French Revolution 1968 - Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville

 FRENCH REVOLUTION 1968 -

PATRICK SEALE & MAUREEN McCONVILLE

If this was France everything would be on fire. And there's the nub of it. Why is England not on fire? Why is England in a near-state of lethargy when it comes to questions of social change? Why do its peoples allow themselves to be plunged head-long into yet another round of austerity when their country is meant to be one of the richest in the world? Why is everything so quiet and subdued? Why is there no foment on the streets? Why is there no sign of anything approaching anywhere near the events of May 1968 in France that caused riots in the streets, barricades to be erected, the near fall of the Government and the near ushering in of a new age? Why? Why? And why again.

French Revolution 1968, written by Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville is the story of the events around May '68 in France, written as they unfolded. Books age, especially if they're written of and about their time. History is always in the making, history is recorded and history moves on leaving only scholars and the likes of us to pore over its bones.

'The quite extraordinary feature of the May Revolution in Paris,' the authors note 'was the extreme youth of the rebel troops. If most of the general staff were over twenty, much of the infantry came from school.' And therein is one of the biggest lessons to be learned: those who have the most to gain are those who have the least to lose, and students at that time having no investment in the system and no sign of a future had a whole world to gain which explains why their discontent and their demands went well beyond the life they led within the walls of their universities. 

"No future!" proclaimed the Sex Pistols nine years later and you can bet any money this was a slogan that Malcolm McLaren came up with rather than Lydon as McLaren would have had a better understanding of how to cajole a crowd into action having been in Paris in '68. Not that McLaren was any kind of seasoned street activist or anything it's just that he probably had a better understanding of how culture works in a kind of reverse psychology way, particularly in comparison to someone like Penny Rimbaud of Crass who would say the Pistols' 'no future' was "a challenge to our creativity", suggesting a lack of understanding on his part. But I digress.

The parents of all these newly politicised students knew nothing about what was going on until it was too late. It was almost as though that within every respectable middle class family there was a Fifth Columnist. So too with the established political parties of both the Left and Right, little did they know that young people everywhere were coming to the view that their parents' world was due for some pretty violent political surgery.

In as much as Daniel Cohn-Bendit is rightly highlighted as playing an important part in triggering off the revolutionary avalanche of May '68, it's always wrong to place too much emphasis on any one individual in regards to such events as they're often turned into heroes of sorts and heroes always in the end tend to disappoint. If there is in fact any one thing that can be pointed at as being the trigger for the '68 Revolution and the actual rioting in the streets then it's the police moving in on the university of Sorbonne to eject students who were occupying it. At the sight of a great mass of armed police arresting a mass of peacefully protesting students, the mass of student on-lookers took exception and jeered and shouted at the police. All it took was for a stone to be thrown at the police for another to follow. All it took was for a gas grenade to be thrown at the students followed by another for the situation to escalate out of control.

'The authorities had blundered badly by penetrating the Sorbonne, and taking into custody scores of young people whose only offence had been to make a little noise. They had then compounded the error by parading their prisoners in front of their comrades. As was so often to happen, repression bred violence rather than stifling it. The immediate effect of the authorities' crude display of strength was to unite the mass of uncommitted students - and their teachers - behind the enrages. In a few minutes a mass movement was created. It was war. The Revolution had begun.'

To provoke a riot is a pretty difficult thing to do as any erstwhile, would-be black bloc anarchist might attest though paradoxically it can take only a tiny incident such as a stone being thrown for things to escalate beyond all expectations. Arguably, most riots are instigated by the police through something they have done such as the killing of someone (be it in custody or not) or through attacking a crowd, causing that crowd to hit back. There can be all the necessary ingredients in place to form a breeding ground for a riot such as a government bearing down unacceptably upon its populace, or economic turmoil, repression, discrimination and so on but if there isn't the spark then depression will prevail and the over-riding state will remain moribund. The key then is for there to be a riot situation for that spark to be lit and that can only occur in no other place but the street. Not on the television, not on the Internet, not on social media. In the street.

'To the observer, one of the puzzles of the May Revolution is that, from the first day of serious fighting, it was hard to establish at whose door responsibility should be laid: was it the heavy hand of the police which lit the fuse, or was it, perhaps, the deliberate courting of repression by small groups of hard-headed revolutionary tacticians?' This question at the end of the day is one of the most important as to understand it leads to understanding where power lies, particularly in regards to who has the power to prevent a riot from happening and who has the power to start one.

From riot to insurrection, as they say, and this is exactly what happened in France, starting from the students rioting and the throwing up of barricades in the streets to the reaching out for support from the unions and the workers in the factories and - to the consternation of the Gaullist government - receiving it.

On the taking over and the occupation of the universities, workers throughout France took note and in solidarity did likewise; downing their tools, taking strike action and occupying their own places of work. This was all done, however, very spontaneously and mostly at base level without the actions being urged or carried forward by the union leadership.

Coming in for criticism during the whole May '68 crisis and deservedly so is the Communist Party of France and the Communist-led CGT trade union federation who when it came to choosing sides between the revolutionaries on the Left and the Gaullist establishment, chose to go with the latter. Their reasoning was that the students and the militants were adventurists and that as Communists they shouldn't jeopardise their hard-gained, supposed semi- respectability by being stampeded into insurrection. Much rather they would in alliance with the non-Communist Left make a bid for political power but acting strictly within the framework of Republican legality. No, not for them the overthrow of capitalism but just a larger slice of the pie.

Much to his credit as a skilled political animal, in what was like a giant game of poker President de Gaulle played his hand, just at the point when his government seemed about to fall. 'In the present circumstances I will not withdraw.' he declared 'I have a mandate from the people. I will fulfil it.' Now where has this been heard before, this talk of mandates - and only recently? The British Conservative Party, of course, and their interchanging Prime Ministers and their clinging to of power.

De Gaulle rallied his troops, calling on all sections of his State apparatus and every tricoloured-blooded Right-wing leaning citizen of France to stand firm against the Communist hordes and their 'totalitarian enterprise'. No matter that the actual Communist Party had denounced the students and their uprising, no matter that they had denounced Cohn-Bendit, no matter that they had done their utmost to present themselves as respectable politicos with no intention of pulling down the State in fact the complete opposite - to the maintaining of the State - the Communist Party and the CGT union and indeed anyone to the Left of politics were all tarred with the same brush and cast as enemies of the State and subsequently enemies of the people.

It was an exceptional display of politics with de Gaulle's words serving to unite every French conservative under the sun whilst at the same time causing disunity on the side of the revolutionaries. Cut off at the pass. Ambushed and kiboshed by offers of higher wages and shorter working hours. The Revolution stumbled before falling flat on its own dreams then given a good kicking whilst on the ground. The Revolution was dead.

To this day it's always asked when and where did a revolutionary, anarchistic society ever successfully exist? The answers trotted out are always Spain in '36, Ukraine in '18, and so on. To this I would add Paris in May of 1968 - if only for a few short weeks. It was there and then that the peoples of Paris became truly alive; without petrol, without public transport, without monies to spend on commodities, with food rationed - though all alleviated through mutual aid to ensure no-one went without and no-one went hungry. With only themselves and each other. When the pomp of officialdom and the social pressures of bourgeois-dictated society were done away with. When the first full-scale challenge in a Western state to the inhuman efficiency of modern industrial life was launched.

It didn't last, as we know. The flame was snuffed out and the red and black flags were replaced by the tricolour, and the Internationale replaced by the Marseillaise. The example, however, had been set. The imagination and the spirit fired. The gauntlet had been thrown down for others to follow with lessons taught and left to be learned for the next time. And it's inevitable. There will be a next time. There's no question about it. When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake and the key is in not being afraid of ruins because before they leave the stage of history the bourgeoise are blasting and ruining the world anyway so what have you got to lose? There isn't really any other option.

John Serpico