- For other events in May 1968, see 1968.
A May 1968 poster: "Be young and shut up", with stereotypical silhouette of
General de
Gaulle.
May 1968 is the name given to a series of protests and a general strike that
caused the eventual collapse of the De Gaulle government in France. The vast majority of the protesters espoused left-wing
causes, but the established leftist political institutions and labor unions distanced themselves from the movement. Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake up the
"old society" in many social aspects and traditional morality, focusing especially on the
education system and employment.
It began as a series of student strikes that broke out at a number of universities and lycées in Paris, following confrontations with university administrators and the police. The de Gaulle administration's attempts to quash those strikes by further police action only inflamed the
situation further, leading to street battles with the police in the Latin Quarter,
followed by a general strike by students and strikes throughout France by ten million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the
French workforce. The protests reached the point that de Gaulle created a military operations headquarters to deal with the
unrest, dissolved the National Assembly and called for new parliamentary
elections for 23 June 1968.
The government was close to collapse at that point (De Gaulle had even taken temporary refuge at an airforce base in Germany),
but the revolutionary situation evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, after a series of
deceptions carried out by the Confédération Générale du Travail, the
leftist union federation, and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), the French
Communist Party. When the elections were finally held in June, the Gaullist party emerged even
stronger than before.
The events of May
On 22 March far-left groups and a small number of prominent poets and musicians, along with
150 students, invaded an administration building at Nanterre University
and held a meeting in the university council room dealing with class discrimination in French society and the political
bureaucracy that controlled the school's funding. Heavy marijuana smoke filled the air as students called for an overhaul of
French society. René Riesel demanded the expulsion of two Stalin supporters from the meeting when they attempted to disrupt a
speaker. This led to great unrest and the meeting became increasingly hostile.
The school's administration called the police, who surrounded the university. They initially agreed to let students go in
groups of 25, first women and then men. When the men began to emerge however, they were arrested. When other students gathered to
stop the police vans from taking away the arrested students, the riot police responded by launching tear gas into the crowd.
Rather than dispersing the students, the tear gas only brought more students to the scene, where they blocked the exit of the
vans. The police finally prevailed, but only after arresting hundreds of students.
Following months of conflicts between students and authorities at the University of
Paris at Nanterre, the administration shut down that university on 2 May 1968. Students at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris met on 3
May to protest against the closure and the threatened expulsion of several students at Nanterre. On Monday,
6 May, the national student union, the UNEF - still the largest student union in France today - and the union of
university teachers called a march to protest against the police invasion of the Sorbonne. More than 20,000 students, teachers
and supporters marched towards the Sorbonne, still sealed off by the police, who charged, wielding their batons, as soon as the
marchers approached. While the crowd dispersed, some began to create barricades out of whatever was at hand, while others threw
paving stones, forcing the police to retreat for a time. The police then responded with tear gas and charged the crowd again.
Hundreds more students were arrested.
High school student unions spoke in support of the riots on 6 May. The next day they joined the
students, teachers and increasing numbers of young workers who gathered at the Arc de
Triomphe to demand that: (1) all criminal charges against arrested students be dropped, (2) the police leave the
university, and (3) the authorities reopen Nanterre and the Sorbonne. Negotiations broke down after students returned to their
campuses, after a false report that the government had agreed to reopen them, only to discover the police still occupying the
schools. The students now had a near revolutionary fervor.
On Friday 10 May, another huge crowd congregated on the Rive
Gauche. When the riot police again blocked them from
crossing the river, the crowd again threw up barricades, which the police then attacked at 2:15 in the morning after negotiations
once again floundered. The confrontation, which produced hundreds of arrests and injuries, lasted until dawn of the following
day. The events were broadcast on radio as they occurred and the aftermath was shown on television the following day. Allegations
were made that the police had participated, through agents provocateurs, in the
riots, by burning cars and throwing molotov cocktails [1].
The government's heavy-handed reaction brought on a wave of sympathy for the strikers. Many of the nation's more mainstream
singers and poets joined after the heavy handed police brutality came to light. American artists also began voicing support of
the strikers. The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) reluctantly supported the
students, whom it regarded as adventurists and anarchists, and the major left union
federations, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the
Force Ouvrière (CGT-FO) called a one day general strike and demonstration for Monday,
13 May.
Well over a million people marched through Paris on that day; the police stayed largely out of sight. Prime Minister
Georges Pompidou personally announced the release of the prisoners and the reopening of
the Sorbonne. The surge of strikes did not, however, recede. In fact, the protesters got even more enraged.
When the Sorbonne reopened, students occupied it and declared it an autonomous "people's university". Approximately 401
popular "action committees" were set up in Paris and elsewhere in the weeks that followed to take up grievances against the
government and French society.
In the following days workers began occupying factories, starting with a sit-down strike at the Sud Aviation plant near the city of Nantes on 14
May, then another strike at a Renault parts plant near Rouen, which spread to the Renault manufacturing complexes at Flins in the Seine
Valley and the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. By 16 May workers had occupied roughly fifty
factories and by 17 May 200,000 were on strike. That figure snowballed to two million workers on
strike the following day and then ten million, or roughly two-thirds of the French workforce, on strike the following week.
These strikes were not led by the union movement; on the contrary, the CGT tried to contain this spontaneous outbreak of
militancy by channeling it into a struggle for higher wages and other economic demands. Workers put forward a broader, more
political and more radical agenda, demanding the ousting of the government and President de Gaulle and attempting, in some cases,
to run their factories. When the trade union leadership negotiated a 35% increase in the minimum wage, a 7% wage increase for
other workers, and half normal pay for the time on strike with the major employers' associations, the workers occupying their
factories refused to return to work and jeered their union leaders, even though this deal was better than what they could have
obtained only a month earlier.
On May 25 and May 26, the Grenelle agreements are signed at the Ministry of Social
Affairs. They provide for an increase of the minimum wages by 25% and of the average salaries by 10%. These offers were
rejected and the strike went on. The working class and top intellectuals were joining in solidarity for a major change in
worker's rights.
On May 27, the meeting of the Union
Nationale des Étudiants de France (national Union of the students of France), most outstanding of the events of May
68, proceeded and gathered 30,000 to 50,000 people in the Stade Sebastien
Charlety. The meeting was extremely militant with speakers demanded the government be overthrown and elections held.
On 30 May several hundred thousand protesters (400,000 to 500,000, many more than the 50,000
the police were expecting) led by the CGT marched through Paris, chanting, "Adieu, de Gaulle!" (Meaning: "Farewell, De
Gaulle.")
While the government appeared to be close to collapsing, de Gaulle remained firm though had to go into hiding. After ensuring
that he had sufficient loyal military units mobilized to back him if push came to shove, he went on the radio the following day
(the national television service was on strike) to announce the dissolution of the National Assembly, with elections to follow on
23 June. He ordered workers to return to work, threatening to institute a state of emergency if they did not.
The events of June
From that point the revolutionary feeling of the students and workers faded away. Workers gradually returned to work or were
ousted from their plants by the police. The national student union called off street demonstrations. The government banned a
number of leftist organizations. The police retook the Sorbonne on 16 June. De Gaulle triumphed
in the legislative elections held in June and the crisis came to an
end.
Slogans and graffiti
-
It is difficult to precisely identify the politics of the students who sparked the events of May 1968, much less of the
hundreds of thousands who participated in them. There was, however, a strong strain of anarchism, particularly in the students at Nanterre. While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the
millenarian and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the
strikers (the anti-work graffiti shows the considerable influence of the Situationist
movement)[citation needed]
1968 in an international context
France was far from the only country to witness student protests in 1968. The events were preceded by the announcement, in the
United States, that United States
President Lyndon B. Johnson would choose to withdraw from the 1968 presidential campaign in March due to rising domestic opposition. This
was soon followed by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (on
April 4), and a student-led occupation and closure of Columbia University on April 23.
In Mexico, on the night of 2 October 1968, a student demonstration ended in a storm of bullets in La Plaza
de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, Mexico City.
The United States and German student movements were relatively isolated from
the working class, but in Italy and in Argentina students and
workers joined in efforts to create a radically different society.
In Belgium, students from the University in Leuven protested against the dominance of the French language in the
Flemish university, which resulted in a separate Francophone
university.
In Eastern Europe, students also drew inspiration from the protests in the West. In Poland and
Yugoslavia students protested against restrictions on free
speech by Communist regimes. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring offered a broadening of political rights until it was crushed by the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies.
Many of the student groups involved with May 1968 were also inspired by a strain of political thought called
tiers-mondisme (third worldism). Students idealized and followed socialist movements in countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, or China, and revered figures such as, Castro, Che or Mao. Their
struggles in their own countries were tied to their support of these third world socialist movements.
In pop-culture
- The Mai '68s, an indie-pop-punk band from Leicester, United Kingdom, took its name from the May 1968 events.
- Robert Merle's book, Derrière la vitre is a
novel set in the May 1968 events.
- Vangelis released an LP, dubbed a poème
symphonique, entitled Fais Que Ton Rêve Soit Plus Lang Que La Nuit and was a musique concrète/folk recording collage reflecting the May 1968
strikes. Vangelis was in Paris at the time recording with Aphrodite's Child. The LP
was limited in release to France and Greece and only on vinyl.
- Chris Marker's 1977 film A Grin Without a Cat
IMDb is a 3-hour-long film
documentary portraying the history behind the social unrests of the sixties. Made with archival images, it deals with May 1968 in
depth.
- Milou en Mai (Milou in May, also released under the English title May
Fools), is a later film (1990) by Louis Malle. It portrays the impact of revolutionary
fervour on a French village.
- Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film The
Dreamers was based on three young film-loving students and their experiences in May 1968, although it features the
events mainly as a backdrop and not predominantly within the primary plot.
- Roman Coppola's 2001 film CQ depicts the
Paris film making world of the late 1960s and makes repeated reference to the events of May 1968.
- Philippe Garrel's 2005 film Les Amants
Réguliers IMDb ("the
regular lovers") is a 3-hour-long rejoinder to The Dreamers that portrays the May 1968 events through the eyes of a group
of young artists who grow increasingly absorbed in a world of drugs and free love upon what they see as the failure of the May
1968 events.
- The Stone Roses song "Bye Bye Badman" on their eponymous debut album was said by lead singer Ian Brown to be
about the riots. The lemon the band commonly use as a logo represents the lemons used by protesters to sooth their eyes from the
effects of tear gas.
- The Merry Month of May is author James Jones's 1971 novel concerning the events of the 1968 student revolutions in
Paris. It is centered around a rich American family, the Gallaghers, living as expatriates in Paris.
References
See also
External links
Further reading
- Cohn-Bendit, Daniel - Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative
- Cornelius Castoriadis avec Claude
Lefort et Edgar Morin - Mai 1968: la brèche
- Dark Star Collective - Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 68
- Feenberg, Andrew and Freedman, Jim - When Poetry Ruled the Streets
- Gregoire, Roger and Perlman, Fredy - Worker-Student Action Committees:
France May '68
- Jones, James - The Merry Month of May (novel).
- Adair, Gilbert - The Holy Innocents (novel).
- Ross, Kristin - May '68 and its Afterlives
- Quattrochi, Angelo and Nairn, Tom. The Beginning of the End.
- Singer, Daniel - Prelude To Revolution: France In May 1968
- Touraine, Alain - The May Movement: Revolt and Reform
- Vienet, Rene - Enrages And The Situationists In the Occupation Movement, France May '68
- Debord, Guy - The Society of the
Spectacle
- Raoul Vaneigem - The Revolution
of Everyday Life
- Knabb, Ken - The Situationist Anthology
- Plant, Sadie - The Most Radical Gesture: Situationist International in a Postmodern
Age
- Tony Cliff - France – the struggle goes on
- Mark Kurlansky - 1968: The Year That Rocked The World
- Ferlinghetti, Lawrence- Love in the Days of Rage
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