The way in which events unfolded in 1968 seemed at first sight to confirm the claims of students throughout the world that they could 'detonate' revolution. No doubt the governments of a number of countries were beginning to tremble at such a prospect! The world was experiencing an unprecedented wave of student unrest - Poland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain and America. Some of these struggles had reached a higher pitch than in France.
In Spain the students fought the dictator Franco. In the United States, students were to the fore in the movement against the Vietnam war and in the black consciousness and civil rights movement in the South. In Northern Ireland, students were involved in an upsurge of struggle against anti-Catholic discrimination. Intellectuals, students and sections of the workers in Czechoslovakia were being drawn into a profound political ferment known as the 'Prague Spring'.
Big battles had erupted in all the major university towns of Germany. An attempt was even made on the life of the student leader Rudi Dutschke. In Britain as elsewhere students were on the march in their tens of thousands against the American war in Vietnam. Although the student struggles were symptomatic of deeper social conflicts, nowhere else other than in France did they spark off a general strike of workers, let alone one that could have brought to an end the rule of capital.
What is the explanation? It lies not in any superior methods adopted by the French students, but in the coming together of all the political and social preconditions for revolution - the combustible material. The bonapartism of de Gaulle acted as an additional and aggravating 'detonator'.
French students had been involved in big movements against the Algerian war in the early 1960s. They had demonstrated as vociferously as any in support of the struggle in Vietnam for independence. This was a particularly potent issue because it revived the memories of France's inglorious attempt to hold on to its former colony of Indo-China. It was after France's catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu that US imperialism had assumed domination of South Vietnam.
In Early 1968 it was protests against a restrictive education system and archaic rules which erupted into open clashes on the campuses. With the renowned subtlety of a frightened bureaucracy, the authorities called in the forces of the state. On a number of occasions, police 'put down' the troubles. At the beginning of May some students from Nanterre, including Daniel Cohn Bendit, were to be tried in the university courts for 'disrupted behavior'. A battle between students and fascists loomed. On May 2, Roche, the Director, closed Nanterre University.
The next day, students from Nanterre gathering peacefully with those of the Sorbonne, were viscously attacked by the hated riot police - the CRS - and hundreds of students were arrested. Lectures at the Sorbonne and the Censier Annexe were suspended. Anger mounted and the University Teachers' Union (SneSUP) called a strike. This was promptly declared illegal by the Education Minister, Alain Peyrefitte.
On Sunday 5 May, students arrested on the previous days' demonstrations were summarily imprisoned and fined. All hell broke loose! Demonstrations were banned and the university strikes spread to the secondary schools. Each application of the iron fist aroused more anger and determination on the part of the students.
On Monday 6 May, a defiant 60,000-strong demonstration in the Latin Quarter of Paris was attacked by the riot police, with a brutality which aroused widespread sympathy for the students among the population of Paris. It aroused, too, the indignation of workers everywhere as news of the atrocities reached them over the radio. To protect themselves, the students began to throw up barricades with anything to hand. This was the first time barricades had appeared on the streets of Paris since 1944, when the workers rose up against the German army before the Allied forces had reached the capital city.
At the end of a night of bloody battles 739 injured were taken to hospital. Many hundreds more were cared for in the homes of Parisians. The middle class were stunned and horrified. In the days that followed numerous eye-witness reports appeared in the French newspapers. One doctor wrote 'with all the bitterness of my powerlessness' to Le Monde of what he had just seen from his window:
I saw, coming out from a cafe, young foreigners bent double, for or five policemen to each, battering them violently on the face whenever possible, otherwise on the shins. The youths had tried to protect themselves with books then the books had gone flying. The blows rained until they were thrown into the police van thirty meters away. How long that short distance seemed! Residents of this bourgeois quarter were shouting their indignation.
One black youth who had been walking normally when he was put in the 'Salad Basket' (Black Maria) emerged fifteen minutes later with his face covered in blood. He staggered and collapsed. They laid him out on a stretcher and took him away. I suppose the color of his skin had warranted him being 'taken care of' inside the van.
Shortly afterwards in battles with the police the students succeeded in pushing them back - vans and all. Some bottles hurtled down from several stories up on the forces of law and order. The sympathy of the population goes visibly to the students who remain masters of the terrain. Tomorrow there will be police denunciation of 'foreigners' and the real demonstrators will have smashed the cops and I say this with satisfaction ... I admit it!
On various occasions when the police were forced back applause burst out on the balconies. No hostility was displayed towards the demonstrators - on the contrary radios, food and refuge were provided. A poll indicated that 80 per cent of the Paris population were behind the students. The government had misjudged and banked on a tiny group of agitators being isolated. Peyrefitte had spoken of 'a handful of troublemakers'. Scandalously the leaders of the 'Communist' Party had echoed these sentiments, suggesting that the movement of the students was the work of grouplets or 'groupuscules' - Trotskyists, anarchists - even OAS and CIA agents!