Chicago Literary Club

25 February 2008

The French Students’ May Riot

By

Peter V. Conroy Jr

There are dates that mark their epoch, that remain sharp in our general consciousness, and that stand as landmark chapters in our history books. Simply reciting the list of such dates plunges us into the heart of a culture and a society. For us Americans, some of those dates would be: July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence; 1865, the assassination of Lincoln; December 11, 1941, Pearl Harbor, the day that would live in infamy. Other cultures highlight other events: October 1917, the Russian Revolution; August 1914, the shot at Sarajevo and the outbreak of World War I. For France, we could cite 1789, the storming of the Bastille and the Revolution that followed; 1915-16, the battle of Verdun. The British would probably think of the battle of the Somme in 1916, Dunkirk in 1940, the London Blitz. Less military but equally sad examples would be the assassination of JFK in 1963 and the death of Princess Diana (30 August 1997).

Tonight I would like to draw your attention to another such momentous date: 1968, a year that marked critical events in many countries around the world. The first months of 1968 saw the Prague Spring, a brief flowering of freedom nipped in the bud by Soviet tanks in August but one that would blossom definitively 20 years later. We in the US were shocked by the photos documenting the January Têt offensive in Vietnam. The thought that the battle might be a shocking military defeat for us only fortified anti-war sentiment that was already strong. We also suffered through two assassinations, Martin Luther King’s on April 4, and Bobby Kennedy’s on June 5. The west side of Chicago still bears the scars of the riots that followed their deaths. On April 23rd, students staged an uprising at Columbia University in New York City that set a pattern for similar events on college campuses across the country.

1968, it seems, is a year that does not lack for significant events. The one I want to discuss this evening is probably not well know here in the US. I am referring to what is known in France as “mai 68,” a national upheaval of unprecedented proportions, a critical event that marked a turning point in French political life and social attitudes. Present day France lives in the shadow of “May 68.” Those who actually participated in those events are regarded today with a mixture of awe and wonder, to the point that there is even a specific term used to designate them, “les soixant-huitards” which translates as the sixty-eighters. Certain phrases, “the events of May” and “68” are so self-evident to French ears that they are immediately recognizable, they can only refer to what happened in that particular May of 1968.

Tonight I would like to recount some of those famous “events of May” in an attempt to explain why it has left such an enormous legacy. Before telling the story of those events, day by day, however, I’ll begin with a more general word about this phenomenon as a whole.

For Frenchmen and women today, both those who were there to experience it and those who have just heard about it, or read about it in the history books, “May 68” can be considered in a number of different ways. First, it has been described as a carnival, a wild, joyous celebration, a gleeful explosion, a riotous release of pent-up and stifled emotions, a much needed and welcome societal catharsis for a straight laced and hidebound society. Seen as a comic happening, May 68 resembles the feasts that mark the last days before the beginning of Lent as so joyously exemplified in the carnival of Rio de Janeiro. Second, May 68 has been considered a remarkable collective upheaval, a unplanned and unpredictable event that generated its own momentum and direction. Enormous numbers of individuals participated in this major happening yet no single leader directed it. In a country like France where a premium is placed on hierarchical organizational structures, the lack of a strong, unified leadership giving precise orders to a cohort of obeying subalterns is something of an anomaly, especially in the political domain. The chaotic events of May lacked a clear, single-minded focus; they were largely spontaneous, moving in unpredictable ways according to a (il) logic of their own. Third and most important, May 68 is understood as a conscious attack on the political status quo, a radical and rebellious questioning of those in power that nearly led to the overthrow of the elected government. It was the closest that France came in the twentieth century to total societal breakdown. It is almost inconceivable today for us to imagine how a placid country like France, enjoying real prosperity and not unhappy with its elected officials, could so suddenly fall into chaos. This massive societal breakdown flashed out of apparent ease and contentment. What began as almost insignificant student unrest culminated in a nation-wide strike that shut down the whole country. For at least one full month France was paralyzed, immobile, teetering on the brink of civic and social dissolution.

May 68 was not then a month like any other. Let us look closer at this extraordinary period and the extraordinary events that fill it.

Early in 1968 a French political observer, Viansson-Ponté, wrote in the prestigious newspaper Le Monde that “France was bored. She is sleeping.” He claimed even to hear “the snoring of self-satisfaction … despite unrest at the university level and a crisis in national education.” He evoked also the country’s “apathy” and its “incoherence.” Although no one knew it then, France was approaching the end of a period of unparalleled economic growth and prosperity. The years after the close of World War II became known to later historians as the “Les Trente Glorieuses,” “The Thirty Glorious Years” which would definitively end with the OPEC petrol crisis of 1972. That phrase was an historical allusion to another episode in French history, the “Les Trois Glorieuses,” “The Three Glorious Days” in 1830 that terminated the Bourbon monarchy and opened a period of comfort, contentment, and political stability under the new king, Louis Philippe d‘Orleans. While the French phrases only share the adjective “glorious,” the connection between the two absent nouns, days and years, both plural and feminine, as well as the symmetry of 3 and 30 make the allusion easy to recognize. By 68 the scars of World War II had healed. The county was once again rich, its economy strong, its people prosperous. This general prosperity did conceal, nonetheless, a certain amount of unrest and discontent. Workers who were usually lower class did not share proportionately in this new found wealth. University students, who were largely upper class and affluent, were restless because they had no say in governing academe and were dissatisfied with the curriculum. Nonetheless, this post-war boom was so successful that the only danger France faced in the late 60s, or so it seemed, was complacency and an indolent enjoyment of its own well being. Beneath the surface, however, a deeper malaise was eating away at that self-satisfaction. And so when that sleeping giant did awake with a mighty roar, no one was prepared for the outburst.

It began – of course, we can say now-- almost insignificantly on the university campus of Nanterre, on the western edge of Paris. One of the newly created campus annexes of the expanding University of Paris, Nanterre was built in 1964 and four years later still not completed. Traditionally French universities never had campuses per se, like ours, although this is less true today than it was 40 years ago. They tended to be housed in older buildings in downtown locations, some like the Sorbonne dating back to the seventeenth century. Since space there is at a premium, it is all devoted to classrooms, faculty offices, and administrative bureaus. Because the university is narrowly focused on academic pursuits, there are no sports teams, no basketball courts or football fields, few recreational facilities. Nor are there any of the extra curricular activities that we find so normal in our universities like the newspaper, the year book, student government, the chess or the math clubs. French students come to class, listen to lectures, and leave. They rent rooms off campus; they read and study in cafes rather than in libraries. Conceived along the American model, Nanterre was intended to be an exception to this rule and a showcase for the new French university.

Higher education in France was beginning to feel the negative effects of its recent success. Unprecedented numbers of students were attending the university whose admissions policy had been relaxed, but few were finding jobs upon graduation. The ranks of the disgruntled were growing. Complicating the situation was the fact that, while university diplomas were losing their traditional value on the job market, the grandes écoles –-elite technical institutions that were open only through rigorous competitive examinations-- had lost none of their luster. Thus liberal arts and sciences students resented being deemed inferior to those in mathematical and engineering studies. Subordinate to these major issues was a minor, local grievance. But it was practical and immediate, and therefore significant out of proportion to its intrinsic merit. Nanterre was the rare French university with dormitories on campus. The Nanterre students were demanding co-ed dorms and the right to visit the opposite sex without any restrictions. The refusal of the student demands provoked a demonstration on January 26 and later, on February 14, a strike by those living in the dorms.

Nanterre was an exception to the French university model for another reason. It was built in a barren suburb, far from any urban conveniences or activities. Running along the campus edge, and thus always visible, was a run-down shantytown inhabited mainly by impoverished immigrant workers. The always politicized French students found an inspiration for their political activity in this unfortunate contrast between their own affluence and the workers’ poverty. Additionally, French students expect an exciting social milieu to complement their studies, a demand easy to satisfy since usually French universities are located down town, in the business, commercial and cultural center of their city. This allows students to enjoy the hum of urban life, a richer and more varied menu that what they could find on campus. They feel attached to the city’s pulse. The contrast between the barren Nanterre and the exciting Latin Quarter in Paris, only a few kilometers away, was glaring. French students regard their years at the university as an immersion in current, most often political, concerns, while Americans see their undergraduate years as something of an escape, a pause or diversion before serious life begins. American universities are often large communities in small towns, while French students are a smaller but homogeneous population surrounded by a much larger social group. Not surprisingly then, all the energy that in American universities flows internally, to sports and on campus activities, both social and artistic, is channeled in France externally, into questions about urban issues and interest in politics. This urban context is precisely what was missing at Nanterre. The absence of this exciting urban contact was exacerbated by the campus’s unfinished condition and the proximity of obvious poverty. Since they did not have their usual focus of interest, the students needed another cause to spend their energy on.

French politics during the first half of 68 did not lack for hot-button issues. Sentiment against the American war in Vietnam was running high. Stung by their own failure in Indo-China which they blamed on America’s refusal to help, the French gloated over American difficulties there. They took advantage of any opportunity to denounce the war and to demonstrate against what they called American imperialism. University students also objected to their own ostentatious consumer society and the capitalist system underlying it, both of which they considered specifically American faults. Early in 68 bombs were detonated in front of several American establishments in Paris, Chase Manhattan, the Bank of America, and TWA. Four students from Nanterre were arrested after a similar bombing incident at the American Express office on March 20. That was the spark that set off the powder keg.

Immediately a student committee sprang up. The Movement of March 22 (M22M) declared solidarity with the students and condemned their arrest. Students stopped attending classes. Their time and energy were now directed into interminable discussions about the situation which brought the simmering issue of the dorms to a head also. On March 28, after campus unrest and demonstrations, the dean at Nanterre officially suspended classes. In reaction, the university professors’ union in Paris (a strong national organization, with a huge majority of all professors as members) called for a nation-wide strike to protest his decision. Also in sympathy with Nanterre, a militant student group at the Sorbonne held a public meeting (29 March) in one of the main lecture halls, the salle Richelieu. This rally provoked administrative anger because the students had not asked for official permission. They talked about boycotting the all important end of year examinations in addition to disrupting classes. A week of discussions between students and faculty led no where. Then students left for two weeks of Easter vacation (April 4 through 18). Officials hoped that after the vacation all would return to normal.

It did not. On April 21 and again on the 23, various militant student factions on both the far left and the far right attacked each other with clubs and other hand weapons. Most identified themselves by an alphabet soup of acronyms proclaiming their various Maoist, Trotskyite, anarchist, and diverse revolutionary allegiances: Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF), Union des Etudiants Communistes (UEC), Front universitaire anti-fasciste (FUA), Féderation des groupes d’études de lettres (FGEL), Jeunesse Communiste révolutionnaire (JCR), Union des jeunesses communistes-marxistes-léninistes (UJC-M-L), Comités d’action lycéens (CAL). Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the student leader from Nanterre soon to be baptized Danny the Red and currently an elected member of the European Parliament, was interrogated by police for his role as instigator of one of these clashes. Students resented what they considered this unwarranted intrusion of civil authority into university matters. The government seemed unconcerned with this student unrest and chose not to act. Prime Minster Georges Pompidou was preoccupied with preparations for an official trip that would take him to Tehran from May 2 until the 11^th. Disdainful of such insignificant matters, President de Gaulle maintained an Olympian silence. Without any direction from above, the other government ministers did not react. The situation was deteriorating rapidly as those in power stayed on the sidelines.

Acting without any governmental input, Dean Grappin closed Nanterre on May 3. Militant students immediately moved to the Latin (or student) Quarter in downtown Paris. Calling themselves the “Enraged Ones” after the political extremists who rioted during the worst days of the French Revolution in 1793, they occupied the courtyard of Sorbonne, generally regarded both in France and abroad as the flagship and the symbolic center of French higher education. As others joined them, the total number swelled. While the students talked outside, in the courtyard, the professors inside the building tried to decide on their course of action. Jean Roche, the chancellor of the entire Paris university system, which included some eleven other campuses in addition to the Sorbonne and Nanterre, contacted the Minister of Education, Alain Peyrefitte, looking for advice. No one is sure who made the final decision, but eventually Roche called on the police to remove the students milling about in the interior courtyard. It took about 3 hours for the police to lead the students through the narrow entrance ways and into the small public square in front of the Sorbonne where paddy wagons were waiting for them. Although the protesters themselves went peacefully, a large crowd gathered quickly and watched anxiously. Concerned for their fellow students and unsure of what exactly was happening and why, the onlookers finally panicked. A projectile was thrown, then more. Police retaliated with tear gas. The conflict escalated. When the police tried to charge the crowd, the students disappeared into the surrounding streets. Thus the first violent clashes began and continued through the night.

Students were enraged not just by being arrested but more importantly by the police presence at the Sorbonne. University precincts were supposed to remain inviolate, beyond the reach of the metropolitan police. Longstanding tradition, dating back to the middle ages and the tumultuous students of that epoch, held that the university was autonomous, a safe haven against civil authority. One of the slogans repeated constantly throughout the month was “Free our comrades!” The rector’s summoning of police onto university property shocked the students’ sense of the university’s special status, not to mention their own.

Friday May 3 was the first outbreak of the violence that would last a month, bring tens of thousands of policemen to the Latin Quarter, and provoke additional confrontations and turmoil throughout the rest of the country. Major cities like Nantes, Rouen, Lille, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Marseille, and Lyon experienced the same student insurrections as did Paris. Clashes with the police continued on an almost daily basis for the rest of the month of May. Periods of calm during the day would alternate with pitched battles at night. By day, students and their sympathizers would roam freely through the Latin Quarter and later through the university buildings that the students had occupied. Despite the violence, residents, tourists and other visitors, and just plan curious on-lookers were able to walk about the Latin Quarter during daylight hours under the watchful eye of a massive police presence which seemed to occupy every major intersection. Particularly prolonged and violent clashes marked three Fridays (3^rd, 10^th, 24^th), which became known as the “red” Fridays, as we shall see.

On Monday, May 6^th, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the Nanterre protests, appeared before a university disciplinary committee at the Sorbonne which was now surrounded and protected by riot police. That afternoon, a huge number of protesting students demonstrated in his support. Twelve hours of violent clashes between students and police followed. It was the worst urban disturbance Paris had seen in a decade. A thousand people were injured, 345 of them policemen. Four hundred students were arrested. This conflict established the cat-and-mouse game that subsequently characterized all the skirmishes between students and police. When the police charged and tried to surround them, the students would flee into a rabbit warren of side streets, cafes, restaurants, and regroup elsewhere. All these clashes were indecisive, with neither side winning victory. As dawn broke, each side would retreat to its own turf, unable to prevail against the other and maintaining its wary vigilance and offensive stance.

Tuesday brought another march. Since the Latin Quarter was heavily patrolled by police, twenty to thirty thousand gleeful demonstrators gathered at Denfert-Rochereau, a major traffic intersection south of the Latin Quarter on the left bank. This huge open square had several major boulevards radiating out from it, and it became the usual place for student demonstrators to gather and for marches to begin. Avoiding the main arteries the police had cordoned off, they marched all the way across the Seine to the Place de la Concorde on the bourgeois right bank, disdainfully ignoring the National Assembly as they passed by. They paraded up the posh Champs Elysées all the way to the Arc de Triomphe. Once they reached that huge traffic circle, they climbed all over the monument, posing for pictures and unfurling their black and red flags, symbols of anarchy and protest. This was a special event since the students strayed so far from their home base in the Latin Quarter. Their route was quite long, and they carried out the whole affair peacefully and even with a certain comic flair singing the “Internationale,” the communist party hymn, in order to provoke the bourgeois on-lookers. The latter were predictably incensed by this tomfoolery and by the mockery the students made of the Arc de Triomphe, that serious monument to past French glory. This demonstration became known as the “long march,” a reference not only to the distance covered, but also to Mao Zedong’s long march. Mao was of course a hero and an inspiration to the leftist students throughout the 60s and 70s. They enjoyed using his name as a political provocation against conservatives and others on the right. Evoking Mao in the students’ code also signified opposition to the war in Vietnam and was another sign of the extensive anti-Americanism common at that time on the French political left. Tuesday best represents the comic and festive aspect of the May events. Despite their serious intentions, the students accepted their role as clowns and played their part of comic provocation to the hilt.

Public opinion at this point was heavily in favor of the students and their cause. A national IFOP poll on 8 May found that 80% of Frenchmen viewed them favorably, while they disapproved of the police actions on the 3^rd and the 6th. Intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre formed a committee (a traditional French gesture) to support the students and signed a manifesto (equally traditional) on May 8 that urged workers to join them in opposition to the government. Misreading the whole situation completely, Alain Peyrefitte, the Minister of Education, saw no crisis in the making, and had dismissed on May 6 all the unrest as the work of a few agitators. One historian calls the government position a movement “from brutal reaction to incomprehensible inaction.”

A few days later, on Friday the 10^th, at the request of university authorities, the police occupied the Sorbonne and closed it down. By this time, the municipal police had been reinforced by the CRS, the Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité, the elite national para-military troops attached to the ministry of the Interior. They are called upon in tense and violent situations and are especially trained as an anti-riot unit. They were also joined by units from the Gendarmerie Nationale, a national police force that is a branch of the army.

Friday the 10^th was the worst night of rioting that France had seen since the tumultuous 1930s. Immediately it became known in student legend as the Night of the Barricades. For the first time students systematically erected barricades throughout the Latin Quarter. They built them out of the cobblestones they pried up from the streets and the automobiles they overturned and set ablaze. Old trees along the famous Boul’ Mich were cut down and added to the breast works. Throughout the night, police charged the barricades and routed the students. The latter retreated, disappeared into the labyrinth of narrow and crooked streets, and then reappeared at another barricade. They continually rebuilt the barricades that the police dismantled.

The winding, narrow streets of the Latin Quarter were ideally suited to this type of urban resistance. The police were frustrated both by the tenacity of their opponents and by their tactics of fight and flight. Paving stones were not only used for the barricades but were hurled at the police who replied with tear gas, their weapon of choice. Although heavily armed, they did not fire any shots. However, when they did capture students, they beat them with their long truncheons. On that Friday night, a malodorous, heavy cloud hung over the entire Latin Quarter as the acrid smell of burning tires combined with tear gas to suffocate the whole neighborhood. Some of it wafted down into the metro, the underground subway, which runs underneath the Latin Quarter. Without knowing why, numerous commuters in the train that evening began to tear up and gag on their trip home.

The violence was compounded by chaos. The Latin Quarter was always an active, busy area, filled with residents, tourists, and ordinary Parisians patronizing its many restaurants and cinemas. It was congested as usual on this spring evening. The ordinary crowd was later increased by a number of curious on-lookers, drawn to the scene by radio reports of what was happening there. Unable to identify their adversaries, the police considered almost anyone they saw fair game, especially young people. They beat both demonstrators and innocent passers-by, even chasing them into apartment buildings and lobbing tear gas canisters into crowded cafes. This overreaction provoked a huge public outcry in favor of the students and against the forces of law and order. There were numerous witnesses to the abuses, many of them solid bourgeois and respectable middle class. They did not hesitate to raise their voices in protest. The chaos was unbelievable, students rioting, police counterattacking, and tourists strolling through the neighborhood. The final score for the Night of the Barricades was 367 wounded, 460 arrested, and 188 cars either destroyed or heavily damaged. The number of wounded for this night as for all the others is probably much too low. Fearing arrest if they turned up in hospitals, many of the students who were beaten simply returned home to nurse their wounds in secret.

By throwing up barricades, the students tapped into radical French history. Barricades have always been a powerful symbol of insurgency and revolutionary spirit for the French. Paris had seen many such barricades in its history, dating back to civil wars in the sixteenth century, urban riots during the French Revolution, revolts in 1830 and 1848, and the hand-to-hand fighting of the Commune in 1871. Another curious footnote. Today we see one of the pedestrian consequences of May 68: there are no more paving stones that in the past made Parisian streets quaint and charming. Whatever cobblestones remained after May were removed or covered with asphalt to deprive insurgents of their favorite weapon and thus to prevent a repetition of this kind of event. On a much smaller scale removing the cobble stones or tarring over them recalls the Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 1850s. Measured to coincide with the range of army machine guns, his wide and straight boulevards were designed to prevent the armed resistance and the barricades that had marked the urban conflicts of 1848.

All this action was reported live by radio. Europe 1 and Radio Luxembourg, two popular stations broadcasting from outside France and thus free of government interference, gave the fullest accounts of what was happening. In marked contrast, the Gaullist government censured the coverage by its own stations, especially television at the ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion-Televison Française). One hour-long documentary on the student crisis, scheduled for broadcast on 10 May, was cancelled at the last moment without explanation. The national radio station, France Inter, fared a bit better. Nonetheless, later in the month (May 20), its reporters went out on strike to protest governmental censure of the media. In August, after the unrest ended, the government fired 1400 employees.

Student leaders later bragged that they had followed police maneuvers through radio reports. Listening to their transistors prepared them for what would happen. (Remember that this is forty years ago, long before our instant communications through cell phones, laptops, and the internet.) Throughout the events students spoke to reporters live while the police did not. By participating in these actions as well as in the reporting of them by the media, the students won both the technical game (using transistor radios which were innovations at the time in order to monitor police activity) and the propaganda war (getting their version of events, their spin out to the public first). Influenced by these radio broadcasts, the listening public came to support and sympathize with the students while they turned against the government. The radio reports also galvanized students outside the Latin Quarter either in Paris or in other cities across the whole country who were thereby inspired to participate in the upheaval.

By the morning of the 11^th, once Friday night’s clashes had ended, the police had finished their occupation of the Sorbonne. However, another university building at Censier, a few block away, was unguarded. Students invaded it. The Censier campus was the first university building the students took over. Two days later, the police left the Sorbonne and it was officially reopened for class. Immediately, the students took over that building too and settled in. Many of them ate and slept there. They did not leave the premises until June.

Once they were in control of the Sorbonne building, the students begin an infinite series of meeting, discussions, and general assemblies. They replaced their professors’ lectures with their own political speeches. Huge meetings, open to everyone, continued round the clock. There are reports of homeless people sleeping in the lecture halls, mindless of the debates swirling around them. On a less humorous note, a certain number of real thugs and hooligans also settled in the basement of the vast building. All the political parties and splinter groups found rooms to hold their own meetings. They argued political theory, drew up policy papers, and read them to the general assemblies. They printed broad sheets and ephemeral newspapers to publicize their views, which they distributed to the public. Students from the art school produced a number of impressive posters. Images and slogans from those posters still resonate today while the idealistic and utopian policy statements are completely forgotten.

Again in their desire to provoke, students called these meetings “soviets” after the example of the Russian Revolution. Most often however these endless talkathons became tedious repetitions of political slogans and juvenile posturing. Despite their tendency to degenerate into pure bull sessions, they did articulate a coherent complaint and issued a call for idealistic but impossible reforms in the university and in society. While nothing of real importance was said and little of what was said has been remembered, these constant sessions did create a fantastic esprit de corps among the participants and gave them a palpable sense of their own importance. They felt, and they were right, that they were indeed making history rather than studying it.

Their dreams of reform were not entirely impossible however. The violence of the government’s reaction to the Night of the Barricades, the second “red” Friday, provoked a general (or national workers’) strike on the following Monday (May 13^th). Leaders of the two main unions, the CGT (Conféderation Générale du Travail) and the CFDT (Conféderation Française Démocratique du Travail), called for a general strike and joined the students for another massive demonstration. Eight hundred thousand gathered at the Place de la République, the workers’ traditional meeting place, and marched through downtown Paris and the Latin Quarter to end up at Denfert Rochereau, the students’ home base. Perhaps because union workers were involved and not just students, police kept out of sight and the demonstration took place without incident.

Strikes are always political in France since the government is closely identified with management and has so much control over wages and other bread-and-butter issues. Thus by its over reaction to the student unrest, the Gaullist government on the right made possible the left’s cherished but heretofore impossible dream: the alliance of union workers and militant students, the proletariat and the working poor on one hand with affluent bourgeois intellectuals on the other. When at least half a million demonstrators gathered on the 13^th , (or 800,000: estimates of crowd sizes varied all through May according to the political bias of the observer), union leaders and politicians joined students in a previously unimaginable alliance. With that conjunction of forces, the events of May took a turn into hard-core political opposition that was much more dangerous to the government than mere student protests.

Looming in the symbolic background of this “manif” (the French term for such gatherings, demonstrations, or marches) was a notorious anniversary. Ten years previously, a national crisis had erupted that ended the Fourth Republic and brought Charles de Gaulle, the current president, to power. What was taking place in the Latin Quarter in 1968 brought back vivid memories of what had happened in 58.

After a lackluster performance in WWII, the French army was further demoralized by a series of set backs in its colonial wars, culminating in its defeat in Indo-China (principally Vietnam and Cambodia). Frustration reached a high point during the Algerian independence movement that had started in 1954 and coincided with the debacle at Dien-Bien-Phu. Soldiers blamed the government for not supporting them enough even as they failed to quell the guerilla uprising militarily. In May 1958 a new premier was named who was said to favor negotiations with the Algerian rebels. The French public was bitterly divided by the question of whether to keep Algeria French or to give it independence. To protest against any possible compromise by the new premier, anti-independence extremists in Algiers (the colons or pieds-noirs)held a huge street demonstration on May 13 that turned into a riot. Government buildings were sacked. A revolutionary governing committee defied Paris and took over power in Algeria. Although General de Gaulle in retirement maintained his distance publicly, he nonetheless made it know to the leaders of the putsche that he would be ready to lead a new government. All of France was panicked. For several weeks in May rumors flew that the generals in Algiers were planning a paratroop attack on Paris. The capital was tense beyond belief; individuals even began to arm themselves against what they considered an imminent assault. President René Coty convinced the premier to resign in favor of de Gaulle who was confirmed by the National Assembly on June 1. Thus de Gaulle was the last premier of the Fourth Republic, which he dissolved. A new constitution, approved the following September, established the Fifth Republic with de Gaulle as its president.

This serious concern that history might be repeating itself was offset by a certain amount of levity and humor. Although this first week did see violent confrontations between students and police, there were moments of sophomoric hijinks, like the long march to the Arc de Triomphe. In a similar comic vein, slogans and various graffiti appeared on walls throughout the Latin Quarter. Posters produced by art students circulated these words and images outside the confines of the neighborhood. Many were simply political, but others, the ones that have remained in the public’s mind ever since, evoked an almost unreal, carnival attitude. One of the most famous and ambiguous is the clever tautology: It is forbidden to forbid. Other examples include: Under the cobble stones is the beach. Take your desires for reality. Be realistic, demand the impossible. Imagination is taking power. I am a Marxist, as in Groucho. Once of the most celebrated posters of all shows a silhouette of de Gaulle emphasizing his military kepi and his large nose. The caricature is accompanied by the phrase, “Le chienlit, c’est lui.” (He is the chienlit). The joke demands an explanation. While maintaining near total silence about the student unrest at the beginning, de Gaulle finally did express his evaluation of the student revolt on the 18^th: “Reforms, yes; hijinks, no.” (La reforme, oui; la chienlit, non). Chienlit is a rare and unusual word; de Gaulle was always known for his command of all the nuances of the French language. It means (1) carnival or (2) the revelers who wear masks and indulge in outrageous party behavior or (3) the hijinks associated with a carnival atmosphere. The word epitomized De Gaulle’s contempt for the students and their protests. However, the word was rare and unusual. Moreover, it sounds just like the vulgar expression, “he shits in his own bed,” and that was how the students understood it when they turned the phrase back on the general.

Despite the troubling alliance of workers and students that had begun on the 13th, de Gaulle himself remained serene and detached, almost oblivious to what was happening in the Latin Quarter. He left on a state visit to Romania that lasted from May 14 through the 18^th, departing shortly after Pompidou’s return from Teheran on the 11^th. The government was facing a daunting situation. Labor unrest was getting out of hand. Union leaders had called a general strike. Despite the legal requirement of five days notice, strikes began breaking out all over the country almost at once. The first, at an airplane factory in Nantes in the Loire valley, began on the 14^th. Others followed quickly. Two million workers were on strike by the 19^th, ten million by the 24^th, including those at the government owned Renault factory at Flins who had gone out on the 16^th. This was out of a total population of fifty million. The number of strikers surpassed the total number of union members, which amounted to only four million. Another Renault plant became the symbol of the strikers’ attitude. It was located in Boulogne-Billancourt, a working class neighborhood on the south west side of Paris, part of the “Red Belt,” a ring of working class neighborhoods that encircled the more prosperous downtown sections of the capital and that voted solidly communist. There the workers took over the factory, in a classic “lock out” (or sit-in or occupation), which was repeated in many other factories. Often any managers who happened to be on the premises were locked in their offices while the workers occupied the rest of the building.

Immediately upon his return from Iran on the 11^th, Prime Minister Pompidou went into action and took charge. On the 14th, he addressed the National Assembly and promised to reverse the government’s intransigent position. He called for an end to violence and the opening of negotiations with the students. He talked of reconciliation and compromise. He proposed discussions with the unions about salary increases. He spoke to the nation by radio on 16 May. His presentation, however, was upstaged by the students, whose leaders gave a sparkling interview to journalists that same day on the same radio station. Despite the Prime Minister’s change of course, France ground to a halt that week, all its essential activities paralyzed: the national railroads and airlines were closed down, as were the busses and metro in Paris (all its mass transportation), post offices all across the country (which also handled telephone calls and functioned as banks), schools, gas and electricity service, major stores. There was no garbage collection in Paris. Even bank employees went out, and banks limited the amount of cash depositors could withdraw. Gasoline was no longer available, so nobody drove anywhere. Most Frenchmen remained at home, hoarding food because they had no idea when stores would be able to restock their empty shelves. Food was a particularly sensitive issue since at that time most French housewives shopped daily and purchased only enough for that day’s needs. Some even shopped both for lunch and dinner. While the situation did look catastrophic, the country’s mood was not glum. There still remained some of the festive spirit as everyone seemed to stand around and wait.

The National Assembly defeated a motion to censure the government that the left had proposed on May 22. That same day it declared that the student leader Daniel Cohn Bendit was “undesirable in France” and should not be allowed back into the country. He had gone on a short trip to Germany to consult with student activists there. In solidarity with "Danny the Red,” there were renewed demonstrations on the 23^rd and 24^th. Five hundred were wounded, 800 arrested. The famous slogan “We are all German Jews” was launched as the students showed their support for Danny who was Jewish and a German citizen although born in France. Despite the ban, Danny turned up at the Sorbonne and held a press conference in front of cheering students on May 29.

On the 24^th de Gaulle moved into action, finally. He addressed the nation by television, a media he was not comfortable with. His speech was a total failure. About the speech, one critic wrote: “He took three weeks to say in five minutes that he would start in a month to do what he hadn’t done in 10 years.” Even as de Gaulle was speaking, demonstrators had already started marching from the Gare de Lyon to the Place de la Bastille. As they dispersed, some returned to the Latin Quarter, others headed downtown. Thus began the third “red” Friday, which was punctuated by violent clashes all over the Latin Quarter. In addition, the stock exchange building in the center of Paris was trashed and then set ablaze so this third “red” Friday became known as the Night of the Bourse. 795 were arrested and 500 hospitalized, half of them police officers. Forty eight cars were destroyed.

Let me open a brief parenthesis here. The amount of destruction recorded in 68 is not impressive when compared with subsequent riots like the one in Saint Denis and Argenteuil in October 2005. But there the violence never left the neighborhood. Unemployment among the young and prejudice against minorities were the underlying causes. Although serious, October 2005 never put the country or the government in jeopardy.

Pompidou began non-stop negotiations with the principal unions about increasing wages over the weekend. By Monday morning, the 27^th, it seemed that he had struck a deal with the union leaders. When they presented it to the rank-and-file, however, it was soundly and immediately rejected, first by the radicals at Boulogne-Billancourt and then by workers all across the country. This was an enormous humiliation for the union leaders, especially those in the very powerful but old-fashioned communist CGT, who saw the rank-and-file escaping from their control. They forbade any contact between workers and students. They tried to prevent students from entering any of the factories on lock-out. Clearly they were terrified they might lose control of their own workers, especially the more radical younger ones. Students engaging in direct political action was a dangerous example for the very hierarchical and tradition-bound unions which did not want to risk their power in this upstart revolt against the government.

That evening, the radical left held a huge rally in a football stadium where 35,000 students and workers denounced de Gaulle and his handling of the student unrest as well as the union leaders and their salary negotiations. Pierre Mendès-France, a well respected politician, attended. His simple presence (he chose not to speak) gave respectability to the whole meeting at Charléty. On the following day François Mitterrand, the leader of the socialist party, gave a press conference in which he called for a provisional government to see the country through this crisis and suggested himself or Mendès-France as a replacement for de Gaulle. Mitterrand had lost the presidential election to de Gaulle three years earlier, in 1965. In 1981, he became president of France and served two terms (14 years).

Two days later, on May 29, the crisis came to a head. Radio and newspaper headlines exclaimed the incredible event: “We have lost General de Gaulle.” As he left the Elysée Palace in Paris for his home in eastern France, the President disappeared. No one, not even his own cabinet ministers, knew where he was. Speculation ran rampant: did he flee? Was he assassinated by embittered veterans of the Algerian conflict and the terrorist group OAS who always felt betrayed by de Gaulle because he gave Algeria its independence? Did he resign, as he did in January 1946 in the midst of the political bickering that marked the immediate post-war period? Astonishment, perplexity, and incredulousness pervaded every corner of the country. Tension was palpable. For a momentous day France tittered on the brink of complete chaos, its President absent and nearly driven from office by unruly students and young workers operating outside the normal bounds of political opposition.

Another huge but peaceful demonstration took place as everyone wondered what had happened to the General. All the parties on the left began to rally around Mendès-France as the most likely candidate to take power and establish a new government. Mendès-France himself went to the National Assembly where he announced that he would be willing to form a new government.

What did happen? Even today not everyone agrees, but the most likely scenario is this: De Gaulle drove not home but to the headquarters of France’s nuclear strike force not far from Paris. From there he flew to Baden-Baden, in West Germany, where he met with the generals commanding the French army stationed there. The total number of troops was 160,000 but 120,000 of those were draftees. De Gaulle wanted to know if the army was still loyal and if he could count on it in an emergency. To buy himself the army’s loyalty it seems that he agreed to amnesty the generals who had led the terrorist group OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète) that grew out of the Algerian independence dispute and who had been languishing in military prison since 1961. They were freed a few weeks later.

De Gaulle was missing for less than a day. At 4:30 PM on the 30th, back in Paris, he made another speech to the nation on radio. This one, however, was a tremendous success. In full form and at the height of his oratorical power, in four minutes he denounced the threat of a communist takeover, dissolved the National Assembly, and called for elections. He said nothing about the students and what was happening in the Latin Quarter, but did exhort Frenchmen to support him with “civic action.” That evening another enormous demonstration took place, but this one was in favor of the government. A huge crowd, of one-half to a million strong, mostly well dressed, middle age, middle class gathered at the Place de la Concorde and along the Champs Elysées. Some were from the rich elite, matrons wearing gloves, old men displaying military medals on their chests, and young men who were well dressed and well groomed, unlike the student protesters. Others were less affluent, concierges and small shop keepers, but all conservative and afraid of civil unrest. How did this right-wing “manif” come about? Some called it a spontaneous reaction to de Gaulle’s speech. Others claimed that it was prepared in advance and triggered by his staged disappearance. If de Gaulle was really on the ropes because of the uprising in the Latin Quarter, no one could deny that now he had pulled off a major come-back with that single radio address.

With elections imminent, workers and students, always uneasy allies, began to drift apart. De Gaulle’s accusation that the left, i.e., the unions especially the communist CGT, had conspired against the government was untrue but effective. The wage package negotiated with Pompidou and rejected on the 27th began to look better to the strikers and served as a basis for obtaining further wage concessions. The CGT called off the demonstration it had planned for the 31^st. While the students continued their revolution in the streets, the unions turned their efforts from strikes to the upcoming political campaign and the elections. By government order and with police protection, gasoline suddenly became available for the long holiday weekend of Pentecost (including Monday), June 1st through the 3rd. The French were back behind the wheel and happy. Traffic jams, seen by some as another sign of panic, were on the contrary a signal that things were returning to normal. On Tuesday, after the holiday, Paris was held motionless by massive gridlock that lasted from 9AM until 11PM. Everyone was driving –-or attempting to drive-— since public transportation and taxis were not yet back in service. Starting on June 4^th, labor unrest began to diminish as workers returned to work: electricity, then the Paris metro, finally the coal industry. There were, however, a few more violent outbreaks, a rear guard action of the student-worker coalition that was now losing momentum. On 6 June the police tried to take back the Renault factory at Flins from the strikers who were occupying it. This led to several days of rioting, climaxing in the death of a militant high school student on 10 June. Violence broke out once news of his death reached Paris. The next day police shot and killed two strikers at the Peugeot factory at Sochaux as they attempted to retake that factory back from militant workers. Despite all the violence and all the rioting, these and two other accidental deaths were the only fatalities that can be directly attributed to the May events. The last strike, at the government owned Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt, ended on 18 June.

During these first weeks of June the students lost the public favor they had previously enjoyed. Their cause was splitting off from the workers’, as the latter returned to work. Most Frenchmen were weary of the weeks of clashes, upset, and destruction. They considered that the student grievances had been addressed, their questions answered, their complaints resolved. Pompidou finished negotiating a minimum wage increase of 35%. Elections were upcoming with their promise of change. Even a reform of the university system was announced. Protesters and their barricades slowly disappeared. On June 16th, the last of the student occupiers left the Sorbonne. Even as things returned to normal, there were a few violent and bloody clashes with the police on June 10^th, 11^th, and 16^th. A week later, in the national elections of June 23 and 30, de Gaulle and his UDR party won a landslide victory.

With those elections late in June “May 68” ended. The crisis that had convulsed the country and brought it to a standstill for more than a month was over. The events of May ended as suddenly and as unexpectedly as they had begun.

But all was not completely finished. Georges Pompidou, the only minister who brought any leadership to the government’s interaction with the students and who negotiated the wage hikes that neutralized worker unrest, was replaced as Prime Minister on July 10. Wags in the press commented that this was his reward for being successful and brilliant when his boss was not. Less than a year later, on 28 April 1969, Charles de Gaulle resigned as president. The ostensible cause was the failure of a referendum he had proposed even though most considered it superficial and irrelevant. Many commentators saw his departure as the last event of May, its tardy denouement.

These then are the principal events of May 68 as it played out in France. A month of crisis and conflict, a month of doubt and uncertainty, a month of violence and destruction that pitted police against students, young against old, a month of radical upheaval after which everything went back to normal, or so it seemed.

May 68 was both a beginning and an end. Old France began to change, slowly it is true, but nonetheless significantly and irreversibly. A new France emerged from those confrontations. The students had shown that the government could be forced to listen and to take their ideas into account. Workers had flexed their muscle and won some of the largest salary concessions ever. What disappeared was the old France in which people did not communicate across social class lines, in which the average Frenchman complained about government but never felt involved in its operation. Now Frenchmen knew that they could play a part. They saw first hand that their cooperation with government at the most basic level was essential and that withdrawing their support was a valuable political card they could play. Before 68, France was indeed an undemonstrative and even a repressed culture. Tradition and precedent ruled; exceptions and innovations were frowned upon. Things were like that, and like that they stayed. Until May.

May 68, now 40 years in the past and under appreciated outside of France, was a month that indeed did change the face of the world.