May 68

• May 2nd:

As of the morning, the rumor is questioned by nobody any more (the evidence is there, in the Sorbonne) and will start the revolt: the movement Occident, consisted of militants of extreme right-hand side and helped for the occasion by former parachutists, stated that it prepared, for the following day, to attack Nanterre and to restore the order. It is the swing-low of combat on the campus.

In forecast, one is armed with clubs, of bolts, one manufactures kingpins and piles up iron bars. The manpower of the commando of Occident, parachutists included/understood, exceeds the 200 elements.

the meeting that Occident intends to hold is only one pretext for in découdre and the warning is taken with the serious one. Pro-Chinese of UJCml thus prepares to receive their visitors with dignity and transforms faculty into fortified camp with “strategic” occupation from the roofs, catapults, giant catapults for giant projectiles (generally of the tables), kingpins, road-metals, etc Of the helmeted guetteurs took seat on the roof provided with the cases of bolts and stones. There are sentinels everywhere, with the doors and the windows of the buildings. Bludgeon with the hand, helmet with the belt, the chiefs patrol. Trenches dug on the campus are designed to stop the progression of the adversary and to block its cars. Contacts were even made with workmen who work in a nearby building site, so that, if the need were felt some, they support the students with their bulldozers! The students of the Université of Beijing are used as models, they already had recourse to this strategy of defense which envisages to make campus a fortified camp. One does without hand in hand a leaflet of Occident: We will show tomorrow that we are able to oppose to us to red terror and to restore the order with the means which are essential .

Finalement, Occident will not come, but the police force if. A building of the residence is transformed into Fort-Chabrol.

In the middle of effervescence, one learns that eight students of the Movement of March 22nd are convened before the Commission of the contentious and disciplinary businesses of the University of Paris, that Robert Flacelière chairs, director of the National university of the street of Ulm and vice-president of the Council of the University, for on Monday, May 6, with 11:30. The defendants who must answer of the evening of March 22nd are: Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Olivier Castro, Michel Pourny, Daniel Schulmann, Yves Fleischl, Ploix, Jean-Pierre Duteuil and Rene Riesel.

At the end of the morning, the senior of Nanterre, Mr. Grappin, and the Roche vice-chancellor go to the site to note the situation with the director of higher educations of the ministry, Mr. Olmer. They are anxious. Hook does not see an other solution only to suspend the courses, like in March. One is at fifteen days of the examinations, faculty can with the rigor remain closed up to that point: Moreover, after having marked the blow, we envisage to gradually reopen it if the situation allows it.

In the afternoon, 300 students approximately requisition the large lecture theater of faculty for film projection on the war of Vietnam and the Black Power. Rene Rémond finds his amphitheater occupied with a sign on the door: The course of Rémond will not take place. The historian, furious, protests, but anything made there. He receives for any encouragement a table in the legs, one hoots it, one expels it and he is constrained to make half-turn. The courses of François Bourricaud and Michel Crozier are also disturbed.

the 20 hour old tv news on the first chain diffuses the call of the Grappin senior who protests against the action of small groups of extremists . The departure for the Iran and the Afghanistan of the Prime Minister Georges Pompidou is also diffused this same evening.

Communicated UNEF and Movement of March 22nd for a demonstration on May 6th with 10:00 in the Sorbonne: to be opposed to the repression engaged against certain students.

• May 3rd:

a trotskist of IRON starts by calling upon necessary alliance with the working class. Then, a militant reads aloud the leading article of Georges Marchais in Humanity . Then, Cohn-Bendit, harangue public: How the Sorbonne becomes new a Nanterre! , it launches. It is then with the turn of Jacques Sauveagot, 25 and history years, bachelor of law of art, militant of the PSU and vice-president of the UNEF (whose it takes the presidency by interim since April), unknown of Cohn-Bendit and others, to speak. All these beautiful people wait, moreover, of firm footing the nationalists who, after the closing of Nanterre, promised to make them return throat.

During this time there, the de Gaulle General receives some personalities to lunch. Among them, the actor Fernandel who made shift the turning of a film to be present.

At the beginning of afternoon, the Parisian readers of the literary supplement of the Monde take note of the publication of some works: a novel of Andre Stil, conforms to the esthetic line of the Communist party, two collections: one of texts castrists and one on Mao. They are informed of the situation of the Swiss letters. With the one, a very critical ticket of Robert Escarpit: … Nothing is less revolutionist, nothing is more conformist than pseudo-anger of a breaker of squares even if it equips his mandarinoclastrie with a Marxist language or situationnist… . While the police force is on the point of penetrating in the Sorbonne, 45 teachers of Nanterre meet in the buildings of their faculty, deserted after the decision to suspend the courses, in order to discuss text pointing out the urgency of a university reform, that Alain Touraine, Paul Ricoeur and Guy Michaud made public in Le Monde of May 2nd. Stressing that the disturbance of the courses by the extreme left was exaggerated, they estimate that the University and the academics are, partly, persons in charge of the vagueness of violence and agitation.

the group of militants of Occident arrives street of the Schools before accelerating in the tread. At the same moment, a covered civil police of a long black leather overcoat orders with his uniformed policemen and helmeted to charge the procession, which gallops towards the entry of the Sorbonne and climbs some steps before making half-turn abruptly. They move away, whereas the police officers who track them really do not seem to seek to catch up with them. The commando of extreme right-hand side disaggregates and disperses in the neighbouring streets.

With 16:45, they are perhaps thousand, but, by a prompt reinforcement, they will be more than two miles at 5 p.m.

a police chief tells: At 17:16, demonstrators arrive of the street Champollion towards the Sorbonne. Their number can be evaluated with 1  000. They apply a punctuated technique of harassing of severe clashes but of short duration. The police force receives the order “to clean” the accesses. To give off the second and third bus of “prisoners”, shaken by crowd, and to allow the transshipment of some of them, a tire having been burst by the demonstrators, the police force draws from the teargas grenades. Demonstrators, fighting against asphyxiation, break a grid of tree and loosen some paving stones, the first. This time all starts.

Some of the leaders of UJCml are with their stronghold of the ENS. student Cinquantedeux of Nanterre, members of the Movement of March 22nd, who attended the beginning of the riot arrive while running to seek them. One says to them: Is needed that you came quickly, one fights on the Saint-Michel boulevard. They heard it with the radio; One needs you, you only can save the situation! They answered: They is surely people of right-hand side who fight, without that, one would be us there already.

• May 4th:

In Paris

• the May 3rd, the Sorbonne, occupied by demonstrators and risking a possible attack of the student movements of extreme right-hand side (as Occident) is evacuated by a muscular police intervention: several hundreds of students are stopped, of which Jacques Sauvageot, the leader of the student main trade union. This intervention of the police force in the Sorbonne is very badly lived by the students who thought themselves protected by the university statute. (see the chronology, above, for more details)
• the students react at once by violent demonstrations against the police force: jets of paving stones, then barricades. These demonstrations then take again with the advertisement custodial sentences for the demonstrators, during whom start to flower the libertarian slogans.
• the president of SNE-Sup (trade union of the teachers of the superiors), Alain Geismar, decides to support the demonstrators. The members of the Communist party and the organizations of Extreme left are initially taken of short (for them, the revolution is supposed to come from the workmen, and not from the students; moreover, the claims of the movement of March 22nd appear to them puerile and middle-class men and especially gauchists ). After one moment of undulation, they try however to gain the workmen with this “revolt”. The CGT, for its part, does not follow them and its general secretary of the time, Georges Séguy, is explained some in front of the media: Cohn-Bendit which is? Undoubtedly you refer to this launched movement with great reinforcement of publicity which, in our eyes, does not have an other objective only to involve the working class in adventures while being based on the movement of the students . But the base of these traditional organizations of left exceeds their persons in charge.
• the May 13rd an immense demonstration crosses Paris. The trade union CFDT speaks about a million demonstrators. The police headquarter does not even concede two hundred and thousand of them. The strike extends quickly in the current from the month: it is the wild first General strike of the History. It is as the first time as a general strike paralyzes a country arrived at the stage of the Consumer society. The Communist party denounces the demonstrations coeds, where he sees a handling of the extreme-left. During the confrontations of the Latin Quarter of Paris, a demonstrator is killed out of a stab.
• the population, vis-a-vis police repression, tends to take made and causes for the students, in spite of the barricades and the destruction of tens of cars and of the urban Mobilier.
• the Head of the State, the General de Gaulle, in official trip in Romania at the beginning of the events, does not grant initially much attention to these demonstrations. It lets its Prime Minister Georges Pompidou occupy himself some: one will say of him later that " rare are the politicians, such Mr. Pompidou, to box at this point during the insultes". This one stops another official trip in Afghanistan to face the situation. It requires that the police force leave the Sorbonne, in order to calm the situation. It is believed whereas he tergiversates and yields but actually this movement is tactical: it reverses the responsibilities on the students whose excesses then lose justification in comparison with the opinion (letter quoted by Raymond Aron in its Mémoires , p.667). De Gaulle remains with the variation by reserving the possibility of intervening if need be. However, with most extremely from the dispute, de Gaulle disappears during several hours, with the general surprise. That plunges the majority in a certain distress. It will consult the Général Massu in Germany, in the helicopter which was to lead it for the end of the week with its residence of Colombey, in order to make sure of the support of the army.
• the Prime Minister Georges Pompidou proposes to dissolve the National Assembly to organize new legislative elections. It estimates with accuracy that the student's movement, continuing the strike in spite of the accession to its claims, was made unpopular. De Gaulle lines up in this opinion and announces dissolution by the radio in a short speech which changes abruptly gives it (see Charles de Gaulle for some extracts). But these days will carry in their center the germ of a cooling of the relations between Georges Pompidou and the Général de Gaulle.
• the May 30th is organized a walk of support for the government, carried out by André Malraux and Michel Debré. It brings together three hundred and thousand demonstrators according to the police headquarter and a million according to the gaullists.

In province

In the universities

In the colleges

In the companies

In the administrations

In the places of culture and animation

Consequences of May 68

With the political plan

Agreements of Grenelle

An increase in 35  % of SMIG to 600  F per month and of 10  % of the wages, the reduction of the working time, are amongst other things concluded at the time of the Accords of Grenelle, following negotiations carried out in particular by the young person senior official Jacques Chirac, and the resumption of work is carried out gradually at the beginning of June. The police force and the gendarmerie progressively evacuate the various occupied places. A police officer (crushed by a truck) and two workmen die during the confrontations of the beginning of June.

Dissolution of the National Assembly on May 30th, 1968

The legislative elections of June 1968 see the very broad victory of the gaullists, gathered in the famous party for the occasion Union for the defense of the Republic. One wondered much about this reversal of the fear, so much the media gave the impression which the population leant for the student movement. To the bottom nobody on the left had given the impression to control what occurred and the solution appeared to be temporarily apart from the movement, in institutional stability.

Referendum on the regionalization and the role of the Senate of April 27th, 1969 and departure of the de Gaulle General

The Général de Gaulle had wished a referendum in May 1968. Georges Pompidou had pled and obtained the dissolution of the National Assembly. De Gaulle does not give up her project of referendum. It perceives that May 1968 put forward a more direct need for democracy and nearer to the people. He imagines to decentralize certain places of decision and refonder the Senate by changing his criteria of recruitment radically. It is the object of this referendum. It puts all its political weight in the balance by promising to leave if the French answer “not”. Not carries it with 52,41  % (80,13  % of voters, 77,94  % of votes cast). As it had indicated, the De Gaulle General leaves.

In the cultural plan, economic and social

Generally May 68 marks the brutal opening of the culture French to the social dialog and media, which will infiltrate in all the wheels of the company and the family intimacy, and a big step of awakening of the universalization of the modern society (after the “world” wars) and of the questioning of the Western model of the “company of Consommation”.

• One of the principal influences of the revolution of May 68 is located at the sociocultural level , like recognized it François Mitterrand at the time of the 20th birthday of May 68.

One attends a disaffection of the French for the public and political sphere and the militancy in general. It will undoubtedly be the bed of the end of the fear of the left to the capacity in 1981. May 68 is the song of the swan of the conflict “right-hand side-left” which will not exist any more but for the political parties and the electoral campaigns.

the events of May 1968 mark a political division which has repercussions in the French company. For example, the schism of the university of the social sciences of Lyon II. Currently, one locates sometimes the political personalities according to the “side” of the barricades where they were located. The pejorative qualifier of “gauchist”, created by Lénine in 1920 ( The infantile disease of Communism ), enters the current language.

Of new values appears. They are in particular centered around the autonomy, the primacy of the personal realization, the creativity, the multidisciplinarity and the valorization of the individual implying the refusal of the traditional rules of the company and the questioning of the authority. The redefinition of new rules is built around the idea of Autogestion and the communautarism. The concept of self-management will be competed with by that of Cogestion which will be expensive with Edgar Faure in its reform of the teaching which will follow and generally sails very about it in the political organizations worry about this evolution considered to be “anarchistic”.

• the sexual release is one of the broad topics of May 68, correlatively on arrival of the contraceptive modern. The Féminisme also develops, with its most radical movement, MLF, and plays a great part in the implosion of the Militant traditional ism with the profit of feminist topics like the authorization of the Avortement, the questioning of the allocation of the functions in the couple (“What is longer: to make cook steak of a revolutionist or that of a middle-class man? ”), “birth without violence”.

• the denunciation of the Communist regimes reformists ( the Gulag Archipelago , the Cry of the stones ) is confirmed. This disillusion on Communism, just after an intense political commitment, in particular of the Maoists and extreme left which appeared a time among the young people like a more authentic alternative, will lead to a pessimism generalized in the mediums of left, a systematic car-denigration of all that could exist before the Revolution of May.

• This time is underlined by “ New philosophers ” such as Bernard-Henri Levy. The dessinatrice humorist Claire Bretécher has remarkably illustrated this spirit with its weekly publication in frustrated Nouvel Observateur entitled “”. Yves Duteil will sing Important it is not only one does who counts, it is the history, the way in which one tells it… , follows a second reading of the French history, and the forward setting of its violences.

• the influence of May 68 is manifest in the school pedagogy in France. Of disciple, the pupil becomes a subject which can intervene in the pedagogy of which it is the object, it is the Coéducation. The dimension of the free word, by the debate, increases. The authoritative discipline makes place with the participation in the decisions. The teachers were sometimes destabilized in the idea that they were done of their trade. One will criticize then this evolution considered to be often too permissive. It also was at the origin of the participation of the pupils and the parents in the staff meetings and the redefinition of the school payments in the establishments as of June 1968.

• In the economic domain and social

the conflict of the company of the watches “Lip”, led by Charles Piaget of the Trade union CFDT, with Besancon in 1973, will be a very mediatized illustration of this evolution, with an experiment of implementation of the self-management of the company which will make run much ink.

This influence will have also consequences in 1973 in movements of called into question of the army and nuclear deterrent force and generally in the ecomovements (Brice Lalonde) and antimilitarists (the fight against the extension of the military camp of the young peasants of the Larzac, from which Jose Bove is resulting, the current of the Non-violence) and famous the ONG like “Doctors without borders” (Bernard Kouchner), directly resulting from the planetary awakening of the movements of May 68. It is also the period of the birth of the idea of “Halte to the growth?” (1972) title of a publication of the founded Club of Rome in 1968.

Curiously, if one believes of it the magazine the Expansion , the annual rhythm of increase in the productivity “increased” during the three years which followed May 68. It is clear that with the victory of the gaullists elected by the conservatives on May 30th, 1968 to repress the movement of May 68 and to break the movement, the political objective did not go in the direction of the claims of the demonstrators against whom the gaullists had devoted themselves to an arm wrestling.

• In the presse'

the Encyclical Humanæ vitæ , published in July 1968, is especially known for its refusal of the Contraception.

the ecumenical community of the Frères of Taizé becomes one of the poles structuring of this upheaval. With the beginning of the year 1970, to forty thousand young people, come certainly from the whole world, but much from France, gather around them each week of Easter in the Burgundian small village of Taizé, which usually counts fifty inhabitants. Each one is invited to take part in the “Concile of the young people”. One creates “basic communities” in the communist world, as in the western world or in Latin America, with the image of the first Christians. These extracts of texts of Taizé express the Christian upheaval in echo with the events of May 68: Christ ressuscity comes to animate a festival with most intimate of the man , He will give enough us imagination and of courage to become sign of contradiction . This “sign of contradiction” will become later on “ sign of reconciliation ”.

Some slogans Soixante-huitard S

• It is interdict to prohibit.
• this slogan deserves a special place: “ It is interdict to prohibit ” was, at the beginning simple autoreferential joke launched by whimsical the Jean Yanne; it was thereafter taken again with the first degree, that whose concerned one will be surprised… and amused.
• imagination seizes the power!
• With bottom the commercial spectacular company.
• never work.
• I take my desires for realities because I believe in the reality of my desires.
• Fine of the university.
• To live without idle period and to enjoy without obstacle.
• the trouble is counter-revolutionary.
• No replastering, the structure is rotted.
• We do not want a world where the certainty not to die of hunger is exchanged against the risk to die of trouble (this sentence drawn from the introduction of the Traité good manners with the use of the young generations of Raoul Vaneigem was largely commented on by Thierry Maulnier, which was member of the French Academy, and by the chronicler André Frossard, which will become it).
• Those which make the revolutions with half only make dig a tomb.
• One will not assert anything, one will not require anything. One will take, one will occupy.
• Plebiscite: that it is said yes that one says not, it makes us idiots.
• Since 1936, I fought for pay rises. My father before me fought for pay rises. Now I have a TV, a refrigerator, a VW. And however, I always lived the life of an idiot. Do not negotiate with the owners. Abolish them.
• the owner needs you, you do not need him.
• Hard-working: you are 25 years old but your trade union is other century.
• Please leave the Communist party also Net while leaving which you would like to find it while entering there.
• Be realistic, ask the impossible one.
• One buys your happiness. Steal it.
• Under the paving stones, the beach (at the time of the erection of the barricades, one had found under the macadam the old pavement of Paris, and under the paving stones - immediately used way which one guesses - the sand bed on which they were posed).
• Formerly, we had only the poppy. Today, paving stone.
• the golden age was the age where gold did not reign. The golden calf is always of mud.
• the barricade closes the street but opens the way.
• It will have there nothing any more from now on but two categories of men: calves and revolutionists. In the event of marriage, that will make réveaulutionnaires .
• the alarm clock sounds: The FIRST humiliation of the day!
• Imagines: it is the war and nobody goes there!
• Leave the fear of the red to the animals with horns.
• Course comrade, the old world is behind you.
• the walls have the word.
• Elections, trap with idiots.
• (on a bottle of poison) Press: not to swallow.
• ORTF : The police force speaks every evening at 8 p.m. to you.
• Take your desires for reality.
• We all are of the German Jews.

In answer to violent repression, screen printed posters say:

• CRS also are men: the proof, they rape the girls in the police stations. perhaps
• CRS=SS
• It has no report/ratio there… But perhaps none.