CHAPTER 8 The SI’s Second Phase, Part Three, 1967–1968

As for judging revolutions by the amount of bloodshed they lead to, this romantic vision is not worth discussing. Some incontestable revolutions have involved very little bloodshed—including even the Paris Commune, which was to end in a massacre—while on the other hand numerous civil confrontations have caused thousands of deaths without in any way being revolutions. It is generally not revolutions that are bloody, but the reaction’s subsequent repression of them. Guy Debord, “The Beginning of an Era” ∵

This chapter is about the roles that the SI played in the student unrest and pro- tests that began at the University of Strasbourg, then spread to Nanterre Univer- sity, and eventually erupted at the Sorbonne and throughout Paris and the rest of France, culminating in the events of May ’68, when over ten million people walked off the job, occupied factories, and protested in the streets, demanding the right to control all aspects of their labor and lives. Scholars have differed in their interpretations of the influence of the SI and of Debord on these events. For example, Anselm Jappe refrains from interpreting the SI’s role and instead focuses on the group’s prescience: “The very least one can say is that no one anticipated the liberatory content of the events of 1968 as well as the Situation- ists, and this must be granted quite independently of the questions of the extent to which they may have ‘influenced’ the protagonists of those events and the extent to which those protagonists may have been conscious of such an influ- ence.”1 Greil Marcus goes further than Jappe, venturing this interpretation: “You can’t say the Situationists started May ’68. You can’t say they governed May ’68. I think you can say this: Had there never been a Situationist International, there never would have been a May ’68.”2 And Guy Atkins attributes a central role to Debord in the events, stating: “When the time came—in Strasbourg in Novem- ber of 1966 and in Paris in May 1968—Debord was ready … to take over the revolutionary role for which he had been preparing during the past ten years.”3 For every scholar who has written about the SI’s roles in these events, there are dozens who either don’t refer to the situationists or who merely mention

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2019 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004402010_008 298 CHAPTER 8 the group in a superficial way. Debord even stated as much in a 1969 article titled “The Beginning of an Era,”4 wherein he observed that during the year following May ’68, over 300 books about the events had been published, and that a “systematic minimization of the SI” characterized most of the books. Debord added that one pattern of “falsification” consisted “in limiting the SI’s activity to Strasbourg, eighteen months before, as a remote triggering of a crisis from which it would later seem to have disappeared,” and another pattern was to depict the situationists “as an autonomous group of irresponsible maniacs springing up by surprise, perhaps even armed, at the Sorbonne and elsewhere to stir up disorder and shout extravagant demands.”5 This chapter explains the SI’s roles at Nanterre during the 1967–1968 academic year, and at the Sorbonne during May ’68.

Nanterre University, 1967–1968

The next few sections of this chapter are about the SI’s role in the student unrest and protests that took place on the campus of Nanterre University during the fall of 1967 and into the winter and spring of 1968. To understand the student protests at Nanterre, it is first necessary to have a sense of the everyday living conditions experienced by students, which were the same on most of the cam- puses in France. Nanterre was unique, however, for what might be called its anti-psychogeographical, anti-dérive qualities. Nanterre University, located in the western part of Paris, opened in 1964 to alleviate the overcrowding at the Sorbonne, which was due to soaring enroll- ments in the fields of sociology, psychology, philosophy, and other “arts” fields. Francois Crouzet, who was a faculty member at Nanterre in the 1960s, recounted in a 1969 article titled “A University Besieged: Nanterre, 1967–1969” that the new academic year of 1967–1968 saw a huge increase in student enrollments, with five thousand new first-year students, which brought the total enrollment to twelve thousand, resulting in a glaring overcrowding problem (the previous year’s enrollment had been eight thousand). Along with overcrowding were the unappealing conditions of the Nanterre campus, which Crouzet described as “a sort of desolate no-man’s land”:

Surrounded by railroad tracks, factories, and large gray blocks of cheap apartment houses, and with the infamous shanty towns [where immi- grant workers from North Africa lived] not far away, this grim and depress- ing neighborhood had none of the amenities—the cafes, cinemas, and shops—which students frequented in the Latin Quarter.6