The Legacy of May '68 in France
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
TAKING TO THE STREETS The Legacy of May '68 in France By Janice Valls-Russell Paris The students who in May 1968 briefly took over the center of Paris, defying their elders from behind...
...In April, groups described by Socialist Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement as Trotkyists persuaded passengers on flights bound for Mali, Africa, to protest against the presence on board of gagged, handcuffed illegal immigrants who were being escorted back to their home country by French police...
...Some 20 Maoists and Trotskyists were elected in the March regional elections...
...We bear an objective, historical responsibility for that...
...Other banners were more cruel, the most famous being "CRS=SS," aimed at the French riot police...
...So Cohn-Bendit and his pals set out for the Sorbonne, where they linked up with the gauchistes—Trotskyists, Maoists and other revolutionary firebrands who were active in the Quartier Latin...
...Under government pressure, employers agreed to high pay raises, shorter working hours and union representation at the shop-floor level...
...This, in turn, pulled in the labor confederations...
...What lingers from May 1968 in the country at large is a tendency to air one's discontent in the streets, and a parallel mistrust of institutional democracy that the Mitterrand years failed to erode...
...TAKING TO THE STREETS The Legacy of May '68 in France By Janice Valls-Russell Paris The students who in May 1968 briefly took over the center of Paris, defying their elders from behind makeshift barricades, are now middle-aged citizens worried about jobs, mortgages and thinning hair...
...The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18...
...The 1970s brought an easing of political and social mores...
...Leftists denied that immigration from sub-Saharan Africa and the Muslim Maghreb, much of it illegal, was causing cultural and social problems...
...A general strike ensued...
...What strikes one, amid the worldwide horror and despair, is the smiling earnestness of France's young rebels...
...Notes Cohn-Bendit, who lives in Germany and is a Green Party member of the European Parliament: "We destructured France and, in that, we are guilty...
...Throughout the academic year, CohnBendit and a handful of other students had been disrupting courses at the new University of Nanterre and defying rules that put the women students' residences out of bounds to the men...
...Certainly they have gotten off to a limp start, with predictable film retrospectives, new books that rarely have anything novel to say, and smug "we-werethere" reminiscences by intellectuals on talk shows...
...A kind of generosity prevailed then too...
...But the powerful General Confederation of Workers (CGT), which was controlled by the Communist Party, resisted involvement...
...Utopia and good humor are written across their attractive features, beautifully photographed by, among others, Henri Cartier-Bresson...
...Prime Minister Georges Pompidou caved in and brought everyone to the negotiating table...
...The CGT accepted the deal, drawing other mainstream unions along in its wake...
...Asked about the soixantehuitards, they respond: "It was all very well for them...
...By introducing proportional representation on the eve of the 1986 general election, Mitterrand enabled the FN to send 35 deputies to the National Assembly...
...The soixante-huitards perhaps had some excuses...
...Shedding the red flags of their youth for pink respectability, several leading ex-gauchistes like Henri Weber and Alain Geismar, who were teachers, Bernard Kouchner, a doctor active in international humanitarian causes, and Roland Castro, an architect, served the Socialist administration...
...In a public statement on March 23, Center-Right President Jacques Chirac denounced the FN as "racist and xenophobic" and urged the Left to avoid "pouring oil on the fire...
...Such historical blurring is apt to take in young people...
...Quite a few of those who discovered at the time that they had a talent for leadership went on to careers in or close to the Socialist Party...
...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...
...Nevertheless, factory workers across the country put down their tools...
...It covers the main events of 1968, from Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination to the Biafra war and Soviet tanks rolling into Prague...
...Many come from workingclass backgrounds...
...France whipped itself into such a frenzy that spring 30 years ago that any commemorative events are bound to be an anticlimax...
...The French Communists' mission, as dictated to them by Moscow, was first and foremost to shore up the President of France, Charles de Gaulle, rather than allow unsuitable Leftists to gain any power...
...Early this April it went unnoticed...
...There were no trains, no mail deliveries...
...Many attend multiethnic schools and colleges and are appalled by the FN leaders' insinuations that all races are not equal...
...Although the gauchistes tried to exploit them, Cohn-Bendit and his cohort remained true to their initial pattern of spontaneity and defiance...
...World War II had taken place only a generation earlier, and while a minority of them had mothers or fathers who were active in the Resistance, many confess to having been uneasily ignorant about whether their parents had collaborated with the pro-Nazi Vichy regime or simply been indifferent to what was going on...
...Simultaneously, farLeft movements led by '68 participants like Alain Krivine, a Trotskyist, exploit the disarray felt in those urban areas by teachers, social workers and nonwhite teenagers, all of whom, like their FN-voting opposite numbers, see themselves abandoned to their fate by the mainstream parties...
...Ne travaillez jamais (Never work...
...Public opinion tends to side with whoever is in a protesting mode: civil servants, railway workers, truck drivers, students and, in mid-April, cauliflower growers...
...But the country had given itself a fright, and on June 30 a general election afforded de Gaulle's supporters a sweeping majority...
...Although the law was later changed, local elections this past March left five regional administrations dependent on the support of FN representatives...
...AIDS has turned the '68 dream of sex without hindrance into a deathtrap...
...Another legacy, in a way, has been the "fascists" many students of '68 thought they were fighting, who have now materialized in the form of the xenophobic, far-Right National Front (FN...
...Fellow students and passersby were aghast to see them being shoved into police vans...
...Veteran feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir—who saw their ranks swell after the young women rebelling against their patriarchal families in 1968 discovered the sexism of some male gauchistes—had much to cheer: Contraception and abortion were legalized, divorce by mutual consent was introduced and women generally won more consideration in the workplace and the home...
...They live at home and hang on to their boyfriend or girlfriend when they have one...
...A fistful of soixante-huitards (sixtyeighters) still cling to their (far) Left- (far) Right vision of the world...
...The unrest spread, until on May 2 the school was closed...
...They didn't have so many things to worry about...
...The support of teaching staff, especially junior lecturers, brought the teachers' unions into the protests...
...A rally in the Sorbonne's main courtyard on May 3 fizzled out—or would have if the police had not arrived and rounded up those still on the scene...
...Their attitude helped create an atmosphere in which the FN could begin to flourish...
...Despite internal ideological quarrels, Francois Mitterrand's 1981 victory was welcomed by the entire French Left...
...On May 22, upon learning that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the son of German Jews, had been prevented from returning to France after a quick trip to Germany, Paris students held a march bearing banners that read: Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands (We are all German Jews...
...Militants compare these expulsions to the death camp trains of World War II...
...Some slogans warned against Leftist opportunism...
...Students increasingly worry about unemployment and making ends meet...
...More recently, the brutality of French troops and police during the civil war that led to Algeria's independence in 1962 had revived unpleasant memories of the Vichy years...
...Police brutality and the government's clumsy handling of the crisis created public sympathy for the students...
...The next thing the country knew, barricades had been thrown up in the area and cobblestones were flying...
...Then the presence of police on a campus led to rioting, as it did during the student strikes of 1976, 1986 and 1995...
...Basic foodstuffs began to get scarce as housewives laid in stores...
...The student movement then petered out...
...Predictably, the French Left has led anti-FN marches and rejuvenated veterans of the '68 demonstrations have taken to the streets again, this time alongside their sons and daughters...
...censorship slackened off...
...There is little chance, however, of a replay of the events of 30 years ago...
...A year later, though, voters rejected a constitutional reform, forcing de Gaulle out of office...
...The FN plays on the frustrations of a white working class that feels trapped in drab urban areas increasingly populated by Arab and African immigrants and their children (most of whom are in fact French citizens...
...Aphorisms scrawled on the Sorbonne's walls were almost self-mocking: Demandez l'impossible (Demand the impossible), Jouissez sans entraves (Sex without hindrance...
...The National Front polls 15 per cent...
...In the mid-1980s, as former student radicals gained political power, Trotskyist-led antiracist groups colluded with the opportunistic Mitterrand to stir up a dangerous mood...
...A few students—and quite a few Trotskyists—also rallied to the cause of the unemployed who occupied public buildings over the Christmas season and in some cases led the action...
...An exhibition of Magnum agency photographs that opened here at the Sorbonne and will travel to Toulouse and Aries, in the South of France, best captures the mood and convulsions of the period...
Vol. 81 • April 1998 • No. 5
