The May Movement, as author and Professor of sociology at the University of Nanterre Alain Touraine has coined it, immediately smacks of Marxist ideology. This is entirely due to principles of real-estate: location, location, location. The student movement originated among the students of the university of Nanterre, which was built in 1965 as an extension to the Sorbonne, Paris’s leading university.# It was here that the university uprising was born and it was here that it became the May Movement. Touraine puts it simply:
Nanterre is on the wrong side of Paris… [It] is created in the image of the university system. The lack of reflection and imagination, the lack of real decision are expressed in the subjection of the students, especially those who live in the dormitories, to conditions which have more in common with the area as it used to be (a working class district) than they do with the Latin Quarter or a university campus.#
The students were crammed into a tight living quarters at night and were hob-knobbing with factory workers and others of “the proletariat” during the day. Here these bright young students, who might one day come to take over their father’s firms and factories, picked up the discontentment and unrest of the blue-collar and a view of Marxism that is all too commonly held among the college and university educated from a bourgeoisie background. The students called for an uprising against the status quo, much like their peers around the world did that same year; however, there was one distinct difference. The students of Nanterre would opt to take violent reaction in the streets rather than a peaceful demonstration.
The newspaper played a vital role in this uprising. While the philosopher and writer of many anti-Gaullist articles, Jean-Paul Sartre, stuck to his daily intake of Le Monde, the students of the Sorbonne and Nanterre published their own paper for the uprising.# # The newspaper Action was a student publication that had a great deal of influence on the streets of Paris. It was created by older and more militant students of the movement and was used as a representation of the struggle; its first page was a poster and its articles were inflammatory editorials or news centered on workers issues. Four issues of Action filled the streets in the month of May that year, but its publication continued for twenty-four issues.
“The Mad Week from the 3rd of May to the 13th, thousands of rebels lived in the tempo of the refusal. Here the chronology of this fight which only begins,” rang out the student newspaper Action.# It was on the 2nd of May that the Dean of Nanterre ordered the school shut down “sine die.” The “fascistic” group Occident, a far-right paramilitary organization in France, made a violent attack on the Sorbonne. Seven Nanterre students were detained. Early on, the students felt a misrepresentation in the media and published a manifesto which stated: “The press and the radio said to you that few hundreds reign violence with the Latin Quarter, and thus prohibit the serious students from working in peace. THE PRESS, THE RADIO LIE TO YOU!#” Partially fueled by their proletarian associations and by the marginalization of the student body, the student reformers thought that Nanterre could no longer be isolated. The criticism must cover the university system and serve as a critique of capitalist society.# The students had found comrades and cause in their factory working neighbors, but what about the past generation of left-wing intellectuals? Were the students as bound to their ideological parents as they were to the factory workers they shared little in common with?
By far the greatest intellectual figure among the university students at this time was Jean-Paul Sartre. He has written numerous treatise and chastisements of Gaullism and fathered the philosophical school of existentialism, of which came the existential crisis under which modern students seemed to suffer. He was the rogue and rebel among rebels in his day but in this fight he had no appeal. To the leaders of May 1968, Sartre was nothing more than a writer and not the fired up instigator they needed. At the time Sartre was heavily involved with his largest undertaking yet, Flaubert. This epic tome would be published in the mid-1970s in three volumes whose combined mass made up more than four thousand published pages and thirty years of Sartre’s intellectual endeavors.# Sartre rarely left his own home, and this only occurred when he went to eat pot roast and mashed potatoes with his mother on Sunday.#
A decade before during the Algerian crisis Sartre found himself at the center of everyone’s focus. People either wanted him shot in the streets or on a pedestal and defending their ideals. He was untouchable in every sense to the point that de Gaulle shirked the idea of treating him like a normal citizen saying, famously, “you do not imprison Voltaire!”# Now he was, just ten years later, so out of touch with the current movement and wrapped up in his own work he was barely finding the time to involve himself with these young students overturning cars in the street. In many ways Jean-Paul Sartre suffered from the same thing every man encounters at some point in his life--Sartre was old. Like most men who have pushed passed their sixties, it was easier to remember his youth than to identify with the youth. Indeed, it is likely he faced his own midlife crisis.
The “mad week” had ended. The student barricades and protests erupted into full violence after May 13th and by May 20th more than ten million workers were on strike. The economy of France was paralyzed. Charles de Gaulle was not giving in to the demands of the protestors but was increasingly worried about the safety of those serving to protect him and his family. For this reason de Gaulle left Paris without saying a word to anyone, even Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. De Gaulle retreated to Germany to see if he still had support from the army, which had taken up post in West Germany like the rest of the Allies of World War II had done. Upon arriving he said to General Massu, “Everything is lost. I am no longer in control of anything. I am withdrawing.” A few hours alone with the General and de Gaulle emerged ready to fight again. There is no record of what was said between the two.# The General de Gaulle who led a parade through the streets of Paris when it was retaken by the Allies had aged as well and could no longer face the responsibilities of his office alone. De Gaulle would not return to France until he was assured that the military would become involved in this social upheaval which sought to usurp the politics of Gaullism in France.
The leaders of the student revolt had chosen their fate by isolating themselves from the benevolent grandfather figures they could have allied with in Sartre’s generation of men. So what was to be done? The public was growing weary of the confusion between opposing factions within the students and could not honestly differentiate between the ideologies of them and de Gaulle. The public was distasteful of de Gaulle’s heavy-handed politics, but would as soon rather be rid of the open violence from the students than the stern policies and prolonged tenure of an aging man. De Gaulle eventually returned to France with much praise because of threats from Prime Minister Pompidou, who threatened to resign if he did not return.# An announcement was made by radio on May 30th that if the workers did not end their strike then de Gaulle would declare a state of emergency. He promised new elections on the 23rd of June, which he and his party aptly won.# The events of May ended in a hush compared to the loud uproar with which they had started. It was all too anti-climatic.
In terms of political gains, May 1968 was nothing short of a step backwards from the aims of the students who participated and the left-leaning citizens who supported them. Charles de Gaulle and his party gained more political authority as a result of revolt and the disparate ideals of the youthful revolutionaries. They received no support from the intellectual class of prior generations, the likes of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and their contemporaries because they rejected the prospect of such support. Further, there was no united political aspiration of The May Movement. Most of France was discontent with Gaullism but no one could offer a viable replacement in government. The political spectrum of the students varied from a social-democratic movement to a weird hybrid of anarchism and Marxist philosophy. The May Movement was a social struggle and a revolution of social ideals such as modern sexuality and university life. As it were, it served a social revolution but did not provide a political revolution. De Gaulle maintaining power in France after 1968 was like the election of Richard Nixon after the transcendentalist movement in America.
The memory of May 68 is still present in the minds of modern Parisians. Most recently, it has been denounced by current French president Nicolas Sarkozy in a speech made during a rally for his election campaign in 2007. “The inheritants of May 68,” claimed Sarkozy, “have damaged political morale. The inheritants have weakened the idea of citizenship by denigrating the law, the state, and the nation.”# The views taken of the movement are as varied as the current views of Sarkozy and his presidency. Despite the controversy of interpretation, it is still widely regarded as one of the movements that shaped modern France.
# Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, ed. Norman Macafee trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 457.
# Alain Touraine, The May Movement: revolt and reform: May 1968--The Student Rebellion and Workers' Strikes--the Birth of a Social Movement, (New York, Random House, 1971), 125.
# Ibid
# Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, ed. Norman Macafee trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 458.
# Alain Touraine, The May Movement: revolt and reform: May 1968--The Student Rebellion and Workers' Strikes--the Birth of a Social Movement, (New York, Random House, 1971), 249.
# Action, “La Semaine Enragée,” May 13, 1968.
# Action, “Pourquoi Nous Nous Battons,“ May 7, 1968.
# Action, “Ce N’est Qu’n Début,” May 7, 1968.
# Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, ed. Norman Macafee trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 459.
# Ibid, 458.
# Ibid, 415.
# Mattei Dogan, “How Civil War Was Avoided in France,” International Political Science Review 5, no. 3 (1984): 252.
# Ibid.
# Le discours du général de Gaulle du 30 mai 1968, “Allocution Radio Diffusée du 30 Mai 1968,” http://membres.multimania.fr/mai68/degaulle/degaulle30mai1968.htm (accessed April 29, 2011).
# Youtube, “Sarkozy Criticizes May 68 Generation,” from France 24, Windows Media Player File, 1:21, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihfgbt9NSzk (accessed April 29, 2011).
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