| May 1968 civil unrest in France | |||||||
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| Barricades of overturned vehicles. Paris, France. | |||||||
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The May 1968 protest refers to a particular period in French history. It was historically significant for being the first wildcat general strike ever,[1] and for being the largest general strike ever, bringing the economy of an advanced industrial country to a virtual standstill.[1] It commenced with a series of student occupation protests. The strike involved 11,000,000 workers, over 22% of the total population of France at the time, for a continuous two weeks,[1] and its impact was such that it almost caused the collapse of President Charles de Gaulle's government. In staging wildcat strikes, the movement contrasted with the trade unions and the French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français, PCF), which began to side with the de Gaulle government.[1] Groups revolted against consumerism,[2] rejected all the authoritarian institutions (family, school, factory),[3] and embraced left-wing positions that were critical of Western capitalism and the modern technical society.
Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake up the "old society" and traditional morality, focusing especially on the education system and employment. It began as a long 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 quell those strikes by 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 eleven million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the French workforce. The protests reached such a point that government leaders feared civil war or revolution. De Gaulle fled to a French military base in Germany, where he created a military operations headquarters to deal with the unrest, dissolved the National Assembly, and called for new parliamentary elections for 23 June 1968. Violence evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, after a series of deceptions by the Confédération Générale du Travail (the leftist union federation) and the PCF. When the elections were finally held in June, the Gaullist party emerged even stronger than before.
May 1968 was a political failure for the protesters, but it had an enormous social impact. In France, it is considered to be the watershed moment when a conservative moral ideal (religion, patriotism, respect for authority) shifted towards a more liberal moral ideal (sexual liberation) that today better describes French society, in theory if not in practice. Although this change did not take place solely in this one month, the term mai 68 is used to refer to this general shift in principles, especially when referring to its most idealistic aspects.
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On 22 March far-left groups, a small number of prominent poets and musicians, and 150 students, occupied an administration building at Paris University at Nanterre 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.
The school's administration called the police, who surrounded the university. After the publication of their wishes, the students left the building without any trouble. After this first record, some leaders of what was named the "Movement of 22 March" were called together by the disciplinary committee of the university.
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 Sorbonne University 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 Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (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 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:
Negotiations broke down, and 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.[4]
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 PCF reluctantly supported the students, whom it regarded as adventurers 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. However, the surge of strikes did not recede. Instead, the protesters got even more active.
When the Sorbonne reopened, students occupied it and declared it an autonomous "people's university". Public opinion at first supported the students, but quickly turned against them after its leaders, invited to appear on national television, "behaved like irresponsible utopianists who wanted to destroy the 'consumer society.'"[5] Nonetheless, in the weeks that followed, approximately 401 popular action committees were set up in Paris and elsewhere to take up grievances against the government and French society, including the Sorbonne Occupation Committee.
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. Workers had occupied roughly fifty factories by 16 May, and 200,000 were on strike by 17 May. 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. In fact, in the May '68 movement there was a lot of "anti-unionist euphoria,"[6] against the mainstream hierarchical unions, that were more willing to compromise with the powers that be than enact the will of the base.[1]
On 25 May and 26 May, the Grenelle agreements were conducted at the Ministry of Social Affairs. They provided for an increase of the minimum wage 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 workers' rights.
On 27 May, the meeting of the UNEF, the most outstanding of the events of May 1968, proceeded and gathered 30,000 to 50,000 people in the Stade Sebastien Charlety. The meeting was extremely militant with speakers demanding the government be overthrown and elections held.
The French Socialists saw an opportunity to act as a compromise between de Gaulle and the Communists. On 28 May, François Mitterrand of the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left declared that "there is no more state" and stated that he was ready to form a new government. On 29 May, Pierre Mendès France also stated that he was ready to form a new government; unlike Mitterrand he was willing to include the Communists. Although the Socialists did not have the Communists' ability to form large street demonstrations, they had more than 20% of the country's support.[5]
Also on 29 May, de Gaulle postponed the meeting of the Council of Ministers scheduled for the day, and secretly removed his personal papers from Élysée Palace. He told his son-in-law Alain de Boissieu "I do not want to give them a chance to attack the Elysée. It would be regrettable if blood were shed in my personal defense. I have decided to leave: nobody attacks an empty palace." De Gaulle refused Pompidou's request that he dissolve the National Assembly as he believed that their party, the Gaullists, would lose the resulting election, telling Pompidou "I am the past; you are the future; I embrace you". De Gaulle then mysteriously disappeared, telling no one in the government where he was going. The canceling of the ministerial meeting, and the president's disappearance, stunned the country.[5]
Pompidou unsuccessfully requested that military radar be used to follow de Gaulle's two helicopters, but soon learned that he had fled to the headquarters of the French military in Germany, in Baden-Baden, to meet General Jacques Massu. Massu persuaded the discouraged de Gaulle to return to France; now knowing that he had the military's support, de Gaulle rescheduled the meeting of the Council of Ministers for the next day. His wife Yvonne gave the family jewels to their son and daughter-in-law—who stayed in Baden for a few more days—for safekeeping, however, indicating that the de Gaulles still considered Germany a possible refuge. Massu kept as a state secret de Gaulle's loss of confidence until others disclosed it in 1982; until then most observers believed that his disappearance was intended to remind the French people of what they might lose. Although the disappearance was real and not intended as motivation, it indeed had such an effect on France.[5]
On 30 May 400,000 to 500,000 protesters (many more than the 50,000 the police were expecting) led by the CGT marched through Paris, chanting, "Adieu, de Gaulle!" ("Farewell, de Gaulle!") While Communist leaders later denied that they had planned an armed uprising, they had overestimated de Gaulle's strength as shown by his escape to Germany. The movement was largely centered around the Paris metropolitan area, and not elsewhere. Had the rebellion grown in strength, perhaps by occupying key public buildings in Paris, the government would have had to use force to retake them. The resulting casualties could have incited a revolution, with the military moving from the provinces to retake Paris as in 1871. Maurice Grimaud, head of the Paris police, played a key role in avoiding revolution by both speaking to and spying on the revolutionaries, and by carefully avoiding the use of force.[5]
On 30 May Pompidou persuaded de Gaulle to dissolve the National Assembly and call a new election by threatening to resign. Over radio De Gaulle announced the new election, scheduled for 23 June, and ordered workers to return to work, threatening to institute a state of emergency if they did not.[5][7] Immediately after the speech, about 800,000 supporters marched through the Champs-Elysées waving the national flag; the Gaullists had planned the rally for several days. The Communists agreed to the election, and the threat of revolution was over.[5]
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. Contrary to de Gaulle's fears, his party won the greatest victory in French parliamentary history in the legislative elections held in June, taking 353 of 486 seats versus the Communists' 34 and the Socialists' 57.[5] On Bastille Day, there were resurgent street demonstrations in the Latin Quarter, led by leftist students wearing red arm-bands and anarchist students wearing black arm-bands. The Paris police and the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité responded with brutal repression starting around 10 pm and continuing through the night, on the streets, in police vans, at police stations, and in hospitals where many wounded were taken. There was, as a result, much bloodshed among students and tourists there for the evening's festivities. No charges were filed against police or demonstrators, but the governments of the UK and West Germany filed formal protests, including for the indecent assault of two English schoolgirls by police in a police station.
Despite the size of de Gaulle's triumph, it was not a personal one. A survey taken immediately after the crisis showed that a majority of the country saw de Gaulle as too old, too self-centered, too authoritarian, too conservative, and too anti-American. As the April 1969 referendum would show, the country was ready for "Gaullism without de Gaulle".[5]
It is difficult to identify precisely 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).