The événements de mai, as they are widely known, continue at once to stimulate and to baffle analysis. ‘Ce qu'il faut comprendre, c'est à la fois l'énormité et l'insignifiance de mai 68’ (Edgar Morin)—or, in other words, how the most spectacular and unpredictable period of civil disorder experienced by a Western democracy since World War II culminated in the biggest majority in French electoral history for the incumbent regime. The cultural and (in an Althusserian sense) ideological results of May have always been more apparent than its political ones; yet it could be argued that these latter include the fall of de
Unrest in the student milieu had been manifest for several months before May, primarily in the form of protests against the Vietnam War and the restrictive conditions under which students lived. These converged on the new campus at Nanterre in the Paris suburbs, where male students were not allowed to visit women in their rooms, and the administration block was occupied on 22 March in protest against the arrest of a Nanterre student who had taken part in an attack on the American Express building in Paris. Libidinal emancipation (as evidenced by the slogan ‘Jouissez sans entraves’) and direct action—two of the major themes of May—were articulated here. Robert Merle's novel Derrière la vitre (1970) is set in Nanterre (where its author taught) on 22 March.
Discontent escalated and spread to the Quartier Latin, whose student traditions made of it the opposite pole to Nanterre. (It is interesting to note how the educational institutions most closely associated with May were the time-hallowed—the Sorbonne, the École Normale Supérieure— and the very new—the Paris universities of Nanterre and Censier.) It was the occupation of the Sorbonne by the police and the imprisonment of students that led to the ‘May’ familiar from countless photographic images. The night of 10-11 May—the ‘nuit des barricades’—saw fierce street-fighting on the Left Bank and aroused the sympathy of many young workers for the students, despite the hostility of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the PCF, for whom the students (and Daniel Cohn-Bendit in particular) were spoilt brats playing a dangerously diversionary game.
In the days that followed, strikes and occupations spread from the Paris university world to, on the one hand, the provinces, and on the other the factories. When on 17 May the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, heart of the CGT/PCF's industrial empire, was occupied, it was clear that the established Left had been outstripped by the movement's heterogeneous and contagious dynamism. Trotskyist, Maoist, and anarchist militants were joined by many thousands of others previously not politicized.
De Gaulle's attempts to master a crisis he himself described as ‘insaisissable’ appeared doomed to failure, as his address to the nation on 24 May was greeted with derision and the supposedly generous economic terms of the Accords de Grenelle were rejected at Billancourt on 27 May. It looked increasingly as if the work-force's dissatisfaction with its pay and conditions might combine with the vehement denunciations of capitalism and imperialism emerging from the occupied universities to bring about the downfall of the regime: workers and students alike were opposed to Gaullism's hierarchical gerontocracy.
The leaders of the established Left— Mendès-France, Mitterrand, Waldeck Rochet—in different ways threw their hats into the ring, and when de Gaulle literally disappeared for the afternoon of 29 May (on a mission to General Massu, commander of the French forces in Germany, that not even his prime minister Pompidou knew about), his days seemed numbered. With hindsight, and bearing in mind the all-pervasive theatricality of the events, it now seems unsurprising that within 24 hours the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. In his radio speech on 30 May de Gaulle refused to resign, announced parliamentary elections, and delivered a cavernous warning of the dangers of totalitarian Communism. That evening a massive Gaullist counter-demonstration filled the Champs-Élysées. Exactly a month later the second round of the elections yielded an unprecedented Gaullist landslide.
Less than a year later, however, de Gaulle was to resign—defeated in a referendum on regional reform that everybody knew to be a vote of confidence. It seems quite clear that his patriarchal domination had been irretrievably shattered by May. The PCF was the other major casualty; its loss of contact with youth and belated attempt to turn from condemnation of the events to annexation of them severely weakened its credibility, and it is arguable that the PS became the major Left party because (at least until it was in government) it was better able to identify with the concerns and the spirit of May [see Socialism And Communism].
What was this spirit? Its two main qualities can be summed up as a rejection of unaccountable hierarchies (which bore fruit in the democratization of universities and the recognition of work-place union branches) and a broadening of political terms of reference away from worker-ist economism to include such areas as feminism, the Third World, the environment, and questions of (in the widest sense) culture. Nothing changed after May, yet everything was—remains—different.
[KAR]
Bibliography
- A. Delale and G. Ragache, La France de 68 (1978); A. Schnapp and P. Vidal-Nacquet, Journal de la commune étudiante (1969, new edn. 1988); L. Joffrin, Mai 68 (1988)
