Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (83 page)

These were issues that had not featured prominently in European industrial conflicts since the Popular Front occupations of 1936. They had largely escaped the attention of unions and political parties, focused as they were on more traditional and easily manipulated demands: higher wages, shorter hours. But they overlapped readily enough with the rhetoric of the student radicals (with whom shop-floor militants had little else in common) who voiced similar complaints about their overcrowded, poorly managed universities.

The sense of exclusion, from decision-making and thus from power, reflected another dimension of the Sixties whose implications were not fully appreciated at the time. Thanks to the system of two-round legislative elections and presidential election by universal suffrage, political life in France had coalesced by the mid-Sixties into a stable system of electoral and parliamentary coalitions built around two political families: Communist and Socialists on the Left, centrists and Gaullists on the Right. By tacit agreement across the spectrum, smaller parties and fringe groups were forced either to merge with one of the four big units or else be squeezed out of mainstream politics.

For different reasons, the same thing was happening in Italy and Germany. From 1963, a broad Center-Left coalition in Italy occupied most of the national political space, with only Communist and ex-Fascist parties excluded. The Federal Republic of Germany was governed from 1966 by a ‘Grand Coalition’ of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats who, together with the Free Democrats, monopolized the Bundestag. These arrangements ensured political stability and continuity; but as a consequence, in the three major democracies of western Europe, radical opposition was pushed not just to the fringes but out of parliament altogether. ‘The system’ seemed indeed to be run exclusively by ‘them’, as the New Left had for some time been insisting. Making a virtue of necessity, radical students declared themselves the ‘extra-parliamentary’ opposition, and politics moved into the streets instead.

The best-known instance of this, in France during the spring of 1968, was also the shortest-lived. It owes its prominence more to shock value, and to the special symbolism of insurgency in the streets of
Paris
, than to any enduring effects. The May ‘Events’ began in the autumn of 1967 in Nanterre, a dreary inner suburb of western Paris and the site of one of the hastily constructed extensions to the ancient University of Paris. The student dormitories at Nanterre had for some time been home to a floating population of legitimate students, ‘clandestine’ radicals and a small number of drug-sellers and users. Rent passed unpaid. There was also considerable nocturnal movement to and fro between the male and female dormitories, in spite of strict official prohibitions.
¹⁶⁵

The academic administration at Nanterre had been reluctant to provoke trouble by enforcing the rules, but in January 1968 they expelled one ‘squatter’ and threatened disciplinary measures against a legitimate student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, for insulting a visiting government minister.
¹⁶⁶
Further demonstrations followed, and on March 22nd, following the arrest of student radicals who attacked the American Express building in central Paris, a Movement was formed, with Cohn-Bendit among its leaders. Two weeks later the Nanterre campus was closed down following further student clashes with police, and the Movement—and the action—shifted to the venerable university buildings in and around the Sorbonne, in central Paris.

It is worth insisting upon the parochial and distinctly self-regarding issues that sparked the May Events, lest the ideologically charged language and ambitious programs of the following weeks mislead us. The student occupation of the Sorbonne and subsequent street barricades and clashes with the police, notably on the nights of May 10th-11th and May 24th-25th, were led by representatives of the (Trotskyist)
Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire
, as well as officials from established student and junior lecturer unions. But the accompanying Marxist rhetoric, while familiar enough, masked an essentially anarchist spirit whose immediate objective was the removal and humiliation of authority.

In this sense, as the disdainful French Communist Party leadership rightly insisted, this was a party, not a revolution. It had all the symbolism of a traditional French revolt—armed demonstrators, street barricades, the occupation of strategic buildings and intersections, political demands and counter-demands—but none of the substance. The young men and women in the student crowds were overwhelmingly middle-class—indeed, many of them were from the Parisian bourgeoisie itself: ‘
fils à papa
’ (‘daddy’s boys’), as the PCF leader Georges Marchais derisively called them. It was their own parents, aunts and grandmothers who looked down upon them from the windows of comfortable bourgeois apartment buildings as they lined up in the streets to challenge the armed power of the French state.

Georges Pompidou, the Gaullist Prime Minister, rapidly took the measure of the troubles. After the initial confrontations he withdrew the police, despite criticism from within his own party and government, leaving the students of Paris in
de facto
control of their university and the surrounding
quartier
. Pompidou—and his President, De Gaulle—were embarrassed by the well-publicized activities of the students. But, except very briefly at the outset when they were taken by surprise, they did not feel threatened by them. When the time came the police, especially the riot police—recruited from the sons of poor provincial peasants and never reluctant to crack the heads of privileged Parisian youth—could be counted on to restore order. What troubled Pompidou was something far more serious.

The student riots and occupations had set the spark to a nationwide series of strikes and workplace occupations that brought France to a near-standstill by the end of May. Some of the first protests—by reporters at French Television and Radio, for example—were directed at their political chiefs for censoring coverage of the student movement and, in particular, the excessive brutality of some riot policemen. But as the general strike spread, through the aircraft manufacturing plants of Toulouse and the electricity and petro-chemical industries and, most ominously, to the huge Renault factories on the edge of Paris itself, it became clear that something more than a few thousand agitated students was at stake.

The strikes, sit-ins, office occupations and accompanying demonstrations and marches were the greatest movement of social protest in modern France, far more extensive than those of June 1936. Even in retrospect it is difficult to say with confidence exactly what they were about. The Communist-led trade union organization, the
Confédération Générale du Travail
(CGT) was at first at a loss: when union organizers tried to take over the Renault strike they were shouted down, and an agreement reached between government, unions and employers was decisively rejected by the Renault workers, despite its promise of improved wages, shorter hours and more consultation.

The millions of men and women who had stopped work had one thing at least in common with the students. Whatever their particular local grievances, they were above all frustrated with their conditions of existence. They did not so much want to get a better deal at work as to change something about their way of life; pamphlets and manifestos and speeches explicitly said as much. This was good news for the public authorities in that it diluted the mood of the strikers and directed their attention away from political targets; but it suggested a general malaise that would be hard to address.

France was prosperous and secure and some conservative commentators concluded that the wave of protest was thus driven not by discontent but by simple boredom. But there
was
genuine frustration, not only in factories like those of Renault where working conditions had long been unsatisfactory, but everywhere. The Fifth Republic had accentuated the longstanding French habit of concentrating power in one place and a handful of institutions. France was run, and was seen to be run, by a tiny Parisian élite: socially exclusive, culturally privileged, haughty, hierarchical and unapproachable. Even some of its own members (and especially their children) found it stifling.

The ageing De Gaulle himself failed, for the first time since 1958, to understand the drift of events. His initial response had been to make an ineffective televised speech and then to disappear from sight.
¹⁶⁷
When he did try to turn what he took to be the anti-authoritarian national mood to his advantage in a referendum the following year, and proposed a series of measures designed to decentralize government and decision-making in France, he was decisively and humiliatingly defeated; whereupon he resigned, retired and retreated to his country home, to die there a few months later.

Pompidou, meanwhile, had proven right to wait out the student demonstrations. At the height of the student sit-ins and the accelerating strike movement some student leaders and a handful of senior politicians who should have known better (including former premier Pierre Mendès-France and future president François Mitterrand) declared that the authorities were helpless: power was now there for the taking. This was dangerous talk, and foolish: as Raymond Aron noted at the time, ‘to expel a President elected by universal suffrage is not the same thing as expelling a king.’ De Gaulle and Pompidou were quick to take advantage of the Left’s mistakes. The country, they warned, was threatened with a Communist coup.
¹⁶⁸
At the end of May De Gaulle announced a snap election, calling upon the French to choose between legitimate government and revolutionary anarchy.

To kick off its election campaign the Right staged a huge counter-demonstration. Far larger even than the student
manifestations
of two weeks before, the massed crowds marching down the Champs Elysées on May 30th gave the lie to the Left’s assertion that the authorities had lost control. The police were given instructions to re-occupy university buildings, factories and offices. In the ensuing parliamentary elections, the ruling Gaullist parties won a crushing victory, increasing their vote by more than a fifth and securing an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly. The workers returned to work. The students went on vacation.

The May Events in France had a psychological impact out of all proportion to their true significance. Here was a revolution apparently unfolding in real time and before an international television audience. Its leaders were marvelously telegenic; attractive and articulate young men leading the youth of France through the historical boulevards of Left Bank Paris.
¹⁶⁹
Their demands—whether for a more democratic academic environment, an end to moral censorship, or simply a nicer world—were accessible and, despite the clenched fists and revolutionary rhetoric, quite unthreatening. The national strike movement, while mysterious and unsettling, merely added to the aura of the students’ own actions: having quite by accident detonated the explosion of social resentment, they were retrospectively credited with anticipating and even articulating it.

Above all, the May Events in France were curiously peaceful by the standards of revolutionary turbulence elsewhere, or in France’s own past. There was quite a lot of violence to property, and a number of students and policemen had to be hospitalized following the ‘Night of the Barricades’ on May 24th. But both sides held back. No students were killed in May 1968; the political representatives of the Republic were not assaulted; and its institutions were never seriously questioned (except the French university system, where it all began, which suffered sustained internal disruption and discredit without undergoing any significant reforms).

The radicals of 1968 mimicked to the point of caricature the style and the props of past revolutions—they were, after all, performing on the same stage. But they foreswore to repeat their violence. As a consequence, the French ‘psychodrama’ (Aron) of 1968 entered popular mythology almost immediately as an object of nostalgia, a stylized struggle in which the forces of Life and Energy and Freedom were ranged against the numbing, gray dullness of the men of the past. Some of the prominent crowd pleasers of May went on to conventional political careers: Alain Krivine, the charismatic graduate leader of the Trotskyist students is today, forty years on, the sexagenarian leader of France’s oldest Trotskyist party. Dany Cohn-Bendit, expelled from France in May, went on to become a respected municipal councilor in Frankfurt and thence a Green Party representative in the European Parliament.

But it is symptomatic of the fundamentally apolitical mood of May 1968 that the best-selling French books on the subject a generation later are not serious works of historical analysis, much less the earnest doctrinal tracts of the time, but collections of contemporary graffiti and slogans. Culled from the walls, noticeboardsand streets of the city, these witty one-liners encourage young people to make love, have fun, mock those in authority, generally do what feels good—and change the world almost as a by-product.
Sous le pavé
, as the slogan went,
la plage
. (‘Under the paving stones—the beach’). What the slogan writers of May 1968 never do is invite their readers to do anyone serious harm. Even the attacks on De Gaulle treat him as a superannuated impediment rather than as a political foe. They bespeak irritation and frustration, but remarkably little
anger
. This was to be a victimless revolution, which in the end meant that it was no sort of revolution at all.

The situation was very different in Italy, despite superficial similarities in the rhetoric of the student movements. In the first place, the social background to Italy’s conflicts was quite distinctive. The extensive migration from south to north in the course of the first half of the decade had generated, in Milan, Turin and other industrial towns of the north, a demand for transport, services, education and above all housing that the governments of the country had never managed to address. The Italian ‘economic miracle’ arrived later than elsewhere, and the transition out of an agrarian society had been more abrupt.