200
Overtaken by events:
a Paris journal
ROY PRIOR
Wednesday-Thursday, May 15th-May 16th. The
Paris disturbances have been very poorly reported in the
English press. First, the disturbance may have arisen out of complaints about the University system, but it has gone far beyond that now. It started with a row at
Nanterre, a university outside
Paris, when the university was close for an indefinite period, and seven students were summoned to appear before a university board. The
Sorbonne started to get active, in the big main courtyard; the
recteur called in the police to clear out the students who had gathered to discuss matters. The police carted the students off and there were demonstrations against this action, and against the police. The Sorbonne was closed, and the universities proposed to strike on Monday, May 6th, demonstrations all day long, finishing with 20,000 marching. The police charged the march at
St. Germain des Prés, and the barricades started to go up. The police use
gas. It finishes up with police hunting students through the streets, beating them with
truncheons. On Tuesday, another long march, about 40,000-50,000 people, students and workers. The
red flags lead the march and the
Internationale is sung at the
Arc de Triomphe. More demonstrations on Wednesday, when the left wing parties, hostile hitherto, jump on the bandwagon. Thursday, the Sorbonne is to be reopened: the police are on the scene, and the students demand withdrawal of police, opening of all the colleges again, and the freeing of the arrested students. The
Trotskyists hold a meeting where the whole affair begins to open out into a revolutionary movement. On Friday comes the explosion: thousands of students on a demonstration march are stopped by a dam of police: the students retire into the
Latin Quarter, filling the
Boulevard St. Michel up to the
Luxembourg. They spread out and start erecting barricades to fight the police if they charge. At 2 in the morning, the police attack, using gas
201
grenades, tear gas, truncheons … fighting goes on until 5:30, around about 60 barricades: many students are injured and seven are still missing, no one knows where. On Saturday, tension: the
trade unions call for a
general strike. The student militants occupy an annex of the University, and use the premises for discussions and debates. On Sunday, the unions discuss and prepare their demonstration. On Monday the strike takes place, and workers and students march together to demonstrate against the police and the government. On Tuesday the government gives in, and says that the student demands for association in the organisation of the University will be met: and the newspapers give the impression that this is what it is all about.
So it was, perhaps, in the first instance, but things have changed. The students have taken over the University completely. The lecture rooms are crowded with committees discussing the whole movement—for it is a movement: the whole structure of western society is being called into question. The groups of the left are of course very prominent in this questioning: Maoists, Trotskyists, Communists and Anarchists have plastered the Sorbonne with posters, declarations, exhortations; a flood of brochures, leaflets, pamphlets and broadsheets, as well as improvised newspapers, pours out. The great courtyard of the Sorbonne is crowded with people: students and workers, and some bourgeois, arguing, forming groups where people stand and discuss, dispute, bellow, disagree, create an atmosphere where one feels that they are awake! This goes on twenty-four hours a day, while people pass in and out of the building, the lecture halls witness continuous meetings and committees and in the courtyard people go on arguing. Around the courtyard are the placards and proclamations, people sell the newspapers and hand out the sheets: trestle tables along the walls are ococupied by various groups selling their literature—Trotskyists, Communists, Maoists: I haven’t run across the Anarchists yet but I know they are there: their posters are edged in black. Walking out across the Place de la Sorbonne, you can see the same thing—groups, discussions, everywhere perfect strangers joining arguments, exchanging views, in an atmosphere of charged excitement which is impossible for me to communicate. The level of discussion is remarkably high, on the whole, and if you can imagine the sort of energy the French put into an argument between two drivers whose cars have collided, transferred to an argument about the organisation of the University, the class struggle, the whole organisation of our society, the possibility of revolution: all this conducted by a free-floating crowd of literally thousands of people, in the Sorbonne, in the street, in the cafes—this all going on day and night—then you may get some idea of the Quartier Latin at the moment.
The moment being 2.15 in the morning (Thursday), and the place being a crowded (at this hour!) cafe in the Place de la Sorbonne. If I were rather younger and a great many illusions richer, I might be tempted to believe in the revolutionary atmosphere all around me. For
202
the atmosphere, if not the situation, is certainly one of revolution—
it reminds me a little of accounts I have read of the society in
Spain in the first days of the
revolution, feeling of excitement, of tension, of all sorts of possibilities for the future, the illusion that these people might, just might, put a really big crack in the structure of the society which they are questioning so fiercely. In the spectrum of opinion you can recognise the possible chronological pattern of hypothetical revolution, from reformists whose ideas are limited to the granting of certain concessions within—
well within—
the format of the set-
up as it is, through others who advocate a far greater degree of change in the status of the student, those who look for the fall of the present government without thinking much further (even those who would be satisfied with the resignation of a few ministers), those who want to see the students declare their solidarity with the workers, abandoning their present privileged position as those who are destined to be the bastions of capitalism, through to those who look to a total destruction of capitalist society and the establishment of a socialist society of one sort or another, and those who talk as if the revolution were scheduled for tomorrow, or the day after at the very latest. Here it all is, in words at least.
And what will come out of it? Not much perhaps: in fact, my guess would be, concessions in words from the government, soothing noises, a few reforms, a scapegoat or two—the Préfet of Paris, for instance, who did not want to send the police in to the Sorbonne in the first pace—and then, nothing. For a while, the question is: is the feeling underlying this revolt so strong that it will break out again? I believe it is: this is absolutely not a question of mild student discontent within the framework of the education system, although it may appear that way, and may have started that way. It looks to me like a deep-rooted discontent and dislike of the whole structure of society together with a total distrust of the discredited leaders of the left. Those of the right are scarcely mentioned, even de Gaulle and Pompidou are not names one hears often, and when one does it is in tones of dismissal. There is no need to attack them in words: they are there, that’s all. In fact, there is a very remarkable lack of names—plenty of initials of left wing parties, but no names. No “Leaders” in the old sense: nobody’s leading.
4.10 a.m. Les Halles, always a sight worth seeing—Paris’s belly, Zola called it, with its almost blocked streets, its furious activity, its enormous articulated lorries bringing in fish from Brittany and the <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: south-west">south-west, cheese from Normandy, milk from all over the place. How very far from the atmosphere of the Sorbonne: the students may express solidarity with the workers, but how much solidarity do these workers feel for the students? A certain amount, perhaps, since one of the student grievances—not one that is well publicised however—is that so few children of the working class get to university.
9.20 a.m. This morning I have been with Sorbonne students effecting liaison with the medical students, who are not so enthusiastic or so
203
well organised. In fact, the Sorbonne people were on picket duty, persuading the medical students to keep up the strike and not enter into discussions with the teaching staff. It is remarkable to see: dispute, argument, persuasion, but never the faintest suggestion of a fist raised in anger. If in normal times Sorbonne students went to the Faculty of Medicine and dared to try to tell them what to do, they would be thrown out, but now the students must above all stay together, otherwise the movement is done for.
I am writing this in the courtyard of the Sorbonne. I look up to the roof, and there flying in the wind is a sight I have never seen before: a flag with no decoration, no addition, no national symbol: a plain red flag. And I can’t stop myself from shedding tears.