. 13
