IN TODAY'S CLIMATE, it is not surprising that the twentieth anniversary of May 1968 has been the occasion for running up the colors of political or economic "realism", or for a war of words about cultural change/renewal, changes in standards and so on. Platitudes drown out what is most specific in a concentrated social and political crisis such as May 1968.
CHARLES-ANDRE UDRY
W
HAT MAY 68 represented was the emergence for a brief time(the last week of May) of a limited range of possibilities for thoroughgoing changes. It was not a phantasmagoria of maybes or a revolution right around the corner. It was the appearance on the social and political scene of crossroads, and, depending on how these were negotiated, other possibilities opened up or
The May crisis, like all great social and political events, speaks with a number of voices, and for good reason. From May 3 to
June 6, 1968, the protest of many sections of society converged. That opens up the floodgates for a plethora of interpretations.
The minister of the interior at the time,
Raymond Marcellin, started the ball rolling with his "theory" of an international plot directed from Cuba and East Berlin. This was manna from heaven for the right-wing press. Then some innovative sociologists discovered the "crisis of higher education."
As the first lesson in the syllabus, it is acceptable. As an explanation for a crisis that led former prefect of police Maurice Gri-
"fear is taking hold of the maud to write, state apparatus", it is a bit thin.!
Edgar Morin talked about the "eruption of the youth" on the scene; Gérard Mendel, about "the Oedipus complex." This has had its day! For Tourraine, May 1968 was a
"social movement of a new kind"! Engineers, technicians and media people were at its center. Millions of striking workers supposedly were overshadowed by them.
Nonetheless, over and above the real complexity and myriad facets of such an explosion, some powerful tendencies cannot be conjured away. May 1968 was the intersection, not the fusion, of a mass student movement and a gigantic working- class mobilization. In the beginning, the
International Viewpoint #142 • May 30, 1988 student movement combined very immediate demands with a maximalist radicalization of perspectives. It was a sort of "juvenile constituent assembly," as Lucio Magri nicely puts it.?
Biggest general strike in the history of France
But he continues "everyone recognizes that the entry of the working class into the struggle was the most important event in May." That is obvious. It was the biggest and broadest general strike in the history of France. A strike that shook up society and the government more than the electoral shock-waves of 1981 and 1988.
The figures show that. "The number of strikers grew continually. On May 24, it was not far off 9 million. In 1936, the June strikes involved 3 million people. The record, therefore, was shattered. No industry was spared. Even agricultural workers were caught up in the wave."3 Estimates differ on the number of strikers, from 5.8 to 9 million. The comparison says a lot. According to Pietro Kemeny, who systematically takes the lowest estimates, the figures were 2.45 million strikers in 1936, 2.9 million in 1947 (the big struggles at Renault and other plants at the start of the cold war) and 5.7 in 1968.
Kemeny concludes: "Almost ten days lost per person employed is atypical, even with respect to the other exceptional years; this meant that more days were lost than the total since the war." That amounted to nearly 150 million days lost through strikes. If you try to establish a rate of participation relative to the working population, the indices are the same. For every economically active people, 34,233 participated in the 1968 strike. In war period.
### Strike wave spread spontaneously
The strike wave spread spontaneously. A snowball grew into an avalanche. After May 10, the movement ceased to be solely students. On May 11, the trade-union confederations (the CGT and the CFDT), as well as the National Teachers' Federation (FEN) and the Students Union of France (UNEF) issued a call for a 24-hour general strike and for "powerful demonstrations" on May 13. The sweep of solidarity was to extend far beyond that.
With a hesitant spontaneity, the workers took advantage of a political situation that seemed to open the way for a more effective struggle for their wage and conditions demands than partial strikes or the "24hour national days of action" that had dominated trade-union life since March 1966. The thirty-four decrees issued by de Gaulle, Pompidou and Debré over the summer of 1967 had exacerbated discontent and politicized demands. These measures involved jobs (assuring the "mobility" of the workforce); social security; linking wages to productivity; freeing businesses from taxes; and concentration of land ownership.
On May 14, a strike broke out at SudAviation-Bougenais in the outskirts of Nantes. On May 15, the working class fortress of Renault-Cléon went on strike. On Friday, May 17, Paris subway, railway and postal workers came out. "C'est la chienlit," "It's a mess," de Gaulle said. On May
The peak of the May crisis took form. It came between May 22 and 30. In this period, there was a subtle interaction of the strengths and weaknesses of the strike, the inertia of the past and the possibilities rush1. Maurice Grimaud, En mai, fait ce qu'il te plaît, Stock, 1977, p.279 2. Lucio Magri, Temps modernes, August-September 3. Michel Winock, La fièvre hexagonale. Les grandes crises politiques 1871-1968, Calman-Lévy, 1986, 4. Pietro Kemeny "Il movimento degli scioperi nel XX 5. G. Pompidou, Pour rétablir la vérité, Flammarion, 1982; Yves Guéna, Le temps des certitudes, Flammarion, 1982; Jacques Massu, Baden 63, Plon, 1983; Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle, le souverain, Seuil, 1986.
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68-88
ing into a breach that had been partially opened, choices and abstentions whose result was recalculated at every moment....
Supposedly, May 1968 played the role of forceps assisting the birth of a modern France that was fathered by de Gaulle in
KOLETAI
Mass meetings
UISS of students and workers
(DR)
tus, specifies: "We sensed better than others the fragility of the leading circles." 8
It is undeniable
68-88 FRANCE Party — said something that was justified in this context:
"It is also true that, on the basis of the existing conditions, it was possible to envisage quite a different outcome to the May crisis. And from this starting point we can legitimately talk about the subjective responsibilities of those who had the power to accomplish these decisive options."11 This brings us to the policy of the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), led by Georges Séguy of the French Communist Party, with the duo Waldeck-Rochet/ Georges Marchais, and François Mitter-
1958 but had a difficult gestation. Once OU TEMPS POUR RETOUR as again, this leaves very little room for choices by the social and political actors in a field of possibilities — these were limited, but not to one possibility standing splendidly alone.
The strike was based on the industries that had been reinforced by years of growth and on the public services. But it spread beyond that, not just to the students, but to unusual areas — to radio and TV, in which prolonged strikes took off, to the Ministry of Equipment, to insurance and banking. It lasted. More than four million wage earners struck for more than three weeks.
Regime on the ropes by May 14
The giant demonstrations were a characteristic of May. They were the meeting place of new generation of students and young workers. They were also the expression of the idea that "maybe politics is in the streets." But there was a serious lack of a project, and during what exaggeratedly came to be known as the "government's vacation," it fell into the abyss between the all or nothing of a radical but inexperienced youth, as did the far left organizations that had developed within this stratum (and hardly at all in the ranks of wage earners).
The entry of one new layer after another into the strike paralleled the deterioration in the regime's position. But there was no clear consciousness of this interaction. And why should this have been automatic?
By May 14, the regime was on the ropes. The economics minister in the recently ousted Chirac government, Edouard Ballur, wrote: "The government no longer existed as an organ of deliberation and decision making; it was no more than a coterie, a cabal."? Maurice Grimaud, who was in a strategic position in the police apparathat the question of the government was posed, if not that of power in the full sense. Obviously, the concentration of power inherent in the Gaullist system made it easier to shake a pyramid that had suddenly been thrown on its head by this unexpected crisis. We should not forget that in April the polls indicated that 61% of the population were "satisfied" with de Gaulle?
On May 24, the general launched his proposal for a constitutional referendum on participation. It was a flop, a fiasco. The demonstrations responded, "He is the mess." (C'est lui, la chienlit!) The strike grew stronger.
In his monumental biography, Lacouture reports that de Gaulle "could only tell his crest-fallen entourage: 'I missed the target. Then he went away repeating that word, coupled with a formula that everyone of his intimates would hear endlessly in these twilight hours — 'unmanageable, the situation is unmanageable' "10
"The CP only jumped on the train to pull the brake"
The "great visionary" was blinded by what is a feature of very acute political and social crisis: the possible. Pushed down every day under the weight of the established system, it germinates beneath the real. Initially it finds its existence denied, and then it is combatted with determination, as de Gaulle began to do on May 30.
Magri — a member of the Italian Communist Party at the time, who was to become the editor of Il Manifesto [a magazine that represented a split from the CP] and who is now back home in the Communist rand/Pierre Mendès-France. On May 25, 1968, The Economist wrote:
"A revolution requires the coming together of a revolutionary situation and a party or an organization ready to take power. Since France has been virtually brought to a standstill, the situation might appear revolutionary. But the party that has always claimed the revolutionary role shows no sign of wanting to fill it. The Communists have jumped on the train, but only to pull the brake.
One might smile in reading this simplistic interpretation coming from a head under a bowler hat, plagiarized from text-book "Leninism," about the seizure of power by a party in a developed capitalist society. However, it correctly illustrates the two facets of the crisis between May 24 and May 30. On the one hand de Gaulle and the Gaullist regime, which had been strong, were notably weakened, fragile. The problem of another government was vital in those days.
On the other hand, the CGT, the Communist Party and François Mitterrand — who headed a loose constellation of forces, the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left (FGDS) — each in their own way did their best not to develop the potentialities of 6. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, Editions de Minuit, 1984, p.217. 7. Edouard Balladur, L'arbre de mai, Atelier M. Julian, 1979, p.249. 8. Grimaud, op. cit., p.289. 9. Winock, op. cit., p.332. 10. Lacouture, op. cit., p.686. 19 11. L. Magri, Temps modernes, October 1969. May 30, 1988 • #142 International Viewpoint
FRANCE 68-88 this general strike that was demoting a general.
Caught off balance by the cumulative momentum of the strike, the CGT could only ride with it. It favored slogans for specific categories of workers, for specific enterprises, ignoring general slogans. In short, it did everything to assure that a factory occupation remained only an occupation and did not become a starting point for altering the political relationship of forces, for mustering both defence and counter-attack by wage earners.
"We could have gone
La lot further"
Nonetheless, there was a sentiment that "the state had to change." As the general secretary of the CGT in Renault, Aimé Halbeher, acknowledged: "I know that among a good part of the workers, the most conscious ones, there was the idea that we could have gone a lot further. They were very confident about what could come out of the crisis and, on the basis of that, in the installation of a people's government. "12
Logically, the CGT, which dominated the trade-union movement, neglected any initiative that could give the general strike a different tenor, one that would have assured that the tremor provoked by society developed into the beginnings of a challenge to it. It could have done this in practice by offering other forms for International Viewpoint #142 • May 30, 1988 democratic leadership of the movement and putting forward demands pointing toward a different organization of "wage
With contempt, the CGT rejected the proposals for self-management made by a radicalizing CFDT. So, there was no attempt to promote the emergence of a democratic central organization that would be representative, even if at the beginning it did not lead the bulk of the strikers. Such organization was seen on a smaller scale in the 1986 student mobilizations or in the strikes of railway workers and teachers at the end of 1986 and the beginning of 1987 [see IV 111 & 112]. This is what we called the possible; it was pushed back under the ruptured bark of the real.
The start of the Grenelle negotiations on May 25 (in the Ministry of Social Affairs in the Rue de Grenelle) echoed the proposal for a referendum on participation launched by de Gaulle. Séguy and Pompidou came to an agreement. The millions of strikers made the cabal difficult. Higher wages were made the central demand. The negotiations dragged on. The strike continued,
"No one seemed think that a solution was near at hand. Then suddenly, at 2.30am, Chirac and Séguy put their heads together. Between the CGT and the regime, a deal was concluded in two hours. It was offered unchanged to the other parties (the bosses and the other union confederations), with the important reservation that the workers had to accept it," explained Jean Poperen, future secretary of Mitterrand's Socialist The government made concessions on wages (a 35% increase in the minimum wage, from 2.22 francs an hour to 3) on the working week (two hours less for those working more than 48 hours a week and one hour less for those working 45-48 hours). No concession was made on the demand for a sliding scale of wages, and none
The editor in chief of Le Monde, Pierre Viansson-Ponté, who had chewed over the theme of "France is boring" during March, wrote on May 28: "If the conclusion of the Grenelle negotiations does not manage to resolve the social conflict, and is not accepted by the 'base,' then France may go from a grave national crisis to a revolutionary situation in a climate of violence and
"Suddenly the stakes have multiplied"
Jean Poperen asked the question: "Logically, the Grenelle accords are supposed to stop it the movement cold. Why should we deprive ourselves of this formidable means of action? What is the reason for putting on the brake when the incapacity of student vanguardism is leaving the Communists in command of the terrain, at a time when the regime is accepting them as its
sole interlocutors, at a time when the question of power [that is, of the regime] is posed?
"The reason precisely is that this question is posed. Suddenly, the stakes have multiplied, and with them the risks. One more step, and a crisis of the system will open up. The Communists no doubt have the means to open up such a crisis. They are not doing it....The truth is rather that the Communists are concerned about stabilizing the situation and do not consider it imperative to modify the relationship of forces."14
On May 22, Lacouture recounts: "The confusion of Vendroux [de Gaulle's brother-in-law) was all the greater because in the midst of all this Waldeck-Rochet, the general secretary of the French Communist Party, told him loudly enough to be heard by everyone: Above all, insist that they hold firm, 'he' [de Gaulle] must not leave. "15
The eruption of May 1968 upset the habits and plans of the CP leadership. What kind of storm could fail to upset the routine of a long distance run toward toward the 1972 presidential elections. In fact, that was what the CP leadership had its sights set on. The reference point was an antimonopoly coalition. Its weapons were the monopoly control its apparatus held over the working class. Without this background, it would be incomprehensible why the theme of provocation ran like a red thread through the official speeches. The student movement and then the spontaneous strike were infractions of the code that was supposed to regulate this long march.
Furthermore, from the CP's standpoint, de Gaulle had the merit of taking France out of NATO and even of building up the French independent nuclear deterrent, the "force de frappe." In this respect, he was more useful to the "socialist camp" than the likes of Guy Mollet, Mendès-France or Mitterrand, who were devoted to NATO This clarifies Waldeck-Rochet's statement to Vendroux.
Workers reject Grenelle
"accords"
Finally, the CP was not ready to smooth the path for those — from the PSU (a left centrist group to the SFIO (the SP) and the Conventions de Institutions Républicaines (Mitterrand) - who were trying to put together a left force to rival it. The Mitterrand experience in the 1970s shows that this fear was well founded. The result was that the CP channelled the movement, while trying to capitalize on it. It did not orient the movement toward achieving its potentialities. In this sense, it blocked it.
This is why the effects were less cataclysmic than predicted by the editor of Le Monde when the workers rejected the Grenelle "accords", first at Renault and then elsewhere. To prevent a blow up, they were not to be called "accords." What was the reason for this rejection? The gap was too great between what seemed possible and what had been obtained. But the gap was just as large between this rejection and its translation on the political level into a gov-
No governmental perspective
The Charléty rally on May 27 was a crossroads of the political projects represented by Mendès-France, by the emergence of a revolutionary and self-management current and by the maximalist illusion expressed in the cry, "power is in the streets." This was not the case. But it is true that the crisis of the regime had reached its climax.
Mitterrand, a parliamentary politician and constitutionalist who learned later to bide his time, made a sudden move. "I am a candidate" [for the presidency], he declared on May 28. In a press conference, he announced the FDS's rejection of the referendum. He saw de Gaulle's defeat as leading to the dissolution of the Assembly.
De Gaulle, on the other hand, had gauged things well. Hesitant at his low point, this manic depressive — as Lacouture describes him — went to visit his loyal soldiers (Massu in Baden-Baden) in order to psyche himself up. Then he came back for
The CP organized its own demonstration on May 29, an orderly one. It proposed a "people's government," without being very specific about it. In fact, the trade-union left gave up the idea of giving the strike any centralized organized expression. With this logic, respecting the division of labor between parties and unions in order to better dam up the movement, the political left offered no governmental perspective. That is, they offered no proposal for a government whose tasks would harmonize with the more or less expressed aspirations of the movement, aspirations, moreover, that needed to be articulated more explicitly.
In order to set the tone, in his news conference Mitterrand went as far as saying: "Depending on our imagination and our will, the question posed in Prague in this spring of 1968 could find its answer in Paris."16 The grandeur and abjection of May
At that point, the government, because it was the government, took advantage of the failure — of the vacation! — of the left in the political arena. On May 30, de Gaulle announced over TV that he was postponing the referendum. He stayed, kept Pompidou as his premier, dissolved the National Assembly and organized elections. This time, he was "on target." He did not defeat his adversary; he retook the chair that it could
In a crisis, the party on the attack loses everything if it does not know how to advance. The lack of a solution aroused uneasiness in the social layers initially
68-88 FRANCE favorable to change. So, the tide turned quickly. On May 31, Séguy announced that the CGT "has no intention of disrupting the election; it intends to achieve a positive settlement of the workers' demands."
The strike wave ebbed, but unevenly, with new flare-ups. It took a week for the ranks of the strikers to break up. This was another confirmation, a negative one, of the power of the social mobilization.
The acuteness of the political crisis highlighted, in a condensed space of time, the possible alternatives, the role of the choices facing the political and trade-union forces and their decisions. It was then that the possible could have been grasped. Otherwise, it would pull back into its shell. After that point, it was pointless to drivel piously about how "everything is possible." In fact the social and political dynamic is more complex and alive than the sociologistphotographers and the economists who look at reality through a telescope can grasp. May 1968 cannot be dissected by looking seperately at the power of the strike on the one hand and the policy of the CP and the CGT on the other.
An explosion after 20 years of economic growth
May 1968 exploded after 20 years of growth. The social weight of wage earners increased. But the patterns within this category shifted, and they were linked in a different way to society as a whole. Gains were achieved. But there was still a feeling that they had not received a large enough share of the wealth around them, and that they could lose what they had achieved. This is the source of the combination of the defensive and offensive, the vagueness about the goals of the strike that made it difficult for its potentialities to emerge
Tradition - the role of the CP and the CGT - the political culture and history also weighed in the balance. The years preceding 1968 had not made it possible for experiences to ripen and for activists to mature qualitatively and quantitatively who could have appeared capable of leading a prolonged assault. It was one thing for the strike to get underway without any central control (but given impetus on more than one occasion by activists and cadres of the CGT or the CP). A limited outflanking of the trade-union apparatuses is another, especially if you measure this by the yardstick of the breadth of the strike.
The strike committees essentially represented the grip of the apparatus on the workplaces, through its activist base. The result was contradictory. The braking role of the apparatus was far from evident. The committees were not elected. There were 12. Jean-Marie Vincent, Temps modernes, July 1968. 13. Jean Poperen, L'unité de la gauche 1965-1973, 21 15. Lacouture, op. cit., p.683 16. Poperen, op. cit., p.141. May 30, 1988 • #142 International Viewpoint
THE TET
FRANCE • VIETNAM 68-88 no strikes that started up the process of production again on a different basis, no active strikes, strikes that could have thrown the pendulum further to the left when it could go no further on the political level. Thus, no experience, even partial ones, of direct democracy could take shape. That was the precondition for displacing the le-
OFFENSIVE gitimacy of the parliamentary democratic institutions, especially since the masses' democratic feelings had been put on edge, and rightly so, by the Stalinist experience.
1968 laid the basis for other advances
VIETNAM, 1968. On January 31, the Tet offensive began.1
The liberation forces almost simultaneously attacked enemy
Finally, the crisis of political leadership
— which was real for some days, although positions in all the large towns in the south of the country, in cushioned by Pompidou's initiatives
36 of the 44 provincial capitals as well as 64 other local should not be transposed onto the repressive apparatus. The prefect of police, the centres. Lasting three weeks, there was fighting in the heart minister of defence, Pierre Messmer, and of Saigon, even in the sanctuary of the US embassy which the chief of the general staff, General
Michel Fourquet, did "deliberate" among was partially occupied by a revolutionary commando squad.
themselves and take decisions. They did
In this unprecedented offensive, auxiliaries and local armed not just talk, they acted. Balladur, Grimaud and Lacouture brought up the question of forces were usually in the front lines. The regular forces using the army, which was discussed explifought the US army in a broad frontal combat around the Khe citly on May 29, but only discussed. In the army itself, with a few exceptions, the
Sanh base, not far from the demarcation line between north mood of the conscripts was to remain and south. Hue, in the centre of Vietnam, was taken by the silent.
people's army. The battle of Hue lasted until February 24. The
So, not everything was possible, far from it. But something different from the May
Americans only succeeded in retaking this ancient and
30 "debacle" without a fight was possible.
symbolic citadel after having bombarded and destroyed 80
Those who realize today, like the rénovateurs and Juquin, what a vacuum was left by the failure of the CP to link up with such a social struggle are expressing in their way an understanding that there was a possibility to turn the situation in a different direction. It was within reach. The CP and the
CGT rejected it.
Obscuring the difference between the
May 1968 crisis and the post-May 1968 period is a sleight of hand. It confuses the reward of success with the consolation prize of defeat. Of course, once the momentum was broken the de Gaulle, Pompidou and Giscard governments were going to make concessions. They relaunched the economic machine. Braking the momentum does not mean crushing a movement.
So, on the basis laid down by 1968 there were advances in other areas - the women's movement, democratic reforms of the education system, greater trade- union rights. But one cannot retroactively say that these gains were all that was at stake in 1968 in order to throttle a debate on strategy, which according to the conventional wisdom today no longer has any place.
An intelligent observer like Viansson-
Ponté, who has been wrong less often than the scribblers in vogue today, was totally off the track in March 1968. *
22
17. D. Bensaid & A. Krivine, Mai si!, Edition La
Brèche, 1988.
International Viewpoint #142 • May 30, 1988 per cent of it. PIERRE ROUSSET
HROUGHOUT February, battles continued across the country. In May, a second wave of battles hit 119 urban centers and military bases. In the third wave, in August-September, the liberation forces attacked American installations more systematically. But the bulk of the Tet offensive came in February.