French Student Protest: Losing the Romanticism Amidst the Chaos

PROTEST to the French student has always been a tradition tinged with romanticism and infused with folklore. Barricading the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, arching cobblestones on the heads of the "flies," clinging to your comrade and meeting the police charge, even getting blackjacked and later displaying your "wounds" were in part a celebration, reminiscent of Le Grand Soirdance, song, love, and combat.

Protest was even expected and within certain limits approved by the French people, themselves carriers of a taint of anarchism. It has been said that if at 20 you are not behind the barricades you are a coward and lack idealism, but that at 35 if you are not in the ministry you are a fool and lack realism. During the events of May 1968, Maurice Grimand, chief of the Parisian police, appealed to the students as one of the gang, that he too had been a student and had gotten blackjacked by the police.

Up until the late fifties the youth groups of parent political organizations-whether fascist, republican, moderate, or communist-directed much of student activism. Students toed the party line. There was only one real student organization, IUNEF, IUnion Nationale des Students de France, created in 1907. Only after the First World War when the siblings of the middle and lower bourgeoisie began entering the university did IUNEF lose its elitist outlook and provide "services materiales" (rooms, student restaurants, student reductions) for its members.

Following World War II the majority, the majos, wanted IUNEF to remain apolitical but a growing minority, the minos, demanded the creation of a student syndicat. Generally the majos stayed in power, often with contributions from the government at election time, under the direction of law and medical students who reasoned more like future doctors and lawyers than students.

1956 saw the creation of the other big student group, IUEC, Union des Etudiants Communistes, from a restructuralization of the Mouvement de la Jeunesse Communist. Prior to 1956 communist students were nurtured within the cadre of the party, but after the brutal suppression of Hungarian revolution, dissension reared and the party elders decided to segregate them in a separate student organization to better control them.

THE ALGERIAN WAR jarred the students out of their slumber and acquiescence to adult organizations. Outraged with colonial atrocities students roared out into the streets daily. New groups proliferated with the most militant and politically conscious such as Jeune Resistance, Mouvement Anti-Colonialiste Francais, and Groupe Nizan secretly helping the NLF. Students became a power of their own.

Consequently, l'UEC and l'UNEF were also at the height of their power. During the early years of the sixties l'UEC was without rival in the Latin Quarter, capable of mobilizing thousands in the streets in a few hours. When the OAS began its pro-war terrorist actions in both France and Algeria, and student groups, particularly Jeune Nation, rallied in support of the war, miltants of l'UEC organized the Front Universitaire AntiFasciste, FUA, to physically eliminate these fascists from the Latin Quarter.

The bloody clashes that resulted between the FUA and Jeune Nation were nothing new to the world of student polities. French student groups probably spend more time and energy infighting than they do organizing political action. Each group has a specially chosen "service d'ordre" to protect themselves and to attack others.

Violence was thus an early fact of student life. No morals inhibited French radicals as they did American activists. Violence was taken for granted and French students were stoical about the results. An anarchist friend of mine after being severely beaten in a fight dragged himself into a small alleyway and lay silently bleeding until the police went away and his friends came back to take him to the hospital.

The ending of the Algerian War brought crisis to the new student movement. Partially, the problem was that most of the students were tired. Colonial atrocities easily stung the moral conscience, but with the winning of Algerian independence the heterogeneous student population wanted to go back to its cates, its cinema clubs, its studies, and its love affairs.

But more crucial was the problem that no one could agree what to do next. The minos at l'UNEF, who had become the majos during the war, adopted a "ligne universitaire," their long-awaited dream of making l'UNEF into a student syndicat which would defend student interests through strikes, demonstrations, and occupations of classrooms. Despite consistent attempts at sabotage by the former majos the ligne universitaire initially caught the imagination of the students. But after its aborted attempt to prevent the Sorbonne visit of Prime Minister Segni of Italy, l'UNEF steadily dechned in influence. With 100,000 memoers out of a student population of 250,000 in 1961, l'UNEF shrank to barely 50,000 out of a student population of 600,000 shortly before the student revolt in May, 1968.

WHY DID l'UNEF fail? One reason is that French students just didn't have any common interests worth defending besides meal tickets, free lecture notes, and housing bureaus. Also there was the lack of communication between French students which never fails to shock Americans. One French girl confided to me, "all the students I knew in the Faculte are the friends I made in lycee and in most cases grammar school."

Another, more important, reason is that it is nearly impossible to change French universities from within. Private universities don't exist in France. The government strictly controls education. The students could and did make a lot of noise, but the Minister of Education turned the traditional deal ear.

L'UEC was convulsed by an even bigger crisis. From its powerful position in the early 60's, l'UEC in the last few years has become the standing joke of the Latin Quarter. After the Algerian War l'UEC tricated into the "Italians" (Supporters of the line of the Italian Communist Party), the orthodox members (staunch loyalists of the French Communist Party), and the "Gauchistes" (further divided into a Trotskyist tendency and a Maoist tendency). This bitterly divided house held together until 1965 when the French Communist Party, scizing an opportunity to gain in the national parliament, supported the non-communist candidate for President, Francois Mitterand. The Trotskyists stomped out of the party Congress, denouncing the FCP as supporters of the status quo, and, holding their own Congress, declared the birth of the Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionaire (JCR). Six months later the Maoists also quit and hoisted their banner, the l'Union des Jeunesses Communistes marxistes-leninistes (l'UJCm-l).

The JCR and the UJCm-l were only two of France's renowned "groupescules." By 1968 there were probably over 20 or more. Except at a very few places like the Faculte of Lettres at the Sorbonne they had little influence over the rest of the students. Forever dreaming in their ideological heavens (Godard's La Chinoise gives a fair idea of the ideological obsession of these students), the groups alienated their peers. I lighly centralized and burcaucratized they were controlled by cliques who regarded prospective members with suspicion, and admitted them only after a rigorous "competition."

But thanks to American imperialism in Vietnam, the French student movement was given a real blood and guts issue which everybody could understand and students once again swarmed into the streets.

Veterans of France's own Vietnam and Algerian wars, their moral outrage was quickly turned into concrete political action both against the U. S. and increasingly against their own government, whom they accused of supporting the war effort.

AS THE Americans escalated the war, European students escalated their demonstrations. 5,000 students participated in a peaceful five-hour march in Liege in 1966, tens of thousands marched in the more militant demonstration in October, 1967, in Brussels, and then in West Berlin in February, 1968 students fought pitched battles against German police.

The leader in ideology and revolutionary pratique was the German SDS. Convinced that Advanced Industrial Society had developed a complex system to integrate and blunt all opposition within it, they concluded that participation in parliamentary elections, worker-employer councils, student-faculty committees, cte., was all a-big sham. The owners of the big enterprises and the politicians still made the decisions, only "consulting" the people from time to time. To destroy this false impression of participation and open a breech in the system of integration, the political action of SDS became a "refus organisee."

They specifically warned that this refusal must not happen on the fringes of society like that of the American hippies or Dutch Provos, because society can easily contain the marginal revolts of individuals. The only recourse was a frontal attack against society by relusing all legitimacy and doing the illegal. The focal point was direct action, violent and spectacular confrontation through personal insult, scandal, provocation, violent street demonstrations, and breaking of police lines. The aim was to ridicule the es-

tablished justice of society, to show as Deutshke says that "the rules of the game of this absurd democracy are not ours."

This new style of the polities of "total contestation" soon pushed its roots into French soil. In Fall. 1966, members of the Internationale Situationniste, dubbed "les enrages" by the press, shocked France by completely razing the local association of l'UNEF. Influenced more by the Surrealists and Nihilists than Marx or Mao, they succeeded through student indifference in being elected to the direction of l'UNEF. Their first and last official act was to declare the immediate dissolution of the association, burn all its files, and urinate on the crowd passing below the office while singing the International.

Besides its brutal attack on institutions, which was a keynote of the revolt in May '68, the situationnists represented the new spirit and new kind of student entering student polities. Joy and laughter became necessary accompaniments of revolutionary action. "The proletarian revolutions will be celebrations or will not be." declared the situationnists. The new radicals were agitators more spontaneous and less ideological than the propagandists in the groupescules.

No one expected May's revolt. Everyone realized the potential of the student movement, but lacking any one strong organization no one took it seriously. The success and originality of Cohn-Bendit and friends were to avoid abstract polities and instead concentrate on university issues, which gradually led to political issues.

THE BREEDING ground for the student revolt was the Faculty of Letters at Nanterre, France's first attempt to create an American style campus university. The French botched it. No real thought was given to increasing the contacts between students and faculty. After class the professors immediately drove back to Paris. The government simply moved the whole rigidly bureaucratic and authoritarian apparatus of the French university into modern buildings. It changed its skin, but not its soul.

As the expectations of the students were shattered by reality, they became obsessed with leaving the campus. Boredom loomed. For 12,000 students there was only one restaurant nearby and no cinema. Nanterre itself is a "bidonville," a honky-tonk town of shabby houses and grey shacks surrounded by huge expanses of dumps and cheap, concrete apartment buildings. Fitzgerald's ashheaps and Eliot's wasteland, they are Nanterre. A fantastic number required a shrink.

Adding to their frustration was also the fear that even if they made it out of Nanterre, there was little likelihood of finding a job suitable to their education. In the last few years there had been a huge increase in the number of university students, but no similar increase in opportunities. Like American students facing the draft those French students in sociology, philosophy, and literature, who were the great majority of revolutionaries, looked upon their futures with dread and without the hope that ending a war would bring a solution.

What enabled the revolt to break out so quickly and brutally was the rigidity of the university structure, which knew only one way of change-rupture. The government and not the faculty controls the university. They decide everything from how much money is spent to what time the classes are given. There are no "intermediate institutions"-no student-faculty committees which can often muffle and absorb a conflict as at Harvard. If anything goes wrong it is brought straight to the ministry. In a system with such little leeway for evolution, any change was a radical change and any serious challenge liable to topple everything.

The complete failure of the moderate student strike in November 1967 for smaller classes, a library, and less stringent degree requirements convinced the students that the faculty and administration didn't want to and couldn't do anything. Traditionally docile to their professors and fatalistic about their futures, French students goaded by Cohn-Bendit began to challege their professors and then to insult them, shout them down, and denounce them as charlatans in a repressive university.

After Christmas, education stopped at Nanterre, Chaos regned. The fete had begun once more. Informal and having no real ruling clique, the movement at Nanterre, later to be named. The Movement of March 22, accepted all kinds of students. Jokes and songs replaced much of the usual political jargon. Much more spontancity and personal involvement was possible at Nanterre than at the Sorbonne where "revolutionary vanguards" controlled all action and inaction. And for the first time in the history of the French student movement members of more than one groupescule militated in the same organization. Secure that the interests of their groups were not threatened, they gleefully joined March 22's rape of the university.

But the whole movement could have been stopped if the faculty and administration had not reacted to the provocation of the students with such equivocation. Bewildered and angry with no precedent to guide them, they frantically applied stop-gap measures. Wooing the students one week and calling in the cops the next created a great tension at the faculty. The students never knew what was going to happen to them. Insecure and fearful, students banded together in a community-something almost unknown at a French university.

THE STORY of "les evenements" is old now. Everyone in Paris talks about it in the same way they talk about the Commune of '71 or the Revolution of '86.

The music of life in France can be savage and wild one moment and tranquil and melancholy the next. In May the government had completely abdicated power and ten million workers had joined the students in the streets. Came September and not only were the students isolated from the population but again badly split among themselves.

A deep psychological depression has hit the student movement this year. After the first round of rallies at the "red" department of sociology at Nanterre the past autumn, one marxistleninist who had never before talked in Freudian terms lamented to one old comrade, "you know what's wrong? Une maladie psychologique." A girl, an influential member of March 22. which fell apart over the summer, said simply, "I'm depressed." The result was political action by rote. Uninspired, the students mechanically applied the old tactics of May. They called the professors and cops dirty names, they occupied buildings and boycotted classes, they covered the walls with "It's only a beginning. Continue the combat."

But the professors ignored them, the police brutally and effectively cleared the buildings, and the rest of the students yawned as they read the slogan for the hundredth time. The worst, they didn't believe what they were doing themselves.

All the groups took refuge in their ideological backrooms and there hesitantly tried to piece together future plans. As usual, their plans didn't match. The only consensus is that something will happen in the future, but not in the same way.

They are right in at least one sense. Student protest has lost its romanticism, at least one sense. Student protest has lost its romanticism.