Militant Protest and Practices of the State in France and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1968-1977

Home , Alain Geismar, Bommi Baumann, Christian Delporte, Ernst Benda, Jules Moch, Julien Freund

Under the Paving Stones: Militant Protest and Practices of the State in France and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1968-1977

Luca Provenzano

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2020

Luca Provenzano

Abstract

Under the Paving Stones:

Militant Protest and Practices of the State in France and the Federal Republic of Germany,

1968-1977

This dissertation investigates the protest cultures of social revolutionary groups during and after the events of 1968 in France and West Germany before inquiring into how political officials and police responded to the difficulties of maintaining public order. The events of 1968 led revolutionaries in both France and West Germany to adopt new justifications for militant action based in heterodox Marxism and anti-colonial theory, and to attempt to institutionalize new, confrontational modes of public protest that borrowed ways of knowing urban space, tactics, and materials from both the working class and armed guerrilla movements. Self-identifying revolutionaries and left intellectuals also institutionalized forums for the investigation of police interventions in protests on the basis of testimonies, photography, and art. These investigative committees regularly aimed to exploit the resonance of police violence to promote further cycles of politicization. In response, political officials and police sought after 1968 to introduce and to reinforce less ostentatious, allegedly less harmful means of crowd control and dispersion that could inflict suffering without reproducing the spectacle of mass baton assaults and direct physical confrontations—means of physical constraint less susceptible to unveiling as violence. Second, police reinforced surveillance and arrest units. The new tactics of the police borrowed their principles from the struggle against subversion, criminality, and terrorism in order to neutralize the small-group tactics of militant demonstrators. Thus, 1968 served as the point of emergence of

a confrontational protest culture within the New Left that in turn provoked the re-articulation of practices of the state. It was a revolution in the counter-revolution.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One. Justifying Militant Protest: Revolutionary Left Discourse and Legitimate Counter-

Violence after 1968 ...... 34

1.1. French Revolutionary Discourse in the après-mai ...... 37

1.2. Violence-Talk and Militant Protest in the West German APO, 1968-1972 ...... 60

1.3. „Wer sich nicht wehrt, lebt verkehrt“: Violence Discourse and Revolutionärer Kampf,

1973-1975 ...... 66

1.4. Permanence of the Politico-military? Spontis, Autonomen, and the Rearticulation of

Violence Talk, 1975-1980 ...... 78

Chapter Two. Militant Protest as Trial of the State ...... 94

2.1. Studying Confrontational Practices Beyond the Military Paradigm: An Intervention ...... 97

2.2. French Leftists and Militant Demonstrations, 1968-1979 ...... 102

2.3. Adversarial protest in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1968-1978 ...... 108

2.4. “Hit and Run”: The Power of the Paving-Stone ...... 120

2.5. “Close-Combat”: The Insurgent Baton ...... 130

2.6. Fire and Flames: Molotov Cocktails in Action ...... 138

2.7. Barricades as Obstacle and Incitement ...... 147

2.8. “If Possible, Bring a Helmet”: Protecting the Body, Thwarting Identification ...... 152

Chapter Three. State Violence and Its Critics: Left Intellectuals and the Critique of Violence . 160

i 3.1. Flics: Critiques of Violence and Representations of the Police during the Parisian May-June

1968 Events ...... 169

3.2. Photographers and the Scene of Violence in May 1968 ...... 196

3.3. Artwork and Caricature: Figuring the Flic ...... 205

3.4. “Means of Authority”: Critiques of Violence during the Frankfurt Struggles of 1973-1974

...... 211

3.5. Photographic Documentation of Police Violence During the Frankfurt Struggles, 1973-

1974...... 236

3.6. Schläger: Leftist Caricature of the Police ...... 240

Chapter Four. 1968 and the Technopolitics of Constraint ...... 244

4.1. Empowering the Experts : Modernizing Bureaucracies and Police Equipment ...... 255

4.2. Beyond Lacrymogenesis: The Fifth Republic Arms for Anti-Subversive Struggle, 1968-

1977...... 260

4.3. Beyond the Schlagstockeinsatz: West German Protest Policing, the Water Cannon, and

Chemical Coercion, 1968-1975 ...... 286

4.4. Anti-Nuclear Demonstrations, Autonomen, and the Search for Stronger Weapons, 1976-

1981...... 301

Chapter Five. Targeting the Militants ...... 316

5.1 Public security culture in France: From La Guerre contre-révolutionnaire to La Lutte

antisubversive ...... 321

5.2. What was Internal Security? West German Protest Policing and the Pursuit of Extremists,

1968-1975 ...... 354

ii 5.3. Between Auflösung and Verbrechensbekämpfung: The Intensification of Surveillance and

Arrest Dispositifs during the Frankfurt Struggles of 1973-1974 ...... 378

5.4. Anti-nuclear Protest and the Consolidation of Internal Security, 1976-1981 ...... 383

Conclusion ...... 396

Bibliography ...... 402

iii List of Illustrations

FIG. 1. Student battles, worker strikes as depicted in Nouvelle avant-garde in June 1968.

FIG. 2. Matraquages in the Livre noir des journées de mai.

FIG. 3. “Tear gas” and explosive grenades in the Livre noir des journées de mai.

FIG. 4.—“CRS-SS!” Atelier populaire poster by Jacques Carelman.

FIG. 5.—“Was he armed?” Satirical drawing by Maurice Sinet.

FIG. 6.—“We’re learning too!” Satirical drawing by Maurice Sinet.

FIG. 7.—“The government begins a dialogue.” Atelier populaire poster of a member of the security services wielding the rifle-grenade launcher.

FIG. 8. Images of police working over protestors in the Housing Council/Revolutionärer Kampf joint publication against rising transit prices and “police terror.”

FIG. 9. Water cannon, police baton charges, and physical mêlée struggles as depicted by FAZ during the April 1973 demonstrations.

FIG. 10. Drawing of Police batoneers at work during the Frankfurt housing struggle of 1973-4 for

Der lange Marsch.

iv Acknowledgments

Intellectual production is always contingent on a community. My gratitude is due to archivists and librarians in France, Germany, and the United States who rendered this dissertation possible. This dissertation was also rendered financially possible by the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at

Columbia University in the City of New York and the Alliance Call for Doctoral Mobility. During my years in graduate school, I also had the opportunity to rehearse and rework my arguments in forums like the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), Emeritus

Professors in Columbia (EPIC), the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and the Intellectual and Cultural History Workshop (ICHW) in the History Department. I thank all those who offered constructive criticism or advice. Editors of The Journal of Modern History gave me an unparalleled opportunity to revise parts of my argument in its early stages, and I thank the anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments were essential at that stage of the project. The

Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po and Gerd-Rainer Horn were also welcoming and supportive hosts during the 2017-2018 academic year. Marianne Caron and the Fondation Caron graciously allowed me to consult contact sheets by Gilles Caron from May 1968 for my research. Catherine

Sinet generously provided the rights for use of the drawings by Maurice Sinet (Siné). The Rare

Books and Manuscript Library at Columbia and Beinecke Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript

Library at Yale University courteously allowed me to use images.

I also want to thank my dissertation committee. All three internal committee members generously gave constructive comments on chapters of this dissertation. Samuel Moyn is a formidable advisor who always makes himself generously available for counsel; his constructive criticisms frequently led me to reinforce or otherwise ameliorate my dissertation framework while he has played a major role in the rediscovery of the seventies as an important moment in the history

v of contemporary Europe and the West. Mark Mazower offered important advice, generously met me as early as the orals process, and also offered me a model of impressive undergraduate teaching at the start of my graduate education. Ever since his Dark Continent, I have been much more alert to the historical contingency and fragility of democratic Europe. Emmanuelle Saada has always been a bastion of support and searching criticism and gave extensive feedback on several draft chapters even though she was also serving as Chair of Contemporary Civilization. I also want to thank the outside committee members. Julian Bourg’s insightful criticisms have been instrumental to my writing and research, while From Revolution to Ethics was integral to my interest in scholarship on 1968. Karrin Hanshew gave advice early in the project and generously agreed to contribute her expertise on the Federal Republic of Germany during the defense; Terror and

Democracy in West Germany was an important scholarly reference for me. I hope we will all be able to continue scholarly discussions in the years to come.

Historians at Reed College contributed their energy to my intellectual development in my undergraduate years and set me on the path I later followed—though sometimes against their good counsel. As a Visiting Assistant Professor, Joel Revill introduced me to the discipline and to the history of the French revolutionary tradition when I was a mere 19 years old. Benjamin Lazier was a major inspiration and encouragement to me as I wrote my undergraduate thesis; my first exposure to 1968 came in our course together. Mary Miller first prompted me to start considering violence from a historical perspective during an engaging undergraduate course on violence in early- modern Europe. In the Columba University Department of History, Victoria de Grazia, Susan

Pedersen, and Malgorzata Mazurek offered exemplary models of scholarship and teaching.

Stefanos Geroulanos of NYU, Bernard Harcourt of Columbia Law School and the Columbia

Center for Critical Thought, and Jesús R. Velasco of the Columbia Latin American and Iberian

vi Cultures Department all also encouraged my intellectual development as a younger graduate student.

Last, but not least, I owe lasting gratitude to my colleagues, friends, family members, and students who offered comradeship during this process. In the History department, I would like to single out Susannah Glickman, a brilliant scholar and organizer; Paul Katz; Zac Levine; and Ben

Serby. Older mentors like Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Danilo Scholz, and Terence Renaud have also offered important support and advice even as they navigated the precarity of contemporary academia. Danielle Carr befriended me during a summer research trip in July of 2019 and let me talk at her about my project. Others who have offered moral support and comradeship that allowed me to bring this project to completion over the years include Karlynne Ejercito, Todd Garon,

Nathan Gusdorf, Colin Kinniburg, and, more recently, Samantha Fox. My family members deserve more recognition and gratitude than this mortal coil can provide. Finally, a note to my students in

Contemporary Civilization and at Columbia University over the academic years 2014-2020: you inspire me.

This dissertation republishes and revisits some elements of Luca Provenzano “Beyond the

Any errors of omission or commission are mine alone.

vii Introduction

This is a study of violence, militantism, and governance in the French Fifth Republic and the

Federal Republic of Germany. It traces groups of radicals who practiced avowedly violent demonstrations–but not the tactic of armed struggle–and official actors among the political class and the police who rearticulated their modes of intervention in protest contexts to answer both militant practices and critiques of police violence. Part One, “The State in Its Limits,” follows

1968 revolutionaries in their discovery of an interval between subjection to the law and victimization by the forces of repression, and it recovers how these actors articulated both legitimations of violence and adversarial protest practices that frustrated and alarmed public officials. Self-identifying revolutionaries ensured that the experience of confrontational protest in the year 1968 were integrated into an adversarial protest culture—an assemblage of theories of violence, ways of knowing and moving in primarily urban space, and practices of obstructing and injuring the police borrowed from European workers and global anti-imperialist movements. The second part of the dissertation, “The New Model of Protest Governance,” tracks how government officials, experts and different police units organized as a network and engaged in determined work to foreclose on militant protest by integrating new equipment, armament, knowledges and practices from global counter-revolutionary operations and domestic anti-criminality mechanisms.

The dissertation shows how the Third-World politico-military strategy of New Left revolutionary movements generated both re-articulations of European protest culture and the broad refoundation of protest governance by two prominent European states.

Violence and 1968

1 The history of protest recounted here starts around the year 1968 and ends around 1977 during the first phase of the Franco-German anti-nuclear movement. A concise version of the current scholarly consensus on 1968 in France and West Germany as it pertains to political violence might read as follows: by the sixties, European parliamentary democracies were struggling to manage the new political and social demands of young people. Revolutionary currents inspired by

European heterodox Marxist groups (Socialisme ou Barbarie, Quaderni Rossi, the Fourth

International) and by these Third World movements like the Algerian War of Independence, the

Vietnam War, decolonization in Africa and Asia, and Latin American anti-imperialist movements turned a sector of the youth against the political leadership of European Communist parties aligned towards Moscow and against the hegemony of the center-right and social-democratic parliamentary parties that had dominated post-war politics.

West German students were perhaps at the forefront of the European protest movement and began staging demonstrations in the mid-sixties. Under the leadership of radicals in

Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), a breakaway fraction of the youth wing of the mainstream Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), students also engaged in targeted rule breaking (Regelverletzungen) and provocations designed to dramatize the police in its repressive function. Continental police typically operated according to the procedures of the interwar period and the Cold War and inflexibly tried to repress protests using mass baton assaults, a dynamic that had already generated broad incidents of youth revolt in events like the Schwabing

“Riots” in Munich in 1962. Provocative protest and state violence started triggering further cycles of politicization in the Federal Republic of Germany, particularly in the case of the June 1967 anti-

Shah demonstration in West Berlin, when a police officer–now know to be a Stasi informant— killed student Benno Ohnesorg. Police assaults on students led to new, negative, anti-police

2 solidarities and a fraction of the movement began to envision systematic self-defense and counter- violence. The West German student movement led by SDS continued to radicalize and held an international demonstration and conference against the Vietnam War during the Tet Offensive in

February of 1968. In mid-April 1968, an assassination attempt on SDS leader Rudi Dutschke brought thousands of protestors to the streets of West Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, and other movement bastions in an effort to take direct action against the local organ of reaction, the hated Springer-Verlag. Violent encounters led radicals like journalist Ulrike Meinhof to proclaim a turn “from protest to resistance.”

Following further encounters in the late sixties and early seventies and the organizational fragmentation of the New Left into various forms of left sectarianism, activists like Meinhof,

Andreas Baader, and Gudrun Ensslin constituted themselves as an urban guerrilla movement, leading to expanding cycles of bombings, assassinations, and state counterterrorism that only declined in the late seventies and early eighties. In the context of the German Autumn of 1977, spectacular attempts to pressure the West German government to release incarcerated guerrillas failed. In the course of this process, much of the radical left finally de-solidarized themselves from armed struggle groups—a process that led to the serious decline of the armed movement in the late seventies.

French students had experienced similar politicization during the Algerian War of

Independence, leading radicals to build their own Trotskyist, anarchist, and Maoist organizations after their expulsion from the youth wing of the Parti communiste français (PCF) in the mid-sixties.

French revolutionary leftists (gauchistes) attended the SDS-organized February 1968 international demonstration against the Vietnam War in Berlin and learned the theory and practice of provocation. Yet French revolutionaries initially put a more militant turn on these practices than

3 their West German peers, and engaged in encounters involving the extreme-right and the police in the context of demonstrations against the Vietnam War, generating volatile incidents involving police in Paris already in March of 1968. Localized agitation and skirmishes between leftists and the far-right on the Parisian periphery at Nanterre became explosive, engendering the main events: the six weeks from May to mid-June 1968. On May 3, police repression of a meeting at the

Sorbonne by a network of Nanterre far-left groups forming the Mouvement du 22 mars (M22) led to direct confrontation between students and the police around the Sorbonne University. After several days of running confrontations, on May 10-11, 1968, revolutionary students built extensive barricades in the Latin Quarter and initiated another confrontation.

The French government responded maladroitly; as in West Germany, in the early phase of the cycle, police violence inadvertently generated initial convergences between Parisians and student demonstrators and negative solidarities in the form of anti-repression mobilizations. The mobilization of broader sectors of the French polity against police violence converged with wildcat strikes and factory occupations by a restive working class, and the Communist-led Confédération générale du travail (CGT) reluctantly followed the occupations movement. France was soon the stage for a general strike involving 10 million workers and the occupation of Parisian universities like the Sorbonne by the students. However, by the end of May, President De Gaulle managed to restore the situation by dramatizing military support for the regime, staging a massive counter- protest in Paris, and promising new elections, whereupon the Communist Party leadership and its affiliated trade-union pulled back from the brink and helped to de-mobilize the workers. Students tried to stage further demonstrations involving the barricades, but these failed to achieve sustained political resonance, and the police restored order in Paris and other cities and at worker-occupied factories, a process culminating in the last major episodes of violence on June 10-11, 1968. The

4 Gauche prolétarienne (GP) and Ligue communiste (LC), two dominant French revolutionary left groups of the post-1968 period, tended to become more and more militant in the following half- decade. However, rather than commence armed struggle, the groups self-dissolved or were dissolved by the government in the summer and fall of 1973 and subsequently turned away from revolutionary violence because it became obvious that the workers did not approve of an armed movement. Thus ended the revolutionary drive towards violence within French gauchisme.

This study is focused on the decade after the main events of 1968 and trains its gaze on confrontational protest, not on the phenomena of armed struggle that has been the main target of scholarly inquiry in studies of political violence in the Seventies. My inquiry is based on the assumption that we can learn about politics, culture, and phenomena of resistance by studying practices that are often eclipsed by analysis of the most overt forms of confrontational behaviors.

Violent protest after 1968 has rarely received significant scholarly attention and is typically interpreted as a mere precursor to engagement in armed struggle (in scholarship on West Germany) or considerably downplayed because no sustained urban guerilla movement emerged out of the protests (in scholarship on France). Despite this, throughout the seventies, and even at the high point of armed struggle, a broader network of radical actors engaged in militant protests than armed activity, while spectacular encounters between police and demonstrators in urban spaces in Paris and Frankfurt am Main rarely failed to generate significant public attention.

The dissertation shows that the 1968 events were a major point of inception of the discourse and practice of militant demonstrations as a permanent possibility for ultra-left currents: in the decade after 1968, if the New Left tried and then sidelined armed struggle as a potential option, other forms of violent direct action were never abandoned. Indeed, scarcely a year went by in

France or West Germany from 1968 to 1977 without militant demonstrations or confrontational

5 protests that led to dozens of injuries or more—sometimes, hundreds,—among both police and radicals. In this sense, the dissertation provides a genealogy of modern violence discourses and practices by contemporary ultra-left, insurrectionist groups that identify as autonomists and anti- fascists and that regularly attempt to intensify conflict in demonstrations—re-deploying identifications, discourses, and practices that were already deployed by militants in the contexts of violent protests in the seventies.1

In the dissertation, I try to suspend my own moral and political skepticism about militant practices in order to avoid the danger of merely articulating the discourses of public officials or the retrospective illusions of 1968 actors who disavowed militancy as part of their exits from revolutionary politics. The past is past, and my aim is not to merely act out one or another pre- constituted position on “violence” from the debates of the 1968 and the seventies or the early eighties but to show how those positions were constructed and re-articulated. I examine how revolutionary leftist discourses legitimated the use of physical constraint in the context of demonstrations, how the revolutionary left practiced confrontational protest by borrowing and refining modes of action borrowed from the European working class and Third-World guerrillas and introducing novelties of their own, and how revolutionary leftists and left intellectuals sought to discredit and de-legitimize the uses of physical constraint by the police and to publicize police violence in protests.2 Indeed, I try not to use the category “violence” as an analytical category but

1 Exemplary texts of contemporary French ultra-leftism include Comité invisible, L’insurrection qui vient (Paris: Fabrique éditions, 2007); Comité invisible, Maintenant (Paris: La Fabrique, 2017).

2 I will regularly translate Gewalt as violence, although this is misleading since Gewalt can imply either neutral or legitimate force or conversely, violence. For the semantics of Gewalt, see Étienne Balibar, “Reflections on Gewalt,” Historical Materialism 17, no. 1 (March 2009): 99–125, https://doi.org/10.1163/156920609X399227.

6 to show how it was deployed and used by the social revolutionary left and representatives of the state in the context of political and social conflicts that had both a discursive or symbolic and a more directly physical dimension. In those cases where I will try to perform an analysis of confrontational practices as practices, I will use less-moralizing designations like “force” and

“physical constraint.”

Social-revolutionary Lefts in France and West Germany: A Transnational après-mai

Part One of this dissertation is primarily focused on the discourses and practices of the

1968 movement and the post-1968 revolutionary groups that built and sustained a subaltern tradition of confrontational protest (manifestations violentes or Kampfdemonstrationen). In the case of the French Hexagon, I study the discourses on violence and militant practices that emerged and were embraced in three successive revolutionary groups from May-June 1968 until the end of the seventies. The Mouvement du 22 mars (M22) and the Trotskyists of the Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (JCR) were the main organizations advocating adversarial, militant protest during

May and June 1968. The antiauthoritarian Maoists of the Gauche prolétarienne (GP) and the JCR successor organization Ligue communiste (LC) took part in politico-military experiments from

1968 until the end of 1973.3 Finally, in the second half of the decade, violence-talk and adversarial demonstrations were articulated by leftists inspired by contemporary events in Italy—the autonomes. In the Federal Republic of Germany, from 1968 until around 1972, a fragment of the

Berlin extraparliamentary opposition (außerparlamentarische Opposition or APO) embraced militant demonstrations. Starting in the early seventies, the Frankfurt group Revolutionärer Kampf

(RK) and the Frankfurt Housing Council (Häuserrat), two organizational faces of the Frankfurt

3 For the Ligue communiste, see Hélène Adam and François Coustal, C’était la Ligue (Paris: Éditions Arcane 17; Syllepse, 2019). 7 spontaneist (Sponti) movement, were the definitive face of adversarial protest in the Federal

Republic. Finally, from 1975 to 1978, relays for a discourse theorizing adversarial opposition to the police but not armed struggle included Frankfurt and Berlin spontaneists and West German

Maoist groups (K-Gruppen). In the course of the decade, most of these groups were small, but they could sometimes bring out around 500 to 3,000 militants to a demonstration and could cause considerable consternation for the police when embedded in larger demonstration groups.

Excepting the K-Gruppen, the self-identifying social revolutionary groups under study in this work shared a number of ideological commitments. These groups positioned themselves in the tradition of allegedly inclusive social-revolutionary or mass violence as against the minoritarian violence of armed groups. From 1968 to 1976, common commitments included anti- imperialism; the hybridization of anti-authoritarianism and Marxism; a commitment to realizing the working class as the subject of social revolution based in heterodox Marxist theory that emphasized worker autonomy; and conceptualizations of violence largely articulated by post-war

Francophone Marxist and anti-colonial writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. Inquiry across national boundaries reveals that some fractions of the West German extraparliamentary opposition (APO) and later Frankfurt militants in Revolutionärer Kampf and the Sponti movement were highly informed by the experience of Italian revolutionary left groups like Lotta Continua and French leftists, and vice versa. After 1976, both the French autonomes of Camarades and West

German anti-authoritarian Marxist groups (Spontis) grouped around BUG-Info and Autonomie.

Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft shared in the decomposition of Marxism within the New

Left, the critique of post-1968 militancy, and the turn away from workerism towards the first- person politics (Politik erster Person) that marked the Italian experience of the Red seventies and

8 particularly the movement of 1977.4 Throughout the cycle, French and West German social- revolutionary left groups triangulated between pacifism and contemporary armed movements.

Transnational European exchanges between these groups were frequent, but unequal. Prior to May 1968, French revolutionary leftists participated in the February 1968 international conference on Vietnam at the Technical University of West Berlin, and writings by militants of the JCR subsequently evinced theory transfers from West German radicals.5 Similarly, Daniel-

Cohn Bendit of May 1968 notoriety visited West Berlin for the February 1968 conference.6 As philosopher, left intellectual, and violence theorist Jean-Paul Sartre observed in 1968, a not inconsiderable number of the revolutionary notions of the French students came from their comrades in SDS.7 However, in the post-1968 period, the circulation of concepts and practices involving militant protest generally proceeded in the opposite direction, just as the philosopher had predicted. French publications on the May-June 1968 events and the experiences of post-1968 revolutionaries in the Gauche prolétarienne were translated by the West German publisher Trikont-

Verlag, as well as by Rowohlt, Wagenbach, and other radical publishers.8 The case of the

4 See Chapter One. For Italian Autonomia, see Luca Falciola, Il movimento del 1977 in Italia (Roma: Carocci editore, 2015).

5 Salar Mohandesi, “Bringing Vietnam Home: The Vietnam War, Internationalism, and May ’68,” French Historical Studies 41, no. 2 (April 1, 2018): 219–51, https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-4322930; Daniel Bensaïd and Henri Weber, Mai 1968: une répetition générale (Paris: F. Maspero, 1968).

6 Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Zwichen Frankfurt und Paris: Daniel Cohn-Bendit,” in Fischer in Frankfurt: Karriere eines Außenseiters (Hamburger Edition, 2001), 84.

7 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les Communistes ont peur de la révolution,” in Situations VIII. Autour de 68 (Paris: NRF-Gallimard, 1971), 223–25. The 1968 SDS volume Rebellion der Studenten was almost immediately translated into French as Uwe Bergmann, Wolfgang Lefèvre, and Rudi Dutschke, La révolte des étudiants allemands (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).

8 For example, Jean-Paul Sartre, Der Intellektuelle und die Revolution, trans. Irma Reblitz (Neuwied, Germany: Luchterhand, 1971); Gauche prolétarienne, Bewaffneter Kampf und Massenlinie: Beitrag der Gauche Prolétarienne zur Vorbereitung des bewaffneten Aufstands (München: Trikont-Verlag, 1972); 9 Revolutionärer Kampf (RK) offers the main example of the transnational “return” of concepts of violence and militant protest practices from the French May 1968 and the Italian “rampant May” to West Germany in the seventies. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, exiled from France, was one of the core militants of Revolutionärer Kampf, while the group newspaper, Wir wollen Alles! argued as late as 1974 that class struggles in Italy since 1969 were “next to the French May” the “first practical examples” that the historical “pacifism” and “integration” of the working class as a motor of capitalist development in Western Europe could be overcome.9 Processes of transnational circulation contributed to overlapping problématiques concerning la violence/Gewalt, as well as convergent practices of militancy confrontation (Chapters One and Two). Thus, it would be analytically dubious to insist on the incommensurability of the discourse, practice, or experience of the revolutionary lefts under study on the basis of presumed national differences: one of the epistemological benefits of my approach is that it has enabled me to avoid the reification of alleged national differences in militant culture.

For militants of the revolutionary left studied in this dissertation, a major implication of

1968 was that the practice of confronting, then eluding, police in demonstrations could be both operative and legitimate. Thus, the “lesson” of May 1968 was that the monopoly of the state on

Jean-Paul Sartre, ed., Der Westen wird rot: Die “Maos” in Frankreich, Gespräche u. Reportagen, trans. Andree Valentin (München: Trikont-Verlag, 1973); Gauche prolétarienne, Volkskrieg in Frankreich? Strategie und Taktik der proletarischen Linken (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1972); Michel Foucault et al., Neuer Faschismus, neue Demokratie: über die Legalität des Faschismus im Rechtsstaat (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1972).

9 Wir wollen Alles! “Klassenkämpfe in Italien,” 1. Cf. Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital, trans. David Browder (Paris: Verso, 2019). The very title of the journal Wir wollen Alles! was borrowed from the Italian workerist slogan Vogliamo tutto! (“We want everything!”).

10 both material and symbolic violence was eminently resistible.10 It took years for many members of social revolutionary groups to finally conclude that militant resistance to the police was a futile endeavor for furthering social struggles, while recalcitrant activists and new protest actors in each national context would regularly take up the mantle of militant protest. This dissertation expands our knowledge in part by investigating the forms taken by militant protest.

A Study of the State

The dissertation is also a study of the history of the exercise of physical constraint by agents of the state and the efforts to legitimize that exercise. Although the phenomenon of counterterrorism has received a significant amount of historical attention, protest governance practices during the movements of 1968 and the seventies have not. Most scholarly accounts of “political violence” tacitly exclude the practices of physical constraint by the police from in-depth analyses and sideline the conflict between police and protestors—these frequently re-enact essentialist discourses about the New Left that were deployed by governments, or conversely, reiterate discourses on the police prevalent within militant sectors of the left. The lack of parity between studies of revolutionary militancy and the state is more than a coincidental oversight: it aligns on

10 French intellectuals whose own trajectories were enmeshed in the experience of post-1968 gauchisme tend to take as their point of departure the position that “the state” is reproduced through ideology, the imaginary or symbolic, and desire, rather than primarily through physical constraint. Consider Louis Althusser, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’état : Notes pour une recherche,” La pensée, no. 151 (June 1970); Pierre Bourdieu, “Sur le pouvoir symbolique,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 32, no. 3 (1977): 405–11; Pierre Bourdieu, Sur l’État : cours au Collège de France, 1989-1992 (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2012); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie. 1, L’anti-Oedipe (Paris, France: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972). Similarly, Michel Foucault would deliberately push beyond the framework of the state as the locus of domination in Michel Foucault, La société punitive : cours au Collège de France, 1972-1973 (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 233–34; Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir : naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). For recent theoretical analyses that speak to this point, see Guillaume Sibertin- Blanc, Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari : essai sur le matérialisme historico-machinique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2013).

11 the sensationalism and stigmatization of the 1968 generation as “violent” subversives as it was undertaken by contemporary governing authorities and conservative newspapers and it puts a scholarly imprimatur on the efforts of contemporary governing officials to monopolize the meaning of confrontational protest by insisting that the violent ones were the militants, while theirs was regulated, legitimate force. In sum, from the state perspective, violence was not something that protestors, let alone the police, did in protests, it was what revolutionary or “extremist” demonstrators were. The discourse of the radical left merely subverted the terms of this analysis.

Theirs was a justified violence while that of the agents of public order was inherently illegitimate; the police was intrinsically violent. Thus, any account of conflicts between protestors and the police risks vehiculating a single point of view, and an essentialist one at that. However, the power that protestors and public officials had to make their own perspectives prevail was not equal, and state officials were well-placed to both monopolize “symbolic violence”—their ability to define the meaning of confrontational encounters—11 and to monopolize legitimate physical constraint.

Thus, any historical account that aspires to articulate an independent perspective must work to both identify and de-naturalize the efforts by agents of the state to exert their definitional power in these conflicts. Whether this dissertation is successful in that regard is for the reader to decide.

11 For the state as the organization that successfully claims the monopoly of symbolic violence—a variation on Weberian state theory—see Bourdieu, Sur l’Etat; Bourdieu, “Sur le pouvoir symbolique”; Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes (Paris: Points, 2015). For the classic Weberian thesis: Staat ist diejenige menschliche Gemeinschaft, welche innerhalb eines bestimmten Gebietes…das Monopol legitimer physischer Gewaltsamkeit für sich (mit Erfolg) beansprucht. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft : Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, ed. Johannes Winckelmann, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1976), 822. Weber says legitimate, not legal, Gewalt, and his concept of legitimacy denotes how a practice appears to observers. I do not think that states ever actually achieve the absolute monopoly of legitimate force in confrontational protests, but the Weberian theory provides adequate representation of what they aim to accomplish.

12 Although claims that 1968 represented a significant event for European police are not novel, inquiries into the police management of protest have rarely been based on access to extensive archival sources, contributing to significant lacunae in understandings of how public officials and police reconfigured public security culture during and after 1968.12 In particular, public and scholarly discussions of protest during the French 1968 events have been unduly influenced by uncritical receptions of the work of politically ambitious, public-relations savvy officials like former Parisian Prefect of Police Maurice Grimaud.13 Although Grimaud did take action to restrain the police use of force in Paris in 1968, he also went to considerable lengths to circulate ideological interpretations of police conduct during and after the events of May and June

1968, going so far as to claim quite incorrectly that “nobody had died” during the events.14 Grimaud also benefitted from the considerable lowering of expectations by his predecessor, Maurice Papon, who had presided over the direct import of counter-revolutionary terror tactics and encouraged colonial massacres and racialized round-ups in the heart of Paris in 1961 and who had helped to

“cover” the police killing of anti-communist demonstrators during the Charonne events of

February 1962.15 Ousted by the hard-liners in April 1971 and searching for influence in the rising

12 By public security culture, I mean the principles, practices, and material artifacts used to produce “security” and “order.”

13 On Grimaud as political entrepreneur, see Christian Delporte, “Maurice Grimaud, le préfet médiatique,” Histoire@Politique n° 27, no. 3 (December 16, 2015): 33–42.

14 Conseil de Paris, Séance du 8 Juillet 1968, Bulletin municipal officiel, July 24, 1968, 453-455.

15 The point is adroitly made in Lilian Mathieu, “L’autre côté de la barricade : perceptions et pratiques policières en mai et juin 1968,” Revue historique n° 665, no. 1 (May 27, 2013): 151. Exemplary works on massacres d’état in Paris include Alain Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962 : anthropologie historique d’un massacre d’État (Paris: Gallimard, 2006); Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961 : Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

13 Socialist Party, Grimaud later dramatized his efforts to restrain violence against demonstrators in his 1977 memoirs;16 his testimonies have frequently been deemed more credible than they actually were. Early journalistic accounts and scholarship frequently embed police claims by Grimaud and prominent police into the understanding of May 1968: police overreactions were inevitable because of the violence of protestors, police had practiced considerable restraint, etc.17 Only recently have scholars begun to articulate a more critical view of the police during May 1968 that is based on police archives.18 Meanwhile, historians lack scholarly, archivally-informed accounts of the transformation of the ideologies, practices, and material apparatuses of the main specialized public order units of the French state: the Compagnies d’intervention of the Parisian Préfecture de

Police (PP), the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité (CRS), and the Escadrons de gendarmerie mobile (EGM) of the Gendarmerie nationale.

Historical accounts of policing in West Germany have likewise typically ended on a cautiously optimistic note in 1968 or 1970, identifying reform movements in the police such as the

New Line (die neue Linie) as the finishing point of processes of reflexivity and auto-regulation that started around the 1962 Swabian riots in Bavaria. 19 We lack analysis of the deeper imaginary

16 Maurice Grimaud, En mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît (Paris, France: Stock, 1977).

17 Several May 1968 myths about the police are usefully repudiated by Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

18 For example, Ludivine Bantigny, 1968 : de grands soirs en petits matins (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2018); Mathieu, “L’autre côté de la barricade”; Oliver Davis, “Managing (in)Security in Paris in Mai ’68,” Modern & Contemporary France 26, no. 2 (April 3, 2018): 129–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2018.1431212.

19 Klaus Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik: zwischen Bürgerkrieg und Innerer Sicherheit: die turbulenten sechziger Jahre (München: Paderborn, 2003); Gerhard Fürmetz, Herbert Reinke, and Klaus Weinhauer, eds., Nachkriegspolizei: Sicherheit Und Ordnung in Ost- Und Westdeutschland 1945-1969 (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 2001); Klaus Weinhauer, “Staatsgewalt, Massen, Männlichkeit: Polizeieinsätze gegen Jugend- und Studentenproteste in der Bundesrepublik der 1960er Jahre,” in Polizei, Gewalt und Staat im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Alf Lüdtke, Herbert Reinke, and Michael Sturm (Wiesbaden: VS 14 of public order policing, how police actually operated during the confrontational demonstrations of the seventies, or the “equipment” they deployed to manage demonstrations in the seventies.

Although based on meticulous research, the account by Klaus Weinhauer of protest policing from

1962 to 1970 in Hamburg and Nordrhein Westfalen (NRW) largely accredits the de-militarization thesis as it was advanced by self-identified agents of police reform such as 1969-1987 Berlin

Polizeipräsident Klaus Hübner, whose own 1997 memoir attempted to shape the discourse around

Berlin protest policing in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.20 The state of the narrative is something like this: starting in the fifties, internal security policy in West Germany was built around the possibility of an armed uprising by the Communist “internal enemy” and military assault by the Eastern Bloc. Police formations like the Bereitschaftspolizei (BePo) and the

Bundesgrenzschutz (BSG), the paramilitary border police, were organized under the leadership of functionaries who served in the German Army during the Second World War, and police were organized according to military models of authority, tactics, and weaponry.21 In the field of protest policing, West German police remained influenced by interwar mass psychology, Cold War military ideology, and practices and training for military anti-partisan actions in the sixties. These

Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011), 301–24. Sociologists Busch et al. did examine policing of demonstrations in the seventies but did not have access to archival sources—see Heiner Busch et al., Die Polizei in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt ; New York: Campus, 1985), 318–57.

20 See Klaus Hübner, Einsatz. Erinnerungen des Berliner Polizeipräsidenten 1969-1987 Mit einem vorwort von Bundeskanzler a.D. Helmut Schmidt (Berlin: Jaron Verlag GmbH, 1997). Weinhauer is careful not to conclude that de-militarization continued in a linear fashion in the seventies, however. Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik: zwischen Bürgerkrieg und Innerer Sicherheit: die turbulenten sechziger Jahre, 327–32. Indeed, Weinhauer’s analysis of police interpretation of the Easter 1968 demonstrations notes the fixation on student “violence” by the police, the one-sided and unconditional justification of police violence by the “modernizers,” and the re-militarization of police analyses of protest in 1968—conclusions that prefigure my own. Ibid., 310–15.

21 Busch et al., Die Polizei in der Bundesrepublik, 59–61.

15 Cold War ideologies were directly expressed during the political protests of the New Left: although

West German police never used firearms en masse, they indiscriminately assaulted demonstrators and were easy targets for the student tactic of calculated provocation. In Berlin, where the police leadership included former Wehrmacht Oberleutnant Erich Duensing, Polizeipräsident from 1962 through 1967, assaults on demonstrators in small, often uncontrolled, groups at the visit of the

Iranian Shah Reza Pavlavi on 2 June 1967 had massive generational consequences when a member of the Kriminalpolizei, Karl-Heinz Kurras, killed “apolitical” student Benno Ohnesorg and teams of police assaulted unresisting “agitators” in groups.22 However, following the demonstrations of

1967-1968, new police leadership currents altered course under pressure from modernizing political authorities in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Hamburg, and Bayern. Police articulated a new, civilian paradigm that more strictly delimited physical force in the seventies: “flexible reaction.”

Internal security experts subsequently consolidated the division between military and police forces in the Bundesrepublik and “de-militarized” the police while the military was excluded from internal intervention and the BGS assumed internal functions. If the French language scholarship on protest policing in 1968 has framed the events within a history of the auto-regulation and reduction of the use of physical constraint in protests, recent scholarship on Germany has tended in a similar direction, showing how police interventions became more “flexible” and how police learned to respect the right to demonstrate.

In my view, the framework of “reform” or police “modernization” often tends to obscure more difficult questions: to what extent was police “restraint” ever intended to extend to the

22 For recent scholarship, see Eckard Michels, Schahbesuch 1967 : Fanal Für Die Studentenbewegung (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2017). Cf. Klaus Weinhauer, “Controlling Control Institutions: Policing of Collective Protests in 1960s West Germany,” in Control of Violence: Historical and International Perspectives on Violence in Modern Societies, ed. Wilhelm Heitmeyer et al. (New York, NY: Springer, 2011), 221. 16 “agitators” of the New Left? Why did police interventions in the seventies frequently generate considerable outcry, not merely from New Left currents and students or from the actors of the New

Social Movements (NSMs) but also from journalists hostile to the New Left, in cities like Berlin and Frankfurt and in the hinterlands of the anti-nuclear movement? Scholars seem to take for granted that the paradigm that allegedly replaced civil war (Bürgerkrieg), Internal Security, was a civilian constellation and that police were significantly “demilitarized,” even as some of the same police learned judo and were trained to use submachine guns against armed extremists and to neutralize “terrorists” and hostage-takers based on lethal force. The West German federal government and the Länder also introduced a broad variety of élite internal security units like the

Mobile Einsatzkommandos (MEK) and Spezialeinsatzkommandos (SEK), for deployment against criminals and armed insurgents during the decade after 1968, and by the end of the seventies, these elite units were deployed in order to grab “extremists” in the context of demonstrations and to take over occupied housing. Rather than see 1968 as the last hurrah for a militarized conception of the police, as the current periodization of West German scholarship on police and protest implies, I argue that we should see the protests of 1968 as the beginning of a cycle of organized, planned, and careful escalation of West German police concepts, means of constraint, and tactics—an escalation that officials largely successfully concealed from the public by concerted public- relations strategies.

Of course, one consistent finding of this dissertation is that West German police experts placed a higher emphasis on minimizing force against protestors than their French counterparts— a finding that is hardly striking given that French police had been considerably more integrated into colonial counter-revolutionary operations in the recent past. In fact, the West German political class and public officials were more concerned about the potential resonances of police violence

17 than their French peers. However, all talk of “de-militarization” aside, the equipment, weapons, and tactics of protest governance in West Germany during the seventies were closer to those of the

French security forces in operations of the maintenance of order, or to British army units on “riot control” in Northern Ireland, than they were to contemporary “civilian” protest policing on the

British or Scandanavian models. Thus, only the ascendancy of Law and Order conservatives like

Margaret Thatcher partially closed the “gap” between British and West German protest governance in the early eighties.23 As late as the Easter Demonstrations of 1968, West German police on protest duty operated in uniform without any anti-riot protection, and typically deployed the rubber baton (Gummiknüppel) and old-fashioned 4,000-liter water cannon to “disperse” the demonstrations, but by the end of 1981, police had introduced the massive, much more powerful water cannon; full riot gear including shields, wooden batons, visors, and body armor; Chemical

Mace spray; CS and CN gas; adaptations that allowed them to fire tear gas at considerable distance; helicopters for surveillance and transport; and chemical laden water jets. Some police in protests were also armed with MP4 submachine guns in order to neutralize terrorists, and firearms were certainly exhibited during major demonstrations. As police sociologists wrote in 1985, “the transformed appearance and different mode of conduct of the police towards protestors in contrast to earlier decades is striking to the eye even from a superficial perspective.”24

23 The British metropolitan police integrated tactics and equipment from the Royal Ulster Constabulary into the metropolitan police under the Thatcher government. For Britain, see Brian Drohan, “Unintended Consequences: Baton Rounds, Riots, and Counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, 1970-1981,” Journal of Military History 82, no. 2 (April 2018): 491–514; Erik Linstrum, “Domesticating Chemical Weapons: Tear Gas and the Militarization of Policing in the British Imperial World, 1919-1981,” The Journal of Modern History 91, no. 3 (September 2019): 557–85.

24 Busch et al., Die Polizei in der Bundesrepublik, 351. This was, the authors assure us, a purely “external” military appearance because the aim of the operations was not to kill. Ibid., 352. 18 In light of access to formerly unavailable sources from the security apparatus in each country, I believe that previous historical scholarship has been too reliant on the discourse of the state in its effort to define the stakes of conflicts involving New Left protestors and to recruit members of civil society in an effort to subdue militant protest. I also argue that historians of the police who have presented police history within the framework of “reform” and “modernization” have often neglected how official reflexivity about targeted, proportionate interventions in protest originated in considerations of legitimacy and the possibility that state violence might provoke radicalization, rather than in abstract humanitarianism or sentimentalism about human life. Last, in each country, the construction of countersubversion and Internal Security perspectives led to systematic efforts to increase the amount of pressure on the New Left through the expanded use of undercover police, intensified surveillance, and special arrest teams for “grabbing” presumed militants.25

Scholars of the policing of protest in both France and West Germany have been fundamentally too credulous towards two phenomena in particular: the technopolitics of police weapons and procedures of constraint, and the tactics of the police. To this day, considerable scholarly imprecision reigns about the weapons the police actually used in protests of the sixties and seventies. For example, French scholarship often redeploys descriptions of the new artifacts of constraint that virtually take for granted public-facing state glosses on the use of agents like the water cannon, “tear gas,” and even explosive grenades, sometimes framing them as mechanisms for the “distancing” (mise à distance) of demonstrators—a phrase directly out of police discourse

25 I was not able to access sufficient archives from the Renseignments généraux or the Verfassungsschutz to integrate them into this study; however, it is also true that the surveillance services were extensively deployed against the New Left.

19 that has connotations of self-defense.26 It is common in this vein to learn that French “tear gas” simply rendered protestors “inoperative” and to learn nothing at all of the penchant of the French police for launching explosive grenades. Meanwhile, the late-imperial genealogy of the main

French “tear gas,” CS gas, is ignored. Likewise, historians and sociologists of the West German police have rarely inquired into the technological dimension of police violence in the protests of the seventies. Of course, as we will see, the New Left itself struggled to integrate the critique of new means of protest policing into its anti-repressive politics.

Expert sources from within the modernizing bureaucracies of the state reveal that police armament and practices that were externally presented as mere “equipment” and as “humane” alternatives to the mass baton assault were capable of inflicting significant injury, and often went well beyond tears in their physiological effects. Moreover, a comparative perspective shows that

French police were unique on the continent in their regular use of multiple chemical agents–not

“tear gas”—and recourse to explosive grenades in 1968 and the seventies. This dissertation confirms that West German politicians and police took a more conservative and cautious approach to the “modernization” of police armament for public order operations than their French peers— despite considerable circulation of information about public order policing between the two police, and between West German police and their peers in the United States and Japan. However, West

German internal security experts also tended to base protest governance on novel techniques of physical coercion. Police introduced Chemical Mace Mark V, rebaptized the less-evocative

Reizstoffsprühgerät (RSG 1), for protest governance; added the chemical CN into the water

26 For example, Bantigny, 1968; Fabien Jobard, “Matraque, gaz, boucliers: La police en action,” in 68: Une histoire collective, 1962-1981, ed. Michelle Zancarini-Fournel and Philippe Artières, 2nd ed. (Paris: La Découverte, 2015); Mathieu, “L’autre côté de la barricade,” 149–50.

20 cannon, an innovation apparently borrowed from the Japanese anti-riot police; refined and deployed more powerful water cannon that could cause bruises and fractures in the early eighties; and introduced CS gas for police use in 1981. In both cases, alternative police mechanisms of physical constraint actually became stronger, more invasive, and more painful in the course of the seventies. Although the self-identifying modernizers were loath to acknowledge it, police “reform” in the field of public order operations after 1968 included not merely anti-riot equipment to render police officers less vulnerable to protestors but also encompassed extended reliance on new means of inflicting suffering.

Thus, this dissertation argues that after 1968, both French and West German police remodeled protest governance through the technopolitical pursuit of new types of physical constraint. In both states, the forms of less-ostentatious, less-traceable, but nevertheless, physical constraint that governments institutionalized left fewer records of injury, led to fewer incriminating photographs, and did not involve direct physical contact—and that was part of the point. The implication of this dissertation is that under democratic conditions, if the legitimacy of practices of physical constraint in protest is in question, states tend to opt for new modes of inflicting physical suffering on the bodies of protestors that—at least generally—minimize visible and ostentatious injuries. However, when state officials are less concerned about the political resonances of police violence, police “modernization” inevitably integrates technological means that are considerably more powerful and invasive in order to secure the monopoly on violence— as occurred in France after the initial public response to police violence in 1968 and in West

Germany in the late seventies and early eighties. Meanwhile, police exercised considerable power in defining the public discourse around new means of constraint in ways that downplayed their violent aspects.

21 This dissertation problematizes histories that interpret European policing and 1968 as part of a story of linear, progressive “de-militarization” and the “civilization” of police ideologies and tactics. Police reformers, and sometimes historians after them, tend to write the history of the post- war police as if it were a story of the mere dissolution of militarized mentalities and ethics governing the use of force. Insofar as historical study of violence in Europe is focused on mass killings of the period from 1914 to 1945 and by the colonial massacres by post-war imperial regimes, it is understandable that police practices that did not contribute to a historically high body count should appear as “demilitarized.” However, as scholars we should address the fact that our own considerations about what counts as “significant” uses of force tend to be “militarized” and polarized around the extremes of the interwar period and colonial warfare—and that this in itself skews our baseline for what counts as extreme uses of force. We should not conclude too rapidly that because there were no massacres d’état, the policing of demonstrations in Paris in 1968 was restrained—nor that the policing of demonstrations in 1968 and the seventies in West Germany represented de-militarization because it did not resemble fascist punitive expeditions or Nazi violence. While it is legitimate to note that police sometimes presented what they were doing as

“reform,” we need to investigate what work “reform” did.

If one part of this dissertation investigates the materialities of constraint deployed against

New Left protestors, I also argue that the paradigm of policing the major political demonstrations in 1968 and the seventies was at the very least military-adjacent. Its principles were conceived of by officials under the broader rubrics of the struggle against “subversion” (France) and “internal security operations” (West Germany). State officials and members of the security apparatus apprehended their adversaries as “subversives” (France) and an extremist minority (West

Germany) and perceived their own citizens as an at-risk population to be proactively enrolled in

22 the struggle against extremism even when radicals were not engaged in “terrorism.” After the year

1968 in particular, police went out of their way to co-opt journalists, radio, and television representatives to this end during confrontational protest sequences. As the 1975 police guide

Führung und Einsatz der Polizei put it, “The police must strive to maintain or to achieve the trust of the population in order to fulfill its legal obligations.”27 In protest contexts, both French and

West German police sought to stigmatize and target adversaries conceived of as perennially

“violent” and illegal agents, and simultaneously strove to limit the exposure of broader protest movements and civil society to physical constraint by the police in order to isolate radicals from the polity. This meant recruiting citizens as subjects of countersubversion (France) and internal security (W. Germany) and it is perhaps unsurprising that within a decade of this strategy, some protestors would begin to explicitly identify as “non-violent” in each country in an (unsuccessful) effort to avoid being targets of the “legitimate physical constraint” of the police.28 However, rather than essentially “civilian” imperatives, the aim of the government to secure the loyalty of the citizenry and identify and neutralize “violent” actors in protests would have been fully comprehensible to contemporary theorists of counter-revolutionary operations or counterinsurgency. Thus, protest policing practices were “de-militarized” to the extent that firearms and the potential for lethal force were displayed, but not used, except in the rarest cases.

However, to the extent that surveillance, targeted grabs of militants by mobile specialists, and efforts to control the public reception of police intervention assumed higher and higher importance, police were applying the major principles of counter-revolutionary and domestic counter-terrorism

27 Führung und Einsatz der Polizei (Hamburg, 1975), 2.

28 For another, less cynical, perspective on non-violence see Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 152–92.

23 operations to the democratic governance of protest: intensify use of surveillance and infiltration of extremist threats; apply selective, proportionate coercion to the adversary; and recruit the broader polity as government partners.29 This dissertation takes 1968 not as the end of a period of demilitarization, but as the point of initiation of a new period of militant, if not militarized, protest- policing.

Although some of my claims deployed in this dissertation would have been uncontroversial to the New Left, unprecedented access to state archives has allowed me to empirically substantiate my arguments about protest governance after 1968. In the French case, I have used archival sources from the Ministère de l’intérieur, the Parisian Préfecture de Paris, the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité (CRS), and the Gendarmerie mobile (GM). In the West German case, I followed officials in the Federal Interior Ministry, federal Bereitschaftspolizei (BePo) and

Bundesgrentzschutz (BGS); different interior ministries of the Länder, principally Hamburg,

Hessen, Niedersachsen; and the local police or Schutzpolizei of the Polizeipräsidium Frankfurt.

This approach has allowed imperfect, but sustained coverage of the technopolitics of police armament in protest after 1968, as articulated by confidential working groups and technical commissions of the police, and the tactical forms of protest management after 1968.

Theoretical framings: Trials of the State (épreuves d’État)

How should scholars study adversarial behaviors? I inquire not merely into what militants and the police said about la violence/die Gewalt but what they did in militant protests—their

29 See for example, Ministry of Defense, Land Operations Volume III. Counter-Revolutionary Operations. Part 2. Internal Security, 1st Amended version, 1971. Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-Keeping (London: Faber, 1971). For recent works that consider protest governance in the context of counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, see Drohan, “Unintended Consequence”; Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights : Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (London: Cornell University Press, 2017). 24 material practices. I want to recover not merely adversarial discourses and efforts to define adversaries in demonstrations as agents of illegitimate physical constraint—though I do that also— but to also investigate the equipment and practices of the adversaries involved in demonstrations.

In not differentiating discourses and practices and seeking to analyze their intersections, past scholarship on political violence or police violence has sometimes naturalized the categories used by its objects of study and short-circuited the description of the practices. Similarly, in many accounts of militancy, violence, and protest, scholars take labels like “baton” and “tear gas” or

“Molotov cocktail” at face value, neglecting the shifting materialities that these designations were meant to designate, and taking for granted later claims by ex-militants and critics of the 1968 movement that their violence was essentially “theatrical” and devoid of “real” violent content or claims by police that their means were “humane.” Similarly, rather than study the justification of violence as a practice among other practices, scholars end up framing individual encounters subtly or unsubtly around claims that revolutionaries acted in self-defense, or performed mere counter- violence, or that police were violent or used legitimate force, respectively—modes of “coding” confrontations ubiquitous in the source material. Rather than verifying or delegitimating claims about violence made either by the neo-revolutionaries of 1968 or by the police, I want to investigate how those claims were assembled and what their practical consequences were. Taking some methodological hints from the actor network theory of Bruno Latour, I try to track enmeshed discourses, material artifacts, and practices and grant each their due.30

30 Bruno Latour, Enquête sur les modes d’existence (Paris: La Découverte, 2012); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social : An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford ; Oxford University Press, 2005).

25 Historians of violence most often taken approaches that exclusively study the discourses of justification for violence provided by self-proclaimed revolutionaries or the contiguous conditions of political and social conflict, following an influential approach to the historical study of violence first laid down by cultural and social historians in seventies.31 The dominant analytical frameworks typically maintain the actual materiality of practices at a considerable distance and elide the phenomena that must be explicated in order to talk about something else. In its political- or socio-historical variants, the description of confrontational practices yields to the description of antecedent or contiguous conditions like coups d’état or labor conflict. In the cultural history variant of this approach, conflictual practice becomes a pre-text that yields to analysis of the fields of signification embedded in past radical subcultures. Thus, reigning analytical frameworks inevitably envision exercises of physical constraint as an expression of ideology, political calculus, social habitus, or affect. In an approach similar to that of a criminal investigator in a television drama, the historian examines violence as a means of learning something about the violent actor: constraint and its effects become mere epiphenomena. In either approach, the practice of coercion tends to disappear the further one goes into the analysis, yielding to the description of allegedly more foundational strata: the act vanishes into something of an entirely different nature.32 By contrast, in this dissertation, I evaluate both conceptualizations of violence and militant practices

31 Dwyer, “Violence and Its Histories”; Philip Dwyer and Joy Damousi, “Theorizing Histories of Violence,” History & Theory 56, no. 4 (December 2017): 3–6, https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12034.

32 For an example far afield, in an influential 1977 article, Pierre Clastres contests analysis of “violence” (war) as an expression of human biology, economics, and exchange but then reduces warmaking to an epiphomenon of collective representations of the political. Pierre Clastres, Archéologie de la violence: la guerre dans les sociétés primitives (La Tour-d’Aigues, France: Éditions de l’Aube, 2016). In this dissertation, I attempt to avoid any such reduction in order to study the practices.

26 and I then go on to look at how the analyses and practices of the police were restructured—or not—through the protests of the seventies.

This dissertation is organized around trials of state (épreuves d’État) in the sense explored by sociologist Dominique Linhardt.33 For Linhardt, trials of state are processes that require the redefinition of “the state” in regard to specific issues and obstacles, sequences through which “the state” becomes the object of uncertainty and collective scrutiny in one of its manifestations (in this study, the police).34 The concept of the trial (épreuve) as operationalized in this dissertation borrows from and revises the concept of the trial as it has been productively used in French pragmatic sociology and the actor-network theory.35 Because of novel, adversarial demonstration practices and critiques of violence, security forces and state officials circa 1968 experienced the

33 Linhardt is a CNRS researcher at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory on Reflexivity Studies (Laboratoire interdisciplinaire d’études sur les réflexivités) at the EHESS-Paris. See Dominique Linhardt, “La force de l’État en démocratie. La République fédérale d’Allemagne à l’épreuve de la guérilla urbaine (1967-1982)” (thèse pour le doctorat de sociologie, Paris, Ecole nationale supérieure des mines de Paris, 2004); Dominique Linhardt, “La Fraction armée rouge et les autres : la guérilla urbaine en RFA,” in 68, une histoire collective, ed. Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 470–76; Dominique Linhardt and Cédric Moreau de Bellaing, “Légitime violence ? Enquêtes sur la réalité de l’État démocratique,” Revue française de science politique 55, no. 2 (2005): 269–98, https://doi.org/10.3917/rfsp.552.0269.

34 Dominique Linhardt, “Avant-propos : épreuves d’État. Une variation sur la définition wébérienne de l’État,” Quaderni 78, no. 2 (2012): 5.

35 For pragmatic sociology, Luc Boltanski, De la critique : précis de sociologie de l’émancipation (Paris: Gallimard, c2009); Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, c1999); Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, De la justification: les économies de la grandeur (Paris, France: Gallimard, 1991); Latour, Reassembling the Social : An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. It should be noted that I somewhat moderate the rejection by pragmatic sociologists of the earlier critical sociology school by recognizing that the historical and finite nature of the categories and practices available to critics left considerable margins for symbolic domination. I acknowledge domains in which it is apt to talk about “symbolic violence” without considering it as an a priori principle that practical agents fundamentally “consent” to domination or “state ideology.” For critical sociology, see Bourdieu, Sur l’Etat; Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes; Bourdieu, “Sur le pouvoir symbolique.” For the recent moderation of the rejection of critical sociology by pragmatic sociologists, see Boltanski, De la critique.

27 fragility of domination and threats of hypervisibility and illegitimacy–a trial of the state as both an organizational practice and cognitive framework. The militant protests of the late sixties and seventies threatened to thwart the efforts by state officials to secure the monopoly of legitimate physical constraint by undermining the legitimacy of physical constraint exercised by state officials and by undermining the monopoly of physical constraint.

The theoretical apparatus of the épreuve d’état is not so different from how 1968 radicals thought about their own practices and is therefore more appropriate than structures that place the main emphasis on militant protest as a response to “means of provision.”36 Thus, a tract by the short-lived Trotskyist Comité pour la Révolution permanente noted in the fall of 1968 that “Our struggle is against the state. But a state doesn’t exist as such, so we must struggle against its manifestations.”37 By “manifestations,” the authors meant the police. On both sides of the Rhine, activists frequently thought along these lines in the vein of SDS theoretician and activist Rudi

Dutschke, who had theorized demonstrations as a means of revealing both the fragility and the authoritarianism of the West German state in 1968. The police were a privileged manifestation of

“the state” that radicals aimed to resist. Of course, as revolutionary leftists would find, subjecting

“the state” to trial does not guarantee its disaggregation.

36 See Alexander Sedlmaier, Consumption and Violence : Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014). Although his framing of violence as a protest against the dominant regime of consumption and distribution of goods is impressive, Sedlmaier neglects the extent to which violent protest was directed not merely at property, but at the police, and was self-consciously revolutionary violence. My view is that property destruction by far-left movements was supposed to provoke the police to present itself as a capitalist state and to outline the vulnerability of its pretension to monopolize Gewalt, following concepts elaborated by Rudi Dutschke already in 1968. Militant protest was, as Linhardt would say, a trial of state.

37 Comité pour la révolution permanente, “Sur la manifestation,” 3. “It is not for the police to contest our presence in a given location, but for us to contest theirs, everywhere.” Ibid., 4, italics mine.

28 Chapter Summary

The thesis of this dissertation is that new forms of revolutionary left protest deployed in

1968 and the seventies generated significant problems for the standard operations of the police and provoked reflexive efforts by state officials and functionaries to rearticulate their own practices.

The processes generated around 1968 thus led to innovations in the practices of state that included new modalities of physical constraint, formations, and tactics designed to surveil and intercept militant protestors interpreted as a type of “insurgent.”

In Part One, “Militant Protest as Trial of the State,” I describe how in their ascendant phases, radical groups and their allies articulated both the critique of arms and the arms of critique.

Chapter One locates the emergence of a militant subject disposed to confront the police via analysis of the discourses that were part of the militant-ization of radical political thought after 1968. I argue that one enduring legacy of 1968 was the discursive construction of practices of combative protest as legitimate counter-violence. Rather than attempt to determine whether or not the revolutionary left in France and West Germany were “violent,” I study leftist conceptualizations of “violence,” tracing how revolutionaries articulated and defended concepts like self-defense, counter-violence, violence as means of politicization, and violence as praxis in journals and theoretical texts. Reductive interpretations of the trajectory of the European radical left after 1968 have tended to present willingness to countenance “violence” as something that either inevitably yielded a turn to armed struggle or, conversely, was rapidly and productively overcome in the course of the seventies. I try to show that the construction of conceptual frameworks that rendered militant protest meaningful has to be understood as a resilient legacy of transnational European

1968.

29 Chapter Two moves from an analysis of radical discourse to trace adversarial protest as practical activity and embedded savoir-faire, showing how militant protest troubled standard state conceptual frameworks and operations and introduced insecurity, not least among police and functionaries, about the extent of state domination: the critique of arms. The emergence of militant protest subjected state power to a practical critique of domination that manifested the limits to the protest governance model inherited from the interwar period. Rather than mounting a merely symbolic challenge, militant protestors posed significant problems for police because they circumvented and countered standard police practices. Investigating how self-identifying revolutionaries refined their practices, equipment, and organizational forms allows us to identify the practical difficulties and insecurities that police would subsequently attempt to surmount— though not entirely successfully.

One of the persistent legacies of 1968 was the organization of informal committees (French

Commissions d’enquête, German Ermittlungsausschüsse) tasked to investigate police violence in demonstrations and to articulate a counter-narrative to the one advanced by state officials. Chapter

Three focuses on these groups at work in May 1968 and the Frankfurt housing and public transport struggles of the seventies while simultaneously investigating whether their claims were substantiated by mainstream sources. I assess the principles that animated critiques of police violence and typical efforts to render visible and intolerable the violence of the state in photography and artwork. I argue that the historically available categories and practices around

1968 involved particular sensitivity to the “touch of the state”38: when militants discussed or showed police “violence,” most often they collapsed that “violence” into the use of direct physical

38 I am indebted to Julian Bourg for the term. 30 force via the baton or the well-placed punch or kick. Thus, the conditions of appearance of state conduct as violence implied that the security forces could restrict high-profile physical struggles in order to re-legitimize physical constraint. Similarly, both radical and reformist critiques of police violence tended to align on criteria of selective force and harm-minimization. Thus, criticisms of the police at work tended to incentivize and effort to be—or at least to appear—more selective, restrained, and humane in the use of force. Revolutionary leftist critiques of the state thus had potentially reformist implications.

Part Two traces the emergence of new conceptual frameworks, tactics, and equipment within the security forces and identifies these as an effort to simultaneously render police intervention effective in the face of militant protest forms and legitimate in the face of critique. In

Chapter Four, I follow how functionaries introduced, generalized, and reinforced police means to re-monopolize constraint in the face of adversarial demonstrations—relying particularly on chemicals, the water cannon, and grenades. These means of crowd dispersion circumvented the traditional deployment of physical constraint by police using the mass baton charge and the bullet.

I argue that “modernizing” officials and technicians turned to new police armament in order to pursue a strategy of effective, painful, but less ostentatious, less excessive state domination that would not be as susceptible to interpretation as intolerable “violence”— answering both the critique of arms and the arms of critique via technopolitics. However, because of their material limitations and because militant groups took steps to neutralize these new means, their usefulness could not be taken for granted. Recurrent uncertainties about the operational quality of new armament provided functionaries with pretexts for the intensification of these means in the course of the seventies, a dynamic I trace in both national contexts.

31 Chapter Five traces the emergence within each security state of discourses and accompanying practices that partially superseded the interwar imaginary of the maintenance of order and its correlated intervention tactics of mass blockades and baton assaults. New interpretations of protest violence as the work of essentially violent militants provided grounds for mobile police formations and the intensified surveillance and pursuit of militant actors in demonstrations by police specialists. Police integrated new units and practices into the governance of protest that were derived from other types of state intervention—countersubversion in France and anti-criminality and counterterrorist operations in West Germany. This development has typically been sidelined in histories that situate 1968 and the seventies as periods of the “civilization” or “de-militarization” of police intervention.

§§§

It is sometimes assumed that revolutionary militants of the seventies in Western Europe were animated by mere ideology or mere left-wing nostalgia: Marxist revolution, we assume from our post-Soviet vantage point, was assuredly an anachronism in 1968. Yet in the midst of the events, few intellectuals were as daring as Alexandre Kojève, who dismissively declared, “Blood has not flowed, this is not a revolution” during the French 1968 events. In fact, the historian is hard-pressed to find a consensus among the archives of the public officials and functionaries tasked to maintain public order that revolution in 1968 was definitively not the order of the day. Hindsight has obscured contemporary experiences of the events and the horizons of possibility that actually disclosed themselves, and we find it likewise difficult to recognize the experience of militants of

JCR or the Frankfurt Spontaneists: one could resist agents of the state in protest and avoid the alternative between victimhood and passivity. “Resistance is possible!” members of the Frankfurt group Revolutionärer Kampf crowed in 1974: we wonder if it ever was. By situating us at the start

32 of the challenge of New Left protest and following the travails of the police after 1968 and through the seventies, this dissertation shows that it required no modicum of effort for police to more or less successfully confront and contain the protest culture of New Left militants of the post-1968 period. Yet therein lies one of the ironies of the effort to deploy social-revolutionary violence in the sixties and seventies: seeking to inspire a combative revolutionary movement, militants provoked a significant reorganization of the state.

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Chapter One. Justifying Militant Protest: Revolutionary Left Discourse and

Legitimate Counter-Violence after 1968

At a meeting of the French militant group Gauche prolétarienne (GP) in May of 1970, the surveillance services recorded these words by a spokesperson: “In a modern country like France, we believe that the tactic of the popular guerilla, partisan actions—unarmed, then armed—is the only one that allows [revolutionaries] to undermine and finally to destroy bourgeois power…the great lesson of May 1968 is that violence pays.”39 In France, May 1968 led to the expansion of revolutionary left discourses that explicitly valorized “violence.” The same could be said of 1968 in West Germany, as Gewalt became an integral element of neo-revolutionary thought within the

SDS, the extraparliamentary opposition (APO) and the later Frankfurt group Revolutionärer

Kampf (RK).40 Understandings of legitimate militant intervention encompassed justifications for individual and collective self-defense, resistance, or counter-violence; the defense of revolutionary violence as an ideological contribution to worker agency; and the advocacy of violence as a means of individual and collective autonomization or production of the revolutionary self. In both national cases, the 1968 sequence saw the discursive construction of legitimate counter-violence

39 Le Général Ourta, Commandant régional de la gendarmerie nationale à paris, No 98/4.III.R. Mj/Hm 1ère Région militaire / Commandement régional de la gendarmerie nationale à Paris / Hôtel National des Invalides Paris 7ème / État-Major 3ème bureau, “Note de mise en garde,” Paris, May 23, 1970, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, henceforth APP, FD 155, Dossier 4*. Italics mine. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Cf. Alain Geismar, Pourquoi nous combattons : déclaration d’Alain Geismar (Paris: Maspero, 1970), 15.

40 RK were part of the West German Spontaneist (Sponti) movement, one of the most visible currents of the West German Neue Linke. See Sebastian Kasper, “Das Ende der Utopien: Wandel der Spontis in den langen 1970er-Jahren” (Dissertation, Universität Freiburg, 2017).

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by militant groups, a process that provided the ideological conditions for militant protest practices that subverted traditional security practices of the state. This chapter identifies ambient discourses on violence in 1968 and the seventies as part of the challenge that the culture of militancy posed to the state—a de-monopolization of the claim to legitimate violence.

This chapter traces the history of violence-legitimations among those revolutionary left groups committed to militant protest and direct action. Most often, historians of “political violence” in countries where fractions of the revolutionary left embraced armed struggle, like West

Germany or Italy, study the discourse and ideology of urban guerrillas or discuss broader leftist discourses on violence through the concept of terrorist sympathizers (Sympathisanten) – a category produced by the state in its struggle against armed groups.41 Conversely, the main question posed in the study of French revolutionary groups and violence is why armed struggle did not emerge.42

In this chapter, I conduct an analysis of French and West German revolutionary groups that deployed a broad variety of understandings of emancipatory violence but never engaged in advocacy for the specific organizational tactic of armed struggle. Violence was nevertheless a fundamental dimension of how the social-revolutionary left experienced, conceptualized, and

41 The literature on West German terrorism is vast. See Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die blinden Flecken der RAF (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2017); Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, 1. Aufl, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006). For sympathizers, Karrin Hanshew, “‘Sympathy for the Devil?’ The West German Left and the Challenge of Terrorism,” Contemporary European History 21, no. 4 (2012): 511–32.

42 For various scholarly positions, Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics : May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); Isabelle Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil : L’après 68 en France et en Italie (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1998). Ex-militant discussions include Adam and Coustal, C’était la Ligue; Antoine Liniers, “Objections contre une prise d’armes,” in Terrorisme et démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 137–224; Henri Weber, Rebelle jeunesse (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2018).

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articulated politics in 1968 and the seventies. In both France and West Germany, the militant transformation of radical political thought formed a fundamental continuity between the 1968 movement; Spontaneist, Maoist, and Trotskyist successor organizations; and radical movements that sought to preserve the original doxa and practical commitment to opposition to state authority amidst the decline of both Marxist ideology and armed struggle groups at the end of the seventies.

Rather than envision “violence” as something disavowed in the course of the French après-mai, or in the context of seventies West Germany, I seek to show that a specific triangulation between pacifism and armed struggle outlasted the radicalization and subsequent disarmament of successive groups of militants and remained a resonant option for a fraction of the New Left throughout the “1968 years” or the “red decade.”43

In this chapter, I reject interpretations of the European 1968 movements and violence that turn on narratives, even if implicit, of the productive negation (Aufhebung) of the impulse towards violence. These interpretations present violence as something constructively overcome in the self- education of the New Left, profitably yielding to ethics or civil disobedience. I contend that study of legitimations of violence beyond the trajectory of armed struggle and its overcoming allows us to see that the desire to confront the state was not overcome in the course of 1968 or the decade that followed: it was one of the most enduring contributions to radical subjectivity of the period.

Even if many members exited the militant scene and disavowed violence, and groups like the

Gauche prolétarienne and Revolutionärer Kampf collapsed in no small part due to the experience

43 For the “68 years” see Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds., 68: Une Histoire Collective, 1962-1981 (Paris: La Découverte, 2008). For the “red decade,” see Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt : unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution, 1967-1977 (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001).

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of violence, violence-legitimations and investment in militant protest outlasted the trajectory of any group or renunciation by any individual militant. However, careful study of the overall patterns of violence justification shows that in the course of the decade, conceptualizations of violence as means of politicization of the working class declined, and violence justifications became more oriented on the alleged role of violence as a practice of self-actualization among members of extreme-left groups—a turn epitomized by the decline of Marxism and rise of an autonomist politics of the first person (Politik erster Person).44 As Western European radicals’ understandings of violence were renegotiated in the course of the decade, they reconsidered its revolutionary dimension and instead came to primarily present it as a practice of the collective or individual self and an experience of autonomy or agency.45

1.1. French Revolutionary Discourse in the après-mai

For aspiring theoreticians within the French revolutionary left, violence from below represented one of the most salient dimensions of the 1968 events: French revolutionaries were not Gandhian

Satyagrahis and rather than consensus on civil disobedience, advocacy of revolutionary violence was common to groups vying for the 1968 legacy. The contrast between the French movement and its West German counterpart is instructive: in Germany during the Easter 1968 demonstrations, members of the student movement attempted to analytically differentiate between violence against

44 The key text was Thomas Schmidt, “Facing Reality: Organisation Kaputt,” Autonomie. Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft, no. 1 (October 1975): 16–35.

45 In this vein, Häberlin et al. write that violence became reformulated as a means of overcoming fear in the revolts of 1981. However, it should be noted that this merely put an affective turn on the notion of violence as praxis, while earlier members among the Sponti scene had already claimed resistance as the only alternative to state terror. Joachim C. Häberlen, Jake P. Smith, and Russel A. Spinney, “Struggling for Feelings: The Politics of Emotions in the Radical New Left in West Germany, c.1968-84,” Contemporary European History 23, no. 4 (November 2014): 615–37.

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objects and violence against persons, but French student revolutionaries articulated no such distinctions during or after May and June 1968—the police were fair game.46 Rather, in the course of the half-decade after the events of 1968, French revolutionary groups articulated a number of mutually reinforcing conceptualizations of legitimate self-defense, counter-violence, exemplary action, violence as means of ideological revolution, and violence as individual and collective de- serialization.47 Thus, the intellectual debates on violence masterfully tracked by Emma Kathryn

Kuby from 1944 to 1962 had political effects decades later on May 1968 radicals.48 In fact, radical violence-talk in large part reactivated conceptualizations introduced during post-war anticolonial struggles as depicted in the Critique de la Raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) and

Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth).49

One of the main concepts in play was “self-defense” (autodéfense).50 Originally self-defense articulated the refusal of victimization by the police and specifically, the defense of the right to

46 See below. Important English-language analyses of debates about violence in the West German APO include Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962- 1978 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 334–36; Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, 103–10.

47 As Julian Bourg has noted of the GP, violence quickly became an “overdetermined” category in militant discourse. Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 54–55.

48 Emma Kathryn Kuby, “Between Humanism and Terror: The Problem of Political Violence in Postwar France, 1944-1962” (Cornell University, 2011). Although Kuby does not consider 1968 and the seventies, the theoretical debates in France from 1944 to 1962 also had significant resonances on a Europe-wide scale from 1968 to 1977.

49 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, précédé de Question de méthode (Paris: Gallimard, 1960); Jean-Paul Sartre, “Préface à l’édition de 1961,” in Les damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 17–36; Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002). The chapter “On Violence,” had also been printed in the May 1961 issue of Les temps modernes.

50 Clovisse Versa, “Quand une idée pénètre les masses elle devient force matérielle,” Avant garde jeunesse, April 1968, 12; Alain Geismar, Serge July, and Evelyne Morane, Vers la guerre civile (Paris: Editions et publications premières, 1969), 160. The concept of self-defense against the militant far right OAS had been, 38 39

demonstrate in the face of state intervention. This variant of self-defense entered revolutionary print as early as the social movement in Caen in February of 1968. Foreshadowing the sensibility that marked later Parisian confrontations, a member of the Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire

(JCR), the most prominent French Trotskyist group during 1968, wrote that an organized and equipped group throwing stones and using slings could turn the relationship between protestors and police into “the opposition of two wills” rather than an univocal situation of police domination, and could thereby prevent police from restricting the liberty of expression of the movement.51

Similarly, the short-lived 1968 publication Action would deploy concepts of legitimate self- defense in its original May 7, 1968 issue: “One never fights against a stronger party for the pleasure of doing it (par plaisir)… The students are in a state of legitimate defense.”52

After 1968, the entrepreneurs of revolutionary violence typically stated that self-defense ought to yield to active, offensive actions. JCR militants conceptualized “worker self-defense” as early as June 1968 as a stage preceding the constitution of armed militia groups, and members of the Mouvement du 22 mars (M22) paradoxically concluded that self-defense included both self- protection and offensive operations.53 Similarly, leftists like Alain Geismar and Serge July who

unsuccessfully promoted within the far left and PCF at the apex of right-wing terrorism and state violence during the Algerian War of Independence. Dewerpe notes reactive, disorganized efforts to resist the murderous police onslaught at the February 8, 1962 Charonne demonstration in Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962, 142–62. Cf. Nicolas Lebourg, “L’affrontement des étudiants extrémistes, dans les années 1960,” Etudes Mai, no. 5 (April 27, 2018): 45–58.

51 Versa, “Quand une idée pénètre les masses elle devient force matérielle.”

52 Anonymous, “Pourquoi nous combattons,” Action, May 7, 1968, 4.

53 Bensaïd and Weber, Mai 1968, 200; Mouvement du 22 mars, Ce n’est qu’un début, continuous le combat (Paris: F. Maspero, 1968), 72.

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merged into the French Maoist movement wrote in Vers la guerre civile (Towards Civil War) that the self-defense provisions adopted in 1968 were but provisional stages on a route that should have led to organized revolutionary violence;54 the same authors indicted the movement for failure to pass from self-defense to insurrection on the second night of the barricades on May 24, 1968.55 In his published journal of the events, Surrealist poet Pierre Peuchmaurd, who also fought the police, criticized the decision to remain defensive and stated that the students ought to have adopted offensive, guerrilla tactics.56 This position extended to some members of more official groupings on the left like the Parti socialiste unifié (PSU).57

Although militant actions of the combat-demonstration type eventually came to function as substitutes for armed struggle in 1968 and the après-mai, it appeared self-evident to the revolutionaries that the dynamics of violence in protests and strikes would eventually generate armed conflict, envisioned either as a protracted armed struggle on a Maoist model or presented as a single, decisive insurrection. As the authors of Vers la guerre civile concluded, “The contradictions can only end in blood.”58 Similarly for prominent Trotskyists such as Daniel Bensaïd and Henri Weber, “a revolutionary organized direction would have been able to develop the

54 Geismar, July, and Morane, Vers la guerre civile, 198. For theoretical reflections on “civil war” as conceptual framework for understanding politics after 1968, see Foucault, La société punitive, 26–31.

55 Ibid., 204. For an extended critique of 22 March, Ibid., 206-210; for an even harsher critique of the defensive stance of the PSU, Ibid, 212.

56 Peuchmaurd, Plus vivants que jamais, 121.

57 Manuel Bridier, “Sur la violence,” Critique Socialiste, no. 1 (1970): 43–56.

58 Geismar et al., Vers la guerre civile, 137. As if to illustrate the connection between anti-imperialist transfers and the militarization of European radical thought, the text was written in Cuba, heart of the Latin American guerrilla struggle.

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already favorable relation of forces in order to turn May 1968 into a violent but not very bloody revolution.”59 By the early seventies, French leftist conceptualizations of self-defense were articulated to a problématique of revolution in which spontaneous, unarmed, and defensive force would yield to organized, armed, and offensive force in the last instance: the problem of the 1968 events was that “the last instance” had never arrived.

In the period after 1968, organizational heirs to the Trotskyist and Maoist groups of May and June sought to guide the movement towards the confrontations that had been missed. Because of its admittedly excessive rhetorical appeals to insurrection, penchant for street confrontations, and embrace of a clandestine, but aborted, armed strategy, the GP is most commonly viewed as the main representative of post-1968 revolutionary violence.60 In 1971, its journal Cahiers prolétariens struggled to counteract negative campaigns by the government and PCF but simultaneously insisted that “Violence is an element of practice.”61 As a 1976 issue of the Cahiers prolétariens published by recalcitrant militants from the Maoist movement noted, “the accent was placed on forms of direct, illegal and violent struggles…”62 Yet the Ligue communiste (LC), the second main social-revolutionary group of the après-mai, did not deplore violence either. Under the guidance of a Commission très spéciale (CTS) led by members like Michel Recanati,63 the

59 Bensaïd and Weber, Mai 1968, 203; Ligue communiste, Ce que veut la ligue, 76-77.

60 See Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 51-60; Bourg, “Red Guards of Paris,” 489-490.

61 Gauche prolétarienne, “À propos d’une dissolution,” Cahier prolétariens, no. 1 (January 1971): 10. Emphasis in the original.

62 Cause du peuple, “de gilles tautin à pierre overney,” Cahiers prolétariens : De la résistance prolétarienne à la Révolution Prolétarienne, no. 1 (May 1976): 6.

63 On Recanati, see Daniel Bensaïd, Une lente impatience (Paris: Stock, 2004), 171–73. See also Romain Goupil, Mourir à trente ans.

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demonstration security service (service d’ordre) of the LC developed into a quasi-autonomous organization that routinely sought confrontations between demonstrators and the police.64 In

January 1973, a Ligue communiste brochure on violence announced the coming “inevitable confrontation.”65 In other words, both main organizational competitors for the May 1968 heritage tended to frame militant protest and other violent interventions as potentially useful tactics to advance the revolutionary process.

French 1968 revolutionaries also framed their violence as “counter-violence” (contre- violence) in the face of state repression and the intrinsic violence of capitalist relations of production. Among leftists, the notion of counter-violence as the re-foundation of the broken reciprocity and endemic violence of capitalist society had sources in Francophone existential philosophy and particularly in the oeuvre of Jean-Paul Sartre. In his 1960 Critique de la raison dialectique, Sartre had written that “Violence always discloses itself as a counter-violence, a riposte to the violence of the Other…the insufferable fact of broken reciprocity and the systematic utilization of the humanity of man to realize the destruction of the human.” Sartre had unfolded the concept of counter-violence through analyses of colonization in Algeria, founding an interpretation in which anti-colonial violence was merely the overdue reciprocation of original colonial violence institutionalized in the colonial regime: these analyses were reformulated by

64 The JCR/LC service d’ordre served as a considerable advantage in the inter-group competition for recruits, while according to Bensaïd, by the early seventies, LC was probably the best-equipped group for armed struggle. For the service d’ordre, see Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 35–36; Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil, 77–81.

65 Ligue communiste, Qu’est-ce que la violence? (1973) 8.

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Frantz Fanon in his 1961 anticolonial masterwork Les Damnés de la terre.66 However, the concept of counter-violence proved amenable to redeployment under metropolitan conditions. In his intellectual commentary after May 1968, Sartre deployed the concept to legitimate revolutionary and worker violence under metropolitan conditions and explicitly defended the violence of the demonstrators as “counter-violence” against the police and against an oppressive society.67

Similarly, in an interview alongside André Glucksmann for a Frankfurt film collective in July of

1970, Sartre surreptitiously re-deployed the concept while critiquing intellectuals who decried leftist or worker violence. Sartre argued that scruples over violence “from below” were one-sided and arbitrary:

What does it mean to “avoid violence”? …Isn’t contemporary society based on violence? If this is the case, one can’t thoroughly change anything in this society by positioning oneself above violence. Now, all the intellectuals that…say to themselves “I will critique and write, but I consider violence something primitive and barbaric,” are accomplices of the regime, accomplices of a certain violence, namely, the established type (die etablierten). What they therefore consider to be barbaric and primitive violence is the violence of the masses, which is only a response to the violence that is constantly done to them [i.e., counter-violence].”68

66 Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, 687–88; Sartre, “Préface à l’édition de 1961”; Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre. For the debt of Fanon to Sartre, see Ben Etherington, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Decolonization? Frantz Fanon’s the Wretched of the Earth and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason,” Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 1 (April 2016): 151–78, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244314000523. The concept of counter-violence is omnipresent in Damnés although the term is only used rarely. One case of direct use is Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre, 85.

67 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les Bastilles de Raymond Aron,” in Situations VIII. Autour de 68 (Paris: NRF- Gallimard, 1971), 175; 178.

68 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich? Interview mit André Glucksmann, scope film kollektiv, Frankfurt. Hessischer Rundfunk, 12.7.1970,” in Der Intellektuelle und die Revolution (Niewied, Germany: Luchterhand, 1971), 48. Italics mine.

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Similarly, as Sartre told interviewer Claude Kiejman in January 1971, capitalist society was itself violent and the French state was repressive; therefore, “[Counter-]Violence is something absolutely necessary.”69

Uses of the concept of counter-violence within the French 1968 movement were common, although explicit recourse to the word was less frequent. From the start of the events, radical organs like Avant-garde jeunesse presented their own violence as a legitimate response to the illegitimate violence of the police. For the UNEF/SNE-Sup Commission Témoignages et Assistances juridique, the violence of the demonstrators was “in fact, a counter-violence [contre-violence] that only took certain extreme forms because of the provocation constituted by the police presence.”70

Later French Maoists articulated the concept of counter-violence to defend strikes, acts of sabotage, factory occupation and direct opposition to the police, often deploying it their broadsheets and tracts.71 Thus, at his trial before the Court of State Security in June of 1970, Alain

Geismar issued reiterated rhetorical deployments of the counter-violence concept.72 Similar uses of the concept of counter-violence reoccur regularly in militant reporting in the Maoist journal La

Cause du peuple, which regularly encouraged workers to riposte the violence of the police and the

69 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Ein Betriebstribunal. Interview mit Claude Kiejman, Paris,” in Der Intellektuelle und die Revolution (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971), 75. Emphasis in original.

70 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 67. See Ibid., 280: “Violence is inherent to the nature of the relations of production in our societies.”

71 “Counter-violence” also had extremely powerful resonances among members of the French extreme-left whose Jewish family members had been killed by fascists. For an interpretation of LC in terms of Jewish identity, see Florence Johsua, “‘Nous vengerons nos pères...’ De l’usage de la colère dans les organisations politiques d’extrême gauche dans les années 1968,” Politix N° 104, no. 4 (2013): 203–33, https://doi.org/10.3917/pox.104.0203.

72 Geismar, Pourquoi nous combattons.

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capitalists rather than suffer as victims. Similarly, the Cahiers prolétariens of January 1971 criticized the notion that “the use of popular counter-violence [contre-violence], the violent riposte to the permanent, legal violence of the dominant class,” could be postponed until the moment of insurrection.73 Occasionally, a cognitive turn was placed on counter-violence; thus, a student interviewed by Jacques Durandeaux in June 1968 conceptualized revolutionary violence as disclosure of the real violence in political and social relations: “When we pose the problem of violence and we talk about violence, we imagine that we are going to introduce on the political scene an element that is external to it, that doesn’t already exist within it… what the events revealed is that violence is fundamentally present in society…”74 Similarly, for the UNEF/SNE-Sup

Commission behind the Seuil publication Ils accusent, “The violence of enraged speech, the violence of the barricades rendered manifest the repressive structures of bourgeois society and its police armature in forcing the police to invade the street…75” And for André Glucksmann, rather than introducing conflict, the barricades “unveiled the field of battle that France has been, is, and remains.”76 The notion of the militant, violent demonstration as forcing the repressive structures of the state to unveil themselves was a conceptual lieu commun of the 1968 generation in both countries whose practical effects we will consider in Chapter Three.

73 Gauche prolétarienne, “À propos d’une dissolution,” 10.

74 Jacques Durandeaux, Les Journées de mai 1968, rencontres et dialogues (Bruges: Desclée, De Brouwer, 1968), 36. Italics mine.

75 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 283.

76 Glucksmann, Stratégie de la révolution, 11.

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Revolutionaries also posited allegedly subversive ideological effects for violence and identified it as a dimension of “exemplary action” (l’action exemplaire) that would inspire working-class militancy.77 Thus, in its May 18, 1968 issue, Avant-garde jeunesse declared that violent demonstrations were not merely a subjective indication of the will to struggle but integral to a process of politicization and destruction of ideologies of the state: “In rendering blow for blow to the CRS and mobile gendarmes (gardes mobiles), in demonstrating for the entire day in all of

Paris, in building barricades before the cordons of the police, we didn’t simply demonstrate that we were determined to win. We also began an immense process of demystification. We showed that the government (le pouvoir) wasn’t all-powerful, that the mobile gendarmes weren’t invincible, that ministerial decisions weren’t sacred, that the order of things wasn’t immobile.”78

The May 1968 special issue of Avant-garde jeunesse featured a full page image of student street- combats above worker picket in a visual manifestation of this thesis (fig. 1).

77 See Mouvement du 22 mars, Ce n’est qu’un début, continuous le combat, 59–74; Geismar, July, and Morane, Vers la guerre civile, 158–80. M22 members notably insisted on the “violent” dimension of all exemplary action; Mouvement du 22 mars, Ce n’est qu’un début, continuous le combat, 72.

78 Avant-garde jeunesse 13 (May 18, 1968), 4. Emphasis mine.

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FIG. 1.—Exemplary action and worker strikes. The layout of these images by an unknown photographer from the single-issue JCR publication La Nouvelle avant-garde 1 (June 1968) illustrates the thesis that student combativeness had catalyzed the politicization of the workers.

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Within the Maoist GP, the concept of exemplary action yielded to the notion of violence as a dimension of “ideological revolution” (la révolution idéologique).79 As Geismar and his companions put it in 1968, “The street is the site where the revolutionary proletariat accomplishes its ideological tasks; the site where the destruction of the repressive apparatus of state power concretely begins.”80 By 1970, prominent GP members argued that through carefully-selected confrontational actions, including violent demonstrations, revolutionary groups would generate a self-sustaining ideological revolution that would precede and prepare the prolonged armed struggle.81

The notion of ideological revolution derived in part from the theoretical legacy of

Althusserian Marxism and its reception of the Cultural Revolution in China. Prominent members of the GP hierarchy had attended the École normale supérieure and were former students of

Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, whose contemporary theoretical interventions posited ideology as a central element in the contestation and reproduction of capitalism.82 As early as 1966, in an essay written anonymously for his Maoist students, Althusser had written that the ideological

79 Radicals did not argue that their practice was exclusively ideological or symbolic, an interpretation that emerged only retrospectively. For Geismar and his comrades, in May, “symbolic power, in the deployment of the action, articulated itself to a real, growing power of resistance to the armed forces of repression.” Geismar et al., Vers la guerre civile, 162. Emphasis in original.

80 Geismar et al, Vers la guerre civile, 212. Note that there is also an appeal to the real, material aspect of the confrontation in this sentence.

81 Glucksmann, Stratégie de la révolution, 28; Gauche prolétarienne, “Illégalisme et guerre,” Cahier prolétariens, no. 1 (January 1971): 29–30.

82 Bourg, “The Red Guards of Paris.”

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(l’idéologique) could sometimes be the determinant instance of the class struggle.83 Althusser later theorized that the privileged modality for the inculcation of ideology was “interpellation,” the practice of “recruiting” epitomized by the police officer’s demand to submit to identification in the street.84 The GP theoretical framework tacitly posited revolutionary violence as a counter- interpellation that recruited workers to revolutionary ideology. Thus, another anonymous GP member situated violence as part of the ideological revolution in the fall of 1969 (“violent struggles are necessary…the current phase of the revolution is the ideological phase”).85 As the Cahiers de la Gauche prolétarienne put it in May 1970, “violent partisan actions create the ideological conditions for a prolonged armed struggle.”86 The following January, the Cahiers prolétariens insisted that “physical violence against the law and against bourgeois order marks as a general rule the most advanced point of the ideological revolution…”87 GP Maoists considered limited physical violence to be an irreducible element of the ideological revolution that would provide the

83 Louis Althusser, “Sur la révolution culturelle,” Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes, no. 14 (November 1966): 16. “The domain of the ideological is one of the fields of the class struggle…it can become the strategic site where, in certain circumstances, the fate of the class struggle hangs in the balance.”

84 For interpellation, Althusser, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’état : Notes pour une recherche.” By 1970, however, Althusser strongly disapproved of the focus on confrontations between revolutionaries and the forces of order among his ex-protégés. For Althusser and May 1968, Stéphane Legrand, “Louis Althusser : mai 1968 et les fluctuations de l’idéologie,” Actuel Marx n° 45, no. 1 (April 9, 2009): 128–36.

85 Anonymous, “Les guérilleros sans fusils,” Le nouvel observateur, December 15, 1969, 22.

86 Gauche prolétarienne, “Rapport d’orientation,” Cahiers de la Gauche prolétarienne, no. 2 (May 1970): 41–42. “Violent demonstrations” (manifestations violentes) were considered an integral part of the repertoire of “violent partisan actions”; Ibid., 40.

87 Gauche prolétarienne, “Illégalisme et guerre,” 31.

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conditions for armed conflict.88 As Glucksmann put it in the July 1970 interview, “The workers are now practically testing their forces. When this experiment is over—we call it ‘ideological revolution’—then the moment for armed struggle will come.”89 Sartre faithfully summarized the interpretation of his younger comrades when he stated in 1972 that “The masses, in France, had not achieved the stage of armed struggle. Regardless, the Maoists, very conscious of the long march that they had to make, wanted first of all to resuscitate revolutionary violence by punctual, effective, more or less symbolic actions…”90 Maoist conceptualizations of violence were thus aligned on themes of contemporary French post-structuralism involving ideology and the reproduction of the relations of production.91 Although few militants stated that violent political practice could be analyzed exclusively based on its ideological dimension, it is nevertheless true that most proponents of violence posited that in the contemporary period its value lay in its ideological effects on both revolutionaries and the working class. In short, the revolutionary imaginary would come to power through violence.

Despite the organizational competition between the GP and the Trotskyist LC, this framework actually extended from the Maoists to members of the Trotskyist left. As prominent

Trotskyists Daniel Bensaïd and Henri Weber concluded in their text on May 68, “The political value of any struggle comes from its ideological effects (son incidence idéologique) as much as

88 Geismar, Pourquoi nous combattons, 14-15; Benny Lévy (alias Pierre Victor) in Michèle Manceaux, Les maos en France. Avant-propos de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 239.

89 Glucksmann in Sartre, “Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich?,” 45.

90 Sartre, Preface to Manceaux, Les maos en France. Avant-propos de Jean-Paul Sartre, 8.

91 Althusser, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’état : Notes pour une recherche.”

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from its concrete results.”92 Members of the LC endorsed use of violence in order to revolutionize the ideology of the working class even as they classed the Maoists as “armed reformists” and perceived their own demonstration security service (service d’ordre) as the core of a future red army.93 As Bensaïd declared in June of 1970, “We are for revolutionary violence, for the resistance that ruins the prestige and authority of the tyrannical and the little bosses, [violence] that brings to life class antagonisms.”94 The point of militant self-defense and other actions, according to the oft- quoted Leninist slogan, was to “arm the masses with the desire to arm themselves.”95 Bensaïd and three fellow members of the Political Bureau of the Ligue concluded in the preparatory remarks for their Third Congress in June of 1972 that violence would have to be “reintroduced” into social conflict and also presented the “minoritarian violence” of the avant-garde as a means of encouraging “mass violence.”96 In short, both main wings of French post-1968 revolutionary politics conceptualized violent acts as potentially subversive of the respect for legality and

92 See Bensaïd and Weber, Mai 1968, 142. Emphasis in the original.

93 See the song of the LC service d’ordre in Adam and Coustal, C’était la Ligue, 159.

94 “In order to pass to another level of the confrontation, technical preparation and a qualitatively different organizational classification are needed. The problems of clandestinity, the relationships between political organization and military work…are the tasks and the questions of the hour. Only their solution will allow to pass to another level than the simple escalation of paving-stones and matraques.” Daniel Bensaïd, “La gauche prolétarienne ou la violence réformiste,” Rouge, June 1, 1970.

95 Ligue Communiste, Ce que veut la Ligue communiste. Section française de la 4e Internationale; manifeste du Comité central des 29 et 30 janvier 1972 (Paris: François Maspero, 1972), 81. Ligue communiste, Autodéfense ouvrière, 25.

96 Paul Alliès et al., “Le problème du pouvoir se pose ? Posons-nous-le !,” Bulletin intérieur, no. 30 (June 21, 1972). Bensaïd, Une lente impatience, 149–50; Adam and Coustal, C’était la Ligue, 153–57.

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authority that undergirded the capitalist state: the roar of battle would overwhelm the symphony of state ideology. Revolutionary violence was ideology critique in action.

Focus on the ideological effects of violence provided a measure for ascertaining and regulating its use: for the most prominent wings of French 1968 leftism, limitations on violence followed from appraisals of the risks of premature armed struggle in the absence of a combative working class and from the requirement that violence be legitimated in eyes of the workers. For the authors of Vers la guerre civile, it would have been an error to prematurely take up arms during the events of 1968: “To shoot down (abattre) the CRS, to trigger civil war, would have closed the movement off…The only consequence would have been to isolate the partisans from the mass, breaking the unfurling of the movement.”97 As Henri Weber would later assert, in this framework,

“Violence was supposed to remain symbolic, thus, restrained and self-limited.”98 According to the prevailing orientations of French revolutionary groups, specialized armed struggle would have to await correct conditions; until then, violence ought to be both explicit in its justification and open to worker participation. In other words, the limitations on violence flowed primarily from the politico-military imaginary of French social-revolutionary groups, rather than from exogenous moral considerations.

97 Geismar et al., Vers la guerre civile, 158. Ultra-leftist Pierre Goldman claimed to have encouraged armed violence against the state in 1968 on the grounds that the military response of the police would have radicalized the struggle, but recalled facing incredulity from most 1968 revolutionaries; Pierre Goldman, Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 70–71. By his own avowal, prior to his arrest in 1970, Goldman began to plan armed guerrilla struggle and met a Maoist hierarch (probably Benny Lévy) to discuss this but missed their later follow-up meeting; Ibid., 80-81; 99-100.

98 Weber, Rebelle jeunesse, 166.

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Self-identifying revolutionaries imbued the ideological dimension of violence with democratic potential, envisioning it as a means of mobilizing masses. For Glucksmann,

“[exemplary] action is validated by its content, its form, and its power of communication”99; the

Cahiers of the gauche prolétarienne announced in the summer of 1970 that the political targets of militant intervention had to be apparent, while “even the military form of the action must be immediately assimilable by the masses.”100 In January 1971, the GP journal Cahiers prolétariens differentiated its own understandings of violence from the concept of “minoritarian violence.” The

GP opposed small groups that “substituted themselves” for mass initiatives while asserting that punctual actions by small groups might nevertheless “accelerate” working-class struggles101 –in other words, social-revolutionary violence.

Similarly, the Trotskyists of LC attempted to establish a politico-military criterion that would allow the calibration of violence to working-class combativeness. As Michel Lenoir put it in the broadsheet Rouge in 1972, “revolutionary, violent, illegal action only takes on significance in relation to a general political context and a level of consciousness of the masses that includes sufficiently exceptional traits such that the action will not turn against its authors.”102 In 1973, the

99 Glucksmann, Stratégie et révolution, 95. Cf. 30-31 : “‘Extraparliamentary’ violence…is the condition of a dialogue with the State—forced to recognize that the one he cannot physically suppress is a ‘worthy interlocutor;’ it is [also] an effective dialogue with the population, in able to obtain the reinforcement of other political sectors.” Glucksmann also proposed that the concept of “symbolic efficacy”(from the work of structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss) provided an explanation for the success of the barricades; Ibid., 48-49fn2.

100 Gauche prolétarienne, “Rapport d’orientation,” 48.

101 Gauche prolétarienne, “Illégalisme et guerre,” 29.

102 Michel Lenoir, “La violence hors de l’histoire,” Rouge, March 18, 1972.

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brochure Qu’est-ce que la violence? outlined two types of “minoritarian violence,” including divisive expressions of frustration, on the one hand, and “real revolutionary acts,” on the other: “If minoritarian violence may, in the best of cases have an exemplary value and encourage struggle, the organized violence of the mass of the workers is even more effective and educational. Only it can throw down the system of capitalist oppression.”103 The workers must in the end understand and deploy violence themselves, guided to this conclusion by the new revolutionary party. Yet if violence were to be effective in this way, its legitimacy would have to be apparent to those workers, embedded in their experiences.104 In this framework, the contours of the imagined revolutionary process posed limits to the degree of specialization or militarization involved in contemporary confrontations; hence, the predilection for confrontations in the street that were both more open to spontaneous participation than armed struggle and that afforded a degree of restraint—no killing— in order to satisfy the need for comprehension.

Some French social revolutionaries also conceptualized violence as a privileged practice – perhaps the practice—through which individuals and groups, tacitly gendered masculine, became true political subjects out of their passive condition as objects of state violence and practiced serious politics. Embrace of violence thus assumed a privileged status in the self-definition of revolutionaries and became a criterion of inclusion in the true revolutionary forces over and against

103 Ligue communiste, Qu’est-ce que la violence? 6. The historical record contradicts Henri Weber, who retrospectively imagines that the LC were unilaterally hostile to minoritarian violence; Weber, Rebelle jeunesse, 165. For a useful corrective, Daniel Bensaïd, “Terrorisme et lutte de classe,” Rouge, September 30, 1972; Lenoir, “La violence hors de l’histoire.”

104 For a similar conception, see “Legalità Borghese e violenza rivoluzionaria,” Lotta Continua, vol. 2, no. 10, April 18, 1970, 7.

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orthodox Communists and socialists who had embraced parliamentary forms.105 Peuchmaurd noted how reunions early in May 1968 had introduced a new notion to the podium: “In the absence of a revolutionary party, the true revolutionaries are those who fight the police.”106 In this conceptualization, willingness to countenance violence provided the criterion of revolutionary subjectivity. For the Comité Censier in 1968, “Whoever refuses violence a priori is not revolutionary...”107 In a similar framework, as an October 1968 tract “On the Demonstration” announced, demonstrations were apolitical without the threat of violence: “In order to have any political dimension whatsoever, a demonstration must either lead to violence or take place calmly in order to show that it is able to do without violence.108

In other words, for one faction of the social-revolutionary left, violence and politics were identified such that its embrace by the movement represented recognition of the “essence” of the political. As Glucksmann argued in his 1968 Stratégie de la révolution (The Strategy of

Revolution), with resonances from the political theory of interwar reactionary jurist (and eventual fascist) Carl Schmitt, “Only the one who has the stupidity to confound political life and parliamentary life will be able to imagine that the ‘violence’ violated peaceful ‘political debate.’

By abandoning the reign of verbal declarations in order to define itself in the world of relations of force, politics commits no infidelity to itself: it simply becomes serious. The outermost, but

105 Bensaïd and Weber, Mai 1968, 22. As late at 1976, Maoists would proclaim: “The use of revolutionary violence is the touchstone that separates the revolutionaries and the reformists…” Cause du peuple, “de gilles tautin à pierre overney,” 6.

106 Peuchmaurd, Plus vivants que jamais, 40.

107 Comité Censier tract, June 7, 1968, BNF LB61-600 (931).

108 Comité pour la révolution permanente, “Sur la manifestation,” 1.

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permanent possibility of violence defines the game of political forces in its specificity. There is no politics without the horizon of violence…”109

Some 1968 violence entrepreneurs presented violence as de-reification of the individual and collective self—a framework evidently derived from the anticolonial writings of Fanon and

Sartre.110 In his journal of the Parisian 1968 confrontations, entitled Plus vivants que jamais (!),

Peuchmaurd presented the adversarial confrontations of May and June 1968 as moments when protagonists contacted the real, passing beyond the domain of abstraction (“We have passed from the vague to the precise, from the dream to reality, from the conceptual to the physical. We will no longer listen to the ex-combatants: we have experienced violence.”)111 Similarly, as a 27-year- old ex-student told interviewer Jacques Durandeaux in June 1968, “For the moment, it is necessary to live at the level of violence, at the level of the demonstrations, we have to remain at this primitive level in order to be able to become conscious of ourselves, to permit us to have ideas that we have

109 André Glucksmann, Stratégie de la révolution (Paris: C. Bourgeois, 1968), 28–29. Glucksmann masked his quasi-Schmittian definition of the political behind an appeal to the writings of Max Weber. Significantly, the same political theorist, Julien Freund, had introduced both Weber and Schmitt to French audiences in the sixties. See Julien Freund, L’essence du politique (Paris: Sirey, 1965); Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Notably, Schmitt himself had claimed that Marxists that took class struggle “seriously” would begin to face the bourgeoisie as an enemy engaged in “civil war.” Ibid., 37. See also Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, 208-210.

110 Cf. Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, 90: “At the level of individuals, violence sobers” (la violence désintoxique). Ibid., 91: “Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification…the enterprise of mystification becomes, in the long term, practically impossible.” In his commentary, Sartre would claim that anti-colonial violence allowed the colonized to “recover his lost transparency” and “know himself.” Sartre, “Préface à l’édition de 1961,” 32. Sixty-eighters appear to have “translated” these authors as theorists of violence in the abstract, implying that the theses were applicable outside of colonial conflictuality or armed struggle. Cf. Sommier, La violence politique, 62-64.

111 Peuchmaurd, Plus vivants que jamais, 171. Ibid., 48: “we are starting to understand that what we do is serious, that this night is unparalleled, that we have never truly lived until now…” Cf. Fanon 91: “The praxis that has thrown them into a desperate mêlée (corps à corps) confers on the masses a voracious taste for the concrete.”

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still never had, that were blocked somehow…The confrontation revealed myself to me…”112 In these frames, violence was valuable not merely for its potential political effects on those outside the movement, but on the basis of criteria entirely located within the revolutionary subject, individual or collective—the revolution of the self, outside any theory of the revolutionary period or working-class radicalization. In sum, violence was praxis.113 Though already anticipated in the après-mai, the conceptualization of violence as praxis and criterion of revolutionary subjectivity tended to express itself more directly as the revolutionary horizon –and the number of members involved in Maoist and Trotskyist groupuscules—receded in the course of the late seventies and violence in protest became the specialty of the autonomists (autonomes).

Anchored in a transnational European current in the second half of the seventies and inspired by Italian Autonomia,114 the French autonomists of the late seventies tended to articulate the same concepts that had been advanced during the ascendant period of the revolutionary left from 1968 to 1973: militant self-defense, counter-violence, violence as criterion of revolutionary subjectivity, and violent praxis. However, autonomes no longer conceived of violence as a means of activation of worker agency and such a proposition would have expressed an avant-garde position that autonomes typically regarded as illegitimate. Autonomist discourse illustrates how the decline of revolutionary horizons in the late seventies prompted a re-articulation of

112 Durandeaux, Les journées de mai, 14-15. Italics mine. Cf. Sartre, Preface to Damnés, 29.

113 This discursive act essentially substituted “violence” for “labour” in the original Marxist anthropology, just as Sartre arguably did in his Critique. Cf. Marx, Capital, 283. For Marx and violence, see Étienne Balibar, “Reflections on Gewalt,” Historical Materialism 17, no. 1 (March 2009): 99–125, https://doi.org/10.1163/156920609X399227.

114 See Falciola, Il movimento del 1977 in Italia.

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revolutionary left violence discourse that foregrounded self-defense, counter-violence, and praxis and tended to leave behind the notion of ideological revolution or violence as a means of politicization.115 On the one hand, in a move highly reminiscent of Critique de la raison dialectique by Sartre, or the Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche, in an autumn 1976 article, autonome Bernard

Nadoulek defined violence as the general form of relations between humans, one another, and the world: “Violence is the constituting force of all of human history, beyond all value judgments it is a relation of domination that man establishes with his milieu, his peers, and his own nature, [and] power is the retroactive, formal sanction of this relationship.” Nadoulek criticized the organized violence of the militants, and almost rejected the notion of revolutionary violence altogether as the product of a disempowered mode of behavior fashioned by the originary violence of institutions.

Organized revolutionary groups and their services d’ordre allegedly “recreate[d] the apparatuses of repression and self-repression functioning in the same mode as that of the institutionalized violence of the system.”116 He also deployed the concept of violence as a practice of individual and collective de-reification in a framework highly reminiscent of Sartre: “The affirmation of individual violence defines itself as a condition of the experience whereby, in deconstruction our social inhibitions, we progress towards the capacity of mastering an autonomy that is the safeguard of a revolutionary action, but also its aim.”117 Violence, in other words, was a means of autonomization of the self, even if the Camarades article also pleaded for a modicum of

115 Nadoulek, “Sur la violence,” Camarades, nouvelle série 2 (Summer 1976): 45-47; Bernard Nadoulek, Violence au fil d’Ariane : du karate à l’autonomie politique, Poche-Bourgois (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1977).

116 Nadoulek, “Sur la violence,” 47.

117 Ibid.

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pragmatism and the insertion of violence into decentralized revolutionary strategy. Similarly, in

December of 1976, the autonomist journal Camarades reclaimed both mass violence and armed struggle as a criteria of revolutionary subjectivity against the state, against the standard parties, and against the groupuscules that had disavowed confrontations by the late seventies, including the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR), the successor to the Trotskyist legacy.118 The following November, after a banned Parisian demonstration during the Klaus Croissant affair,119 another author for Camarades claimed that the new movement had transcended the “ideological” positions of the “old” revolutionary movements that had ended up either embracing passivity or declining into an isolated, militarized duel on the model of the West German RAF.120 Yet despite the claim to a new start, the author rapidly ended up enmeshed in a classical argumentation based on the notion of counterviolence: “The problématique of ‘violence/nonviolence’ is already outmoded by the movement, because the restructuration of capital has implied the setting up of very elevated repressive structures, which prohibit us today from imagining winning struggles if we don’t envision the level of violence that will be necessarily assumed in the direct confrontation with the state.”121 In other words, violence was necessitated by the repressive structure of the capitalist state. Autonomes would move from theory to practice at the March 23, 1979 Parisian

118 “La question de la violence, l’État, le mouvement révolutionnaire et l’union de la gauche,” Camarades. Revue militante dans l’autonomie, no. 3 (December 1976): 32–35.

119 For Croissant, see Markus Lammert, “Die französische Linke, der Terrorismus und der ‘repressive Staat’ in der Bundesrepublik in den 1970er Jahren,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichtte 59, no. 4 (October 2011): 533–60, https://doi.org/10.1524/vfzg.2011.0028.

120 Anonymous, “Sur la violence, encore et toujours,” Camarades. Revue militante dans l’autonomie, no. 6 (November 1977): 9–10.

121 Ibid.

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demonstrations by the metallurgists of the CGT trades union and conduct extended street fights involving the police.

Violence discourse in French leftist circles went through three different sequences. Self- defense and counter-violence were introduced as early as 1968 and remained conceptual resources.

By contrast, discourse assigning violence validity as exemplary action or element of ideological revolution multiplied from 1968 to 1972 before entering decline in 1973 alongside the dissolution of groupuscules like the GP and LC and the turn towards an autonomist perspective in which the notion of activating worker agency from outside through violence was sidelined. Finally, understandings of violence as marker of true revolutionary status or real political practice and violence as collective and individual de-reification had advocates already in 1968 and within post-

1968 groups but tended to return in force alongside the emergence of the autonomes in the latter half of the seventies. Thus, the historical trajectory of “violence” was above all conditioned by the decline of the vanguardist and workerist perspectives, just as we will see that the rise of a “politics in the first person” in the Frankfurt Spontaneist movement led to the recalibration of violence away from the notion of exemplary action and towards violence as a realization of the subjective praxis of the movement.

1.2. Violence-Talk and Militant Protest in the West German APO, 1968-1972

Although the violence debate in the Federal Republic of Germany had begun already in the mid- sixties, the writings and debates of West German 1968 foregrounded far more ambivalent ideological positions on violence than the ones that prevailed in French revolutionary groups: significantly, the very notion of a violence question (Gewaltfrage) common to German social- revolutionary discourse in 1968 had no equivalent in the Hexagon, where the value of

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revolutionary violence was self-evident. Yet West German revolutionaries’ conceptualizations of violence would similarly multiply in the course of the late sixties and early seventies. Self- identifying revolutionaries articulated concepts ranged from self-defense, to counter-violence, to violence as a means of politicization, and militancy as praxis. Indeed, there was a high-level of ideological congruence between the two movements, yet outside of the discussion of armed struggle, West German revolutionary discourse on violence was defined by relative pragmatism in contrast to the positions articulated in France. Predictably, in light of the relative absence of radical agitation among the West German working class, the ongoing isolation of the German APO, and the lack of any domestic equivalent to the general strike of French 1968, West German revolutionaries rarely articulated any analogue to the French identification of violence as an ideological means of resuscitating worker combativity or initiating revolution, although by 1973, the Frankfurt group Revolutionärer Kampf occasionally re-deployed the concept of “exemplary action” (exemplarische Aktion) articulated during Parisian 1968. West German Spontaneist revolutionaries who opposed armed struggle but embraced the paving-stone would also come to defend social-revolutionary violence—violence as articulated to the social struggles of the working class or its youth substitutes— in ways that neatly mapped onto the theories of the earlier

Gauche prolétarienne and Ligue communiste in France.

Belying the claim that West German social revolutionaries legitimated violence against objects but disavowed violence against persons, the most militant public variant of West German revolutionary discourse in 1968 actually defended legitimate “self-defense” (Notwehr,

Selbstverteidigung) against the police. Thus, an anonymous tract entitled “Violence” published

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during the April 1968 demonstrations abjured violence “except in self-defense,”122 and a report on discussions on the violence question (Gewaltfrage) at the Technical University during the April protests announced that “we can only apply violence against persons in cases of self-defense and defense of a third party….”123 Similarly, in interviews between Der Spiegel and SDS national leaders Karl D. Wolff and Frank Wolff during the April 1968 demonstrations, the two insisted that some recourses to stone-throwing were justified in order to avoid victimization by the police. In response to a skeptical Spiegel interviewer, the Wolffs distanced SDS from incidents whereby stone-throwing had injured and killed bystanders in Bavaria, but insisted that “we are also not in the future going to let ourselves be defenselessly worked over (zusammenschlagen) by the police,” and evoked a right of resistance (Widerstandsrecht).124

Nevertheless, it is true that for West German radicals the notion of “counter-violence

“(Gegenwalt) initially articulated a limited justification for applying force to the material infrastructure of police violence, namely, the water cannon (Wasserwerfer) and for breaking the publishing machinery in the hands of the Springer media conglomerate. This notion of

Gegengewalt articulated a regulatory strategy that aimed at general social recognition of the use of force by the movement: “Our use of violence must always remain recognizable as counter- violence, that is, as a response to the violence that the dominant group imposes…”125 Thus, in the

122 “Gewalt,” 19 April 1968, APO-Archiv, Standort Berlin, 1382-1385.

123 “Ergebnisse der Diskussionen im Audimax der TU zur Frage der Gewalt und zu unseren weiteren Aktionen,” mimeographed fragment of a larger report in APO-Archiv, 1382-1385, 5.

124 Der Spiegel, 22 April 1968, 39.

125 “Ergebnisse der Diskussionen.” Emphasis in original. Cf. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, 687– 88.

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spring of 1968, the consensus remained that self-defense was valid against police violence but that counter-violence could only be applied to the technological infrastructure of state violence.

Nevertheless, self-defense would broaden its conceptual scope in the post-1968 period; as an authorial collective in Berlin declared after the cobblestone confrontations around demonstrations against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in May of 1970, “We are in self-defense (Notwehr) against this awful (beschissene) society.”126 Similarly, the concept of counter-violence would come to articulate an appeal to offensive violence against persons and leave behind its original specificity.

In well-known slogans like “Break what breaks you!” (Macht kaputt, was euch kaputt macht!) the point was generally that society itself was intrinsically violent to marginalized revolutionaries and the working class and thus the potential object of legitimate counter-violence.

In the course of the year 1968, some APO members eventually advocated offensive violence against the police in the context of militant combat-demonstrations (militante

Kampfdemonstration). On the whole, the 1968 movement in the Federal Republic demonstrated fundamental ambivalence towards, and often rejection of, offensive violence. After the confrontational November 4, 1968 action before the Berlin state court on Tegeler Weg (Chapter

Two), a contentious assembly in the Audimax of the Technical University ensued, and the FU-

Spiegel student newspaper published a two-page debate about the action. Nevertheless, violent, adversarial protest had its advocates, and understandings of violence as de-reification of the self and real political practice were evinced, not least by an anonymous SDS authorial collective after

126 Agit 883 60 (14 May 1970): 2.

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the Tegel action.127 According to the authors, by the throwing of stones against the police, demonstrators had overcome their designated position as victims of police violence, negated their internalized, “bourgeois ideology,” and acted in a “real offensive” against state power based on a

“correct insight” into the nature of the bourgeois state.128 Similarly, in the context of anti- imperialist demonstrations in Berlin in May 1970, militants articulated conceptualizations of violence as self-defense; counter-violence against imperialism; criterion of revolutionary subjectivity; and praxis.129

From 1968 to 1971, the militant subculture grouped on the Berlin scene around the broadsheet Agit 883 advocated both armed struggle and militant “mass” violence such as that advocated by elements of the French revolutionary left.130 In fact, Agit 883 printed the foundational theoretical justification of armed struggle by the RAF, Das Konzept Stadtguerilla, in May 1971, while a number of its contributors, including Gudrun Ensslin, founded the prominent clandestine armed guerrilla group.131 However, as is often overlooked due to the streamlining of historical inquiries into the German revolutionary left and violence around the history of terrorism, the same

127 For in-depth canvassing of the Tegel debates, see Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, 104–7.

128 SDS-Autorenkollektiv, “Realer Angriff. Action am Tegeler Weg.,” FU Spiegel, no. 67 (December 1968): 6.

129 Agit 883 60 (May 14, 1970): 2. The epigram to the article was a quote from Mao on the latent violence of the masses.

130 References embraced the Red Army Fraction of the Japanese Zengakuren, the Tupamaros of Uruguay, and the PLO. For German reporting on the French GP and its duel against the state, an exemplary issue is Agit 883 65 (July 1970).

131 As an anonymous Autonome, nom-de-guerre “Geronimo” noted in his nineties retrospective Fire and Flame, “this step was not indicative of the majority of anti-authoritarian activists though.” Geronimo, Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement (PM Press, 2012), 47–48.

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paper also launched a critique of the armed guerrilla orientation in the Federal Republic on grounds that aligned on contemporary French revolutionary left criticisms of minoritarian violence. Thus, the December 1971 article “Leninists with Guns” articulated an understanding of true revolutionary violence as mass intervention in opposition to the minoritarian, armed struggle orientation of the RAF: “The RAF grabs ahold of its weapons arsenal in order to arouse the appearance through its actions that the masses will understand them, identify themselves with them, and in these actions recognize their own latent resistance against their oppressors and exploiters. [RAF] completely ignores in this that in highly developed capitalist countries secret militant groups can only operate in an active mass movement…”132

In other words, the armed struggle orientation was already becoming a transcendent vanguard that would not encourage worker combativity even if it did arouse passive sympathy.

More notably, the article articulated a concept of revolutionary violence that evidently had its model in the general strike of Parisian May 1968–revolutionary violence as embodiment of the social struggle of the working class: “[For European armed struggle groups] violence is no longer conceptualized as the means for oppressed classes and strata to find voice in violent capitalist society; it is much more for them the content of the struggle. But violence is not all equal violence: we have to pose the question of revolutionary violence within class society. Revolutionary violence, revolutionary struggle today in the metropole is the resistance of the class that has no means of production…”133 Yet although this intervention implied that some radicals of the Berlin

132 “Rote Armee Fraktion: Leninisten mit Knarren,” Agit 883, no. 86 (December 6, 1971): 9.

133 Ibid.

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APO deplored all violence but that of the “masses,” the following two issues applauded the self- defense measures taken by youths who had occupied the Berlin Georg-von-Rauch Haus in

December 1971 and established an “autonomous youth center” in Hannover.134 In sum, the youth could be oppressed classes practicing revolutionary violence too, provided that violence was articulated to a social struggle. This was no purely aleatory perspective; in the coming decade, housing struggles in Frankfurt would provide the historical conditions for radical re-appropriations of the discourse and practice of militant protest by Frankfurt Spontaneists and in particular by the group Revolutionärer Kampf. Since the Spontis formed the most influential current of the self- defined “undogmatic left” of the seventies, studying their positions provides a useful entry-point for the broader analysis of violence discourse and the West German revolutionary left of the seventies.135

1.3. „Wer sich nicht wehrt, lebt verkehrt“136: Violence Discourse and Revolutionärer Kampf,

1973-1975

During the period from 1973 to 1976, the group Revolutionärer Kampf (RK) would become the leading exponent of revolutionary violence as expressed in the form of militant protests and physical altercations with the police. Infamously, RK member and later foreign minister Joschka

134 Agit 883 87 (January 22, 1972); Agit 883 88 (February 16, 1972).

135 For a helpful dissertation on the Sponti movement that looks occasionally to their views on violence, see Kasper, “Das Ende der Utopien.” Its organizational history and discourse render Revolutionärer Kampf a West German analogue of the French Gauche prolétarienne. The GP represented a merger of Maoist workerism and the antiauthoritarian current of M22 and also derided as a “Spontaneist” organization by rivals; RK organizational affiliates included the Hamburg “antidogmatic” Maoist group Proletarische Front (PF) and the Köln group Arbeiterkampf.

136 Frankfurt Spontaneist slogan. English: “Whoever doesn’t defend himself lives badly.”

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Fischer would become the leader of an informal, 40-member group, composed mostly of young men, that trained in various street-fighting techniques, the Putzgruppe.137 Discussions of violence among members of RK during the 1973-1975 struggles typically mobilized the concept of “self- defense” (Selbstverteidigung), but revolutionaries also had recognizable recourse to notions of

“counter-violence” (Gegengewalt), violence as means of politicization, and revolutionary violence as necessary embodiment of the struggle of the working class. Thus, the militant Sponti framework for conceptualizing violence largely deployed concepts that had been articulated in 1968 by the antiauthoritarian currents of the Mouvement du 22 mars in France, the Gauche prolétarienne, and the Italian radicals of Lotta Continua. This was no accident, insofar as RK was informally led by

Daniel Cohn-Bendit of May 1968 notoriety and other militants enamored of Italian radicalism and

RK militants also worked alongside activists from Lotta Continua who were in exile in West

Germany.

Yet the RK newspaper Wir wollen Alles! also engaged in politico-military considerations on violence that sought to balance the alleged political value of combat against the police against the risks of criminalization and the threat that militants would isolate themselves from both the population and broader social movements.138 In the end, RK rejected armed struggle as minoritarian and self-lacerating but simultaneously derided the reluctance to use violence by

137 For Fischer, see Sibylle Krause-Burger, Joschka Fischer : Der Marsch Durch Die Illusionen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1997); Wolfgang Kraushaar, Fischer in Frankfurt : Karriere eines Aussenseiters (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001); Paul Hockenos, Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic : An Alternative History of Postwar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

138 For a representative RK article on the strategy of the SPD and the police that evinces Sponti fears of political marginalization and criminalization, see Revolutionärer Kampf, “Die Politik von SPD und Polizei: Spalten, kriminalisieren, draufschlagen,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 13–14 (March 1974): 9–10.

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contemporary Marxist-Leninist groups like the Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschlands (KBW) as consented subjection to domination and state violence.139 Meanwhile, although historians have often argued that intellectuals of the Frankfurt school –particularly Herbert Marcuse--were a prominent source of New Left understandings of protest and violence in West Germany,140

Frankfurt Spontaneists frequently evoked a line in Humanisme et terreur (1947) by Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, one of the first philosophical efforts to articulate the concept of counter-violence in post-war French thought. As Walter Günterroth would recall at the end of the seventies, “We said [that] we did not invent violence; we merely found it before us; in order to eliminate violence, we required violence.”141 This was an adulterated line from the classic 1947 essay, and it is tempting to conclude that RK were trying to translate the post-war triangulation between the pacifist yogi and the militarized commissar into post-1968 conditions in West Germany, opting for an allegedly social-revolutionary, proletarian violence as a way out of the alternative between

139 For criticisms of the KBW, Revolutionärer Kampf, “Zwei Sorten von Kommunisten,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 15 (April 1974): 12. For armed struggle, Revolutionärer Kampf, “Wenn der RK kräht auf dem Mist, kommt die Masse, oder sie bleibt wo sie ist,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 17 (June 1974): 9; “Brief an die Bewegung des 2. Juni,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 17 (June 1974): 12. Significantly, RK rarely printed communiques or reported on actions by armed struggle groups operating in the Federal Republic of Germany; in fact, its publisher, Trikont, was responsible for the original publication of an ex-urban guerrilla who had abandoned armed struggle, Michael “Bommi” Baumann. See Michael Baumann, Wie alles anfing, 1. Aufl (München: Trikont-Verlag, 1975). However, RK and other Spontis were initially more receptive to the Italian Brigate Rosse; see Wir wollen Alles! 19 (August 1974).

140 Wolfgang Kraushaar and Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, eds., Frankfurter Schule Und Studentenbewegung: Von Der Flaschenpost Zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995, 1. Aufl (Frankfurt am Main: Rogner & Bernhard bei Zweitausendeins, 1998). Cf. Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, 92–94.

141 Walter Güntheroth, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” Autonomie. Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft, no. 13 (January 1979): 34. The quote comes up as early as the RK contribution to the Frankfurt University discussion on violence in May 1972. Rote Hilfe, Neues vom Sozial-Staat. Dokumentation zum Teach-in der Roten Hilfe zur unmittelbaren Unterdrückung durch Polizei und Justiz (Frankfurt am Main: Rote Hilfe, 1972), 34.

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pacifism and the urban guerrilla.142 Meanwhile, civil disobedience was considered an absurdity; as a Hamburg collective of Spontis occupying the residence on Eckhoffstraße 39 evinced in Wir wollen Alles! in May 1973, “If you haven’t got a baton, protective helmet, and facial handkerchief, you’re a lunatic (Spinner) whose intentions nobody can take seriously.”143

The positions embraced by RK concerning violence were epitomized by two declarations in its newspaper Wir wollen Alles! in the course of confrontations between social movements and police in the 1973-1974 struggles: “Resistance is possible!”144 and “Resistance is necessary

(nötig)!”145 For members of RK, violence could be articulated to a social movement, and had been in the course of the housing struggles;146 it was also an obligatory recourse in the face of the violence of the state and of capitalist society. An article about the housing struggle in the February-

March 1974 Wir wollen Alles! entitled “Our Violence (Gewalt) against Theirs” articulated a logic of counter-violence that would have been fully familiar to contemporary readers of Sartre or

142 The exact quote is: “[L’anti-communiste oublie] que le communisme n’invente pas la violence, qu’il la trouve établie, que la question pour le moment n’est pas de savoir si l’on accepte ou refuse la violence, mais si la violence avec laquelle on pactise est “progressive” et tend à se supprimer ou si elle tend à se perpétuer…L’anticommunisme refuse de voir que la violence est partout…” Italics mine. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur : essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 42–43.

143 Wir wollen Alles no. 4 (Mai 1973): 2.

144 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Widerstand ist möglich - Wohnungskampf in Frankfurt,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 3 (April 1973): 1; Häuserrat Frankfurt, ed., Wohnungskampf in Frankfurt (München: Trikont-Verlag, 1974), 73.

145 Wir wollen Alles! no. 12 (January 1974), 1. The two slogans were also deployed in a tract published at 50,000 copies; Häuserrat Frankfurt, Wohnungskampf in Frankfurt, 99–101.

146 Einige Genossen aus Frankfurt, “Unsere Gewalt gegen ihre!,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 13 (March 1974): 5; Häuserrat Frankfurt, Wohnungskampf in Frankfurt, 75. Thus, according to the Frankfurt Housing Council, the housing council appeared as a counterpower (Gegenmacht) after confrontations in the spring of 1973 because it “actually embodied (verkörperte) the unity of mass work and the violent defense of mass interests.” Ibid., 75.

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Merleau-Ponty: “Violence, or even more precisely, violent resistance, was and is for the housing council and all those that solidarized themselves with its struggle and it aims, never an end in itself…we never invented violence, but always only found it in front of us. Violent resistance, whether it was an issue of housing occupations, rent strikes, demonstrations or even street battles, embodied always the last, necessary measure of the movement for the achievement of the interests of the workers and students…the violence of the police baton forced violent resistance.”147 A critical reply in June 1974 nevertheless gestured to the common doxa: “We are materialists, and man can’t struggle against physical violence using ideas…We must [venture onto] the field of the adversary, whether we like it or not.”148 Following the logic of counter-violence, because the state deployed violence, and because violence was endemic to capitalist relations of production, recourse to violence was a practical need for the revolutionary left. Frankfurt radicals embraced a less elegant variant of the same thesis in a slogan articulated by demonstrators on February 24,

1974 in the city center: Gegen Polizistenschweine, helfen nur noch Pflastersteine (“against police pigs, only paving-stones help now”).149 Meanwhile, neo-Marxist conceptualizations of capitalist society as the perennialization of violence were fully taken on board in the 1974 historical

147 Ibid., 5. Italics mine.

148 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Wenn der RK kräht auf dem Mist, kommt die Masse, oder sie bleibt wo sie ist,” 9. See Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843-4): “Clearly the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons, and material force must be overthrown by material force.” Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 251.

149 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 25, 1974, 20.

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intervention Die “andere” Arbeiterbewegung by Karl-Heinz Roth, a member of the RK-affiliated

Hamburg group Proletarische Front (Proletarian Front).150

Self-defense and counter-violence were dominant concepts emplotted in descriptions of militant recourse to physical confrontation in the course of the social struggles around housing in

1973-4, and in fact, RK narratives were strikingly similar to French leftist reports on confrontations in May 1968 and the seventies. These concepts were evident in reportage on incidents like the decision to erect barricades around the occupied home at Kettenhofweg 51 in the Frankfurt

Westend in March 1973:

After the smashing (Zerschlagen) of the demonstration...we would not allow ourselves to be defenselessly worked-over a second time. Stones were collected, street signs torn out and broken up, lathes and sticks taken care of, and at 3pm the cops attacked under the hail of stones.151

None of us had reservations about throwing stones. We massively defended ourselves, united against police terror (Bullenterror)…the resistance in the Westend continued.152

If demonstrators protect themselves with helmets; beat up civil informers, because they have already all too often been beaten and arrested by these guys; if they defend themselves against photographers of the political police; or if they even strike back against [Mayor] Arndt’s uniformed batoneers (Knüppelgarde), that is nothing but necessary resistance (Gegenwehr). Whoever renounces this helplessly subjugates themselves to state terror!153

In another variant, the demolition of historic housing was presented as violence that solicited reciprocal counter-violence from the social movement. As the Frankfurt Häuserratszeitung

150 Karl Heinz Roth, Die andere Arbeiterbewegung und die Entwicklung der kapitalistischen Repression von 1880 bis zur Gegenwart (München: Trikont-Verlag, 1974).

151 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Widerstand ist möglich,” 2. Italics mine.

152 Ibid.

153 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Der Räumung,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 3 (April 1973): 7–8.

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proclaimed after the demolition of formerly occupied homes in the spring of 1974, Jeder Stein wo abgerisse / wird von uns zurückgeschmisse! (“We will throw back every stone that has been torn out!”)154

RK writings often counseled the political subordination of violence to revolutionary strategy and simultaneously mobilized the concept of “exemplary action” (exemplarische Aktion) a discursive that evinced the transnational trajectory linking Sponti activists like Daniel Cohn-

Bendit to May 1968.155 As in France, this notion implied both optimism that violence could be a means of activating worker militancy and an effort to regulate and direct the use of physical violence so as to avoid the potential depoliticization of the confrontations.

We must in any case hinder the housing struggle from becoming a naked struggle against the police, a struggle whose contents will no longer be talked about and in which we will be isolated and smashed. The past one and a half weeks have shown that the struggle around the occupied house on the Kettenhofweg 51 brought a mass movement in Frankfurt to its feet…156

The first housing occupations and the violent confrontations they enflamed altered the situation. These exemplary actions (exemplarischen Aktionen) showed many that it can also go otherwise…157

[Public] sympathies for the housing struggle did not …develop in Frankfurt because the movement went off peacefully, but precisely the opposite: because it achieved violent resistance.158

154 Frankfurter Häuserrat, “Jeder Stein wo abgerisse wird von uns zurückgeschmisse,” Häuserratszeitung, no. 9 (March 1974): 1–2. “It was the stones of our demolished homes that we hurled at the banks and against the police.” Ibid, 2. Emphasis in original.

155 Writings from the Mouvement du 22 mars had been published in the Frankfurt student newspaper Diskus as early as November 1968; Mouvement du 22 mars, “Exemplarische Aktion: Was ist das?,” Diskus. Frankfurter Studentenzeitung, no. 7 (November 1968): 6–7.

156 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Der Räumung,” 8.

157 Einige Genossen aus Frankfurt, “Unsere Gewalt gegen ihre!,” 5.

158 Ibid.

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Nevertheless, RK discourse on violence remained modest in contrast to French gauchiste violence- talk in the après-mai. The pragmatic ambition to regulate antagonisms was evident in the very definition of “revolutionary violence” as articulated to the social struggles of the workers in “Our

Violence Against Theirs” in the February-March 1974 issue of Wir wollen Alles! “The struggle of the workers and the reformist reaction have posed the question of revolutionary violence

(revolutionäre Gewalt) as the order of the day. Every revolutionary, militant action has its positional value today in its class-articulation. Not to recognize (beachten) this would be fatal.”159

As the Frankfurt Housing Council (Häuserrat) put it during the initial confrontations in the spring of 1973, violence had remained inseparable from social conflict: “Violent resistance was never an end in itself, but rather remained even in the consciousness of the masses mediated with the content of the struggle. Everyone understood what [the confrontation] was about (worum es hier ging).”160

Later Sponti talk had recourse to notions of violence as disclosure of endemic capitalist violence and praxis. Acknowledging, but critiquing, the second formulation, the authors of

“Unsere Gewalt gegen ihre!” (Our Violence Against Their!) noted that “every one of our militant actions brought us short-lived euphoria and revolutionary identity” before deploring the avant- gardism and amateurism that this sentiment had inspired and proclaiming a future workerist orientation.161 By the summer of 1974, new RK members recognized but criticized assumptions

159 Ibid., 7. For a similar theme refracted through reporting on Italian worker struggles, see Revolutionärer Kampf, “Italien: Organisierte Gewalt der Arbeiter als Antwort auf die Krise,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 13 (March 1974): 28–29.

160 Häuserrat Frankfurt, Wohnungskampf in Frankfurt, 73.

161 Einige Genossen aus Frankfurt, “Unsere Gewalt gegen ihre!,” 5.

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within the movement about militant violence as both means of disclosure of the real violence endemic to capitalism and practical de-reification of the self. The original principle the authors identified was that society was violent, but this violence advanced masked. Revolutionaries therefore had to “go onto the field of the adversary” and use violence to force the violence of capitalist domination to reveal itself, a variation on the Rudi Dutschke framework that substituted

“violence” for the calculated rule-breaking advocated in the 1968 SDS classic Rebellion der

Studenten (Student Rebellion): “Our interest is to make the [systemic] violence public and nameable as a component of order and power in societal conflicts for two aims: [first,] to break through the ideological veil of this society and to lay naked its essence at one point in order for it to be understood…” But the same authors also recognized the principle of violence as praxis; violent resistance was useful, “[Second] in order for ourselves, who have been affected through our upbringing and development by this veil of non-violence, to confront violence as a personal experience and to transport ourselves into a position able to not just argue with ideas. This motive of self-understanding, of struggling against our bourgeois part, so we’re the ones that enact violence, and not just the ones who behave verbally towards the violence of the others (the proletariat, the Palestinians) stands in equal rank beside the [motive of unveiling].”162 In short, violent struggles were required in order to reveal the subterranean violence of capitalism and to simultaneously found a practical militant subject. Nevertheless, these motivations, recognized as partially valid by the authors, had allegedly led to efforts to outpace the adversary in the use of violence rather than pursuing confrontation at the political level, breaking the articulation of the

162 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Wenn der RK kräht auf dem Mist, kommt die Masse, oder sie bleibt wo sie ist,” 9.

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political and the military. Not for the first time, Spontis evinced concerns about the autonomization of violence and its divorce from social conflict, a dynamic whose negative consequences were illustrated, according to the authors, by the urban armed struggle effort in the Federal Republic of

Germany, already perceived as a debacle.163 The conclusion to the article evinced the position that revolutionary violence must be articulated to the social struggles of the dominated: “Our thesis is that on the grounds of the specific conflict-structure of the housing occupations and the cycle of violence (occupation, defense, evacuation, resistance) we’ve arrived at an escalation of the confrontation in Frankfurt am Main that has and will have no authentic feet in the daily conflicts of the masses of renters.”164 The authors recommended a more radical democratic, workerist perspective as against a tendency towards militant vanguardism in the housing struggles.

Nevertheless, as an October 1974 article by the RK editorial collective entitled “Der

Bewaffnete Kampf wird nicht ein Kampf von Avantgarden sein” (The Armed Struggle will not be an Avant-garde Struggle) evinces, the content of the triangulation between civil disobedience and armed struggle did not fundamentally alter in the course of the 1973-1975 cycle. Like contemporaries in the Italian group Lotta Continua or French revolutionaries in LC and the GP, the Spontis of Revolutionärer Kampf unambiguously stated that armed struggle was inappropriate in contemporary conditions: “armed struggle is not the order of the day in the [Federal Republic of Germany].”165 Moreover, the editors argued against the position that small, networked armed

163 Ibid., 9.

164 Ibid., 10.

165 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Der bewaffnete Kampf wird nicht ein Kampf von Avantgarden sein,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 21 (October 1974): 2. The critique of the RAF had been initiated already during a May 1972 teach-in; Rote Hilfe, Neues vom Sozial-Staat, 31–35. See also the contribution by the Sozialdemokratische Hochschulbund (SHB) in Ibid., 44–49. 75 76

groups or the perfection of logistics and planning could mitigate the fundamental issues. Perhaps more importantly, the article criticized the limits of symbolic or exemplary action as realized by armed groups on the basis of an understanding of true revolutionary violence as intrinsically linked to the autonomization of the working class and the realization of counter-powers:

What the revolutionary movement in the contemporary [Federal Republic of Germany] lacks is not violent actions that have more or less meaningful symbolic functions (Signalfunktionen), that only announce massive resistance, that are the practical expression of anti-imperialist consciousness, thus, actions that require propagandistic interpretation and as a rule don’t serve to accomplish the position of counter-powers…we don’t need militancy that has above all an ideological, in the best case, psychical function for the masses. This militancy, unfortunately, is practically consequential above all for those who directly or indirectly participate.166

In other words, theories of the symbolic potential of violence as applied to armed struggle actions were mere alibis for the revolution of the self by vanguardist groups. In their place, RK promoted a reciprocal relationship between “mass” and “militant” action that resembled the position of Lotta

Continua in 1970 and the French GP and LC in the early seventies: “Not-legal, peaceful mass work and illegal, militant action are the alternative, or have to “dialectically’ extend themselves, or rather, the character of mass work must be that it flows into a revolutionary struggle…”167

As some members of RK had already argued in their analysis of the housing struggles, the defense of militant action on account of its symbolic function tended towards an autonomization of violence that paid declining dividends. According to the editorial collective, the political re- functionalization of violence would take place along the two axis that had been explored in the housing struggle: militant self-defense (militanter Selbstschutz) in actions, demonstrations, strikes,

166 Ibid., 2.

167 Ibid.

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and political work in the streets and factories, and “offensive” actions that built counterpower

(Gegenmacht) and showed the possibility of achieving the ends of the workers. If these militant actions might require small, committed groups articulating special knowledge and operating alongside broader political cover, the aim of violent intervention most be subordinated to “mass work.”168 This deployment of the concept of social-revolutionary violence indicated a not-so- subterranean appropriation of the politico-military imaginary of the French post-1968 revolutionary left.169 As a contemporary critic in the Berlin revolutionary broadsheet Info-BUG ironized, “One might almost believe that Cohn[-]Bendit would like to simply translate the old concepts of the Gauche prolétarienne into German conditions (Verhältnisse): direct actions, exemplary actions, mass-movement.”170

Like its predecessors on the Berlin scene after 1968, Sponti discourse on violence during the Frankfurt cycle from 1973 to 1975 was generally articulated to four notions: self-defense or resistance; counter-violence, violence as means of politicization or exemplary action, and social- revolutionary violence. Although members of Revolutionärer Kampf writing in Wir wollen Alles! sometimes acknowledged the validity of the notion of violence as praxis, they also criticized this concept as a potential source of the depoliticization of violence. The Sponti problématique generally posed violence as a means of resistance for a social movement that inevitably would

168 Ibid. The statement at the bottom of the page reiterated that “the violent intervention must originate in political mass-work.”

169 The position evidently owed something to the circulation of GP Maoist theory by the Sponti publisher Trikont-Verlag, notably, Gauche prolétarienne, Bewaffneter Kampf und Massenlinie.

170 K.L., “Häuserkampf in Frankfurt und Berlin: neue Stufe der Klassenkämpfe?,” BUG-Info, no. 4 (March 24, 1974): 18–19.

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have to face violence from the state, a concept that closely aligned on notions of counter-violence that had been articulated by Francophone existential Marxism and that were available in German translation starting in the late sixties.171 Finally, as the cycle proceeded, authors in Wir wollen Alles! tended to become more and more skeptical of the notion of violence as exemplary action or practice of ideological unveiling, promoting the notion that violence should issue from social struggles in the streets and factories and criticizing the danger that militant action might become a ritual for the far left to confirm and found its own militant identity rather than a functional means of social transformation. In this sense, West German revolutionary violence discourse closely followed the trajectory of its analogue in France even though Revolutionärer Kampf had to simultaneously defend the legitimacy of “mass violence” against both a constituted armed struggle movement and left-wing organizations that presented recourse to violence as politically inept.172

1.4. Permanence of the Politico-military? Spontis, Autonomen, and the Rearticulation of Violence

Talk, 1975-1980

The dissolution of RK in 1975 and confrontations involving the police in the summer and fall of 1976 encouraged discussions within the Sponti movement linked to violence legitimation that nevertheless sustained and confirmed the original doxa concerning violence. The discussions intensified after the May 10, 1976 confrontations in Frankfurt following the death of RAF member

Ulrike Meinhof; the interdicted demonstration that followed led to serious Molotov cocktail

171 For example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanismus und Terror, trans. Eva Moldenhauer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966); Frantz Fanon, Die Verdammten dieser Erde, trans. Traugott König (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966).

172 A good example of this three-way dialogue is the transcript from the summer 1972 teach-in at Frankfurt University, Rote Hilfe, Neues vom Sozial-Staat.

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injuries for young police officer Jürgen Weber, the burning of two police vehicles, retaliatory razzias by the police, and a media campaign by the Frankfurt Polizeipräsident that the Spontis interpreted as yet another effort to criminalize the movement, followed by a high-profile bombing by the urban guerrilla group Revolutionäre Zellen. Yet even as Spontis mounted non-violent demonstrations in defense of the individuals investigated by the police, the reactions of prominent

Spontis largely gestured to the permanence of the politico-military conceptions of Revolutionärer

Kampf that were consolidated in 1973. Thus, in the context of a bomb attack by the Revolutionäre

Zellen, public-facing discussions at the subsequent SB-Congress on June 9, 1976 were marked by the plea by prominent ex-RK member Joschka Fischer to “throw away the bomb and to take up the stone and a resistance that means a different life.”173 This was a plea for the return to mass violence as the proper substitute for minoritarian violence. As prominent Sponti Matthias Belz wrote in October 1976 in Autonomie, “We say no [to armed struggle]; as the Sponti comrade at the SB Congress said, ‘take up the stone again, throw away the pistol (Knarre).’”174 Thus, the

Fischer discourse was not a rejection of counter-violence but sat squarely within the usual RK triangulation between armed struggle and pacifism. It in no way amounted to abjuring violence on principle; at the SB congress, Daniel Cohn-Bendit would position the Meinhof-demo actions as an expression of the subjective needs of “the movement” and argue that “the violence that is a

173 Attributed to Joschka Fischer, “Rede aus Frankfurt,” Radikal, no. 2 (July 1, 1976): 9. [Gerade weil unsere Solidarität den Genossen im Untergrund gehört…fordern wir sie von hier aus auf, Schluß zu machen mit diesem Todestripp, runter zu kommen von ihrer “bewaffneten Selbstisolation,” die Bomben wegzulegen und die Steine und einen Widerstand, der ein anderes Leben meint, wieder aufzunehmen.] On this point, see Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 335. However, Koenen neglects that this position fit into the traditional politico-military triangulation of RK.

174 Matthias Belz, “Stammheimer Landfriedensordnung,” Autonomie. Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft, no. 4 (October 1976): 15.

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component of resistance (Gegenwehr) against the violent, criminal state” was an integral commitment to be balanced against “the search for other forms of political action.”175 As late as the Fall of 1976, prominent Frankfurt Spontaneists positioned true revolutionary Gewalt as the

Massenputz – the protest-confrontation—as opposed to the forms embraced by urban guerrillas.176

Nevertheless, as Sebastien Kasper notes, until the end of the seventies at the earliest, the necessity of revolutionary violence was not the subject of serious, explicit controversy within the Sponti movement.177 Nevertheless, as a later writer would state in the Sponti journal Pflasterstrand, “The

10th May was in retrospect the Black Friday for our scene. Nowhere was violence as the motor of the wickerwork of revolt from below as strongly anchored as in the office of Pflasterstrand. 10th

May marked a decisive turning point. For social revolutionaries, the use of violence always requires the finest definition until the tiniest details if it is to remain a moment of liberation...”178

Spontis were similarly becoming concerned by the threat of isolation and the danger of a militantism that bureaucratized into an apparatus of internal constraint within both the armed struggle movement and contemporary rivals like the Maoist KBW that began to turn to militant demonstrations in the second half of the decade. In the October 1976 issue of Autonomie, Matthias

Belz noted that the original concept of counter-violence was out: “The old legitimation of our militant resistance, [that] we had not invented violence, but only found it in front of us, found itself

175 Infodienst 129 (June 12, 1976), 9.

176 Belz, “Stammheimer Landfriedensordnung.”For the semantics of Putz, see Kasper, “Das Ende der Utopien,” 188–89.

177 Kasper, “Das Ende der Utopien,” 271.

178 “Randbemerkungen eines Außenseiters über die Scene. Zwischen neuen Initiativen und Demoralisierung,” Pflasterstrand 17 (October 20-November 2, 1977): 13.

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out in the same way it did for its originator, Merleau-Ponty: the excuse for terror within the left itself…the resignation that violence is but the midwife of the new society in order to become free of violence.” Yet again, this did not imply the complete rejection of all counter-violence but rather a fear that institutionalized counter-violence, particularly by hierarchically-organized groups, would inevitably become an integrated, systemic element of capitalism – a concern analogous to contemporary autonomist writings in France. As Belz argued, “…we must always invent new counter-violence, because that in front of us is that from above; because even the old counter- violence transformed itself too quickly and readily into violence, into an integrated part

(Bestandteil) of a violent society.”179

Five months later in the Sponti journal Autonomie in February 1977, Joschka Fischer issued a plaidoyer against violence as a key dimension of militant identity on political and ethical grounds in an essay that also included eclectic references to the contemporary scholarship of Michel

Foucault on the prison, the work of French anthropologist Pierre Clastres on violence in “primitive societies,” and Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.180 For Fischer, who bemoaned the nostalgia prevailing within the Spontis, violent militancy had become a limitation on revolutionary possibilities and had broken the movement in a self-reinforcing dynamic that facilitated repression: “The more that we were broken as a movement with revolutionary content, the more we came across the militancy-and-violence-trip…the more our struggle became military,

179 Belz, “Stammheimer Landfriedensordnung,” 16.

180 Work by Clastres appeared in German translation in later issues of Autonomie. Pierre Clastres, “Archäologie der Gewalt: die Rolle des Krieges in primitiven Gesellschaften,” trans. Lisa Heidenreich, Autonomie. Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft, no. 8 (October 1977): 25–42.

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armed (even though this was subjectively founded) the easier it became to finish off the movement, because reaction has an excellent understanding of this form of the struggle—it is its essence.”181

This retrospective verdict potentially defined as impossible the very social-revolutionary violence that RK had posited as possible and necessary during the 1973-1975 housing struggles and simultaneously confirmed longstanding Sponti concerns about the potential that militant, violent practice would become autonomous, liberating itself from politics and social conflict: “At a certain point our direct physical resistance against the cops (Bullen) autonomized itself from the content that lay at the sources of this resistance and whose practice above all had led to the confrontation.”182 Simultaneously, Fischer called for the supersession of the “myth” of revolutionary violence, although he also insisted that, “I also don’t believe that we should let ourselves be pacifistically planted in the ground like lambs to slaughter” and gestured ambiguously towards the discursive space occupied by self-defense and counter-violence.

I only find it just, that we must evacuate ourselves of the myth of revolutionary violence. Revolutionary violence and armed struggle are two theoretical concepts, precisely like proletariat, class-struggle, revolution, etc., that actually do more to conceal important experiences and liberation than they allow them. And that is precisely the case of revolutionary violence, of our violence…we aren’t permitted anymore to take cover behind these concepts, rather, we must investigate the concrete mechanisms that will be elicited by our violent resistance – in order to defend ourselves against them.183

However, this was anything but the end of the politico-military triangulation among the Spontis; the article merely articulated a different understanding of revolutionary violence even as it pointed

181 Joschka Fischer, “Verstoß in ‘primitivere’ Zeiten : Befreiung und Militanz,” Autonomie. Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft, no. 5 (February 1977): 53. Emphasis in original.

182 Ibid., 54. Emphasis in original.

183 Ibid., 56. Emphasis in original.

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towards the rejection of the original counter-violence logic and the transnational decline of Marxist conceptualizations of revolution within the ’68 generation. Furthermore, the apparently “new” position more than superficially resembled the original argument by Merleau-Ponty in 1947 that revolutionary violence was morally permissible if it pointed towards more human relationships.184

Thus, the article actually represented another legitimation of counter-violence even as it pointed towards enduring concern about militants becoming an apparatus of internal power-struggles within the Left.

Revolutionary violence does not legitimate itself by the violence of the cops, the reactionaries, and the fascists, but only and alone through the liberation FROM violence that it immediately and indivisibly brings forth for all, [it] is therefore always resistance towards the outside and must never become power…towards the inside, in the movement, and in ourselves…this does not imply opposition to all the many forms of direct and even armed resistance from us and other subjugated [groups]. It does however imply opposition to every form of militarization, of more effective “technologies of power,”185 that are also and precisely at home in the radical Left, of centralized structures, of leaders and lead, of command and subordination…186

In short, the new position did not imply that one should not confront the police but rather that the original constructions of legitimate counter-violence were obsolete and that Gewalt must remain spontaneous rather than organized—a sentiment that aligned on the transnational ascendance of autonomist currents in Italy, France, and West Germany and the rejection of vanguardism. As

Fischer put it, “We will only have a new relationship to violence on the other side of the

184 Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur, 41. Other potential referents might include Niccolò Machiavelli, for whom violence is permissible if it founds a superior political order.

185 Autonomie author Thomas Schmid was evidently reading Michel Foucault and published a prolonged excursus on recent German translations. See Thomas Schmidt, “Mikrophysik der Macht und Politik der Körper. Zu zwei Büchern von Michel Foucault,” Autonomie. Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft, no. 6 (April 1977): 1–6.

186 Fischer, “Verstoß in ‘primitivere’ Zeiten : Befreiung und Militanz,” 56. Emphasis in original.

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unbridgeable chasm between militantism and pacifism, when at last we don’t merely attack and resist the external cops (Bullen) but even more so, the inner cop in us!”187 Try as he might, Fischer could hardly extricate himself from the conceptual tangle of 1968 violence legitimations.

Like contemporary interventions by the French autonomists, this intervention pointed towards the volatilization post-1968 anti-authoritarian Marxism and re-articulated the violence problem in new language equally indebted to Michel Foucault, Pierre Clastres, and diatribes against “the militant” by Deleuze and Guattari.188 Anti-authoritarianism had essentially come back to haunt radical commitment to violent resistance from within—engendering fears of organized, militant violence as dangerous for the movement—, while Sponti discourse on violence had rearticulated its theoretical referents and textual basis from the Marxist, anti-colonial, and existentialist sources of the New Left to contemporary Francophone philosophy as circulated in

Germany by the publishing house Merve.

Although prominent Spontis like Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit may have turned away from violent action altogether during the subsequent 1977 German autumn, the counter-cultural current of the Sponti scene represented by their biweekly Pflasterstrand would continue to encode adversarial practices within familiar conceptualizations of counter-violence in the two major protest-encounters of 1978, even as contributors to the journal gestured towards the marked pluralization of attitudes. Thus, another Pflasterstrand author concluded of the first major antifa demonstration in Frankfurt on 17 June 1978 that “The builders of barricades and the stone-

187 Ibid., 57.

188 Ibid.

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throwers weren’t in this case a politically defined special group, they were the product of the hour.

Their resistance was equally militant and unprepared, its dimension is comprehensible based on the brutality of the cops (Bullen)...” A triumphant report in the Berlin Sponti journal Info-BUG declared the confrontation a victory, one that had allegedly given militants back the courage to engage in “practical resistance.”189 Pflasterstrand likewise inscribed anecdotes and photographs of police violence into a recognizable trajectory of original state violence and radical counter- violence its reportage on the series of demonstrations that concluded in extreme confrontations on

25 November 1978. Police violence on 20 November 1978 had brought out reciprocal counter- violence: “The sadism of these scenes cannot be overestimated…It is impossible to defend the police thuggery (Schweinerei) of that night…there were a lot of serious injuries, panic, and helpless rage. It is apparent (Fest steht), that many brought something of the rage that originated on that evening to their behavior on the second Saturday.”190 And although other Spontis and members of the Iranian student group CISNU reported experiences of violent victimization and

Angst, one contributor related satisfaction at the demonstration as an act of defiance against the reified social order, “a warning to all those who believe that they can force our lives, our non-state- sanctioned subculture, into an arbitrary, cybernetic system of rules, in which men can be arbitrarily turned off or altered.”191 In short, despite the pluralization of attitudes towards violence within the declining Sponti scene, earlier understandings were ambient and available for reactivation in the

189 Info-BUG 195 (June 1978): 14-15.

190 Editorial Collective, “Eine Woche im Frankfurter Herbst,” Pflasterstrand, no. 43 (December 2, 1978): 18.

191 Wolfgang, “Ruhe im Lande: Es herrscht keine,” Pflasterstrand, no. 43 (December 2, 1978): 22.

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context of demonstrations.192 Letters to the editor in the subsequent issue of Pflasterstrand evinced

a spectrum of negative and positive evaluations of the action. As one thrilled Sponti from

Offenbach reported, “I have not seen the backs of the police for a long time. Simply classic.”193

These responses pre-dated, and pre-figured, new actors calling themselves the Autonomen who would step forward as Trägers of violence talk and militant protest actors in the eighties even as prominent older Spontis (alt-Spontis) and members of the Citizens Initiatives (Bürgeriniativen, BIs) more or less explicitly renounced violence.194 Although it would be impossible to fully investigate the discussion on violence amidst the notoriously unprogrammatic Autonomen during the ecological and anti-nuclear movement and the revival of the housing struggles on a federal level in

1980 and 1981, it suffices to canvass a few contributions from the Berlin newspaper Radikal and

Autonomie Neue Folge from Hamburg—both journals once associated with militant Spontis and later central to autonomism—to see that violence had not lost its salience among a fraction of radicals. As Andrew Tompkins points out, the transnational Franco-German ecological movement

192 By contrast, the ultra-Maoists of the Kommunistische Bund Westdeutschlands would defend the 1978 antifascist action in the ever-more orthodox terms of interwar Marxism. KBW, “Untitled Editorial,” Kommunismus Und Klassenkampf 6, no. 7 (July 1978): 289–90.

193 Pflasterstrand 44 (December 16, 1978—January 12, 1979), 36.

194 The connections between the Autonomen and the original protagonists of 1968 were obscure—there was much overlap in vocabulary and political culture between the autonomists and the West German Sponti movement and much effort to differentiate the Autonome from the Maoist K-groups. Significantly, however, the classic literature on West German autonomy starts its genealogies in 1968, while a cursory look at Autonomist journals like Radikal, Autonomie. Materialien gegen dei Fabrikgesellschaft. Neue Folge, and the like reveals enduring continuities that place the Autonomen in the genealogy of the New Left. See George N. Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics : European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997); Geronimo, Fire and Flames. A recent scholarly history integrating the Autonomen into a longer history of violent opposition to consumerism is Alexander Sedlmaier, Consumption and Violence : Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany (Ann Arbor [Michigan]: The University of Michigan Press, 2014).

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made extensive use of both non-violent and violent tactics in the late seventies and eighties,195 and contributors to Autonomie were intensely critical of the explicitly non-violent turn of the Bis during the ecological movement: in fact, autonomists presented explicit non-violence as a statist ideology.

Thus, autonomist responses to the eviction of ecological activists from the “Republic of Free

Wendland” at Gorleben in the summer of 1980, when non-violence activists had imposed their line on Autonomen and protestors had performed a passive sit-down before being evicted by police, demonstrated the continued legitimacy of self-defense and counter-violence among militants. In

“On the Ideology of Non-Violence and the Eviction of 1004,” several autonomists “unmasked” the claims of the leading non-violence advocates of the Bürgerinitiativen as ideologies of state: “Here the state did not only succeed in doing violence to us using its batons and submachine guns, rather, it dominated the heads, thoughts, feelings, and desires of people.”196 For these Autonome, the decision for purely passive resistance to the eviction might have been justified based on the disproportion of forces between activists and the police, but explicitly identifying as “non-violent” and conceiving of de facto passivity and physical inferiority as a “moral victory” was self- victimization, a modern Nietzschean slave morality: “It is a catastrophe, when [in addition to making the tactical choice for passive resistance] men make themselves into victims, deliver themselves over to the adversary and conceive of precisely [their] defenselessness and passivity as power (Stärke) and celebrate and propagate it as a moral victory.”197 This critique implied that use

195 See Andrew Tompkins, Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany, First edition, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 147–95.

196 Arbeitskreis politische Ökonomie der BUU-Autonom, “Zur Ideologie der Gewaltfreiheit und zur Räumung von 1004,” Autonomie. Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft. Neue Folge, no. 4/5 (1980): 19. Cf. Anti-AKW Telegramm 22 (August 1980).

197 Arbeitskreis politische Ökonomie der BUU-Autonom, “Zur Ideologie der Gewaltfreiheit.” 87 88

of violence could be expressive of independence from the definitional and boundary-making power of the state. Another activist reported her moral ambivalence at the action in the pages of the Anti-

AKW Telegramm in August of 1980: “In front of our eyes our friends were choked, beaten, yelled at, torn away line by line, and kicked! And us? We sat ‘violently’ on the ground, did not intervene, did not defend ourselves, and didn’t defend the others…! This ‘self-mastery’ appears to me, in retrospect, completely opposed to any normal, human reaction.”198 As the editorial collective of

Autonomie put it in “Theses on the Crisis of the Anti-AKW-Bewegung” (1980), the entire spectrum of means should be considered on a situational basis, even as the collective appealed to both

“broadening mass resistance” and “the blockade and ultimate removal of the nuclear power plants.”199 The same authors claimed that “nonviolence” was a “pure ideology” and— provocatively—presented it as another variant of “apathetic self-conditioning” seen among victims at Nazi concentration camps, even as they rejected spontaneous, individual stone-throwing as an egotistic “Sponti-militancy” in favor of “decentrally-organized subversion with mass appeal.”200 In short, violence could be effective Gegengewalt in the face of the violent nuclear politics of the state; it could be articulated to mass protest as social-revolutionary violence; and it was an expression of autonomy from the norms and values of the West Germany state. Meanwhile, after rioting in Berlin on December 12 1980, a seminal moment in the constitution of the new autonomist movement, the

198 “Räumung des Dorfes: das gleiche Geschehen - underschiedliche Erfahrungen!,” Anti-AKW Telegramm, August 1980, 11.

199 Autonomie Editorial Collective, “Thesen Zur Krise Der Anti-AKW-Bewegung,” Autonomie. Materialien Gegen Die Fabrikgesellschaft. Neue Folge, no. 4/5 (1980): 115–18.

200 Ibid., 116.

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Berlin Occupations Council (Besetzerrat) coded demonstrations as counter-violence and self- defense in ways that immediately recalled the declarations of RK and the Häuserrat almost a decade earlier: “We don’t want any violence, but it is always forced out of us…when our living conditions are supposed to be destroyed by the policy of the [Berlin] senate, when humanity is being crushed by concrete, cops, and computers, then we defend ourselves… there will always be more resistance!”201 These rhetorical moves echoed those of Frankfurt Häuserrat circa 1974: the earlier housing struggle had left a long shadow.

§§§

This chapter has revised the analytical frame of studies of the French and West German

revolutionary left and violence after 1968 by turning to violence talk beyond technical discussions

of armed struggle and identifying a transnationally convergent discourse on violence among 1968

radicals committed to militant protest. As a historiographical intervention, I have argued that

analyses that reduce the history of the New Left and violence to that of armed struggle or terrorism

and its overcoming inadvertently tend to misrepresent revolutionary subjectivity by imposing an

anachronistic alternative between armed struggle and civil resistance explicitly rejected by many

revolutionary left groups that nevertheless embraced politico-military thought in contrast to

parliamentarism. For these groups, the legitimacy of violence was linked to a social-revolutionary

horizon that provided a simultaneous justification for deploying force in order to inspire or defend

“mass” militancy and also for limiting the application of physical constraint on the grounds that

terrorism in the contemporary conditions did not activate worker agency and was a self-defeating

201 Besetzerrat, “Ohne Bullen, Kein Heißer Krawall,” Radikal. Extrablatt, December 1980, 2.

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proposition. Gauche prolétarienne fellow-traveler Jean-Paul Sartre would himself deploy this logic as late as his 4 December 1974 visit to RAF member Andreas Baader in Stammheim prison.202 In their infamous and often-misunderstood encounter, Sartre told an annoyed interlocutor that “the masses” had not understood RAF actions and declared that minoritarian actions might be appropriate for Latin America but were not adequate to conditions in the metropole.203 There was nothing innovative about this argument: it simply reiterated the contemporary positions of the

French extrême-gauche and Revolutionärer Kampf. In an interview for Der Spiegel prior to the meeting, Sartre stipulated that violence was an essential dimension of revolution but that a prior

“ideological revolution” was necessary—dimensions of French gauchiste thought we have already identified.204 As Sartre had told German-French intellectual Arno Münster in an unpublished interview intended for the political magazine Panorama only two days before the visit, armed struggle was a “putschist strategy” because “revolutionary action could only be the action of the masses themselves.”205 In sum, there was not one mode of theorizing revolutionary violence after

1968 in Western Europe—there were two. Yet the differences between the armed vanguard and social-revolutionary modes of theorizing violence were generally inaudible in the moment—and in fact, Panorama magazine would cancel the Sartre-interview in the face of considerable public

202 For the political context of the visit, Lammert, “Die französische Linke, der Terrorismus und der ‘repressive Staat’ in der Bundesrepublik in den 1970er Jahren.” Cf. Kraushaar, Die blinden Flecken der RAF, 118–46.

203 For excerpts from the protocol of the discussion, see Der Spiegel, February 4, 2013, 44-45.

204 Alice Schwarzer, “Schreckliche Situation,” Der Spiegel, December 2, 1974.See also Michel Meyer and Jean-Paul Sartre, “Procès des members de la bande à Baader,” Le journal à 20h, Antenne 2, May 21, 1975.

205 Panorama of December 2, 1974, HIS-Archiv, Publ. 034, 002, 1, 6 in Kraushaar, Die blinden Flecken der RAF, 130.

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outcry.206 Nevertheless, apologies for revolutionary violence did not necessarily entail approval for the importation of armed struggle to the metropole even before the German Autumn of 1977; conversely, disavowal of armed orientations did not imply a disavowal of violence in itself.207

As far as the New Left goes, social-revolutionary political culture oriented on militant protest would prove both broader and more enduring than armed struggle: Sartre, not Baader, had the last word. Talk of “violence” among influential New Left revolutionary currents operating in

France and West Germany after 1968 was much broader, more durable, and more ubiquitous than has traditionally been acknowledged, and “violence” was a major category through which self- identified revolutionaries thought through politics, denounced capitalism and the state, and conceptualized the significance of their own practices. The decline of the revolutionary horizon and critique of Marxist anti-imperialism in the late seventies did not imply the disavowal of violence but merely meant downplaying of the violence as a means of politicization or contribution to worker agency. Self-defense and counter-violence would remain salient to the New Left, but by the end of the seventies, the notion of violence as a means of constituting third parties as revolutionary subjects had declined in favor of the notion of violence as work on oneself—the self being either the individual or the revolutionary movement. This shift was “overdetermined”—it both reflected the resignation of the radical left to the experience that violent acts did not inspire worker militancy and the underlying shift in the political culture of European radical groups away

206 Ibid.

207 The French experience shows there was no inevitable one-to-one correspondence between justifications of violence during the 1968 student movements and the later decision for armed struggle—a point that reveals the teleology in many narrations of the emergence of terrorism in West Germany, particularly in the work of Wolfgang Kraushaar.

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from the workerism inspired by May 1968 and the 1969 Autunno caldo in Italy and towards a politics focused on the movement. Subsequently, groups like the French autonomes or West

German Autonomen understood violence in more self-oriented and affective dimensions—as practices of autonomization from state norms or of overcoming state-induced terror and feelings of impotence after defeat at ecological protests or and German Autumn—even as many journals influential within the autonomist currents like Camarades, Radikal, or Autonomie frequently re- enacted debates of the earlier seventies or those conducted in contemporary Italy. Thus, what shifted in the seventies was not the legitimacy of violence per se but the contours of violence legitimation.

In both France and West Germany, young revolutionaries brought no modicum of imagination and theory to the construction of barricades and throwing of paving-stones after 1968.

Thus, historians who have implicitly or explicitly presented adversarial protest practices as defensive, as mere counter-violence, or as a quasi-natural affective reaction to the onslaught of the police have naturalized rather than historicized the ideological foundations of militant demonstrations and violent direct action.208 However, “violence” was not merely an object of discourse but implicated in practices: in the course of 1968 and the early seventies, militant groups reflexively adjusted “tactics” to confront the state, turning the events of 1968 into the basis for a militant protest culture.209 As a student told Jacques Durandeaux in 1968, “The reality [of

208 For affect, Ludivine Bantigny and Boris Gobille, “L’expérience sensible du politique: Protagonisme et antagonisme en mai–juin 1968,” French Historical Studies 41, no. 2 (April 1, 2018): 275–303, https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-4322954.

209 Comité de la révolution permanente, “Sur la manifestation,” is symptomatic of this type of practice- oriented thought.

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confrontation] was not legality or the call to violence or the discourse about violence, the reality was the paving-stone, the matraque, the strike...”210 It is to the practice of militant protest that we will now turn.

210 Durandeaux, Les journées de Mai 68, 33. Note the implication though: violence was the content of real political practice.

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Chapter Two. Militant Protest as Trial of the State

The power (force) of the police is immobility; the power of the protestor is mobility. There will not be a direct confrontation between the police and the protestors: the latter successfully ‘hold’ (parviennent à tenir) by riposting using projectiles…” Action, May 7, 1968211

Theorized, guided, illuminated by practices of signification, revolutionary violence was not exclusively an object internal to revolutionary left discourse: it entailed practical activity for militants as well.212 Moreover, if radical discourses on violence might well have generated misgivings within the state apparatus, it was above all the emergence of militant protest as a practice that altered the relationship between European protestors and the state. As opposed to ordinary or routine demonstrations, confrontational incidents acted as embodied critiques of domination of the police, frequently exposed the limited viability of standard techniques and equipment for the management of demonstrations and solicited reform efforts among politicians and functionaries. The central argument of this chapter is focused on the adversarial dimension of militant protest practices: I argue that the emergence of new practices of militant protest subjected state power to a critique of arms, and that critique manifested the limits of standard state practices for the management and repression of demonstrations inherited from the interwar period. In short, adversarial behaviors in demonstrations posed significant problems for police because they circumvented and countered typical operational forms of the state—choreographed mass baton

211 Action no. 1 (May 7, 1968), 2.

212 In other words, “violence” worked as what Michel Foucault referred to in his 1972-1973 course as a “relay” (échangeur), functioning at the juncture of discourses and practices. Foucault, La société punitive, 38–39.

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assaults and blockades—and “revealed,” not only to the participants, but also to the police, that the state had neither unconditional dominance nor a monopoly on legitimate constraint. The ensuing regime of protest management is inexplicable except in relation to the travails of the police after 1968—travails generated, in the final instance, by militant protest.

This chapter traces the emergence of militant protest practices and the accompanying know-how and material infrastructure in France and West Germany from the late sixties through the mid-seventies, embracing both a diachronic overview of sequences of confrontation and a synchronic analysis of the principles and obstacles imposed by different practices of militant protest. Despite differences in the intensity of militant confrontations,213 the material practices of adversarial demonstrations after 1968 in France and West Germany had a high degree of transnational convergence, generated typical forms of obstruction, destruction, physical insecurity, and injury and provided similar incentives to reinforce the apparatus of the state across national boundaries. Second, militant protest involved practices that would prove strikingly resilient and transnationally mobile among such extreme-left groups: the decline of the anti-imperialist Maoist and Trotskyist groups in the mid- and late-seventies did not significantly entail their decline, since many of these practices were taken up without substantive modification in the second half of the seventies by the transnational European autonomist movement. In short, 1968 generated a rearticulation of the protest culture of the radical left.

Last, this chapter articulates a threefold analytic that simultaneously investigates militant protest forms and their material underpinnings as physical constraint directed at police adversaries,

213 For Frankfurt Spontaneist analysis of violent demonstrations during the French 1976 cycle that appreciated the higher level of militancy outre-Rhin, see the April 1976 special issue of Fuzzy-Zeitung (April 25, 1976).

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as embedded or practical acts of signification towards an idealized third-party, typically the working class; and as practices of reflexivity that aligned militants within revolutionary left traditions. This analytical framework aligns on different New Left conceptualizations of violence that we observed in Chapter One: self-defense and counter-violence gestured towards action against an adversary; violence as a means of politicization or ideological (“symbolic”) revolution pointed towards the signification of militant action for (idealized) workers or popular classes; and conceptions of violence as a criterion of revolutionary subjectivity or dimension of praxis pointed towards the reflexive dimension of militant action—the revolution of the self. In generic terms, the immanent adversarial principle of militant protest was physical opposition and the overthrow of a one-sided flow of physical coercion and constraint that emanated from the agents of the state.

The signification of militant protest towards idealized observers was the declaration of radical conflict or hostility and the identification of the state as a resistible adversary. Finally, the reflexive dimension of militant protest positioned its participants within the historical tradition of revolutionary anti-capitalism or popular resistance to oppression.

The reconceptualized history in this chapter points towards a historical revision of standard presuppositions that by 1968, the Western European state was an unconditionally dominant force in political life, the sole arbitrator of coercion and its legitimacy. What 1968 revolutionary youths uncovered by virtue of their own practices was the arbitrariness of this pretension and the uneven and unfinished status of the claim to the monopoly on legitimate violence. The militant experience of the state was that radicals could confront the police, operate illegally, deploy physical constraint against the representatives of public order, and avoid and mitigate repression—injury, apprehension, and imprisonment. Thus, the practice of militant protest exposed a hidden interval between obedient subjection before the law and passive victimhood before overwhelming “state

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repression.” Much subsequent historical analysis has inadvertently concealed this interval by presuming a model of “the state” nowhere to be found in the chaotic confrontation between militants and the police and also centering scholarly inquiry on victims—those protestors and bystanders, often unprepared for confrontations, who did suffer at the hands of the police.214

Although contemporary historiography has an objective basis for the presentation of protestors and bystanders as victims of police violence in critical discourse on police interventions circa 1968

(see Chapter Three), it has substantially dismissed the extent that militants destabilized. police domination.

2.1. Studying Confrontational Practices Beyond the Military Paradigm: An Intervention

Broadening the critique elaborated in Chapter One, the focus of this chapter on the material practice of militant protest is also an original contribution since analysts typically study revolutionary violence in Western Europe during the sixties and seventies through its most radical form, armed struggle, obscuring militant protest practices conceptualized by the revolutionary left as “violent.” Thus, researchers typically investigate episodes of antagonistic protest merely as contributors to, or alternatives to, armed struggle. In inquiry into French 1968 and the après-mai, confrontations between leftist groups or workers and police have been primarily interpreted by scholars like Isabelle Sommier as “substitutes” for terrorism and allegedly primarily “symbolic” actions, an interpretation already promoted by high-profile ex-leftists in the seventies after they

214 I take my ideology definition from Louis Althusser, Sur la reproduction, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011). However, militant protest revealed that the state had none of the omnipotence and stability conveyed by the notion of the “state apparatus” (appareil d’état).

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had turned away from revolutionary violence.215 By contrast, historians often introduce episodes of adversarial protest in West Germany and Italy in the late sixties and seventies as mere preludes to or training periods for “terrorism,” obscuring the reality that practices involving recourse to paving stones and Molotov cocktails neither unilaterally led to nor vanished after the advent of assassination and bombing campaigns, proving remarkably resilient long after groups pursuing armed struggle were in steep decline.216 Meanwhile, the field of historical violence studies has overwhelmingly sought out more high-profile episodes in the history of political violence, guided by the principle that the main marker of significant violence is a body count.217

The aim of this chapter is to construct an analysis of confrontational, militant protest practices that explains how adversarial protest generated sentiments of insecurity among the security forces and subverted standard practices for the control of demonstrations. What were these adversarial techniques of protest subsumed under the discourse of “mass violence” or “militant action”? Alongside its various interpretations, what was the “violence” that occurred in violent protests, manifestations violentes, Kampfdemonstrationen? What were the practices of

215 This attitude has its most sophisticated version in the work of Sommier, but was essentially produced by ex-GP Maoist intellectuals, such as Olivier Rolin, in the late seventies. What Sommier also neglects is that terrorism itself had a potent symbolic dimension as theorized by its proponents; thus, it makes no sense to oppose “symbolic” “unarmed” militant action and “real” armed struggle. Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil; Liniers, “Objections contre une prise d’armes.”

216 As Karrin Hanshew acknowledges in Terror and Democracy, although terror of the RAF-style went out of fashion in the course of the 1977 German Autumn, political violence of the demonstration type did not; to the contrary, it expanded in the context of the West German Autonomen. Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, 251.

217 Thus, militant protest practices have only a marginal place in the Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Violence, although the book jacket depicts French students confronting the police in May 1968; Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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confrontation? What principles and knowledges were set to work in the practices of revolt?218 And why were state officials frequently so threatened or frustrated?

To answer these questions, however, requires dismantling epistemological obstacles, and not least, the notion of militant protest as reducible to symbolic action towards an idealized third.

The vast gap in the extent of physical injuries, destruction, and fatalities separating the militant demonstrations of 1968 and the seventies from military conflict and interwar revolutionary violence has been the source of considerable retrospective misrecognition of adversarial protest as essentially a practice of representation. Because the acts of militant youths and their state adversaries around 1968 were considerably less injurious than those in the military conflicts and revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence that haunted modern Europe from the revolutions of the 19th century to their Marxist and anti-colonial counterparts in the 20th century, it has become fashionable to dismiss the confrontations as merely apparent, incidental to what the events were actually about. This interpretation was actively imposed by some observers of the 1968 events: as

Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-born Hegel scholar, naturalized French citizen, and Soviet spy, allegedly stated in 1968, “Blood has not flowed, this is not a revolution.” Another precocious variant of the relegation of 1968 practice to “representation” was offered in 1975 by French ultra- left revolutionary Pierre Goldman, the former leader of the service d’ordre of the Union des

étudiantes communistes (UEC) who had sojourned in Venezuela as a guerrilla and returned to become a bandit in France while planning an armed struggle in the metropole—plans brought

218 Again, one of the leading lights for this type of study is Foucault, who, despite his overwhelming focus on discourses, proposed as early as 1968 an analysis that would reveal in “behaviors, struggles, conflicts, decisions, and tactics…a political knowledge that is not of the order of a secondary theorization of practices, and that is not the application of a theory.” See Michel Foucault, L’archéologie Du Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 254.

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down by his arrest in 1970. In Goldman’s vitriolic critique of the 1968 rebels, the encounters between police and demonstrators in 1968 were false simulations of real confrontations— the students should have radicalized the confrontation, practiced armed self-defense, and provoked a fully military response from the state.219 In 1978, the ex-guerrilla war theorist Regis Debray synthesized these strains of discourse and asserted that 1968 had seen conflict “reabsorbed without a general confrontation: no civil war, no confrontation, no blood, it’s been said often enough.”220

What is implicitly at work in these analyses—and in much of the later inquiry into protest in the

1968 period—is the preliminary conceptual identification of violence and armed struggle. Having imposed a specious and limiting definition of “violence,” the analysis then takes the form of a syllogism: real violence implies killing; militant protest did not kill; therefore, the violence of protest in 1968 and the seventies was not real violence. Later historians and scholars sometimes merely recapitulate this formula; thus, for Gerd Koenen, Revolutionärer Kampf merely

“simulated” terror; the RAF practiced it.221 One finds much the same analysis in the work of

Isabelle Sommier, who—drawn along in the retrospective illusions of her interview subjects— contrasts the exercise of political violence by French and Italian left groups by stating that the

219 See Goldman, Souvenirs obscurs, 70–71. Ironically, Goldman reiterated these claims after the Mexican 1968 events –the massacre of Tlatelolco—showed that sometimes, states could massacre their youth without engendering a revolution and despite the general failure of the armed movements in Latin America.

220 Régis Debray, “A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary, NLR I/115, May–June 1979,” New Left Review, n.d., accessed June 1, 2019. 51. For writings on Goldman sympathetic to his dismissive analysis of 1968 violence, see Régis Debray, Les Rendez-vous manqués : pour Pierre Goldman (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975).

221 Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 351.

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violence of groups like Gauche prolétarienne and the Ligue communiste remained “essentially” of the order of the “symbolic” or the “theatrical.”222

Yet despite its retroactive naturalization as common sense, the minimization of the encounters between youths, workers, and the police –and the classification of student practices of revolt as merely symbolic violence, ideological intervention, ritual, representation, theater, and so forth—was not the contemporary consensus position in 1968 and the seventies even though notions of violence as also symbolic and productive of ideological effects were generalized within the revolutionary lefts under inquiry in this dissertation. In contrast to later scholarly analysis, the discourse articulated by journalists, militant groups, officials and police alike typically likened confrontational protests and military encounters. The confrontations between Italian youths, police, and the carabinieri in Rome in March 1968 were reported by the Corriere della Sera as a

“furious and violent battle” and became retrospectively labelled the Battaglia della Valle Giuglia by both the 1968 generation and mainstream political figures. Le Monde described the confrontations between students and state forces on May 6, 1968 as un véritable combat de rue.

Berlin had its own street battle (Straßenschlacht) outside the Tegel Landesgericht in November of

1968.223 Radicals involved in adversarial encounters with the police like Pierre Peuchmaurd also routinely evoked the violence of confrontations and deployed military categories in their descriptions of the events–and as we have seen, politico-military thought was deeply embedded in the ideology of the revolutionary left groups that practiced this type of contestation. Finally, both

222 Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil, 77; 89–97.

223 Corriere della Sera, March 1-2, 1968; Le monde, May 8, 1968; Frankfurter Rundschau, November 5, 1968, 5.

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public-facing and internal state discourse depicted revolutionary militants as essentially illegal, aggressive, and inclined to violence. In light of the general consensus in contemporary depictions that violence was a highly-salient dimension of 1968 protest, it is perplexing that anyone should take its subsequent minimization as merely apparent confrontation at face value, yet dominant conceptualizations of real violence as unlimited, extreme, military conflict imperiously dictate their problématique to the field of violence research and obscure. By contrast, I will argue that insurgent practices in street confrontations circa 1968 and the seventies faced the state, eluded its typical modes of operation, and frequently outmatched the police in the infliction of injuries--yet simultaneously obeyed limits posed by the potential escalation to the use of firearms by the security forces. Although social-revolutionary left groups failed to integrate militant practices into a successful revolutionary strategy, the tactical savoir-faire embedded in the militant protest culture nevertheless generated regular frustration among police functionaries and politicians in the course of the “1968 years.”

2.2. French Leftists and Militant Demonstrations, 1968-1979

In France in the late sixties and seventies, militant protest became a characteristic practice of the revolutionary left. Already evinced in social movements in the west of France in 1967 and at Caen in January 1968, the practice of confronting police during social and political conflicts undoubtedly hit its apex during the May and June 1968 events in Paris. On May 3, 1968, in the context of the intrusion by the police into the courtyard of the Sorbonne, students took to the streets to demand the liberation of their arrested comrades; as the situation degenerated into a three-hour street combat between some 1,500 police and gendarmes and 2,000 demonstrators, members of

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the revolutionary groups and Parisian youths began to stone the police in earnest.224 During confrontations on Monday, May 6, 1968, police charged on the boulevard Saint-Germain, but as reporters for Le Monde observed, the demonstrators responded to the use of batons and the rifle blows of the gendarmerie by moving cars into position as obstacles against the advances of security forces and throwing projectiles, regrouping after each police assault.225 Though barricades famously joined mobile hit and run behavior, the Parisian model of protest-insurgency had already stabilized in the initial events; so had the typical physical gap between the security forces and demonstrators, an abandoned space containing paving stones and obstacles. Parisian confrontations only hit full stride on May 10-11, May 24-25, and June 10-11 (the famous “Nights of the Barricades”), but a style of action involving mobile skirmishing and barricades was well in place by May 6, 1968.226 The vast majority of injuries reported by the forces of order in Parisian

May and June 1968 (some 2,000) were the consequences of hard projectiles; the same held for many of the most severe wounds.227

The fact that a generalized crisis resulted from these confrontations that imperiled the Gaullist government did much to ensure the plausibility of confrontations in France in the post-1968 period,

224 For Parisian police perceptions, see Mathieu, “L’autre côté de la barricade,” 153. For contemporary reports see Le Monde, May 5-6, 1968, 9; Adrien Dansette, Mai 1968 (Paris: Plon, 1971), 89–91.

225 Le Monde, May 8, 1968, 8.

226 For a fuller narration from the Parisian police perspective, see Mathieu, “L’autre côté de la barricade,” 153–66. For summaries from the Préfecture de Police, see Rapport du DGPM à Monsieur le Préfet de Police, “Action de la Police Municipale au cours des événements qui se sont déroulés à Paris du 3 mai au 16 juin 1968,” Paris, July 9 1968; Archives de la Préfecture de Police; Préfecture de police, “Analyse des évènements consécutifs aux manifestations des étudiants du 2 au 19 mai 1968” Préfecture de police, “Du 20 au 24 mai 1968,” all in AN 19800273/63.

227 For the official count, see Maurice Grimaud, BMOVP, Conseil de Paris, July 8, 1968, 453.

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and the informal institutionalization of the rebellious style continued in the après-mai. Although

French youth revolt rarely attained the same scale as it had during 1968, members of militant revolutionary groups like the GP and LC frequently attempted to confront the police, often guided by the desire to stage a reiteration of the events. As a fall 1968 tract “On the Demonstration” announced, “for several months now we have been demonstrating frequently and with violence.”228

During periods of special tension like the spring and summer of 1970, although efforts to provoke a new cycle of worker contestation failed, the pavé and other projectiles remained privileged materiel for direct action in Paris and at other sites of leftist agitation like Caen or Grenoble: protesters consistently enacted microcosms of the May events or lured police to the edge of university campuses in order to physically harass them. Domestic surveillance reports by the

Parisian branch of the Renseignements généraux (RG) indicated the tenor of contemporary reunions of the GP during “hot summer” (été chaud) of 1970: “The appeal to a mass demonstration in the streets of Paris was made every time alongside the pressing appeal to come numerous and armed. In the usual language of gauchiste militants that might easily signify that every militant should be equipped with the panoply of what every good demonstrator must have: helmets, matraques or crowbars, slings, bolts, [and] Molotov cocktails, rather than other weapon.”229 On the same night of May 27, 1970, the Préfecture de police reported an eight-hour confrontation between groups sortieing forth from buildings at Censier and Beaux-Arts in order to harass the

228 Comité pour la Révolution permanente, “Sur la manifestation,” 1.

229 Préfecture de Police, Direction des Renseignements généraux, “Les dirigeants de la Gauche Prolétarienne entendent engager une épreuve de force avec le pouvoir…” May 27, 1970, 2, APP, FD 160.* Emphasis in original.

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security forces in the now-traditional 1968 style: the throwing of paving stones and use of improvised barricades. Some 79 functionaries were injured, 1 hospitalized, and 19 went on administrative leave; of the 470 “verifications of identity” at Beaujon that ensued based on mass arrests, only 13 demonstrators were subsequently investigated by the criminal police.230

Encounters between police and militant protestors would occur at regular intervals and marked the history of the period from 1968 to 1973. Some of the more high-profile incidents in

France included campus insurrections at Nanterre and Grenoble in the spring and summer of 1970, the Parisian antifascist demonstration of 10 March 1971, another round of campus mobilizations in the spring and summer of 1971, the January 1973 Parisian demonstrations after the re-election of the American President Richard Nixon, and a second June 21, 1973 antifascist protest against a meeting by the extreme-right group Ordre nouveau that led to the dissolution of the LC by Interior

Minister Raymond Marcellin.231 The consensus is that most French workers around and after 1968 did not participate in confrontations and that students largely imagined a potent reservoir of worker violence waiting to be tapped. Yet confrontational actions were not restricted to student demonstrations or even worker strikes in the après-mai; in fact, appraisals by the CRS in the spring of 1971 insisted that militant interventions were being generalized among other social categories like shopkeepers and peasants, themselves encouraged by transient groups of revolutionary

230 Rapport de Jacques Battesti, Sous-Directeur Chef du 1er District. Bat/Jac. PP/DGPM/1er District/ No. 3975 du 27 mai 1970, Objet : “Compte-rendu de service d’ordre,” Paris, May 30, 2020 APP 163*; Rapport de André Friederich, DGPM à Directeur de la Police judiciaire, “Manifestation de la ‘Gauche prolétarienne,” Journée du 27 mai et nuit du 27 au 28 mai 1970,” Paris May 30, 1970, same folder; Rapport du DGPM André Friederich à Préfet de Police, Paris, May 30, 1970, same folder.

231 See Bensaïd, Une lente impatience, 167–71; Adam and Coustal, C’était la Ligue, 166–70.

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organizers.232 Provincial demonstrations in the Southwest and regionalist encounters in Brittany and Corsica were also the source of sporadic confrontations well into the mid-seventies. Indeed, regionalist movements radicalized during the Bastia incidents in Corsica in 1975 and confrontations in August of 1976 at Montredon: in both cases, regionalists fired on the police, killing and wounding agents of the state. Though these incidents proved atypical, it was not only revolutionary left groups that confronted the state and due to the overwhelming concentration of the security forces in the capital often the most serious encounters occurred outside Paris.

Finally, although typical histories inquiring into “violence” and 1968 focus only on the rise and fall of the Gauche prolétarienne and the Ligue communiste, combative protest persisted well after the former had dissolved itself and the Trotskyist left had reoriented its line. As a recent history of the GP told by former rank-and-file militants notes, after the dissolution of the organization many militants would continue their unarmed guerrilla against the state by becoming members of the French autonome movement, revolutionaries who attempted to model their culture on Italian Autonomia.233 During demonstrations and student strikes (grèves des facs) against the reform of the higher education system in the spring of 1976, autonomes, “uncontrolled elements,” and “marginals” would both confront the police and commit acts of highly visible destruction in

Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Grenoble, and Paris; after one such encounter, the Parisian operational group commander of the CRS complained that “It appears that incidents are systematically sought

232 CRS 2nd division, “Synthèse des Comptes-rendus Techniques en 1970,” Paris, June 1, 1971, 3; enclosure in Henri Mir, “Note pour MM. les Commandants de Groupement des Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, MM. Les Commandants de Compagnie,” Paris, June 4, 1971, AN, 19890672/43*.

233 Anonymous, Les nouveaux partisans: histoire de la Gauche prolétarienne par des militants de base (Marseille: Al Dante, 2015).

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by the ‘uncontrolled’ group nostalgic for May 1968.”234 As a self-identifying autonome affirmed in the journal Camarades the following summer, “The violence of the demonstrations is felt to be necessary by an important fraction of the movement. This is a fact (c’est une constatation).”235 The confrontational style had become a self-sustaining institution that prevailed outside of the trajectories of the organizational heirs of 1968.

As in the Federal Republic of Germany, the anti-nuclear movement of the later seventies also generated notable encounters: in one of the more tragic protest incidents of the decade at

Malville in the Isère region, a small subsection of militant demonstrators attempted to cross the police perimeter surrounding the off-limits nuclear plant being constructed by the state and engaged in confrontations on August 1, 1977. The police response—a barrage of “tear gas” and explosive grenades, proved fatal to 31-year-old schoolteacher Vital Michalon, and in the course of the demonstration several demonstrators and a police officer lost limbs to explosives.236

Nevertheless, the debacle at Malville hardly heralded the end of militant action in the political culture of the French new social movements: both Parisian and provincial demonstrations brought the revival of militant protest in the late seventies and early eighties. Thus, despite the preventative arrest of around 80 autonomist militants, during the March 23, 1979 Parisian metallurgist demonstration, militants built barricades, fought the police, smashed the windows of storefronts,

234 Y. Preau, Commandant de groupement opérationnel, “Rapport technique de fin de service : Maintien de l’ordre public à paris le jeudi 15 avril 1976,” Vélizy, April 29, 1976, 17-18, AN 19780157/25*.

235 Bernard Nadoulek, “Sur la violence,” Camarades. Revue militante dans l’autonomie, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 45. For appraisals of autonomist militancy in France by West German Spontis, see Fuzzy-Zeitung (April 25, 1976).

236 Andrew Tompkins, “Grassroots Transnationalism(s): Franco-German Opposition to Nuclear Energy in the 1970s,” Contemporary European History 25, no. 1 (February 2016): 131–32, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777315000508.

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and burned cars well into the night.237 In short, after a period of social and political pacification in the mid-sixties, the confrontation between demonstrators and the police had become a signature dimension of protest movements, often but not exclusively practiced by the representatives of the gauchiste legacy and its post-Marxist fragmentation.

2.3. Adversarial protest in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1968-1978

Elements of the Neue Linke in West Germany also sustained a culture of militant protest. Despite earlier harbingers in the Swabian riots of 1962, the Bremen riots in January 1968, and the SDS demonstrations of the mid-sixties, organized, adversarial demonstration practices involving recourse to physical force generally fused into the protest culture in the course of the nationwide demonstrations after the attentat on Rudi Dutschke in the spring of 1968. On April 11, 1968, the

Berlin Schutzpolizei reported that stones were thrown against buildings as demonstrators attempted to arrive at the Berlin headquarters of the Springer press. The following afternoon and evening, as police sought to intervene using the baton and the water cannon, stones and other objects were thrown at them from within the protest ranks, a practice that sporadically occurred through the protest cycle. A Berlin police report claimed that the “agitators” (Störer) were well prepared materially for the events, well-organized and tactically prepared: “The behavior of the

Störer often almost inspired respect!” In total, Berlin police reported 63 injured officers.238 In

237 For archival film footage of the event by the Parisian CGT see Anonymous “Manifestation des sidérurgistes à Paris. 23 Mars 1979, Partie deux,” 24 minutes. Fonds audiovisuel du PCF. See in particular 02:28:01-03:40:00, 14:59:00-16:50:00, 19:20:01-22:13:00. For the CRS reports, see file series AN 19990044/2.*

238 Berliner Schutzpolizei,“Verlaufs- und Erfahrungsbericht der Schutzpolizei über die polizeilichen Maßnahmen vom 11. Bis 15.4.1968 anlässlich der Aktionen der „außerparlamentarischen Opposition“ in Zusammenhang mit den Schüssen auf Rudi Dutschke, ” Berlin, May 4, 1968, App. 2915, 20; Ibid., Anlage 2, „Zahlen und Statistiken,“ 1. Landesarchiv Berlin.

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Frankfurt, stone-throwing incidents likewise occurred during confrontations on the night of April

12, 1968; the following night, bottles and stones were also thrown at police.239 Likewise, in

Hamburg, demonstrators embraced stone-throwing when police attempted to take a barricade on

April 12, 1968, and again when the police attempted to forcibly remove demonstrators in front of the Hamburg Polizeipräsidium on April 15, 1968. The Hamburg police reported 81 wounded in the course of the week of protest,--the highest police injury count in the Bundesrepublik that week-

-, and it was again stone-throwing that took the lead as the most frequent source of injury.240 During the April 1968 protests, there was a well-defined tendency towards confrontation among a militant fraction of demonstrators, though many journalists concluded that the police typically started the confrontations, and even some police reports noted that generalized stone-throwing occurred only after the police acted to remove barricades and forcibly remove demonstrators. Thus, according to a manuscript note appended to one police report, during the action in front of the Polizeipräsidium in Hamburg, the gravity of stone-throwing redoubled after police had recourse to the baton and the water cannon.241 Bommi Baumann, a member of the Berlin 1968 scene, later acknowledged that

“[most] people didn’t actually participate [in stone-throwing], just the first few ranks were actually into it, the remainder stood there, or took stones out of your hands from behind...”242

239 Frankfurter Schutzpolizeidirektion, I/51.03, „Abschließender Bericht über die Demonstrationen während der Osterfeiertage, 11. Bis 15.4.1968 in Frankfurt am Main,“ Frankfurt, May 3, 1968 in HHStAW, 530, 431.

240 StaH 136-1-1030.

241 A. 4. “Führungsverhältnisse,” Hamburg, June 14, 1968, 6, StAH 1-136_1029. As I explore in the following chapter, “Conditions of Visibility” this was a consistent liberal critique of state interventions.

242 Baumann, Wie alles anfing, 38.

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To be sure, injuries to police, and particularly injuries requiring hospitalization, were modest over the Easter Weekend in the Bundesrepublik, in stark contrast to the scale of the confrontations in neighboring France during the six weeks from the start of May to mid-June.243

Nevertheless, stone-throwing actually produced two deaths in Munich, incidents that never occurred in neighboring France; photographer Klaus Frings was killed by a stone to the skull, and

Rüdiger Schreck, a demonstrator, was fatally injured by projectiles allegedly thrown from the protester ranks.244 Moreover, officials were extremely conserved, and the conference of the Interior

Ministries overwhelmingly focused on the violence of the demonstrations.245 Prominent members of the West German state apparatus felt that the constitutional order and state were under assault and expressed insecurity about their capacity to control the militants.

West German students in 1968 never experienced broad solidarity from the population during confrontations involving the police — a fact that helps to account for the relatively low profile of militant protest as a New Left tradition in the Bundesrepublik. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the French student revolt and after a lull in confrontations during the almost entirely peaceful marches against impending emergency legislation in May of 1968, there was a second discernable push towards militancy. In Hessen on September 22, 1968, in protest against the award of a peace

243 The count of 270 injured police officers given by Interior Minister Benda pales when contrasted to the 2,000 police and gendarmes reported injured in Parisian May and June 1968 but occurred in a single week. Bundesminister Benda, Deutscher Bundestag, April 30, 1968, 8993.

244 The political consequences of these incidents might well help to explicate the subsequent lower profile of stone-throwing in West Germany and in France through the early post-1968 period.

245 For the internal conclusions of the Innenministerkonferenz—which very much stressed that the demonstrations were violent—see Niederschrift über die Sitzung der Ständigen Konferenz der Innenminister der Länder am 17. April 1968 in HHStAW 503, 4670.

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prize to Léopold Sédar Senghor, derided as a neocolonial apparatchik, members of the APO attempted to occupy the podium at the Frankfurter Buchmesse. Some 2,000 demonstrators faced off 800 security forces at the Paulskirche: one small group attempted to overturn and burn a car, a preferred technique during Parisian May and confrontations in Italy. Likewise, a construction site lent paving stones to the hands of a small group demonstrators. In attendance, and quickly arrested after an unsuccessful charge on the police line, was Dany le Rouge of 1968 notoriety.246 Yet only a handful of police were injured in the confrontations and action was essentially confined to the main practices of the Easter demonstrations as ranks of protesters tried to physically push through the police barricades.

Combative protest of a new intensity emerged in Berlin on November 4, 1968, as 500 to

1,000 demonstrators, including a contingent of “rockers,” faced down 400 police in a confrontation outside the Berliner Landesgericht Tegel, where Horst Mahler stood on trial for his role during the

Easter Demonstrations. Demonstrators initially attempted to break the police cordon outside the courthouse and subsequently began to harass their adversary in earnest, aided by the unexpected arrival of a lorry full of construction materials.247 Previously, stone-throwing had been universally acknowledged to be minoritarian behavior within APO demonstrations: now the conservative

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the majority of the demonstrators were actively hurling stones. In response, West Berlin police reinforcements used “tear gas” against APO

246 For Tegel, Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 120; Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, 104–6. Cf. reportage and photographs in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 23, 1968, 25-27; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 24, 1968, 1, 4, 21-22.

247 See Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 335–36. For an enthusiastic account of the Tegel action, Zentraler Ermittlungsausschuss bei den Asta der TU und FU - Justizkampagne, “Widerstand Gegen Bürgerkriegspolizei,” Diskus 18, no. 8 (December 1968): 15.

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demonstrators for the first time. Police were outraged, and journalists from such outlets as FAZ reported individual officers who hurled stones back at demonstrators and yelled out accusations of murder.248 The hail of stones (Steinhagel) described in both journalists’ accounts and victorious radical retrospectives found its mark: the Berliner Polizeipräsidium reported 120 injured, including

16 from stones to the head, ten police were hospitalized, and protestors partially destroyed one of the two water cannon in service. By contrast, journalists relying on APO sources reported only 48 arrests and a mere 22 injured demonstrators, among them seven hospitalized.249 Berlin police reported more injured officers in this single confrontation than during the entire week of protest in

April 1968, and this may have been the only West German protest confrontation in 1968 in which injuries to the police overtook injuries to demonstrators. West Berlin police authorities themselves reported that the Tegel incident was the hitherto harshest encounter between the police and the

APO in the city;250 the police-internal account of the events stated that “the units had not predicted that the agitators (Störer) would confront the police line so aggressively...the commando of the

Schutzpolizei underestimated the militancy (Militanz) of its adversary.”251 As Klaus Hartung wrote in the left journal Kursbuch in 1977, “We had prepared for an attack with helmets and coshes

(Stöcke); the first rows [of the demonstration] were handpicked for the assault (Sturm) on the police

248 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 5, 1968, 8.

249 Berliner Polizeidirektion, “Verlaufs- und Erfahrungsbericht über den polizeilichen Einsatz am 4.11.1968 vor dem Landgericht Berlin,” Berlin, November 22, 1968; Frankfurter Rundschau, November 5, 1968, 5; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 5, 1968, p.1, 7-8; Der Tagesspiegel, November 5, 1968, 1, 8.

250 Frankfurter Rundschau, November 5, 1968, 5.

251 Berliner Polizeidirektion, “Verlaufs- und Erfahrungsbericht über den polizeilichen Einsatz am 4.11.1968,” 5.

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barrier. In the following street-fight we succeeded in pushing back the police multiple times. In the end the police officers were injured ten times more than comrades. In military categories we had won our first victory on the street.”252 During the Tegel action in West Berlin on 4 November

1968, the police line was in fact twice driven back: “It was obvious that in the face of the stone hail, many police officers only reluctantly followed instructions,” one journalist reported.253

Indeed, the Tegel encounter, more than any other 1968 incident, accelerated the resolve of the

West German police to introduce more consequential anti-riot protection, including shields and helmets. The incident also encouraged the radical left to pursue confrontations that would, in some cases, transition into armed struggle; in the words of historian Timothy Scott Brown, “This first foray into offensive operations was an unqualified success from the tactical perspective.”254

The November 1968 encounter in Berlin was hardly the last incident involving the police and demonstrators in West Berlin, and subsequent confrontations tended to lose their spontaneous dimension, as the liberal magazine Der Spiegel bemoaned in an issue on violence and the New

Left in February of 1969.255 The following summer brought two confrontations in West Berlin alone: forty-seven police were reported injured and nine officers were hospitalized on July 28,

1969, and ninety-six were injured on August 1, 1969.256 The militant struggle-demonstration

252 Klaus Hartung, “Versuch, die Krise der antiautoritären Bewegung wieder zur Sprache zu bringen,” Kursbuch, no. 48 (June 1977): 32. Italics in original.

253 Tagesspiegel, November 5, 1968, 8; Berliner Polizeidirektion, “Verlaufs- und Erfahrungsbericht über den polizeilichen Einsatz am 4.11.1968 vor dem Landgericht Berlin,” Berlin, November 22, 1968.

254 Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 336.

255 Der Spiegel 7, February 1969, 24.

256 Der Tagesspiegel, July 29, 1968, 1; Der Tagesspiegel, August 3, 1968, 1 and 2.

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(Kampfdemonstration) against the U.S. incursions in Cambodia on May 9, 1970 likewise led to injuries, and not merely on the side of the demonstrators. As new West Berlin Polizeipräsident

Klaus Hübner reported in his memoirs, it was “the biggest debacle” he had yet experienced: “a few hundred insurrectionaries” operating on the university territory had met the flank of the police charge by launching a hail of paving-stones, throwing projectiles, and pieces of metal, bolts, and ball-bearings hurled from slings. In his memoir, Einsatz, Hübner reported 300 injuries and recounted that two injured service horses had to be shot on the spot;257 the radical newspaper Agit

883 boasted of 250 wounded police.258 In West Berlin, particularly, the shift towards revolt was unmistakable among the militant factions of a fragmenting APO, enthusiastically supported by some fractions of the antiauthoritarian left.259

Though many militants on the Berlin scene went underground and efforts turned to the ascent of the armed struggle groups in the seventies, the sporadic will to engage in militant protest did not subside and was reignited in the course of housing struggles in such incidents as the broadly publicized 1973-1974 confrontations between Spontaneist militants and the Frankfurt police in the

Frankfurter Westend. Though manuals like the Handbuch für Hausbesetzer had advocated and envisioned elaborate practices of physical resistance to the police in the context of housing occupations as early as 1970, prior to the Westend incidents, confrontational actions during the

257 Hübner, Einsatz, 173–75. Ibid. 175.

258 Agit 883 no. 60 (May 14, 1970): 2.

259 For liberal reportage on violence in ex-SDS groups, Der Spiegel 46, November 11, 1968, 67-72. The chief ideological defender of the Tegel action, Christian Semler, founded the one of the most important of early the Maoist K-Gruppen. See also Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 5, 1968, 8, and the letters between Semler and communist workers in Neue Kritik 51/52 (February 1969): 109-119.

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housing struggles were typically quickly vanquished by an overwhelming police onslaught.260 The

1973-1974 encounters in Frankfurt, the capital of West German youth revolt and home of

Revolutionärer Kampf, were different. On March 28, 1973, confrontations broke out around the squat at Kettenhofweg 51, where militants built barricades and harassed the police advance using projectiles.261 Similarly, the police takeover of another occupied block at Bockenheimer

Landstraße 111/113 in February of 1974 involved no serious resistance due to the unforeseen, sudden, and highly-planned intervention of the security forces, but the ensuing militant demonstration in the Westend on February 23, 1974 allegedly left some fifty police officers injured. As the originally legal demonstration of some 4,000 persons on arrived at the now partially

-destroyed houses on the Bockenheimer Landstraße, militants began throwing stones at the police line; police in the Westend were met by small groups throwing projectiles and physically confronting isolated police officers.262 The Frankfurt Polizeipräsidium would report that at

260 Thus, in December 1971 in Hannover, the authors of one of the more precocious housing struggles in the Federal Republic launched stones and assorted projectiles at the police during the initial stages of the eviction of their occupied home but swiftly surrendered after the security forces used an armored Sonderwagen to smash the barricade blocking the entryway. HPVNI, 140750, “einsatz aus anlasz der raeumung des gebaeudes hannover arndstrasze 20, am 14. dezember 1971,” December 14, 1971, Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Nds 120 Hannover, Acc. 49/80. Nr. 12/7, Überwachung von Versammlungen und Demonstrationen. Demonstrationen in Hannover, 1968-1972. For the first confrontation between militants and the police in the Frankfurt context, see Frankfurt allegemeine Zeitung. Zeitung für Frankfurt, September 30, 1971. 5.

261 Häuserrat Frankfurt, Wohnungskampf in Frankfurt, 65; Revolutionärer Kampf, “Widerstand ist möglich.” For the respectable press, see Frankfurter Rundschau, March 29, 1973-April 9, 1973; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 29, 1973 –April 9, 1973. For the police version, Presse- und Informationsamt der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Dokumentation zum Polizeieinsatz um das Haus Kettenhofweg 51 (Frankfurt am Main, 1973).

262 Der Polizeipräsident in Frankfurt am Main, „Erfahrungs- und Verlaufsbericht in Zusammenhang mit der Räumung der Besetzten Häuser Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumannstraße in Frankfurt am Main,“ Frankfurt am Main, June 7, 1974, HStAS EA 2/303 Bü 1999. For militant reportage, Wir wollen Alles! nos. 13-14 (February-March 1974); Häuserratzeitung no. 9 (March 1974); Info-Dienst February 22, 1974, 1-4.

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approximately 1:30pm, an isolated officer of the Bereitschaftspolizei was accosted, thrashed by a group of demonstrators, and disarmed,. Another pair of police officers were subsequently beaten down; a group of police in civilian clothing attempted to come to their aid and “were assaulted and brutally beaten up by 50-65 criminals with crowbars and paving-stones.”263 Similarly, the summer of 1974 would witness adversarial demonstrations against higher ticket fares for Frankfurt public transit;264 an analogous protest wave ensued in Heidelberg in June of 1975. Both of these demonstration cycles were led by members of the Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschlands

(KBW), at that point the dominant West German Maoist group to emerge from the 1968 movement, although Spontis also took part.

The new social movements of the later seventies generated the conditions for a second wave of militant demonstration practices in the Federal Republic of Germany. Though the majority of the new citizen initiatives (Bürgerinitiativen or BI) movements were comprised of members at least nominally committed to civil disobedience, some Spontis and radical organizations like the anti-imperialist K-Gruppen were committed to militant protest, a strategy that led to notorious and highly-mediatized incidents between police and demonstrators at Brokdorf in the northern coastal state of Schleswig-Holstein in November of 1976, at Grohnde in the state of Niedersachsen in

263 Schutzpolizeiabteilung, “Polizeiliche Lagen in Frankfurt am Main in der Zeit vom 20. Bis 24.2.1974,” Frankfurt am Main, March 1, 1974, 16-17, Bundesarchiv (BA) B136 15620,

264 The protests were led this time by the Maoist Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschlands, although the Spontis also took part. See Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 430–33; KBW Autorenkollektiv der Ortsgruppe Frankfurt, Der Kampf Gegen Die Fahrpreiserhöhung Und Den Magistrat in Frankfurt Mai/Juni 1974 (Plankstadt: Verlag Jürgen Sendler, 1975); Rote Hilfe e.V. and GUV, Polizeiterror gegen die Fahrpreisdemonstrationen in Frankfurt 26.5-1.6.1974 (Frankfurt am Main: W. Schmidbauer /Rote Hilfe, 1974); Sedlmaier, Consumption and Violence, 160–63.

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March of 1977, and at Brokdorf again in February 1981.265 The number of injured police in the major confrontations of the late seventies rivalled any single incident in 1968 in the Federal

Republic despite the integration of riot gear into police equipment, and the police regularly estimated the number of “violent elements” to be in the thousands; thus, the Niedersachsen Interior

Ministry report on the encounters at Grohnde claimed that out of the estimated 11,000 or 12,500 people at the demonstration, around 1,500-2,000 demonstrators were “militant, violent actors,” actively or passively abetted by around 4,000 or 5,000 solidaristic “active helpers.” The militants had allegedly brought motorcycle helmets, waterproof clothing, protective gloves, and a motley assortment of offensive material including iron bars, slings and metal bolts, and martial arts weapons—all of them more or less verified in subsequent film footage. Of the 4,500 deployed police, some 165 officers were reported as having minor injuries while 75 were considered “more seriously” (ernstlicher) injured. The renewed commitment to the militant confrontation showcased practical, material, and organizational innovations on the radical left that would outlast Maoist or anarchist groups involved in the actions to become a resilient militant style in the context of anti- fascist mobilizations and the West German autonomist movements, such as the use of slings and the motorcycle helmets and already in vogue in militant protest in France and Italy. According to the state apparatus, later demonstrators allegedly achieved a higher degree of “specialization” in

265 For the social history, see Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, 167–80; Michael L. Hughes, “Civil Disobedience in Transnational Perspective: American and West German Anti-Nuclear- Power Protesters, 1975-1982,” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 39, no. 1 (147) (2014): 236–53; Tompkins, “Grassroots Transnationalism(s): Franco-German Opposition to Nuclear Energy in the 1970s.”

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tasks and functions; in fact, police would claim that the combats were centrally planned and organized.266

Groups committed to confrontations of this sort outlived and even tended to benefit from the decline of armed struggle groups like the RAF or the Revolutionäre Zellen: thus, by June of

1978, when Maoist KBW and antifa (“anti-fascist”) counter-demonstrators forcibly closed down a public meeting by the neofascist NPD in Frankfurt, the combat-protest had outlived the apex of its rival violent forms to consolidate into a minoritarian but ineradicable dimension of West

German radical practice.267 Meanwhile, as in France, the emergence of combat-protest sometimes left the police in a state of perceived inferiority even at the end of the seventies, introducing insecurity that police officers and state functionaries acknowledged and bemoaned, though rarely in public forums. Thus, at the Frankfurt anti-Shah protest of November 1978, masked, helmeted, and equipped protestors generated chaotic scenes of Gegengewalt at the American embassy, in the

Westend, and on the university campus. Frankfurt Polizeipräsident Müller all but acknowledged to Der Spiegel that the demonstrators had been “the masters of the situation” until considerable police reinforcements arrived;268 as the later report among police noted, militant actions had forced

266 Der Niedersächsische Minister des Innern, “Erfahrungsbericht über den polizeilichen Großeinsatz am 19.3.1977 zum Schutze des KKW-Baugeländes in Grohnde,” Hannover, 1977, Nds. 100, Acc. 146/97, Nr. 38.

267 For the 100-page police report that ensued, see Der Polizeipräsident in Frankfurt am Main, Bericht über die Ereignisse am 17. Juni 1978 in Frankfurt am Main. HHStAW 544, 888. Cf. the seven-page report enclosed in a letter to AK II from Dr. Rossner of the Hessische Ministerium des Innern, „Innenministerkonferenz vom 22. Juni 1978,“ Wiesbaden, August 31, 1978, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B106 371801.

268 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 27, 1978, 1-2: „Die Demonstranten konnten sich für längere Zeit als Herren der Situation fühlen.“

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police units to at least provisionally fall back.269 As the conclusion to the report by Frankfurt

Polizeipräsident Knut Müller put it, “It follows from the declarations of participating police officers that …they were afraid, that some officers wanted to retreat and that it required energetic conduct by the company- and car-leaders to keep them in the police line. Given the strong confrontation with violence and the number of injured colleagues, this can hardly surprise us.”270

For its part, the Sponti newspaper Pflasterstrand noted that the “stone hail” had achieved an amplitude never before seen in the city, leaving police officers visibly shaken and huddled behind the cover of their transport vehicles.271 The visible police domination of the anti-Shah demonstrations of an earlier decade was conspicuously absent.

In sum, the post-1968 conjuncture generated a militant protest tradition unknown in the

Federal Republic for most of the sixties that periodically generated injury, incertitude, and humiliation among the representatives of public order. In the view of the state apparatus, that tradition inexorably tended to become both more organized and more radical in its embrace of physical constraint; a provisional analysis by a Federal Interior Ministry working group in the fall of 1977 asserted that “The criminal energy with which these actions are planned and followed- through has increased; simultaneously, the brutal use of violence has risen…many disruptive groups no longer differentiate, like they did at the start of the seventies, between violence against objects and violence against persons…almost all groups of the “New Left,” above all Maoist

269 Bericht über die Arbeitstagung “Erfahrungsaustausch über die Demonstration von 25. November 1978 in Frankfurt/Main am 12. Dezember and der Polizei-Führungsakademie Münster,” Münster, December 1978, 8, Bundesarchiv (BA), B106 388494.

270 Ibid., 9. Emphasis in document.

271 Pflasterstrand no. 43 (December 2-15, 1978), 19.

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groups, seek militant confrontations with the state.” 272 At least from the perspective of state officials, the art of confrontational protest had assumed an intensity and extension unknown in

1968 and the earlier seventies, outlasting the commitments of the 1968 generation. The West

German Autonomen of the early eighties, whose “Black Blocs” and militant demonstrations in prominent cities like West Berlin were notorious, were but an inflection of this broader tradition;273 both the “equipment” and the “tactics” disclosed in autonomist documents—merging into a broader group in the event of police superiority, breaking up into small groups when police were less concentrated— would have been fully familiar to groups like Revolutionärer Kampf.274 In a very real sense, militant protest had become autonomous of the trajectories of the major institutional actors of the 1968 generation.

2.4. “Hit and Run”: The Power of the Paving-Stone

In his journal entry of May 6, 1968, soixante-huitard Pierre Peuchmaurd described his sense of skepticism as he observed initial confrontations between protestors and police around the former

Montparnasse train station in Paris: “At that moment we passed a few guys working courageously at their paving stone. This little domestic rock seemed derisory…I didn’t know at that point that the paving stone is savage, I didn’t know its force.”275 Unexpected recognition of the power of the paving stone circa 1968 was hardly unique to Peuchmaurd: as youths began to confront the police,

272 Analyse der schweren Störungen der Inneren Sicherheit in der Zeit vom 1.1.1972 bis 30.6.1976, August 1977, 5, 8, B/106/101982.

273 For an unapologetically militant take on the history of the Autonomen, see Geronimo, Fire and Flames.

274 For tactical reflections on protest by the Autonomen, see, for example, Radikal-Extrablatt, December 1980, 4; Der schwarze Kanal 3, April 21, 1982, 20-21.

275 Pierre Peuchmaurd, Plus vivants que jamais (Paris: R. Laffont, 1968), 20.

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the throwing of stones and hard projectiles at the security forces by dispersed and mobile groups emerged as the main manifestation of the rebellious style. Throwing projectiles by hand or launching bolts from slings and running away from the police produced bruises and injuries and often allowed rebellious agents to injure their adversaries and subvert ordinary urban routine while mitigating the danger of contact or arrests: these practices originally exploited vulnerabilities in the governance sensibilities, tactics, and equipment of security forces, and also implicated the general availability of hard projectiles in the urban environment. Thus, the art of the paving stone and its analogues may be usefully understood as “subversion” of the practices of the state that neutralized and exceeded the physical constraint deployed by the police in its paradigmatic form until the end of the sixties, the baton assault, and as the incorporation of the environmental conditions under which militants acted. Moreover, by typically injuring without killing, the throwing of projectiles conformed to an equilibrated rivalry, a regulated escalation in response to the practices of state and in particular, to the use of the baton. Harassment of this type could and sometimes did momentarily overturn the typical relationship of dominance prevailing between police and demonstrators, generating both extreme frustration and injuries in the ranks of the security forces in specific encounters—police taking refuge behind their riot shields and vehicles or enacting retreats, to the considerable enthusiasm of militants. Though state countermeasures like anti-riot protection –adopted and refined after 1968—mitigated the injuriousness of this style of youth revolt, if not its status as an act of outrageous illegality from the point of view of the security forces and state officials, at the advent of the turn to the paving stone, the number of injuries within police forces was often—at least from the police perspective—considerable.

The counterintuitive viability “hit and run” tactics had its foundations in the security culture of Western European states in the context of protest. At the start of the cycles of contestation

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around 1968, individual police and soldiers tasked to manage internal tumults had batons and firearms at their disposal to constrain their opponents. Use of improvised projectiles exploited the

“restraint” of the security forces insofar as firearms were no longer an acceptable police recourse in these situations. Meanwhile, the representatives of public order maneuvered in highly controlled massed formations and were vulnerable to ranged skirmishing: in order to dislocate groups of demonstrators and effect arrests, police typically sought physical contact. The standard mass baton assaults were ponderous enough to elude by mobile groups relying on paving stones and slings: as

Peuchmaurd put it in his journal entry on May 10, 1968, “There is no mêlee [struggle], or hardly any. They have understood that they can’t do anything against paving stones...”276 In the same period, demonstrators would articulate distant harassment (harcèlement) to mobile tactics that borrowed from the principles of armed insurgency: initiative, mobility, and rapid tactical retreat.

As a tract on Parisian demonstrations promoting protest groups modelled on the “urban guerrilla” in the fall of 1968 wrote, “These groups will immobilize, harass, demoralize, and weaken the forces of repression…The police, slow on the defense and rhinoceros-like (rhinocérines) on the attack, can easily be overwhelmed (débordées) if they don’t alter tactics, unless they are drawn into firing on us or they call in the army...”277 Protest and direct action were to be remodeled on the guerrilla even as the use of firearms was out of the question.

The tract proved more or less accurate: accounts of adversarial, combative protest offered by French police, gendarmes, and journalists from 1968 noted that if mobile youths throwing

276 Peuchmaurd, Plus vivants que jamais, 59.

277 Comité pour la révolution permanente, “Sur la manifestation,” 3.

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projectiles may not have been authentic revolutionary subjects, they weren’t defenseless targets for the police either—a reality that typical analyses of “state repression” invested in discourses of victimhood have overlooked. A synthesis by Divisional General Demettre, Commander of the

Parisian Gendarmerie in July of 1968, claimed that the groups of May and June, typified by

“extreme fluidity and mobility,” prioritized a “no man’s land” favorable to the throwing of projectiles and took flight under the cover of predesignated lines of defenders in order to avoid contact, revealing “insufficiencies of all kinds” in the operational practices of the gendarmerie.278

Similarly, the 1969 Règlement of the Municipal Police discouraged frontal actions against combative protestors in favor of surprise attacks and encirclement movements on the ground that the former were unlikely to be efficacious:

Whether the adversary is in the open or entrenched, the frontal attack should be discouraged; its result is long and uncertain; it exposes the men [effectifs] to projectiles most often to no purpose [le plus souvent sans profit].279

Similarly, a high-level synthesis conducted by the central services of the CRS in June of 1971 noted that traditional demonstrations didn’t pose any particular problems for the security forces,

“guerrilla” practices had allegedly proved “very effective” at “at isolating” and “immobilizing” the police.280 Public officials and members of the security forces regularly qualified “violent”

278 Regional Command of the Gendarmerie Nationale, 1st Military Region, Headquarters, 3rd Bureau, Fiche Nr 7873/2-III, Paris, July, 16, 1968, 1, SHD, GD 2007 ZM 1/307577*.

279 Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire de la police municipale (Paris: Imprimerie des services techniques de la préfecture de police, 1969), 299–300.

280 CRS 2nd division, Synthèse des Comptes-rendus Techniques en 1970, Paris, June 1, 1971, 3. This file is enclosed in Henri Mir, “Note pour MM. Les Commandants de Groupement des Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, MM. Les Commandants de Compagnie,” Paris, June 4, 1971, AN, 19890672/43*. Emphases in the original.

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demonstration practices as “urban guerrilla” techniques, a designation that undoubtedly overemphasized their military quality but did reflect revolutionary left discourse and alluded to the mobility of adversarial demonstrators and their rather successful efforts to elude unintentional contact.281 Encumbered by their equipment, organizational forms, and interwar conceptual frameworks, French police and gendarmes were frequently left trailing behind mobile protesters a decade after the experience of 1968; as late as the March 23, 1979 Parisian metallurgist demonstrations by the autonomes, a CRS commander would complain that the protestors had generated “serious troubles and important damages” and were “in good physical condition, very mobile, and difficult to apprehend.”282 Militant protestors proved to be an elusive adversary for police over a decade after 1968.

In West Germany, the emergent style of adversarial, mobile protest posed similar problems because of the enduring legacy of the internal security culture of the interwar period. Thus, although mass columns were common in the Easter protests, German students also protested on

Parisian lines involving irregular, loose formations of militants throwing stones. In the later Sponti movement, the informal group founded for semi-organized confrontation would receive its own colloquial name: the “revolt-group” (Putzgruppe).283 As Gerd Koenen writes, the tactic of the

281 Ibid.; inter alia, see Jacques Aubert, SGP/III 4529, “Note à l’Attention de M. Pierre Somveille, Préfet, Directeur du Cabinet du Ministre,” Paris, September 20, 1968 19910852/2.* Dossier Maintien de l’Ordre; PN/SP/CRS/F/Nr 2,503 “Note pour MM. les Commandants de Groupement des C.R.S., MM. les Commandants de Cie,” Paris, May 3, 1971, AN 19890672/43.*

282 Jules Robin, Commandant la CRS 32, Rapport technique de fin de service, “Maintien de l’ordre à Paris le 23 mars 1979,” Sainte-adresse, March 28, 1979, 12, AN 19990044/2*.

283 Putz was used as a synonym for disorder or anger within the Sponti milieu. Kasper, “Das Ende der Utopien,” 189.

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Putzgruppe was more or less “hit-and-run”: offensive actions using projectiles followed by retreat and sudden counterattack on isolated elements of the police.284 According to the tract “Resistance is Possible!” reprinted by RK in January of 1974, small groupings of militants were supposed to practice autonomous initiative when police were disorganized but merge into the larger demonstration in the event of police superiority. “Again: for the political and practical success of the action, the cooperative work between the small groups…and on the other hand, the demonstration as a whole, is decisive…in the event of [state] superiority, don’t let the groups split up, but rather, retreat in one direction and find a way back to the central core of the demo!”285

However, although counselling retreat in the event of police superiority, the tract also concluded that militants could often maintain position and simply hurl projectiles, counting on police officers’ reluctance to take physical risks.286

As in 1968, this tactic was often successful at keeping police trailing behind the militants, forcing them into self-incriminating excesses (Übergriffe) and indiscriminate arrests, and preventing successful prosecution. During the Frankfurt encounters in the Westend at the end of

March and early April 1973, the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that “After the violent evacuation of the Kettenhofweg, police units in several neighboring streets were targeted by riotous groups (Randalierergruppe) using stones, hard pieces of cast iron, metal pipes, and other dangerous munitions (Geschossen). Again and again…shock troops of helmeted

284 Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 346.

285 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Widerstand ist nötig” (1973) reprinted in Wir wollen Alles! no. 12 (January 1974): 8.

286 Ibid.

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policemen pursued fleeing rioters.” Pursuit was far from entirely successful: over 40 police were reported injured, while only 20 youths were arrested.287 From a military perspective, the confrontation was decidedly an indecisive draw: a representative of the Housing Council counted some 50 injured demonstrators on their side.288 In January of 1974, small-group tactics were reiterated by demonstrators in the Frankfurter inner city (Innenstadt) and once again exposed the police to difficulties deplored by the respectable press; FAZ entitled one editorial “The police were powerless against the demonstrators.”289 Likewise, following the confrontations on February 23,

1974, the conservative newspaper editorialized that “the Frankfurt police showed themselves incapable of hindering rageful attacks against the constitutional order this weekend.”290 Even when mobile groups did not engage in stone-throwing, militants tested the limits of traditional practices of state: thus, during the May 1974 demonstrations against higher U-Bahn tariff rates in Frankfurt,

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung would complain of the “conceptlessness” bordering on

“incapacity” of the police.291

State officials frequently concurred amongst themselves that militant practices had demonstrated serious limitations in the direction, tactics, and material of the police; thus, the final

287 “Straßenkämpfe zwischen Frankfurts Polizei und Demonstranten,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 29, 1973, 2.

288 “100 Personen sind verletzt,” Frankfurter Rundschau, March 30, 1973, 13.

289 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 14, 1974, 19-20. For diagnoses of similar problems during the May 1974 demonstrations against the Frankfurter Verkehrsverband (FVV), see Frankfurter Rundschau, May 30, 1974, 13; Frankfurter Rundschau May 31, 1974, 13; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 31, 1974, 35-36.

290 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 25, 1974, 19.

291 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 28, 1974, 29.

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report on the Frankfurt incidents to AKII noted that “The demonstration on 23 February 1974 showed the limits of police intervention based on our available forces and means of action.”292

Police reports complained that a cadre of militant actors had been objectively supported by the

“nonparticipants”: “Before the assault on the police officers, the group parted, the hooligans

(Politrocker) stormed out, suddenly fell upon the police officers and immediately found their way back to the protection of these apparent nonparticipants…”293 This was a variant of the strategy described in the RK-circulated tract and it translated the population/insurgent relationship as idealized in guerrilla military theory to protest conditions in order to put the police into the difficult position of relative inaction or assaulting the entire demonstration. In circumstances where demonstrators were embedded in a larger group, were able to take advantage of space, flexibility, and mobility, and engaged in sustained projectile-throwing, the ensuing confrontations were never unequivocal successes for the agents of public order, nor did the police often manage to effect significant numbers of actionable arrests. Thus, police were typically able to re-establish dominance over space but regularly failed to apprehend a significant number of demonstrators and sustained insults and injuries in the process.

In sum, throwing projectiles as a group and relying on mobility allowed insurgent protestors to injure members of the security forces, inflict material damage, and avoid arrest and legal recrimination. The furious exactions by police forces when they actually apprehended

292 Der Polizeipräsident in Frankfurt am Main, “Analyse der Einsätze. Aus Anlaß der Räumung der besetzten Häuser Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumannstraße in Frankfurt am Main,” Frankfurt, December 1974, 30, 35, HStAS EA 2/303 Bü 1999.

293 Der Polizeipräsident in Frankfurt am Main, “Erfahrungs- und Verlaufsbericht im Zusammenhang mit der Räumung der besetzten Häuser Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumannstraße in Frankfurt am Main,” July 1974, 47, HStAS EA 2-303 Bü 1995.

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rebellious youths and their regular bouts of aggression towards bystanders who observed, photographed, and reported on these encounters (Chapter Three), likely originated in part from the frustration generated by this style of protest, prompting moves by some elements of the police to avenge their honor by brutalizing anyone within baton distance.294 Mobile demonstrators maneuvering in small groups and throwing hard projectiles underlined the limitations of contemporary protest management and even demonstrated the shortcomings of newer means of coercion and emergent techniques for executing rapid arrests studied later in this dissertation. The outcome of militant protest as an embodied critique of domination was far from unequivocal.

The issue was not merely that the police were physically encumbered and less fit than their adversary or lacked useful weapons: the traditional internal security and public order tactics in protest confrontations had originated in the governance-imaginary of the interwar period, while the hierarchies and organizational standards of public order interventions did not initially favor mobile formations for rapid arrests. Thus, although the Third-Worldist and Maoist militant identifications of some European radicals encouraged efforts to adapt the figure of the heroic guerrilla to local protest conditions, it remains true that fracturing the traditional protest into mobile, autonomous groups of less than twenty protesters, relying on mobility or the “cover” offered by a larger demonstration, and throwing projectiles, were plausible behaviors if one wanted to confront the police, practice illegality and avoid being killed, injured, or apprehended. If one assumes that for radicals, an objective in confrontations was to “hit” without being “hit”—to momentarily overthrow a situation of univocal constraint following the logic of self-defense or

294 Prominent French officials admitted as much. See Georges Pompidou, Entretiens et discours, 1968-1974 (Paris: Plon, 1975), 152; Dansette, Mai 1968, 105. For militant descriptions of exactions, see Chapter Three “Police Brutality and Its Critics.”

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counter-violence—or to force the police to commit politically-incriminating overreactions—it is hard to dispute that small group tactics and use of the paving stone followed a discernable adversarial rationality.

If part of the efficacy of the new style lay in core vulnerabilities in the coercive equipment, physical conditioning, and tactics of the forces of order, another dimension also helps to account for the dominance of stones and other hard projectiles within the various projectiles that might have been adopted. Typical projectiles were commonly available and appropriable within the urban environment and required minimal preparation or precautions to procure and transport. The security forces often sought to cordon off construction sites around protests and marches to deny access to projectiles, but in urban, rocks, paving stones, metal projectiles, bricks, bottles, and bolts were ubiquitous and available to those willing to scavenge or equipped to break up cobblestones or grating. Nor did projectile-throwing demand specialized physical training; if one wanted to injure, demoralize, and force back police, stones, pavés, half-bricks and other hard projectiles were an available and assimilable recourse, faute de mieux.

For the revolutionary left, mobile harassment practices using throwing material were not merely meaningful as tactics, of course, but disclosed themselves as potent acts of signification that would de-transcendentalize the state and de-sacralize the bodies of its representatives, revealing both to be vulnerable to resistance. As practices of reflexivity, mobile harassment also allowed rebellious agents to position themselves in the historical lineage of 19th century revolution, the post-war strikes of the worker movement, and anti-colonial revolts, thereby taking part in the populist, workerist, and anti-imperialist identifications of the revolutionary left. Moreover, after

1968 in particular, mobile harassment tended to be aestheticized as spontaneous revolt against a highly organized, regimented adversary; both militant art and the photographs of youths by

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sympathetic photographers such as Gilles Caron of Gamma invited the viewers to invest in the drama of rebellion, typically showcasing individualized, dispersed youths confronting masses of mechanized state forces. Similarly, slogans like Sous les pavés, la plage (“Beneath the cobblestones, the beach”) evoked both the process of dismantling the street to confront the police and the horizon of the liberation from state power to be achieved through paving-stone revolt.

After 1968, the tactic of launching projectiles at the police and taking flight itself became a potent marker of the spontaneity that was a constitutive element of social-revolutionary identity.

Nevertheless, we would do best not to reduce the paving stone to a mere symbol, at risk of rendering incomprehensible the dynamics of adversarial conflict. Militant practices based on mobile harassment generated injuries and exploited vulnerabilities that police and soldiers would subsequently—and not entirely successfully—try to restrict.

2.5. “Close-Combat”: The Insurgent Baton

Depictions of youths brandishing pickaxe handles were prominent in representations of “youth revolt” or “subversion,” part of a moral panic against leftist violence. Yet if rebellious agents weren’t always averse to procuring striking weapons in the years of contestation, the practice of protest-revolt rarely involved direct physical assault for obvious reasons. Even in cases of numerical superiority, “insurgents” did not necessarily outmatch police or soldiers in physical prowess at mêlée struggles; moreover, rebels who actually threatened to overwhelm police up close were liable to be fired at or threatened at gunpoint. Since virtually every soldier or police officer possessed a baton, potential numerical superiority in distant confrontations often fell away the moment security forces could come in close. The dangers of contact were hardly lost on the youthful practitioners of the street fight; as we have seen already, the marginality of close

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confrontation is confirmed by reports by state officials across national boundaries. Although physical altercations of this type remained fairly common in protest-police confrontations in

France and Germany, protesters used the insurgent baton much more often to deter and elude members of the security forces or to assault isolated police officers than to start concerted attacks on a massed adversary. In general, there was no protest variant of the baton charge: it was security forces that pursued youthful insurgents. Yet when physical contact was sought, the analysis points back to an attempt by militants to compete against security forces over the distribution of physical

“hits” and to appropriate the position of the matraqueur or Schläger, the-one-who-hit, while breaching the police line to attain the protest objective.

In the course of the decade, avoiding contact typically became more rather than less central to the practices of revolt. As we have seen, prior to the main events of 1968, French JCR militants concluded on the basis of the Caen confrontations that charges could be resisted by a determined physical effort to maintain cohesion.295 German students likewise initially risked close contact; in fact, in many of the encounters of 1968 in the Federal Republic, compact groups of demonstrators marched in defiance of the police and attempted to hold the line in the face of police violence, while another main tactic during the spring of 1968 in Berlin was to link arms and proceed at a run towards the police line – embracing contact. French students, too, spectacularly attempted to link arms in the face of a police charge on May 6, 1968 in the Latin Quarter before breaking into mobile groups. Yet though these techniques were not entirely retired, in response to the experience of

295 Versa, “Quand une idée pénètre les masses elle devient force matérielle.”

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baton attacks, militant demonstrators typically became both more mobile and more dispersed, contributing to the emergent primacy of small-group actions.

Sometimes, however, radical aims necessarily implied transgressing boundaries defined by the forces of order: this scenario rehabilitated the mêlée. At the March 10, 1971 anti-fascist counterdemonstration in Paris, French Maoist revolutionaries using corrugated iron shields and crowbars frontally assaulted the security forces protecting the rally at the Palais de Sports, to the enthusiasm of the Maoist leadership.296 According to the subsequent report by the Préfecture de police, later distributed to the commanders of the C.R.S. by its Central Service, “At the head of the cortège were supposed to be placed … the shock troops of Secours Rouge and also…a group of 50 militant Maoists, armed, among other things, with aluminum shields fabricated in an aeronautic factory…Breaking with their traditional tactic which consisted in fixing the forces of the police, harassing them, and avoiding frontal combat, the leaders had decided on a massive frontal attack against the cordons of the Police deployed rue de Vaugirard…”297 In this case, the aim of intervening to end the meeting by the neo-fascist group Ordre nouveau justified a turn away from convention, yet as the anonymous author of the report implicitly recognized, offensive charges against massed police and gendarmes were rare. Similar, organized and planned coordinated assaults would be undertaken in the French capital by the service d’ordre of the

296 Cf. La Cause du peuple, March 17, 1971, 7.

297 Henri Mir, “Note pour les Commandants de groupe des CRS et les Commandants de Cie,” Paris, May 3, 1971, “Comportement des organisations gauchistes à l’occasion d’une récente manifestation,” enclosed report from the Préfecture de police, 5, AN 19890672/42*.

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Trotskyist LC in the early seventies—particularly at the high-water mark of Trotskyist militancy from January to June of 1973.

Confrontations in Germany during the April 1968 protest cycle sometimes involved small groups of militants who employed pickaxe handles, iron bars, and wooden flagstaffs to confront the police. Thus, in one of the most violent protest encounters in Germany during the Easter demonstrations of 1968, the local Schutzpolizei and Bereitschaftspolizei executed an “energetic” dispersion action, batons in hand, in front of the Hamburg Polizeipräsidium, at a relatively high cost to their own: 43 police officers were reported injured, the vast majority after the police plunged into the demonstrator ranks and the order “baton free!” (Knüppel frei!) was given and a small group of helmeted demonstrators brandishing pickaxe handles and iron bars offered resistance.298 Yet recourse to direct physical confrontation in militant demonstrations in West

Germany by no means entirely vanished after the initial turmoil of 1968. Koenen writes that the

RK Putzgruppe learned a special hit- and kick-technique and deployed wooden batons that could equally serve as flag-poles.299 In an infamous incident during confrontations in the course of the

1973 Frankfurt Häuserkampf, anarchist Spontis, including future foreign minister Joschka Fischer, physically assaulted a police officer before being scared off by a colleague who threatened to open fire. The broader collection of photographs of the incident in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published around December 1973, indirectly discloses that before he stumbled into an ambush, the

298 Hamburg Polizeipräsident, “Führungsverhältnisse,” 16, StAH 1-136_1030. For “armed” demonstrators, see Polizeimeister HK, „Situationsbericht über Vorfälle anlässlich der Demonstrationen vor dem Polizeipräsidium,“ Hamburg, April 29, 1968, 1-2, StAH 1-136_1030.

299 Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 346.

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police officer had rashly pursued the unarmed demonstrators alone.300 In this incident, it was the overconfident perception by an isolated police officer that he could pursue the Spontis without reinforcements, Gummiknüppel in hand, that led him into troubled waters. Revolutionärer Kampf would triumphantly report on later incidents in February 1974 when similar isolated but armed counter-terrorist units pursuing demonstrators were subjected to “counter-violence”: “These anti- terror-specialists were armed with revolvers, tear-gas spray, wooden truncheons, and helmets: we had only our bare hands. We took away the batons that they were using to strike the comrades,” reports a comrade. The ‘special units’ (Sokos) were badly beaten (fürchterlich verprügelt) with their own wooden truncheons…They lost their helmets, their tear gas, and even a revolver.”301

Closed formations of militants who delivered “close-combat” against the police were more prominent among the West German Maoist groups. Militant formations of Maoist groups at Bonn in 1973, Brokdorf in 1976, Grohnde in 1977, and Frankfurt in 1978 did directly engage the police using crowbars, pickaxe handles, and the like, in part because their aim was typically to break through police lines, in part as an expression of the hierarchical political culture of these groups and their Neo-Leninist emphases on organization.302 Thus, the New Left journal Der lange Marsch noted that Maoists equipped in the style of the Japanese militants of Zengakuren303 had covered

300 “Frankfurt in Jahre 1973,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 21, 1973, 28, photographs by Brigitte Kleinhans.

301 Wir wollen Alles! no. 13 (Feb.-March 1974), 3. The police report indeed noted that the police officers who were part of the “special group” (Sondergruppe) had been beaten up; Polizeipräsident Frankfurt, „Analyse der Einsatz,“ 30.

302 As Koenen notes, “Based on our whole discourse- and organizational-style we were less Maoists than Neo-leninists.” Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 420. Italics in original.

303 For the Zenkaguren, see William Marotti, “Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest,” American Historical Review, February 2009: 97-135.

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the retreat of the occupiers of the Bonn Rathaus during protests against the visit of South

Vietnamese head of state Nyugen van Thieu in April 1973.304 Similar behaviors were reported by journalists, New Left sources, and the police confrontational demonstrations in the late seventies: during the main confrontation November 25, 1978 in Frankfurt, police reported demonstrators using staffs, iron bars, clamp-irons and other striking materials to assault the police line while the second and third ranks threw projectiles.305 As Koenen, once a leading member of the Frankfurt

Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschlands (KBW) notes, “Distance weapons…were not our deal; close-combat means and above all, modern technology were.”306

The use of striking weapons involved adversarial dynamics that transcended local conditions. The most obvious was the logic of deterrence via one-to-one superiority: striking equipment was typically as long or longer –and in the case of crowbars, more solid— than that of the security forces, who typically had wooden or rubber batons or their own or relied on rifles to hit their opponents. These striking weapons typically allowed militants to both deflect hated baton blows and assault security forces beyond usual striking distance. Because of the standardization and homogenization of the weapons used by security forces and the bureaucratic pace of shifts in police equipment, the police and gendarmes of European states were also vulnerable to the more- or-less improvised adoption of longer batons or crowbars that could shatter wooden batons,

304 Der lange Marsch. Zeitung für eine neue Linke (May 1973), 3.

305 Polizeipräsident Knut Müller, “Einsatz-, Verlaufs- und Erfahrungsbericht aus Anlaß einer Demonstration der CISNU am Samstag, dem 25. November 1978, in Frankfurt am Main,” Frankfurt, December 1978, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, EA 2 303 Bü 1871, 9. Cf. FAZ. Zeitung für Frankfurt, November 27, 1978, 25.

306 Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 416–17.

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polycarbonate shields, and visors. One such identifiable escalation in striking weapons occurred in Paris in the early seventies, as French Maoists adopted iron bars; another occurred in Germany in the late seventies and was coextensive with the major anti-nuclear demonstrations. Longer contusion weapons and solid materials like iron allowed demonstrators to strike out of striking range, parry, and destroy the typically plastic defenses of the police.

Like projectiles, striking weapons were improvised out of commonly available products in the material environment. Aside from their fundamental availability, some equipment allowed the potential juridical defense that militants had been apprehended on the way to sporting practice or work rather than en route to an action, or that the objects in question were mere flagpoles. But the selected striking weapons typically resembled the same ones used by the security forces and rendered possible similar injuries, implying that like security forces, self-identifying revolutionaries incorporated a certain threshold of acceptable injury types into the selection of materiel. The adversarial logic of the use of striking weapons was one of rivalry within a reciprocity structure that prioritized equilibrated self-defense or counter-violence as we have traced its iteration in Chapter One –the overthrow of one-sided constraint.

That is not to say that there was no assumed symbolic dimension to the use of the cosh.

Towards the idealized working-class observer, the well-aimed baton blow disclosed the possibility that one could deliver “blow for blow,”—a Maoist slogan—, literally. Moreover, as reflexive action, the use of the cosh allowed militants to posit themselves in a historical lineage of pre- industrial popular struggles, working-class picket lines, and antifascist organizations of the interwar period. Like stones, coshes were among the traditional “weapons of the weak” in Europe and the Third World, a consideration that appealed to groups that sought to extend social- revolutionary violence such as the French GP or the Spontaneists in the Bundesrepublik. In the

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summer of 1970, French GP members admonished their own cohort not to neglect “traditional” weapons in their theoretical organ Cahiers de la Gauche prolétarienne, invoking the rebellion of

Naxalbarite peasants in India.307 Use of the cosh or crowbar had a reflexive dimension that situated the user in a tradition of mass violence.

These dimensions aside, the deterrent effect and wounding potential in these means were considerable. In France, injuries to security forces from pickaxe handles and other contusion weapons in May and June 1968 and the early seventies were often quite severe, particularly when members of the security forces were isolated and attacked--such incidents were the converse of the systematic hitting of bystanders and detainees by the security forces and other types of state brutality imputed to the “forces of order.” Yet injuries of this type were rarer than bruises and wounds from projectiles because of the marginal status of physical contact in insurgent protest tactics; most often, these happened when police and soldiers assaulted a group of demonstrators to make arrests and disperse the group; or when militants encountered isolated members of the security forces.

For the fundamental reason that militants were rarely reckless enough to engage in full-on physical clashes, mêlées typically played a marginal role in the practice of militant protest, as journalist reports, state accounts, and, official injury statistics all confirm. Yet within that marginality, it is not difficult to discern how the use of these blunt objects responded to the dynamic of conflict. Those that won out were reasonably effective at striking and parrying in one- on-one confrontations, generally available and inexpensive, and able to cause serious injury with an acceptable margin of error, often accumulating secondary benefits like plausible deniability—

307 Gauche prolétarienne “Rapport d’orientation,” 48.

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in short, functionally overdetermined. For the militant fraction of the European New Left, after the demonstrations of 1968, passive victimhood before the police baton was out of the question: in appropriating and using means of striking, demonstrators destabilized the ordinary relationship whereby the police officer who distributed blows.

2.6. Fire and Flames: Molotov Cocktails in Action

One week after the March 10, 1971 militant anti-fascist demonstration against a meeting by the group Ordre nouveau in Paris, the French Maoist broadsheet La Cause du peuple published a front- page image of a lone, burning police officer gyrating on the sidewalk before an impressive incendiary panorama. The broadsheet described the dispositions taken prior to the protest, the planning of the action, and the different formations and their tasks before evoking the moment of

“contact” when militants launched a barrage of Molotovs at the police line barring their route: “On both wings, our cocktails were launched onto the flics (cops), who burned like torches. Then we charged…In total, one hundred flics were put out of action.”308

From 1968 through the early seventies, European radicals forged the use of Molotov cocktails as a dimension of confrontational protest tactics. Leftists originally conceptualized the

Molotov cocktail as a last-resort weapon in the event of serious encounters, and the use of inflamed bottles of petrol became one of the most spectacular forms of militant protest in continental Europe in the course of the seventies. Moreover, Molotov cocktails tended to become more sophisticated in the course of the decade as militants engaged in their own technological adaptations. Yet while the use of Molotov cocktails might appear have to been a dangerous and aggressive intensification

308 La Cause du peuple, March 18, 1971, 7. The reportage here points towards the adversarial logic as opposed to any declaration of hostility against the police or reflexive situating in revolutionary tradition.

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of physical constraint, closer analysis implies that in practice, the use of Molotov cocktails rarely generated grave injuries. An interpretation of the use of Molotov cocktails in terms of adversarial protest dynamics implies that their implementation above all responded to the diminishing efficacy of stones and hard projectiles in the face of state countermeasures and should be understood as an attempt to maintain the deterrence value and potential injuriousness of radical practices in the face of the transformations operated by the state and an effort to “match” police means,309 while simultaneously falling into an aggravated symbolic logic–the declaration of hostility—and a reflexive one—the identification of the militant and the guerrilla. Nevertheless, the record implies that Molotovs were exploited more often as means of intimidation or disorganization than as means of physical destruction.

We should be careful to avoid nominalism about Molotov cocktails: like the material artifacts of the state, local designs went through multiple historical revisions. These shifting coordinates have often been hard to identify in the evidentiary record because European militants did not typically publicize their equipment and remain markedly reticent to discuss them in subsequent interviews, but state archives help. The French security forces anxiously tracked new

“generations” of Molotov cocktail: though fundamentally a glass bottle filled with petrol and ignited by a cloth fuse, typical early adaptations streamlined the ignition process, guaranteed that the bottles would shatter on impact through the addition of gravel310 and/or added potency through

309 The singular divergence in the mass use of Molotovs in protest in each context— volleys of Molotov cocktails were substantially more prevalent in militant protests in France than in those of West Germany— points towards the lack of equivalent for the Molotov among the West German police.

310 Blanc de RJ, Salle d’information et de Commandement, Paris, December 10, 1969, 16h45, APP FD 162. La gauche prolétarienne avant la dissolution le 27 Mai 1970.*

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such updates as corrosive acid.311 As journalist Adrien Dansette noted in his 1971 reportage Mai

1968, the original Molotov cocktails used by French insurgents in 1968 were typically simple flasks or bottles of gasoline lit by a cloth wick at the moment of throwing.312 Two years later, however, the Parisian branch of the Renseignements généraux reported a new type of Molotov cocktail fabricated in the Maoist milieu at Censier in May of 1970, “The ‘advanced Molotov cocktail’ (cocktail Molotov dopé) includes a bottle closed by a stopper: inside are concentrated sulfuric acid mixed with oil and gasoline. On the outside of the bottle is stuck a sachet of potassium chlorate.”313 Later, the commander of a CRS that helped suppress the Maoist “insurrection” at

Grenoble University in June of 1970 reported the discovery of bottles full of gasoline that exploded on contact: “The chemical reaction upon the breaking of the bottle translates into spontaneous inflammation of the “firework” (“feu du bengale”) type.”314 In the spring of 1971, the Préfecture de police identified an anarchist “specialist” at the University of Vincennes who allegedly built

Molotov cocktails on order for revolutionary groups and had “perfected” the newer, self-igniting,

“third generation” Molotov cocktail:

The perfection of these objects, their verified efficacy on the ground demonstrates that the militants specialized in their confection are mastering the technique… The objects used during the demonstration of March 9 [1971] belong, because of their technique of construction and their reliability, to the third generation of Molotov cocktail.

311 Préfecture de Police. PMA-PJA “Des militants de la Gauche prolétarienne confectionnent des engins explosifs dans les locaux universitaires de l’annexe Censier,” 26 May 1970. APP FD 160.*

312 Dansette, Mai 1968, 104.

313 Préfecture de Police, PMA-PJA of May 26, 1970. APP FD 160.

314 CRS/CRG IX/NR 7194/11, Rapport technique de fin de service établi par le Commandant de Groupement Paul David commandant le groupement opérationnel de Grenoble, Marseille, June 19, 1970, AN 19870157/11.*

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Hermetically sealed, they spontaneously inflame by chemical reaction when the substances composing them contact the air. This procedure suppresses the hazards of lighting by traditional means (inflamed rags soaked in oil, a herbicide igniter fixed on the bottle using plaster), although it has a few inconveniences...315

French leftists typically tested different types of Molotov cocktail in forests or on the campuses of

Parisian universities like Vincennes or Censier.316 As the reports imply, state officials tended interpret a dangerous tendency towards professionalization in the refinement of Molotov cocktails and it is apparent that continuity in the word concealed both local variation and subterranean processes of adaptation that rendered Molotovs both more powerful and less mechanically difficult to use.

Though politicians and members of the security forces frequently counted the throwing of

Molotov cocktails as an incendiary outrage, recorded injuries from them were relatively rare in

May 1968 or the après-mai. The first uses of Molotov cocktails by French demonstrators in the late sixties appear to date to the Caen disorders at the end of January 1968.317 The JCR journal

Avant-garde jeunesse printed a notorious Molotov cocktail diagram from the New York Review of

Books in its January-February ’68 issue, and the incidents in Nanterre at the end of April 1968 were aggravated by the interpellation of Daniel Cohn-Bendit for allegedly circulating a tract disclosing how to build Molotov cocktails.318 Photojournalists recorded the artisanal fabrication of

315 Préfecture de police, “Étude sur les aspects ‘militaires’ des actions gauchistes à l’occasion du meeting d’Ordre Nouveau. Enseignements pour les manifestations futures, ” March 1971.

316 Ibid.

317 Rapport du Commandant du 3e Groupement de CRS Louis Bonnet à Rennes à M. Le DGSN, S/Direction des CRS, 3e Section, Paris, “Maintien de l’ordre à CAEN le 26 Janvier 1968,” Rennes, February 2, 1968, 2, AN 19870157/5*; Louis Agrinier, “Compte rendu du service de Maintien de l’ordre effectué dans la Nuit du 26 au 27 Janvier 1968 à Caen,” Darnetal, January 29, 1968, 5, AN 19870157/5*.

318 Avant-garde Jeunesse no. 9 (January-February 1968): 15; Le Monde, April 29, 1968.

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Molotov cocktails on the barricades in May and June 1968, and a message outside the Sorbonne on June 11, 1968, the final “Night of the Barricades,” announced that the demonstrators had resorted to t in the face of the police onslaught.319 Yet very few members of the forces of order were registered by internal sources as injured by Molotov cocktails at the apex of confrontations on the barricades of 1968, even after CRS, Gendarmes, and Parisian Police had routinized the use of offensive grenades, a tactic that would prove fatal to at least two persons. Later in the seventies, a handful of police officers, now protected against most projectiles by new plexiglass visors and riot shields, were badly (and less-badly) burned by inflamed projectiles, prompting the adoption of fire extinguishers and further security measures. Throughout this period, the number of injuries generated by the Molotov cocktail typically paled next to those from stones or slings.

Even as they exalted revolutionary violence and showcased photographs of flics on fire, gauchistes were typically reticent to use Molotov cocktails to injure police: footage of clashes in

March 1971 shows them being hurled on the ground in front of or behind the police rather than into their ranks, presumably to intimidate the police and to cover the retreat of militants. After the fatal shooting of the Maoist worker Pierre Overney by a private security guard, Gépiste leader

Alain Geismar countermanded original orders to use Molotov cocktails directly on the security forces and thereby reportedly avoided a dramatic escalation.320 However, the coordinated throwing of significant numbers of Molotov cocktails appears to have also taken place during the January

20, 1973 protest against the inauguration of President Nixon for another Presidential term in the

319 “Cette nuit avec le CRS,” tract found at the Sorbonne on 11 June 1968, BDIC-Nanterre FD106111.

320 Alain Geismar, Mon mai 1968 (Paris, France: Perrin, 2008), 199–200.

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United States. Gauchistes also threw volleys of Molotov cocktails at the June 21, 1973 antifascist demonstration that led to the dissolution of the Ligue communiste. Militants used volleys of

Molotovs in attempts to break through of the police line, as the acting commander of a CRS recounted an incident in Paris during the January 1973 anti-Nixon demonstration:

Arriving at 150 meters from our ranks, they stopped, well grouped, for 15 to 20 seconds…outside the range of our grenades, and, after a conventional signal, came to charge us at a run.

They stopped a dozen meters from our ranks, and at once Molotov cocktails were thrown and impacted our ranks and those of the Compagnie d’intervention of the Préfecture de police…It’s necessary not to elide that this tactic had the effect of sowing a certain disarray in the ranks of our personnel for 3 or 5 seconds, which the demonstrators exploited to charge us.

It is hard to imagine this incident based on the report as anything but the outcome of a decision to grievously wound police officers: the officer asserted that about 60 Molotov cocktails were simultaneously thrown into the ranks of the security forces.321 However, not one member of the company was reported injured, and though part of the explanation surely involves the defensive practices of the police, the absence of injuries also aligns on the rather different description from another CRS commander exposed to a volley of Molotovs in January of 1974, as demonstrators attempted to break the ranks of the police around the Spanish embassy and other buildings at an anti-Francoist demonstration in Toulouse. According to this account, the demonstrators had employed the Molotov cocktails “like we would use offensive grenades, aiming to intimidate us

321 Rapport technique de fin de service établi par l’Officier de paix Principal Jean Pougeau, Commandant par ordre la C.R.S. N°8, “Maintien de l’ordre à Paris le 20 janvier 1973,”Vélizy, Janvier 21, 1973, 3-4, AN 19870157/17*. Emphasis in original.

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and make us retreat…the barrage of flames occasioned by the explosion of the Molotov cocktails did not permit [us] to perform a counter attack allowing us to apprehend some demonstrators…”322

In other words, the tactic of launching volleys of Molotov cocktails was typically about disorganization and intimidation in an effort to rupture the police line. However, that did not mean that Molotov cocktails never harmed anybody or were never thrown individually “for effect”; at the anti-fascist protest against Ordre nouveau in June of 1973, several police officers were badly burned.323 State reports on confrontations in the mid-seventies in France signaled higher recourse to Molotov cocktails by militant groups, thus, the CRS commonly reported the presence of the

Molotov at university student protests against the reform of higher education in the Spring and

Summer of 1976 (the grève des facs). Nevertheless, injuries remained relatively infrequent in contrast to the typical bruises inflicted by the use of projectiles.

West German militants used Molotov cocktails or “Mollies” in protests less frequently than their French counterparts. To be sure, radicals showcased the Holger Meins film The Making of a

Molotov Cocktail, since lost to posterity, in February of 1968.324 In December of the same year, a

Berlin-based New Left broadsheet published instructions for constructing two different types: one model, named after the journal, contained phosphorous and ignited when the bottle exploded.325

322 Rapport technique de fin de Service établi par le Commandant Marcel Granier de la CRS 26, “Maintien de l’ordre à Toulouse le mardi 15 Janvier 1974. Manifestation antifranquiste pour protester contre le jugement rendu à Barcelone où un militant du M.I.L. a été condamné à mort,” January 1976, in AN 19870157/19.* Italics mine.

323 Two police had to be hospitalized and treated by the intensive burn division at Cochin; Le Monde, June 23, 1973.

324 Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany in the Global Sixties, 193.

325 Willi Wacker, “Schon jetzt bomben bauen, die Revolution kommt ganz bestimmt,” Radikalinski 1, no. 3 (December 1968): 6.

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The 1971 Handbuch für Hausbesetzer likewise diagrammed the construction of Molotov cocktails that militants could ignite via a lighting mechanism (Putzfaden) plastered onto the side of the bottle, an innovation mitigated the danger to the thrower involved in the standard version.326 Thus, as in France, it appears that Molotovs underwent subterranean improvements in order to render them more effective and that information about how to make a “Mollie” was available in print.

Nevertheless, accounts of the concerted use of Molotov cocktails in demonstrations and confrontations in the sixties and seventies were rare. As Koenen notes, volleys of Molotov cocktails were considered off-limits for use against persons during the Häuserkampf of 1973-1974 because they allegedly did not correspond to the needs of mass-militancy (Massenmilitanz).327

Even the most notorious, concerted uses of Molotov cocktails during the seventies would seem to align on the interpretation that Molotovs were meant to be thrown at vehicles or buildings above all, and not supposed to be used directly against persons. Frankfurt Spontis used Molotov cocktails en masse against the police on only two occassions. On September 19, 1975, a group of 150 masked militants hurled volleys of cocktails at police vehicles and the façade of the Spanish

General Consulate at the height of a campaign against the execution of ETA members by a military tribunal of the Franco government.328 This incident did not lead to significant injuries or burns among the police but a police van was set on fire and three police cars were seriously damaged, while police reportedly drew their weapons. The second major exception was a prohibited, 600-

326 Handbuch für Hausbesetzer (Bonn: Verlagskollektiv Rote Klinke Vertrag, 1971), 38–39.

327 Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 345.

328 Kasper, “Das Ende der Utopien,” 192–93; Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 351–52. See FAZ. Zeitung für Frankfurt September 20, 1975, 37; FAZ. Zeitung für Franfurt September 22, 1975, 23-24.

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person protest after the death of Rote Armee Fraktion member Ulrike Meinhof in Frankfurt am

Main on May 10, 1976.329 Police President Knut Müller would report to the Hessen Interior

Minister that some 80 Molotov cocktails were thrown in the course of the hectic, prohibited demonstration; at around 4:40 pm on the Goetheplatz, a police company (Hundertschaft) in pursuit of the demonstration train found itself suppressed “by a regular fire storm of Molotov cocktails.”

One “Mollie” fell through the window of the police radio car (“It at once went up in meter high flames”); after an unsuccessful attempt to jump through the open car door, the driver, a twenty- four your old police officer, “….fell out of the vehicle, staggered and tried to run away. At that instant he suddenly arose in complete flames and let out a hideous scream.…only after the officers threw themselves on the burning man did they successfully extinguish the flames.” 330 The young police officer, Jürgen Weber, suffered grievous injuries while another officer was burned on both legs. The Spontis—concerned that further use of the Molotov cocktails would empower the police to dismantle their movement—subsequently underwent a sustained militancy discussion that led informal leadership like Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer to engage in an extended effort to de- militarize their militant structure. However, even in this relatively grave incident, the number of

Molotov cocktails that were allegedly thrown (80) and the circumstances involved in the injuries would appear to indicate that on the whole, Spontis were not using Molotov cocktails to deliberately injure police officers.

329 Kasper, “Das Ende der Utopien,” 266–68; Kraushaar, Fischer in Frankfurt, 134–40; Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 330–31.

330 Polizeipräsident Müller, “Bericht: Demonstration am 10.5.1976,” May 11, 1976, 5-6, Bundesarchiv, B 106 371801.

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Because of its military origins, the use of the Molotov cocktail had a symbolic dimension that set it apart from the typical material practices of militant protest—if other practices dramatized conflict, the use of the Molotov implied the militarization of the encounters between the revolutionary left and the police: a symbolic declaration of war. Simultaneously, as reflexive performance, use of Molotovs positioned the agent in a specifically military variant of student protest and the urban guerrilla that had transnational legacies particularly in the Southern Cone.331

To this extent, the escalation into use of Molotovs posed an identity problem for groups like the

Frankfurt Spontaneists since their construction required a modicum of organization and blurred the distinctions between Spontis and rival, armed struggle groups who idealized armed movements like the Paraguayan Tupamaros. French gauchistes were not exposed to the same dilemma, for GP

Maoists saw themselves as engaged in an original form of guerrilla;332 likewise, the LC positioned its service d’ordre as the core of a future Red Army.333 Similarly, militant groups like GP and LC did not have to demarcate themselves from rival armed groups. Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that the use of Molotov cocktails was considered a serious physical threat by the police and did occasionally engender serious injuries.

2.7. Barricades as Obstacle and Incitement

331 See, for example, Vania Markarian, Eric Zolov, and Laura Pérez Carrara, Uruguay, 1968: Student Activism from Global Counterculture to Molotov Cocktails, Uruguay, 1968 (University of California Press, 2016), 53–54.

332 Gauche prolétarienne, “Illégalisme et guerre.”

333 Adam and Coustal, C’était la Ligue, 159. For the League and historical Red Army, Johsua, “« Nous vengerons nos pères... »,” 231.

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Subsequent commentary has often depreciated the practical implications of barricades made of stone, wood, metal, or (burning) vehicles in adversarial protests: thus, according to Isabelle

Sommier, the barricades of May and June 1968 were merely “symbolic” gestures and paradigmatic forms of the “theatralization” of revolt, “totally without any military efficacy.”334 This scholarly analysis follows the discourse of some influential individuals and tendencies within the French far left of 1968, such as the members of the Mouvement du 22 mars, which tended to interpret the construction of the barricades as symbolic action or as an expression of revolutionary aspirations.335

In stark contrast, state reports across national boundaries indicate that the forces of order often considered barricades to be a real practical problem; thus, the consensus that barricades were essentially symbols or performances of revolutionary identity is maintained by flagrant inattention to the practical effects of barricades for the security forces. In other words, analysts and historians who have dismissed barricades have not considered the standard operating procedures of the state, a consideration that renders their construction both in Paris and beyond inexplicable except as a merely symbolic action or performance of revolutionary authenticity. Ironically, these accounts cannot integrate the reality that some revolutionary leftists had a highly “tactical,” rather than ideological, view of barricades: for the anonymous authors of “On the Demonstration” in the fall of 1968, “the only usefulness of a barricade is trouble or obstruct the police in their motorized

334 “The theatralization [of violence] manifestly appears in what is often retained of the ‘journées de Mai’: the barricades. That these were totally without any military efficacity whatsoever is not in doubt and everybody acknowledges it.” Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil, 89–90. As we will see, “everybody” included neither the military nor the police.

335 Glucksmann, Stratégie de la révolution, 19; Mouvement du 22 mars, Ce n’est qu’un début, continuous le combat, 68–69.

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movement, to immobilize them in order to best target them, or to draw them out where we want them.”336

Though barricades never attained the solidity and proportions that would allow them to serve as unassailable obstacles, their construction did potentially pose problems insofar as police relied on contact to disperse and apprehend rebellious demonstrators. Their construction rendered unprepared baton assaults a difficult maneuver that could aggravate the risks of injury to the security forces. Already, a tract in the short-lived French publication Le Pavé diverged sharply from later accounts of the barricade as exclusively “symbolic,” noting that during the initial confrontations on the initial Night of the Barricades, “the number of injured [protesters] was relatively low and the barricade proved to be an effective measure of self-defense...” During the

“assault” on a larger barricade on the Rue Gay-Lussac on May 10-11, 1968, “The materials troubled the advance of the CRS or limited their retreat, maintaining a large number of them in a relatively restricted space.”337 Similarly, in the course of the May 1968 events, French gendarmes recognized that it was essential to precede the taking of barricades under the cover of sustained chemical and explosive bombardment. Such at least, was the analysis by General Demettre, the

Commander of the Gendarmerie for the Parisian region:

More than ever, — and units have had a painful experience of this (en ont fait la pénible expérience)— the combination…of grenades and movement is to be set to work…progressions are to only be started under cover from a barrage of grenades that is renewed by constant throwing.

336 Comité pour la révolution permanente, “Sur la manifestation,” 3.

337 Le Pavé no. 1 (May 1968), BnF FOL-LC2-7217, 1.

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It is on this condition alone that the territory can be conquered, and the barricades taken at the lowest cost.338

To be sure, barricade-building did have both symbolic and reflexive dimensions. As significations towards the public, barricades declared the will to physically obstruct and exclude the police. Their construction delimited an autonomous territory subtracted from state authority—university campuses that were focal points of the extreme left, occupied housing or factories, urban spaces frequented by revolutionary groups—and their “defensive” connotations pointed towards state forces as hostile intruders. Likewise, the historical resonance of barricades certainly meant that their construction had a reflexive dimension that allowed revolutionary leftists to posit themselves as the latest manifestation of a history of radical populist, anti-capitalist, and antifascist struggles, including the revolutions of 1848, the Commune of 1870-1,339 the Berlin Spartacist insurrection of

1919, the Hamburg KPD insurrection of 1923, the antifascist defense of Barcelona and Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, and the Liberation of Paris—events that received renewed attention in the sixties and seventies under the impact of New Left historians. Thus, barricade-building belonged to a bid for historical legitimacy issuing from the history of social revolution, working- class movements, and antifascism, resonances that perhaps account for their substantially more frequent construction in France than in West Germany. After all, in West Germany, revolutionary

338 Général de Division Demettre, CRGN Paris, État-Major 3e bureau, 7873/2-III, “Action de la Gendarmerie en maintien de l’ordre,” Paris, July 16, 1968, SHD 2007 ZM 1/307577*.

339 See Peuchmaurd, Plus vivants que jamais, 48.

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aspirations to activate the potential conflictuality of the workers were decidedly less optimistic outside the “Italian” currents grouped around Revolutionärer Kampf and Wir wollen Alles!340

Nevertheless, we need to not lose sight of the operational implications of barricades—the more impactful barricades, such as several of those established in the Latin Quarter in 1968, were formidable, requiring sieges of several hours using chemical and explosive grenades or the use of specialized armored vehicles to dismantle them–activating a politico-military dynamic that forced the state to intensify its use of physical force. In Parisian 1968, the barricade functioned to incite the massive police presence, grenadage, and assaults that initially, at least, helped to solidify the support of Parisian observers for rebellious students. In West German contexts, barricades also frequently prompted the use of vehicles. Moreover, sometimes, revolutionary leftists built barricades simply to initiate confrontations. Thus, when students at Grenoble constructed a barricade blocking the national highway near the university campus in June of 1970, the Police urbaine, C.R.S. and gendarmes found themselves intervening close to an “inviolable” space populated by students. Police complained in these cases that barricades had been deliberately constructed in order to incite them to enter terrain favorable to the leftists. Similar incidents were reiterated on the highway outside Grenoble in April of 1976, when the construction of barricades across the local highway provoked the intervention of the available police–a mere 80 members of the Police urbaine and half-section of CRS—in circumstances that were not particularly auspicious for the representatives of public order given the vast open spaces of the university campus.341 In

340 For Spontis and interventionism cf. Wir wollen Alles! and the special issue on the working-class in Autonomie. Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft no. 9 (October 1977).

341 Jean-Pierre Guercin, Commandant la CRS n° 47, Grenoble, “Rapport Technique de Fin de Service : Service du maintien de l’ordre à Grenoble le 7 avril 1976,” Grenoble, April 12, 1976. AN 19870157/25*;

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these cases, militants used the signification of the barricade for the security forces—an intolerable violation of state sovereignty, an insurrectionary behavior, an obstacle to circulation—to start, intensify, and prolong, confrontations. Thus, although it would be superficial to ignore the symbolic or reflexive dimensions of the construction of barricades in the sixties and seventies, it is reductive, to say the least, to conspicuously ignore their practical dimensions: barricades may not have “worked” in a purely military logic, but they did in a political-military one, organizing an agonistic space full of obstacles to the standard operational forms of police, forcing police to intensify the amount of physical constraint brought to bear through the use of massive amounts of

“tear gas” or armored vehicles, and facilitating claims that police had been the aggressors.

2.8. “If Possible, Bring a Helmet”: Protecting the Body, Thwarting Identification

In the spring of 1976, members of the Public Security division of the French police would report the frequent presence of youths wearing masks and motorcycle helmets to demonstrations; one functionary of the CRS would note that “uncontrolled elements” (les incontrôlés) “often bring helmets and almost always have a scarf over their face.”342 Similarly, an tract containing “security guidelines” for a Parisian April 1976 demonstration counseled equipment that included helmets with visors, gloves, and athletic apparel.343 Months later in West Germany, in preparations for

Jean-Pierre Guercin, Commandant la CRS n° 47, Grenoble, “Rapport Technique de Fin de Service : Maintien de l’ordre à Grenoble, les 11 et 12 mai 1976,” Grenoble May 14, 1976. AN 19870157/25*. There were similar incidents during the grève des facs in Strasbourg ; Lieutenant François Thomas, Commandant le détachement CRS 37- CRS 38, “Rapport technique de fin de service, Service du maintien de l’ordre à Strasbourg – Nuit du 27 au 28 avril 1976,” Strasbourg, April 30, 1976, AN 19870157/25*.

342 Y. Preau, Commandant de groupement opérationnel, “Rapport technique de fin de service : Maintien de l’ordre public à paris le jeudi 15 avril 1976, ” Vélizy, April 29, 1976, 16, AN 19870157/25*. For reports of helmets and other defensive material, see the broader file series 19870157/25*.

343 “Consignes de sécurité pour la participation à la manifestation” (April 1976), in “Paris : manifestation d’étudiant contre la réforme du 2e cycle April 23, 1976,”AN file series 19870157/25*.

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antinuclear demonstrations in Schleswig-Holstein, members of the Maoist K-Gruppen would distribute a tract entitled, “Practical Advice for Protection Against Police Terror.” It recommended padded anoraks, waterproof clothing, handkerchiefs, gloves, diving goggles, and motorcycle helmets.344 (Self-) photographs of militant demonstrators; reports by journalists, radicals, and security functionaries, and contemporary tracts alike indicate that militant protest cultures after

1968 were defined by subterranean striving for protection against the “legitimate, physical constraint” (Weber) enacted by the state: basic protection and elementary measures of identity concealment. Elements of the defensive apparatus were common to both French services d’ordre in militant demonstrations and the Frankfurt Spontaneist Putzgruppe, including the helmet, the handkerchief, and the leather or padded jacket. These material objects had significant impact on both the appearance of confrontations and the efficacy of police practices: as Frankfurter

Rundschau journalist Thomas Darnstädt noted in his reportage on the encounters in the Frankfurt

Westend in March of 1973, when protesters assembled, helmets on, handkerchiefs over their faces, they were reckoning against batons, water cannon, gas, and surveillance photographs.345 During the French 1968 events, the militant demonstrations of the après-mai, and similar

Straßenschlachten in the Frankfurt housing struggle of 1973-1975, radicals forged helmets, padded clothing, and handkerchiefs as elementary equipment in a transnational infrastructure of militancy.

344 Kommunistischer Bund, “Praktische Hinweise zum Schutz gegen den Polizeiterror” (1976) in Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Nds. 1150. Acc. 108/92. Nr. 130.

345 Thomas Darnstädt, “Straßenschlacht im Frankfurter Westend: Rebellen, Polizisten und Passanten wurden verletzt,” Frankfurter Rundschau, March 29, 1973, 9.

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From a tactical point of view, this equipment mitigated the physical constraint enacted by agents of the state and posed obstacles to prevailing police techniques of identification.

The use of protective helmets by revolutionary militants was common in France and West

Germany by 1970, although the original inspiration for use of helmets may have come from the

Japanese Zengakuren, who had already adopted construction helmets in the confrontations of

1967.346 Photographs taken by French comrades for Avant-garde jeunesse show that German student leaders like Rudi Dutschke brought helmets on their belts as early as the international protest against the Vietnam War in West-Berlin in February of 1968.347 According to a subsequent tract, on May 10, 1968, the original “Night of the Barricades,” some members of the French student movement brought construction helmets purchased at the Parisian department store BHV.348

However, in the early seventies the motorcycle helmet largely superseded helmets: in France, the prestigious service d’ordre of the Trotskyist LC were photographed wearing full motorcycle helmets in the year 1973, while the 1973 Revolutionärer Kampf tract “Resistance is Possible!” reminded militants to secure blandly-colored helmets – and protective cups.349

For those determined to engage in confrontations, helmets of any sort were eminently practical, protecting the most vulnerable, and reputedly, targeted, parts of the rebellious body. A

346 Marotti, “Japan 1968,” 103. European revolutionaries were informed about the Zengakuren. Cf. Avant- garde jeunesse no. 9 (January-February 1968): 26.

347 Avant-garde jeunesse no. 10-11 (February-March 1968): 4. Similarly, radicals brought construction and other helmets to the Tegel encounter in West Berlin.

348 Anonymous analysis from the student movement dated 6 June 1968, printed in M22, Ce n’est qu’un début, 120.

349 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Widerstand ist nötig” (1973). See also Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 345–46.

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mêlée struggle could generate real danger, and police often reputedly favored the skull during confrontations and punitive attacks, though other areas like the genitals were also reportedly targeted (see Chapter Three). Finally, helmets could provide protection in the event that the police itself threw stones at the demonstrators—a frequent allegation by revolutionaries. Use of helmets thus responded to the most extreme risks incurred by participation in militant protest; in fact, both journalists and medical volunteers sometimes prudently adopted similar protective measures when intervening in confrontational demonstrations.

Like the full motorcycle helmet, the goggles, masks and handkerchiefs adopted by insurgent demonstrators were also multifunctional, providing both protection and anonymity.

First, goggles provided protection against chemical attacks on the eyes, an important consideration due to reinforced recourse to chemicals to disperse protesters in the course of the late sixties and seventies (see Chapter Four). Similarly, handkerchiefs doused in water and lemon juice were reported to provide elementary protection against chemicals, blunting and delaying the effects of grenadage on the respiratory system. Already on May 6, 1968, Parisian militants adopted facial handkerchiefs and motorcycle glasses; by May 10, 1968 tracts addressing demonstrators counseled the use of sodium bicarbonate, lemon, and anti-vomitive tablets against gas.350 Similar tracts distributed by M22 advised a number of preventive solutions against gas, including the use of hydrocortisone for the eyes, and offered detailed instructions for handling incapacitated demonstrators.351 In West Germany, police generalized “tear gas” in canister form also introduced

350 Anonymous tract from June 3, 1968 reported in M22, Ce n’est qu’un début, 120.

351 M22, “Contre les gaz,” in Ce n’est qu’un début, 48-49.

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it into the water cannon in the seventies (Chapter Four), and militants did not fail to incorporate defensive equipment into demonstrations: as a countermeasure against chemical-laden water jets,

RK counseled waterproof clothing, swimming goggles, and gauze bandages soaked in lemon-juice under handkerchiefs or masks to protect the mucus membranes.352 Facial covering also protected the identity of radicals in response to mounting efforts to identify them for criminal conviction and arrest through film and photography; RK noted that “one should bring facial handkerchiefs and dark, unremarkable clothing” as countermeasures to police, civilian, and amateur photography in confrontations.353 Thus, the adoption by youths of facial handkerchiefs and balaclavas in confrontations in the late seventies aimed to protect militants in an agonistic space submitted to both reinforced chemical constraint and intensified surveillance.

Popular “equipment” also included leather jackets or gloves to protect against blows and to insulate against Molotov cocktail accidents or injuries while building barricades. Leather blunted physical blows better than cotton or denim and is inherently more resistant to flames; dark, leather jackets were common among male members of the GP or the LC service d’ordre as well as the Putzgruppen of the Frankfurt Sponti milieu. Similarly, in the Federal Republic, waterproof attire was an eminently practical—and common—defense against the intensifying reliance of the

West German police on the water cannon.

Even moreso than other material infrastructure of revolt, self-protective measures were subordinated to the adversarial logic of confrontation. To be sure, towards the idealized third, these

352 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Widerstand ist nötig.”

353 Ibid.

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may have been intended to signify the semi-organization of confrontation and the public availability of practical defenses against “violent” police. Following the logic of reflexivity, the use of some apparel like leather jackets situated militants within the masculine youth subcultures of the postwar such as the West German Halbstarken and “rockers”–subcultures that the revolutionary left occasionally attempted to “recruit” militant subjects from on the basis of a theory of marginality (Ger: Randgruppentheorie), particularly for confrontations involving the police.354

Similarly, the history of the combat formations of the Communist movement included leather fanatics in the Red Army like General Leon Trotsky—a significant referent for the JCR.355 Some scholars like Wolfgang Kraushaar have subsequently fixated on the outward appearance and self- styling of the Spontis—the so called “Django” look, named after the popular Italian spaghetti

Western—as an example of the aestheticization of “brutality” within the New Left. Yet analysis of the practices of confrontation implies that the adoption of new means of defense should be understood not merely within an analytic of signification to the idealized third party or identity construction, but also as a calculated effort by militant groups to mitigate the coercive force of the police. Defensive equipment forced police officers into more ostentatiously violent conduct while simultaneously impeding identification in a confrontational space that was an object of intensifying state surveillance, photography, and film. By adopting defensive “equipment,” militants contested the monopolization of the means of physical constraint by the state in order to force its agents to either reveal their limited power or to become excessively forceful—violent in

354 For militants, Halbstarken, and Rockers, see Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 268–69. For Tegel and the rockers, Ibid., 335-336.

355 For the idealization of the Red Army in the JCR, see Johsua, “« Nous vengerons nos pères... »,” 231.

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the strong sense. Similarly, there was a general parallel between the police integration of anti-riot equipment into their defensive arsenal after 1968 and the process of improvising defensive equipment within the ranks of militant demonstrators (violence-counterviolence). Indeed, police often concluded that the defensive equipment of protestors was effective at mitigating the effects of “tear gas” or physical blows and also rendered identification difficult (Chapters Four and Five).

§§§

Forms of adversarial protest action like stone-throwing, the use of pickaxe handles, and recourse to Molotov cocktails in confrontations against police were typically viewed by liberal and conservative contemporaries of European militants, and even some leftists, as manifestations of irrational pathology. Perhaps understandably, scholarly work has demonstrated that there were in fact theories—if not always sophisticated ones—about violence accompanying the practices, a line of analysis to which I have contributed in Chapter One of this dissertation. However, scholarly analysis of protest as communication towards the workers or identity performance has typically come at the expense of an analysis of confrontational dynamics and of militant protest as a tactic.

In this chapter, I have argued that the most salient material practices in protest confrontations were not merely vectors of signification or reflexivity but ought to be understood in terms of physical constraints on the adversary—a practical critique of domination. These practices were scarcely immune to discursive framing by reference to revolutionary aspirations, were full of intended signification for imagined working-class observers, and may well have been central to the practical self-understandings of participants. Nevertheless, militant protest was not a mere medium for signification or self-styling; from a practical point of view attentive to the adversarial dynamics of street confrontation, the tactics of street-fighting men obstructed and subverted the state monopoly over the distribution of injuries just as the discourse of revolutionary violence subverted the

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legitimacy of the physical coercion exercised by the security forces. In the end, confrontation was guided by subversive savoir-faire as much as ideology. Though no doubt few of the practitioners of the street fight circa 1968 imagined that their actions would revolutionize the practices of the state, these rebellious practices informed a growing consensus among government officials and the security forces that traditional organizational forms and material practices for countering contestation were no longer sufficient, motivating a formidable effort to reorganize that inspired both the multiplication of the materialities of constraint available to the police and new operational practices. In the following chapter, I turn to another major problem for agents of the state in confrontations involving young militants: the critique of violence.

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Chapter Three. State Violence and Its Critics: Left Intellectuals and the Critique of

Violence

Certain members of the service d’ordre have committed atrocities that must attract the attention of every citizen. The time is no longer that of indignation, but of acts. Casamayor, “From order to barbarism,” May 16, 1968356

The question that we might pose to ourselves is whether [protestors’] violence was totally illegitimate while that of the police was totally legitimate in every circumstance. UNEF/Sne-Sup Commission témoignages et assistance juridique357

The notion in 1968 that state violence could be used to intensify mobilizations and to activate new subjects in struggle had one source in anti-colonial philosophies of history like Frantz Fanon’s

1961 Damnés de la terre, a text that radicals in Sozialistischer Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS) began to read in the mid-sixties.358 Damnés indicated that during an anticolonial struggle, the violence of the regime was both an omnipresent reality and subverted its own basis; however, - sustaining violence took on a masked or mediated character in advanced capitalist societies of the metropole.359 1968 radicals reading these texts in Western Europe confronted a problématique that

356 Casamayor, “De l’ordre à la barbarie,” Ésprit. Nouvelle série, no. 372 (July 1968): 1015–22.

357 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 67.

358 The chapter “On Violence” had been printed in the second issue of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Kursbuch in August of 1965 while the full translation by Traugott König was read by SDS cadres and discussed in the summer of 1966. Frantz Fanon, “Von der Gewalt,” trans. Traugott König, Kursbuch, no. 2 (August 1965): 1–55; Fanon, Die Verdammten dieser Erde.

359 For the difference between metropolitan and colonial violence, see Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre, 41– 42. For deeper origins on regime typology in Marxist thought, see the analysis of “primitive accumulation” in Karl Marx, Capital : A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1994), 898–99. For an antecedent to the chapter “On Violence” that founds Fanon’s analysis of the colonial state but does not articulate a dialectic of anticolonial liberation, see the 1950 Discourse on Colonialism by 160 161

potentially implied two approaches to anti-capitalism. Colonized subjects should unify the people via military confrontation with the unqualified violence of the regime; European radicals needed to uncover the intrinsic violence of the capitalist state and the authoritarianism of bourgeois society. As Rudi Dutschke would write in Rebellion der Studenten of the violence discussions in

1966, “In the rejection of violence by the majority of students lay the correct insight that in the metropole there could not be revolutionary terror using weapons against people…We lacked up until this moment the meaningful, manifest experience of repression in the metropole.”360 For some

Europeans who integrated these positions into their analyses, militant demonstrations appeared to offer the formidable possibility of forcing through the mediations of ideology to re-found a conflictual, physical relationship between revolutionaries and the representatives of public force: protest would generate a visibly coercive relationship at the heart of the metropole and orient the dialectic of liberation on a proper course. Based on this theory, as formulated explicitly by West

German SDS in the mid-sixties, demonstrations could lead the capitalist state to act out its latent authoritarianism and provoke police overreactions that inevitably undermined the very order that officials sought to preserve.361

French comrades were no less explicit about the potential resonance of state violence. Both members of the Mouvement du 22 mars like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the Trotskyists of the

Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (JCR) may well have hit on this strategy via concept transfer

his former teacher Aimé Césaire. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme ; suivi du, Discours sur la négritude (Paris: Présence africaine, 2004).

360 Uwe Bergmann et al., Rebellion der Studenten oder Die neue Opposition (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968), 72–73.

361 For SDS, see Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, 95.

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from SDS in the course of the February 1968 international conference against the Vietnam War in

West Berlin: in any case, gauchistes understood the political strategy of their West German peers.362 Thus, only days before the May 1968 events unfolded, the JCR journal Avant-garde jeunesse published an article entitled “Create Two, Three Berlins!” describing the April 1968 demonstrations in West Berlin. The author, under the pseudonym Staal, stated that in order to reinforce the student mobilization, “There was only one solution: accentuate the contradiction that the government is in, intensify the demonstrations, practically demonstrate that the State was ready to expand police terror by every means, and isolate State power in sensitizing new sectors to our struggle (en sensibilisant de nouveaux secteurs)...”363 In other words, demonstrations could serve as practical critiques of the bourgeois state that unveiled its fundamental authoritarianism as a means of extending the movement—a concise summary of the SDS strategy.364 Whether or not there was an explicit consensus to provoke the police at the start of the May 1968 events, some

French radicals deployed an analogous interpretation of their own actions during the conflict. As

Pierre Peuchmaurd put in his diary entry of May 7, the initial purpose of confrontations was “to get our noses bloodied” (se faire casser la gueule) in public view on the Parisian streets: “We know that the more we descend into the street, the more we take a beating, the faster and the more

362 For JCR Trotskyists in West Berlin, see Mohandesi, “Bringing Vietnam Home: The Vietnam War, Internationalism, and May ’68.” For Cohn-Bendit at the conference, see Kraushaar, Fischer in Frankfurt, 84.

363 Staal, “Créer Deux, Trois, Berlin!,” Avant Garde Jeunesse no. 12 (May 1968): 4–6.

364 “Insofar as the movement unmasks the real functioning of the [West] German political system, it forces the state to engage in open repression that, through the students, aims at the principal sectors of the population.” Ibid., 6.

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surely [the workers] will rejoin us.”365 Later French anti-capitalists systematized the consensus that it was imperative for revolutionaries to learn how to exploit the violence of the state. In the fall of

1968, Alain Geismar, Serge July, and other former members of the Mouvement du 22 mars at

Nanterre concluded that it was essential for revolutionaries to turn state repression into a

“condition of the revolution” in order to recruit the popular masses into the struggle against capitalism: “The repression of the masses is the truth of bourgeois society. A revolutionary struggle that leads to repression puts the bourgeois regime in question and forces it to avow the truth.”366

André Glucksmann, one of the founders of the broadsheet Action,367 put this point in dialogue with

Max Weber in his 1968 text Stratégie de la revolution: “Whomever contests [the dominant order] must have the knowledge and capacity to use the ‘legitimate’ violence of the state in order to assure themselves a popular echo....”368 For the UNEF/SNE-Sup Commission that edited the volume Ils accusent in the fall of 1968, “The violence of enraged speech, the violence of the barricades rendered manifest the repressive structures of bourgeois society and its police arm and forced the police to invade the streets, soliciting it to suppress, by implication (ce qui l’implique), the bourgeois, democratic State.”369 Similarly, writing as late as 1971 in Les Temps modernes, Tiennot

365 Peuchmaurd, Plus vivants que jamais, 22–23. Diary entry of May 7, 1968.

366 Geismar, July, and Morane, Vers la guerre civile, 140–58. “Repression is a counter-revolutionary weapon. It depends on the revolutionaries to make of it a weapon of the revolution, a condition of the revolution, to act such that in practicing repression, the bourgeoisie digs its own grave.” Ibid., 144.

367 Action was the collective product of the student union UNEF, the Mouvement de 22 mars, and the Comités d’action Lycéens (CAL).

368 Glucksmann, Stratégie de la révolution, 30.

369 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 15–16. See also Ibid., 285-286.

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Grumbach of the anti-authoritarian Maoist group Vive la revolution (VLR) noted that “It is politically decisive to isolate our enemies as protagonists of the use of illegitimate violence and to affirm ourselves as the agents of resistance to oppression.”370 In short, the notion of demonstrations as an embodied critique of the bourgeois state that forced it to manifest an authoritarian substructure, and the political imperative to practice an anti-repression politics, resonated in both national contexts.

Scholarly perspectives on French 1968 often validate the contemporary discourse that it was police overreaction and violence-mismanagement that engendered the crisis.371 Whether or not this is actually the case—and not another iteration of the dependence of historians of the New Left on the categories and discourses of its principal actors—is difficult to determine. Yet even contemporary official analysts ascertained that state violence had played a mobilizing role in May

1968. Syntheses by the Commanders of the CRS noted that Parisian observers were initially on the side of the demonstrators at the start of the events.372 Similarly, the Interior Ministry document of 24 June 1968, “Measures to Maintain Order,” acknowledged that “At the start of the demonstrations led by a handful of students, the measures taken were those that we ordinarily take

370 Tiennot Grumbach, “En cherchant l’unité de la politique et de la vie,” Les Temps modernes, no. 310 (February 1972): 1227. For VLR, see Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics.

371 Bantigny, 1968, 153; Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives.

372 Direction des écoles et techniques de la Police nationale, Service d’études et d’informations techniques, “Maintien de l’ordre public par les compagnies républicaines de sécurité au cours des évènements de mai et juin 1968 (Synthèse des rapports des Commandants de CRS),” 5, AN 19910852/6. Dossier 4, Événements de 1968.*

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in these circumstances, but it rapidly was shown (il s’est avéré rapidement) that they contributed to a festering situation.”373

Less scholarly analysis has been focused on how radicals sought to turn state violence into a means of politicization. One subsector of the public-facing discourse of prominent 1968 protagonists indicated that mobilization against repression was merely a “spontaneous” reaction to police violence—mobilization without a mobilizer, let alone something like deliberate strategy.374 The discourse of spontaneity—and the derision that the 1968 generation systematically directed towards interpretations of the movement as organized process—has founded an interpretative void. My inquiry in this chapter is different from that of most scholarship because I do not seek to retroactively evaluate the truth of allegations of police violence according to a positivistic model. I inquire into the conceptual foundations and representational dynamics of critiques of force—the principles that were mobilized in the practical disclosure of state violence, the images that were circulated—in order to help explicate why a novel, counterinsurgent orientation towards protest management and the reinforcement of new modalities of coercion typically followed militant demonstrations of the 1968 period. The point here is to construct a typology of critiques of police intervention that serves as the second major conditions of historical emergence of the protest management practices that were introduced within the state in the course of the “1968 years.” Ample source material for this mode of inquiry is possible; in the year 1968, police interventions were highly photographed, tracked, and recorded. Informal investigative

373 “Les mésures pour maintenir l’ordre,” , AN 19800273/61*.

374 See for example, Action no. 1 (May 7, 1968), 1.

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committees emerged among revolutionary left groups and informal networks of left intellectuals that generated and circulate testimonials about the violence of the state. In the following decade, the social forms for the denunciation of state violence—informal commissions, published materials, tracts, photographs, and exhibitions—would regularly accompany demonstrations.

Allegations against the police also received partial support and validation by more reputable media sources like Le Monde, Nouvel Observateur, Frankfurter Rundschau, Der Spiegel, and even, occasionally, the local section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In sum, post-1968 demonstrations frequently involved the mobilization in concert of militants, journalists, and photographers to produce and circulate potentially subversive interpretations of agents of the state at work. At the apex of the 1968 movements, these efforts were successful enough to generate coverage by media professionals and public discourses on police violence that extended well beyond the radical milieu. Moreover, their work continued in the seventies. This chapter considers

1968 critiques and representations of state violence and those of later Frankfurt radicals during the housing struggles of the seventies by analyzing the sedimentation that these practices left behind.

I focus on the practices through which the operational procedures of the security forces became subject to controversies concerning legitimate force and violence.

The main part of this chapter is devoted to the May 1968 critique of state violence and that deployed during the Frankfurt struggles of 1973-1974: the lines of force of the critique of force and the conceptual architecture of critical discourse about state violence. Descriptions and denunciations of violent interventions by the police in the context of protest movements were common during the late sixties and seventies, though often discourses of denunciation were less novel for their explicit content than because of the number of concurrent voices and the scale of the effort to produce and circulate documentation. Critical accounts of the interventions of the

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security forces were circulated not only by radical movements but also by more powerful political parties and media institutions, as journalists interposed themselves as observers of the interaction between protesters and police. However, a forensic analysis of the critiques of state violence indicates that liberal and even leftist critics never objected to all state violence equally. I argue that written critiques of state violence above all concerned physical brutality by police and that critical discourse about such means as the water cannon, “tear gas,” and explosive grenades were less common even in incidents where these were used in significant quantities. Finally, intellectuals who engaged on the issue of police violence in protest articulated basic principles that were often reformist in their implications as opposed to revolutionary, outlining the contours of a regime of legitimate constraint based on selectivity, force-minimization, and humanity.375

The unevenness and potentially reformist implications of the critical unveiling of state violence were even more pronounced in the case of visual art and photography. Practices depicting state action in the photographic medium in particular altered the circumstances under which police interventions were enacted by providing potential visual confirmations for allegations of violence, thereby rendering possible new and subversive understandings of police intervention that were difficult to rebut because of the veridical force attributed to photography. However, photographers who sought to record the violence of the state also had specific working practices and implicit perceptions of what constituted a valuable photograph, as did their editors. The typical conventions of critical imagery aligned on the reproduction of scenes of direct physical force, as state functionaries duly noted. In other words, if practices of violence-representation were about what

375 For reformist and revolutionary critique, see Boltanski and Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, 79–80. 167 168

coercive acts could be perceived and shown as violence and what interventions could not, as it turned out, artists and photographers most often interrogated state violence via images of direct, physical altercations between protestors and police: excepting the water cannon, alternative means proved in general less susceptible to photographic documentation. Thus, practices of violence- representation largely neglected the forms of coercion based on alternatives to the baton in order to focus on mass baton assaults and contact between state functionaries and demonstrators.376

Both the critique of violence and artwork and photography provided powerful incentives for governments to propose new material practices based on the principles of harm-minimization and selectivity and to limit incriminating contact altercations between the security forces and demonstrators. These incentives were recognized, and in fact, public officials proposed new apparatuses of violence and working practices of the police partially in order to mitigate negative publicity for state practices (Chapters Four and Five). Thus, critiques of police violence against protest movements encouraged police efforts to be–or at least to appear to be—selective, proportionate, and humanitarian in the use of force, and to institutionalize new modalities of physical constraint. Ironically, reformist and revolutionary critiques of violence that destabilized the legitimacy of the state during prominent protest events served as “motors” for the introduction of a higher level of reflexivity in the use of coercion by the state once the political conjuncture had shifted away from revolution—and motived efforts to promote less ostentatious, less intolerable

376 For a somewhat similar approach, see William Marotti, “Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest,” The American Historical Review 114, no. 1 (2009): 97–135. Marotti notes in passing of the Japanese riot police (kidotai) that it was above all the use of the baton that excited commentary and the photographs in the article broadly support the interpretation advanced here that visual depictions of police violence tended to focalize on contact. Ibid., 119.

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forms of crowd control, crowd dispersion, and the selective targeting of “violent” agents. As we will see in Chapters Four and Five, police reformers commonly aimed to reinforce practices of state that were more aligned on societal understandings of legitimate force and therefore harder to turn into sources of an insurgent political mobilization.

3.1. Flics: Critiques of Violence and Representations of the Police during the Parisian May-June

1968 Events

At the faculty of the Sciences, in the small bureau where we centralize the testimonies, where we class them, compare them, carefully verify, there was…the heartrending fatigue that submerged you when you always encountered the same words: “blows, insults, matraquage, I lost consciousness, I was knocked out, they kept attacking her, I bled abundantly, she screamed, etc.” Evelyn Sullerot, Member of the Sorbonne Commission Against Repression, 1968377

“We don’t denounce you as animals (sauvages) for ‘evacuating’ the street...It is because you strike people on the ground with kicks, rifle blows, [and] baton strikes and because you do it in groups of four or five.” A revolutionary student to a police officer, 1970378

Both militant and conventional journalists were inclined to track, record, depict, and criticize violence involving the police during the May and June 1968 events. However, insofar as critics tracked police violence, the 1968 generation and their intellectual sympathizers tended to critique and represent excessive direct physical force rather more than practices of physical constraint mediated through chemicals and explosives, implying that the former were more readily

“unveiled” as violence than the latter. This is true even though chemical means of coercion served as the main means of dispersing demonstrators as early as the original Night of the Barricades on

377 Evelyn Sullerot, “Repression ou déchaînement?” Le Nouvel observateur, June 12, 1968, 30. Italics mine.

378 René Backmann, “Qui rend la police sauvage?,” Le Nouvel observateur, October 19, 1970, 64.

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May 10, 1968. As Kristin Ross notes in her study May ’68 and Its Afterlives, in the course of the events, the rubber baton or matraque became a stand-in for the arbitrary violence and abuse of authority of the regime. Thus, the “violent” dimension of the violence that 1968 critics tended to denounce was above all the sort of force involved in the derogatory noun used for the police, flic, a reference to the sound of a matraque whistling through the air before the moment of impact. 379

What Ross neglects to mention is that in fact, the denunciation of the matraque as a metonymic signifier for arbitrary violence occurred at the same moment as massive deployment of so-called

“tear gas” on the Parisian streets in 1968, indicating a disjuncture between constraint as practiced and violence as experienced and publicized by the 1968 generation, left intellectuals and prominent media institutions like Le Monde. This disjuncture points towards the cultural significance of the physical blow in organizing the denunciation of violence. Ironically, and despite initial efforts to contest the use of tear gas, both protest literature and mainstream journals rapidly de-escalated their initial positions against chemicals. The critique of the violent state in 1968 was above all indexed to direct physical interactions between police and protestors or police and bystanders. This did not go unremarked by state officials: prominent police officials like Parisian Prefect Maurice

Grimaud subsequently complained that publicity over “police brutality” had given a “frustrating reputation” to the Parisian police.380

In France, informal organizations that reported on police violence found allies in the most prestigious and respectable media institutions. Student organizations provided much of the

379 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 112.

380 Grimaud, BMOVP, Conseil de Paris, July 8, 1968, 454.

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manpower for producing reports in 1968, but French radical students received a relatively high degree of support from left intellectuals, mainstream journalists, and official opposition parties.

Thus, informal commissions against repression received institutional backing from both the student union UNEF and the higher education union SNE-Sup. The prestigious newspaper of record Le Monde –the subject of angry diatribes within the Interior Ministry—began printing letters to the editor in denunciation of police violence already on May 7, 1968, only days after the first major confrontation between radicals and the forces of order.381 Cabinet members of Minister of the Interior Raymond Marcellin circulated an anonymous document on June 24, 1968 that bemoaned the role played by the prominent media outlet: “…the quotidian paper most read by the university and the students, Le Monde, was very harmful. A newspaper with a reputation for seriousness, it sustained the theses of the extreme left with perfidy. During the crisis, it became nothing less than the central organ of subversion.”382

Le Monde was not alone. The Communist newspaper Humanité, the official paper of the

Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), Tribune socialiste, the Second Left magazine Le Nouvel observateur, and the newspaper Combat also lent publicity and authority to allegations of misconduct by the security forces in 1968. Similarly, the Left-Catholic journal Ésprit, founded by

Emmanuel Mounier, issued a full-throated denunciation of the police in its June-July 1968 issue.383

Reportage from the mainstream press was often excerpted as a means of corroborating accusations

381 “Deux témoignages sur les heurts de vendredi,” Le Monde, May 7, 1968, 10.

382 Ministère de l’intérieur, “Panorama de l’extrême-gauche ne dépendant pas du PCF,” AN 19800273/61.

383 Casamayor, “De l’ordre à la barbarie.”. The date of the note was May 16, 1968, after the first Night of the Barricades.

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against the police in radical documentation, a method on display in the UNEF-SNE-Sup reports the Livre noir des journées de mai and Ils accusent, both printed by the prestigious editor Seuil.384

In short, both during the 1968 events and during the broader the après-mai, radicals could count on journalists’ support for inquiries into police violence. Significantly, as late as October of 1970, the Chief editor of Nouvel observateur, Jean Daniel, would denounce the French police as the

“most brutal in Europe.”385

Discourses on state violence resonated in the atmosphere of Left republican, socialist, and communist resentment of the Fifth Republic—the product of what the Left perceived as a coup d’État—on the tenth anniversary of its founding.386 For many on the Left, depictions of police misconduct towards protestors and detained persons also were plausible because of the exceptional violence of the Parisian police in the demonstrations during the Algerian War.387 The spectres of past state massacres in Paris haunted the present: initially during the 1968 events, radical investigators questioned whether police had “disappeared” students in a reprise of the notorious

384 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai; Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent.

385 Le Nouvel Observateur, October 19-25, 1970, 64; cited in Courrier de la république no. 83 (October 1970).

386 For a contemporary variant of the Left origin story, see Grey Anderson, La guerre civile en France, 1958-1962. Du coup d’État gaulliste à la fin de l’OAS (Paris: La Fabrique, 2018).

387 For recent works on the 1961 and 1962 state massacres (massacres d’état) see Emmanuel Blanchard, “Derrière le massacre d’État : ancrages politiques, sociaux et territoriaux de la « démonstration de masse » du 17 octobre 1961 à Paris,” French Politics, Culture & Society 34, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 101–22, https://doi.org/DOI:10.3167/fpcs.2016.340206; Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962; House and MacMaster, Paris 1961. The police had also helped to precipitate the fall of the Fourth Republic; Emmanuel Blanchard, “Quand les forces de l’ordre défient le palais Bourbon (13 mars 1958). Les policiers manifestants, l’arène parlementaire et la transition de régime,” Geneses n° 83, no. 2 (September 19, 2011): 55–73.

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incidents from earlier in the decade.388 Thus, the anti-statism embedded in French post-war political culture, reinforced by the behavior of the Gaullist government and its security forces during the

Algerian War of Independence, predisposed broad sectors of the French Left to mobilize behind atrocity allegations involving the forces of order in May and June 1968.389 The circulation of atrocity allegations in 1968 was not merely a reflection of the violence of the French state—far more modest than it had been in the context of the Algerian War of Independence: it was also a direct consequence of the predisposition of critical sectors of the French media and political elites in the opposition to lend symbolic force and circulate soixante-huitard reports on and allegations about of police violence on the basis of recent historical experience.

For critics, police violence undermined the legitimacy of the Fifth Republic itself. Thus, the UNEF/Sne-Sup Commission témoignages et assistance juridique would argue that the violence of the police during the 1968 events unveiled the Fifth Republic as a police state, a mere regime:

“When a State does not or cannot control its police, that State is no longer republican, that State is no longer democratic, and it becomes quite simply a police state. The police exactions that we are bringing forward testimonies about here are a part of the essential style of a regime born ten years ago from a military putsch.”390 In short, although savvy political operators like ex-Prefect of Police

Maurice Grimaud later presented official practices as restrained and humane by contrasting the conduct of the French police in May-June 1968 to the state massacre of students in Mexico

388 BDIC Delta 61 Rés 1; Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68 : l’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998).

389 For anti-statism as a central dimension of French political culture after 1945, consult Stefanos Geroulanos, “An Army of Shadows: Black Markets, Adaptation, and Social Transparency in Postwar France,” Journal of Modern History 88, no. 1 (March 2016): 60–95, https://doi.org/10.1086/685031.

390 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 72.

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City391—an interpretation he successfully imposed in the late Seventies—most of the French Left actually tended to see the violence of the state as a continuation of the essentially violent, counterrevolutionary origins of the Fifth Republic during the 1968 events.

In Fifth Republic France, allegations of brutality also followed a political dynamic suppressed in the neighboring Federal Republic of Germany. In Germany, the majority fraction of the Socialist Party took the side of the police as an extension of its engagement in CDU/SPD coalition government. The Left parties in the French opposition were thoroughly excluded from the government and had strategic reasons for supporting allegations of police abuses: although neither the French SFIO nor the PCF backed anti-repressive investigations to the hilt, the left-wing

Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) did much to support atrocity claims.392 PSU municipal counsellor

Claude Bourdet was one of the most outspoken detractors of the police in the protests of 1968 on the Parisian municipal council; Bourdet had also been an active critic of the conduct of the Parisian police during the demonstration-massacres of the Algerian War of Independence.393 Similarly, doctor Marcel Francis-Kahn, a PSU adherent, was the main counter-expert on the stage during a press conference on the French use of the chemical CS after the first Night of the Barricades on

May 10-11 and became a major protagonist the ensuing media dispute (see below).394 Some of the

391 Grimaud, En mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît.

392 For the PSU, see Bernard Ravenel, Quand la gauche se réinventait : le PSU, histoire d’un parti visionnaire : 1960-1989 (Paris: La Découverte, 2016). For its part, an Interior Ministry evaluation dated 24 June 1968 declared the PSU the “orchestrator” (chef d’orchéstre) of the 1968 events. Ministère de l’Intérieur, “Panorama de l’extrême-gauche ne dépendant pas du PCF,” 11.

393 Claude Bourdet in Bulletin municipal officiel de la ville de Paris, Conseil de Paris, Séance du 8 juillet 1968, 439-440. For Bourdet during the Algerian War of Independence, see House and MacMaster, Paris 1961.

394 Personal interviews between the author and Marcel-Francis Kahn in January 2017. 174 175

groups that documented police violence in 1968 used letterhead recycled from the anti-repression commissions of the Algerian War—a symptom of continuities in anti-repressive politics in 1960-

2 and 1968.395

Already on May 7, days before the confrontations of May 10 in Paris led to national protests against repression and the generalization of the strike wave, soixante-huitard organs like Action and Avant-garde jeunesse began organizing counter-discourses to the official depiction of violent, subversive students as the source of the trouble.396 The events of the original Night of the

Barricades on May 10-11 rapidly led to the generalization of accusations of police violence by both radical groupuscules and the student union UNEF. Subsequent encounters on May 24-25 and

June 10-11 also generated pronounced efforts to document the violence of the police. Informal commissions against repression were the main forums for organizing investigations and testimonies: after the original Night of the Barricades, UNEF and the higher education union SNE-

Sup formed a special committee in order to investigate claims of violence by the police.397

Similarly, within a week of the second major protest-encounters on May 24-25, the Parisian police reported that a commission had set up in the occupied Sorbonne and that a photographic exposition on police violence had taken place in the university courtyard.398 Initially, left-wing intellectuals

395 See tracts in BDIC F delta 61 rés 1 and 2.

396 Anonymous, “Une dizaine d’enragés,” Action, no. 1 (May 7, 1968): 6.

397 Communiqué in F delta 61 rés 2.

398 Préfecture de police, Situation au théâtre de l’Odéon, May 29, 1968, 2, AN 19910852/6*, Dossier 4., Événements de 1968, Journées du 14 au 31 mai. Notes PP, DCRG, et sdAP ; Préfecture de Police, Situation à la Sorbonne, Journée du 30 mai, May 31, 1968, same file series. For exemplary tracts, see BDIC F delta 61 rés 1 and rés 2.

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also targeted the use of gas on the boulevards of Paris: the press conference organized by UNEF after the first Night of the Barricades on May 12, 1968 included a presentation on the effects of

CS gas by Marcel-Francis Kahn.399 The work of these commissions would form the basis of the edited volume Le Livre noir des journées de mai and the longer volume Ils accusent.400

Denunciations of violence “from below” rapidly earned symbolic approbation from conventional journalists and politicians. On May 5–6, 1968, reporters for Le Monde alleged that during charges by the Compagnies d’intervention of the Préfecture de Police the previous Friday, the police had randomly assaulted bystanders and preyed on isolated demonstrators. The newspaper began printing eyewitness descriptions of police violence on May 7, only days after the first major confrontation between protestors and the forces of order. This trend would continue through the events, and the newspaper printed at least seven editorials and letters on police violence in the course of the month of May alone. Le Monde also documented the use of “tear gas” grenades by the police as early as May 13.401 Meanwhile, on May 14, former prime minister Pierre Mendès-

France demanded a parliamentary inquiry in the National Assembly on the gas used by the French police.402

399 Extrait de la conférence de presse du dimanche 12 Mai prononcée par le Professeur KAHN, BDIC Rés 2; Interview between author and Dr. Marcel-Francis Kahn in January 2018. Dr. Kahn would go on to write several letters to the Prefect of Police and the Ministry of the Interior at Place Beauvau. Letter from Marcel- Francis Kahn to the Ministry of the Interior of 22 June 1968, private archives of Marcel-Francis Kahn.

400 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai; Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent.

401 “Les grenades utilisées pour les opérations contre les rassemblements,” Le Monde, May 13, 1968, 2.

402 Journal officiel de la République française: Débats parlementaires. Assemblée nationale, May 14, 1968, 1777. The inquiry never occurred. 176 177

Nevertheless, discourses of critique, photographic representations of state intervention, artwork, and caricature, would tend throughout the events to focalize on indiscriminate physical interventions and the flic—the police officer engaged in mêlée altercations—rather than deploring the newer means of indirect, physiochemical constraint that were also used by the state to navigate the crisis. The events of May and June 1968 thus provide a representative case of both the articulation of documentation around critiques of indiscriminate force and excessive harm and of the difficulty that both radical activists and journalists experienced when attempting to constitute more novel, less ostentatious, means of coercion like “tear gas” as objects of sustained critique and visibility in 1968 and the seventies. Further investigation into the specific discourse around chemicals will also reveal the extent to which even radical critics tacitly deemed chemicals less intolerable than direct physical interactions involving the police and struggled to articulate consistent objections to the new means that earned echoes from more mainstream sources— implying that the police were not incorrect to subsequently identify gas as a less-objectionable form of repression in relation to the mass baton assault. In the following section, I identify both the prominent lines of critique and the problems that French soixante-huitards faced in articulating objections to the use of gas. In other words, although UNEF/SNE-sup commission and other anti- repressive committees sincerely aspired to “show the entire violence of repression”403 not all police practices were successfully constituted as violence.

Indiscriminate force

403 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 5.

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Accounts of police intervention in Parisian 1968 tended to rely on three principles: selectivity, minimal harm, and humanity. The depiction of indiscriminate force implied that legitimate force must be used only against those who were actually violent or aggressive. According to this principle, police intervention became an intolerable violence once police exercised indiscriminate force or constraint on bystanders or passersby foreign to the protest, particularly the elderly, women, or adolescents.404 Early in the May 1968 events, both radicals and reporters deployed this principle when they described police attacks on Parisians who had not participated in demonstrations. Critiques based in the principle of selectivity tacitly assimilated the norms of protest management to contemporary laws regulating humanitarian conflict between governments:

“non-combatants” weren’t allowable targets of military reprisals, and neither were “prisoners of war” who had already surrendered. Force became illegitimate violence once it became indiscriminate. To be sure, these discourses were overdetermined by the revolutionary theory of the New Left: asserting that “anybody” could become a victim of the police implicated the public in the struggle against police violence by appealing to the presumably broad desire to not be victimized.

Perhaps the most consistent line of this genre of 1968 critiques of the police concerned violence against Parisians who had not allegedly taken part in demonstrations in the Latin Quarter.

This line of criticism was initially vehiculated by militants; during the initial confrontations of

May 3, 1968, Action reported that

Every civilian was a suspect. The police attacked anything that resembled a student: more than one passerby, foreign to the demonstration, spent three hours at the police station.405

404 For example, Ibid., 15–16.

405 Action no. 1, (May 7, 1968): 2. 178 179

The entire evening, the mobile gendarmes systematically attacked isolated students who had the audacity to linger in the streets. Until 1 am in the morning, the special bodies of the police attacked passersby in the small streets of the Latin Quarter, matraque in hand, pursuing them in the corridors and the stairways of buildings.406

Similarly, according to the joint UNEF and SNE-Sup publication Le Livre noir des journées de mai, “On Friday, May 3, brigades of the [police] charged at all the people who were in the streets without in any way differentiating (sans faire aucune distinction) between the demonstrators and the non-demonstrators…”407

Claims that police had indiscriminately assailed anyone who circulated on the streets would be reiterated during the escalation from May 3 through each of the nights of the barricades on May

10-11, May 24-25, and June 10-11.408 Thus, a testimonial published in the Livre noir related how on the night of May 10-11, 1968 on Rue Gay-Lussac, “[the witness] observed the systematic matraquage of every person who found themselves on the street after the assault.”409 Systematizing this critique of indiscriminate force, the UNEF and SNE-Sup Commission Témoignages et

Assistance juridique would conclude in the fall of 1968 that the 1968 events showed that

Any neighborhood on any date at any time might become the theater of repressive police exploits, and experience shows that nobody is protected from arbitrary actions (l’arbitraire) and from violence. Moreover, the fact of being an isolated passerby (passant), far from being a guarantee against police brutality, often brings a redoubling of violence.410

406 Ibid.

407 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 15.

408 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 89–97.

409 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 67.

410 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 68–69.

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It is staggering (ahurissant) to note the number of cases where isolated persons were brutalized, beaten (matraquées), voluntarily injured without the slightest embryo of evidence that they were demonstrators.411

As an eyewitness testimonial to a police intervention against young persons on 11 June 1968 asserted, “All of this, is in my opinion, very serious, because the young people were only passersby in a calm location, and nothing indicated that they might have been demonstrating one day or another in any way whatsoever.”412 These critiques would tend to be confirmed by prominent media organizations; as an editor for Le Monde wrote in a note appended to another set of first- hand accounts of police violence on May 11, 1968, “…certain agents nostalgic for “ratonnades” have indiscriminately insulted, molested, and hit all those men or women who were within range of their matraques, even though they were totally foreign to the demonstration and the students had already dispersed.”413

French 1968 critiques of indiscriminate police violence sometimes borrowed their discursive form from anti-colonial and anti-racist critiques of colonial violence: as Kristin Ross has noted, accounts of indiscriminate force often even appealed to a word—ratonnade—ordinarily referring to racialized violence against North Africans during colonial counterinsurgencies in the late French empire.414 Indiscriminate police manhunts that followed the dispersion of demonstrations in 1968 were designated ratonnades—a word that denoted racist massacres against

411 Ibid., 88.

412 Ibid., 97–98.

413 J.F. “Un nouveau témoignage sur l’attitude de la police municipale,” Le Monde, May 11, 1968, 24.

414 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 34–35.

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Algerians—at the May 12, 1968 press conference statement by Jacques Sauvageot of UNEF and

Alain Geismar of SNE-Sup.415 The Commission Témoignages et Assistance juridique would also assert in the fall of 1968 that police were indiscriminately repressive against the youth in general, and by implication, “racist” in a derivative sense afforded by the French lexicon:416 “It suffices simply to appear young in order to automatically become the victim of police action without another form of procedure (procès). This ends up translating itself into veritable ratonnades and an anti-youth terrorism…”417 Statements like these redeployed the underlying formal structure of depictions of colonialism in writings by authors like Fanon and Sartre, who had characterized the colonial system as the fabrication of two distinct social types and the exposure of the colonized to a regime of arbitrary, racialized, unmediated violence.418 To be sure, 1968 observers also documented racially-motivated violence in the literal sense, violence directed by the police against

Black, Vietnamese, or North African persons.419

The second subset of critiques of police intervention founded on the principle of selectivity took aim at the police for assailing those who documented or observed state violence.420 Thus, the JCR

415 “Une mise au point des organisateurs de la manifestation,” Le Monde, May 12-13, 1968, 4.

416 In French, racisme can include discrimination against any social type in addition to the stricter sense of “racism” as discrimination on the basis of imputed ethnicity.

417 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 70. Italics mine.

418 Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre; Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique.

419 For four testimonies on racialized violence on May 3, 1968, see Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 16–17; 25. Cf. Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 70. “If unfortunately the apprehended person is black, Vietnamese, Algerian, or more generally foreign, they automatically have the right to special treatment—as one witness says, ‘double the dose.’” Ibid., 103- 110.

420 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 27. 181 182

organ Avant-garde jeunesse noted that police had attacked and broken the camera of the Swiss cinéaste Jean-Luc Godard outside the Maspero bookstore La Joie de lire on May 6, 1968. The

UNEF commission reported a more extended variant of what was probably the same incident:

“Two photographers who wore the “Press” identification sign on their sleeves began to photograph the arrest of the film director. The police hit the photographers.” 421 Another photographer reported to the UNEF that he had been assailed and had his film confiscated by the police while documenting police violence the same day.422 Similar claims were advanced pertaining to confrontations on the night of May 10-11, 1968.423

As the above accounts demonstrate, critiques of indiscriminate violence typically explicitly targeted arrests or police use of directly corporeal physical constraint on the bodies of third parties to the protest. Yet this line of critique was also directed against the arbitrary use of grenades. Thus, the turn towards massive use of grenades as the primary means of dispersing demonstrators on the barricades after May 10, 1968424 generated claims that police had used them indiscriminately and

421 Anonymous, “Une dizaine d’enragés.” A concurrent testimony is in Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 27–28.

422 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 29–30.

423 “After the taking of the barricade [on Rue Gay-Lussac], around 3 AM, I continued taking photographs. Two CRS punched me, ripped off my Swiss press armband, and beat me.” Testimony of a Swiss photographer-journalist on events of May 10-11, 1968 in Ibid., 67.

424 See Luca Provenzano, “Beyond the Matraque: State Violence and Its Representation during the Parisian 1968 Events,” The Journal of Modern History 91, no. 3 (August 21, 2019): 602–4, https://doi.org/10.1086/704568.

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launched them into workplaces,425 apartments,426 restaurants,427 educational buildings,428 metro stations,429 and improvised posts set up by emergency medical responders for the Red Cross.430

Police were also accused of launching and throwing grenades at circulating Parisians, observers, medics, or photographers.431 As the editors of the Livre Noir noted of the controversies pertaining to encounters on May 10-11, 1968, “In the narration of the events, many points were controversial, notably, the throwing of grenades into boutiques and apartments. Several witnesses claim to have observed it.”432 Notably, however, reports of the indiscriminate use of gas were numerically less common in published testimonial excerpts than discussions of indiscriminate matraquage and prove that gas was difficult to constitute as an object of this form of critique : after all, as environmental contaminants, grenades were not designed for selective use and ought reasonably to have aroused a significant amount of contention.

Excessive force

425 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 24–25.

426 Ibid., 25; 74–76; 83.

427 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 79–80.

428 Notably, police were accused of throwing grenades into the buildings and courtyard of the École normale supérieure on May 10-11, 1968. Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 76; 80. For images of police firing grenades into buildings and courtyards of the Sorbonne, see below.

429 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 80.

430 Testimonial of a physician from May 10-11, 1968, Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 76.

431 For a grenade attack on a photographer on a balcony, see Ibid., 65.’

432 Ibid., 83. Italics in the original.

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[The police had numerical superiority of] at least four to one and hit people until they were left unconscious on the ground. UNEF testimony on incidents on the boulevard du Port-Royal, May 10-11, 1968433

The police authorities always claimed that they had only used force and violence because they were constrained and forced to do so. Each time that they did so, they allegedly always limited that use to a strict minimum, avoiding useless and gratuitous violence. The imprecision of these affirmations is so evident that it requires no commentary… UNEF/Sne-Sup Commission Témoignages et assistance juridique434

The second principle mobilized in accounts of violent police intervention was that of force minimization. Closely related to the critique of indiscriminate force, the critique of disproportionate force underwrote accounts of police interventions that had exceeded the boundaries of the allowable to victimize persons who were no longer a threat to public order. 435

The horizon of force minimization also manifested itself in accounts of police practices that risked engendering or did engender “excessive” harm and were allegedly not directed to restoring order while limiting injuries.

Objections to “obstinate” police violence followed from the principle that legitimate force should end the moment that “victory” or dispersion had been attained. This principle left scope for legitimate force in order to vanquish the resistance of those considered to be troubling public order but denied that force could be exercised against the vanquished or the incapacitated. In short, one should not persist in delivering violence upon (s’acharner sur)the adversary. Conversely, as a Le

Monde editor wrote on May 11, 1968, defending oneself from a violent demonstrator or using the

433 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 72.

434 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 88.

435 A section of Ils accusent was entitled L’acharnement sur les isolés. Ibid., 97–103.

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baton to disperse the demonstration was justified: “The task of the forces of order is certainly not easy when violence takes hold of the street; it is therefore not an issue of condemning those agents

[of the police] who obey orders, defend themselves from the assault of the demonstrators or repress them (les refoulent), even if it be via inconsiderate hitting.”436

Similarly, claims founded on the force minimization principle frequently involved indignation that police had intervened against protestors who were already neutralized via injuries or arrest, or isolated protestors who were in no condition to resist numerically superior police.

Already during the January 1968 encounters between police and protestors in Caen, the newspaper

Paris-Normandie would state that “‘Gratuitous’ violence had other illustrations. How in effect could we otherwise classify the fact that the men tasked to restore calm worked over demonstrators

(or those reputed to be, because the curious or imprudent were included) already no longer in any condition to fight (mis hors d’état de combattre) by an initial flurry of blows? How can one justify that people already under arrest were violently hit?437

Early in the May 1968 events, radical organs like Action would denounce police misconduct against incapacitated protestors on the streets and in police cars: “Arrested demonstrators were beaten up (tabassés) in the [police] cars. The flics equally beat people who were incapacitated under the effects of the gas.”438 Similarly, testimonies published by UNEF and

SNE-sup noted that police working in groups had assailed protestors or citizens who had already

436 J.F., “Un nouveau témoignage sur l’attitude de la police municipal,” Le Monde, May 11, 1968, 24.

437 Paris-Normandie 29 Janvier 1968, 3. Note the simultaneous deployment of the selectivity principle in parentheses.

438 Action no. 1 (May 7, 1968): 6.

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been knocked down during a police charge or had been apprehended. Typical accounts of four or five police officers assaulting isolated individuals in groups of four or five recall the operating procedures of the équipes spéciales constituted by the Compagnies d’intervention of the Préfecture de Police during the Algerian War, the same groups that historians of the Parisian police have hypothesized were responsible for state massacres of 1961-1962.439 The following testimonies gesture to the simultaneous deployment of different valences of the force-minimization concept— implicating the notion that neutralized persons should not be hit, particularly by groups of police officers.

These two young people were hit (se sont fait matraquer) during the first charge of the police. They fell onto the ground. Following this, all of the [police] that came by hit them although they were on the ground and weren’t moving any more. 440

When a [police officer] managed to apprehend a (s’emparer d’un) demonstrator, at once, five or six other police officers “came to the rescue” in order to prey on (s’acharner sur) their victim who they left in the middle of the street in a more or less serious state….the most seriously injured were two students who, knocked down and covered with blows, were taken away unconscious a few minutes later by an ambulance.441

The young man…wasn’t doing any harm…[The police] caught up to him, threw him to the ground and immediately delivered matraque blows to his head. These blows echoed in a horrible fashion on his cranium.442

On Monday, May 6, 1968…I was the horrified witness to the brutality with which two police persisted in batoning (se sont acharnés à matraquer) a student who was well beyond

439 House and MacMaster, Paris 1961. Several critics, like Claude Bourdet, would make the parallels between police violence in May 1968 and during the protests against the colonial war explicit. BMOVP, Conseil de Paris, Séance du 8 juillet 1968, 439-440.

440 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 24. This testimony strongly resembles a series of photographs by Gamma photographers.

441 Ibid., 25–26.

442 Ibid., 26. Testimony of a doctor on events on the boulevard Saint Michel of May 6, 1968.

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any state of defending himself, on the sidewalk just in front of the garden of the Saint- Séverin Church.443

Saturday, 11 May, at 5 AM, I was behind the barricade at the rue de l’Estrapade; after three hours of resistance, we had to retreat…Certain young women, affected by the gas grenades remained immobilized on the street; from the apartment, I saw the [police] beating three of them; the ambulance personnel of the Red Cross had to tear them from the arms of the [of the police] to take them away.444

Critiques of excessive force also involved the pursuit of isolated individuals and groups into private buildings445 and the exercise of violence in police commissariats.446 As early as May 6,

1968, eyewitness accounts collected by UNEF would report reprisals (sévices) against detainees in police cars and at detention centers;447 similar eyewitness accounts would be published pertaining to incidents on May 10, 1968; May 24-25, 1968; and in June 1968.448 Writing for Ésprit on May 16, 1968, author Casamayor—the habitual pseudonym of judge Serge Fuster—, would denounce violence, “exercised not on combatants, but on prisoners, on the vanquished, not in the heart of the combat, but later…”449 as the apex of the “atrocities” committed by the police. UNEF would also collect testimonies about police who had pursued demonstrators into the improvised

443 Ibid., 24.

444 Ibid., 78. For a concurrent account, Ibid., 79.

445 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 123–34.

446 Union nationale des étudiants de France, 89.

447 For ten testimonies from May 6, 1968: Ibid., 33–38.

448 Testimony of an 18-year old female student in Ibid., 62-63; Testimonies from the rue Gay-Lussac, 10- 11 May, 1968 in Ibid., 66-67. Testimony of a first-aid responder (secouriste) in Ibid., 70-71; testimony of a protestor at the barricade on rue Gay-Lussac, Ibid., 71.

449 Casamayor, “De l’ordre à la barbarie,” 1019.

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medical posts like the one set up at the Institute Henri-Poincaré on the night of May 10-11, 1968.450

In Ils accusent, the UNEF and SNE-Sup Commission Témoignages et Assistance juridique would denounce

Another type of violence [that] is in a way the prolongation of the violence in the street. We’re talking about exactions that took place in private locations, sometimes following actual residence violations (violations de domicile)…This violence might not only by exercised through insults, the matraque, the rifle stock (la crosse du fusil), the shoe, or the fist, but also can be aggravated by a refusal to aid the injured… 451

The force-minimization principle sometimes manifested itself in depictions of the use of grenades by the forces of order, but it also directed the critique of force towards “irregular” rather than standard practices of grenadage and its physiological consequences, for example, singling out the use of the grenade-launcher rifle (FLG) as a means of targeting the body rather than a mechanism for delivering chemicals into the environment of the protest or for saturating the barricades.

Allegations of horizontal fire (tir tend or tir à l’horizontal) or of the targeting of grenades at protestors were common. UNEF testimonials claimed that members of the forces of order had aimed grenades directly at the body rather than at an angle according to standard operational norms.452 The Commission Témoignages et Assistance juridique underlined that “The police used grenades that they disposed of not only to disperse groups of demonstrators, but also to deliberately target...any silhouette that seemed to be a justifiable target for a veritable manhunt (chasse à l’homme).”453 Ironically, force-limitation principles were articulated in order to question the use of

450 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 77.

451 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 69.

452 As we will see, police manuals and regulations re-emphasized the need to fire gas at a minimum angle in the seventies. Chapter Four.

453 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 73. See Ibid., 74-78; 82-83. 188 189

grenades as a mechanical, physical force against the body rather than a means of altering the protest environment through gas.

A dozen demonstrators found themselves trapped between a barricade and the service d’ordre [of the police]. They were subjected to horizontal fire by fifty or so members of the CRS. Within a few seconds, three demonstrators collapsed, hit full-on (touchés de pleine fouet). Another received a grenade that exploded directly in his face.454

Saturday, around 2:30 am, at the barricade on the corner of the rue Gay-Lussac, the flics fired grenades, their rifles horizontal as if at target practice (comme au tir).455

[On the night of May 24-25, Place de la Sorbonne:] The CRS, while running, fired using the grenade launcher rifle in direct fire on the group that was still in front of the entryway of the Sorbonne; there was less than forty meters between the CRS and the people they were firing on; at each impact of grenades on the crowd (I repeat, in direct fire), wreathes of sparks and incandescent matter flew at the surrounding people; several were on the ground.456

In fact, the vast majority of observer accounts of the use of grenades in the published UNEF testimonies concerned injuries or harm suffered from the targeting of grenades directly at the body rather than from typical exposure to the environmental constraints of air contaminated by the various chemicals used by the police. In this sense, force minimization tended to target excessive uses of grenades rather than the use of gas to vanquish resistance, emphasizing rare limit-cases when the mechanical impact of the grenades had generated lasting injuries rather than the typical physiological constraint and suffering of exposure to the gas itself. This critique also tended to conflate use of grenades and use of the explosive, aluminum, OF 37 grenade, which did in fact

454 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 64.

455 Ibid., 65.

456 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 79.

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generate serious injuries and led to the death of far-right student Philippe Mathérion on a barricade on the night of May 24-25, 1968 and the death of worker Henri Blanchet during the police intervention in the Sochaux factory on June 10.457

The typical and limited objection to the use of gas based on the principle of force minimization is revealed by the critical counter-expertise of Marcel Francis-Kahn in the dispute generated by the turn to grenadage on May 10-11, 1968. Despite initial momentum, the effort to politicize the use of gas begun by students and then articulated by Dr. Kahn as a counter-expert would encounter essential limits. In fact, by the moment of the publication of Ils accusent, the discourse on state violence had essentially re-focalized on physical brutalities and the use of grenades as mechanical means of striking. The main allegations were not that gas was an inherently illegitimate or exorbitant means or that it exposed demonstrators and Parisians alike to an unacceptable level of physiological suffering, but that gas became dangerous in enclosed spaces458 or at very high concentrations.459 Because force-minimization oriented critical discourse towards those practices that might cause lasting and demonstrable injury to the body, and because the expert consensus in 1968 was that gas could prove dangerous only in extremes and that the effects were essentially temporary, critics would struggle to constitute gas as an enduring object of critique.

457 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai. For injuries and the OF 37, Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 73–74, 86–87.

458 Cf. Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 80.

459 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 88.

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Thus, although radicals originally sought to label the chemicals “combat gas” (gaz de combat) or

“war gas,” eventually even most left intellectuals took up the official signifier “tear gas.”460

Some critics of excessive force questioned the legitimacy of uses of force that exposed even resistant protestors to serious risk of enduring harm or injury.461 The force-minimization principle underwrote complaints not merely of police hitting persons who had already been

“defeated” or of potentially harmful practices involving grenades, but also encompassed the use of more dangerous striking weapons like the wooden bidules in use within the Parisian compagnies intervention, or the rifles employed in mêlées by the gendarmerie mobile and sometimes, by the

CRS.462 In a typical passage from its article “Nous accusons!” Action authors would write that “The rifle used by the mobile gendarmerie is another, superior echelon [of force]. Its butt, with sharp corners, is manifestly conceived to lacerate the skin, break the bones of the cranium, and damage the scalp.”463

Finally, force minimization principles were embedded in accounts that targeted the aiming of blows at vulnerable parts of the body like the face, head, and genitals.464

460 For “tear gas” as inadequate signifier and symbolic violence, see Provenzano, “Beyond the Matraque,” 601. For the discursive slide from denunciations of gaz de combat and towards gaz lacrymogène, contrast BDIC F Delta 61 Res 2 and Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai; Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent.

461 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 68.

462 Anonymous, “Nous accusons!,” Action, no. 2 (May 13, 1968): 4–5; Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 72; Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 92; 100; 104; 125.

463 Anonymous, “Nous accusons!,” 4.

464 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 100–101.

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[The young man] received numerous matraque blows on the head in a few instants. At the end, his head struck the wall of the post-office building and he fell unconscious on the ground, abundantly losing blood because of cuts on his scalp and face, but also out of his ears, which probably was a sign of a skull fracture…an ambulance came after two or three minutes to carry away the injured, comatose person, whose state appeared alarming. I don’t know what happened to him465

Then I saw two doubled-over young people brought out: four or five police officers for each of them struck them violently in the head with matraque blows, particularly in the face, but sometimes because that place was taken, I saw them bend over to strike the tibias.466

(The blows were particularly destined to strike the head—the people who accompanied me each had three stiches on their scalp and one grave eye trauma.)467

The minimal force principle was one of the most common principles deployed in critiques of police violence in 1968 by both radical and reformist sources and played a structuring role in eyewitness testimonials into police misconduct: it was deployed in accounts of police violence in public spaces, private buildings, and police commissariats. General de Gaulle would recognize the principle even as he rebutted criticisms of the police: in his televised allocution of June 7, 1968, he claimed that police had maintained order while “minimizing injuries” (en minimisant les blessures). However, because of the scientific consensus—and even available counter-expertise— harm-minimization failed to provide the basis for a sustained critique of the use of gas other than gesturing to the dangers of extremely high concentrations of chemicals. This reality was signaled by the declining prominence of the controversy over gas even in those critical sources like the

465 Ibid., 89–90.

466 Testimony of Doctor Le Guen, Le Monde, May 8, 1968; reprinted in Union nationale des étudiants de France, 92–93.

467 Ibid., 94.

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UNEF/SNE-sup volumes: although allegations over gas were prominent in the Livre noir des journées de mai, these claims were already more understated in Ils accusent.468

Police Inhumanity

The third major principle involved in 1968 critiques of state violence was that the executors of legitimate force must maintain their own “humanity” as well as the moral status of their adversaries. In this sense, legitimate force was supposed to involve calm conduct (sang-froid) and impartial respect for the law rather than emotions like enmity or hostility towards adversaries.469

In short, critics took police deontology at its word in order to trace deviations from the normative horizon of the police as restrained executors of the law. Based on this principle, state intervention became violence when police acted in a fashion inconsistent with their own “humanity” and exposed their victims to various forms of “de-humanization.” The principle of humanity directed police-critical discourse towards the gap between the motives of actual police conduct and the norm of a dispassionate force that respected the protestor; if the discourse of harm-minimization directed critics towards the normative horizon of regulated forces, the principle of humanity was deployed in attacks on the underlying principle of police action. This critique often relied on elements from recent Francophone humanist writings and theories of extreme violence and “de- humanization” through colonial or fascist practices.470 For example, the UNEF volume Ils accusent

468 Ibid., 73–87.

469 Evidently this standard pointed back to the civic republican tradition of political theory by figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or the Baron de Montesquieu, for whom government ideally merely executed the law, and the moral theory of Immanuel Kant. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres Complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

470 See Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme ; suivi du, Discours sur la négritude; Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique; Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre. 193 194

did not hesitate to write that “[state] repression aims for the humiliation, the degradation, and a sort of moral destruction of the arrested person.”471

One variation of the discourse on police inhumanity posited that police had departed from modern standards of conflictual conduct to become “savage” or animalistic. The phrase s’acharner sur that denoted police working over their victims also had zoomorphic dimensions—it is used to denote the behavior of carnivorous animals preying on the bodies of their victims. The word sauvage472 and derivatives also reoccur consistently in testimonials and the critical discourse of

UNEF editors, as do words from the repertoire of aggressive animal conduct. The same can be said of the word brutal and derivatives like brutalité.473 These moves returned the typical racializing discourses of the late French empire against the police:

…like a horde of savages, the forces of the police precipitated themselves forward with shields and matraques, yelling, charging the demonstrators and hitting everything in their passage.474

The matraquage began, accompanied by bellowing (hurlements) and obscenities.475

Preying in groups on (s’acharner à plusieurs sur) a downed demonstrator is unworthy (indigne) of civilized police.476

471 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 71.

472 Word frequency counts for words with the stem Sauvage. Sauvage(s), sauvagerie, sauvagement. Le livre noir: 14 uses. Ils accusent: 20 uses.

473 Word frequency analysis for words with the stem brutal-. Le Livre noir: 14 uses. Ils accusent: 58 uses.

474 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 89.

475 Ibid., 94.

476 J.F., “Un nouveau témoignage sur l’attitude de la police municipale.”

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Description of police obscenities and insults is another common element in both eyewitness testimonials and critical discourse, marking police desire to deprive victims of moral status; for the UNEF/SNE-Sup commission, verbal invective by the police was “typical of an instinctive willfulness (acharnement instinctif) to want to destroy the humanity of those at their mercy, already [observable] through language.”477

The UNEF/SNE-Sup Commission also emplotted accounts of physical violence targeting the face, head, and genitals into a discourse on police inhumanity. Police behavior was predatory and animal; it operated on a principle of de-humanization and of objectification.

Their bestial comportment reveals conscious or unconscious obstinacy to reduce their “prey” to the state of an object. It is not by chance if the distributed blows…target particularly the head, the face: [thus,] there will no longer be any reason to understand the reasons that led these men and women to descend to the streets, there will no longer be any communication with these disfigured faces. The matraquages also specifically target the sexual regions, either to dishonor or to harm the virility [of the victims]. In either case, there will no longer be any possible interaction (commerce) with those who thus become sub-human (des sous-hommes).478

As the above passage shows, the critique of police humanity was typically articulated as an objection to the act of hitting the body. To be sure, critics of gas initially imputed hostility to the state by invoking the use of gas in military conflicts. Journalists, radicals, and counter-experts like

Dr. Kahn discussed the use of CS gas in the United States and in Vietnam,479 the use of the OF grenade in military conflicts,480 and the ban on the use of gas for military conflicts between civilized

477 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 281.

478 Ibid.

479 Anonymous, “Nous accusons!” 5. Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noir des journées de mai, 86.

480 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 73–74. Claude Bourdet in Bulletin municipal officiel de la ville de Paris, Conseil de Paris, Séance du 8 juillet 1968, 439. 195 196

states.481 The designation combat gas (gaz de combat) as deployed some tracts at the start of the turn by the state to massive grenadage similarly mobilized an implicit normative distinction between the republican maintenance of order and military conflict. 482 Nevertheless, few critics would try to leverage the discourse of humanity into a critique of gas as a means: symptomatically, the authors of Ils accusent did not attempt to plot the use of chemicals into a narrative about de- humanizing violence but did talk about physical assaults.

3.2. Photographers and the Scene of Violence in May 1968

The May-June 1968 events also provide an important test for my argument that militant photographers and photojournalists alike struggled to render visible the full scope of the coercion being instituted to manage protest but were adept at showing the use of the baton, and that editorial conventions aligned on the exhibition of direct physical altercations between police and protestors or bystanders, rather than the use of “tear gas.” Protest and police practices during the Parisian events were photographed by militant and more conventional journalists alike; a photograph in the

French 1968 militant broadsheet Action! discloses the qualitative shift in extent of media visibility in Parisian May 1968 insofar as it depicts a single protestor assaulted a policeman under the surveillance of two other photographers.483 Although Le Monde did not include photographs in its print editions, responses to confrontations in the Parisian Latin Quarter included relatively

481 “Gaz de guerre: matériel utilize par les CRS pour la repression des manifestant,” May 1968. Private archive of Dr. Marcel-Francis Kahn.

482 Union nationale des étudiants de France, Ils accusent, 73–74.

483 Action no. 1 (May 7, 1968).

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extensive photographic documentation of police assaulting protesters and bystanders including in the high-circulation newspaper France-Soir.484 Radical student newspapers like Action and the

Trotskyist newspaper Avant-garde jeunesse also emplotted photography in their reports.485 The reaction of rank-and-file police to the intrusion of photographers onto the scene of protest in 1968 and the seventies often betrayed animus towards photographers, to say the least: in one case,

Gamma photographer Jean-Pierre Rey took an image of members of the CRS striking a downed demonstrator using their rifles on the second Night of the Barricades on May 24, 1968. Police promptly assaulted Rey, who had to recover in the hospital.486 Later, Les Barricades de mai, a collection of images by photojournalists working for Gamma, privileged photographs of the municipal police working over downed demonstrators in its account of the early days of the revolt.487 Recognizing the contours of representations of state violence, Parisian Prefect Maurice

Grimaud warned his subordinates on May 29, 1968 that actions like striking downed demonstrators were a serious threat to the “image” of the state.488 Grimaud might well have been speaking about those incidents typically immortalized in photographs.

484 See France-Soir, May 5-6, 1968, 1; France Soir, May 25, 1968, 1. To be sure, mainstream publications like France-Soir rarely made these images front and center and the captions tended to depoliticize the violence.

485 See Avant-garde Jeunesse no. 13 (May 18, 1968). The paper had already used a matraquage picture in an article on the police by Clovisse Verse in February of 1968, Avant-garde Jeunesse nos. 10-11 (February- April 1968), 21.

486 Le Nouvel observateur, May 30, 1968, 14.

487 Les Barricades de mai, présentation de Philippe Labro, Photographies de Jean-Pierre Bonnotte, Henri Bureau, Gilles Caron, Jean Lattes (Paris: Imprimeries Lescaret, 1968).

488 Letter from Maurice Grimaud to his subordinates in Dansette, Mai 1968, 397–401.

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In the ensuing sections, I rely on the private archives of the Fondation Gilles-Caron, agency archives, and contemporary 1968 publications to attempt to reconstitute the typical practices of protest photography and the principles of the selection process whereby photographs of violence by state actors were considered fit to print. Thus, practices of rendering visible the violence of the police tended to promote specific scenes: physical assaults by police using the baton and other direct physical contact between police and demonstrators. More than any other media, photographs would promote a political crisis for the police by providing powerful—and apparently irrefutable—visual supports for allegations of brutality. Thus, imagery of police physically attacking the demonstrators was one of the primary vectors for the representation of state action as arbitrary violence. Editors relying on the work of engaged photographers often juxtaposed photographs to the official discourse to reveal that discourse as an ideological “cover” for the reality of state violence and used photography to reveal the interventions of the state not as legitimate physical constraint but as intolerable violence.

Yet practices of violence representation during the Parisian 1968 events also had limits, and coercive practices like the use of chemical gas tended to elude publishing conventions even as these means were institutionalized. Practices for rendering state violence visible in 1968 and the early seventies were focused around contact interventions and the baton at work even in contexts where the baton assault was only one element of the practice of state coercion. Thus, photographs and films of state violence potentially motivated efforts by public officials to alter the prevailing practices in order to avoid close contact and indiscriminate brutality—a motivation acknowledged by contemporary security forces. Yet the ironic outcome of this focus has been a stereotype about how coercion was practiced that endures in historical accounts of May and June 1968 focused generally on police brutality: historians have ignored the arbitrary dimensions of the trial of

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visibility and assumed that the ensuing products of critique were reliable indicators of the broader contours of police coercion. Thus, insofar as the focus of visual art and photography was physical contact between police and demonstrators, practices of violence-representation both encouraged shifts in the crowd dispersion tactics of the state circa 1968 and helped to obscure those shifts from posterity.

Militant or engaged photography was a type of action, a point at which the representation of the events played an acute role in their constitution. The power of subversive photographs to dramatically intensify the political implications of incidents of police violence for publics far from the site of confrontations, and the veridical potential attributed to these photographs, were key dimensions of protest in 1968 through the seventies in and beyond Western Europe. Although much subsequent notoriety has gone to the photographic agency Magnum for its documentation of the events of May and June 1968, it was militant photographers like Gérard Aimé and Elie

Kagan of the JCR, as well as professionals of the photographic agency Gamma—Jean-Pierre

Bonnotte, Henri Bureau, Gilles Caron—,who did the most to document police interventions and resistance. One Gamma photographer in particular, Gilles Caron, deserves special recognition for providing some of the most striking imagery.489 Before vanishing in Cambodia in the spring 1970,

Caron built a reputation as a conflict photojournalist that has endured the span of five decades.490

His photography evinces sympathy towards the phenomenon of youth resistance and attention to

489 For Gilles Caron, see Provenzano, “Beyond the Matraque,” 608–9.

490 Raymond Depardon and Gilles Caron, Gilles Caron-Reporter, 1967-1970 (1978: Editions du Chene, 1978). Although he did not belong to any of the far-left groupuscules that dotted the militant landscape of the après-mai, several of Caron’s photographs were printed for Action.

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contours of police violence, and like others of the 1968 generation, Caron had been originally radicalized as a conscript in the French army in the Algerian War.491 Caron’s attention to abuses of power by the police is manifest in many of his unpublished and published photographs from the

May events.

A helpless protester, perhaps a mere bystander, lies on the cobblestones; around him, a small group of police engage in a vicious assault: I am describing a series of photographs by Gilles

Caron from the second night of the barricades in Parisian May 1968.492 Yet although Caron had a recognizable talent for this type of photograph, a similar description could accompany any number of photographs of police brutality. Photographs of members of the security forces assaulting demonstrators or engaged in violent retribution against downed or detained protestors were a transnational phenomenon in the European decade of revolt both within leftist media and rather more mainstream sources (fig. 2).493 The most paradigmatic representation of state violence in 1968 in France was that of contact involving police and protestors and in particular the types of physical assault elsewhere documented in observer testimonies: groups of police assailing downed or incapacitated demonstrators. The subject of these photographs is usually a group of police officers.

Members of the group menace protesters using batons or deliver truncheon blows, kicks, or rifle butt strikes against a downed or fleeing party, identifiable as a demonstrator, or perhaps, merely

491 Gilles Caron, J’ai voulu voir (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2011).

492 I was unable to secure copyright to the images for this dissertation, but they have been previously published in The Journal of Modern History. See figs. 1-5 in Provenzano, “Beyond the Matraque.”

493 Though I focus on the visualization of protest and repression as a transnational Western European phenomenon, the possibility that these were merely local cases of an international grammar should not be discounted: comparative research on the representation of state violence against ’68 protest movements in Canada and the United States, Latin America, or Japan, would allow us to further explore this hypothesis.

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an unfortunate citizen. Sometimes the injured party is elderly, or middle-aged, occasionally, female. Sometimes it is a male-female couple, as in another series taken by Caron early in the May events showcasing Parisian police officers and gendarmes in the repressive role of the flic.494

Typically, the victim is a young male adult. The “contact” photograph portrays a highly asymmetrical power relationship, one of recognizable domination in which there is no indication of rebellious subjectivity or rejection of authority. Sometimes, the victim of the police is prostrate and potentially unconscious; in the more common cases, one discerns efforts to flee or mitigate injury by the dominated party, a reflexive crouch, an effort to turn away from the police officer.

In contrast to the contact photograph, images focused on new techniques of “distance combat” by police circulated more rarely in print. There were, however, exceptions, typically prompted by the massive use of grenades or gas, such as later action in May 1968. Leftist print media like Avant-garde jeunesse included a fair number of images of chemical bombardment in its May 1968 special issue. The French editorial apparatus in 1968 also circulated a subset of photographs of members of the security forces manipulating horizontally-inclined launchers— another abuse that we have traced in our account of the eyewitness testimonies brought together in such documents as the Livre noir.495 Yet even though French police abundantly used chemicals to vanquish rebellious protestors in the late sixties and seventies, images of the grenade launcher in action were but a minor part of the photographic representation of violence against

494 Gamma Photography, Les barricades de mai.

495 Avant-garde Jeunesse no. 13 (May 18, 1968); L’événement no. 9 (June 1968): 60.

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demonstrators in critical print; their marginal status persevered well after the police prioritized

“distance” combat.

On purely aesthetic-practical grounds, one might surmise that photography of distance methods was difficult because of the intrinsic limitations of the photographic apparatus. The

“distance” tactics of throwing gas rarely allowed for the representation of a dominator-dominated- domination relationship in one frame; one or more of these were almost by necessity unseen. Thus, photographic action could not re-stage, but only allude to, the visual experience of witnessing grenades in motion. In short, it is possible that photography as a medium was suited to the rhythm of human muscular contortions in the act of repetitive hitting and punching, kicking, or jets of water or chemical sprays. In general photographers focused on either the action of firing or on the subsequent victims of the act, while occasionally the art of montage allowed an imperfect solution to the fundamental limitations of the medium. This disjuncture—between the action of the medium and the action to be mediated—might in part account for the relative dearth of representations of the launching of grenades, and the use of offensive grenades in particular, in published print in the late sixties and early seventies across national boundaries, even though photojournalists themselves did attempt photographs of the aiming of weapons or their effects. Thus, although there were photographs of the firing of chemical grenades, clouds of gas, or expended grenades in the photonegatives of photographer Gilles Caron from May 1968, very photographs of this type were ever published; a notable exception is a shot of a grenadier aiming his grenade-launcher rifle at a rooftop published in the June 18, 1968 issue of Action.496

496 Photonegative in Caron Foundation contact sheet 8752; Action no. 12 (June 18, 1968). 202 203

Editorial efforts to showcase police coercion in published work evince some hesitation over how to present the use of gas (fig. 3). During and after the Parisian 1968 events, editors sometimes occasionally opted to represent the use of these means in the form of decontextualized or expended objects, alluding to the scale of its use.497 Another possibility explored for representing the violence inflicted on demonstrators by distance means like gas was the “injury” photograph, showing the effects of distance means in terms of incapacitated demonstrators. Yet just as often, in the case of

C.S. or other tear gas, editors were disinclined to document the effects at all, abetting the invisibility of chemical-based coercion either out of sensitivity towards its subjects, the difficulty of producing a “good photograph” of victims suffering from gas, or a sense that gas simply did not merit documentation. In this sense, and despite the relative agnosticism of photographers like

Caron, the published images of police coercion aligned on the flic and direct, physical police violence.

497 See photographs in Action no. 7 (June 11, 1968): 3; Le Nouvel Observateur 187 (June 12, 1968): 29; Union nationale des étudiants de France, Le Livre noír des journées de mai. 203 204

FIG. 2. Matraquages of a downed person by CRS in the Livre noir des journées de mai. Photos by Jean-Pierre Bauteloup.

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FIG. 3. “Tear gas” and explosive grenades in the Livre noir des journées de mai. Photographer unknown. Evincing the conundrum of depicting grenadage, explanatory text detailing each type of grenade almost crowds out the image.

3.3. Artwork and Caricature: Figuring the Flic

If asked to imagine artwork of the police at work in May ’68, you are highly likely to envision the famous poster of a member of the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité poised to strike using his rubber matraque (fig. 4). Featuring a Martian-like member of the CRS, goggles on, shield up, baton poised to strike, the image gestures to the experience of contact between the protestor and the crowd and thus positions the viewer as a potential recipient of matraquage. Like other 1968 artwork portraying the police, the poster identifies the police and the act of hitting that was central to narrative and photographic representations of state violence as part of a strategy to “recruit” the viewer in an anti-repression politics.

Police and soldiers were not only criticized or photographed in compromising positions but were frequently the target of satirical artwork. However, even more than camerawork, both in

1968 and in the following decade, visual art tended to promote the figure of batoneer as the most

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salient manifestation of the police. In art, police and soldiers were typically represented as relying on firearms and the baton to ensure their dominance, a pattern also evinced by drawings for 1968 journals like Action and Avant-garde jeunesse. Unlike photographs and documentary film, caricature dispenses with any resemblance theory of truth, so it is all the more striking that radical artists above all opted to depict the security forces in the guise of the batoneer. Nevertheless, gas grenades or grenade-launcher rifles simply were not part of the typical equipment of the police in the drawings of the gauchiste artists who drew for outlets like Action and Charlie Hebdo. Thus, the gauchiste satirist Siné (Maurice Sinet) and his comrades consistently depicted the police in the form of the flic (figs. 5-6). A trio of Siné drawings produced for the Agit-prop newspaper Action at the start of the May discloses the police in their repressive role as matraqueur, while another comrade depicted a member of the Parisian Compagnies d’intervention carving a notch into his blood-spattered bidule in June.498 Similarly, Marek Halter’s collection of black-and-white watercolor drawings, Mai, exclusively figures the police as flics.499

Artists who did ultimately draw the police engaged in other repressive tasks like the use of gas did not necessarily portray use of “tear gas” itself as “violence,” as is indicated by a work of art recirculated in the course of the demonstrations against the reform of higher education in April of 1976 (fig. 7). The work, drawn for the 1968 Atelier populaire de l’ex-École des Beaux-Arts, depicts a member of the security forces aiming his rifle-grenade launcher at the viewer alongside the ironic caption “The government starts a dialogue.” Visual foreshortening is used to

498 Action no. 1 (May 7, 1968): 1, 3, 5; Action no. 5 (June 6, 1968), 3; Action no. 7 (June 12, 1968), 1.

499 Marek Halter, Mai : Dessins (Genève: Éditions de l’Avenir, 1970).

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dramatically foreground the funnel used to launch “tear gas” and to represent the grenade- launching rifle as a quasi-rifle, aligning on 1968 critiques that police fired their gas canisters directly at protestors. As in the case of photography, the significance of the use of the FLG in this image stems from its use to individually target demonstrators using grenades as a mechanical means of striking, not its use as a means of saturating an environment using chemicals. In short, the art is embedded in the same sentiment as accusations that the security forces aimed their rifle- grenade launchers directly at their adversaries. The work thus indicates the difficulty of constituting gas in itself as an object of unveiling as “violence.”

Discourses of denunciation, photographs, and art from May 1968 and the protest movements of the après-mai all point towards the difficulty that critics had in apprehending the full contours of repression—a difficulty that left them publicizing direct, physical police violence and the hated baton ironically at the very moment that the French state was in the process of re- founding the standard practices of coercion on “distant” chemical means. Though a few critics acknowledged the novelty of the use of agents like CS gas in the metropole, the historically transmitted principles of critiques of violence proved ill-suited towards the constitution of “tear gas” as a durable object of visibility or denunciation.

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FIG. 4.—“CRS-SS!” The famous screen print by Jacques Carelman of a baton-wielding police officer for the Atelier populaire de l’ex-École des Beaux-Arts. Courtesy National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

FIG. 5.—“Was he armed?”—“Yes, boss…with a diploma!” May 1968 satirical drawing by Maurice Sinet. Courtesy Madame Catherine Sinet / Columbia Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.

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FIG. 6.—“We’re learning too!” Police learn the art of hitting. May 1968 satirical drawing by Maurice Sinet. Courtesy Madame Catherine Sinet / Columbia Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.

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FIG. 7.—“The government begins a dialogue.” Atelier populaire de l’ex-École des Beaux-Arts poster of a member of the security services wielding the rifle-grenade launcher. Author unknown. Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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3.4. “Means of Authority”: Critiques of Violence during the Frankfurt Struggles of 1973-1974 mittel der obrigkeit means of authority man muß sie gesehen haben one ought to have seen them diese gesichter unter dem these faces under the tschako helmet während der schläge during the beatings man muß sie gesehen haben one ought to have seen them diese gesichter unter dem these faces under the tschako helmet zwischen schlag und schlag between blow and blow man muß sie gesehen haben one ought to have seen them diese gesichter unter dem these faces under the tschako helmet nach den schlägen after the beatings sag nicht: diese schweine don’t say: these pigs sag: wer hat sie dazu say: who put them up to it? gebracht

If the French 1968 generation hated its flics, the Schläger500 or Knüppelgarde501 played a key role in the discourse on state violence of the West German extraparliamentary (APO) movement and that of later Frankfurt radicals, as the above poem, “Mittel der Öbrigkeit” (Means of Authority) 502 by Peter-Paul Zahl evinces. The poem is punctuated by repetitive allusions to the act of witnessing police violence and particularly to the grimacing faces of the police under the traditional helmet

(“faces under the Tschako503”); acts of hitting structure the divisions of the poem (“during the hitting,” “between each blow,” “after the hitting”). Repeated allusion to the faces of the police

500 The noun Schläger is derived from the verb schlagen, literally, to hit.

501 Literally, “Baton-guard.” See Häuserratszeitung 9 (June 1974), 3.

502 Peter-Paul Zahl, “mittel der öbrigkeit,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 22, 1976. The absence of capitalization is a deliberate formal feature of the poem.

503 The Tschako was the traditional helmet of the Prussian police; ironically it had been largely replaced by the anti-riot helmet in the course of the year 1968. 211 212

gestures to the possibility that they appeared to be enjoying the use of force, mobilizing the principle of humanity. In the conclusion, the narrative voice directs the emotions of the reader towards the political authorities responsible for these scenes of violence. Written by a member of the former 1968 movements and a literary representative of the armed movement who was imprisoned following a shootout in 1972, the poem stages a microcosm of the 1968 strategy of revealing police violence as the specific and irreducible means of state in a signifying chain that linked the contemporary Federal Republic of Germany to the tradition of unswerving authoritarianism via its police.

“Means of authority” becomes more enigmatic when we realize that by 1976, police in

Frankfurt am Main had diversified the use of force well beyond the traditional repertoire of physical intervention and the Schlagstockeinsatz, in part exactly because of concerns about the delegitimation that resulted from physical interactions between police and protestors. As we will see in Chapter Four, Frankfurt am Main was a key site of inception of new practices to coerce demonstrators, including use of Chemical Mace, baptized the Reizstoffsprühgerät (RSG1); the injection of irritants like CN into the water cannon; and the use of gas—all justified within the police not least as ways to avoid de-legitimating scenes of direct physical contact between police and protestors. As in May 1968, the Frankfurt militant demonstrations of 1973-1976 provide another meaningful basis for the argument that European critics of the police struggled to constitute the use of novel police armament as inherently “violent,” remaining oriented on the

Schlagstockeinsatz and immediate physical force as metonymic figurations of arbitrary authority, particularly in photographs and art. Moreover, although the discourse of unveiling police violence would adjust in the course of the later seventies, its basic contours would remain in place. Thus,

Part I of another Peter-Paul Zahl poem written during the 1976 anti-nuclear movement

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demonstrations, the Brokdorf Cantate, stages both the “recognition” of police violence and affirms the “precise knowledge” by activists of the practices of the state. Although the narrator recognizes the use of an extending arsenal of state including the baton, the pistol, tear gas, Chemical mace, and the water cannon, the narration above all asserts familiarity with the directly corporeal physical constraint exercised by the police in the form of blows (Schläge) and kicks (Tritte). Indeed, the last-minute appeals to knowing “tear gas direct in the face”/ “chemical mace from up close in the eyes” read as an afterthought.

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die schläge ins gesicht the blows to the face die kennen wir we know them die schläge auf rücken und nacken the blows to the back and the nape of the neck ja die kennen wir we know them die schläge auf arme und beine the blows to the arms and legs die kennen wir we know them kennen wir genau we know them precisely und die schläge in die geschlechtsteile and the blows to the private parts die kennen wir we know them die schläge quer über die Nase und die in den the blows right on the nose and in the Bauch stomach ja die kennen wir yes we know them und die schläge genau zwischen die zähne and the blows right between the teeth auch die kennen wir we also know them kennen wir nur zu genau. we know them all too precisely die tritte vors schienbein the kicks in the shins die kennen wir we know them die tritte in den arsch und die in den bauch the kicks in the ass and in the stomach ja die kennen wir yes we know them und die tritte in den schritt and the kicks in mid-step die kennen wir we know them kennen wir sehr genau we know them precisely das tränengas direct ins gesicht the tear gas directly in the face das kennen wir we know it die chemische keule aus nächster nähe in die the Chemical Mace from close up in the augen eyes ja auch die kennen wir yes we know that also und das wasser im werfer mit cns [sic] and the water in the cannon with CN das kennen wir we know it kennen wir nur zu genau we know it precisely

--Zahl, Brokdorf Cantate504

The two Zahl poems indicate that for West German radicals well into the seventies, recognizing police violence meant above all knowing the police officer as a Schläger. Thus, as in France, the general contours of critical discourse on state violence inadvertently pointed towards a flexible

504 Peter-Paul Zahl, Alle Türen Offen : Gedichte (Berlin: Rotbuch-Verlag, 1977), 34–35. Italics in original.

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and selective practice of the police in opposition to massive interventions; and towards the substitution of new modalities of “crowd dispersion” for the baton—precisely the forms of police control that were in the course of adoption. However, in the course of the period, the New Left did developed objections to the use of “tear gas,” and in fact, the left wing of the SPD, the Young

Socialists (Jusos) and radicals would successfully exert enough pressure to generate misgivings among the SPD government about the viability of use of Chemical Mace and CN in the water cannon. Nevertheless, these efforts were tentative enough that police would continue to puruse alternatives to the baton as more legitimate forms of constraint in the seventies.

Organized efforts by radical groups to document police violence in protest cycles were consistent elements of the post-1968 landscape of West Germany, and Frankfurt was no exception.

Thus, after the destruction of the occupied housing block on the corner of Bockenheimer

Landstraße and Schumannstraße in the Frankfurt Westend and the violent demonstration that followed on February 23, 1974, radical intellectuals close to Revolutionärer Kampf organized a fact-finding commission (Ermittlungsausschuss) to collect and analyze testimonies about police excesses (Übergriffe).505 A tribunal at the Frankfurt Volksbildungsheim on March 12, 1974 that united a 2,000-person public including victims of police violence, Frankfurt radicals led by Cohn-

Bendit and Joschka Fischer, and prominent representatives of Jusos including Karsten Voigt, the former federal representative from 1968 to 1972, was the highpoint of this campaign. The strategy of the tribunal and its focus on violence by the police foregrounded the extent to which Frankfurt radicals were operating in the revolutionary strategy originally schematized by SDS in 1968,

505 Jürgen Roth, “Aufruf des Untersuchungsausschusses Foltert die Polizei?,” Häuserratszeitung, no. 9 (1974): 5.

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pursuing confrontations and subsequent police excesses as a means of politicization. As a May

1974 article in Wir wollen Alles! justifying the tribunals disclosed, RK understood allegations of police violence as means of showing the state not as a neutral or impartial third party in social conflicts, but as a capitalist state that would inevitably transgress the limits of bourgeois legality in order to terrorize the masses. In this sense, Frankfurt’s revolutionaries presented police excesses as inevitable expressions of the politics of the local SPD government.506 For Revolutionärer Kampf, the work of publicizing police violence was understood as an essential means of combating ideologies of state:

Reports on mishandling and torture by the police are never in themselves to be avoided as moralistic and moaning…Naturally, it is somehow clear that the police are a repression- and class-instrument. This consciousness is however vague and the ideology of class- neutrality will always be, partially successfully, set against it…it is a matter of showing that the cops are the violent representatives of capitalist interests, that their “order- function” taken in itself is already violent and that in this context, the cops are always ready to cross the boundaries of even this violent legality.507

As journalist Jürgen Roth put it for the Häuserratszeitung, only days before the April 1974 tribunal, “nobody is so naïve as to believe that it’s all just individual incidents, condemnable excesses (Übergriffe) by over-stimulated, over-aggressive or even incited police officers. Current police behavior is politically determined.”508

506 For the “unity of reform and terror,” see Genossen vom RK, “SPD: Die Einheit von Reform und Terror,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 12 (January 1974): 6–7.

507 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Können die Revolutionäre ein Interesses haben an der Zerschlagung der Jusos?,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 15 (April 1974): 4.

508 Roth, “Aufruf des Untersuchungsausschusses Foltert die Polizei?”

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In the spring of 1974, the process of revealing police violence was deemed particularly useful in light of negative appraisals of extreme-left militancy in the press, radio, and television.509 RK deemed the March 1974 tribunal to be simultaneously “offensive” and “defensive,” a social form that justified revolutionary violence even as it sensitized the public to capitalist violence and broke the “information monopoly” of the state.510 Radicals also deemed the tribunal to be a demonstration of the resolve of the movement: as the Housing Council would put it in its 1974 publication

Wohnungskampf in Frankfurt (Housing Struggles in Frankfurt), “The Tribunal became a forum for all of those who were criminalized and whose protest and resistance were supposed to be muted.”511

Efforts to expose police violence in protests to public opprobrium were not just the handiwork of the Spontis. In May of 1974, the Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschlands (KBW) tried to block the rising of public transport rates by organizing protests in the city center. Unlike their rivals in RK, the KBW made no special practical efforts to defend themselves against or confront police—at least not openly—and reprised SDS tactics before the turn to Gewalt. 512 Transit

509 For Sponti appraisals of the reportage on the destruction of the occupied block on Bockenheimer/Schmumannstraße and the following militant demonstration, Wir wollen Alles! no. 15 (April 1974): 11.

510 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Können die Revolutionäre ein Interesses haben an der Zerschlagung der Jusos?,” 4. The event included a film-showing on the protests that united work by prominent author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge and amateur filmmakers, and also included interventions by intellectuals of the left and far-left including Gerhard Zwerenz, Jürgen Roth, Heinz Brandt—a celebrated anti-fascist resistance member and IG-Metal trade union representative—and Karsten Voigt. Some 20 eyewitnesses gave testimonies on police violence during the February events.

511 Häuserrat Frankfurt, Wohnungskampf in Frankfurt, 95.

512 Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 430–33; KBW Autorenkollektiv der Ortsgruppe Frankfurt, Der Kampf Gegen Die Fahrpreiserhöhung Und Den Magistrat in Frankfurt Mai/Juni 1974.

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prices were still raised, and even the center- and center-left newspapers still blamed the radicals for the ensuing “violence,” but the weeklong protest was somewhat successful at discrediting and embarrassing the police and raising misgivings about the mass use of “tear gas” and Chemical

Mace. Efforts by the Maoist mass-organizations GUV and Rote Hilfe to document police violence during the summer 1974 demonstrations against the raising of public transport rates included the circulation of 1,000 copies of a 58-page publication entitled “Police Terror against the Transit- tariff demonstrations in Frankfurt.”

Like the Spontis, the authors of the KBW documentation meant to sensitize new sectors of the population to the violence of the bourgeois state and to build a unified front that would help to politically neutralize and restrain police violence.513 West German Maoists of the KBW also positioned state violence as a mere manifestation of the policy of the social democratic government; thus, according to one slogan during the demonstrations, Preise treiben, Knüppel ins

Genick, das ist Magistratspolitik!514 Frankfurt radicals were also aware of a tension between reformist and revolutionary perspectives on the documentation of police intervention: any descriptions of “excessive” police violence could be construed as demands for reform or incidentally provoke practices of higher reflexivity or restraint by the SPD and the police. Public- facing accounts by RK and the Frankfurt Häuserrat during the June 1974 movement declared that

513 Rote Hilfe e.V. and GUV, Polizeiterror gegen die Fahrpreisdemonstrationen in Frankfurt 26.5- 1.6.1974, 6; 9.

514 Eng.: “Rising prices, a baton at our necks –that is magistrate-politics.” Ibid., 1. Note the appeal to the baton as the metonymic signifier for “repression.”

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perspectives that implied a “reformist” or regulatory attitude towards police violence and that presented the latter as accidental or based on lack of foresight were erroneous:

It is always repeated: the police overshot the goal (schießt über’s Ziel raus), they went a bit too hard, they used a bit too much tear gas, arrested a bit too much, etc. It all might— with some circumspection—involve less violence. This [attitude] is a mistake…the harshness (die Härte) of the police intervention of the last few days is not accidental, but rather the political strategy of the Magistrate. The violent smashing of the demonstrations, the effort to physically liquidate the demonstrators, is intended to cause fear!515

RK members felt the need to double down on the political critique of police “terror” because members of the SPD like Karsten Voigt, the respectable Frankfurt press, and even Polizeipräsident

Knut Müller had explicitly acknowledged that the police had engaged in excesses in the course of demonstrations. Although by 1973 the editorial line of the leading Frankfurt papers was quite hostile to the radical left, that did not mean that mainstream papers like Frankfurter Rundschau and FAZ did not criticize the police, and particularly in the course of the demonstrations against the raising of public transport rates from May 26 to June 1, 1974, editors for the leading papers and journalists deplored excessive and indiscriminate force and claimed that overreactions in fact facilitated the actions of the militants.516

Yet even though RK aspired to a revolutionary critique of the police that above all targeted its function in capitalist relations of production and presented police violence as a direct expression of the political decisions of the social-democratic government to terrorize political opponents, revolutionaries’ own reports and testimonies about police violence inevitably involved a normative

515 Häuserratszeitung/Wir wollen Alles! Gegen Fahrpreiserhohung und Polizeiterror, supplement to Wir wollen Alles! no. 17 (June 1974), 2.

516 Frankfurter Stadt-Rundschau, May 29, 1974, 9. Werner Holzer, “Verthältnismäßigkeit der Mittel,” Frankfurter Rundschau, June 1, 1974, 2.

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orientation that pointed in a more reformist direction and deployed principles of selectivity, harm minimization, and humanity. In short, the act of engaging with police violence in detail inevitably required radicals to activate principles that could point towards reforms, regardless of their preferences for revolution. Meanwhile, these elements were substantially similar to those that had been deployed by the earlier APO movement and French 1968 radicals, pointing up both the endurance and the transnational scope of the principles emplotted in critiques of police violence during protests in the sixties and seventies. Moreover, more often than not, critical discourses and testimonies were focalized on lack of selective intervention and excessive harm and the

Knüppeleinsatz appeared as the primary representative type of police misconduct. Despite some early controversies only the June 1974 struggles on the Zeil against the raising of public transport rates involved significant critical coverage of the alternative means of coercion that were emerging as substitutes for the baton—chemicals and the WaWe—and a subsequent controversy that would halt—but not prevent—the introduction of chemical means into the water cannon in the city of

Frankfurt am Main.

It might appear at first glance that efforts to document police violence by West German radicals were hopeless. In winning public support for their claims against the police, Frankfurt radicals faced an apparently disadvantageous political dynamic that the French 1968 generation did not. The Social Democrats (SPD) occupied the government at the federal level, in the state of

Hessen, and in the city of Frankfurt, and rival Christian Democrats had lined up behind a more vigorous policy of repression.517 On the party-political scene, no alternative left organization like

517 For example, the Frankfurt CDU claimed that the local SPD were not showing enough “resolution” and “courage” after the street-battle of March 28, 1973. Frankfurter Rundschau, March 30, 1973, 14. For the CDU as committed to a law and order, see Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany.

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the French PSU existed to back radicals’ allegations about violent repression, claims that essentially targeted the SPD government, particularly in Hessen. Nevertheless, as we will see, SPD politicians and officials in the interior ministries were concerned about violence allegations, and various organizations and tendencies within the SPD fraction, including the Jusos, were also sensitive to the violence of the police. After the spring 1973 confrontations in the Westend, the local Jusos demanded a parliamentary investigation and the resignation of Frankfurt

Polizeipräsident Knut Muller, and Juso communiques also blamed the police for the confrontations and decried injurious and illegal police behavior towards demonstrators, local residents, women, children, and representatives of the press.518 The Jusos and the local section of the SPD (Ortsverein) and associated civic associations also put out press releases criticizing police conduct during the

February 21 eviction of the houses at Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumanstraße and February 23,

1974 demonstrations in the Westend.519 One week later, at the party congress of the Frankfurt local section of the SPD, a bitter conflict ensued over the conduct of the police.520 Meanwhile, like the

UNEF during the May ’68 events, and reiterating earlier efforts to document police violence during the APO movement, the Frankfurt student union ASTA organized and collected eyewitness reports on police violence and issued its own declarations against the police to the local press.521 Finally, although Frankfurt radicals themselves were keen to denounce the bourgeois press for stabilizing

518 Frankfurter Rundschau, March 30, 1973, 14.

519 Reprinted in Wir wollen Alles! nos. 13-14 (February-March 1974): 15. Cf. Frankfurter Rundschau, February 23, 1974, local edition, 12.

520 Frankfurter Rundschau, March 4, 1974, 9-10.

521 Wir wollen Alles! nos. 13-14 (February-March 1974): 15.

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the discourse of public officials and there was no love lost between local editors and radicals, in the course of the Frankfurt struggles, more respectable media organizations like Frankfurter

Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and Frankfurter Rundschau (FR) occasionally diffused critical perspectives and reportage on police violence. Radical documentation on police terror

(Polizeiterror) frequently included citations from groups like the Jusos or from the mainstream press in order to bolster the credibility of radicals’ own allegations, a documentary dynamic also common to soixante-huitard violence documentation (above).522

The culture of anti-fascism that had been developed on the Left since the interwar period meant that ad-hoc organizations like the Spring 1974 Frankfurt Tribunal could count on the support of a group of anti-fascist politicians and intellectuals of the interwar generation. 523 Heinz Brandt, a former anti-fascist combatant and trade unionist who had fled from East Germany to the West in the early fifties, would lend support to the February 1974 tribunal in Frankfurt; journalist Jürgen

Roth would significantly point out that the curriculum vitae of high-ranking police authorities in

Frankfurt included soldiering on the Eastern Front.524 In short, the political culture of antifascism afforded some scope for recruiting Frankfurt intellectuals as subjects of an anti-repressive politics even as it informed the form that critique of the violent state could take. Of course, radicals also recognized that contemporary police violence was less severe than it had been during the Nazi

522 For a key representative of this method, see Rote Hilfe e.V. and GUV, Polizeiterror gegen die Fahrpreisdemonstrationen in Frankfurt 26.5-1.6.1974.

523 For post-war antifascist intellectuals, see Sean A. Forner, German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal : Culture and Politics after 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

524 Roth, “Aufruf des Untersuchungsausschusses Foltert die Polizei?”

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period or the repression taking place in the Southern Cone; as the RK article on the March 1974 tribunal noted, “Frankfurt is not Santiago yet.”525

Finally, although this chapter analyses only the strategy of “unmasking” in West Germany as practiced during the Frankfurt struggles because these were “front lines” for the introduction of new police tactics and weapons, it is worth pointing out that investigative committees that organized testimonies, collected photographs of police intervention, and documented police violence had emerged in the late Sixties and continued to be a routine element of the protest culture of the New Social Movements (NSMs) of the late seventies. Maoist groups like the KBW and

Kommunistischer Bund (KB-Nord) produced extensive critical documentation of police interventions in the context of protests at Whyl, Brokdorf, and Grohnde.526 Similarly investigative committees were an integral part of the protest culture of the West German Autonomists from the very start of the housing struggles in West Berlin, Frankfurt, at regional squats like the one in

Freiburg in the summer of 1980.527 In this sense, investigative commissions would continue to play a role in the New Left protest culture well after the Frankfurt Ereignisse of 1973-1974.

Indiscriminate Force

525 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Können die Revolutionäre ein Interesses haben an der Zerschlagung der Jusos?,” 6.

526 Brokdorf, ein Exempel: zur Strategie u. Taktik d. Polizeieinsatzes (Hamburg: Reents, 1977); Ermittlungsausschuss der Buu, Augenzeugenbericht aus Brokdorf (Hamburg, 1977); Polizeiterror Gegen AKW-Gegner : Erfahrungen Aus Der Wilster Marsch Und Grohnde. (Hamburg: Arbeiterkampf, 1977); Bürgerinitiative Umweltschutz Unterelbe/Hamburg, Brokdorf 28.2.81. Berichte-Bilanz-Perspektiven (Hamburg: Bürgerinitiative Umweltschutz Unterelbe/Hamburg, 1981).

527 For example, Redaktionskollektiv, Dass der Tod uns Lebendig Findet und das Leben uns nicht tot ! Dokumentation zum Dreisameck mit Fotos, Texten und Flugblättern (Freiburg im Breisgau: Druck und Verlag GmbH, 1980); Ermittlungsausschuss, abgeräumt? 8 Häuser geräumt...Klaus-Jürgen Rattay tot (Berlin, 1981).

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Principles of selectivity that had been mobilized in May 1968 were also emplotted in descriptions of police violence in the course of militant confrontations in Frankfurt; the “coding” of descriptions of police intervention through the selectivity principle was a feature of the critique of violence in both protest sequences covered in this chapter, although unlike their gauchiste counterparts, West

German radicals would sometimes subsume critiques of indiscriminate force under the concept of

Polizeiterror—a rejoinder to the tendency of politicians and respectable and boulevard media organs to widely apply the term “terror” to radical interventions. Most often, complaints about indiscriminate force arose in connection to the Knüppeleinsatz or mass arrests. Thus, in its initial coverage of the early housing struggles, Wir wollen Alles! reported that at the 600-person demonstration on 28 March 1973, police had indiscriminately assaulted demonstrators and passersby although no resistance had issued yet from the protestors: “As we were drawing away from the Zeil, after 10 minutes, suddenly several companies of cops showed up in front of us with water cannon, shields, and batons and immediately began hitting everything like wild. No stone had yet fallen! The demonstration was annihilated (zerschlagen). The cops (Die Bullen) hit like wild at everything in front of them, including passersby.” In later confrontations in front of

Kettenhofweg 51, police allegedly assaulted both inhabitants of the Westend and passersby.528 RK and the Häusserrat subsequently printed 50,000 copies of a tract entitled “Widerstand ist Möglich.”

The authors wrote that “The police gradually lost its self-control (sein Überblick) and beat black and blue everything that came before their batons” and detailed assaults on a doctor who had

528 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Widerstand ist möglich - Wohnungskampf in Frankfurt,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 3 (April 1973): 2.

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helped the injured and attacks on observers in environing buildings.529 In its reportage on another demonstration the following Friday, denounced by RK as “baton-and-arrest orgy,” Wir wollen

Alles! reported that “The cops (Die Bullen) were hoping for beatings (waren geil aufs Prügeln) and looking for an opportunity. As demonstrators threw stones at the TV-car of the police, they found one.”530

Similar accounts were reiterated by RK and its allies in the spring of 1974. After the militant demonstration on February 23, 1974 against the evacuation of the occupied housing block on the Schumannstraße/Bockenheimer Landstraße in the Westend, radicals reported indiscriminate reprisal arrests in the offices of the student union (ASTA) building:

In the evening, the police took revenge. They stormed the student center (Studentenhaus) and the adjacent student housing. They sprayed teargas, destroyed doors and furniture, [and] arrested everybody that they found, for the most part entirely harmless residents of the student center that never were at a demonstration. They were looking for grounds to beat up everyone (alle zu verprügeln).…Police made more arrests on Sunday. For people with long hair, parkas, or leather jackets it was dangerous to leave home. Groups of more than five people…had on Sunday no chance to spend the day without a pause in the Polizeipräsidium. Civil war conditions from above.531

Here we see echoes of May 1968 critiques of police for indiscriminate targeting of the youth: persons that “never even attended” a demonstration had been impacted by the police in mass arrests that amounted to unilateral hostility towards suspect categories on the basis of demographic

529 “Widerstand ist möglich,” published in Häuserrat Frankfurt, Wohnungskampf in Frankfurt, 71–72. (Die Polizei verlor allmählich den Überblick und schlug kurz und klein was ihr vor den Knüppel kam.)

530 Wir wollen Alles! no. 3 (April 1973): 8.

531 Wir wollen Alles! nos. 13-14 (February-March 1974): 3. For actions in the Studentenhaus, see also Anonymous, “Am Besten Gleich ins Stadion: Bericht über Festnahmen in Studentenhaus,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 13–14 (February-March 1974): 12; “Terror und Provokation: Frankfurt,” rote blätter 4, no. 17 (April 1974): 16–21.

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belonging rather than actual behavior. As another article on the February 23, 1974 demonstrations and their consequences evinced, “During the confrontations on Sunday and Saturday many comrades were arrested somewhere far from the streets although they had only been running around, as they left [their] home, etc., and they only were freed after ten or more hours, although police had absolutely nothing on them.”532 The local section of the SPD would report that “The further behavior of the police, the rage-blinded persecution through the entire city, Bockenheim, the university grounds, Kettenhofweg, etc., was a battue (Treibjagd),”533 referring to a practice whereby wild game are driven towards hunters.

Similar descriptions of indiscriminate force by the police were also occasionally circulated by mainstream press organs like FR and FAZ. In reports on the initial confrontations following the eviction of the occupants of the houses on Schumanstraße and Bockenheimer Landstraße on

February 21, 2974, reports by Frankfurter Rundschau noted that “During the baton-charge

[Schlagstockeinsatz] the police showed itself to be indiscriminate (nicht wählerisch)” and detailed assaults on reporters for the Hessen Radio and its own staff.534 Another article, by Lothar Vetter, described in detail attacks by an undercover officer on a 23-year old, uninvolved student, Michael

Krenz.535 Similarly, during the confrontation on 23 February 1974, reporters would detail assaults

532 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Spalten, kriminalisieren, draufschlagen,” 10.Revolutionärer Kampf, “Die Politik von SPD und Polizei: Spalten, kriminalisieren, draufschlagen,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 13–14 (March 1974): 10.

533 Wir wollen Alles! nos. 13-14 (February-March 1974): 15.

534 “Störungen werden im Keim erstickt,” Frankfurer Rundschau, February 22, 1974, 13./

535 Lothar Vetter, “Polizeiknüppel traf einen Unschuldigen,” Frankfurter Rundschau, February 22, 1974, Local edition. “Berührt oder nicht berührt ist die Frage,” Frankfurter Rundschau, March 2, 1974. Local edition.

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on a man who had photographed two plainclothes police officers followed by an attack on a

Rundschau driver who tried to press the police to take the man to the hospital.536 The same paper would go on to detail “excesses” by the police like the indiscriminate spraying of CN into the loudspeaker-equipped Volkswagen belonging to the ASTA, and the random spraying of tear gas into the face of a reporter for the Hessen Radio.537

Radicals aired similar accusations of indiscriminate arrests and attacks during the May

1974 demonstrations against public transport rates on the Zeil, and in this case those allegations also received substantial media support. Thus, the Maoist mass-organizations Rote Hilfe and

GUV538 of Frankfurt am Main would report in their joint account that, “The police organized arbitrary (willkürliche) manhunts. Without any warning, small groups of police ambushed assemblies of people discussing, and even individuals, hit them like wild, arbitrarily arrested a few people and then retreated again…every attempt to differentiate demonstrators and passersby was abandoned, [and] whoever was shopping on the Zeil had to reckon with [the risk of] being beaten up and arrested.”539 Critical reportage on police conduct frequently accused them of indiscriminate arrests and baton-violence, yet during the FVV-demonstrations, critics also deployed the principle of selectivity as the basis for critiques of newer modalities of coercion like “tear gas” and the water

536 Frankfurter Rundschau, February 25, 1974, 7. The Rundschau doubled-down in the face of police denials and produced witnesses; Frankfurter Rundschau, March 2, 1974, 16.

537 Frankfurter Rundschau, February 25, 1974, 8.

538 Gesellschaft der Unterstützung der Volkskämpfe, an affiliate organization of the Maoist Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschlands.

539 Rote Hilfe e.V. and GUV, Polizeiterror gegen die Fahrpreisdemonstrationen in Frankfurt 26.5- 1.6.1974, 6–7.

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cannon. Thus, radical documentation criticized police for indiscriminate force using the WaWe and for the persecution of persons regardless of the extent of their participation in the demonstrations.

During the conflict on the Zeil, one could see that the drivers of the water-cannon behaved with a hitherto unknown brutality. Without prior warning, children were sprayed, [and] incidental passersby weren’t avoided, [but] rather were similarly washed out of the street. The stream was deliberately aimed at single individuals who were persecuted like animals with it…there must have been corresponding instructions from above with the tenor: hit them all, whomever they are (schlagt sie zusammen, egal wie).540

Despite the hostility of many newspaper editors towards the radicals, mainstream reportage also described incidents of physical assault against young people and bystanders:

A little before, a young man with long hair suddenly received a hit on the back of his head with the rubber baton. Like all the others, the young man had stepped backwards without defending himself.541

On the corner of Stiftstraße on the Zeil, there happened to appear an intervention group of helmeted police, equipped with batons and shields, that assaulted those standing around without any regard for the [individual] person for minutes… 542

Once in the evening, the entire conquered five hundred meters of the Zeil were made free, police pressed into the surrounding passages from which nobody could run and in which non-participants had also taken refuge. Police hit [people] in part indiscriminately (teilweise rücksichtslos)…

On the Zeil at least once, ten police stormed upon a group of young passersby and hit everybody whom they could reach or who had stumbled.

In many cases, police officers picked out youths who they had fallen upon, but also other people, indiscriminately out of the crowd, beat them under an ear-piercing concert of

540 Ibid., 17. Notably, the line Schlagt sie zusammen, egal wie implies conceptual modelling of abusive use of the water cannon on the indiscriminate baton-assault on demonstrators.

541 Frankfurter Rundschau, local edition, June 1, 1974, 13.

542 J.B., “Bis in den Abend Straßenschlacht auf Zeil und Hauptwache,” Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung: Zeitung für Frankfurt, May 28, 1974, 29.

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whistles for seconds at a time, and then shoved them back into the crowd. During this activity, police never encountered resistance.543

Similarly, although editors in the Frankfurter Rundschau largely placed responsibility for violence on Frankfurt radicals, they simultaneously deplored how members of the public had suffered at the hands of an “often ineptly operating police” during the May demonstrations: “Massive tear gas use, already from the first days, occasionally uncontrolled assaults (Einschlagen) on the crowd, and planless persecutorial-hunts (Verfolgungsjagden) through neighboring streets and passages hardened the fronts and cemented, together with the strong reactions of the demonstrators, the enemy-picture.”544 Editors and journalists from Frankfurter Rundschau would subsequently report with pathos the lack of discrimination of the police and the indiscriminate effects of the deployment of CN in the water cannon during the May 1974 protests on the Zeil.545 Frankfurter

Rundschau chief editor Werner Holzer insisted that although many police had behaved correctly,

“It is sure that a stratum of police officers also let their water cannon “fire” where it was unnecessary and sprayed tear gas without being provoked or threatened. One will be able to find many explanations for this behavior, but it cannot be excused.”546 Despite its consistent contempt for radicals, reporters for FAZ would likewise deplore indiscriminate use of the water cannon during the demonstrations: “The Police aimed the stream of the water cannon, which fired a very

543 Jürgen Busche and Klau Viedebantt, “Knüppel und Tränengas gegen alle erleichtern die Aktionen der Rabauken,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 30, 1974.

544 Claus Gellersen, “Ausnahmezustand im Fußgängerparadies: Was mit Protesten begann, ist auf der Zeil zur Kraftprobe geworden,” Frankfurter Rundschau, June 1, 1974.

545 Frankfurter Rundschau 30 May 1974, 13.

546 Holzer, “Verthältnismäßigkeit der Mittel.”

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dense mixture of water and tear gas, indiscriminately (wahllos), against anything that moved.”547

Similarly, Frankfurter Rundschau reported indiscriminate and aggressive uses of the RSG1 and tear gas on the night of May 31, 1974.548 In the culmination of reactions to the indiscriminate use of the new chemical solution for the water cannon, the Frankfurt federal parliamentary representative Erich Nitzling of the left-wing of the SPD demanded the removal of CN from the equipment of the police for inner city demonstrations in circumstances whereby non-participants might be endangered or suffer alongside the demonstrators.549 In short, during the 1973-4 struggles, critics did articulate the selectivity criterion to the use of water cannon and chemicals.

Excessive Force

The principle of force-minimization was widely deployed in claims against the police during the

Frankfurt struggles: militants, representatives of civil society, and mainstream political groups circulated accounts of excessive use of force towards the vanquished and of police officers acting harmfully in conditions of unilateral superiority. As we have already, seen, the depiction of police violence of this sort was often subsumed under the concept of “excesses” (Übergriffe). In its very etymology, Übergriff points towards objections to the touch of the state: Über denotes excess, the verb stem greifen literally means to grasp or seize. Naturally, the word Übergriff was typically implicated in discussions of direct mêlées and physical assaults initiated by police. The notion of force-minimization also animated many descriptions of police assailing already-injured,

547 J.B., “Bis in den Abend Straßenschlacht auf Zeil und Hauptwache,” Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung: Zeitung für Frankfurt, May 28, 1974, 29. See J.B., “Tränengas auf der Zeil,” Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung: Zeitung für Frankfurt, May 29, 1974, 35-36.

548 Frankfurter Stadt-Rundschau, June 1, 1974, 13.

549 Frankfurter Stadt-Rundschau, June 1, 1974, 14.

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inoffensive, or neutralized protestors: during the March 1973 demonstrations, FAZ reported that

“On the Bockenheimer Landstraße there were beatings. One of the stone-throwers screamed through a bloody mouth that he wanted to go to the hospital. He was hurled to the ground by five or six officers. One of them, [an officer] in plainclothes, kicked him.”550 Similarly, Revolutionärer

Kampf stated that arrested comrades were assailed during the phase of repression that followed the February 1974 demonstrations, coding police abuses in commissariats as “torture” (Folter).551

Likewise, accounts of police violence against arrested persons in police cars and at the

Polizeipräsidium were reproduced in the Häuserratszeitung, Wir wollen Alles! and the Sponti journal Infodienst (ID) before they served as the basis for the March 12, 1974 public tribunal in

Frankfurt “Does the police torture?” (Foltert die Polizei?). The following is a representative account: “…one of us suddenly received an uppercut from a cop…the remainder of us sought protection from this brutal and entirely raging (voll zuschlagenden) civil-cop. During this proceeding, the cops used batons and this new close-combat gas [e.g., Chemical Mace]. The consequences were a concussion, broken nasal bridge, sprained limbs, bloody noses, etc.”552

Similar reports on the police were relayed by Rote Hilfe in its report on police violence during the

Frankfurt Volksvehrkehr (FVV) demonstrations of May 26-June 1, 1974.553 One victim reported that he had hoped to draw police attention to the brutal working over of a young woman, only to

550 FAZ, March 29, 1973, 29.

551 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Spalten, kriminalisieren, draufschlagen,” 10.

552 Wir wollen Alles! nos. 13-14 (February-March) 1974: 11.

553 Rote Hilfe e.V. and GUV, Polizeiterror gegen die Fahrpreisdemonstrationen in Frankfurt 26.5- 1.6.1974, 43–55.

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be himself set upon by a group of four or five police officers: “Following this, around four or five police beat me with their batons. I stumbled to the ground. Lying on the ground, I was kicked in the face. I suffered a laceration (Plätzwunde) on my chin that had to be stitched from this [assault].

The police then dragged me around 100 meters on the street…”554

Mainstream and radical newspapers alike also reported police violence against defenseless persons or those in a state of numerical or situational inferiority, just as French intellectuals had done during the events of May 1968. During confrontations in the city center in the summer of

1974, even FAZ reported police assaults on isolated or downed individuals: “Those running away

[from the police] were hurried along by groups of officers behind them that beat those who stumbled or were prone. There were (Es kam zu) predations (Verfolgungsjagden) in which multiple police grabbed individual demonstrators, beat them, and afterwards (anschließend) arrested them or let them run away.”555 Claims of police abuses in commissariats had some resilience across major demonstrations, although Wir wollen Alles! would note in the spring of 1974 that the

Frankfurt police appeared to have integrated prior criticisms of police violence into its policies and had practiced new regulations to hinder violence against detainees.

In two known cases, recognized comrades were tortured in jail by the cops, beat up (zusammengeschlagen), and isolated. Nevertheless, this time it didn’t come to such massive torture as was the case in the housing struggle. Prisoners had to be taken directly to the Polizeipräsidium: torture-cases (Folterungen), such as aren’t very seldom in individual Frankfurt police stations, could thus be hindered. After the fuss that had come out over torture in the housing struggle, one couldn’t do it a second time in the current

554 Ibid., 45.

555 J.B./v.i., “Bis in den Abend Straßenschlachten auf Zeil und Hauptwache,” Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung: Zeitung für Frankfurt, May 28, 1974, 29.

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situation.556

In the struggle around the elevation of public transport tariffs, radicals and more mainstream sources became critical of the use of the chemical CN (Chloroacetophenone) as well. In particular, the use of CN in the water-cannon during the suppression of the summer FVV demonstrations of

May 26-June 1, 1974 led to organized publicity by Frankfurt radicals and reportage in the mainstream newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, allowing for meaningful comparisons to French

1968 discourse on chemicals.557 RK and the Häuserrat insisted that “CN is a weapon!” while Rote

Hilfe/GUV assimilated it to a military means of intervention (“Next to firearms and the armored car, this poison gas is another life-threatening means that the clique of rulers deploys against the people.”)558 However, critical discourse mostly involved the risks of bodily damage or lethality under extreme operating conditions or in cases of willfully harmful misuse by the police. For example, Rote Hilfe/GUV complained that Mace had been sprayed at close distance at the faces and bodies of demonstrators, drawing on medical literature that affirmed that Mace could cause permanent ocular harm.559 Meanwhile, reports of injuries by those exposed to the chemicals were

556 RK-Redaktionskollektiv der WIR WOLLEN ALLES!, “Chronik: Kampf um die Strassenbahntarife in Frankfurt,” Wir wollen Alles!, no. 17 (June 1974): 4. By contrast, Rote Hilfe documentation that stated that “The arbitrary beating up of individuals in jail and behind closed doors appears to have gradually become a customary right.” Rote Hilfe e.V. and GUV, Polizeiterror gegen die Fahrpreisdemonstrationen in Frankfurt 26.5-1.6.1974, 7.

557 Häuserrat/Wir wollen Alles! Gegen Fahrpreiserhöhung und Polizeiterror, supplement to Wir wollen Alles! no. 17 (June 1974), 3; Infodienst, June 2, 1974, 13-14; Rote Hilfe e.V. and GUV, Polizeiterror gegen die Fahrpreisdemonstrationen in Frankfurt 26.5-1.6.1974, 17.

558 Ibid.

559 Ibid.

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relayed in an article by Frankfurter Rundschau reporter Hans-Jürgen Biermann. The introductory lines demonstrate the minimal harm principle at work in the reportage on irritant chemicals:

“The intervention of five [CN-laden] water cannon…produced the first victims. Seven people reported to the ambulance services of the University ophthalmology clinic with strong irritation of the conjunctiva. A Frankfurt photographer even appeared at with a cancer-red back for diagnosis by the dermatologist (Hautfacharzt) Oelser. Diagnosis: chemical burns of the first degree.”560

However, even these critiques point out how the principle of harm minimization tended to focalize on lasting physical impact on the body—in effect, protesting injurious possibilities of too much use or improper use of chemicals rather than the use of chemicals per se—the very reformist direction that RK had criticized. The implications of the minimal harm critique of chemicals were ambiguous: they could point towards the use of different chemicals or towards the more circumspect use of chemical force by the police as much as towards the suspension of chemical means of coercion.

Inhumanity

Third, documentation about and critiques of police violence among radical currents during the

Frankfurt struggles also focused on the “inhumanity” and “sadism” of police, outlining the difference between norms of impartial and dispassionate intervention and the actual motives and emotional states of police officers depicted as animalistic and aggressive. The standard derogatory word used by radicals, die Bullen, literally, “the bulls,”561 founded an equivalence between the

560 Hans-Jürgen Biedermann, “Von Tränen bis zur Verätzung: Augen-Dauerschäden möglich,” Frankfurter Stadt-Rundschau, May 30, 1974, 13. Italics mine.

561 I have typically translated Die Bullen as “the cops” but “the pigs” is perhaps the closer analogue.

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police and an animal known for distemper and physical power. Other frequently reiterated concepts in the West German discourse on police passions included Willkür, arbitrary and inconsiderate humiliation and infliction of suffering and moral damage, and Brutalität. Radicals, observers, and journalists also coded police interventions as Verfolgungsjagden—with connotations of persecutorial hunting or predation.562 Among radicals, the denunciation of police intervention as “police-terror” (Polizeiterror)—also referring to the criterion of selectivity— implied an illegitimate aim to intimidate political opponents from expressing their political opinions and the desire to destroy civil resistance to the reformist politics of the SPD government.563 Meanwhile, as in the French case, reports of police misconduct towards demonstrators frequently mentioned police insults, threats, and yelling.564 As an account of the police intervention in the student center in February of 1974 noted of the police had stormed the center, “All were very aggressive and touchy (nervös)…the entire atmosphere was one of aggression and hate.” 565

As was the case of French 1968 documentation on police violence some critiques of police passions had orientations informed by phenomenological accounts of reactionary violence in the anti-colonial writings of intellectuals like Fanon and Sartre. As Rote Hilfe and the GUV declared during the June 1974 protests:

562 Verfolgung has a wide range of denotations, including pursuit, persecution, and prosecution. Similarly, one of the denotations of Jagd (hunt) is also persecution.

563 In this vein, see Genossen vom RK, “SPD: Die Einheit von Reform und Terror.”

564 Revolutionärer Kampf, “Spalten, kriminalisieren, draufschlagen.”

565 Anonymous, “Am Besten Gleich ins Stadion: Bericht über Festnahmen in Studentenhaus.”

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Riled up by an image of “Chaotics,” often on duty [in the demonstrations] without pause the entire day, without any time for reflection, [police were] organized as a dehumanized (entmenschlichten) violence machine whose quality was measured by successful shooting, knowledge of karate, and the number of arrests. The demonstrator was no longer conceived of as a human, but rather as a beast to be eradicated (sondern als auszurettendes Ungetier.)566

In this variation on the critique of police motivations, dehumanized police, instrumentalized into a mere “machinery of violence” (Gewaltmaschinerie), had regarded their adversary as inhuman.

3.5. Photographic Documentation of Police Violence During the Frankfurt Struggles, 1973-1974

If images of the flic at work were the main figures of arbitrary violence in May and June 1968, the visual record of Frankfurt struggles of the seventies shows editorial staff typically selected images of violence that focalized on physical mêlée struggles but were also attentive to the visual drama off the water cannon. Thus, the photographs of police violence in print during the Frankfurt struggles included both images of police, batons high, assailing the crowd or working over individual demonstrators and images of the armored water cannon “striking” demonstrators using its jet. By contrast, images of “tear gas” were virtually non-existent, even though according to reports chemical-laden water jets left gas clouds lingering over the Zeil during the 1974 FVV demonstrations. As in the case of photographs of baton assaults or violence against subdued demonstrators, deployments of the Water Cannon allowed photographers to construct a stark scenario of domination—mechanized means deploying readily visible constraint against un- or barely-armed persons.

566 Rote Hilfe e.V. and GUV, Polizeiterror gegen die Fahrpreisdemonstrationen in Frankfurt 26.5- 1.6.1974, 8.

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Photographic documentation of the protests in radical print included imagery of both direct physical contact between police and demonstrators and water cannon jets. A water cannon firing its jet is at the center of the front page in the April 1973 issue of Wir wollen Alles while another page discloses a tumultuous mêlée; similarly, photographs of groups of police assaulting individuals and images of the water cannon in play were included in the issue following the

February 23, 1974 demonstration.567 Meanwhile, In Gefahr und größter Not, bring den Mittelweg der Tod (1974), an Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz film shown at the March “torture” tribunal, includes documentary footage of water cannon in action against the crowd during the February 23,

1974 demonstration in Frankfurt. Later, the joint special issue of the Häuserratszeitung and Wir wollen Alles! publicizing police terror (Polizeiterror) during the May-June 1974 FVV demonstrations, depicted a policeman, baton raised, preparing to strike an unarmed demonstrator whose arm is outstretched to fend off the blow; another adjoining photograph shows a pair of police officers working over a downed protestor or civilian (Fig. 8). Likewise, in the volume against police terror (Polizeiterror) during the FVV struggles by Rote Hilfe and the GUV, compromising photographs of police touching, dragging, or hitting demonstrators were numerically superior to any other type of image, but the front cover depicted the water cannon in action.568

567 Wir wollen Alles! no. 3 (April 1973), 1 and 5; Wir wöllen Alles! nos 13-14 (February-March 1974), 2; 9.

568 Rote Hilfe e.V. and GUV, Polizeiterror gegen die Fahrpreisdemonstrationen in Frankfurt 26.5- 1.6.1974.

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In mainstream print, both images of direct contact and water cannon deployment were common as early as the initial fights around Kettenhofweg 51 in April of 1973.569 Water cannon were also priority targets of visual documentation, and images of the WaWe jet striking demonstrators, or of the WaWe rolling forward towards the demonstration train, were common to the visual culture of protest documentation. Thus, the reportage on the protest from the local edition of Frankfurter

Rundschau on the February 23, 1974 events prominently placed an image of the WaWe “firing” its jet onto the crowd, setting the image front and center in its documentation even as another front- page image depicted a police officer assaulting a photographer.570 Conversely, images of tear gas and its effects during the struggles were rare even as reporters were alerted to its use in protests.

A notable exception is the Frankfurter Rundschau issue of 30 May 1974 which included an image of ordinary Bürger covering their faces and eyes after the use of chemicals on the Zeil.571

569 See Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Zeitung für Frankfurt, April 2, 1973, 29; Frankfurter Rundschau, April 2, 1973, 13;

570 Frankfurter Rundschau, February 25, 1974, 1 and 7.

571 Frankfurter Rundschau, May 30, 1974, 13.

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FIG. 8. Images of police working over protestors in the Häuserrat/Revolutionärer Kampf joint publication against rising transit prices and “police terror.” June 1974.

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FIG. 9. Water cannon, police baton charges, and physical mêlée struggles as depicted by FAZ during the April 1973 demonstrations around the evacuation of the occupied housing on the Bockenheimer Landstraße.

3.6. Schläger: Leftist Caricature of the Police

Leftist artwork and caricature depicting the police in action in the Frankfurt demonstrations tended to focus on baton assaults rather than the deployment of water cannon and/or chemical constraints.

In fact, as was the case artwork and the figuration of the flic during May 1968, illustrations of the police at work tended to be even more exclusively aligned on the Knüppelgarde than eyewitness reports, reportage, or photographic representations. Caricatures of flics in Wir wollen Alles! typically depicted them in the form of the Knüppelgarde; thus, a drawing in the paper after the

April 1973 encounters depicts a radical punching the teeth out of a truncheon-wielding police officer while another police officer with a riot helmet strides forth brandishing his club in the May

1973 issue. 572 Though the artistic record is hard to track in the case of the Frankfurt conflicts, a

572 Wir wollen Alles! no. 3 (April 1973): 4; Wir wollen Alles! no. 4 (May 1973): 3.

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panoramic depiction of the housing struggles on the cover of the April 1974 issue of Der lange

Marsch. Zeitung für eine neue Linke bolsters this interpretation (Fig. 10). The illustration traces the alleged lines linking the Frankfurt Mayor, Rudi Arnt, developers who profited from the destruction of the historic buildings in the Westend, and the police. The center of the work foregrounds the leader of the police (Hundertschaftsführer) receiving instructions from the mayoral office and giving the order to the police to advance, truncheons in hand, against the defenseless crowd. The police manifest itself in the moment of the baton assault, its means of coercion contrasted to the raised arms of the helpless protestors; the singular act of “resistance” depicted by the illustration is an effort to grasp the baton in the hands of a police officer. The illustration largely aligns on the poem that introduced this section of the chapter, educating the viewer through a set of images that reveal connections between SPD government and capitalistic speculators, the SPD government and the police, and the violent Schlagstockeinsatz against peaceful demonstrators as the specific means of authority of the order-forces.

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FIG. 10. Drawing of Police batoneers at work during the Frankfurt housing struggle of 1973-4 for Der lange Marsch. April 1974. Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

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In 1968 in Paris and in the course of the early seventies in Frankfurt am Main, radicals deployed convergent critiques of force in demonstrations and practices visual documentation and caricatural art. The anti-repressive politics of investigative committees threatened to delegitimize practices of physical constraint by the police, particularly those based on the principle of massive intervention and physical contact. However, the principles animating critique implied that less ostentatious types of constraint, or more selective interventions, might allow police to arrive at a more consensual, legitimate use of force and at least momentarily disorganize their critics. As we turn to the revolution in the counterrevolution in Part Two, we will see how the organizers of the new regime of protest management sought to neutralize both the critique of arms and the arms of critique. Although in the short term, critiques of police violence may have served a mobilizing function for French and West German radicals, their principle lines of force were inadvertently productive of new practices of the state and introduced a higher level of reflexivity into the deployment of violence against protestors by police officers.

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Chapter Four. 1968 and the Technopolitics of Constraint

On December 8, 1968, leading members of the Parisian Préfecture de Police, the Police nationale, and the Gendarmerie nationale assembled at Vincennes. Prefect of Police Maurice Grimaud attended, as did the General Secretary of the Police, Jacques Aubert. The Prefect of the newly empowered Direction des écoles et techniques (DET), Jacques Gandouin and high-ranking members of the Parisian regional Gendarmerie were also there.573 These prominent police officials had come together for a simulated operation to showcase their new UNIMOG machine, a bulldozer equipped, armed, and armored for dismantling barricades. A simulated operation by the

Compagnies d’intervention of the Préfecture de Police ensued: in the course of the action, uniformed police “arrested” volunteers in the guise of revolutionary students. The organizers of the meeting then presented new protective equipment and grenades.574

The meeting at Vincennes was one of a dozen similar encounters in the Parisian region in the après-mai 1968, as state actors remodeled existing repressive apparatuses in response to the emergent, adversarial culture of protest.575 Public officials and prominent representatives of the

573 Notably Divisional General Demettre, director of the regional gendarmerie of the Parisian region, and Colonel Héraud, who had recently chaired a commission on the maintenance of order tasked to review standard practices on the basis of the experiences of May and June.

574 Lt.-Colonel Billard, “Présentation et demonstration de Matériel de Maintien de l’ordre par la Préfecture de Police le 8.12.68 à 11h30 à Vincennes,” Paris, December 9, 1968, 1, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/190055*.

575 I use the word “apparatus” here literally to describes machines or equipment although though the Marxist concept of the “repressive state apparatus” has typically been used to theorize the state itself, figuring it as a machine. See V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, (London, UK: British Socialist Party, 1919); Louis Althusser, Sur la reproduction, 2nd Édition (Paris: Actuel Marx, 2011).

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security forces sought to deploy new equipment for bringing militant students, youths, and workers into line after the events. As French Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin later acknowledged in his 1978 memoir, re-equipping the police for public order operations was one of his main priorities.576 As a police report summarizing the demonstration at Vincennes put it, “The question was posed, after the events of May, of increasing the effectiveness of the forces obligated to maintain order and [of] drawing the lessons from [our] experience; that experience had shown, notably in the case of the Préfecture de police, that [our] materiel was too vulnerable and lacked mobility and sometimes power...”577 France was no outlier: a similar transformation was underway across the Rhine. In the period after 1968, prominent European police and military organizations engaged in technopolitics, the pursuit of a political aim through technological means. Their aim was order, and their technopolitical effort focused on new armament for protest confrontations.578

Unlike more high-profile technopolitical projects such as the production of nuclear armament or power, state efforts to revise weapons for managing protest have typically eluded the

576 Raymond Marcellin, L’importune vérité : dix ans après mai 68 un ministre de l’intérieur parle (Paris: Plon, 1978), 42.

577 Langlade, Secrétariat général pour la police, Direction du Personnel et du matériel de la police, Sous- Direction du Matériel, Bureau de l’Administration Générale, SGP/MAT/Gén., “Note pour M. le Secrétaire Général pour la Police. Moyens matériels destinés au maintien de l’ordre,” Paris, January 2, 1969, 1, AN 19910852/2*, Dossier Maintien de l’Ordre.

578 Gabrielle Hecht defines technopolitics as “a concept that captures the hybrid forms of power embedded in technological artifacts, systems, and practices…the strategic practice of designing or using technology to enact political goals.” Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, Inside Technology (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011), 3; Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France : Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, c1998), 89–90. Bruno Latour counsels us to investigate how domination is fabricated out of associations between human and non-human entities in Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: New York, 2003), 83. For recent contributions to the political history of technoscience, see Radical History 127 (January 2017).

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inquiries of historians. In this chapter, I investigate the strategies and presuppositions of governments confronted by revolutionary militancy of the street combat variant and I describe how they produced, experimented, debated, and justified new weapons. I then trace the disparate material effects of these new apparatuses in encounters between police and their protesting adversaries.

This chapter makes two main arguments. First, one outcome of the “critiques” outlined in

Part One was an ongoing historical reconfiguration of the material artifacts and practices of physical constraint in the pursuit of public order. In the post-1968 governance of protest, police in both France and West Germany typically tried to practice alternative interventions on the body of the protestor in order to avoid mass physical contact between ranks of police and demonstrators and thereby to reduce lasting injuries and scandalous scenes of police brutality.579 Because this maneuver was at least partially successful, historians of social movements have rarely actually inquired into the shifting materiality of physical constraint. Meanwhile, sociologists privy to state sources have often taken police legitimation discourse about novel means at face value, leading to dubious analyses that claim that alternative means like “tear gas” were “means of distancing” (la mise à distance)—a phrase uncritically borrowed from official discourse that de-dramatizes the interventions of the police. It has also been affirmed that these means only affected the perceptual

579 Not all police authorities took part in this turn—in the après-mai, the Parisian Préfecture de police continued to rely on mass baton assaults physical contact for dispersions and even prioritized them over the use of grenades in official doctrine. Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire, 269. However, for the most part, “frontal police attacks” did not generate actual “contact”; the Règlement announced that “its result is long and uncertain: the men are exposed to projectiles and [it is] most often unprofitable.” Ibid., 299–300.

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apparatus, not the body.580 This analysis is both obtuse—how is the perceptual apparatus not part of the body?—and technologically ill-informed. Alternative police weapons could and in practice did leave traces on the body—sometimes, durable ones. To be sure, chemicals and water jets invested the body differently than baton blows, but they were no less corporeal. Significantly, new weapons also impacted more and more of the body. The shorthand that historians, social scientists, and journalists commonly use—“tear gas,” for example—obscures the reality of the new forms of physical constraint that police introduced after 1968.

However, it is the higher legitimacy of these means of constraint, rather than their operational efficacy, that explains their expansion and reinforcement after 1968. Rather than effectively repress militant protestors, alternative coercitives for “mass dispersion” often introduced further complications into the pursuit of public order where state functionaries had anticipated unproblematic success because the new apparatuses were introduced for the dispersion of “masses” rather than the reduction of mobile groups and were also susceptible to basic and inexpensive countermeasures available to protestors in advanced industrial societies. In an enduring dynamic, police introduced new means, declared them unsatisfactory after encounters involving militants, and in turn reinforced them. Thus, the less-lethal arsenal of protest governance tended to become more powerful in the course of the period under study because police consistently found it wanting in actual practice but considered it be more legitimate than the baton.

580 Jobard, “Matraque, gaz, et boucliers,” 281–82. The most influential work in this vein is Patrick Bruneteaux, Maintenir l’ordre : les transformations de la violence d’Etat en régime démocratique (Paris: Presses de la Fondations nationale des sciences politiques, 1996).

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To be sure, the novel manifestations of physical constraint in protest encounters in the sixties and seventies were different in the French Fifth Republic and the Federal Republic of

Germany. The French state prioritized using chemical and explosive grenades to vanquish militants through bombardment; the West German state came to rely on a combination of water cannon, gas, and chemical sprays. Yet although modernizing bureaucracies in France and West

Germany pursued different novel means of constraint, each responded to the political contestation of the sixties and seventies by broadening the array of weapons and equipment in the arsenal of the state for dispersing “masses.” Meanwhile, security officials in each state were well aware via bilateral exchanges that their counterparts in North America, Western Europe, and Japan were pursuing similar projects.581

If it identifies the different agencies responsible for these new practices of constraint, this chapter also tries to foreground the political and operational foundations of the institutionalization of new means of physical constraint for public order purposes. By studying internal discussions about and analysis of new technologies by internal security working groups and technical commissions, I am able to identify the imagined virtues of the new materiel and the working fictions of public officials and the security forces. I then rely on police manuals to look at deontological norms about how the new “equipment” were to be used, and I use reports of actual operations from police, journalists, and militants to identify how new armament was actually used.

Some transnational trends are obvious: in contrast to the growing government trend to theorize the

581 For “tear gas” in Japan’s 1968, see Marotti, “Japan 1968.” Like many historians of French and West German 1968, Marotti does not identify the chemical composition of the Japanese “tear gas”—it was CN. For visits to West Germany by Japanese police inspectors in 1968 and the seventies to discuss public security culture and share protest equipment, see Bundesarchiv, B106 37131-37132.

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problem of violent protestors within countersubversion or anti-criminal discourse (Chapter Five), functionaries who redesigned and introduced alternative police weapons often imagined the object of their interventions by recourse to the fiction of the “hostile crowd” or the “mass” – embracing concepts largely obsolete in sociological theory by the seventies. In fact, the recognizable limitations of the new equipment in practice often ensued because actual militants defied the sociological and anthropological fictions of state officials, fictions that dated to discourses on mass psychology at the turn of the 20th century.

Technopolitical efforts to refine state weapons were also animated by another tension that originated in the simultaneous pursuit of confrontation and problematization of police violence by

1968 radicals (Chapters One-Three). Functionaries rationalized new armament within a conceptual constellation that acknowledged the negative political consequences of ostentatious or excessive force and deployed the principle of force minimization as part of a politics of less-ostentatious, less impactful force. Yet officials often also deployed standards of effectiveness based on the notion that new means ought to allow police to rapidly overcome or neutralize militant protestors—deploying operational logic that posited the main aim of the state as the dispersion of militant protestors at minimal cost to police in terms of insecurity, injuries, and materiel. Political and operational perspectives were sometimes in tension within the state, just as 1968 radicals involved in militant protest found it difficult to articulate the “political” and “military” dimensions of resistance.

In both France and West Germany, however, police and military officials tended to considerably reinforce the means of coercion in the course of the decade as priorities shifted towards the “operational” logic of overpowering the adversary. As state functionaries and security forces themselves recognized that resistance was rarely homogeneously distributed within a

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demonstration group and as the New Left and its genealogical successors were marginalized, state officials prioritized the neutralization, intimidation, and arrest of the demonstrators identified as subversive or militant elements (see Chapter Five). The new analysis of the locus of violence typically legitimated more powerful means for reducing small groups of mobile militants and partially rehabilitated physical contact between the police and its adversaries.

Both standards of operational efficacy and force-minimization referred, in the last instance, back to the two problems I have outlined in Chapters Two and Three of the dissertation--the emergence of practices of militancy that subverted the state monopoly of physical constraint in protests, one the one hand, and the routinization of instances for the critique and delegitimation of police violence in demonstrations, on the other. Thus, the historical re-articulation of the practice of police intervention contained an implicitly Weberian agenda to reinforce the monopoly of legitimate physical constraint. Yet different organizations had incompatible appraisals of the respective virtues of efficacy and discretion. For example, in France, the representatives of the

Gendarmerie mobile prioritized effective force, while the Police nationale and the CRS placed a higher emphasis on force-minimization or legitimacy. The risks state actors were willing to entertain when it came to injuring protestors also varied based on the position of military functionaries in the definition and design of available weapons. In West Germany, the paramilitary border guard (Bundesgrentzschutz, BGS) was primarily responsible for trials involving gas and the development of more powerful, potentially injurious models of the water cannon in the late seventies. In France, the Gendarmerie and military research boards were highly involved in the design and use of more powerful weapons in the police arsenal for crowd control. Military involvement thus regularly generated a more permissive attitude towards harm.

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State efforts to renew the material infrastructure of protest management unfolded differently in France and West Germany, but sequences of reform were consistently synchronized to militant demonstrations such that the insecurities inspired by militant protests ought to be interpreted as the main historical “motor” of the reform of police armament for protest. In the après-mai, French security forces took aggressive action to revise police armament. The West

German Schutzpolizei, Bereitschaftspolizei (BePo), and Bundesgrentzschutz (BGS), pursued parallel efforts to modernize and refine the equipment used against protesters that were inspired by the APO demonstrations of 1968 and the confrontations involving spontaneist radicals of the seventies. 582 However, West German police achieved a less drastic revision of police armament than their French peers and were markedly more cautious. For West German police, it was above all the period from 1976 to 1985 that counted—a period of transnational innovation and upgrades to police armament that included states outside of the purview of this dissertation. During the late seventies, reform efforts were also coordinated on a European scale via a working group of the

European Community TREVI, a confederation of European interior ministries originally devoted to anti-terrorism that extended its focus to extremism and political violence.583 I focus on West

German responses to antinuclear protests in Germany of 1976-1977, which generated a period of innovation and re-evaluation of the armament of the police that fully manifested itself only in the early eighties in the context of militant protest by the Autonomen. During this period, the repressive

582 For example, within a week of the incidents of February 21-23, 1974 in Frankfurt, the Hessen interior ministry made an emergency allocation of 5 million marks to the local police for more water cannon and riot gear; Bonn officials another allocation of 7.5 million marks to the BGS and BPdL.

583 For Bundesministerium des Innern reports on early TREVI exchanges on public order equipment and doctrine, see Bundesarchiv, B 106 78844.

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apparatuses set in place in France largely withstood contestation and critique at the end of the seventies, enduring incidents such as the episode of anti-nuclear protest at the Superphénix reactor at Malville in July of 1977.

Finally, and not incidentally, the effort to reassemble coercion produced a distinctly post- fascist violence, even as aspiring European revolutionaries promoted the revolutionary value of state repression and predicted the coming fascisation of the state. As I showed in Chapter Three, prominent members of the West German SDS viewed protest as practical critique that would reveal the implicit authoritarian violence of the West German state, its repressive essence—a theory I tracked during its operationalization in 1968 in France and during radical struggles in Frankfurt am Main from 1973 to 1974.584 In their foundational 1968 text Vers la Guerre Civile, Alain

Geismar and his cowriters had confidently proclaimed that the state could only manage future conflicts through more and more violent repression: “From coup d’État to coup d’État, the bourgeoisie turns to the street, towards the decisive confrontation, towards civil war...The contradictions can only end in blood…”585 Reassembling coercion proved these predictions wrong: the violence deployed by the state resembled neither interwar fascism nor interwar democracy, integrating prominent principles animating 1968 critiques of police conduct in demonstrations and the contemporary anti-fascist imagination of the 1968 generation alike.586 For all that, the question

584 Bergmann et al., Rebellion der Studenten oder Die neue Opposition, 74–76.

585 Geismar, July, and Morane, Vers la guerre civile, 137; Glucksmann, Stratégie de la révolution, 75.

586 For the anti-fascist imaginary, see Ben Mercer, “Specters of Fascism.”

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of whether “tear gas” and water cannon were essentially humane police “equipment” rather than military “armament” was open and debated.

Not all the new equipment of the police for protest was ostensibly offensive, but all of it aimed to allow police to re-monopolize physical force and to counteract militant protest practices.

In this vein, one of the universal adaptations of the European police after 1968 was anti-riot equipment that mitigated the typical injuries—scrapes, bruises, lacerations—that had arisen during the major protest events of 1968. Police sentiments of physical insecurity were common during the events of May and June 1968, and in Paris, the Préfecture de police rapidly sought anti-riot equipment.587 Although the CRS and some sections of the Parisian municipal police had aluminum anti-riot equipment already prior to May 1968, the police introduced semi-transparent polyurethane shields and visors to all units engaged in public order operations in the period from

1968 to 1970. The Police nationale introduced a new anti-riot shield in July of 1968;588 by 1970, each officer of the Escadrons de gendarmerie mobile (EGM) had a protective vest and a helmet that included a polyurethane visor and the collective equipment of each squadron include polycarbonate riot shields and rubber batons to be used, in theory, for “defense.” According to the manual on the new means, “The protective baton is not an offensive weapon. It is an exclusively

‘defense’ means permitting the carriers of the shield (in principle, deprived of the rifle) to protect

587 For the Parisian police, see Mathieu, “L’autre côté de la barricade.” The equipment is described and shown in the Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire. As Ludivigne Bantigny notes most of the injuries sustained by the French police in May 1968 did not cause what were deemed serious. Nevertheless, there were serious cases of police officers concussed or had broken bones, while injuries were significant to police regardless of their physical gravity. Bantigny, 1968, 167.

588 Fiche sur le Bouclier de protection des agents des Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, Paris, July 5, 1968, AN 19850718/18*.

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themselves in case of individual aggression.” Defense did not however mean “not hitting,” and the manual included diagrams about how to deliver blows to armed and unarmed protestors.589 Despite their ostensible merely defensive quality, shields were also polyvalent—rather than passive— equipment. To be sure, shields were used in the front ranks of a barrage or blockade to protect the police line while the French police fired “tear gas,” but gendarmes were also instructed in how to hit, push, and otherwise constraint an adversary using the shield (“absolutely avoid striking the face and the throat of the adversary”).590 Use of to slings and metal projectiles by militants led the

French police to introduce longer shields and stronger body armor in the course of the decade.

A similar process took place in the Federal Republic of Germany. Although West German police in 1968 had largely gone into action wearing the traditional headpiece of the police, the

Tschako, and did not have polyurethane anti-riot equipment, in the aftermath of the 1968 protests the police introduced a visored anti-riot helmet and a polycarbonate shield.591 Anti-riot equipment would continue to be reinforced throughout the decade. The state of Hessen began coordinating efforts to introduce a rectangular alternative to the round polyurethane shield in the course of the

Frankfurt struggles of the seventies, and the police also introduced a new 800 cm wooden baton

589 For the gendarmerie, Fiche n 36-111, Les opérations élémentaires. L’utilisation du lot individuel complémentaire d’habillement et du lot de matériels de protection pour le maintien de l’ordre, July 1970, 11, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1 189187*. For instructions on use, Ibid., 12-17. The 1969 Règlement of the Préfecture de police significantly indicated how to land painful but not dangerous blows using either the baton or unarmed. Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire, 213–15.

590 Ibid., 10.

591 For later claims that anti-riot equipment was merely “passive,” Hübner, Einsatz, 106.

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as a “last resort.” Larger, rectangular shields and wooden batons would be extended to the

Bundesrepublik in the course of the anti-nuclear movement and its aftermath.592

4.1. Empowering the Experts : Modernizing Bureaucracies and Police Equipment

Alternatives to the baton assault for coercing protestors after 1968 relied on empowered bureaucratic managers and technical agencies. These expert agencies had several qualities in common. Self-styled modernizers worked under regimes of secrecy and devised and judged new techniques and equipment while shielded from public scrutiny and political oversight through representative institutions. Public officials typically only deployed veto power and decided over potential means only after considerable consensus had already been generated within the internal security apparatus. Moreover, the commissions and working groups that did scrutinize new means typically included only life-long representatives of the repressive arm of the state in deliberations about new protest weapons. These committees were thus the apotheosis of the powers of unelected, autonomous functionaries deplored by one strain of 1968 critique. Thus, the technopolitics of police armament epitomized the monopoly of the state in deliberations about legitimate force.

Despite relying on politicians to approve new armament, in the last instance, the closed quality of these deliberations meant that substantial reporting and public criticisms took place well after the introduction of new armament and that critics did not have access to police-internal calculations.

592 For early trials, see Bothe, Technische Kommission, Geschäftsführung, “Niederschrift über die Arbeitsgruppentagung ‘Schutzschild und Holzschlagstock,’ am 19. November 1974 in Innenministerium des Landes Hessen in Wiesbaden,” Hannover, November 27, 1974, Bundesarchiv, B 106 385654. For the new rectangular shield, see Werner Uebe, Der Niedersächsische Minister des Innern, report to the Inspekteuer der Bereitschaftspolizei, January 3, 1978, StAH 136 1-1650 and contract from the firm Narten GmBH; see also file series StAH 136 1 2520.

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The French case provides a particularly acute iteration of this dynamic. After 1968, the means used in the maintenance of order became the object of proposals from no fewer than four police and military technical agencies. Reports from commanders of the gendarmerie and police after May and June 1968 frequently included demands for new or improved equipment and the armaments and equipment boards of the different police forces and the gendarmerie systematized these into coherent proposals.593 Crowning this process, an interministerial Commission pour l’armement dans la lutte antisubversive (Commission for aramement in the anti-subversive struggle), also known as the Groupe de travail Armées-Intérieur, coordinated the technoscience of the security state and advised the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Defense on new police weapons for demonstrations.594 Empowered in June 1968 to articulate an overarching approach to armament for violent street confrontations, operational techniques, and instruction, the working group generated recommendations that were duly approved by the ministers.

Jacques Gandouin originally chaired the Groupe de travail Armées-Intérieur. Appointed in

January of 1968 to the new Direction des études et techniques de la police nationale (DET),

Gandouin was now mid-way through an illustrious career that included former colonial administration in Indochina and the French Union.595 The Commission featured a slim majority of

593 For traces of this process, see the archives of the Gendarmerie SHD 2007 ZM 1 305577*.

594 For the first meeting of the group, see Fiche sur la reunion de la Commission maintien de l’ordre GD 2007 ZM 1/190055.*

For an early description of the group, see Jacques Gandouin, “Note pour M. le Sécretaire Général Pour la Police,” DET/TEC/3e bureau 0322, Paris, February 3, 1969, in AN 19910852/6, dossier 4*.

595 His past positions included chief of cabinet for the High Commissioner of Indochina in 1948 and chief of cabinet for the President of the Assembly of the French Union from 1950 to 1955. René Bargeton, Dictionnaire biographique des préfets - septembre 1870-mai 1982, Paris, Archives nationales, 1994. Pierre Épaud (1917-) a life-long administrator the former Central Director of the Police judiciaire (1968-1970)

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police functionaries and its permanent members in 1970 included eight police officials and six representatives of the army.596 From 1968 through the early seventies, the DET leadership commissioned a handful of police studies of internationally-used equipment for the maintenance of order, and police analysts were integral to the workings of the group. Yet the Direction technique de l’armée de la terre (DTAT), a research agency of the French military, also provided much of the technical expertise. In fact, despite the civilian composition of the core membership on the commission, the presence of chief engineer Paul Defrance of the nuclear and biological weapons research division of the DTAT betrayed the importance of military knowledge in the redefinition of weapons for the maintenance of order. As evinced by the high profile of the functionaries on the board, inventing new techniques to reign in dissent was a serious objective of state. However, the very existence of the commission was apparently unknown to journalists for the French newspaper of record, Le Monde.

In contrast to France, where the Minister of Defense could and did independently introduce new armament for the Gendarmerie without waiting on the Minister of the Interior, military experts and research boards played a relatively marginal role in the redefinition of the contours of state coercion in protest in West Germany, a lower impact that expressed the higher level of discretion by the military in the life of the post-war West German state.597 Moreover, the federal nature of the

replaced Gandouin in January of 1970 and served until 1974. On Épaud, Archives nationales, CAC 20000470/154, Who’s who, 1989-1990.

596 Direction des écoles et techniques de la Police nationale, ‘Renforcement des moyens d’action de la Police nationale Groupe de Travail ‘Armées-Intérieur,’ June 1970, AN 19850718/10, V.E.1.*

597 For the French military in society, see Grey Anderson, La guerre civile en France, 1958-1962 (Paris: La Fabrique, 2018).

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West German republic did not lend itself to central organization of the armament of the various regional Schutzpolizei, despite the existence of federal direction and equipment bureaus for the anti-riot police, the Bereitschaftspolizei, or BePo—and the Bundesgrentzschutz, or BGS, a paramilitary force which expanded its potential application to internal emergencies in the course of the seventies. In short, the institutional actors behind the new weapons for confronting protestors in West Germany benefitted neither from extensive military research and coordination nor from the centralized orientation of the French state and its regime of secrecy. In fact, West German police were relatively more public about the introduction of new means of coercion than their

French counterparts. Reflecting dissatisfaction at the relative lack of autonomy of the West

German security forces from political considerations, the report on the visit to the French gendarmerie and CRS during a liaison trip in December of 1976 noted that the French security forces had been able to introduce CS gas without parliamentary approval or public discussion.598

Public controversy over new police armament for public order operations was more significant in

West Germany than it was in France even though the French police were considerably more

“militarized.”

In addition to the various commissions of the different regional branches of the police, three institutions were responsible for coordinating shifts in police materiel on a national scale in

West Germany. Arbeitskreis II (AKII), the bureau for public security and order, was the major coordinating body of the West German interior ministries and focused on issues of practice,

598 “Einsatzaustattung der französischen Polizei: Bericht über eine Besischtigung bei den CRS in Velizy und der Gendarmerie Mobile in Maisons-Alfort am 2. und 3. Dezember 1976, ” 12, Bundesarchiv, B106 373719. For planning for this visit by the Gendarmerie nationale, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1 189213.*

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training, and equipment for public security. This coordinating board had its natural research wing in the Technische Kommission (TK) led for much of the decade by Police Director Werner Uebe

(b.1920) from the state of Niedersachsen. The work of the TK on new armament was reinforced in the mid-seventies by the Polizei-Führungsakademie Forschungs- und Entwicklungsstelle für

Polizeitechnik (FEStPt) under Leitende Polizei-Direktor Winfried Müller (b. 1927).599 The conference of the interior ministers of the states (Innenministerkonferenz, IMK) decided on recommendations from AK II and maintained a strong tradition of unanimity in decisions about equipment and armament in the seventies prior to the controversial introduction of CS gas in the early eighties, a decision that divided the interior ministries on political lines. Prior to this and despite the more dispersed and federalized structure of the West German police, new police weapons were recommended by the AK II after research and evaluation by the Technische

Kommission and then decided by interministerial consensus at the IMK.

The empowerment of research organizations of the state in order to redefine the means available to manage militant protest led to reforms to the materiality of coercion in both France and West Germany that gained pace around 1968 and were synchronized to further militant protest cycles of the seventies. Yet despite the frequently international origins of the different anti-protest equipment available on the domestic market, perceptions of optimal practices for managing a confrontational demonstration diverged on national lines. The following sections describes the principle considerations governing the introductions of new means of violence, the materialities of physical constraint that were introduced and fortified by technopolitics, police efforts to regulate

599 For the structure of the AKII and its subcommittees circa 1976, Bundesarchiv, B106 78835.

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their use, and the complications that typically ensued in practice from the invention of new means of violence.

4.2. Beyond Lacrymogenesis: The Fifth Republic Arms for Anti-Subversive Struggle, 1968-1977

From 1968 onward, the French police primarily relied upon chemical and explosive grenades for the dispersion of adversarial protests. Though the material infrastructure and savoir- faire behind grenadage emerged over the course of the post-war, it was only in 1968 that the use of massive amounts of chemical and explosive grenades became the primary operating procedure for dispersion of a protest among all branches of the French state, excepting the Parisian municipal police.600 Yet even as police and gendarmes institutionalized grenadage, introduced respiratory interference agents that went well beyond tears in their physiological implications, and upped the

“dose” of individual grenades, authorities remained well aware of and frequently dissatisfied by the limitations of “tear gas” grenades. Police conceptualized “tear gas” (gaz lacrymogène) as a superior alternative to the baton, but chemical intervention proved to be itself generative of shortcomings and controversies, not least according to the analyses of prominent officials.

Moreover, in the course of serious incidents like May 1968, police regularly had recourse to explosive grenades as a superior echelon of coercion. These grenades included the “offensive grenade” (grenade offensive) or OF37, and the “instantaneous lacrymogenic grenade” (grenade lacrymogène instantanée) or GLI. This police armament that had no parallel in West Germany or democratic Western Europe. Similarly, France regularly deployed the more powerful chemical agent CS over a decade before its introduction in West Germany. French police also had recourse

600 Significantly, it was only after 1968 that the CRS saw fit to produce a genealogy of its own use of gas. See CRS, “Fiche sur les moyens lacrymogènes des Compagnies républicaines de sécurité,” Paris, July 17, 1968, AN 19850718/18.*

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to ethyl bromoacetate—a chemical rarely used elsewhere—throughout the period under study. In fact, in the seventies, French police relied on grenadage in public order operations far more extensively than any other European democracy.

France may seem to have provided inauspicious territory for the routine use of chemical and explosive grenades to vanquish protest. Unlike police in the United States and the Weimar

Republic, the security forces of the Third Republic had never used chemicals to suppress domestic protest or insurrection in the interwar period, despite efforts by prominent policemen and the Garde républicaine mobile, the precursor to the gendarmerie mobile, to promote the irritant

Chloracetophenone (CN) in the thirties. Police originally used the chemical Ethyl bromoacetate

(BR) against demonstrators during the early Cold War strikes of 1947 and 1948, and by the early fifties, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defense institutionalized the use of both CN and BR. The French army originally introduced CS gas in the early sixties in the context of the

Algerian conflict, but protests were essentially managed via offensive grenades, bullets, and direct physical constraint. However, the experience of colonial protest management proved to be a critical moment in the assembly of the technological infrastructure used to combat the revolutionary left after 1968; in 1964, National Security made CS gas the basis of their standard tear gas canister on the urging of the Établissement de Bourges, the military agency that had been manufacturing it for the army since the early sixties.601 In the course of the decade, the key organizational impetus for extensive use of grenades originated in the Police nationale and its own specialized Compagnies républicaines de sécurité or (CRS). Thus, the 1965 CRS manual for the

601 Henri Mir, SN/CRS/1, “Moyens lacrymogènes: Matériel de protection contre les gaz lacrymogènes,” January 26, 1968, 2, AN 19850718/18.*

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maintenance of order placed special emphasis on the use of grenadier groups and the rifle-grenade launcher, another key artifact of coercion whose introduction dated to the Algerian conflict.602 On the verge of 1968, French police and gendarmes had access to no fewer than four different chemicals and a half-dozen types of “tear gas” grenades.603

One virtue of this chemical panoply, according to state officials, lay precisely in its more pronounced effects on the body than classic lachrymators. A 1969 memorandum to the Groupe de travail Armées-Intérieur, “Preliminary Report on the Problem of Weapons in the Anti-

Subversive Struggle,” included a summary of the main effects of the four chemicals used in 1968:

Ethyl Bromacetate and Chloracetophenone (Lacrymogenics) At weaker concentrations: selective action on the nerve endings of the conjunctiva and the cornea with immediate but temporary effects leading to the following symptoms: --a painful burning sensation in the eye, spasms of the eyelids, tears, runny nose [rhinorrhée], photophobia, blepharospasm, etc. These symptoms, which disappear in a few minutes after return to a non- contaminated atmosphere are generally accompanied by benign irritation lesions that rarely surpass the stage of banal conjunctivitis. Independently of its lacrymogenic effects, at higher concentrations chloroacetophenone irritates the skin, provoking a burning, itching sensation.

These were the milder chemicals, primarily targeting the eyes. Yet of these, BR was anything but totally benign; the author noted that it could generate “serious lesions” in case of direct application of large droplets on the eyes, “including the definitive loss of the eye.” By contrast, DM, a chemical surreptitiously included in grenades in service in the Gendarmerie, was admittedly a

602 Ministère de l’intérieur, Règlement des compagnies républicaines de sécurité. Livre III Emploi. Notice sur la technique du maintien de l’ordre (Melun, France: Imprimerie administrative, 1965), Bibliothèque nationale de France. 8Fw1431(3).

603 Provenzano, “Beyond the Matraque,” 599–600.

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respiratory interference agent, one that generated difficult breathing and a sense of agony within the throat and lungs:

Its effects appear progressively and manifest themselves in irritation that is initially localized in the nasal passages and then extends to the sinuses, the throat, the trachea, and the lungs (a burning sensation, itches, runny nose, tears, coughing)”. Independently of its actions on the sternum, the successive irritation of the superior and deep aerial passageways provokes antagonistic reflex phenomena that modify breathing and circulation in a disorderly way ([leading to a] sensation of constriction in the chest, respiratory anguish).

Last came CS, an admittedly hybrid chemical agent. Its main effects were difficult, shallow breathing, but it also impacted the eyes and the skin.

[CS] is simultaneously a lacrymogenic and a powerful irritant of the respiratory and digestive tract and the skin…its irritant action manifests itself in several seconds by the following symptoms: A painful sensation of burning in the eye and the respiratory tract, tears, photophobia, sensation of ocular fatigue, rhinorrhea, salivation, cough. Nausea is a minor symptom not regularly observed. Its incapacitating effects are imputable to the respiratory troubles (sensation of oppression in the chest, respiratory anguish). Its irritating action on the skin translates into a sensation of burning particularly acute on the humid parts of the body.604

Parallel agencies drew similar conclusions. Reports by the director of the Laboratoire central de la préfecture de police to Prefect Grimaud at the end of the month of May 1968 noted that of the two main chemicals in service, CN and CS, the latter generated a much more marked action on the respiratory apparatus.605 In other words, French police used chemical agents went well beyond tears in their physiological effects.

604 Paul Defrance, “Rapport préliminaire sur les problems de la lutte anti-subversive,” Annex 1, January 1969, SHD GD 2007 ZM/190055. Italics mine. This file is also available in the archives of the DET-TEC at the Archives Nationales.

605 P. Chovin, Note Verbal, “Étude comparative de deux produits lacrymogènes : chloracétophénone et ortho-chlorobenzylidene-malonodinitrile,” 2, AN 19930005/6.*

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A key element in the technique of bombardment was the grenade-launching rifle (fusil lance-grenades, or FLG) that had entered service in the CRS in 1961.606 The FLG allowed police to launch chemical grenades at over 100 meters, an operational capacity that allowed the police to launch gas well beyond the range of any possible riposte from hand-thrown projectiles, although the security forces remained exposed to projectiles from slings. At the start of the 1968 events, only the CRS had access to the FLG, but the police quickly generalized it throughout the security apparatus. A confidential 1969 DET synthesis noted “unanimous approval” of the FLG among

CRS commanders in 1968.607 Similarly, gendarme reports on the events commonly demanded its introduction.608 The 1969 Règlement provisoire de la police municipale of the Préfecture de police noted that “experience had shown the necessity of grenade launcher rifles that are set into action to maintain very aggressive demonstrators at a respectable distance and to set the personnel out of the range of their projectiles.”609

Grenadage also contained a more threatening dimension: the use of the offensive grenade, or OF37 grenade.610 Originally designed for military purposes in the interwar period, the OF37 carried an

606 Henri Mir to the CRS, Technical file and instructions on the FLG dated November 23, 1960, AN 19890672/33.

607 Direction des écoles et techniques de la Police nationale, Service d’études et d’informations techniques, “Maintien de l’ordre public par les Compagnies républicaines de sécurité au cours des évènements de mai et juin 1968,” February 1969, 9, AN 19910852/6*.

608 See SHD GD 2007 ZM 1 305557*.

609 Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire, 16.

610 SN/SP/CRS/1/no. 1154, “Fiche sur les grenades utilisées par les Compagnies républicaines de sécurité,” Paris, May 13, 1968, AN 19890672/41; DET/TEC, “Renforcement des moyens d’action,” 4.

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explosive charge of TNT. It had been authorized for the maintenance of order in the Gendarmerie mobile in 1950, and gendarmes deployed OF grenades during anticolonial protests in the French

Empire and domestic Cold War protests in the fifties like the social movement in Nantes in 1955.

According to the regulations, the forces of order were supposed to aim OF grenades at the “gaps” in the formations of the “adversary,” rather than at the demonstrators, in order to re-establish order while limiting fatalities.611 Well prior to 1968, officers of the Gendarmerie tended to downplay the inherent dangers of launching these explosives at demonstrators. Thus, the Commander of the 3rd

Legion of the Gendarmerie during the Nantes disorders of 1955 claimed that “The use of the OF revealed itself to be beneficial for the two adversaries (troops and demonstrators) because it at least allowed us to avoid brutal contact…” and pronounced the use of the OF grenade

“invaluable.”612 Gendarmes used offensive grenades against demonstrators during the tumults of the Algerian conflict from 1960 to 1962 and in the course of the colonial conflict, the CRS were also authorized to use the OF grenade during protests. During protests and militant strikes outside of Paris and anti-colonial demonstrations in the French Empire, officers of the CRS and the

Gendarmerie mobile typically used OF grenades once “tear gas” failed to vanquish demonstrators—a dynamic brought to Parisian protest in 1968.

611 CM n 02494/Gend T. du 28 juillet 1950, quoted in Fiche sur l’usage des armes au cours des operations de maintien de l’ordre, August 9, 1955, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/184225.

612 Colonel Colinet, Commandant la 3ème Légion de Gendarmerie mobile, “Étude sur les enseignements à tirer de l’action des forces de l’ordre à Saint Nazaire-Nantes du 29 juillet au 4 octobre 1955,” Nantes, November 5, 1955, 13, GD 2007 ZM 1/ 184225. Colonel Colinet, “Rapport sur les conflits sociaux d’août et septembre 1955 à Saint-Nazaire et Nantes,” Nantes, October 31, 1955, 11, same file series: “The squadrons were able to limit the damage and fulfill their mission by using OF grenades. Once more, tear gas grenades proved themselves to be without valid effects.”

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This was the materiel available to police the demonstrations during the 1968 events, yet although the equipment and savoir-faire that rendered possible significant use of grenades on protestors largely preceded the events, the events of May and June 1968 provoked a qualitative advance that consolidated the ascendancy of grenadage over the mass baton assault and the bullet as the main means of crowd dispersion. Prior to May 1968, the national CRS were already disposed to use grenades to coerce allegedly hostile demonstrators. A group of officers commissioned to study the use of gas after internal disputes within the CRS over the usefulness of newer chemical grenades in the course of the fall of 1967 confirmed that intensive bombardment was an

“imperative condition” of efficacious intervention and unanimously requested that the Interior

Ministry re-authorize the use of offensive grenades.613 Yet although the CRS, and to a lesser extent, the Gendarmerie mobile, were disposed to use grenades as alternatives to contact, most municipal police continued to favor the baton charge. For example, grenadage remained largely marginal to the operations of the Préfecture de police and its Compagnies d’intervention during the protests of the fifties and early sixties. Meanwhile, even in the CRS, official doctrine presented grenadage as an optional supplement to, rather than a substitute for, the baton charge.614

The events of May 1968 ended the interregnum in police tactics. Contemporary radical chronicles and sources from inside the police apparatus alike show that the forces of order deployed grenades as the primary technique for dispersing protestors during the events. As Surrealist poet and self-

613 Rapport sur les observations et les suggestions receuillies par la commission d’étude sur les moyens lacrymogènes auprès des officiers ayant participé aux services de M.O.P. dans l’Ouest de la France en automne 1967, November 1967, 4, AN 19890466/11.*

614 Ministère de l’Intérieur, Règlement des compagnies républicaines de sécurité.

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described revolutionary Pierre Peuchmaurd wrote in his diary entry on the first night of the barricades of May 10, 1968, “There is no more mêlée (corps à corps), or hardly any. They have understood that they can’t do anything against paving-stones. So they keep their distance: they bombard us.”615 For his part, the Director of the Public Security bureau of the Police nationale,

Albert Bonhomme, reported in June that grenades had become the “principal means” allowing police to responding to the distant “harassment” tactics of protestors “without serious risks for either party.”616 Meanwhile, the author of a synthesis for the Gendarmerie mobile for the Parisian region attributed the growing aversion of protestors to the forces of order in the course of the events to the generalized use of chemical grenades and the OF as the practice of “distance combat” (!)

“replaced” the mêlée confrontation.617 Some 20,000 chemical grenades and 3,000 offensive grenades were thrown in the Parisian operations of the Gendarmerie mobile alone, according to their own statistics. Considering that this was but one of three branches operating in Paris and that the CRS were likely even more prolific in their expenditure of grenades, one might reasonably estimate that the different organizations of the French police and gendarmerie used no fewer than

40,000 chemical or explosive grenades in Paris.618 The amount of expended grenades went well beyond anything that functionaries had foreseen and in fact, bombardment was so drastic that prominent models of “tear gas” grenade were entirely expended in the national police arsenal by

615 Pierre Peuchmaurd, Plus vivants que jamais, 59.

616 Albert Bonhomme, SN/SP/CRS/1 N° 1346, “Note to the General Secretary for the Police, cc’ed to the General Director of Public Security,” June 13, 1968, AN 19890672/41.

617 CRGM Paris, “Maintien de l’ordre à Paris: Synthèse,” Arceuil, July 5, 1968, 2, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/022435*.

618 Provenzano, “Beyond the Matraque,” 604.

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June.619 From the perspective of the demonstrators, Peuchmaurd would write that the grenadage on nights like May 10, 1968 –the original “Night of the Barricades”— was “a deluge.”620

Officers on the ground and high officials of the Gendarmerie and the Police nationale did not hesitate to identify a broad range of benefits from the deployment of grenades as a substitute for “contact.” According to functionaries, grenades allowed the security forces to intervene against protestors who threw projectiles from building-tops or the cover of barricades; allowed police and soldiers to generally conserve their energy; and represented the best viable option for responding to mobile protestors who often successfully avoided close contact. Moreover, from either a humanitarian perspective or one attentive to the legitimacy of state violence, distant interventions minimized the perceived risks of close-in actions for the forces of order and demonstrators alike, avoiding the potential for eventful displays of violence. Early in the May events, Prefect Grimaud, worried about the dangers of baton assault in the protests, instructed his subordinates to avoid contact—an order that all but ensured extensive grenade use.621 The dispositif of grenadage thus emerged from the convergence of tactical dynamics and concerns about the political consequences of police violence.

The notion that grenadage was an effective, and uneventful, practice of state was confirmed in the reflections of public officials on the events in the après-mai. In July of 1968,

General Germain of the Regional Gendarmerie of Metz reported to the Operations bureau of the

619 Albert Bonhomme, SN/SP/CRS/1/N°1418, Note pour le Sécretaire général pour la Police, July 26, 1968, in AN 19850718/18*.

620 Peuchmaurd, Plus vivants que jamais, 62.

621 Le Goff, Mai 1968, 114.

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Gendarmerie that according to the generally unanimous views of his subordinates, “In view of avoiding to the utmost dangerous contact for the two parties (and in any case, to maximally protect the forces of order), [the security forces must] create a ‘no man’s land’ through the fire (via appropriate equipment) of tear gas and offensive grenades, keeping the demonstrators at a sufficient distance.”622 Though descriptions of the benefits of using grenades ranged from the protection of the security forces to the management of hostilities, gendarmes were generally in agreement that the use of grenades was the single most appropriate technique for handling hostile masses in their analyses– though many expressed support for the more powerful explosive grenade.623 In February of 1969, Jacques Gandouin reported to his superiors that “[t]he experience of the massive and tumultuous demonstrations of the past year proved the effectiveness of grenades for the dispersion of crowds.”624 A synthesis of the reports of commanders of the CRS noted unanimity about the effectiveness of the FLG while asserting that OF grenades remained essential to public order operations because of their ability to generate “panic” and supplement “tear gas” in the event of adverse environmental conditions.625

622 Le Général Germain, Commandant Régional de la Gendarmerie à Metz, 2-III, Nr 2002, 9 July 1968, “Constitution, équipement et mode d’action des formations de Gendarmerie mobile au maintien de l’ordre,” 4, SHD GM 2007 ZM 1 307577.* Emphasis in original.

623 The collection of gendarme reports in file series SHD GM 2007 ZM 1 307577* is instructive in this regard.

624 Jacques Gandouin, DET/TEC/3e Bureau 0322, Note pour M. le Sécretaire Géneral pour la Police, “Lutte anti-subversive,” Paris, February 3, 1969, 2, AN 19910852/6.*

625 Direction des écoles et techniques de la police nationale, “Maintien de l’ordre public par les compagnies républicaines de sécurité au cours des évènements de mai et juin 1968,” February 1969, 9, AN 19910852/6*.

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The governance objectives implicated in this practice of coercion are helpfully summarized in a January 1969 report by Paul Defrance. In it, Defrance advised his readers to envision a refined gradation of violence, “a progressive and efficacious escalation between the baton and firearms, whose use must only intervene at the final extremity”: “At each of the stages of that escalation, the means used must become more and more disagreeable, until becoming unbearable [insupportable] for the demonstrators, without ever producing irreversible lesions or consequences requiring medical or surgical treatment.”626 In short, according to the experts, the ideal form of constraint in the “maintenance of order” would be painful, even irresistible, but would not engender injuries requiring medical intervention, pre-empting any recourse to doctors or surgeons—the same sort of recourse that was liable to produce a media incident or legal challenge.627 The point of using chemicals and explosives was to decouple the efficacious production of suffering from lasting physiological harm to the body—and the body politic.

Grenades also assumed significance because of specific concerns about extensive physical contact between police and protestors. The majority of the officials on the Groupe de travail

Armées-Intérieur viewed use of gas as a desirable substitute for the police baton as means of mass dispersion. As a 1970 synthesis of the work of the DET indicates,

A major principle dominated in each of the debates: as much as possible, avoid direct contact between the members of the forces of order and the demonstrators – a source of useless violence with frustrating consequences. To dislocate and unmake a dense, hostile group [foule] determined to confront [the forces of order], it is therefore necessary to set in place means capable of rapidly dispersing [it] without danger to either party… only explosive and lacrymogenic grenades can effectively fulfill this role. The group

626 Defrance, “Rapport préliminaire sur les problèmes d’armement dans la lutte anti-subversive,” (January 1969).

627 Ibid., 13-14.

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consequently devoted itself particularly to the problem of grenades in depth in order to augment their efficiency while also eliminating the risks of corporeal injury.628

Notes like these demonstrate both the objectives presiding over decisions regarding coercive means and the presuppositions embedded in the confirmation of grenades as the primary mechanism for dispersing protestors in the après-mai. Functionaries aimed to re-functionalize the practice of coercion in order to avoid “useless violence” and to reduce the danger of lasting corporeal harm; they redeployed the harm-minimization principle not as a critique of violence but a means of regulating violence and an argument for the primacy of grenadage. However, the commission envisioned its task fundamentally within a decidedly interwar perspective on the dangerous masses; grenades were selected both because of the perceived dangers of contact and because of the underlying consensus that the targets of operations in the street was an aggregate that had to be dispersed.

Functionaries deployed similar principles and implicit assumptions in the production and introduction of a novel apparatus of constraint in the après-mai: the GLI. The officials and technicians who introduced the GLI believed that the security forces required grenades that covered different levels of constraint and risk to the body including an explosive grenade that could safely be launched at demonstrators from the FLG. Though the security forces commonly praised the efficacy of offensive grenades for rapidly overwhelming “violent” demonstrators in their reports on the maintenance of order during May 1968, functionaries of the Police nationale were

628 Direction des écoles et techniques de la police nationale, Service d’études et d’information techniques, 3e bureau. “Renforcement des moyens d’action de la Police nationale Groupe de Travail ‘Armées- Intérieur,’” June 1970, AN 19850718/10*.

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concerned about the dangerous aluminum fragments projected by offensive grenades. These functionaries wanted a weapon that would achieve the intimidating, explosive power and noise of the offensive grenade at a lower risk to the body of the protestor.629 By contrast, high-ranking gendarmes did not perceive the offensive grenade as particularly dangerous. The June 1968 synthetic report of the Gendarmerie National for the Parisian region declared that “the use of

[offensive] grenades proved its effectiveness without moreover constituting a real danger”—but the final report of the commission delegated to review the modes of action of the Gendarmerie mobile in June of 1968 had outlined the need for a “not dangerous, very loud disengagement grenade (grenade de dégagement)” as a substitute for the OF that could be fired from the rifle- grenade launcher.630 Meanwhile, some functionaries of the Ministry of Defense hoped that a marginally safer explosive grenade could be used as a pretext for bypassing the requisitions ordinarily required to use physical weapons on demonstrators. In the words of a memorandum by the Bureau of General Studies of the CRS in December of 1969,

The [new] grenade…was conceived and realized, in the aftermath of the events of May 1968, in order to give the civilian and military security forces a device assuring a transition between classic lacrymogenic [CS] grenades, on the one hand, and the “OF” grenade, on the other. The former had been judged to have an insufficiently rapid effect and the later, a dangerous outcome vis-à-vis demonstrators (in particular, fragments). It was a question of realizing a device: destined to replace the “OF” grenade and that, because of this fact, was supposed to present similar characteristics (blast, sound, light) while eliminating the dangers (fragments); susceptible to have instantaneous lacrymogenic effects;

629 Direction centrale de la sécurité publique, Bureau de l’équipement, “Note d’information,” January 21, 1970, AN 19850718/10*.

630 CRGM Paris, “Maintien de l’ordre à Paris: Synthèse,” 6; Capitaine Herault et al., “Rapport de la Commission d’Étude ‘Maintien de l’ordre,’” October 1968, 11, GD 2007 ZM 1/190055*. The reports of the Commission are located in the same file series.

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able to be launched both from a rifle [unlike the OF] and by hand.631

A prototype “explosive grenade for the maintenance of order” closely followed the 1968 events.632

Those prototypes initially codesigned by the Préfecture de police and the private firm Alsetex were deemed unsatisfactory because tests to determine the potential for dangerous fragments showed that the new grenade was potentially more hazardous to demonstrators than the original OF due to the substantial amount of TNT incorporated in the design.633 The Groupe de travail Armées-

Intérieur subsequently delegated the armaments institute at Bourges to design the new grenade and to produce another prototype in July of 1969. As the prototype evolved, Jacques Gandouin proposed the new name “instantaneous lacrymogenic grenade” (GLI) in the place of the original designation “explosive and lacrymogenic grenade” and demanded the addition of a marginal amount of CS to the grenade, in order “[t]o protect oneself, just in case, against the hostile reactions of public opinion.” At this stage, the desire to produce a marginally safer alternative to the OF and a cynical ploy to “camouflage” the new coercitives as a mere “tear gas” grenade were incorporated into the design.634

631 MI/DGPN/DCSP/1e Division, Bureau des études générales N°69 175, “Note d’information,” Paris, 11 Décembre 1969, AN 19890718/1*. Cf. Robert Rochet, “Grenade sans éclats.”

632 Direction des écoles et techniques, “Renforcement des moyens d’action de la Police nationale,” Paris, September 1968, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/190055.

633 Lt.-Col. Cerveau, Chef du Bureau technique d’organisation et d’emploi, “Compte rendu de la 3ème reunion de la Commission de maintien de l’ordre,” MA/Gend.T., No. 1261, November 5, 1968, 1, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/190055.

634 Compte-rendu des journées des 9 et 10 juillet a Bourges, sur une présentation de grenades, AN 19850718/10. This document is affixed to Pejon, Chef du Service d’études et d’information techniques, “Note pour M. le Directeur de la Sécurité Publique S/c de Monsieur le Directeur General de la Sûreté nationale, À l’attention de Messieurs Esmiol et Monier.” DET/TEC N PP/NC 2157, Paris, July 25, 1969, AN 19850718/10*.

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The French army abandoned their GLI project when the Direction technique de l’armée de la terre ran out of funding and proved unable to overcome technical problems, but the Groupe de travail Armées-Intérieur continued to supervise the progress of the two private firms rapidly emerging as specialists in the production of weapons for the maintenance of order, Alsetex and

Lacroix. The Alsetex version of the GLI was adopted by 1973. Evaluations of the final product imply that the outcome largely corresponded to the demands formulated in 1970 for a marginally safer hybrid grenade designed to be fired using the grenade-launcher rifle. Nevertheless, internal controversy raged between the Police nationale and the Gendarmerie over whether to classify the new grenade as “tear gas” or as an armament requiring a specific requisition from the authorities.

The Police nationale resisted the classification of the GLI as “mere” tear gas because of predictions by members of the CRS equipment bureau that blame for injuries resulting from the indiscreet use of the new coercitives would borne disproportionately by the CRS.635 Thus, the Chief of the

Equipment Bureau of Public Security wrote the Chief of Services of the CRS to insist that “Despite its qualification as an ‘instantaneous lacrymogenic grenade’ (grenade lacrymogène instantanée), the Alsetex device clearly presents the same explosive characteristics as the OF augmented by a lacrymogenic effect...”636 and criticized the presentation of the grenade as a “mere” tear gas canister. The Interior Ministry view prevailed and the “instantaneous tear gas” grenade was

635 C. Ginollin, “Réunion du groupe de travail ‘Armées-Intérieur du jeudi 2 juillet 1970,” Paris, July 20, 1970, AN 19890466/11.*

636 G. Monier, the Chief of the Equipment Bureau, BE/Nr 7, “Note pour M. le Chef de Service des CRS,” Paris, January 9, 1974, 19850718/10.* Dossier. Les Engins lacrymogènes en étude, Grenade sans éclat.

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classified as an arm, obstructing the objective of the Gendarmerie to informalize its use and put it at the discretion of individual commanders. Nevertheless, the official designation “GLI” remained.

The final iteration of the GLI included 10 grams of CS powder in its plastic body and some

20 grams of TNT, but was deemed less likely than the offensive grenade to cause trauma or penetration wounds.637 As a record of a meeting at the Direction des écoles et techniques that presented the GLI within the discourse of harm-minimization noted in January of 1974,

Its explosive action (combining the effects of sound and concussion) (effet de souffle) is virtually identical to the O.F. grenade model 37. Although the blast is the same (1.2 to 1.3 bars at 1 meter), it is nevertheless markedly less dangerous than the latter: --Because of its total absence of fragments and of the projection of dangerous elements (éléments vulnérants) while the OF 37 disperses fragments of aluminum in a radius of 10 to 12 meters…The Alsetex grenade has an expanded polystyrene body, pulverizes at the moment of the explosion, and the launching section is in polyethylene, detaching itself before the impact of the [grenade] body. --Because of a lesser charge of explosive matter (20 grams of tolite compared to 90 grams in the OF 37).638

Containing both explosive and chemical agents, the GLI syncretized the two primary modalities of mass dispersion that police had relied on during the encounters of 1968. But the CRS adopted it as a substitute for the offensive grenade while the Gendarmerie retained both the GLI and the

OF grenade in their equipment.639 Once bureaucrats transformed it from a principle animating critiques of violence into a regulatory principle for the use of force, minimum force could mean

637 Direction des études et techniques Procès-Verbal of 6 March 1974 Meeting at the D.E.T., AN 19850718/10.*

638 Ibid., 4-5.

639 Roger Gros, Chef du Service des CRS, Notè à l’attention des Messieurs les Commandants de Groupement des C.R.S., Messieurs les Commandants de Compagnie, “Grenades lacrymogènes instantanées,” Paris, July 1, 1975, AN 19900166/1*.

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either the substitution of one means for a less dangerous one or the multiplication of the materialities of constraint.

The second major project of the Groupe de travail Armées-Intérieur actually quadrupled the amount of CS in the standard grenades. Functionaries decided to “up the dose” followed persistent dissatisfaction among the security forces over the amount of chemicals in the standard models: already in January 1968, the Director of the CRS, Henri Mir, requested stronger CS grenades and proposed elevating the amount of chemical agent in each grenade from two to eight grams.640 Police and gendarmes expressed renewed doubts about the effectiveness of the common

CS grenades in service during the May 1968 crisis, and their dissatisfaction intensified during encounters between police and militants in the summer of 1970. As a synthesis of reports by commanders of the CRS in 1970 noted, “There is a general affirmation that grenades are hardly effective.”641 Officials’ reticence to alter the amount of the active reagents following public disputes over the safety of tear gas in 1968 finally yielded in the summer of 1970. The major initiatives for new means of coercion originated in the military at an inter-army reunion presided over by Louis Saget, the Cabinet Director of the Minister of State of National Defense, Michel

Debré, in June of 1970.642 The Directeur générale de la police nationale, Jean Dours, for his part,

640 Henri Mir, Note pour Monsieur le Préfet, Directeur du personnel et du matériel de la Police, Sous- direction du matériel, Bureau de l’armement, SN/CRS/1 no. 219, Paris, January, 26 1968, AN 19850718/18*.

641 CRS 2nd division, “Synthèse des Comptes-rendus Techniques en 1970,” Paris, 1 June 1971, 2. This is an enclosure in Henri Mir, Note pour MM. Les Commandants de Groupement des Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, MM. Les Commandants de Compagnie, Paris, June 4, 1971, AN, 19890672/43*.

642 Note à l’attention de M. le Ministre de l’Intérieur, “Amélioration de la grenade ‘criquet,’” Paris, July 17, 1970, 19850718/10, Dossier 3*.

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expressed misgivings to his subordinates in Sécurité publique over the higher amount of chemicals.

However, the Groupe de travail Armées-Intérieur duly recommended the higher level, and

Ministers Michel Debré and Raymond Marcellin approved.643 Following concerns from the medical service of the French army that 15 grams was potentially too dangerous, the two Ministris eventually settled on 10 grams of CS for the more powerful “dose”—a compromise between the proposal by the military and the target that had been originally set by the police prior to 1968.644

Adopted in the summer and fall of 1970 after a spate of radical interventions by the revolutionary left, new F2 grenades at 10 grams of CS were initially used sparingly. By the mid- seventies, however, they were routinely used in the hundreds in confrontations. This was hardly a sign of outstanding effectiveness but symptomatized the ascendancy of the operational practices that had become dominant during May 1968. The first use of the new grenades occurred during encounters between the CRS and an illegal assembly (attroupement) of radical youths during protests in Caen in May 1971; the regional command of the CRS proclaimed that the effects of the newer grenades were “markedly superior to the other types.”645 By the mid-seventies, the CRS were routinely using the more powerful grenades in large numbers in confrontations: during anti-

Franco protests in Paris over the weekend of September 26-28 1975, the CRS units present used

643 Decision by Raymond Marcellin, N°2210 DET/TEC/ 3ème Bureau, Paris, September 1, 1970, AN 19850718/10, Dossier 3*.

644 Note entitled “Communication téléphonique de M. Combe de la D.E.T. le 9 octobre 1970,” 19850718/10, Dossier 3.*

645 CRS/CRG/I II/2 no. 1593, “M.O. Caen Journée du 4 mai 1971,” May 5, 1971, AN 19890466/11, liaisse 1*.

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140 of the more powerful grenades, an expenditure of CS equivalent to 600 standard grenades circa 1968.646

The construction of the GLI and the introduction of higher-strength versions of the standard

“F2” grenades were imperfect technological workarounds to what would prove to be an enduring limitation of “tear gas”: in practice, chemical grenades were not terribly successful in the face of gauchiste counter-expertise. CS gas is susceptible to tolerance and some demonstrators likely became less susceptible after repeated exposure. Second, as we have seen in Chapter Two, militants learned to take anti-vomitive agents, anti-inflammatory medicine, and to adopt goggles or masks to mitigate the impact of chemicals. Third, because of the mode of action of grenades, which operated by altering the atmosphere, this form of physical constraint was ill-adapted to mobile protest practices from the start, a resilient legacy of its original conception for the management of “mass” demonstrations, not the mobile, small-group tactics of the gauchistes. By displacing the line of confrontation after the use of grenades, mobile groups of demonstrators limited the effectiveness of all but the most sustained atmospheric saturation, just as they evaded the mass baton assaults of the police. This reality was recognized by militants: in the fall 1968, the tract entitled “On the Demonstration” noted that “Charges with the baton or offensive or lacrymogenic grenades aim to disperse a mass of demonstrators… nothing has been predicted/provided (prévu) against small, mobile, autonomous groups.”647 In the Parisian police,

646 Rapport technique de fin de service établi par le commandant de groupement CHEVALLIER Charles, commandant le groupement opérationnel permanent pour la région parisienne, “Service d’ordre. Maintien de l’ordre à Paris les [26-28] septembre 1975,” CRS/CRG/1/2/N°2665, 12-14, AN 19870157/22*.

647 Comité pour la revolution permanente, “Sur la manifestation,” 4.

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pessimism about the usefulness of grenades against typical gauchiste tactics reigned as early as

February 1969. Thus, the instructions of the Directeur générale de la police municipale (DGPM) to the sub-directors responsible for Parisian operational districts of reminded subordinates that

[Grenades] only are effective under determinate circumstances. They have no effect in open air against small mobile groups, frequently reveal themselves to be equally bothersome for the service d’ordre and the demonstrators and create a dangerous psychological climate because of the noise of the explosions, which is precisely what certain agitators seek. Their efficacy is, on the other hand, incontestable to obtain the dislocation of static, compact, and large groups, to maintain at a distance a threatening crowd…or for the evacuation of invaded buildings (keeping in mind the danger of a fire).648

As a captain of the Gendarmerie mobile would report during campus encounters at Lille in March of 1971, “Tear gas grenades are hardly effective against demonstrators acting in small groups that can elude (contourner) the cloud of gas which is moreover rapidly swept away by winds that sweep without resistance in these open spaces.”649 Moreover, in order to pursue demonstrators, the forces of order frequently had to cross or occupy sites they had bombarded, potentially becoming victims of their own atmospheric modifications. From the operational perspective, environmental forms of chemical constraint were often ambiguous in their effects.

New doctrinal statements by the Police nationale after 1968 nevertheless consolidated the dominance of grenadage as the primary practice of state for dispersion of a “hostile” demonstration. In a break from the 1965 regulations of the CRS, which exclusively positioned the

648 Instructions reprinted in Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire, 315.

649 For remarks in this sense, see Captain Laplane, 4ème Escadron du 19e Groupement de Gendarmerie mobile, “Opération de maintien de l’ordre à Lille du 19 mars 1971,” Vouziers, March 20, 1971, 2, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/190055*.

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use of “tear gas” as a force-multiplier for the mass baton charge,650 the post-1968 DET Instruction dans le cadre du maintien de l'ordre public, indicated that grenades could be deployed on their own as a means of obtaining dispersion (“In the maintenance of order, the use of lacrymogenic means has as its aim either to assure the dispersion of offensive demonstrators, or to precede and prepare another dispersion action by the service d’ordre.”)651 On the one hand, the Notice provisoire sur les moyens lacrymogènes, a guide distributed by the Direction centrale de la sécurité publique to the CRS in August of 1971, implied the tactical primacy of grenadage even as it warned police not to solely rely on grenades: “Lacrymogenic means take their place in the ensemble of means of intervention. Because their effect is always limited, they must always be systematically combined in the heart of one dispositif including the use of other technical procedures…they are never totally substituted for the latter.”652 Yet the 1971 Notice provisoire also advised CRS commanders to “prioritize” deployment of lacrymogenic action against “the most dynamic of the adverse elements.”653 Moreover, the guide advised that the limited effectiveness of the CS grenades in service was typically due to “insufficient concentration” of the gas in the

650 Ministère de l’intérieur, Règlement des compagnies républicaines de sécurité. Livre III Emploi, 45.

651 DET, Instruction dans le cadre du maintien de l'ordre public, post-1968, SHD, 98ad99, 149-150.

652 Notice provisoire sur les moyens lacrymogènes (August 1971), 10.

653 Ibid., 13: “In operations of the maintenance of order, the commander must oppose the aggressivity, the mobility, and the tactical sense displayed by certain groups of militants, units that are essentially and resolutely mobile…unit leaders must take the conduct of the most dynamic of the adverse elements into the utmost consideration. [Police] will counteract the latter in applying lacrymogenic action as a priority, according to the procedures best adapted to the situation.” Italics mine.

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environment and prescribed aggressive collective throwing rather than the recourse to another tactical procedure as a means of combatting the limited efficacy of grenades.654

Official texts translated the critiques of excessive and indiscriminate force into regulatory principles and did caution commanders to exercise caution about the indiscriminate over-use of grenades, but doctrine generally naturalized the recourse to large quantities of gas against confrontational demonstrators. Thus, internal regulations both redeployed the principles that had animated critique–minimal force and selectivity—as operational norms, and validated and reproduced the practical logic that had emerged in the course of the 1968 events. That practical logic was as follows: use chemical grenades, and lots of them, on militant protestors, rather than any other procedure. To be sure, the DET Instruction invoked both efficacy and minimal risk to those exposed, while “categorically prohibiting” the direct targeting of demonstrators using the

FLG—an act that had been criticized in 1968 discourse on the police that we examined in Chapter

Three.655 Yet the 1971 Notice provisoire legitimated large-scale use insofar as it described the constraints exercised by grenades as “generally without seriously damaging consequences” even while warning about risks of excessive and indiscriminate use.656 By the seventies police regularly used hundreds of grenades when confronted by gauchiste demonstrations.657

654 Ibid., 19: “The use of tear gas grenades, in particular, that of grenades that have short-term effects, in the course of an operation of the maintenance of order may reveal itself to be of mediocre efficacy… Collective, vigorous throwing [les jets collectifs avec élan] permits us to remedy these inconveniences. The movement implied by this mode of throwing has the effect of provoking, among the demonstrators, a movement of retreat, or even flight.” Italics mine. For collective use of the FLG in batteries, Ibid., 31.

655 DET, Instruction dans le cadre du maintien de l'ordre public, 149.

656 Ibid., 11. For risks, Ibid., 12-15.

657 CRS 2nd division, “Synthèse des comptes-rendus techniques en 1970, ” Paris, 1 June 1971, annex.

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Yet contrary to expectations at its inception, bombardment proved to be an imperfect tactic, imposing itself for want of a superior tactic rather than because of its remarkable effectiveness. As some members of the security apparatus noted behind the scenes, the inherently indiscriminate quality of gas frequently meant that it was precisely those who were reticent to confront the security forces that suffered the most from its deployment, since basic countermeasures and mobility could largely offset the effects of grenades, and bombardment sometimes generated opprobrium from the public. In short, grenades had originally been rationalized with an eye towards the dispersion of “masses,” and no amount of technopolitics could overcome their inherent limitations of as ephemeral environmental contaminants. In December of 1975, Prefect André

Delmas, the Directeur centrale de la sécurité publique, lamented the tendency for the interventions of the security forces to generate even more serious disorders and included “several scenes of the maintenance of order, viewed with a certain amount of fairness (justesse) by a satirical artist” in the annex to the monthly analytical report of the CRS The satirical drawing depicted a largely pacific group of demonstrators marching under the surveillance of the police. In later captions, a group of “anarchists” (anars) used the cover of the demonstration to break windows and launch

Molotov cocktails before making a hasty retreat, whereupon the forces of order fired a volley of grenades into the peaceful demonstration train. Both the security forces and attentive observers were aware that launching massive amounts of “tear gas” was most effective against those who came to the demonstration unprepared for confrontations and typically had only minor consequences for militants; likewise, security functionaries acknowledged that grenadage could intensify antagonisms between ordinary demonstrators and the forces of order. In other words, even police functionaries were aware that grenadage could and sometimes did generate illegitimate violence that generated hostility towards police.

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In the spring of 1976, Robert Pinaud mounted a similar complaint from his position in the operational bureau of the CRS. In a missive to the commanders of the CRS, he included “intense grenadage” on a list of “ill -adapted” and “disproportionate” police practices to be rectified, appealing to the principle of force-minimization: “In effect, it happens far too often that a handful of “uncontrolled elements,” anarchists without organization or equipment for street fighting, have managed to generate, or more exactly, to lead the forces of order to generate, a veritable atmosphere of rebellion by ill-adapted or disproportionate interventions: intense grenadage, massive interventions, norias of operational columns.”658 It was no coincidence that Pinaud indicted grenadage first and foremost in this internal critique of indiscriminate force: originally conceived of in the fall of 1968 as an efficacious response to the “hostile mass” and force- minimizing substitute for close contact, grenades, like the baton assault, had revealed their practical potential to generate hostility when police attempted to use them in significant quantities against mobile groups of demonstrators. Police had envisioned the use of chemical interventions as a new and more adequate vehicle of state coercion. Now grenadage had revealed its status as a problematic procedure, one potentially undermined by the very regulatory logics that had been deployed in its justification.

Nevertheless, grenadage had been durably embedded in the governance practices of the

French state. The reliance of the police on grenades in the maintenance of order was epitomized by the tactics of the security forces in the face of anti-nuclear demonstrations at the Creys-Malville reactor site during the confrontations between 25,000-30,000 ecologists, allegedly including

658 Robert Pinaud, Note PN/SP/CRS/4/N°2768, “Amélioration des techniques de maintien de l’ordre,” Paris, April 8, 1976. AN 19890466/11.*

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4,000-5,000 “violent elements,” and several thousand member of the security forces, on July 31,

1977. The CRS and Gendarmerie deployed multiple, overlapping lines of “defense” in order to prevent protestors from nearing the exterior wall of the nuclear facility – a strategy that emerged in part out of bilateral exchanges between the French and West German officials in the context of the transnational anti-nuclear movement and that expressed the determination among French officials to avoid repetition of the incidents near the nuclear site fence that had occurred in

Schleswig Holstein and Niedersächsen in the fall of 1976 and spring of 1977.659 To defend these lines and to interdict the prohabited zone, police relied on the full panoply of ranged physical constraint as it had been reinforced after 1968, including the high-powered F2 CS grenade, the

GLI, and the offensive grenade. Both the Gendarmerie mobile and the reinforcing CRS expended thousands of tear gas and explosive grenades and largely avoided contact, an intense re- instantiation of the dispositif of grenadage as it has emerged almost a decade earlier during the events of May 1968.660 Yet because of the perceived limitations of “tear gas,” the security forces rapidly had recourse to the GLI and the offensive grenade to counter the advances of the demonstrators, a practice that had fatal consequences for ecologist Vital Michalon. Roger

Roustang of the Eighth Regional Group of the CRS reported to his hierarchical superiors that “Tear

659 Henry Manent, Commandant le Groupement des CRS 8 à Direction générale, Direction Centrale de la sécurité publique, Service des CRS, Division : Organisation et Moyens, Bureau des Études Generales, Paris, “Opération de maintien de l’ordre à Creys-Malville,” August 4, 1977, AN 19990044/1*; Commandant Principal Roger Roustang, Commandant le Groupement Régional des CRS 8, “Rapport technique de fin de Service : Opération de maintien de l’ordre à Creys-Malville les 30 et 31 juillet 1977,” AN 19990044/1*.

660 Commandant Principal Roger Roustang, “Rapport technique de fin de Service : Opération de maintien de l’ordre à Creys-Malville les 30 et 31 juillet 1977,” AN 19990044/1*. The CRS, the minor party to the confrontation, deployed 285 GLIs ; 120 OF grenades borrowed from colleagues in the Gendarmerie; 587 CS grenades of the stronger, 7% type; 185 ethyl bromacetate grenades; and around 300 CS grenades of the weaker 1.5% type.

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gas was not effective because of the terrain (open countryside) and the means used by the demonstrators to protect themselves from the gas. Only OF grenades and the GLI allowed the units that were engaged to contain the demonstrators (GLI) and to disorient them (OF) in the moment of the charges [against the police line].”661 The leader of the Gendarmerie of Isère justified the use of the “indispensable” OF by redeploying the summary logic of the French state in the government of protest since the fifties: grenadage was a less-harmful alternative to the corps à corps.

300 to 400 particularly hardened demonstrators delivered battle to the forces of order for three hours. The use of the OF proved indispensable: tear gas grenades were not sufficiently dissuasive. Without [the OF grenades], a veritable open mêlée battle would have taken place leading to much higher losses.662

Certainly, a death and numerous wounded should be deplored, but, taking account of the number, the equipment, and the aggressivity of the demonstrates who had decided to fight, the losses would have been much heavier in case of a mêlée (corps à corps)…663

The Creys-Malville incidents indicated how the French security forces deployed the principle of harm-minimization as a justification for incidents of grenadage that had serious, enduring consequences for protestors—indeed, no one even claimed that Michalon himself had sought to be involved in confrontation. Moreover, nobody had died because of the West German police during the earlier phases of the transnational antinuclear movement. Likewise, several demonstrators—including an unsuspecting West German radical, Manfred Schulte, who had never seen offensive grenades in action—664 had limbs mutilated by explosives. Moreover, a gendarme

661 Ibid., 18.

662 Colonel Roy, Commandant le Groupement de Gendarmerie de l’Isère, “Rapport : Opération de maintien de l’ordre les 30 et 31 juillet 1977 sur le site de la centrale nucléaire de CREYS-MALVILLE,” Grenoble, August 5, 1977, 6, AN 19990044/1*.

663 Ibid., 9.

664 INFO-Berliner undogmatischen Gruppen August 15, 1977, 23. 285 286

also lost his hand when an OF grenade went off, allegedly due to the reverberation of an explosive used by the demonstrators. The disparities in outcomes between the French and West German phases of protest were symptomatic of the enduring disjuncture in the governance practices that had resulted from the integration of critiques of violence and operational imperatives in the two territories: only the French government redeployed the minimal harm principle as a justification for the use of explosives on protestors. Thus, contra Andrew Tompkins, the issue was not that

West German practices of confrontation were interpreted as more significant threats once

“translated” to France—French gauchistes had long instantiated similar, and in fact, significantly more adversarial confrontational practices—but that the French government had institutionalized more dangerous public order practices than its West German homologues despite significant transnational linkages between the police.665 What the transnational protest cycle revealed were enduring disparities in the technopolitical practice of state violence.

4.3. Beyond the Schlagstockeinsatz: West German Protest Policing, the Water Cannon, and

Chemical Coercion, 1968-1975

Nevertheless, in the Federal Republic, police officers had also sought to reinforce alternatives to the baton, particularly after the April 1968 Osterdemonstrationen. Thus, on 11 and

12 December 1968, under the auspices of the TK, functionaries from the Federal Interior Ministry, the federal border guard (Bundesgrenzschutz), and the police of different Länder convened at

Hangelar, less than 10 kilometers from the capital city of Bonn, as delegates for a new

665 Tompkins, “Grassroots Transnationalism(s): Franco-German Opposition to Nuclear Energy in the 1970s,” 131.

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subcommittee. Police evaluated tear gas canisters; discussed the possible introduction of CN into the water cannon; and even reported on the potential use of chemical sprays.666 Within five years, each of these apparatuses had been adopted as the technopolitical search for alternatives to the baton yielded more and reinforced water cannon; CN in canisters and water jets; and the Chemical

Mace spray, rebaptized the less-evocative Reizstoffsprühgerät (RSG1) or irritant spray apparatus.

By the end of the year 1968 alone, the traditional helmet of the police was on its way out in protest policing in favor of an anti-riot helmet, while the rubber baton (knüppel) was complemented by the polyurethane riot shield. As in France, West German police modernizers prioritized alternative means of constraint that in turn generated novel complications in protest incidents that were perceived as validating further technopolitical refinement. Although police only consolidated many of the reforms anticipated in the seventies during the autonomist movement of the early eighties in the context of the end of social democratic hegemony in the state apparatus, within years of 1968, the government and the police had already started to re-organize the practice of state coercion in protest conditions. Significantly, in the summer of 1978, the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) reported that state and federal police equipment now included 120,000 tear gas canisters, 30,000 riot shields, 36,000 Reizstoffsprühgeräte, and 137 water cannons.667

666 Protokoll über die 1. Tagung der Unterkommission „Hilfsmittel der körperlichen Gewalt“ Bonn- Hangelar, 12./13. December 1968, Bundesarchiv B106 367534. For background, Niederschrift über die Sitzung des AK II „Öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung,“ Auszug aus der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Innenministerien der Bundesländer am 7. Und 8. November 1968 in Freiburg/Br., 41-43, in B 106/367534.

667 BMI, Übersicht über Organisation, Stärke, Ausrüstung und rechtliche Grundlagen der Polizeien der Länder und des Bundes, Stand 01.07.1978 in HHStAW 503, 6646, Erstellung der „Übersichten über die Organisation, Stärke, Ausrüstung und rechtlichen Grundlagen der Polizeien der Länder und des Bundes,“ Band 2, 1971-1978. This was the first statistical overview to include data on tear gas, riot shields, and the RSG1.

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Judged relative to their French counterparts, West German officials articulated the regulatory principle of harm-minimization to the use of less powerful material apparatuses in demonstrations in 1968 and the seventies and West German officials were on the whole more apprehensive about the possibility that illegitimate violence by the police could generate solidarities between protestors and the public, the dreaded Solidarisierungseffekt.668. This was not lost on militants: Frankfurt Spontis who wrote as participant-observers of militant protests during the Parisian 1976 demonstrations against the loi Haby acknowledged that in crossing the Franco-

German border, they were to encounter considerably more “militarized” apparatuses: “In our journey it was clear that we would find different relationships, that the immediate confrontations would be managed much more harshly, that the militarization of the CRS, the barracked preparedness-police (Bereitschaftspolizei), is much more progressed (fortgeschritten) than [in

Germany], that the behavior of the cops (Bullen) is more brutal and aggressive…”669 Scarcely over a year later, another group of Spontis would recount their panic during the repression of the French phase of the Franco-German anti-nuclear movement at Malville, noting that the French police didn’t merely deploy “tear gas” but also had recourse to veritable grenades (evidently, the GLI and

OF grenade):

A grenade fired into the crowd four meters from me exploded and it tore up the tips of my fingers despite this distance. Others (at least temporarily) lost sight…Through the massive use of this weapon we were forced to retreat, during which the cops (die Bullen) continued to fire directly into the crowd…670

668 See Chapter Five of this dissertation.

669 Die Fuzzy, special issue, 25 April 1976, 2. Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts library.

670 Anonymous, “Malville ist eine Reise wert!” Info-Berlin undogmatischer gruppen 168, August 8, 1977, 2.

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Behind me a tear gas grenade explodes. I don’t feel my leg anymore, I fear that my leg is gone, I can’t turn around, suddenly I move on. [I feel] simultaneous fear and hate as well as total helplessness.671

Yet if West German security experts deployed a more cautious approach to new police armament than their French peers, technopolitical reforms to the material infrastructure of the maintenance of order consistently followed protest incidents, and as in neighboring France, the trajectory of

West German protest policing beyond existing means had sources in the difficulties intrinsic to the mass baton assault and in sentiments of insecurity and feelings of disarmament on the part of police who encountered militant demonstration tactics. Thus, by the fall of 1968, some West German functionaries had become well aware that the use of the baton was neither uncontroversial nor particularly effective. The dynamics that prevailed in France were also united in the Federal

Republic of Germany: a security culture of concerted baton assaults as means of achieving crowd dispersion did not enable police to reassert their authority against more mobile, flexible demonstrators, and police were also concerned about the political consequences of ostentatious physical constraint.

After the Osterdemonstrationen of 1968, police engaged in technopolitical efforts to reform the use of physical constraint against demonstrators and to direct the practice of coercion through alternatives to the baton. The motivations of the police modernizers were both political and police-tactical: as Klaus Hübner, Police President of West Berlin from 1969 to 1987, later wrote in his memoirs, “by using the baton, you drive the curious and the non-participants into the

671 Ibid.

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arms of the ringleaders of every revolt by the dozen (reihenweise).”672 The principle of proportionality was subsequently deployed by the police in favor of a graduated echelon of physical constraint: a May 1, 1968 report of the Berlin police noted the requirement for the

“application of direct force according to a graduated system (Proportionality of the means: simple corporeal force, water cannon, police lines with batons), mounted police, special commandos…”673

Police also prioritized new means on the grounds that direct physical confrontations between masses of demonstrators and the police were undesirable. Thus, an April 21, 1968 analysis by the

Interior Ministry of Nordrhein-Westfalen circulated proposed that “Means of intervention like barrier apparatuses, water cannon...and irritant chemicals render possible the action (Vorgehen) of the police without leading to direct physical confrontations between [police] and the agitator that are undesirable from a psychological perspective.”674 Similarly a statement of police-tactical principles in demonstrations circulated by the Interior Ministry of Niedersachsen to governing officials and the regional police authorities in August of 1968 concluded that alternative means of coercion like service horses, water cannon, service dogs, and police barriers needed to be used more often, and advised that “[T]he baton must only be applied if the intervention of the water

672 Hübner, Einsatz, 91.

673 POR Iwicki, Zusammenfassung und Auswertung des anläßlich der Arbeistagung über Fragen der Verwendung der Polizei am 25. 4. 1968 gehaltenen Referats (Senatsrat Prill, Berlin), Berlin, May 1, 1968, StAH 136-1_1030.

674 Der Innenminister des Landes NRW, IV C2 6116, „Einsatz der Polizei bei gewaltsamen Demonstrationen und Unruhen,“ Düsseldorf, April 21, 1968, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, EA 2/303 Bü 1981.

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cannon has been unsuccessful.”675 Another note in the fall of 1968 from the Nordrhein-Westfalen

Ministry of the Interior evinced anxieties that direct physical contact between police and demonstrators might undermine state legitimacy because of the media profile of the baton assault:

“These [mêlées] are undesirable from a tactical and psychological perspective. The danger is that the close-in intervention of the officers may dissolve into individual actions. This yields to the well-known unsightly scenes of brutality (Prügelszenen) that—captured by the demonstrators in photographs and interpreted one-sidedly—implicate the police as [brutal] batoneers

(Knüppelgarde)…”676

Predictably, one of the novel priorities was “tear gas.” Although CN had been deployed by the West German police since the fifties, in contrast to their French counterparts, police in the

Federal Republic rarely deployed “tear gas” during the main encounters of April 1968: notable exceptions were Frankfurt and Munich during the 1968 Easter Demonstrations and the Tegel confrontation in Berlin in November.677 Yet only days later, the Interior Ministry of Nordrhein-

Westfalen praised irritant chemicals (Reizstoffe) for both reasons of effectiveness and harm- minimization:

675 Der Niedersächsische Minister des Innern, “Richtlinien für den polizeilichen Einsatz bei Demonstrationen,” Hannover, August 15, 1968, Niedersächsiches Landesarchiv (NLA), Nds. 120 Hannover, Acc. 49/80, Nr. 12/3.

676 Der Innenminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Hinweise für den Einsatz der Polizei bei Demonstrationen und änlichen Anlässen,” Düsseldorf, October 31, 1968, 11, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/188201*. This file was forwarded to the Gendarmerie by Général Gauthier-Briand on March 6, 1970.

677 See for example, Frankfurter Schutzpolizeidirektion, “Abschließender Bericht über die Demonstrationen während der Osterfeiertage, Bis 15.4.1968 in Frankfurt am Main,” Frankfurt, May 3, 1968, 30, HHStAW 530 431; Berliner Schutzpolizeidirektion, “Verlaufs- und Erfahrungsbericht über den polizeilichen Einsatz am 4.11.1968 vor dem Landgericht Berlin,” Berlin, November 22, 1968, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/188201*.

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Irritant chemicals are more suitable than almost any other means (kaum ein anderes Mittel) to quickly achieve an overpowering (durchschlagende) and sustained effect while virtually [preserving] the corporal integrity of the troublemaker, which has a particular moral importance…the intervention of irritant chemicals can be both milder and more effective than the intervention of the police baton.678

As the leader of the Schutzpolizei of Nuremberg demonstrated in a two-part contribution to the professional journal Die Polizei in May of 1970, West German police came to understand chemical irritants as means of intervention that would allow them to exercise more successful and less controversial force. In theory, police were now able to neutralize their adversary without endangering them and while sparing them from the discrediting intervention of the baton.

The effect when applied correct is immediate. It allows a higher level of incapacitation of agitators, generating typically (prinzipiell) no or limited dangers to the health of those exposed The effected environment is spatially very extended It affects also those agitators who cannot be reached by other means of intervention (including firearms) A more flattering and energy-saving intervention is possible Dangers for non-participants are reduced to a minimum.679

In October of 1971 at Goslar, the Second Working Circle of the Interior Ministries decided to introduce an array of chemical canisters containing between 2.4 and 24 grams of the chemical CN, all produced by the Dynamit Nobel firm.680 Soon, police had access to four different models of tear gas canister and were developing the capacity to launch canisters at a distance using signal pistols, and later, funnels for their rifles and MP5 machine-guns. These techniques evoked the practices of

678 Der Innenminister des Landes NRW, „Einsatz der Polizei bei gewaltsamen Demonstrationen und Unruhen,“ April 24, 1968, 3-4, StAH 136-1_1030.

679 Georg Steiner, “Tränengas - Ja Oder Nein?,” Die Polizei 5 (1970): 151–54; Georg Steiner, “Tränengas - Ja Oder Nein? II,” Die Polizei 6 (1970): 188–91.

680 “Auszug aus der Niederschrift über die Sitzung des AK II “Öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung” der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Innenministerien der Bundesländer am 26.27. Oktober 1971 in Goslar, 38-39.

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the police in neighboring France and Italy. In stark contrast to the French police, however, officials decided that CS gas was unsuitable for use in the Bundesrepublik. Thus, in 1969, on the basis of materials procured from United States sources, Dr. Gromes of the Bundesministerium ds Innern concluded that CS should not be brought on, a decision that would only be revisited in the late seventies.681 In contrast to their French counterparts, the German police had no standard doctrinal statement on the use of “tear gas” equivalent to their regulatory texts about the water cannon published in 1969 and reedited in 1975.

It was the water cannon that emerged out of the 1968 protest sequence in West Germany as the most prominent alternative means for managing confrontational dissent. The WaWe 4000, named after its 4,000 liter tank, had been introduced in the early sixties, and police publication of nation-wide instructions on its use in 1969 evince its growing standardization as a means of dispersion. Police regulations indicated that the WaWe should be used to vacate public places when “milder” means like corporeal physical force (pushing) were insufficient but that they could deploy the WaWe in order to avoid use of striking weapons (Hiebwaffe) (e.g., batons) or firearms.682 According to official doctrine, the water could be deployed as a rain (Wasserregen); directed in front of militants as a blockade (the Watersperre); or deployed “in full force” against

“agitators” as a jet (Wasserstoß): “[The water jet] should be applied against hardened

(hartknäckige) agitators in order to hinder them from advancing and to force them to retreat.”683

681 ORR Dr. Gromes, Beschaffungsstelle des BMI, “Verwendung von CS für polizeiliche Zwecke in der BRD,” Bonn, March 31, 1969, 6, Bundesarchiv, B106 385624. For CS in French protests, see above and Provenzano, “Beyond the Matraque.”

682 Einsatz von Wasserwerfern und Wasserarmaturen, 7. See also Führung und Einsatz der Polizei (Hamburg: 1975), 28.

683 Ibid., 15. 293 294

However, police frequently deemed the jets from the water cannon to be too weak in the course of the seventies;684 moreover, water cannon had never been designed for handling dissenters that did not function as a “mass” and that engaged in tactically astute behaviors. This problem would continue to haunt later variants of the water cannon, another sign of the difficulty of repurposing apparatuses originally designed for mass control to confront the new form of militancy.

Police renewed trials to introduce chemicals into the water only days after the 1968 Easter

Demonstrations. In the summer of 1968, the Hamburg Interior Ministry examined the introduction of Ethyl bromacetate into the WaWe 4000 jet but officials were deterred by medical assessments from the ophthalmology clinic at Hamburg university.685 Police re-aligned their hopes on the potential exploitation of CN for the same end: West German police were not the first to move in this direction since similar measures had been used by Japanese police against the ANPO movement and the Zengakuren in the late sixties and early seventies.686 To be sure, initial evaluations were not encouraging: in June of 1969, an in-house report by the BMI indicated that toxicological tests by Professor Dr. Klimmer at Bonn University had failed.687 However, the

684 Hessisches Ministerium des Innern und für Sport, “Analyse der Einsätze aus Anlass der Räumung der Besetzten Häuser Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumannstraße in Frankfurt am Main,” sent December 9, 1974 to the IMK, 33; “Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Ausstattung und Ausrüstung der Polizei,” November 14-15, 1974, 4, HStAS EA 2-303 Bü 1999.

685 Auszug aus der Niederschrift über die Sitzung des AKII der AGdI am 23.4.1968 in Bonn, 36, in NLA Nds. 100, Acc. 2004/144 Nr. 59.

686 Cf. William Marotti, “Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest,” 119.

687 Herrmann, BMI, “Sitzung des AK II der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Innenministerien der Bundesländer am 26. u. 27. Juni 1969 in Garmisch-Partenkirchenn; Hilfsmittel der körperlichen Gewalt,” Bonn, 24. Juli 1969, 2-3. NLA Nds. 100, Acc. 2004/144 Nr. 59.

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outcome of these negative trials was far from definitive: two years later, modernizers reconducted trials in the summer of 1971 before recommending the introduction of CN into water jets.688 AK II duly set the original maximum effective “dose” at 150 mg CN/1 liter of water at the 26-27 October

1971 conference in Goslar, the same conference that approved new CN canisters.

The justification for the use of chemicals in the water cannon relied on the same principles as the use of gas. Thus, Doctor Gromes of the procurement agency of the Bundesministerium des

Innern mobilized principles of effectiveness, force-minimization, and humanity in his advocacy for the novel means in 1973: “In demonstrations, the use of water cannon has no longer sufficed for a rapid successful dispersion (einen raschen Räumerfolg). The use of tear gas canisters has also become problematic [because] the protestors (Störer) have learned to throw these canisters back, which then often leads to the application of corporal violence between the police and the protestors, which hardly allows us to avoid escalations.” By contrast, the use of CN in the water cannon would allegedly join both the irritant effects of “tear gas” and the discomfort generated by the ordinary water cannon, allowing more effective interventions and simultaneously allowing the state to avoid the Knüppeleinsatz:

It works immediately (augenblicklich). It cannot be thrown back. It can intervene at a distance. It secures a rapid, successful dispersion [of the demonstrators] (Räumerfolg). It hinders later (nachträgliche) regrouping [of the demonstrators] It is a humane means relative (im Vergleich zur) to the application of physical force.

688 For reports on tests by police in Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Unterkommission Polizeiliche Einsatzmittel, Protokoll über die 3. Arbeitstagung der Unterkommission Polizeiliche Einsatzmittel am 25./26. August 1971, ” Bundesarchiv B106 367553.

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It is not dangerous in contrast to the use of tear gas canisters. 689

Although the report stated that the new modality of coercion would unite the operational effects of ordinary water cannon and “tear gas,” it also disclosed that the irritant effects of exposure to chemical jets included burning and irritation of the skin, in contrast to the limited, generally lacrymogenic effects of CN in vaporous form.690 Similarly, only days earlier, the report by Police

Doctor Wendler at the fourth conference of the “Police Means of Intervention” Working Group in

Hannover declared that exposure to CN in liquid solution led to a “strong burning sensation” on the skin.691 Reports on in vivo trials also indicated that both types of irritation were typical.692 These effects were moreover potentially more long-lasting than those of exposure to “tear gas” because the liquid continued to irritate the skin via drenched clothing, preventing the possibility of rapid recovery and re-entry into the demonstration train.693 In other words, like their counterparts in

France, West German security forces were turning to more extensive, insidious chemical coercion whose acknowledged physiological effects included physical burning and irritation.

Nevertheless, the minutes of the Technische Kommission from the spring 1973 conference indicate that the effectiveness of the new means was not always apparent. Thus, representatives

689 Dr. W. Gromes, “Über den Einsatz von gelöstem CN mit Wasserwerfern,” Bonn-Duisdorf, March 22, 1973, p.1, Niederländisches Landesarchiv, Nds. 100 Acc. 65/97. Nr. 13. In the report, CN was acknowledged to be dangerous at very high concentrations.

690 Ibid.

691 Dr. Wendler, Der leitende Polizeiarzt, “Vierte Arbeitstagung der Arbeitsgruppe ‘Polizeiliche Einsatzmittel,’ der Technischen Kommission in Hannover vom 7. - 9.3.1973,” Hannover, March 15, 1973, in Niederländisches Landesarchiv, Nds. 100 Acc. 65/97. Nr. 13

692 Ibid.

693 Dr. W. Gromes, “Über den Einsatz von gelöstem CN mit Wasserwerfern,” 2.

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from Hamburg and Hannover noted that the maximum concentration of 150 grams CN/Liter water had proved of dubious efficacy and that the effects fell far short of those predicted during the operational trials of August of 1971. Based on calculations that the temperature-sensitivity of the chemicals was responsible for its underwhelming efficacy, the conference members resolved that it would be necessary to double the amount of CN at lower temperatures and also recommended the addition of alcohol to the liquid solution to improve the chemical potency of the active reagents.694 The final resolution of AKII effectively doubled the allowable maximum amount of

CN, and the physiological impact of exposure to the higher dose proved considerably more extensive. As a doctor for the BGS noted, at the new concentration, exposed test subjects showed visible symptoms of eye and skin irritation for up to three quarters of an hour after the trials, even after the removal of clothing and showers.695 Officials had authorized a higher quantum of suffering on the basis of reinforced chemical coercitives.

Police deployed CN in the water cannon during demonstrations in Frankfurt am Main beginning in 1974. Sure enough, police would rapidly express dissatisfaction at the original “dose” of CN in the course of the Frankfurt Ereignisse of February 20-24, 1974. The police-internal analysis of the Polizeipräsidium Frankfurt reported that, “The events have shown that the armament of the officers and the means of intervention must be seriously improved. For example, the intervention of CN-filled water cannon showed, that the proscribed solution of 150 mg of CN

694 Technische Kommission, Geschäftsführung, “Niederschrift über die vierte Tagung der Arbeitsgruppe ‘Polizeiliche Einsatzmittel,’ der TK” Hannover, March 9 1973, 1, 7, in NLA Nds. 100 Acc. 65/97. Nr. 13.

695 Dr. Med. Noack, Oberfeldarzt i. BGS, “Arbeitstagung der Unterkommission ‘Polizeiliche Einsatzmittel’ vom 7. Bis 9.3.1973 in Hannover,” Kessel, March 15, 1973, 2, in NLA Nds. 100 Acc. 65/97. Nr. 13.

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per 1 liter of water was too limited because of the limited temperature outside.”696 Meanwhile, the analysis of the Frankfurt incidents in February noted that “Water cannon proved itself as a consequential means of intervention during these operations (Einsätze). As the water cannon advanced, demonstrators ran away, although they came back when it stood still. The spraying of a solution enriched by CN proved itself to be necessary. However, the mixture was too weak during these operations.”697 The higher “dose” was deployed in May 1974, and as we saw in Chapter

Three its use against anti-FVV demonstrations on the Zeil was broadly interpreted as indiscriminate violence, generating pressures on Mayor Rudi Arnt and Polizeipräsident Knut

Müller from the left-wing of the SPD and from the Frankfurt Jusos to recall the use of chemical- laden water. Moreover, the critique of water cannon based on the principle of selectivity led the new regulations of 1975 to counsel a considerable time gap between official warnings and actually deploying the WaWe, “particularly during the deployment of irritant chemicals and when recognizable non-participants might also suffer (Mitleidenschaft).”698

The third new apparatus introduced by West German security experts to the arsenal of coercion in protests in the seventies was the Chemical Mace Mark V spray built by the U.S. weapons manufacturer Smith & Wesson. Chemical Mace could be sprayed at up to 7 meters and generated “uncomfortable eye- and skin irritation as well as irritation of nasal and oral cavities”

696 Frankfurt Polizeipräsidium,“Schlußbetrachtung über die GSOD-Einsätze vom 21. bis 24.2.1974,” Bundesarchiv, B136 15620.

697 Hessisches Ministerium des Innern und für Sport, “Analyse der Einsätze aus Anlass der Räumung der Besetzten Häuser Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumannstraße in Frankfurt am Main,” 33.

698 Einsatz von Wasserwerfern und Wasserarmaturen, 19.

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according to the later regulations by the Bundesministerium des Innern.699 Appraisals of the legality and potential usefulness of Chemical Mace as a “helping aid to physical force” began in the late sixties. However, evaluations conducted at the University of Michigan in the summer of 1968 indicated the potential for lasting injury, and in June of 1969 a summary report (Gutachten) by

Doctor O.R. Klimmer in Bonn concluded that inappropriate uses (unsachgemäßer Anwendungen) of Mace could cause localized, lasting damage to the eyes.700 Because of these discouraging results, police initially prioritized testing the generalization of CN in vapor form as “tear gas” or the integration of chemicals into the water cannon. Yet protest incidents in the seventies would generate demands for new armament in due course, and the interior ministries approved further tests by the Technische Kommission at Goslar in October of 1971 on the grounds that Mace might prove a substitute for the use of firearms. Police in the state of Hessen introduced and deployed

Mace in the course of the Frankfurt encounters of 1973-4, and the Federal Interior Ministry introduced it into the equipment of the Bereitschaftspolizei and the BGS shortly thereafter. In the course of its introduction, Mace was rebaptized the less-evocative Reizstoffsprühgerät (RSG 1).

West German security experts typically understood “distance means” like the RSG 1 as potential substitutes for both firearms and the baton, at once more effective and proportionate or humane when deployed correctly.701 Moreover, West German officials also sought the RSG1

699 Bundesministerium des Innern, Bedienungsanleitung für das Reizsoffsprühgerät, Bonn, January 1975, Bundesarchiv, B106 373647.

700 Prof. Dr. O.R. Klimmer, “Toxologisches Gutachten zur Frage der Wirkung des Chloracetophenons auf den Menschen beim Einsatz als Augenreizstoff, ” Bonn, June 10, 1969, 14, HStAS EA 2/303 Bü 1747.

701 Brief for the Interior Minister, Niedersächsisches Ministerium des Innern, Abteilung II, “Reizstoffsprühgerät Chemical Mace,” Hannover, April 9, 1975, NLA Nds 100 Acc 2004/144 Nr 59, 1Ibid., 3. “During the operations on [April 5] in Hannover Chemical Mace was always applied when the use of the baton would have been required.”

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because of concerns about the dangerous media profile of the Knüppel. Thus, a member of the

Niedersächsen-based Technische Kommission (TK) concluded in 1976 that “The deployment of irritants in the place of the police baton appears to me to be an essential step in the system of police-typical weapons. The range of the irritant spray apparatuses…allows the elimination of the unfortunate (unliebsame) pictures of melees (Schlägereien) that always return to discredit the police.”702 Similarly, notes by the Inspekteuer der Bereitschaftspolizei in 1977 concluded that the banalization of the RSG 1 as a substitute for the use of the baton had allowed state forces to arrive at a more legitimate and effective practice of physical constraint that contributed to a “significant decrease” in “the level of [societal] antipathy” towards the police:

The use of the baton is fundamentally more consequential and harder to control in its application than the RSG1. Bloody injuries (Blutergüsse), bruises, and other painful, potentially serious injuries, are unavoidable when using the baton. The use of the baton [also] often generates a lasting impression and will often be designated as “brutal” in public opinion. This [problem] has not occurred with interventions using the RSG 1…703

Likewise, interior ministry officials in Hamburg supported the use of Chemical Mace (the RSG1) in the seventies because police considered it a valuable alternative to the use of the baton and the bullet.704

702 Niederschrift über die Fachtagung der Technischen Kommission “Polizeitypische Waffe” am 21. Bis 23.9.1976 in Münster-Hiltrup, 38, Bundesarchiv, B106 373647.

703 Inspekteur BPDL, “Verwendung von Reizstoffen durch die Polizei, RSG 1-Chemical Mace,” Bonn, January, 14 1977, Bundesarchiv, B106 373647.

704 Ruwe für der Innenminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen an den Hessischen Minister des Innern, Düsseldorf, 26. January 1977. Cf. Tebarth for the Niedersächsiche Minister des Innern, “Einsatz des Reizstoffsprühgerätes (RSG), Hannover, December 13, 1976, 1, NLA NDS 100 Acc 2004/144, Nr. 57. Cf. the telegram from the Hessen Ministry of the Interior, “Einsatz des Reizstoffsprühgeräts,” December 27, 1976 and the telegram from the NRW Interior Ministry, “Erfahrungen mit dem Einsatz des Reizstoffsprühgerätes (RSG 1),” December 30, 1976., NLA Nds. 100 Acc 2004/144., Nr. 57.

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Through the RSG1 in many cases the goal of police intervention may be achieved without the police baton or firearms, which always generate lasting injuries.… Physical interactions in our experience lead to strong emotionalization of the event. Reportage (Berichterstattung) about “mishandled” citizens is also seldom free from exaggeration and emotional influences.705

Summarizing the vulgate, a conference bringing together officials from the Bundesministerium des Innern, Polizeiführungsakademie Münster, the Technische Kommission, the Institut für

Aerobiologie, and police representatives of the Länder concluded in 1978 that “Chemical irritants may on the one hand be used in cases where the use of the baton would be a disproportionate measure, on the other hand, they cover the territory [Bereich] between the baton and the use of firearms well…”706 West German police officials reinforced systematic chemical constraint as an essential dimension of public order operations in the seventies.

4.4. Anti-Nuclear Demonstrations, Autonomen, and the Search for Stronger Weapons, 1976-1981

Given the equipment that we have identified above, it might seem counterintuitive that when the state police of Niedersachsen reported “inequality in weapons” (Waffenungleichheit) in the course of anti-nuclear protest at Grohnde in March of 1977, they meant that their own armament was inferior to that of militants.707 Nevertheless, prominent police warned that

“outmatched” police might resort to firearms in the late seventies in the context of the anti-nuclear

705 Dr. Redding, “Bericht über Reizstoffsprühgerät (RSG1) ‘Chemical Mace,’” 1-2, StAH 136-1 1666,

706 Polizei-Führungsakademie, Forschungs- und Entwicklungsstelle für Polizeitechnik, “Niederschrift der Tagung der Arbeitsgruppe ‘Reizstoffe’ am 17./18.1.1978 in Münster-Hiltrup,“ Münster August 22, 1978, 10, StaH 136-1 1668, 10.

707 Landesbereitschaftspolizei Niedersachsen, “Erfahrungsbericht über den polizeilichen Großeinsatz am 19.3.1977 zum Schutze des KKW-Baugeländes in Grohnde,” Hannover, August 12, 1977, 60, NLA Nds. 100, Acc. 146/97, Nr. 38.

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movement, and West German police frequently claimed that their own means were inferior to those of militant demonstrators using slings and improvised striking weapons. In the short term, some of the police were granted an 80 cm wooden baton (Holzknüppel), in addition to the rubber baton, while the Federal Interior Ministry generalized the RSG1 spray within the

Bereitschaftspolizei and Bundesgrenzschutz. Yet reports on the inefficacy and inferiority of alternative police means like the water cannon and “tear gas” also launched a second cycle of technopolitics: in the course of the following half-decade, an assemblage of experts, technicians, and officials designed, endorsed, and introduced new means into the police arsenal. These new weapons included both the massive WaWe 9000—a vehicle whose jets were capable of generating considerable injuries—and CS gas. The major lines of the new police priority on reinforcing the power of “distance” means were laid bare already in the June 1977 report presented to the

Innenministerkonferenz in Kiel: “In addition to the present equipment, we require police means of intervention with further-ranged effects that render an immediate confrontation (man against man) unnecessary. These means of intervention must be adequate to the range and danger of the means of the agitator.”708

Nowhere was the difficulty of relying on alternatives to the Schlagstockeinsatz more evident than during the protests at Brokdorf on November 13, 1976 and at Grohnde on March 19,

1977. As Leitende Polizeidirector Müller from the Kiel Schutzpolizei noted in a report to the subcommittee of leading police executives at the Polizei-Führungsakademie Münster, police had

708 Bundesministerium des Innern, “Bericht über die Erfahrungen aus Groseinsätzen zum Schutz von Kernkraftanlagen,” June 1977, 12, Bundesarchiv, B136 31628.

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deployed a total of 16 water cannon at the site of the Brokdorf demonstration.709 Original appraisals were positive: scarcely one week after the bitter confrontation on 13 November, 1976, Karl-Heinz

Amft, Inspekteuer der Bereitschaftspolizei der Länder (BPdL), reported that police had successfully defended the fenced-in construction zone by relying on the means of physical constraint that had been prioritized since 1968 for dispersing a “hostile” mass (“The police deployed water cannon, tear gas canisters, and—because of immediate danger of a breakthrough— the Reizstoffsprühgerät.)710 As Amft concluded in his report, “Police officers were able to generally avoid direct confrontation with the demonstrators (in particular, the use of the baton) despite the hours-long effort of the agitators to break into the site (Gelände). Otherwise, there would have been more and serious injuries on both sides.”711 Yet the experience of confrontational protest in

1976 and 1977 also demonstrated shortcomings that resulted from the relative availability of practical countermeasures against the new chemical arsenal of the police. In due course, the emergence of conservative political consensus at the state and federal level allowed a successful bid for newer protest management weapons and more powerful gas, water cannon, and chemical sprays.

Police complaints about alternative means of coercion –most of them recently introduced and reinforced after 1968—were ubiquitous during the confrontations of the anti-nuclear movement in

709 Leitende Polizeidirektor Müller, “Erfahrungen aus den Einsätzen im Raum Brokdorf. Störertaktiken und -tekniken. Einsatzkonzepte der Polizei,” July 1977, 11, HStAS EA 2/303 Bü 1851.

710 Inspekteuer der BPdL Karl-Heinz Amft, “Einsatz der Polizei aus Anlaß der Demonstrationen und gewalttätign Aktionen am 13. November 1976 im Raume Brokdorf,” Bonn, November 22, 1976, 3, Bundesarchiv, B106 83927.

711 Ibid., 4.

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1976-1977, even though we have seen that high-ranking police functionaries like Karl-Heinz Amft initially positioned the substitution of “distance” means for the Schlagstockeinsatz as successful.

In practice, officers reported that the RSG-1 suffered from the same limitations as the use of chemicals in vapor form: it could be counteracted by distant, mobile, projectile-throwing tactics and the same affordable and generalizable defensive countermeasures that mitigated the effects of

“tear gas” and the water cannon (see Chapter One). In 1977, the Schleswig-Holstein Interior

Ministry noted based on the experience of the anti-nuclear demonstration at Grohnde that “the

[RSG1] apparatus showed no effect on people that had effective protective measures, for example waterproof clothing, protective helmets, [and] gas masks.”712 Similarly, the

Landesbereitschaftspolizei of Niedersächsen (LBPN) reported that the RSG1 had proved ineffective at the 1977 Grohnde anti-nuclear demonstrations because of its short range and the protective measures adopted by militants.713

Police experts also deemed CN to be of limited efficacy as “tear gas.” Dr. Teichmann of the regional Grenzschutskommando indicated that at the Brokdorf encounters, “a significant number of tear gas canisters were thrown back into the ranks of the security forces…as has already been shown, the deployment of tear gas in open spaces and with unfavorable wind directions does not achieve the desired success.”714 Similarly, the director of the regional Bereitschaftspolizei of

712 Schleswig-Holstein Interior Ministry, “Erfahrungen mit dem Einsatz des RSG Roem Eins,” Kiel, February 10, 1977, NLA Nds. 100 Acc 2004/144, Nr. 59.

713 Landesbereitchaftspolizei Niedersachsen (LPBN), “Erfahrungsbericht über den polizeilichen Großeinsatz am 19.3.1977 zum Schutze des KKW-Baugeländes in Grohnde,” 34, 53-54, NLA Nds. 100, Acc. 146/97, Nr. 38.

714 Dr. Teichmann, Grenzschutzkommando Küste, “Bericht über den Einsatz von Kräften des GSK Küste anlässlich der Großdemonstration in Brokdorf, Kreis Steinburg, am 13./14. November 1976,” Bad Bramstedt, December 10, 1976, NLA Nds. 1150 Acc. 108/92, Nr. 130.

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Niedersachsen reported that at the Grohnde demonstration, the deployment of CN proved ineffective against well-equipped protestors who wore leather protective gloves and simply threw the burning canisters back onto the police line.715

The water cannon proved no more effective on the night of the major encounters at

Brokdorf. In one of the most dramatic incidents, militants mounted coordinated attacks on a water cannon, put it permanently out of action, and delivered its occupants into a desperate situation requiring the intervention of police helicopters: “The water cannon was attacked by around 50 or

60 violent agitators with crowbars and similar dangerous objects…the occupants were attacked after breaking the window shields with iron rods, as was the nozzle, and the entire vehicle was immobilized. The endangered occupants of the water cannon could only be saved through the use of tear gas from the BGS helicopter and the medical vehicle and the simultaneous deployment of two groups from one of the nearby police companies.”716 Incidents like these were troubling to officials, who subsequently deemed the WaWe 4000 to be of mediocre efficacy; Dr. Teichmann concluded modestly that “Although [the] WaWe proved itself an effective means, the CN- immersion is nevertheless without any sustained effect in winter and against consequential protective clothing by the demonstrator/agitator.”717 For the Direction of the Niedersächsische

715 LBPN, “Erfahrungsbericht über den polizeilichen Großeinsatz am 19.3.1977,” 54.

716 Ibid. 5; Einsatzbericht des GSK Küste anläßlich des Polizeieinsatzes bei den Protestaktionen gegen den Bau des Kernkraftwerkes (KKW) Brokdorf, Krs. Steinburg. Für die Zeit vom 10. Bis 14. November 1974 (enclosure), 5. For the helicopters, Einsatzverlauf der von der GS-Fliegerstaffel Küste am 13. 11. 1976 im Raum Brokdorf eingesetzten Hubschrauber, 2. Anlage zum Bericht vom 10. Dezember 1976, 2, 4-5. NLA Nds 1150 Acc. 108/92 nr 130.

717 Teichmann, “Bericht üben den Einsatz von Kräften des GSK Küste,” 22, NLA Nds. 1150 Acc. 108/92, Nr. 130.

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Bereitschaftspolizei, however, “The WaWe- and [tear gas] deployments through and over the

[protest-]zone remained frequently without effect on agitators equipped with protective masks and glasses,” while the “CN solution [of the WaWe] had hardly any effect on well-protected Störer.”718

These negative appraisals drove demands to reinforce the water cannon that would yield two new prototypes in the late seventies—the WaWe 6000 and WaWe 9000. As an information and working conference of the leaders of the Bereitschaftspolizei in September of 1977 concluded, “a new water cannon must be developed.”719

In the interim, German police relied on quantity in lieu of quality and also returned to the mass baton assault. Thus, at Brokdorf in 1976, the BGS used helicopters to launch tear gas into the demonstration, vitiating efforts to throw gas canisters back at the police line. The LBPN report on the spring 1977 Grohnde incidents predicted that in the future, “The intervention of the RSG 1 and the shooting of [tear gas] must be more aimed and concentrated in order to have a stronger effect,” and promoted the introduction of specialized police groups for “salvo-style”

[salvenmäßigen] practices reminiscent of the standardized techniques in neighboring France.720

Likewise, the report indicated that police should use multiple water cannon in lines to maintain a blockade.721 Unsuccessful intervention using the new means of coercion also led to a return to the

718 LBPN, “Erfahrungsbericht über den polizeilichen Großeinsatz am 19.3.1977,” 34, 54.

719 Ergebnisniederschrift über die Informations-und Arbeitstagung der Leiter der Bereitschaftspolizeien der Länder in Königsbrunn am 7. u. 8. September 1977, Anlage zum Schreiben BMI ÖS-IBP -636 004/6 vom 30.9.1977), 14, Bundesarchiv, B106 112609.

720 LBPN, “Erfahrungsbericht über den polizeilichen Großeinsatz am 19.3.1977,” 31.

721 Ibid.

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baton assault. At Grohnde on March 19, 1977, mounted police charged the demonstration in order to evict demonstrators who had successfully demolished a section of the fence adjacent to the construction site.

As a consequence of these tribulations, the West German police and the

Bundesgrentzschutz pursued more powerful means. Beginning in 1977, the Technische

Kommission began a multiyear comparative review of chemical irritants for dominating militant protest, paying special attention to the potential integration of CS gas into the police arsenal. These decisions were reinforced by bilateral contacts involving French police and multilateral engagement conducted through the European Community. In early December of 1976, Inspekteuer

Amft of the Bereitschaftspolizei and Representative Winfried Müller of the FEStPt visited the headquarters of the CRS and Gendarmerie mobile in neighboring France to inquire into the equipment of their counterparts. As a telex from Amft requesting the visit had declared only a day after the Brokdorf encounter, West German police were receptive to novel police armament (“We would like to acquire knowledge about the equipment of the police, particularly the weapons.”)722

The report on the visit by Amft and his colleagues called attention to the broad use of CS by the

French state in operations of the maintenance of order and also conveyed information about the new GLI.723 As FEStPt Director Müller commented in his covering letter on the report, “only CS is deployed as an irritant chemical [in France]. CS is supposed to be more effective than CN and

722 Karl-Heinz Amft, Inspekteuer der Bereitschaftspolizei der Laender, Message to the Gendarmerie nationale dated November 4, 1976, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1 189213*.

723 Winifried Müller, Polizei-Führungsakademie FEStPt, “Einsatzausstattung der französischen Polizei,” Münster, February 8, 1977 and enclosure entitled “Einsatzaustattung der französischen Polizei: Bericht über eine Besischtigung bei den CRS in Velizy und der Gendarmerie Mobile in Maisons-Alfort am 2. und 3. Dezember 1976,” (end 1976-beginning 1977) in Bundesarchiv, B 106 373719.

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less toxic.”724 In the course of contacts through the equipment working group of the newly-minted

European Community organization for confronting political violence, TREVI,725 West German functionaries consistently noted the apparently higher efficacy of CS gas.726 The following year, a bilateral meeting took place on 23 and 24 January 1978 in Bonn between West German and French functionaries specializing in public order; the minutes of the working group on armament and special equipment stipulated that “The use of CS or CN, their effect and consequences, took up a large part of the discussion.”727 Jacques Hubert of the Services techniques de la Police Nationale subsequently forwarded documentation on the Grenade lacrymogène instantanée (GLI) to his homologues in exchange for studies on the respective effects of CN and CS by the American

Battelle-Institute.728 West German police also attempted to investigate equipment that would allow them to saturate an area with gas, French-style. Thus, in June of 1977, three months after the

Gröhnde demonstrations, the forth conference of the police Leitende Exekutivbeamte (LEX) resolved to produce an “apparatus that would render it possible to launch tear gas grenades at a higher cadence, greater range and [with] greater area of effect.”729 Second, functionaries began to design more powerful successors to the standard water cannon, the WaWe 6 and the WaWe 9.

724 Ibid., underlined by recipient.

725 Terrorisme, radicalisme, extrémisme et violence international.

726 For TREVI minutes, see Bundesarchiv, B106 78844.

727 Kurzprotokoll über die Sitzung der Arbeitsgruppe Bewaffnung und Specialausrüstung, Bonn, January 23, 1978, Bundesarchiv, B106 146547.

728 Note technique sur la grenade lacrymogène instantanée au CB modèle F3 and the covering letter from Hubert to Bundesminister des Innern, Paris, March 16 1978, Bundesarchiv, B106 146547.

729 Bundesministerium des Innern, “Bericht über die Erfahrungen aus Großeinsätzen zum Schutz von Kernkraftanlagen,” June 1977, 12, Bundesarchiv, B136 31628.

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In the early seventies, officials, police, and technicians had sought one balance between effectiveness andforce-minimization, but the second round of police modernization produced markedly more powerful repressive apparatuses. To be sure, the West German police demonstrated scruples over the use of CS gas that French counterparts likely would have found absurd. As in neighboring countries, West German police were hardly unaware that CS was considerably more powerful than their own standard chemicals because of its effects on the respiratory apparatus. The minutes of a new irritant working group in 1978 noted that according to comparative trials, “in medium and high concentrations, CS brings forth strong respiratory irritation (Würgreiz) among the affected.”730 Yet while the respiratory interference from CS had been typically considered desirable by the French police, their West German colleagues viewed it as a potential problem: officials were concerned that immobilizing, respiratory interference effects would not allow demonstrators or the uninvolved to extricate themselves from a saturated environment. Meanwhile, some functionaries also considered that the oppressive sensation in the chest generated by the more powerful chemicals would result in an influx of demonstrators reporting for medical care—and by implication, a potential controversy.731 Thus, even in the late seventies, West German police- tactical and political considerations militated against the use of CS gas.

However, the demands for new water cannon proved more consensual. By 1978, the security forces had already started designing two new models: on the one hand, police of the state

730 Polizei-Führungsakademie, Forschungs- und Entwicklungsstelle für Polizeitechnik, “Niederschrift der Tagung der Arbeitsgruppe ‘Reizstoffe’ am 17./18.1.1978 in Münster-Hiltrup,” Münster, August 22, 1978, 30, in StAH 136 1 1668.

731 Ibid., 30.

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of Niedersachsen pressed for a new 6,000-liter water cannon. On the other, the federal

Bundesgrentzschutz began to collaborate with private industry to design what became the 9,000- liter WaWe 9. Although each of the new cannon could spray protestors directly in front of the vehicles, their more powerful jets were also envisioned as a way to stop demonstrators from making a full-scale assault on the cannon. At a July 1977 conference of the Bereitschaftspolizei and the BGS in Hannover following the Grohnde confrontations, participants endorsed the proposal that water cannons ought to be able to fire jets of up to 16 bars of water pressure at a range of 65 meters.732 In other words, the state had transcended dousing to embrace hitting militants with water jets—water cannon in the strongest sense of the word.733

State officials and technicians acknowledged the potentially injurious consequences of high-powered jets well before the new vehicles entered service. Thus, already in June of 1978, one gendarme on the “Water Cannon” working group of the TK concluded that in the case of the

WaWe 6 prototype, the “total pressure of 15 bars in conjunction with the long-range jet represents a considerable danger for the police adversary, particularly at close range.”734 Yet discussions of the precise physiological effects of the new, high-pressure jets were rare, implying that police were more concerned about overwhelming militant adversaries than they were about limiting serious injury. Thus, typical promises that the jets would knock down an adversary at 30 meters apparently

732 Niederschrift über die Arbeitstagung betr. Neukonzeption eines Wawe für die Bereitschaftspolizei der Länder und des BGS am 12.7.1977 in Hannover, 4; B106 388478.

733 Polizei-Führungsakademie, Forschungs- und Entwicklungsstelle für Polizeitechnik (FEStPt), Bericht über Waffen und Einsatzmittel, April 1981, in NLA Nds. 100 Acc. 2004/144 Nr. 59.

734 Franz Brechter, Polizeihauptkommissar im BGS, “ad hoc-Sitzung der Technischen Kommission; Arbeitsgruppentagung ‘Wasserwerfer’ bei der Bereitschaftspolizeiabteilung I Baden-Württemberg in Bruchsal am 29.6.1978,” Rosenheim, July 6, 1978, 3, Bundesarchiv, B106 388476.

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never accompanied detailed deliberations about the potential injuries of the impact of the jets or a subsequent fall. Meanwhile, police consensus that the WaWe needed to be more powerful at a longer range was reinforced by incidents in Frankfurt like the Antifa demonstration on 17 June

1978 and the anti-Shah demonstrations by the Iranian student union CISNU and assorted radicals on November 25, 1978. Police analyses of these events indicted the standard WaWe model on the grounds that its jets were too low-pressure and generally ineffective; thus, Frankfurt

Polizeipräsident Knut Müller reported of the June 1978 Antifa demonstration that, “The limited range of the water cannon that were deployed showed itself again. The construction of new, stronger, and further-range water cannon must be intensified (forciert).”735 The first prototype of the new WaWe 9, a 60,000 pound metal monstrosity mounted on a three-axle chassis, was delivered to the state of Hessen in December of 1979 for trials.736 Reports on its deployment at the

Brokdorf II demonstration of February 1981 noted that “The exceptionally effective deployment of the WaWe 9 should be particularly pointed out” but added that the “On the grounds of the special dangerousness of this means of intervention, only an experienced officer of higher rank should be deployed as the commander.”737 The deployment of WaWe 6 and WaWe 9 models at the

735 Polizeipräsident Knut Müller, Bericht über die Ereignisse am 17. Juni 1978 in Frankfurt am Main. HHStAW Abt. 544-888, 25. Cf. Polizeipräsidium Frankfurt, “Bericht über die Arbeitstagung Erfahrungsaustausch über die Demonstration vom 25. November 1978 in Frankfurt/Main, am 12. Dezember 1978 an der Polizei-Führungsakademie,” Münster, 5, Bundesarchiv, B106 388494; Polizeipräsident Knut Müller, “Einsatz-, Verlaufs- und Erfahrungsbericht aus Anlaß einer Demonstration der CISNU am Samstag, dem 25. November 1978, in Frankfurt am Main,” December 6, 1978, 17, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, EA 2 303 Bü 1871. Ibid. 9: “In this phase of the confrontation the officers had no adequate countermeasures. The limited water pressure of the water cannon left no lasting impression…” Ibid., 19: “The value of the water cannon intervention proved itself inadequate yet again.”

736 Police reports on the new machine are located in the Bundesarchiv, B106 388482.

737 Fleischfresser, Landespolizei Schlesweig-Holstein, “Erstanalyse des Polizeieinsatzes,” Itzehoe, March 13, 1981, 3, Bundesarchiv, B106 113118.

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Gorleben nuclear site in September of 1982 led antinuclear movement activists to report broken ribs, hematomas, and eye injuries from the new, high-pressure jets.738 This outcome was entirely predictable.

Although other new repressive apparatuses failed to advance far beyond initial prototypes in the late seventies, the introduction of the WaWe 9000 and CS gas would materialize in the early eighties in what amounted to a victory for a less compromising approach to police armament. This repressive turn in the means of repression built on two political developments. First, the emergence of the West German Autonomen and their “Black bloc” tactics in ongoing confrontations around

Berlin, Bremen, and other squats, and the anti-AKW and ecological movements in the early eighties, sustained police demands for new means after protests where the extent of police injury— and humiliation—frequently reproduced the insecurity that police experienced during the 1976-

1977 antinuclear movement. Second, a spate of CDU victories in regional elections ended over a decade of SPD and liberal hegemony in the Interior Ministries of the Länder. The new CDU/CSU governing majorities in the Länder offered promising conditions for the introduction of the harsher anti-protest countermeasures by AKII and the Innenministerkonferenz: thus, in the course of the cycle of autonomist squatting in May of 1981, AKII concluded that “The recent conflict strategy of violent agitators (gewalttätige Störer) renders apparent that police can only fulfill their responsibilities by accepting a disproportionately high number of injured police officers…in these interventions it has become ever more evident that means of intervention that neutralize attacks

738 Der Spiegel, September 20, 1982, 126-128.

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from violent breakers without leading to inappropriate [police] injuries are lacking.”739 In what had been reoccurring police refrains since 1976, AKII now definitively concluded that the 1968-era

Wasserwerfer 4000 was “tactically and technically outdated,” declared that the use of CN in the water cannon was “unsatisfactory,” and asserted that CN-based tear gas canisters did not possess adequate range, were not powerful enough, and did not have an adequate area-of-effect. The AK

II accordingly recommended longer-range water cannon; new irritants that would generate

“immediate incapacitation” (Angriffsunfähigkeit)—in short, CS gas; mobile launchers that would allow “aimed barrage fire” at ranges up to 150 meters; further efforts to outfit the helicopter to launch gas; canisters that would be impossible to throw back; and analysis of “mechanical distance means” -- a euphemism for the rubber bullets in use in neighboring Switzerland and deployed by the British Army in Belfast.740 Similarly, the Group concluded that the RSG1 and its immediate successors were unsatisfactory and requested a stronger irritant for use in spray form, an indirect way of appealing for the introduction of CS as a chemical spray.741

At its 93rd Conference in September of 1981, the Technische Kommission recommended the introduction of CS gas into police service in canister form and further tests on the use of CS in

Mace and the Water Cannon.742 A new majority of CDU-governed Länder on AKII subsequently recommended that the interior ministry conference endorse CS as a suitable police means of

739 Sitzung des Arbeitskreises II ‘Öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung’ der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Innenministerien der Bundesländer am 12./13. Mai 1981, StAH, 136 1 1662.

740 Ibid., 3-5.

741 Ibid., 5-6.

742 Technische Kommission, Vorlage zum Auftrag des AKII vom 12./13.5.1981, 11-12, StAH 136 1 1662.

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intervention.743 Earlier, in July of 1981, the conservative state of Bayern had introduced CS on its own initiative, a move that aroused intense frustration in interior ministries in SPD strongholds like Hamburg; the six other conservative Länder followed in due course.744 The consensus that had precluded the introduction of more powerful chemical means in the seventies had been undone.

Nevertheless, discussions around the introduction of novel coercitives in West Germany in the early eighties did not forsake the managerial framework of the 1968 conjuncture so much as rearrange its internal economy: what was novel was the relative balance between the horizon of efficacious physical constraint and the horizons of legitimacy and harm-minimization. In internal debates within the conference of the interior ministries, the minority of SPD-governed Interior

Ministries like Bremen and Hamburg tended to warn of the risk of new solidarities emerging from illegitimate police violence, a familiar refrain since 1968; by contrast, the dominant CDU fraction placed the discursive focus on the ineffectiveness of extant practices of physical constraint and underlined the “neutralization” of militant protestors as the main issue. As conservative majorities emerged in the Länder and at the federal level, the discussion prioritized physical suppression of militant protestors rather than efforts to reduce the risk of illegitimate violence.

§§§

Placing the technopolitical introduction of new armament at the center of our analysis allows us to see novel police weapons as integral parts of a governance strategy that sought to overcome

743 Niederschrift über die Sitzung des AK II “Öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Innenministerien der Bundesländer am 28./29. September 1981 in Regensburg, 14. The vote represented the new CDU majority in the Länder, as the only against voices were Bremen, Hamburg, and Nordrhein-Westfalen; Hessen abstained. StAH 136 1 1663.

744 Bayern: July 1981, Baden-Wurttemberg: November 1981, Niedersachsen: May 1982, Rheinland-Pfalz (November 1982), Schleswig-Holstein: May 1983.

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militant protestors while guarding against the dangers that violence might further undermine the tenuous position of the police after 1968. Modernizers like Jacques Gandouin of the Groupe de travail armées-intérieur and Winifried Müller of FEStPt pursued what were deemed less- ostentatious, less-intense, and simultaneously more effective means of intervention in order to allow police to calibrate their own interventions based on the resistance offered by militants and to allow police to avoid the political consequences of the mass baton assault. To be sure, the iterations of this strategy differed on either side of the Rhine: French police learned to have large- scale recourse to atmospheric constraints like CS while continuing to use explosive grenades as a means of last resort, while their West German peers decided to expose demonstrators to irritant- laden water jets, the RSG1, and the powerful cannon of the WaWe 9000. In both national contexts however, the multiplication of critiques of police violence and simultaneous difficulty of managing militant demonstrations ironically yielded new and different ways of dispersing the rebellious crowd and the simultaneous putting into parenthesis of the mass baton assault. Militant critiques of police intervention and practices of violent protest thus served as catalysts for a new level of reflexivity in the armament used by the police for protest—a revolution in crowd dispersion.

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Chapter Five. Targeting the Militants

In the preceding chapter, we traced how police reinforced new armament for the dispersion of a demonstration after 1968 and sought partial substitutes for the mass baton intervention.745 We learned how the proposition that violence in protest proceeded from hostile “masses” continued to inform discussions by security officials about the intensification and extensive use of nominally accurate means like “tear gas” or water cannon in order to “disperse” hostile demonstrations.

However, state practices in demonstration contexts after 1968 also included techniques that aimed to allow the identification, arrest, and prosecution of revolutionary and criminal elements in a demonstration rather than the dispersion of hostile masses. These practices included redoubled efforts to surveil and identify infractions and to deploy specialized police units for interdicting

“violent,” militant groups on the margins of broader demonstrations or embedded in them. Police and public officials never wholly substituted these practices for those of “crowd control” and

“dispersion” in operations of public order. Nevertheless, after 1968 police regularly advanced claims that mass interventions alone were insufficient and counter-productive in the face of the tactics of revolutionary groups and the imperative to prosecute lawbreakers, and subsequently turned to allegedly more operative interventions by specialists and the use of surveillance in order to target the militants.

The new ethos of protest governance was based on novel criminological and political analyses, rather than the traditional mass-psychological interpretations, of risks to public order. It

745 Contemporary British Army internal labelled these techniques “crowd dispersal techniques.” Ministry of Defense, Land Operations Volume III. Counter-Revolutionary Operations. Part 2. Internal Security, 37– 42. 316 317

initially promised both a higher level of efficacy in the face of mobile protest tactics and more selective use of state force in contexts where the security forces had been identified as indiscriminately violent according to prominent lines of 1968 criticism. However, the difficulties inherent in managing heterogenous protest groups proved enduring, and even these interventions of the state remained potentially generative of chaos in the place of the return to order, as is shown by analysis of protest incidents in the mid-seventies in French and West German contexts.

Nevertheless, the prevalence of an analysis of violent protest as the work of specific groups of subversives or militants meant that the limitations on police intervention were interpreted as signs of the insufficient or faulty operationalization of new orientations rather than their intrinsic limitations.

For much of the 20th century, police and military interventions in operations of the maintenance of order were based on the proposition that large aggregates—“masses”—of demonstrators were the main threats to public order. In response, police guidelines proposed both the accumulation and deployment of large numbers of police to counteract demonstrations and the use of mobile patrols to prevent “masses” from assembling. If a demonstration had assembled with permission from the government, or if political authorities decided to tolerate an undeclared demonstration, individual and small group initiatives were discouraged in favor of centralized and hierarchically directed blockades. In the event of an illegal or “hostile” demonstration, police manuals prescribed mass baton assaults or charges by the cavalry as a last resort before using firearms for dispersion. In either event, large formations of police were meant to apply legitimate

(or at least, legal) force to disperse an “aggressive mass” or to show force in the form of blockades

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to moderate a “passive mass.”746 Police theory also placed a minor emphasis on trying to localize agitators or instigators who were seen as individuals responsible for generating a collective disposition towards violence in the mass. As historians of protest policing in the 20th century have frequently noted, the ideological basis for police practices in protest was essentially mass psychology as it had been elaborated in the fin de siècle. In this theoretical constellation, the insertion of an individual into a mass of people tended to lead to the deregulation of emotions and actions under the influence of subversive leaders or instigators.747 These masses were dangerous and had to be kept under the control of the police.

Mass police intervention tactics tended to persist in public order operations in the post-war period, as is evidenced by continental European police manuals even after 1968.748 Similarly, even in the sixties and seventies, French and West German manuals on public order operations continued to include a brief summary of principles of mass psychology. 749 Force was above all to

746 In practice, those demonstrations perceived as hostile were almost always the ones organized by the Communist Party or anticolonial movements.

747 For intellectual history, see Christian Borch, The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Serge Moscovici, L’âge Des Foules : Un Traité Historique de Psychologie Des Masses (Paris: Fayard, c1981). Classic texts include Scipio Sighele, La Foule Criminelle; Essai de Psychologie Collective (Paris: Alcan, 1892); Gustave Le Bon, La Psychologie Des Foules, 1st ed. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1895).

748 For France, see Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire. In possession of the author. Manuals for the Police nationale and CRS include: Direction des écoles et techniques, Instruction dans le cadre du maintien de l’ordre public (1968), Service historique de la défense, 98a99, 43-44 ; CIAPN, Formation du représentant de la force publique, 1970, Service historique de la défense. For an excellent decryption of the principle of mass intervention and its dangers, see, Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962, 188–92. For West Germany, VfdP 1: Vorschrift für den Großen und den Außergewöhnlichen Sicherheits- und Ordnungsdienst (Bonn, 1965); Führung und Einsatz der Polizei.

749 For France, Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962, 123–24. Classic post-war statements include Jean Schira, Principes généraux d’action des forces du maintien de l’ordre sur la voie publique (Rennes: Imprimerie des nouvelles de Bretagne, 1951), 84–86; Ministère de l’Intérieur and Ministère de la Défense nationale, Encyclopédie nationale de la police (Compagnie nationale de diffusion du livre, 1955), 133–34. 318 319

be used to “disperse” a hostile demonstration rather than to secure arrests—a notion that prevailed even as Western European police officials largely attempted to prioritize alternatives to the baton like grenadage and chemical-laden water jets as means of dispersion after 1968.750 The governance practices of the state in protests in contemporary France remain largely derivative of this system to this day, even as the socio-technical means for obtaining the dispersion of a “hostile mass” or illegal demonstration have aligned on grenades and water cannon rather than the mass baton assault;751 much the same might be said for the Federal Republic of Germany despite claims by the police about its tactics of de-escalation. Meanwhile, the norm that police should not use firearms in a protest unless under direct fire had long been institutionalized in the post-war police.

Interwar mass psychology was prevalent among many police functionaries even in 1968.

However, in the course of the late sixties, public officials and police took notice of the fact that mass dispersion practices were inherently indiscriminate, not particularly effective in the face of the mobile practices of small groups, and often counterproductive for proceeding to viable arrests and criminal convictions. Protestors learned to maintain their distance and to avoid highly

The perpetuation of interwar mass psychology is evinced in the après-mai by the CRS manual by the Direction des écoles et techniques, Instruction dans le cadre du maintien de l’ordre public, 43-44 ; CIAPN, Formation du représentant de la force publique, 2a-3a (“La foule.”) For mass psychology in the West German police doctrine of the sixties, see Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik: zwischen Bürgerkrieg und Innerer Sicherheit: die turbulenten sechziger Jahre, 275–77; Weinhauer, “Staatsgewalt, Massen, Männlichkeit,” 305.

750 Police nationale, L’instruction dans le cadre du maintien de l’ordre public, (1970), SHD, 98ad99, particularly pp. 69-71. As the section “Using force” noted “To use force is to constrain a hostile group (attroupement) to disperse on the order of one’s officer.” Ibid., 71. Cf. CIAPN, Formation du representant de la force publique, 56a. For the Räumung of territory in West German police doctrine, see Führung und Einsatz der Polizei, 42–44.

751 Cf. Noël Mamère and Pascal Popelin, Assemblée nationale. Rapport N° 2794, 2015.

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choreographed baton assaults, regrouping once the police had halted to form a new blockade; if police did achieve mass contact, baton swings and mêlée confrontations inevitably endangered observers and non-violent demonstrators as well as militants and often aroused accusations of police brutality that potentially resonated in other sectors of the polity. Moreover, even those means of dispersion that triumphed after 1968, such as “tear gas” and water cannon, had never been designed for use against small, mobile groups, could be mitigated by mobile tactics and countermeasures, and were susceptible to critiques of police violence founded on the principle of selectivity. Revolutionary leftists engaged in militant protest recognized the tactical limitations of the mass interventions of the police; as a French Trotskyist tract proposing militant mobile groups in the après-mai put it in November of 1968, both baton assaults and grenadage “aim to disperse a mass of demonstrations…nothing has been provided (prévu) against small, mobile, autonomous groups.”752 Throughout the period opened up by 1968, both the embodied critiques of domination and the critiques of violence outlined in Chapters One and Two exposed the limitations of state practices inherited from the interwar period and simultaneously mitigated newer techniques of mass dispersion based on grenadage and water cannon.

In the course of the 1968 movements and the period of post-1968 radical contestation, ministerial officials and police who confronted demonstrators tended to re-conceptualize protest violence as a primarily political rather than mass-psychological phenomena, and imputed it to the machinations of revolutionary or essentially criminal groups who sought to undermine the authority of “the state”—framework that as we have shown was far from entirely unfounded, even if it led police to attribute acts of violence to an organized, unitary adversary. This new orientation

752 Comité pour la révolution permanente, “Sur la manifestation,” 4. 320 321

had operational implications: if the aim of police intervention was to constrain, arrest, and counteract a small minority of subversive demonstrators, politically-motivated adversaries profiting from mobility or exploiting the cover of a larger demonstration, then the mass-dispersion interventions of the interwar period, or even mass-arrests, were not particularly operative and even potentially counterproductive. The position by officials and the security forces that violent actors in protest represented a militant minority of extremists or perpetual criminals led them to try to transfer surveillance and arrest practices from the struggle against subversion, terrorism, and violent criminality to the policing of demonstrations. However, depending on whether security officials and their elected counterparts put the accent on apprehending and punishing militants or on avoiding granting them potential resonance through indiscriminate repression—force or legitimacy—operations of public order could take on a more or less active dynamic. In general,

French public security officials tended to prioritize the aggressive pursuit of militant groups while

West Germany internal security officials, bolstered by recuperative readings of SDS theory, were more cautious about the potential resonances of Staatsgewalt.

5.1 Public security culture in France: From La Guerre contre-révolutionnaire to La Lutte antisubversive

The revolt of the students was not spontaneously unleashed in order to reform the University. It was deliberately begun by the “Mouvement du 22 mars” and other groupuscules…This small minority, whose composition and character must be analyzed, had formed groups that believed in the efficacy of direct action and had learned a technique of subversion.753 In France, 1968-era discourses identifying protest violence as the work of “extremists” or

“professional revolutionaries” should be understood as the re-deployment in domesticated form of

753 Ministry of the Intérieur, “La Crise de Mai,” June 24, 1968, 6-7.

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counter-revolutionary discourses elaborated during the Cold War strikes and demonstrations and late colonial conflicts such as the Algerian War of Independence.754 Of course, although French revolutionary leftists were both stigmatized and targeted as essentially violent agents of

“subversion” in the après-mai, the French security apparatus successfully avoided repression of the scale that had targeted the racialized North African population—and to a lesser extent,

European antiwar activists—during the fifties and early sixties, particularly during the Algerian conflict.755 There were no state massacres in Mai-Juin 1968, despite the fears of activists. Thus, exclusive focus on the continuities of ideological forms underestimates the rupture at work in the move from the discourse and practice of la guerre contre-révolutionnaire of 1958-1962 to what

1968-era public security officials like Jacques Gandouin sometimes identified as la lutte antisubversive.756 Yet for all that, French internal security officials in 1968 and the seventies framed threats to public order within a preexistent field of signification that had been partially constituted by counter-revolutionary discourse in the late French empire and domestic Cold-War

754 For la guerre contre-révolutionnaire, see Raphaëlle Branche, La Torture et l’armée Pendant La Guerre d’Algérie : 1954-1962 (Paris: Gallimard, Nrf, c2001). For continuities in French internal security discourse, see Mathieu Rigouste, L’ennemi intérieur : la généalogie coloniale et militaire de l’ordre sécuritaire dans la France contemporaine (Paris: Découverte, c2009). Because his polemic is directed at establishing the colonial genealogy of French securitarianism in the wake of the 2005 émeutes dans les banlieues, however, Rigouste sidelines swathes of evidence that the struggle against gauchisme and international terrorists such as Carlos the Jackal were the central security concerns of the French state from 1968 until at least 1981.

755 For racialized policing in the post-war Préfecture de Police, see Emmanuel Blanchard, La Police Parisienne et Les Algériens, 1944-1962 (Paris: Nouveau Monde, c2011); Emmanuel Blanchard, “La Goutte d’Or, 30 juillet 1955 : une émeute au cœur de la métropole coloniale,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales n° 195, no. 5 (2012): 98–111. For “state massacres” in the heart of the metropole, see House and MacMaster, Paris 1961; Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962.

756 Jacques Gandouin, DET/TEC/3ème Bureau 0322, “Note pour M. le Sécretaire general pour la police: Lutte anti-subversive,” Paris, February 3, 1969, AN 19910852/6*.

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era conflicts, generating continuities in the form, if not the content, of public security thought that mapped onto continuities in both high-ranking officials and mid-level functionaries of the Police nationale, CRS, and the gendarmerie. Past public security discourse inflected by anti-communism and decolonization predisposed security officials to view the 1968 protest movements and violent incidents as above all the product of internationally networked revolutionaries. However, it remains true that in 1968 and particularly during the après-mai, French revolutionary groups also attempted to legitimize revolutionary violence, discursively positioned themselves in relation to revolutionary movements in the Third World, and practiced forms of intervention borrowed from armed movements, such as the use of the Molotov cocktail. Thus, a report by the French domestic surveillance services, the Renseignements généraux, concluded that a Molotov cocktail attack on a police commissariat in November of 1969 by a group of Maoist militants

revealed the intention of the Maoists to transpose into acts, in France, techniques of subversion that until know have only been truly applied abroad and that we can now envision systematically… In a general manner, we can affirm that the gauchiste elements…intend to put into practice a veritable urban guerrilla by actions will tend to demoralize the population and to discredit public power by creating a climate of insecurity.”757

Until now, the analysis of the broader public security culture of the 1968 French political class and police has often been sidelined either by presentations of public order as the idiosyncratic obsession of hardline Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin (b.1914), a virulent anti-communist who entered his post on June 12, 1968. Recent interpretations also depict official declarations

757 Report by the Renseignements généraux du 21 novembre 1969, APP, FD 162. La gauche prolétarienne avant la dissolution le 27 May 1970.* Italics mine.

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about “subversion” as examples of the political instrumentalization of language.758 A native of

Brittany, Marcellin had served as the undersecretary of Jules Moch, the anticommunist SFIO

Minister of Interior, who put down the miner strikes of 1947 and 1948. Marcellin had the dubious merit of receiving medals from both the Vichy regime and the Fourth Republic for his wartime service, and he had also been exposed to the theories of La guerre révolutionnaire that had flourished in the French military during the Algerian War. In the eyes of his detractors, Marcellin was obsessed by revolutionary movements and public order in the post-1968 period (“a dangerous maniac for order”).759 His tendency to view the “subversion” of Mai ’68 as an international conspiracy guided from outside of France evinced earlier Cold War discourses and earned him the hatred of the New Left and derision from subsequent historians. Needless to say, the reputation of

Raymond Marcellin as an illiberal, authoritarian flic was hardly unfounded: President De Gaulle quipped, enfin, Fouché, le vrai, upon his entry into the government, drawing parallels between his new Minister and the authoritarian Minister of the Napoleonic period, in what amounted to a simultaneous put-down of his inexperienced “liberal” predecessor Christian Fouchet. However, focus on Marcellin has typically precluded investigation of the more generalized discourses of the domestic security apparatus concerning threats to French national security and the source of

“violence” in demonstrations. That official public-facing discourse may be seen as part of an effort by the political authorities to engineer divisions between the political forces arrayed against them

758 For his later writings on May 1968, see Marcellin, L’importune vérité; Raymond Marcellin, La guerre politique (Paris: Plon, 1985). For official declarations as political interventions, see Bantigny, 1968, 182– 87.

759 Bensaïd, Une lente impatience, 204.

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in 1968, as Ludivine Bantigny has pointed out. However, this implies the instrumentalization of political language in a way that overlooks that there was no public-private dichotomy between what high officials said before the National Assembly in 1968 and the après-mai and their real analysis of the student movement.760

Well prior to the entry into action of Raymond Marcellin as the new Interior Minister in

June of 1968, officials explicitly articulated the premise that a revolutionary adversary organized from outside France was responsible for violence in protests in the course of the demonstrations of May 1968. In his declaration to the National Assembly on May 14, 1968, Prime Minister

Georges Pompidou himself attributed the violence of the events to the Mouvement du 22 mars at

Nanterre: the group had allegedly “erected violent direct action” into a “doctrine.”761 Similarly, on the night of May 24-25, the “liberal” Minister of the Interior, Christian Fouchet, identified violence as the work of “anarchists” organized for the “guerilla” and “criminal elements” (la pègre) from the “nether-regions of Paris.”762 In the après-mai, high functionaries in the Elysée also shared the premise that May 1968 protest had manifested a type of guérilla urbaine; in September of 1968, an “extremely urgent” request was conveyed on behalf of Bernard Tricot, the General Secretary of the Presidency of the Republic, for information about the measures that were being taken to

“adapt the forces of order to the methods of the urban guerrilla” (“On this occasion, it is appropriate to indicate how personnel in plainclothes, officers or agents of the police judiciare, can participate

760 Bantigny, 1968, 182–87.

761 Assemblée nationale 1ere séance du 14 mai 1968, 1770. Later, President Pompiduo would later describe May to television reporters as an act of “subversion.” Pompidou, Entretiens et discours, 1968-1974, 153.

762 Le Monde, May 26-27, 1968, 6.

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in anti-commando operations…such that the chances of prosecutions and convictions would be better in front of the repressive jurisdictions.”)763 Tricot was at this point one of the closest counselors of Charles De Gaulle.764

Marcellin reiterated the official discourse in his presentation to the National Assembly on

14 November 1968: the groupuscules were responsible for the rioting. “How were these demonstrations transformed into riots? Several revolutionary parties inspired by Trotskyism,

Castroism, or Maoism have organized on our territory for several years. These very sectarian revolutionary groups, activists,765 practice violence, include 1,000 to 3,000 militants each, and have as their objective the taking of political power.”766 Marcellin’s oratory concerning the tactics of the demonstrations evinced a similar analysis:

At the start of the demonstrations, the leaders parlay with the chiefs of the [police] service d’ordre and request their retreat – it will suffice to consult your memories to acknowledge how exact this analysis is. As they do not succeed, they reject the warnings (sommations) that are made of them and turn to the second phase of the action: provocations against the forces of order. These are done by the first ranks of the demonstrators who have a special equipment…and who, from insults to the launching of projectiles, submit the CRS, gendarmes, and police officers to a rude trial (à rude épreuve). Once the conditions of the confrontation are realized, the militants of the first rank who are actual strike forces (groupes de choc)…break away in front of the forces of order and expose the mass of students and high-schoolers in order that they experience the assaults of the [police].767

763 Paul Noirot-Cousson, CAB/VIII, “Note à l’attention de M. le Secrétaire Général pour la Police, ” Paris, Septembre 9, 1968, AN 19910852/2. Dossier Maintien de l’Ordre.*

764 Bernard Tricot, Mémoires (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1994).

765 The term activiste had been deployed by the government to designate right-wing extremists during the Algerian War of Independence.

766 Assemblée nationale 2e séance du 14 novembre 1968, 4404.

767 Ibid. 4405.

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To be sure, official discourse had an ideological function: it identified “violence” as an organized process initiated by the revolutionary left and presented police violence as reactive or secondary.

However, Marcellin also explicitly presented the “mass” of demonstrators as mere victims of the leadership—an analysis that tacitly broke from the interwar theories of mass psychology that presented demonstrators as a “hostile mass” and attributed violence to the being-in-the-group of the demonstrators.768 Similarly, Marcellin did not hesitate to identify a “profound similarity between the tactical methods and strategies of French and West German students” and to argue that on both sides of the Rhine, students were practicing the same principles. In fact, he essentially proposed that French students had only reproduced the SDS strategy. This ideological work redeployed the form of countersubversive Cold War discourse—international conspiracies, outside agitators, violence—while proposing new content for it.

In the Federal Republic of Germany, SDS has 3,000 militants…Rudi Dutschke claims that it is necessary to “constitute groups of twelve men to attack and work over the more virulent police.” He adds that the burning of cars, the throwing of Molotov cocktails must be considered weapons to be used in the last extremity but that one mustn’t hesitate to use them. The general principle of action is always the same: start from peaceful actions, provoke the intervention of the police, and then resist using violence. This is the infamous procedure of provocation, repression, revolt.769

This was a motivated oversimplification, but not an entirely unfounded one, since French

Trotskyist militants recognized the notion of using demonstrations as a means of unveiling the simultaneous authoritarianism and vulnerability of the state in their reportage on the

768 Ibid., 4407-4408.

769 Ibid.

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Osterdemonstrationen of 1968; and later gauchistes did justify their own confrontation tactics as means of ideological demystification of “the state” in the vein of SDS theory. Marcellin would regularly declare the responsibility of revolutionary militants and foreign agents for the events of

May 1968. However, in comparison to his West German counterparts, Marcellin was less worried about the potential resonances of police violence in the population—he scornfully dismissed student critiques of violence as “psychological struggle”—a barely-displaced reference to the notion of “psychological action” in counter-revolutionary war theory (“Psychological struggle is the very essence of subversion”).770

In the following section, I trace state-internal countersubversion discourses within the upper- and mid-level functionaries of the police and the gendarmerie in analyses of demonstrations during the events of May 1968 and the après-mai. I show how functionaries deployed claims about militant, violent actors as the bases for new emphases on the surveillance of the extrême-gauche and the introduction of aggressive, mobile public order units and novel tactics designed to secure arrests. Nevertheless, unproblematic success remained highly elusive because of the difficulty of practicing selective, effective action towards “militant protestors,” a source of frustrations as late as 1976. Identifying and apprehending militant demonstrators who operated on the margins of or embedded in the demonstration block proved extremely difficult when the “mass” of demonstrators did not de-solidarize themselves from the “violent” agents or when police were deterred from action by the mobility of protestors or the scale of protest violence.

770 Ibid. 4406.

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The proposition that public officials and police needed to engage in a countersubversive struggle was the basis for most of the controversial decisions the Interior Minister took, including the policy of extensive surveillance and infiltration of the radical left; the legal prohibition of groups like the JCR and UJC-ml in 1968 and the later dissolution of the GP and LC using interwar legislation against armed groups; the effort to disseminate the ideology of the state and stigmatize revolutionary militants as violent “vandals” (casseurs); the notorious public order legislation known as the anti-casseurs law;771 the de facto ban on Parisian protest from June 1968 until the early seventies; the effort to use police patrols to prevent any sort of assembly in Paris; and the decision to exclude “foreign” agents of “subversion” like Cohn-Bendit and West German SDS members from French territory during the events.772 In surveilling, disorganizing, and prosecuting

“revolutionary organizations” and frequently banning demonstrations by “subversive” or

“extremist” groups, Marcellin and his subordinates merely re-deployed interwar, Cold War, and anti-colonial discourses and practices that aimed to permanently disorganize revolutionary groups even as they adapted these to the peacetime conditions of French democracy.

Less has been said about the impact of countersubversion on the practices of the police once a banned demonstration by l’extrême-gauche was underway. In this regard, countersubversion effected a shift in public order operations towards apprehending and identifying militants. When Prefect of Police Maurice Grimaud promoted the slow accumulation of

771 Loi no 70-480 du 8 juin 1970 tendant à réprimer certaines formes nouvelles de délinquance, Journal officiel de la République française, Lois, June 9, 1970, 5324.

772 For broader decisions by Marcellin, see Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 51–60; Maurice Rajsfus, Mai 1968 : sous les pavés, la répression : juin 1968-mars 1974 (Paris: Le Cherche midi éditeur, c1998).

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overwhelming numbers of police and sustained, massive grenadage prior to the assaults on the barricades on the night of May 10, 1968,773 his orders relayed interwar modes of police intervention and its corresponding theories of threatening mass conduct, even as he attempted to foreclose on the dangers of a mass baton assault. The point was to disperse the mass of demonstrators using grenades and defer and restrict mass mêlée contact, but the aim of police practices in these operations remained mass dispersion and “defensive” operations. Similar police practices in Paris

1968, like mass arrests, impacted a considerable number of protestors during the May events, but most demonstrators were released rather than deferred to the Police judiciaire precisely because of a lack of concrete evidence.774 Counter-subversive modes of intervention re-valorized police mobility and the pursuit of physical contact for the purposes of apprehending specific groups of demonstrators portrayed as those responsible for the confrontations and of prosecuting them—a strategy initiated in May 1968 and reinforced in the après-mai. 775

Following his emphasis on “neutralizing” the revolutionaries, Marcellin did not hesitate to push for a more active iteration of police tactics once he took over as Interior Minister in June

1968. As he put it in his 1977 memoir, his decisions were influenced by dissatisfaction at the

“rigidity” of public order operations as he had observed them early in the May events: “On the street of Saint-André-des-Arts, boulevard Saint-Michel, boulevard Saint-German, etc., I saw static

773 Le Goff, Mai 68, 114.

774 May 3: 596 interpellations; May 6: 469 arrests; May 10-11: 521 arrests; May 24-25: 805 interpellations. Préfecture de police, “Analyse des évènements consécutifs aux manifestations des étudiants du 2 au 19 mai 1968.” AN 19800273/63; Préfecture de police, “Du 20 au 24 mai 1968,” AN 1980027/63.

775 Mathieu, “L’autre côté de la barricade,” 164. Mathieu does not recognize the counter-subversive basis of these practices and only describe them as more “offensive.”

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lines [barrages] of police facing lines of demonstrators respectively launching at one another tear gas grenades and rocks, bolts, and pieces of metal from tree grates. The rigidity of this [public order] tactic came from the centralization of the command at the Préfecture de police and also concerns about avoiding confrontations that might go badly…”776 Countersubversive assumptions led to a focus on the arrest and prosecution of smaller groups of protestors who committed infractions in protests as opposed to mass dispersion. In the après-mai, Marcellin repeatedly sent circulars to his subordinates reminding them that in the event of “violent demonstrations” organized by “extremist movements” or “rebellious professional organizations,” the authorities were required to proceed to the arrest of the demonstrators and transfer them to the Parquet.777 In sum, the identification of “violence” as the work of revolutionaries who practiced a domestic variant of la guérilla urbaine was a conceptual commonplace in instructions and reports on protest incidents by the Ministry of the Interior, the Police nationale, the Préfecture de Police, and the

Gendarmerie and implied the ascendancy of a counter-subversive imaginary for analyzing demonstrations. Thus, the concept of “subversion” (la subversion) was not merely an ideological one deployed to “mask” the violence of the state in public-facing discourse; it actually functioned in the reform of public order operations in the après-mai.

The premise that the agents of violence in demonstrations were in fact specific groups of

“subversives,” and the corresponding claim that the principles of the interwar maintenance of order were ill-adjusted to the tactics of those militants, was not entirely new in 1968. Political

776 Marcellin, L’importune vérité, 41.

777 Raymond Marcellin, Circulaire Nr 70-190, 2 April 1970, 19910852/2; Raymond Marcellin, Circulaire Nr 71-170, 22 March 1971, 19890672/43.

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interpretations of violent protest as the work of subversive groups like the PCF or anti-colonial movements and the need for steps towards more rapid, “flexible” modes of intervention to target militants had already been promoted in the Préfecture de police by figures like the anti-communist

Prefect of Police Jean Baylot and his ex-subordinate and later successor, the infamous Maurice

Papon, in the fifties and early sixties.778 Similarly, police reports of violent encounters during Cold

War social disorders occasionally attributed protest violence not to the hostile masses but to so- called commandos. Although largely invested in interwar mass psychology and the notion of offensive operations in protest contexts as mass dispersion, Parisian Police Commissioner and instructor Jean Schira observed in his 1951 police manual that a political (i.e., communist) demonstration included “convinced militants, équipes de choc, [and] the ‘hard core’ who crystallize around them the less dynamic elements”779—observations that had no place in classical theories of mass psychology. Similarly after the August-September 1955 social movement in

Nantes led to extended confrontations between demonstrators and the police, a working paper by a group commander of the Gendarmerie mobile concluded that in the course of social movements,

“The union leaders are often overwhelmed by the rank and file of their movement and extremist commandos who have nothing in common with the workers, voluntarily sabotage their movements, and violently attack the [police] service d’ordre with the unavowed intention to

778 For Baylot and anti-communism, Jean Baylot, “Les libertés publiques : leurs garanties, leurs limites,” BnF FM BAYLOT IMPR-1538 (Paris, 1955); Blanchard, La Police Parisienne et Les Algériens, 1944- 1962. Papon had encountered French revolutionary war theory during his time in colonial administration and was influenced by “political” interpretations of Algerian and French anti-war demonstrations as the work of subversive forces like the FLN and the PCF. Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962; House and MacMaster, Paris 1961.

779 Schira, Principes généraux d’action, 96.

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provoke brutal reactions that will exasperate the worker world…The extremist commandos discussed above are instructed in revolutionary techniques and tactics in ‘special schools’ by men rendered competent in the international exercise of the insurrection (émeute).”780 Other reports on the Nantes emergency complained of protest forms that would later be deployed in Mai-June 1968, including the practice of harassing blockades of police, retreating during a charge, and promptly reassembling once the police deployed another blockade.781 Analyses that imputed protest violence to the work of leftist revolutionaries circa 1968 were the continuation of this counter-subversion analysis, one that intrinsically presented the majority of demonstrators or “sympathizers” as non- threatening and directed police to focus their coercive action on hardened militants. In this respect, the main novelty of public security discourse after 1968 was that officials frequently conceived of leftist protest as a form of guérilla urbaine in the vein of Carlos Marighella and the Tupamaros of

Uruguay.

Mobile emergency groups were reinforced within the police during the après-mai on the basis of claims that the state had to riposte the mobile tactics of revolutionary groups. Thus, a report issuing from contacts between the DET, the Public Security bureau of the Police nationale, and the Préfecture de police in June and July of 1968 noted that “The fluidity of the demonstrators…imposed on [the police] the setting up of a tactical riposte à posteriori...”782

780 Chef d’Escadrons Bognel, Cdt de le 1er groupe d’escadrons de la 1ère Légion Ter de la Gendarmerie mobile, “Étude sur l’escadron de Gendarmerie mobile en maintien de l’ordre (Métropole à l’exclusion de Paris),” December 10. 1955, 17, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1 184225.

781 Chef d’Escadrons Belloc, “Rapport sur des enseignement découlant des services du Maintien de l’ordre executes à Nantes en Août en Septembre 1955,” Arras, October 26, 1955, 3, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1 184225.

782 Direction des écoles et techniques de la police, 3ème bureau, “Le renforcement des moyens d’action de la police nationale,” (July 1968), 5, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1 307577*.

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Sections of the Compagnies d’intervention de la Préfecture de police were deemed to have done this work tolerably well in May 1968, and the Police nationale subsequently introduced new mobile formations throughout the Police urbaine—the Formations d’intervention des corps urbains (FICU).783 As a January 1969 note destined for the General Secretary of the Police noted, the purpose of these formations was to allow police to reduce the number of “operative” revolutionary militants by securing arrests (“If the adversary does not have at their disposition unlimited numbers for the strategy of replacement and if their degree of hostility, their mordant, count for more than their astuteness, the intervention force, on its side, must above all deploy a certain power of intimidation, be tactical…possess good technique, and above all operate rapidly.”)784 In order to ensure the further operational capacity of the police, Marcellin also created an interagency groupe d’évaluation opérationnelle whose aim was to analyze the tactics of revolutionary groups and propose revisions to the maintenance of order. The group started meeting

June of 1969.785

In the Préfecture de police, police leadership had already reinforced tactics derived from the counter-subversive imaginary during the 1968 events. As Lilian Mathieu notes, the instructions of the police hierarchy on May 23, 1968 focused on restricting the amplitude of potential confrontations involving police and protestors through the “defensive” use of tear gas grenades

783 For the FICU, AN 19920427/34.*

784 Author unknown, “Création d’unités d’intervention de maintien de l’ordre dans les corps urbains,” Paris, January 31, 1969, AN 19920427/34.* Cf. Jacques Aubert, S.G.P./IV/3511 Arrêté relatif à la création de sections et compagnies d’intervention dans les corps urbains de sécurité publique, Paris, July 3, 1969, AN 19920427/34*.

785 Raymond Marcellin, Cabinet, SGP/VI 3015, “Emploi des forces de maintien de l’ordre,” June 3, 1969, AN, 19910852/2. Dossier Maintien de l’Ordre.*

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against stone throwing students and their barricades, followed by deployments of water cannon and police baton assaults.786 These practices originated in the imaginary of “mass” intervention and corresponding theories of collective violence. Facing 2,000 demonstrators determined to confront the police on May 24, 1968, the “second night of the barricades,” the Parisian police had saturated the sector of operations for fifty minutes using “tear gas,” prior to sending police behind the water cannon and bulldozers to assault the barricades. The Directeur général de la Police municipale described the grenadage as a “vast operation.”787 However, following the May 24 confrontations,

Grimaud had decided to “pass onto the offensive by neutralizing those that appeared to be the principal agents of the radicalization of the movement.” To accomplish this, the Préfecture de police deployed undercover police from the Renseignements généraux and the Police judiciaire according to instructions from Maurice Grimaud on May 25 to target the “inorganized non-student elements” and “organized elements.”788 Pace Lilian Mathieu, the real distinction between these types of operations was not that between “defensive” and “offensive” modes of intervention but between mass interventions modelled on the interwar imaginary of the maintenance of order and interventions organized around the targeted pursuit of “subversives” and “criminals”—groups that

Maurice Grimaud referred to more discreetly as éléments organisés and éléments incontrôlées.

The integration of new types of intervention directed against “subversives” into the ordinary operations of the Municipal Police continued unabated in the après-mai. Counter-

786 Mathieu, “L’autre côté de la barricade,” 160–61.

787 Rapport du DGPM à Monsieur le Préfet de Police, “Action de la Police Municipale au cours des événements.” Cited in Mathieu, 161.

788 Mathieu, “L’autre côté de la barricade,” 162.

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subversive public order policing concepts were stabilized by the Fall 1969 Règlement provisoire de la Police municipale, a guide intended for officers and high functionaries of the Parisian police and covered by the code of professional secrecy. In his introduction to the document, the Prefect explained that the new guide was needed because of recent police “modernization” and tactical endeavors “to adapt the modalities of [police] actions to the new forms of subversion and disorders” in response to the May 1968 events.789

Among the novelties promoted by the Préfecture de police, two in particular evince the countersubversive turn to surveillance and mobility: the integration of a twenty-five man section of undercover officers into each of the 14 Parisian Compagnies d’intervention–the standard

Parisian formations for the maintenance of order and the construction of a specialized group of motorcycle-mounted police.790 Clearly imagined as “anti-commandos,” members of these formations received special training in unarmed self-defense and direction in the use of the rubber baton, indicating that countersubversion rehabilitated direct physical contact against designated militants even as the police sought to avoid, defer, and circumscribe mass physical interventions against the entire demonstration.791

789 Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire.

790 The 14 Compagnies d’intervention were units deploying from the nine administrative territories in Paris and the Parisian region, or Compagnies de district. Depending on the level of threat, Compagnies d’intervention deployed from 122 to 165 men in 3-6 sections of 25 men plus the undercover and motorcycle mounted section. For the organization of the Parisian police, see Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962; Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire, 4–7; Provenzano, “Beyond the Matraque,” 588–89. The Compagnies d’intervention were introduced after the 28 May 1952 Ridgway demonstration in Paris; “Rapport au nom de la 2e Commission sur le fonctionnement de la Préfectture de police au cours de l’année 1953” (Conseil Municipal de Paris, 1954), Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville.

791 Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire, 226–27.

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According the Règlement, the fundamental principle of the undercover police of the districts was that of “camouflage,” but police were also supposed to known the urban geography of their “sector of operations.”792 The primary tasks of the undercover uniformed police were observation, surveillance, and the transmission of information on the course of demonstrations to the higher echelons of the police via rapidly placed phone calls to the Préfecture. In theory, undercover police were also supposed to discern the presence of “violent” actors in the demonstration and to promptly convey relevant information via word of mouth, telephone calls, or signals to uniformed police, but observateurs en civil were also trained to intervene physically to “neutralize” the “dangerous demonstrators” or “violent agitators,” an admittedly dangerous task in the context of demonstrations.793 The undercover observer concept transposed an imperative from Cold War counterespionage—identify and neutralize the “subversives”—onto public order operations. Indeed, the very language of the manual—“neutralize,” “sector of operations”— betrayed the origins of these tactical concepts.

The Parisian municipal police also manifested the counter-subversion concept and its corresponding emphasis on targeting revolutionary militants in the creation of the voltigeurs— motorcycle-mounted police units that accompanied each of the Parisian Compagnies d’intervention on deployment and that formed a unit of 53 men as of November of 1969. Marcellin would specifically take credit for these formations in his 1978 memoirs, boasting that their interventions rapidly put gauchistes to flight.794 The motorcycle teams appear to have originated in

792 Ibid., 225–26.

793 Ibid., 227–28.

794 Marcellin, L’importune vérité, 42–43. 337 338

a proposal by Paul Cousseran, the cabinet director for the Sécrétaire général pour la police, to study the introduction of armed, mobile sections of the police “using mopeds and moving in groups of 10 or 20…helmeted and armed but endowed with a light outfit very similar to that of our troublemakers,” in the spring of 1969.795 These units, mounted in pairs on motorcycles, were tasked to detect “elements” that had not joined the demonstration train or hostile assemblies; to provide surveillance to prevent the outflanking of mass formations of the uniformed police; and to cover the operations of the observateurs en civil. However, the motorcycle-mounted police were also deployed for “commando [!] actions on the rear of the masses of demonstrators” and to

“intervene as a counter-commando (contre-commando), on the condition of being in sufficient numbers, against mobile groups of aggressive militants.”796 Later designated the FLIR (formation légère d’intervention rapide) this unit epitomized the effort of the Parisian Préfecture to propose new, specialized squads specifically designed to confront gauchistes imagined as quasi- insurgents.797

The Police nationale and the Préfecture de police de Paris were not the only organizations pressing for mobile interventions on the basis of countersubversive analyses that presented revolutionary militants organized in small, mobile groups for street-fighting as a serious threat to public order. Divisional General Demettre, Commander of the Gendarmerie for the Parisian

795 Paul Cousseran, Note pour M. Gandouin, Directeur des Écoles et des Techniques, SGP/II 1178, March 7, 1969, 19910852/2.( Dossier Maintien de l’Ordre

796 Préfecture de police, Règlement provisoire, 226–27.

797 A pair of voltigeurs were responsible for the affaire Oussekine, the killing of student Malik Oussekine during a demonstration on the night of December 5-6, 1986.

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Region, concluded in a June 16 report that “The forces of order in the course of the demonstrations of May and June 1968 encountered a new subtle, and organized adversary, who adopted hitherto unused forms of subversive action.”798 Demettre reiterated the observation that the actions of the demonstrators had included both mêlée tactics in the initial phases of the events and the constitution of flexible, mobile groups that prioritized distant harassment of the security forces and retreat, and simultaneously emphasized the sophistication of the revolutionaries and their purported direction by international revolutionary forces: “[the adversary] possesses, moreover, a technique of barricade combat…that it will certainly ameliorate in light of the latest information and directives of the Fourth International.”799 These observations led directly to demands for tactical innovations by the Gendarmerie: “On the tactical level, it can no longer be a question of contenting ourselves exclusively with frontal actions and outdated procedures. Maneuver must be the rule.”800 The new tactics that were proposed relied, often implicitly, on the principles behind contemporary military operations—mobility, aggression, and small-group initiative. In this optic, the momentary dispersion of a demonstration was not enough; the state needed to be able to apprehend the adversary and prosecute militants in order to reduce the revolutionary ranks. As

Demettre wrote, “If maneuver is indispensable in the actual conduct of operations of the maintenance of order, it has equally appeared that this maneuver must be led with a constant agenda of aggressiveness and ferocity [mordant] in a way that never leaves demonstrators any

798 Général de Division Démettre, Commandement régionale de la Gendarmerie nationale, 1ère Région Militaire, “Action de la Gendarmerie au maintien de l’ordre,” N 7873/2-III, Paris, June 16, 1968, 1, SHD, GD 2007 ZM 1 307577*.

799 Ibid., 2

800 Ibid. Emphasis in document.

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respite.” In conclusion, the maintenance of order required a complete refoundation, a “new doctrine.” As Demettre put it, “It’s on this condition alone that public order will be maintained under the best conditions in the face of emerging (naissants) revolutionary movements already conscious of their force.”)801 In the appraisals of contemporary security functionaries, the revolutionary movements that had emerged in 1968 required not merely new armament, but new tactical dispositions to supersede police doctrine inherited from the interwar period.

The Demettre report launched an extended appraisal of principles and tactics of the French gendarmerie in the maintenance of order that would achieve doctrinal sanctification in the later

1975 Instruction sur les opérations de maintien de l’ordre menées par la Gendarmerie. In June of

1968, Demettre successfully requested the composition of a commission to reconceptualize the maintenance of order by the Gendarmerie mobile and proposed Colonel Héraud of the First

Armored Group of the Gendarmerie mobile as its President.802 In October of 1968, the Commission concluded that although “masses” would have to be met by “masses,” it would be imperative “to respond to harassment and diversion actions through mobility, dynamism, and ferocity

(mordant).”803 Accordingly, the commission recommended that each eighty-member squadron of the Gendarmerie mobile ought be built around a core of “athletic, well-trained” men, “either having received or able to receive commando training.” This core group would operate as a select

801 Ibid., 4.

802 Le Général de Division Demettre, Commandant régional de la Gendarmerie nationale à Paris à M. the Ministre des Armées, Direction de la Gendarmerie et de la Justice Militaire, Cabinet, 06605/2-III, Paris, June 18, 1968. SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/190055*.

803 Colonel Héraud, Président de la Commission Maintien de l’Ordre, Groupement blindé de Gendarmerie mobile, “Rapport d’ensemble de la Commission,” No 1533/2, Versailles, October 11, 1968, 6 SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/190055*.

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intervention team (équipe léger d’intervention) in order to undertake arrest attempts and actions like the suppression of projectile-throwing protestors on rooftops. When embedded in a single

Escadron de gendarmerie mobile (EGM), the presence of the commando would promote

“initiative” and “dynamism.”804 The major implication of the report was that the modes of action of the maintenance of order conserved from the interwar period were no longer sufficient to counter revolutionary militants practicing a new culture of protest. Divisional General Demettre put it succinctly in a covering letter to the operations bureau of the Gendarmerie mobile that conveyed his unconditional approval for the work of the commission: “the 1930 instruction on the maintenance of order must be entirely revisited.”805 The 1975 Instruction accordingly stipulated members of each squadron were to receive specialized training to “neutralize” dangerous individuals and groups.

High-ranking functionaries of the CRS deployed similar claims about protestors and pursued higher mobility, albeit taking a more conservative approach. Thus, already the Synthesis of reports from the CRS on May 1968 listed the “extreme mobility” of the protestors, the

“spontaneity of certain assemblies,” and “the supervision [encadrement] of certain groups of rioters [émeutiers] by the specialists of street combat [combats de rue]” as operational difficulties encountered in May and June 1968.806 Regional and company commanders of the CRS from 1968 through the seventies often complained that their typical modes of action did not allow the forces

804 Ibid., 7-8.

805 Le Général de Division Demettre, CRGN à Paris to the BTOE, “Commission ‘Maintien de l’ordre,’” Paris, October 22, 1968, 1 SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/190055*.

806 Direction des écoles et techniques de la police nationale, Service d’études et d’informations techniques, “Maintien de l’ordre public par les Compagnies républicaines de sécurité au cours des évènements de mai et juin 1968, ” 1, AN 19910852/6.* 341 342

of order to apprehend significant numbers of protestors based on “the urban guerrilla” (guérilla urbaine). Thus, a high-level synthesis of operational reports from 1970 approved and circulated by CRS General Director Henri Mir in June of 1971—covering the “hot summer” (été chaud) of

1970—noted general satisfaction that the practices of the interwar maintenance of order were effective for managing self-regulated protests, but declared broad consensus among subordinates that police operations were troubled by the “guerrilla” practices of the extrême-gauche.

Of course, the traditional demonstration composed of cortèges and marches of several thousand persons, is still observed, but, well-organized by its own service d’ordre, it does not pose particular problems for the use of our means and habitual procedures of [the maintenance of order].

But the commanders of [operational groups] and company leaders very clearly affirm that the new forms of [militant] action born in May 1968 have continued to perfect themselves against the forces of order in the course of the operations of the maintenance of order in 1970 and even sometimes place them in difficulty; in effect, the tactic adopted is based on the use of methods inspired by the guerrilla, led by disciplined, combative adversaries constituted in commandos of a dozen well-protected and well-armed individuals; the latter confront the forces of order by all types of harassment and very rapidly erect barricades that they generally set fire to and use to cover and protect themselves in order to cause all sorts of depredations.

These practices, which have proven very effective at isolating the forces of the police and immobilizing them in large numbers, are no longer specifically the acts of young demonstrators…807

In short, French security functionaries agreed in the après-mai that the allegedly new mode of militant intervention, not incorrectly ascribed to the modelling of radical protest tactics on Third

World insurgency, constituted the main threat to public security. Soixante-huitard protest frequently pinned down and immobilized large numbers of police. By the early après-mai, police

807 CRS 2nd division, Synthèse des Comptes-rendus Techniques en 1970, Paris, June 1, 1971, 3; enclosure in Henri Mir, Note pour MM. Les Commandants de Groupement des Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, MM. Les Commandants de Compagnie, Paris, June 4, 1971, AN 19890672/43*. Emphasis in the original. 342 343

had begun to initiate a series of operational turns framed around the principle of targeted, rapid, and aggressive interventions against these groups.

Regardless, the après-mai practices of gauchiste groups would continue to demonstrate the limitations of the interwar model of mass protest policing and solicit similar analyses of the need for more flexible police tactics. How troubled police, gendarmes, and their superiors in the Interior

Ministry and Ministry of Defense often were in the face of the new model of militancy emerging around May 1968, and despite the push toward mobility, might be illustrated by an admittedly minor case from the après-mai. In the first week of June 1970, as the government sought to arrest and prosecute members of the Gauche prolétarienne, a squadron of mobile gendarmes and company of the CRS arrived at the University of Grenoble. Their aim was to aid the local judicial police in their efforts to locate and apprehend Claire Brière-Blanchet and Pierre Blanchet, two prominent local members of the Maoist group. The mission was a failure, for the Blanchets successfully eluded their pursuers; moreover, leftist students forced an embarrassing police retreat from the university campus. According to the subsequent police report, within 45 minutes of the police intervention in the early evening, some 400 to 500 gauchistes began to aggregate around the gendarmes stationed at the university restaurant, first hurling insults and then throwing stones.808 The local company of the CRS quit the site to return to its vehicles, covered by a squadron of mobile gendarmes; left in a tenuous position, the latter used tear gas and explosive, offensive grenades (grenades offensives) to cover their retreat. The report by the CRS commander rather

808 Jean Recoche, “Rapport technique de fin de service : operation de maintien de l’ordre du 3 juin à Grenoble,” Grenoble, 4 juin 1970, AN 19870157/11*.

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defensively maintained that the withdrawal had been orderly:809 the captain of the squadron of the

Gendarmerie mobile noted that retreat had been a “difficult operation since, harassed without interruption by the demonstrators [one part of the unit] was unable to extricate itself to rejoin the vehicles two or three hundred meters away…”810 Meanwhile, according to the local police commissioner, “[police] charges would have only encountered an empty place (vide)…it would have been not only dangerous, but above all ineffective to act otherwise.” Together, the CRS and gendarmerie suffered thirty-one injured, including a member of the CRS who received a fractured arm.811

Another outrage was yet in store. On the evening of June 4, 1970, local leftists constructed barricades across the national highway near the university, an act of obstruction that rendered future confrontations inevitable. The CRS and Gendarmerie mobile were ordered to disengage the barricade in the middle of the night, and the outcome of the incident was hardly entirely satisfactory from the perspective of the security forces. Although the barricade was eventually dismantled, the summary section of the police analytical report is instructive: in the course of the confrontation, not a single demonstrator was reported apprehended but over 500 tear gas grenades were used, and the CRS reported 13 injured, with two police officers hospitalized for one and three months, respectively. One member of the CRS, according to his commander, “received a Molotov

809 Ibid. A similar confrontation at the campus of Nanterre had likewise led to similar humiliating incidents for a squadron of the gendarmerie in March of 1970. SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/022440*.

810 Capitaine Testevuide, Commandant l’Escadron 10/15 de Gendarmerie mobile, “Action de la Gendarmerie mobile au maintien de l’ordre le 3 juin 1970 - Campus Universitaire de GRENOBLE,” 56/4, Grenoble, June 4, 1970, 5, AN 19920646/8*.

811 Jacques Tourne, Commissaire Divisionnaire Commissaire Central à M. Le Préfet de l’Isère, Cabinet. “Opération de contrôle des occupants de la Résidence Berlioz, le Mercredi 3 Juin 1970,” Grenoble, June 5, 1970, 2, AN 19920646/8*. 344 345

cocktail directly in the face that caused him serious facial injuries.”812 The operation had eventually set two Compagnies républicaines de sécurité and two squadrons of the Gendarmerie mobile— around 400 police officers—against an estimated 100 to 150 demonstrators allegedly acting in groups of seven or eight.813 Stating the obvious, the reporting officer remarked that “The techniques and means of the forces of order are not very adapted to this type of operation…physical contact is always refused, dispersion rapid and inevitable, the [militant] action very dispersed and spectacular and involves only a few elements and very few risks [to the adversary].”814

As the report by Group Commander Paul David commanding the operational group of

Grenoble put it in mid-June 1970, “It appears in light of experience that the extremist movements conduct a new form of struggle, the urban guerrilla…the sporadic action of commandos that perpetuate acts of vandalism in order to then disappear in an anonymous population when the police forces approach, renders their intervention more difficult and moreover, less effective.”815

Furthering this analysis, the Group Commander would describe the activity of groups of 10-20 militants who “harassed” the forces of order while avoiding physical contact; engendered incidents in public in order to lure in the forces of order and regrouped elsewhere in order to conduct another action; surveilled police movements, possibly by dialing in to police frequencies; and took cover

812 Note in dossier entitled C.R.T. Concernant le M.O. Grenoble, du 6 mai au 17 juin, AN 19870157/11*.

813 Jean Recoche, Rapport technique de fin de service à Grenoble, June 12, 1970, N2/GO, “Maintien de l’ordre à Grenoble les 4 et 5 juin 1970,” AN 19870157/11.*

814 Ibid., 7.

815 Paul David, Commandant de Groupement, “Service d’ordre: Maintien d’ordre à Grenoble du 5 juin 12h00 au 17 juin 1970 20h,” Rapport technique de fin de service établi, Marseille June 19, 1970, 17, AN 19870157/11.*

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in larger groups of citizens “in order that police intervention shall be unfavorably judged by the public.”816 The CRS company had allegedly fractured the company into sections (groups of 25) in order to capture “the elements or groupuscules that had infiltrated [!] the perimeter.”817 In short, the police intervention borrowed from the tactical imaginary of the counter-guerrilla.818

Nevertheless, efforts to restructure the governance of protest based on new security premises proved to be difficult to operationalize in practice, as is illustrated by a second round of militant interventions at the University of Grenoble, in May of 1976. In this case, both the commander of the CRS and the Commissioner of the local Police urbaine deployed counter- revolutionary modes of analysis even as they noted that it proved highly difficult to arrest revolutionary militants. In rather more dramatic incidents than those at the Grenoble university campus in June 1970, some 200-300 militants would once again build barricades on the national highway on April 11-12, 1976 and engender a 10-hour confrontation in which helmeted, masked revolutionaries harassed a unit of 72 members of CRS 47 (Grenoble), and 80 Urban Police, later reinforced by two 75-men units of the Gendarmerie mobile and another CRS.819 For his part, the

Departmental Director of the Urban Police of the Isère region would report in a memorandum on the “urban guerrilla techniques” of leftist “commandos” that although contemporary protestors were less numerous than those of the early après-mai, the former were more aggressive, organized,

816 Ibid. 18.

817 Ibid.

818 For the counter-guerrilla, see État-major de l’armée, Instruction contre-guerilla dans le cadre du maintien de l’ordre. TTA 123, 1956.

819 Jean-Pierre Guercin, Commandant la CRS n° 47, Grenoble, Rapport technique de fin de service : aintien de l’ordre à Grenoble, les 11 et 12 mai 1976, Grenoble, May 14, 1976, AN 19870157/27*.

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and well-equipped. The tactic, however, was the same: “After having attacked the Police forces, the groups disperse in order to flee, then reconstitute themselves or divide again according to a harassment tactic that frequently fixes [in place] important numbers [of police]…very mobile, aggressive demonstrators, helmeted, using balaclavas, armed with crowbars, and carrying Molotov cocktails, stones, bolts, and slings, represent a serious danger for public order.820 Of a total of 22 interpellations, only four persons were apprehended in flagrant délit and could be immediately brought before a tribunal.821 As if to signal the enduring reliance of the police on mass dispersion techniques even when these proved largely inoperative, the security forces had deployed 900 “tear gas” grenades and 102 offensive grenades.822 Roger Gros reported 15 injured, including “seven gravely wounded” among the two sections of the CRS.823

As the above example points up, after a brief lull following the auto-dissolution of the GP and the dissolution of the Trotskyist LC by the Interior Ministry in June 1973, violent incidents during demonstrations in 1975 and 1976 were the source of a second period of internal re- evaluation of police practices. Police once again deployed counter-subversive analysis, emphasized mobility and securing the arrest of militants, and sustained the effort to institutionalize mobile practices that extended beyond mass dispersion. Under the tenure of Michel Poniatowksi

820 C. Galmiche, Le Commissaire Divisionnaire Directeur Départemental des polices urbaines de l’Isère, “A/s des techniques de la guérilla urbaine adoptées par les groupes gauchistes et de la nécessité du renforcement en effectifs et moyens du Corps Urbain de Grenoble,” Grenoble, May 12, 1976, 4, in AN 19900166/1*.

821 Guercin, “Maintien de l’ordre à Grenoble, les 11 et 12 mai 1976,” 8-9.

822 C. Galmiche, “A/s des techniques de la guérilla urbaine,” 2.

823 Roger Gros, Chef de Service des CRS, “Information sur l’utilisation des unites, Fiche analytique de mai 1976, Paris, 29 June 1976, 37 in file series AN 19890466/12.* 347 348

in the Interior Ministry at the Hôtel de Beauvau, officials reactivated counter-subversive analysis and attendant claims that police and gendarmes had to become more mobile in the pursuit and arrest of revolutionary militants and casseurs in the course of the operations of the maintenance of order. Showing that subversion was not the idiosyncratic obsession of Raymond Marcellin, Michel

Poniatowksi likewise interpreted the anti-nuclear movements of the seventies through the lens of revolutionary militancy: thus, in July of 1975, his instructions to metropolitan Prefects would present the ecological movement as a mere “pretext” for gauchiste subversion: “It is necessary, in the present circumstances, to effectively counteract the systematic efforts at contestation and agitation that are organized by gauchiste and extremist movements for political ends and not for a true defense of the environment or of our quality of life.”824 Rather than liberalizing the practices of state, Poniatowski would frequently send circulars reminding both departmental Prefects and the Prefect of Police in Paris that Marcellin’s directives for the maintenance of public order remained in force.

The reactivation of countersubversion discourse in the mid-seventies was directly related to the consolidation of demands for a more “operational” practice of the police and to complaints that dispersion was not a sufficient criterion for successful police intervention in protests. Often, as in the case of Marcellin, the countersubversive imaginary was bound to an emphasis on punishing violators of the law. One day after the May 1, 1975 demonstrations in Paris, Poniatowski wrote to his subordinates to complain about the tactics of the police: “I have observed that in the operations of the maintenance of order the police limit their action to the dispersion of

824 Michel Poniatowski, Circulaire 75-385, Paris, July 29, 1975, AN 19920230/6.

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demonstrators and the protection of buildings and goods…you will give instructions to the representatives of the forces of order in order that officers of the Police judiciaire shall be present on the spot and in order that demonstrators that have committed infractions shall be interpellated and sent to the parquet.”825 One week after another Parisian demonstrations in September of 1975 led to incidents on the Champs Elysées, Poniatowski sent another circular that redeployed the logic of the Marcellin interior ministry in the après-mai:

The methods and means utilized by the forces of the maintenance of order are ill-adapted to the new form that violent demonstrations take in public space, both in urban and rural zones. The units of the Police and the Gendarmerie remain very static in the face of harassment by mobile groups of demonstrators that are more and more disciplined and equipped. This situation must end. The forces of the maintenance of order must return to more mobile dispositions and show a more tactical mentality (ésprit plus manouvrier).826

At the end of the month, the Interior Minister would write to his subordinates complaining once again that in spite of his reminder that the instructions of his predecessor concerning violent demonstrations were to be strictly applied, “I notice that the number of individuals arrested on the occasion of demonstrations is low (faible) and sometimes even zero…To me, it is inadmissible that in the course of violent demonstrations where important damages are committed and functionaries are injured, no arrest of the authors of these crimes can be effected.”827 Like his predecessor, Poniatowski pressured departmental Prefects and the Police nationale to become more “operational”—and deliver more arrests that led to criminal convictions—rather than to simply disperse violent demonstrations.

825 Michel Poniatowski, Circulaire 75-230, Paris, May 2, 1975. AN 19920230/6.

826 Michel Poniatowski, Circulaire 15-505, Paris, October 7, 1975, AN 19920230/6.

827 Michel Poniatowski, Circulaire 75-547, Paris, October 29, 1975, AN 19920230/6. 349 350

Building on prevailing dissatisfaction and the improvisation of more mobile tactics in the early seventies, in 1975 and 1976, the high command of the Gendarmerie and members of the central direction of the CRS in turn intensified the priority on mobility. Within the Gendarmerie mobile, this effort was well underway, as we have seen. Inside the CRS, three major advocates of higher operational capacity were the Chief of Services Roger Gros, his adjunct Robert Pinaud, and Robert

Le Texier of the 4th bureau; each would assume the post of Central Director of the CRS in the seventies. As in the rival units of the Gendarmerie, in the CRS, the conviction that the security forces opposed a new style of guerrilla protest—not mass violence but the work of specialists of disorder—justified a concerted effort to prioritize the operational ability of the units to coerce, pursue, and apprehend violent actors but to spare ordinary demonstrators from harm.

Official instructions and police reports on confrontational protests in 1975 and 1976 routinely demanded flexible, rapid interventions. Already in the aftermath of the May Day 1975 demonstration in Paris—when “groups organized as commando teams” had vandalized the commissariat of the 20th arrondissement and the CRS intervention had only yielded one arrest—, the leader of the Parisian regional operational group, Charles Chevallier, remarked that “[t]he heavily equipped forces of order are almost never in a condition to make arrests and only rarely find themselves in contact against groups that dissolve themselves into the crowd when the police forces intervene...it is necessary to augment the mobility of the intervention forces.”828 In the aftermath of the September 1975 demonstrations in Paris, the same officer wrote an even more

828 Rapport technique de fin de service établi par le commandant de groupement Chevallier Charles, commandant le groupement opérationnel de la région parisienne, “Maintien de l’ordre public à Paris le samedi 3 mai 1975,” CRS/CRG 1/2/N°1312, Vélizy, May 13, 1975, 7, AN 19870157/23*.

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embittered report about the inability of the police forces to apprehend the actual casseurs ,despite a sizeable police presence.

It’s been proven that in the current context a few determined commandos (we might speak of 20 commandos of about twenty individuals each) can generate very serious depredations, despite the presence of a numerous deployment (dispositif) by the forces of order…829

The primary reason for the relative impossibility of counteracting the action of these delinquants (casseurs) resides, in my opinion, in the slowness of the units (particularly those of the CRS and the squadrons of the Gendarmerie mobile)…

The Préfecture de police disposes of a FLIR (light rapid intervention force) …very effective at interpellating dangerous elements at the end of a demonstration. Despite the double danger of these formations (disproportionate dispersion and the risk of uncontrolled actions) (actions incontrôlées) it is necessary to multiply [these] light formations. These alone are capable of “neutralizing” the commandos of the “windowbreakers” (casseurs).830

Although well aware that the intrusion of units practicing counter-subversion logic could lead to intervention by police formations that were too small and also entailed the risk of uncontrolled initiatives from police officers, Chevallier was convinced of the necessity of specialized units for

“neutralizing” the adversary. Although discourses identifying protesting adversaries and organized, guerrilla actors were evident in the analyses of the CRS as early as 1968, in the years

1975-1976, the discourse of countersubversion once again saturated the highest institutional levels of the Police nationale. The logical corollary—pursuit and apprehension by counter-specialists— would not fail to become an institutional priority again; thus, in the spring of 1976, the Adjutant

Group Commander addressed a letter to CRS commanders that acknowledged that recent events

829 Rapport technique de fin de service établi par le commandant de groupement CHEVALLIER Charles, commandant le groupement opérationnel permanent pour la région parisienne, Service d’ordre. Maintien de l’ordre à Paris les [26-28] septembre 1975, CRS/CRG/1/2/N°2665, 18, AN 19870157/23*.

830 Ibid., 19-20. Emphasis in original.

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had demonstrated the “growing inadaptation of the ‘classic’ techniques” and demanded input on new practices:

[I]t has appeared that in the majority of cases the ‘classic’ procedures, reposing on compact formations proposed as examples in the [1965] technical notice on the maintenance of order, were no longer sufficient…It’s not an issue of considering them as outmoded. It is necessary only to dispose of elements susceptible of discerning punctual actions, adapted to the particular forms of aggression…In effect, it happens far too often that a handful of ‘uncontrolled elements’…have successfully led, or led the forces of order, to create a veritable atmosphere of rebellion by ill-adapted or disproportionate actions…831

This framework prioritized apprehension of the presumed minority of “violent elements” but also promised to “secure” those allegedly foreign to the disorder. By implication, it satisfied the demands of one dimension of the soixante-huitard critique—the assertion that police operations inevitably involved indiscriminate violence against innocent demonstrators or bystanders. The new tactics, in theory at least, would also allow the police to minimize interventions that would only further trouble public order in a vicious cycle of escalation and counter-escalation. In

December of 1975, Director of Public Security André Delmas wrote approvingly of the deployment of small groups of undercover police to apprehend militants at Ajaccio in Corsica as an alternative to the mass interventions of units of the CRS and gendarmerie. According to Delmas, procedures like these had allowed the arrest and conviction of the “true culprits” and the “absence of any violence” towards uninvolved parties. 832 Similarly, in an analysis for the CRS in September of 1976, Robert Gros claimed that the first semester of the new year had confirmed the previous

831 Robert Pinaud, Commandant de Groupement Adjoint, Service des CRS, Bureau Exploitation, PN/SP/CRS/4/N°1911, Information sur l’utilisation des unités. - Fiche semestrielle de synthèse (2e semester 1975), Paris, March 12, 1976, AN 19890466/12.*

832 André Delmas, Préfet Directeur Central de la Sécurité publique, Information sur l’utilisation des unités - Fiche analytique de décembre 1975, Paris, February 17, 1976, PN/SP/CRS/4/N°1218, 19890466/12*. Italics in original.

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decline of “mass violence” and the emergence of violence by a militant minority. Gros emphasized the importance of “encirclement” operations as opposed to frontal actions of mass dispersion in order to allow arrests.833 These insights were subtended by a affirmations from the countersubversive imaginary: as Gros summarized it, “the majority of incidents requiring the intervention of the CRS for several years have been the actions of a very active minority of

‘specialists of disorder.’”834 In the ensuing months, the group commanders of the CRS were solicited for proposals for improving the operational capacity of their units. As the ensuing synthesis noted, the group commanders unanimously requested the introduction of “specialized elements” in each CRS in order “to permit the neutralization of agitators evolving in small, very mobile groups” and to organize the riposte against armed ambushers.835 These proposals led to the introduction of the Sections de protection et d’intervention (SPI) in each CRS company in 1977.836

These polyvalent specialized units were and were trained to intervene against both armed enemies and gauchiste commandos.

Because of the debacle of vandalism on the Champs Elysées in protests at the end of

September 1975 and later incidents, parallel efforts to improve the maneuverability and offensive

833 Roger Gros, Chef du service des CRS, Information sur l’utilisation des unités - fiche analytique de juin et juillet - fiche semestrielle de synthèse du 1er semestre 1976, Paris, September 1, 1976, PN/SP/CRS/4/N°6163, marked as 43-61. AN 19890466/12*. Encirclement was discouraged in the interwar model of public order policing in order to give the “mass” an opportunity to disperse.

834 Ibid., 52.

835 Service central des CRS (author unknown), “Synthèse des propositions des commandants de groupement pour l’amélioration des techniques de maintien de l’ordre,” August 2, 1976, 1, AN 19890466/11*. Additional requests included better protective material, a sturdier defensive baton, a modern rifle, and relatively more military-grade equipment.

836 The SPI continue to be employed in the CRS. Mamère and Popelin, Rapport fait au nom de la commission d’enquête. 353 354

ability of the security forces were also underway in the Gendarmerie and the Préfecture de police.

At a reunion involving the Director of Public Security and representatives of the Police nationale, the Préfecture de police, and the Gendarmerie in May 1975, pessimism about the inability of the forces of order to arrest mobile casseurs and unanimity about the need for mobility and flexibility reigned, a participating gendarme reported.837 Thus, the arrest of rebellious groups engaged in harassment (harcèlement) reemerged as a major concern of French protest management tactics in the later seventies in response to the re-activation of the protest culture of 1968 by the latest heirs to the militant legacy, the autonomes.

5.2. What was Internal Security? West German Protest Policing and the Pursuit of Extremists,

1968-1975

On 30 April 1968 in the West German Bundestag, Bundesinnenminister Ernst Benda (CDU) advanced to the podium of the Bundestag to announce a message of emergency to his peers.

Ominously declaring that “When acts of violence become a political means then it is not only public order in the police sense that is injured,” Benda announced that the protests since the attentat against SDS paragon Rudi Dutschke had set the constitutional system in danger.838 Noting that respect for the Federal Constitution excluded “violence in any form and against anyone,” he claimed that, “The events in our country since 11 April 1968 allow us to recognize that small, radical groups have lost this standard [from view]. These groups disregard law and right and they

837 Le Capitaine Vernier, Comte-rendu de reunion, “Réunion ‘Maintien de l’ordre’ au Ministère de l’Intérieur, le 26 mai 1975,” Paris, June 3,1975, 1, SHD GD 2007 ZM 1/191848*.

838 Deutscher Bundestag. 5 Wahlperiode. 169. Sitzung. Bonn, den 30. April 1968, 8989.

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replace it with violence.”839 Concluding that “militant groups” were “prepared to use all available means in service of their political aims,”840 Benda broadly construed the violence of the protests as the work of acting, militant minorities. (“Parliamentary democracy, the free state founded on the rule of law, are solidly founded in the Federal Republic of Germany, and none of us will allow small militant groups to destroy our state.”)841 As his invective demonstrates, Benda advanced a political reading of the April demonstrations in which “violence” was the result of “extremists” in

Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS). West German officials preferred to denounce violence by “radical” and “militant” groups rather than “subversives,” “revolutionary groupuscules,” and “urban guerrillas,” but their perspective was formally similar to the one advanced across the Rhine in May 1968. Although the Federal Interior Minister simultaneously evoked standards of proportionality, he also declared that police would have to intervene promptly against “excesses”:

The police had to protect life, health, and property of the citizen even against groups that don’t hold back from violent acts and that in addition are determined to provoke the police. The earlier and more decisively, and simultaneously the more reflectively (besonnener) the police intervene against acts of violence (Ausschreitungen), while observing the police principle of proportionality, the earlier [police] succeed in preventing the worst and bringing to reason those who in general are still capable of reasonable reflection. A delayed or deferred intervention of the police in general leads to more victims for all participants.842

839 Ibid., 8989-8990.

840 Ibid., 8991.

841 Ibid., 8996.

842 Ibid., 8998.

355 356

As Benda would later put it, militant, radical minorities were attempting to use organized violence to destroy the West German state.843

In the ensuing discussion, members of the liberal Free Democratic Party (Freie

Demokratische Partei, FDP) and the Social-Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei

Deutschlands, SPD) generally placed an emphasis on the need for reforms. Liberal Party representative Walter Scheel complained that Benda had “spoken exclusively of order, exclusively of security” and drew parallels between the CDU interpretation and that of the Springer press

(“The demonstrations were represented as a pure act of violence without any recognition of which political aims stood behind them”).844 He warned that “administrative interventions, organized police interventions, even reinforced police intervention” might repel demonstrations but would not solve the underlying issues.845 As Scheel put it, if the police were the sole means of guaranteeing democratic order, the Federal Republic of Germany would become a police state.846

However, the SPD tended to confirm the existence of a militant fraction of violent agents even if they argued that young people were justifiably angry. Thus, SPD party representative Helmut

Schmidt deployed a the same analytical framework for understanding violence in demonstrations as his CDU colleague Benda; Schmidt contrasted the mass of students whose “youthful idealism” deserved understanding versus the “small minority” “who want violence (Gewalt), who want a

843 West German officials preferred the language of “militant minorities” “radical groups” and “violence” to the terminology of “subversion” and “revolutionaries.”

844 Ibid., 8998.

845 Ibid., 9000.

846 Ibid., 9002-9003.

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coup (Umsturz), who want revolution and talk endlessly of Revolution, [and] who feel like Lenin or Bakunin or Guevara…”847 The CDU had no monopoly on the language of resolute action against violence. As Schmidt put, “We [Social Democrats] know well where violence and terror and political murder lead, and will do everything in our power, not to allow such methods, from whomever, to be introduced into Germany again.”848 However, Schmidt also articulated the principle that differentiated the governance of protest in the Federal Republic in the seventies from its French analogue: police themselves had to be restrained from excesses (Übergriffe) and punished by the courts because “the dumbest [situation] that we could arrive at would be the polarization—here police, there students—into a general confrontation (in

Pauschalkonfrontation).”849 In short, efforts to build police capacity to intervene against militant, violent actors had to be counter-balanced by actions to manage the police in order to avoid excessive repression and the solidarization of the students and the militant minority against the state. Moreover, the right to demonstrate had to be preserved. Schmidt subsequently announced to the “young people” the willingness of the SPD to engage in future debates—provided that they did not deploy violence.850

One year before Willy Brandt became Chancellor of an FDP/SPD coalition government, the principles deployed by Helmut Schmidt in response to the April 1968 demonstrations already prefigured how governing SPD politicians and police authorities would couple the identification

847 Ibid., 9011-9012.

848 Ibid., 9017.

849 Ibid., 9017.

850 Ibid., 9018.

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of “extremists” as agents of political violence and a higher degree of circumspection about the potential political resonances of state intervention than their French counterparts.851 Mainstream

West German political officials and police alike identified the agents of “violence” as radicals and ideological extremists separate from the general body of students and young people, a core representation of security concerns that had genealogies in the 20th century anti-communist tradition. In this regard, officials of the Gaullist regime and the rising SPD authorities converged in their analyses: a militant minority of actors bent on overthrowing the state were deploying violence. However, West German political officials, particularly SPD officials, were simultaneously concerned about the potential risk that forceful interventions against extremists might lead to the generational radicalization of the youth, a consideration that was rarely voiced in France.852 Yet as in France, in the Federal Republic, the emergence of a new analysis of demonstrations organized around the proposition that violence issued from a discrete group of militant, subversive Störer using the demonstrations as a pretext for confrontations also led to efforts to redefine police practices in order to single out the presumed militant minority for surveillance, arrest, and prosecution, a strategy that continued to receive substantial support within the police apparatus in the context of protest-confrontations in the seventies. Though the police of the Federal Republic of Germany were hardly alone in the shift to efforts to improve the

851 As Weinhauer has noted, similar reactions were well underway in Hamburg. Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik: zwischen Bürgerkrieg und Innerer Sicherheit: die turbulenten sechziger Jahre, 316– 23.

852 For example, in April of 1968 Interior Minister Benda announced that he would not ban the SDS on the grounds that although legally justified it would likely render surveillance more difficult and hinder the isolation of the “radical elements” in the student community: “The natural inclination to solidarize oneself with [oppressed] minorities, would be initiated, and with that susceptibility to radical ideas would be strengthened. Ibid., 8995.

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reconnaissance capacity, mobility, and flexibility of the police in response to the new styles of protest, in the course of the seventies, West German police had a unique reason to push to improve the ability of the state apparatus in these directions: the liberal reform of the criminal code in 1970 required the West German state to be selective in efforts to apprehend, surveil, and prosecute demonstrators, revising long-standing illiberal precedents for punishing mere participation in a demonstration that turned violent.853

Two phenomena would be reinforced by emergent police conceptualizations of violent action as the work of a militant minority taking cover within the broader demonstration: first, the use of new units and tactics for apprehending violent agents conceived of as discrete elements in the broader demonstration group; second, the employment of photography squads whose main purpose was to identify militants and procure evidence for successful prosecution of excesses

(Ausschreitungen). The security forces also tended to introduce units and operational principles from the effort to identify, surveil, and neutralize criminals and terrorists into police interventions in protest in the course of the seventies, and deployed the specialized anti-crime and counterterrorism units of the Länder –the MEK and SEK—against the Störer in the context of the anti- nuclear movement, housing struggles by Autonomen, and ecological protests.

The overall framework of police interventions against the West German neue Linke has been somewhat obscured by scholarship that identifies the history of the police in the postwar as an ongoing turn from a “militarized” conceptualization of public order operations as Bürgerkrieg

853 See Deutscher Bundestag, 6. Wahlperiode, Drucksache VI/502, Drittes Gesetz zur Reform des Strafrechts (Schritlicher Bericht des Sonderausschusses für die Strafrechtsreform). 359 360

to an allegedly “civilian” constellation prioritizing internal security or innere Sicherheit.854 To be sure, West German politicians and police officials did substitute a new conceptual regime for older principles of mass policing and Civil War as the overall frames through which police were supposed to intervene in protest, and also carefully tried to introduce new terminology for order- policing concepts that were too obviously transferred from military operations, and they did call that regime “internal security.” Thus, the affirmation of the principle of minimum force in the 1975 version of the new police regulatory text for public order, Führung und Einsatz der Polizei , and the appeal to public legitimation in the second principle pointed towards a new conception of public order. 855 That new conception integrated critiques of police intervention circa 1968 and the seventies and redeployed them as state regulatory principles. However, the simultaneous priorities on targeting extremists and securing legitimacy from the broader population, were also central to the principles of military counter-revolutionary operations in the sixties and seventies. Exclusively

Germany-focused scholarship on innere Sicherheit has elided the fact that in the seventies, West

Germans were not the sole artificers of the internal security concept and that another major international advocate of internal security included the British military, whose 1969 manual

Counterrevolutionary operations Part II. Internal Security shared a number of the same principles

854 Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik: zwischen Bürgerkrieg und Innerer Sicherheit: die turbulenten sechziger Jahre. The original founders of the narrative of police democratization were none other than the “reformers” themselves; for a representative account, full of typical lacunae and contempt for the APO, see Hübner, Einsatz.

855 Führung und Einsatz der Polizei (Hamburg: 1975), in StaH 136-1 866, 2: “The fundamental principle of minimal intervention and proportionality are to be observed; this is above all essential in the use of immediate [physical] force… Public life may influenced by police measures no more than is necessary. The police must strive to maintain or to build the basis of trust of the population in order to fulfill its legal obligations.”

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as the 1975 manual Führung und Einsatz der Polizei: “prevention,” “minimum force,”

“safeguarding loyal citizens,” and “maintenance of public confidence.”856 In other words, internal security was not an inherently “civilian” concept.857 Meanwhile, many of the actual protest policing concepts in West Germany in the post-1968 period were “de-militarized” merely to the extent that officials substituted new words with positive, allegedly “police” connotations for those borrowed directly from military discourse.858

In the context of protest, the turn to internal security as early as 1967-1972 did imply an effort to turn away from structures of affect, discourses, and practices of mass police intervention and exemplary violence as exercised during the period from 1920 to 1945, but internal security also introduced new principles based on the “combat against criminality”

(Verbrechensbekämpfung) and the defense against “threats to the constitutional order” to protest policing. This new-modelling of public order thus implied new positive priorities for the police in protest, like surveilling, identifying, and arresting militants apprehended as perennially-violent agents. The main difference between French public security culture circa 1968 and its West

856 Ministry of Defense, Land Operations Volume III. Counter-Revolutionary Operations. Part 2. Internal Security.

857 The observation by Carl Schmitt—“all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,”—might be reframed as follows for police research: every public order concept is a civilianized military concept. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

858 Thus, special squads for targeting “violators” in protest were named Aufklärung und Festnahme- Kommandos even though as a police officer noted, the military concept of the Streifkommando covered their operational practices perfectly well—Berlin Senator für Inneres, “Erfahrungsbericht über die Anpassung der polizeilichen Einsatztaktik an das Verhalten radikaler Störergruppen,” Berlin (August 1969), HStAS EA 2-303 Bü 1984, 2. Similarly, rather than surveillance (Überwachung), the PDV 100 would deploy the “neutral”-sounding word information (Aufklärung) and observation (Observation).

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German counterpart was the relative value put on the principle of neutralizing adversaries versus the principle of avoiding violence towards third parties and securing public legitimation: the

French accentuated the former, their West German homologues the latter. Indeed, Führung und

Einsatz der Polizei left open to the decision of the police leadership whether to prioritize simply fending off threats to public order or the pursuit of criminal offenses and infractions in the context of a protest: either dispersion or the pursuit of arrests. 859

The positioning of the police of the Federal Republic in protests of the late sixties and seventies partly based itself on recuperative readings of extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) leader Rudi Dutschke of SDS. In two contributions to the edited volume Rebellion der Studenten oder die neue Opposition, published by Rororo Verlag in May of 1968, Dutschke described how

SDS had started to apprehend domestic protest in the Bundesrepublik by way of analogy to the insurgency in Vietnam, with the Vietkong inspiring members to confront the state apparatus.

According to Dutschke, “The successful struggle of the [Vietnamese] national liberation front had enormous importance for us insofar as it above all encouraged us to take on an active attitude of resistance against our own domination system and against the police as the visible representative

(sichtbarer Vertreter) of that system of domination.”860 Nevertheless, most members of SDS acknowledged in internal debates in the sixties that armed guerrilla struggle was impractical in the capitalist West; rather, a subset of the group embraced a strategy of calculated injury to the law

(Regelverletzung) in the form of confrontational protest actions.861 As Dutschke wrote, “Insofar as

859 Führung und Einsatz der Polizei, 5.

860 Bergmann et al., Rebellion der Studenten oder Die neue Opposition, 74.

861 Ibid., 72; Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, 100. 362 363

confrontations revealed the manifest irrationality of the system, the terror in the institutions, and the brutality of the police, we tried—just like the Vietkong—to demonstration the vulnerability of the system.”862

Unfortunately for the militants, prominent state officials promptly began to reform their protest management style. By April of 1968, Interior Ministers and police of the various Länder agreed that because extremist forces aimed to bring the state to deploy ostentatious, disproportionate violence, the forces of order had to strive all the harder to limit coercion to the

“militant” fractions of the movement. Some copies of Rebellion der Studenten were rapidly read by the police; by May of 1968, at a meeting of the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP), SPD politician and federal representative Klaus Hübner (b. 1924)—soon to be the top police official in West

Berlin from 1969 to 1987—would directly reference lines in the text in a presentation entitled

“Gesellschaft in Bewegung.”863 The impression that Rebellion produced on him was so strong that

Hübner continued to refer to paragraphs of the text in his memoirs almost thirty years later.864 By the fall of 1968, it was a theoretical commonplace within the police that the militants were aiming to deploy provocations that solicited police overreaction.

Although police in states such as Hamburg and Munich had begun to consider more

“flexible” tactics well prior to the 1968 demonstrations, the emergent, tentative nature of the general federal consensus on a New Line (neue Linie) might be signaled by contrasting the IMK

862 Ibid., 76.

863 Klaus Hübner, “Gesellschaft in Bewegung,” May 1968, 14-15.

864 Hübner, Einsatz, 52–55.

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discussions of February 1968 and those of April 1968. On February 8, only days before the

February 17, 1968 International Demonstration against the Vietnam War in West Berlin, the federal representative of the IMK, Interior Minister Walter Krause of the Baden-Wurttemberg, originally claimed that although police should protect a peaceful demonstration, “boundaries” had to be shown to any demonstration that crossed the line.865 Although some participants at Interior

Ministry conference noted that radicals aimed to dramatize police terror (Polizeiterror), most were in accord that the representatives of public order should show more, not less, resolve towards the radicals: the final resolution of the IMK stated that the governments of the Länder had decided “to decisively counteract the injury of the legal order by radical groups.”866 When Krause stated that

“Police are not permitted to let themselves be provoked; they are not permitted to lose their nerves,”867 he was the only one on the record to introduce the notion that police responses to illegality might undermine the legal order. There is scarce evidence that the community of Interior

Ministers had aligned on consensus about a “flexible response” in February 1968 or were particularly united in concern about the resonances of police intervention prior to the April 1968

Osterdemonstrationen.

As a consequence of the April 1968 demonstrations, high officials, particularly those of the SPD, placed the accent on directing police to avoid interventions that could become sources of radical politicization. One of the figures associated most with the “modernization” of the police,

865 Niederschrift über die Sitzung der Ständigen Konferenz der Innenminister der Länder am 8. Februar 1968 in Bonn, HHStAW 503 4670, 15;

866 Ibid., 20.

867 Innenministerkonferenz am 8.2.1968 in Bonn (Transcript), 4, HHStaW 503-4670.

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Senator Heinz Ruhnau (SPD), Interior Minister of Hamburg, evinced the new operational imaginary at the Interior Minister Conference (IMK) on 17 April 1968.868 According to the minutes of the conference, Ruhnau appealed to both the international dimension of the protest movement and the organization of the violence by extremists, key Cold War anti-communist notions, but also called for police not to give the militants opportunities to exploit police violence to increase mistrust of the state:

Senator Ruhnau (Hamburg) demonstrated that the unrest in the young generation is not a purely German phenomenon…The actions of the last few days have been a case of the organized application of violence, which fundamentally has been prepared for a long time. According to the Leninist theory that you have to exploit an incident, [radicals] found a “vehicle” in the attentat in order to carry out prepared actions…[radicals] want to transgress the laws in order to put the entire legal order into question. The imperative protection of the rule of law using all legal means implies that the behavior of the police has to be directed such that the radical, militant minority (radikal militanten Minderheit) doesn’t successfully drive a wedge between the state and the younger generation.”869

Similarly, Ministerpräsident Heinz Kuhn of NRW reminded his interlocutors against “creating martyrs” on the grounds that this might allow media networks to spread radicalism into the major industrial concerns (Großbetriebe).870 In other words, the protest strategy of the radical left,

868 For an earlier declaration, „Erklärung von Senator Ruhnau,“ Hamburg, April 16, 1968, in StAH 136 1- 136-1-1030. “The last few days have brought a hard burden onto all Hamburg police officers. For the first time the police encountered the prepared and organized use of violence during their intervention. It would however be false, if we allowed the experience of the last few days to drive us into a building of fronts…It is our task to uphold the rule of law using all legal means. Simultaneously, we must be thoughtful [such that] our behavior is always deployed, such that a radical, militant minority does not successfully drive a wedge between the state and the younger generation.” Italics mine. See also Der Spiegel, April 29, 1968, 50.

869 Niederschrift über die Sitzung der ständigen Konferenz der Innenminister der Länder am 17. April 1968 in Bonn, 5-6, HHStaW 503-4670.

870 Ibid., 6.

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partially inspired by re-imagining the APO as guerrillas in the metropole, prompted an official discourse at the highest levels that proposed to counter the APO through limited use of constraint against the uninvolved and the simultaneous intensification of the measures against radicals: limited state violence in demonstrations in response to the limited provocations

(Regelverletzungen) of militant groups. This same strategy had the benefit of potentially satisfying liberal critics of the police by promising a higher level of selectivity in the use of force; after all, publications such as Der Spiegel had alleged as recently as the Easter Demonstrations of 1968 that the police had endangered bystanders and peaceful demonstrators and used disproportionate levels of force.871

Public security discourse within the police in 1968 evinces the notion that violence and illegality issued above all from specific groups of criminal militants rather than from the demonstrators imagined as a hostile mass and the corresponding position that police ought to both avoid interventions that generated solidarity from different participants and selectively surveil and target the agents of violence. As self-identifying “reformer” and Berlin Polizeipräsident Klaus

Hübner acknowledged in his memoir, rather than a “hard” or “weak” mass intervention, the SPD triangulation promised “the enforcement of the law and simultaneous repulsion (Abwehr) of dangers” based on the notion of “discrimination” (Differenzierung).872 Although Hübner was

871 Spiegel editor Rudolf Augstein had himself criticized the police in no uncertain terms. Der Spiegel 17 (April 17-22, 1968); Der Spiegel 18 (April 29, 1968). Police were sensitive to these critiques. Werner Kuhlmann, a Nordrhein-Westfalen social-democrat and the federal representative of the West German police union, would complain in August of 1968 that “like the extraparliamentary opposition, a part of the German press sought the guilt for the escalation of violence during the Easter weekend solely on the side of the police.” Werner Kuhlmann, “Die Polizei im Demokratischen Staat,” Frankfurter Hefte, vol. 23, no. 8 (August 1968): 549.

872 Hübner, Einsatz, 59. For his reflections on the negative political consequences of mass-dispersion using the baton, see Ibid., 134-135. 366 367

explicitly critical of the “friend-enemy” mentality of the traditionalists in the police and the CDU, his memoirs evince how the “reformers” themselves deployed their own rigid distinctions between peaceful demonstrators and criminal Störer; in fact, Einsatz features a veritable lexicon of pejorative terms for the protestors of the neue Linke.873 For Klaus Hübner and his peers, the notion of the “violent protestor” was a contradiction in terms: someone who acted violently at a demonstration was not a protestor. (“We have to repel the ones who trouble a public assembly or who, concealed by the protection of the anonymous mass, instigate or commit crimes…a participant in a public procession is a demonstrator as long as he holds to the principle of peacefulness. However, the moment that [the demonstrator] raises a stone to throw it and oversteps the laws…he is no longer a demonstrator, but rather, as a violent perpetrator in the mass, a “breaker of the public peace” [Landfriedensbrecher].”)874 Thus, while it is true that the SPD unequivocally supported the right to demonstrations, their criterion for what counted as a “demonstration” was non-violence; anything else was a “demonstrative action” (demonstrative Aktion) that needed to be repressed. Moreover, violent actions were deemed to proceed from the deliberate decisions of violent actors. As the later 1975 manual Führung und Einsatz der Polizei put it, in these types of actions, those responsible “deliberately set themselves outside the constitutional order.”875

873 For a partial list: Schwärmer, Mob der Straße, Pöbel, Rabauken, Rechtsbrecher (Ibid. 53-54), Aktionisten, Chaoten, Rebellen, Anstifter, Täter, (Ibid., 93-95) Unruhestifer…und ihrem Mob (Ibid., 98), Chaoten, Aufrührer (Ibid. 174-174), Anarchisten, Kämpfer, Straßenkämpfer, Störer, Rädelsführer (Ibid., 178-180).

874 Hübner, Einsatz, 266–67.

875 Führung und Einsatz der Polizei, 111.

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The emergent policy of the West German police was to apply targeted, limited violence and legal repression to the militant minority, but to simultneouly avoid impacting the “passive demonstrators” –mitigating the indiscriminate state violence that student radicals allegedly aimed to provoke. As police guidelines from February 1968 from the Interior Ministry of Bavaria—a conservative stronghold identified as another site of police modernization—show, this in no way meant tolerating the “agitators” (“The police must take on the agitators; police management must be very mobile.”)876 However, police put the focus on avoiding allowing radicals to provoke them into controversial interventions and individual police were counseled not to be provoked. As the

Bavarian police regulation circa 1968 noted, “Demonstrations will often be infiltrated

(unterwandert) by all possible groups…the police must under all circumstances avoid generating solidarization-effects.”877 This was the Munich line as it had been theorized by police officers in the aftermath of the 1962 Schwabinger Krawalle;878 the regulations allowed police more flexibility over when to enforce the law precisely in order to avoid successful “provocations” by political

“infiltrators.” (“In order to avoid a corresponding worsening of the whole situation, it can be

876 Staatsministerium Bayern, PV-Information Nr. 1. “Verhalten der Polizei bei Demonstration und ähnlichen Anlässen,” Munich, February 1968, 1, in HHStAW 530 431. This file was sent by the Hessische Ministerium des Innern to the different branches of the police of the state in September 1968.

877 Ibid., 2; Polizeihauptkommissar Klaus, Bayerische Bereitschaftspolizei, “Polizei und Studenten,” Munich, Feb. 1968, same file series, 8: “Demonstrations and subversive actions (Störaktionen) will be typically planned, prepared, and staged (in Szene gesetzt) by very small groups.” Ibid., 14. “Hinder ‘solidarization’!”

878 Martin Winter, “Polizeiphilosophie und Protest policing in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland - von 1960 bis zur staatlichen Einheit 1990,” in Staat, Demokratie und Innere Sicherheit in Deutschland, ed. Hans- Jürgen Lange, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, 2000), 203–21.

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necessary not only to defer immediate measures against formal violations but also to refrain from immediate measures against grave infractions.”)879

In the aftermath of the 1967-1968 demonstrations, similar propositions were circulated in police guidelines in Niedersachsen, Nordrhein-Westfalen and Hamburg, where SPD governments were proposing the “New Line” (neue Linie). These texts typically invoked principles of proportionality and discrimination in the use of force; thus, the same principles that were frequently activated in 1968 critiques of violence were redeployed as regulatory principles for police intervention. The August 1968 guidelines for police in Niedersachsen noted that “All police measures must be supported by the fundamental principle of proportionality…”880 and also stipulated that “Necessary interventions may in principle only be directed against agitators

(Störer). People that visibly don’t participate in agitation must, insofar as this is possible, remain unbothered.”881 Concerns about how police violence might generate solidarities between militant sectors of the New Left and the broader younger generation were central to each of the texts. For example, the Nordrhein-Westfalen Interior Ministry guidelines for police intervention issued in

October of 1968, redeploying some of the original language in Rebellion der Studenten, lent state sanction to the concerns articulated by interior ministers earlier that year, and stipulated that,

“The main tactical means of the demonstrators is provocation; the priority object of this provocation is the police as the visible representative [sichtbarer Vertreter] of state authority. [The

879 Staatsministerium Bayern, “Verhalten der Polizei bei Demonstration und ähnlichen Anlässen,” 4.

880 Niedersächsische Minister des Innern, „Richtlinien für den polizeilichen Einsatz bei Demonstrationen,“ Hannover, August 15, 1968, 2. Nds 120 Hannover Acc 49 80 Nr 12 3.

881 Ibid., 4. These principles later were incorporated in PDV 100, Führung und Einsatz der Polizei.

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APO] wants to lead the police by any possible means into hard actions….”882 The same guidelines directed police to discriminate between different groups of demonstrators in order “to avoid anything that leads to an undesirable solidarization of the participants, for example, premature or disproportionately harsh application of coercive means.”883 As Hübner would later write, “Our fundamental aim to maintain inevitable conflicts free from the expression of violence had to be supported by the long-term process of isolating criminal actors (Straftäter).”884

This politico-police strategy did not mean passivity in the face of collective illegalities.

The Nordrhein-Westfalen guidelines from October of 1968 noted that in the event that the intentions of the demonstrators were known to be “not peaceful” and included deliberate disruptions of public order, “restraint” (Zurückhalten) is not appropriate.”885 Similarly, April 24,

1968 guidelines stipulated that police were to intervene promptly using “all available legal means” to suppress the building of barricades.886 Meanwhile, the August 1968 Niedersächsen Guidelines on police operations in demonstrations rendered apparent that demonstration involving significant

882 Der Innenminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Hinweise für den Einsatz der Polizei bei Demonstrationen und ähnlichen Anlässen,” Düsseldorf, October 31, 1968, 1.

883 Ibid., 7: “Modalities of intervention the police must reflect that the demonstration, in particularly in major demonstrations, is not a closed, homogenous group. They must if possible avoid everything, that leads to an undesirable solidarization of the participants, for example, premature or disproportionate use of coercive means.” Cf. Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik: zwischen Bürgerkrieg und Innerer Sicherheit: die turbulenten sechziger Jahre.

884 Hübner, Einsatz, 315.

885 Der Innenminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfallen, “Hinweise für den Einsatz der Polizei bei Demonstrationen und ähnlichen Anlässen,” 7.

886 Der Innenminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Einsatz der Polizei bei gewaltsamen Demonstrationen und Unruhen,” 24 April 1968, 8, StaH 136-1 1030.

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illegalities and the presence of weapons were to be dissolved.887 Thus, policies of restraint only were meant to extend to peaceful demonstrators and not to militants who aimed to use demonstrations to subvert the constitutional order or who practiced violence: the aim of the police was to simultaneously reinforce the legitimacy of the state, to repel enemies of the constitution

(Verfassungsfeinde) and to prosecute the Störer. Thus, the April 1968 guidelines in Nordrhein

Westfalen reminded the reader that “The prosecution of criminal acts may not be disregarded [in favor of] the precautions around the maintenance of security and order” and complained that the low level of prosecutions coming from the Osterdemonstrationen was insufficient and would only lead students to believe that their illegalities were justified.888As Hübner later wrote, “A police officer has to repel dangers and bring criminal suspects to the competent judge.”889

***

Once deployed as logics of state, principles of proportionality and restraint actually led to the multiplication of new police tactics for neutralizing militant demonstrators. In particular, the further integration of agents and practices from the struggle against criminality and counterterrorism modelled protest policing on other domains of police work. In light of the consensus about the threat posed to the state by violent protests infiltrated by revolutionary militants, it was only logical that the police of the Bund and Länder began to prioritize the surveillance, targeting, and arrest of the militant minority involved in demonstrators particularly during the 1968

887 Niedersächsische Minister des Innern, “Richtlinien,”1.

888 Der Innenminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Einsatz der Polizei,” 4.

889 Hübner, Einsatz, 145.

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conjuncture. Despite precedents in state efforts to target the alleged ringleaders (Rädelsführer) of the West German student movement via mobile Greifftrupps in earlier protests in the sixties,890 specialized identification and arrest units and tactics merging the criminal police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo) and the uniformed Schutzpolizei were considerably reinforced in the post-1968 period.

Thus, the Berlin police report of 30 April 1968 reported that united groups from the uniformed and the criminal police were to be articulated in small, motorized groups of some 14 men.891 In the winter of 1968-1969, police in West Berlin quickly built a coordinated reconnaissance and arrest unit (Aufklärungs- und Festnahmekommando) that included 240 officers of the uniformed police divided into units of 60 and 45 police officers from the Kripo under one unified command structure.892 As the Commander of the Berlin Schutzpolizei, Hans-Ulrich Werner, reported to his colleagues at a seminar at the Police-Institut Hiltrup in October 1969, the Berlin police originally devised the groups in response to Rosa Luxembourg demonstrations on January 18, 1969, when members of the local APO launched stones through bank windows on the Kurfürstendamm, damaging upwards of 250,000 German marks worth of property, the hitherto most extensive act of vandalism in Berlin demonstrations.893 The stone-throwers were allegedly protected from police

890 Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik: zwischen Bürgerkrieg und Innerer Sicherheit: die turbulenten sechziger Jahre. For a radical commentary, see Bergmann et al., Rebellion der Studenten oder Die neue Opposition, 79. Early precedents were acknowledged in Niederschrift über die Sitzung des AK II am 28. May 1968 in Bad Oeynhausen (Kurhaus), 6, NLA, p

891 Boettcher to the Berlin Polizeipräsident, “Einsatz der Polizei in der Zeit vom 11. Bis 15. April 1968,” Berlin, April 30, 1968, StaH 136 1 1030.

892 Berlin Senator für Inneres, “Erfahrungsbericht über die Anpassung der polizeilichen Einsatztaktik an das Verhalten radikaler Störergruppen,” 2.

893 For police memories, see Hübner, Einsatz, 93–95.

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intervention by their demonstrating peers, a complaint that recurred throughout the decade; prevailing analyses stated that the police required “the highest flexibility and mobility” in response to New Left demonstrations.894

The Berlin police subsequently introduced a new, hybrid unit of uniformed police of the

Schutzpolizei and officers of the criminal police. The latter were either embedded in the demonstrations or circulated in unmarked cars in order to identify “lawbreakers” or “agitators”; these officers then used the police radio to direct motorized uniformed police to rapidly deploy and engage identified groups of “agitators” or dangerous individuals. A 1969 document from the

Berlin Senator für Inneres, on the adaptations of Berlin police tactics to the behavior of “radical agitators,” listed the functions of the new units as “overlying surveillance of the entire operational field,” the arrest of “concealed agitation groups,” and “the engagement (binden) of overt agitation groups until the arrival of reinforcements.”895 Police concluded triumphantly that their operations had spread “insecurity” within the ranks of “potential violators.”896 The distinction between

“covert” and “overt” agitators operating around the demonstrations was a significant indication of the counter-subversion governance sensibility in play.

894 Polizei-Institut Hiltrup, Erfahrungsaustausch über Einsätze der Polizei bei Demonstrationen und Ausschreitungen. 22 - 24 Oktober 1969, 50.

895 Berlin Senator für Inneres, “Erfahrungsbericht über die Anpassung der polizeilichen Einsatztaktik an das Verhalten radikaler Störergruppen,” 3-4.

896 Ibid., 6. Hübner did not mention this new formation in his later memoir, recounting his efforts to inhibit the escalation of violence through the construction and deployment of a discussion team (Diskussions- Kommando) for deployment in protest contexts and his cooperation alongside young psychologist Siegfried Schubenz. Hübner, Einsatz, 119–30.

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Mobile surveillance and arrest units were not only the work of the Berlin police. At a well- attended seminar for police presided over by Polizeidirektor Werner Giese of Hamburg in the spring of 1970, a report by representatives of the criminal police (Kripo) of Bonn and Wiesbaden

(Hessen) stressed that “the experience of interventions in the last years has shown the police that the core of the problem of arrests in major interventions is the apprehension and extraction

(Ergreifen und Herausholen) of known potential [!] violators or agitators (Störer)… from a mass of men (Menschenmenge)” and called for the generalization of the coordinated units from the uniformed and criminal police.897 In this lens, the “mass” represented less the main adversary than it did a sort of environmental condition obstructing police interventions to “neutralize” radicals.

The aim would have been recognizable to Mao or counterrevolutionary war theorists— to fish the

“insurgents” out of the “water.” A police working group report by a conference of the police institute in the spring of 1970 described the action of these units, and the language unintentionally disclosed how the practices continued to be envisioned in terms of tactical virtues from military practices: “The intervention of the troop must next be surprising, determined, and concentrated in the front…Dispersal in the radical mass minimizes the power to strike (Schlagkraft) [of the arrest team] and often leads to failure…The wedge (Keil) storms into the mass and drives forward, if necessary, through the intervention of physical force, into the hard core (Störerkern)...898

897 Kriminaloberrat Schulte and Kriminaloberrat Eberhardt, „Die Problematik der Festnahmen bei Großeinsätzen,“ in Schlußbericht (Protokoll) über die Seminare für Leiter der uniformierten Polizei und Leiter der Kriminalpolizei vom 23.-27 Februar 1970 und vom 16.-20. März 1970 im Polizei-Institut Hiltrup, 15, Stadtsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB).

898 Polizeidirektor Brüning, „Erfahrungen mit Einsatzformen der Polizei,” Schlußbericht (Protokoll) über die Seminare für Leiter der uniformierten Polizei und Leiter der Kriminalpolizei vom 23.-27 Februar 1970 und vom 16.-20. März 1970 im Polizei-Institut Hiltrup, 31.

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Though envisioned as selective intervention against the radical core of the demonstration, this type of police action potentially led to a general escalation of tensions, and in fact, experience was ambiguous, a reality alluded to even by the police. The same report acknowledged that “the intervention of specialized groups for the aim of apprehending recognized violators within the mass...often leads to rioting (Ausschreitungen) and excesses on the side of the radicals,” a euphemistic framing of the escalations generated by groups of police officers driving into a demonstrating group in pursuit of a single individual or small group. Moreover, as the discussion implied, arrest and prosecution of the “agitator” (Störer) served ineluctably to justify the return to direct physical constraint on the part of the police: marginalized as an approach for dispersion of the whole demonstration, the Schlagstockeinsatz was now re-legitimated as a means of securing arrests and constraining the allegedly militant actors: “The isolated agitator or criminal actor

(Straftäter) can no longer carry out his action undisturbed in the protection of the anonymity of the mass.”899

Police analysis that focused on the pursuit of “criminal violators” in demonstrations also incited another trend in internal security in West Germany after 1968: the metastasizing a priori state surveillance of the New Left in virtually all domains. Thus, at the same February-March 1970 conference, police leadership from Nordrhein Westfalen stipulated that the intervention of undercover police using small radios and concealed police cars ought to be seen as a necessary dimension of police tactics for demonstrations.900 Another manifestation of the turn to the

899 Ibid., 32.

900 Polizeidirektor Lottmann and Polizeioberrat Haimerl, “Der Einsatz von Beamten in Zivil bei Großeinsätzen” in Schlußbericht (Protokoll) über die Seminare für Leiter der uniformierten Polizei und 375 376

surveillance and prosecution of militants, rather than mere dispersion of illegal or violent demonstrations, was the construction of specialized groups for photographing and filming protestors and securing evidence, known as the Beweissicherung-und dokumentations-Kommando, or BeDo. Surveillance and photography were deemed a potentially powerful aid to police efforts to prosecute demonstration offenses: the Interior Ministry of Nordrhein-Westfalen concluded in

1968 that “Film, photographic, and sound recorders are a terrific means for securing evidence for

…the prosecution of criminal behavior.”901 Similarly, the Interior Ministry of Niedersachsen directed police to build film and photography squads towards this end.902 In light of the often- ambiguous effects of efforts to apprehend demonstrators at the site of the demonstration, some police also promoted film and photography teams not only as a complement to mobile arrest teams, but as a more reliable substitute for them. There were, however, other calculations in play as well; thus, in 1968, the Bavarian Interior Ministry asserted that photography and recording could have a deterrent effect by generating insecurity among demonstrators.903 Failure to secure viable evidence also generated efforts to reinforce the practice of recording.904 Finally, although police originally valued both on-site arrests and surveillance, in the course of the decade, they came to

Leiter der Kriminalpolizei vom 23.-27 Februar 1970 und vom 16.-20. März 1970 im Polizei-Institut Hiltrup, 19-20.

901 Der Innenminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Hinweise für den Einsatz der Polizei bei Demonstrationen und ähnlichen Anlässen,” Düsseldorf, 31 October 1968, 11.

902 Der Niedersächsische Minister des Innern, “Richtlinien für den polizeilichen Einsatz bei Demonstrationen,” Hannover, 15 August 1968, 3.

903 Bayern, “Information für das Verhalten der Polizei bei Demonstrationen und ähnlichen Anlässen,” 11.

904 Ibid., 81

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view the latter as a potentially viable substitute for the former. Thus, by 1970, the Berlin police prioritized surveillance as a means of securing evidence for later prosecution on the theory that violent actors could be apprehended outside of the demonstration, thereby avoiding regrettable public incidents.905

Efforts to record protest to allow for successful prosecution of violent actors tended to embrace more and more sophisticated modes of surveillance in the seventies. Though sound- recordings of loudspeaker talk and photography had been used since the late sixties, in practice photographs were often inadequate evidence for prosecution. As Police Director Bruning reported to his colleagues in 1970, photographs often “did not allow one to determine, if the demonstrator hit a police officer or the opposite” or if protestors had acted in self-defense.906 In due course, the techniques of surveilling demonstrations would come to embrace more comprehensive means of recording like long-distance cameras, recorders, and film-cameras, and even electronic cameras that could be transmitted directly to police headquarters.907

Nevertheless, the consequences of these new state practices for the power relations between militant demonstrators and the agents of the state frequently appear to have been modest, as evinced by the outcomes of confrontations between the Schutzpolizei and Kriminalpolizei (Kripo),

905 Polizeiobberrat Maiwald, Polizeioberrat Iwicki (Berlin), „Dokumentation bei Großeinsätzen,“ in Schlußbericht (Protokoll) über die Seminare für Leiter der uniformierten Polizei und Leiter der Kriminalpolizei vom 23.-27 Februar 1970 und vom 16.-20. März 1970 im Polizei-Institut Hiltrup.

906 Ibid., 82, 85.

907 Kriminaloberrat Panitz, “Schwerpuntke kriminalpolizeilicher Tätigkeit bei Großeinsätzen und Möglichkeiten für eine Verbessrung der Zusammenarbeit zwischen Kriminalpolizei und Schutzpolizei.” Schlußbericht (Protokoll) über die Seminare für Leiter der uniformierten Polizei und Leiter der Kriminalpolizei vom 23.-27 Februar 1970 und vom 16.-20. März 1970 im Polizei-Institut Hiltrup, 41-74.

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on one side, and radical demonstrators from Maoist and Spontaneist circles, on the other, in

Frankfurt in the mid-seventies. In these cases, protestors described in the analyses of public officials as adapting tactics from urban guerrillas908 managed to generate broad and spectacular interruptions of public order in the city, injured police, and generally elude arrest and criminal prosecution. The outcomes of these confrontations raise questions about the implementation of the

“New Line”: why did journalists frequently concur with radicals that police interventions had been indiscriminate, and why were successful prosecutions so low? Yet as we will see, these incidents typically led state officials to further endorse surveillance and anti-criminal operations as the guiding lights of protest management.

5.3. Between Auflösung and Verbrechensbekämpfung: The Intensification of Surveillance and

Arrest Dispositifs during the Frankfurt Struggles of 1973-1974

On February 23, 1974 1974, only 48 hours after the police takeover of blockaded and occupied houses in the Frankfurter Westend, local police were confronted by a demonstration that deviated from the original plan.909 As a demonstration train of 3,000 people arrived in front of formerly occupied houses on the Bockenheimer Landstraße at around 1:20 pm and the police intervened, the vanguard of the demonstration began to pelt the nearby police blockade with stones, fireworks,

908 The final police report on the June 1975 Freiburg demonstrations noted that the demonstrators had adopted a minuet tactic, “as described by Marighella in his Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.” LPD Karlsruhe, Einsatzerfahrungen anläßlich der Demonstrationen im Juni 1975 in Heidelberg, January 1977, 10, HStAS EA 2/303 Bü 2001.

909 For the initial police report, Schutzpolizeiabteilung, “Polizeiliche Lagen in Frankfurt am Main in der Zeit vom 20. Bis 24.2.1974, Frankfurt, March 1, 1974, enclosure in Sommerfeldt, “Hausräumungen und Nachfolgsdemonstrationen in der Zeit vom 20. bis 24. Februar 1974 in Frankfurt/Main,” Wiesbaden, March 6, 1974, Bundesarchiv, B136 15620. Cf. Hessische Ministerium des Innern und für Sport, “Analyse der Einsätze aus Anlass der Räumung der besetzten Häuser Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumanstraße in Frankfurt am Main,” 1974, 35-36, HStAS EA 2/303 Bü 1999. For prosecutions, Ibid., 34.

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and smoke bombs, building a barricade near Bockenheimer Landstraße 111.910 Demonstrators allegedly assaulted isolated police, and a group of nine plainclothes officers attempted to come to the rescue of two of their comrades only to be “brutally beaten up by 50-55 lawbreakers with crowbars and paving-stones.”911 In the ensuing mêlée, some 45 police were injured. The local boulevard papers decried a bloody battle while respectable bourgeois papers like FAZ identifying the violence as the result of subversive “terrorists” embedded in the demonstration.912

Police had deployed some seven companies of uniformed police in anti-riot equipment, 150 members of the Kripo, and a helicopter, but the Frankfurt incidents were anything but major successes from the viewpoint of state officials. Police reports stressed that although the long- prepared “evacuation” of the occupied apartment at Kettenhofweg 51 had been smoothly managed, the subsequent protest on 23 February 1974 had not: “In many cases the officers [were] not prepared for the considerable violence (Ausschreitungen) of the radicals, such that inappropriate behavior (Fehlverhalten) that not infrequently contributes to injuries among the officers is always repeated.”913 Similarly, nowhere had the police forces successfully apprehended an appreciable number of the reportedly violent actors during the actual protests and out of 86 prosecutions related

910 Ibid., 16.

911 Ibid., 17.

912 FAZ described the event as a “bloody street battles” (blutigen Straßenschachten) and applauded Federal Interior Minister Genscher for removing the “façade” that “terrorists” used to present themselves as “demonstrators” (“Genscher sees it correctly, it is a case in the Frankfurt terror of a conscientious attacks on the rule of law”). Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 25, 1974.

913 Hessisches Ministerium des Innern und für Sport, “Analyse der Einsätze aus Anlass der Räumung der besetzten Häuser Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumanstraße in Frankfurt am Main,” 1974, 20.

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to the demonstration, all but 15 cases were dismissed within four months.914 The police analysis for the IMK would report that officers of the Schutzpolizei had engaged in excesses (Übergriffe) in the course of the confrontation915—showing the limitations of the “New Line” as it had been practiced since 1968. In the final analysis, the police report concluded, “Public security and order in similar demonstrations will only be maintained in the city of Frankfurt am Main when there are enough [police] forces deployed, multilaterally trained (vielseitig ausgebildet) and even more purposefully equipped than [those] until now.”916

If the protests of 1967-1968 represented the major ideological inception point for the new model of police intervention in protests, the Frankfurt encounters of the seventies prompted officials to extend the internal security orientation as both the dominant cognitive constellation and practice of the West German state in demonstrations. Both political and police analyses of the Frankfurt

Ereignisse typically reiterated the proposition that radicals were exploiting social struggles to seek deliberate confrontations. Thus, the March 1974 resolution of the congress of the SPD Unterbezirk for Frankfurt denounced violence as the work of “terroristic minority groups” even as it warned against the tendency of both police and protestors to generate a reified Feindbild.917 Meanwhile, the Polizeipräsidium analysis was significantly less discriminating: “For the Hausbesetzern and their sympathizers, raising awareness about ills (Mißstände) is by far only secondary; they primarily seek the confrontation with State power (the individual groups for very different

914 Ibid., 9, 34.

915 Ibid., 23.

916 Ibid., 36.

917 For the full text of the SPD resolution. Frankfurter Rundschau, March 5, 1974, 13.

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reasons.”918 Behind the turmoil of the confrontations, police discerned the guiding hand of the

Italian group Lotta Continua, the Maoist K-Gruppen, and of course, the Spontaneist group

Revolutionärer Kampf.919 Similarly, redeploying their post-1968 analysis, state officials concluded that the Frankfurt incidents exemplified the use of the demonstration to encourage solidarity between local citizen and revolutionary cadres and to delegitimize the security apparatus by guiding the police towards indiscriminate state violence: “Generally it may be said that it is a priority aim of the agitator to guide police action against a large number of non-participants through their [own] actions, in order to thereby produce an “atmosphere” adverse to the police (um so “Stimmung” gegen die Polizei zu erzeugen).”920 Similarly, another report (Erfahrungs- und

Verlaufsbericht) on the Frankfurt incidents, transmitted from the Hessen Interior Ministry to AKII, complained that the “violent elements” of the demonstrations had benefitted from the tacit solidarity and protection of the non-participants (Unbeteiligten): “The tactically clever behavior of the aforementioned Politrocker groups was evidenced in so far as so-called “non- participants”…following the behavior of the so-called “chaotics,” actively participated in illegality

(Rechtsbrüchen)…their mode of behavior objectively supported the illegality of the “chaotics” and even rendered it possible…”921 This analysis redeployed the original external and internal

918 Hessisches Ministerium des Innern und für Sport, “Analyse der Einsätze aus Anlass der Räumung der besetzten Häuser Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumanstraße in Frankfurt am Main,” 1974, 36.

919 Ibid., 11-12.

920 Ibid., 15.

921 Frankfurter Polizeipräsidium, “Erfahrungs- und Verlaufsbericht im Zusammenhang mit der Räumung der besetzten Häuser Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumannstraße in Frankfurt am Main,” Frankfurt, July 16, 1974, 48, HStAS EA 2/303 Bü 1995.

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discourses of the state that had emerged in the course of the APO movement: the police confronted a militant minority that adopted violent, illegal tactics and used ordinary demonstrators or even deployed “non-participants” to protect itself from effective reprisals and incriminate the state apparatus, and militants benefitted from the tacit actions of non-participants. Similarly, officials interpreted the Frankfurt February 1974 incidents as validation of the legitimacy of refined, scaled down, and “energetic” police tactics and the intensified employment of the criminal police to surveil demonstrations, even while acknowledging that these had so far shown little impact. Thus, in response to the recent incidents, the Frankfurt Staatschutzdientsstelle (SD) division of the criminal police recommended numerically more non-uniformed officers; more photographers protected by an escort (“experience has shown that photographers are a high priority target of the demonstrators”); more information-processing; and a broader field of action for surveillance units

(“because of the application of so-called “small group tactics” on the side of the demonstrators it is desirable…to deploy forces to surveil the territory proximate to the demonstrations in addition to those that accompany the demonstration train.”)922 The analysis of the Frankfurt disorders reinforced the official consensus around a new managerial style prioritizing initiative by smaller, more flexible police units and the intensified surveillance of both the site of demonstrations and potential subversive forces in the urban center: “The analysis of this action allows us to once again comprehend that well-articulated forces, through energetic and consequent behavior by smaller

922 For the intensified use of the criminal police in order to surveil demonstrations as an implication of the state analysis, see Ibid., 48-50.

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police units, are able to achieve the police goal against large agitator groups. However, that only works when these forces are well-coordinated.”923

As the Frankfurt incidents show, the further embedding of both the cognitive and practical dimensions of the new style of protest management continued unabated not despite, but because of its limited operational dividends; although the actual effects of the new practices for targeting and intervening on the “militant minority” often fell well short of police ambitions, it was precisely these limitations that led to an effort to intensify the countersubversion style. A similar process would be undertaken in the context of the anti-nuclear movement of the late seventies, as New

Left protest continued to act as a “motor” for the turn towards internal security frameworks and the consolidation of new state practices oriented on targeted surveillance and arrest. Thus, the new

1975 police manual Führung und Einsatz der Police enunciated the principles of minimal force and proportionality, avoiding untoward influence of public life, and reminded the police to win the trust of the broader population through publicity work.924 Similarly, the manual promoted the use of specialized surveillance and arrest units for tasks like the protection of specific territory from

(Raumschutz),925 the management of assemblies and processions, and “not-peaceful demonstrative actions.”926

5.4. Anti-nuclear Protest and the Consolidation of Internal Security, 1976-1981

923 Hessisches Ministerium des Innern und für Sport, “Analyse der Einsätze aus Anlass der Räumung der besetzten Häuser Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumanstraße in Frankfurt am Main,” 1974, 20.

924 Führung und Einsatz der Polizei, 2.

925 Ibid., 88–90.

926 Ibid., 105–24.

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On May 6, 1977, Dr. Werner Maihofer (FDP) of the Bundesministerium des Innern wrote his colleague Werner Staak on the subject of “demonstration excesses.” Summarizing the official position that violence was the product of radical groups, Maihöfer declared that the “exploitation

[of the anti-nuclear movement] by left-extremist groups represents a threat to public security and order…”927 Particularly essential, from the point of view of the Bundesminister des Innern, was securing police capacity “to arrest more violent actors, and above all ringleaders.”928 Maihofer subsequently announced his willingness to cooperate in improving the operational effectiveness of the security apparatus of the Bund, and particularly that of the Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS), only recently deployed for protest operations and turned from a paramilitary border guard into an internal gendarme.929

The outreach from Bonn was part of another federally-coordinated effort to render the police more effective at securing arrests and prosecutions of “violent agents” in the context of the anti-nuclear demonstrations at Wyhl, Brokdorf, and Grohnde during the anti-nuclear protest cycle of 1975-1977.930 On Tuesday, 8th November 1977, prominent members of the West German political class and state apparatus met for a four-hour meeting at the official residence of

Bundeskanzler Helmut Schmidt. The central point of this security talk was to outline measures on the table to reign in recent violent actions in demonstrations in the context of the emergent anti-

927 Dr. Werner Maihöfer, BMI, to Behörde für Inneres der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, Senator Werner Staak, Bonn, 6. Mai 1977, 1, StaH 1 136 1668.

928 Ibid., 2.

929 For the BGS, Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, 121–22.

930 For the anti-nuclear movement, see Ibid., 167–73; Tompkins, “Grassroots Transnationalism(s): Franco- German Opposition to Nuclear Energy in the 1970s.”

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nuclear movement. To that end, Leitende Polizeidirektor Hans-Joachim Juretzky of the state of

Niedersachsen discussed tumultuous experiences at the nuclear construction site at Grohnde the previous spring. The topics of the ensuing discussion ranged from the importance of surveillance prior to major demonstrations to the possibility of securing dangerous objects used by demonstrators. Officials also debated the potential reintroduction of the controversial pre-1970 iteration of article 125 of the Strafgesetzbuch (StGB), a clause that had originally criminalized remaining in a protest group once violence had occurred and that was analogous to the anti- casseurs law in neighboring France. 931 Parties to this discussion included Hans-Dietrich Genscher

(FDP) and Helmut Kohl (CDU); Werner Maihofer (FDP), the Federal Minister of the Interior; the

Federal Justice Minister Hans-Jochen Vogel (SPD); the representatives of the

Innenministerkonferenz (IMK) and Justizministerkonferenz (JMK); the Presidents of the

Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) and Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) and Minister-Presidents

Hans Filbinger of Baden Wuerttemberg and Hans Kuhn of Nordrhein-Westfalen. In short, management of protest had become a prominent concern of West German politicians and state security officials, including figures traditionally linked to domestic intelligence.

As the meeting at the villa showed, the coordination of all available means of state short of the Bundeswehr was becoming part of the ordinary pursuit of public order in response to insecurities arising out of the protests at Brokdorf (Schleswig-Holstein) in the fall of 1976 and at

Grohnde (Niedersächsen) in the spring of 1977. Although at both demonstrations, police prevented

931 Kurzvermerk über das Sicherheitsgespräch am Dienstag, dem 8. 1977, von 20.30 Uhr bis 0.40 Uhr im Kanzlerbungalow. This file was sent by Dr. Schüler, the Chief of the Bundeskriminalamt to the Ministerpresident of the Land of Baden-Württemberg on 28 November 1977. HStAS EA 2/303 Bü 2003, Sicherheitsmaßnahmen bei Großdemonstrationen, innere Sicherheit, 1977-1978. 385 386

the mass occupation of nuclear construction sites by tens of thousands of members of citizens’ initiatives (Bürgerinitiativen) and radical groups like the Maoist KBW, analyses of police performance within the state apparatus were far from unambiguous, underlining the high number of police injuries, discouraging statistics regarding arrests and prosecutions, and the shortcomings of police equipment and weapons in the face of militant demonstrators allegedly bent on violence.

The basic contours of the internal security discourse that had prevailed since 1968 were on full display in official analyses. In the prevailing optic of the government after the anti-nuclear confrontations of 1976-1977, the police again confronted a “militant minority” that exploited demonstrations in order to generate confrontations and to guide the police to overreact.

Summarizing the analysis of the security forces at a conference of the new police subcommittee designated to coordinate the exchange of police perspectives at the federal level in April of 1977, a high-ranking police officer from the state of Schleswig-Holstein concluded that the 1976

Brokdorf demonstrations showed that “The inexperienced organizers [of the BI] will be used and instrumentalized for the purposes of the leftist groups.”932 The prevailing analysis of the state was evident in the reports on the demonstrations by functionaries of the Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS) and police officers: police typically differentiated between the militant minority of “violent actors,” their active or passive supporters, and the citizen initiative groups (BI), sometimes represented as a set of concentric circles. Thus, the report by the BGS regional commander on the Brokdorf demonstrations of November 13-14, 1976 differentiated between a militant, allegedly violent “hard

932 “Erfahrungen aus den Einsätzen im Raum Brokdorf – Störertaktiken und -techniken – Einsatzkonzepte der Polizei,” April 1977, HStaS, EA 2/303 Bü 1851.

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core,” their “active helpers,” and the remainder of the protest movement, apprehended as mere background noise. 933

However, state officials also discerned a qualitative shift in the will to violence among members of the militant left. Thus, in August of 1977, an eight-member federal working group, including representatives of the BePo, BGS, Verfassungsschutz, and Interior Ministry, concluded that a number of militant groups “no longer differentiate—as they still did at the start of the seventies—between violence against objects and violence against persons,” and declared that both

“brutality in the use of force” and the “criminal energy” deployed in planning for confrontational demonstrations were on the rise.934 Similarly, the “Report on the Experience of Major Interventions to Protect Atomic Energy Sites” approved by the Innenministerkonferenz at Kiel in June of 1977 depicted radical demonstrators as increasingly tactically-savvy, organized, equipped, and committed to “violence.”935 Notably, these observations paralleled remarks on French protest among the chief functionaries of la Sécurité publique in the mid- and late- seventies.

The difficulty of maintaining what police perceived to be a satisfactory level of control generated another round of in-paradigm efforts to improve surveillance and police mobility in protest. On the surveillance side, the police began to institute comprehensive pre-checks to prevent militant groups from bringing weapons or defensive equipment to the demonstration. This proved

933 For example, in Dr. Teichmann, Grenzschutzkommando Küste, “Bericht über den Einsatz von Kräften des GSK Küste anläßlich der Großdemonstration in Brokdorf, Kreis Steinburg, am 13./14. November 1976,” Bad Bramstedt, 10 December 1976, 5, NLA Nds. 1150 Acc. 108/92, Nr. 130.

934 LPD Krassmann (BGS) et al., “Analyse der schweren Störungen der Inneren Sicherheit in der Zeit vom 1.1.1972 bis 30.6.1977,” August 1977, 5, Bundesarchiv, B 106 101982.

935 Bundesministerium des Innern, “Bericht über die Erfahrungen aus Großeinsätzen zum Schutz von Kernkraftanlagen,“ June 1977, 1, Bundesarchiv, B 136 31628.

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both controversial and labor-intensive, and never became a standard operating procedure. State surveillance potential was also reinforced by the mandate of the federal Verfassungsschutz to observe “extremist” groups engaged in confrontational demonstrations in order to ascertain and track signs of impending violence in advance of major protests.936 The June 1977 report submitted to the Innenministerkonferenz concluded that, “The risk to the criminal actor must be sensibly raised” and proposed to improve evidence collection, to ameliorate the number of on-site arrests through improved tactics, to accelerate criminal prosecutions, and to introduce a federal information service for “violent” actors.937 Meanwhile, the Schutzpolizei, BePo, and BGS continued to improve their own surveillance functions in protests through new recording technology and training. Perhaps most significantly, the Alouette II helicopter promised to give the police eyes in the sky over demonstrations. Yet, ironically, like earlier reforms to the material practice of police surveillance and intervention tactics, these efforts would often find themselves vitiated in the years to come by elementary techniques of anonymization such as the rapid generalization of masking (Vermummung) among demonstrators. Symptomatically, already in

August of 1977, the police and politicians at the Kanzlerbungalow conference discussed the possibility of a ban on masks.938

936 See Bundesarchiv, B106 119451.

937 Bundesministerium des Innern, “Bericht über die Erfahrungen aus Großeinsätzen zum Schutz von Kernkraftanlagen,“ Anlage 3. Führung, Organization und Taktik der Polizei, 1. Ibid, 9 restated the need for the training of special units for making arrests. Bundesarchiv, B 136 31628.

938 Kurzvermerk über das Sicherheitsgespräch am Dienstag, dem 8. 1977, von 20.30 Uhr bis 0.40 Uhr im Kanzlerbungalow.

388 389

The 1976-1977 demonstrations manifested yet again the limits of prior reforms to protest management based on the principle of prosecuting violations of the legal order. Despite hitherto unprecedented levels of surveillance of the demonstrations and the tactical deployment of coordinated surveillance and arrest units to operationalize “grabs” (Zugriff) by small groups of police officers, only small numbers of “violent” actors were apprehended—let alone successfully prosecuted. At Brokdorf, in the face of some 81 injured police, only 28 demonstrators were arrested during the main events on November 13, 1976.939 At Grohnde, where some 5,000 police allegedly faced 12,000 demonstrators including a “hard core” of several thousand, 236 police officers were injured, some 300,000 DM worth of equipment was damaged, and a mere 26 people were arrested and brought before the criminal police commission (Sonderkommission) set up to initiate prosecutions. Out of 122 original investigations by the commission, a mere 14 were eventually prosecuted, according to a report from August 1977.940 Insofar as government officials and functionaries aimed to neutralize and punish extremist Straftäter, this was anything but satisfying.

Obviously, militants could violate the legal order and avoid the glaive of the law; as

Kriminaloberrat Fritz Hücker of the Landespolizei Niedersachsen noted in an April 1978 report to the Polizei-Führungsakademie, there were “significant weak points” in the arrest and prosecution of demonstration infractions.941 Many of these issues stemmed from the difficulty of

939 Rudolf Titzck, Innenminister des Landes Schleswig-Holstein, “Bericht über den Ablauf der Demonstrationen gegen den Bau eines Kernkraftwerks in Brokdorf,” December 10, 1976, Nds 1150 Acc 108 92 Nr 130, 19.

940 Fritz Hücker, “Erfahrungen aus den Einsätzen am KKW Grohnde: Konsequenzen für Ausbildung und Einsatz,” August 1977, 9-10, HStAS EA 2-303 Bü 1869.

941 Ibid., 3.

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executing the “grab” operations that had been institutionalized by arrest units in the course of the seventies when violent actors were “unrecognized, or unreachable, [or] even unidentifiable” in the demonstration ranks. Because demonstrators all wore similar clothing (raincoats, face covering, parkas), members of the criminal police struggled to describe the correct targets for intervention to their uniformed colleagues, while those police that were well-placed to identify “perpetrators” were otherwise habituated to dispersions and blockades. As Hücker concluded, “Grab- and description-difficulties…dominate in these operations.”942

The limitations of police aspirations to secure arrests and criminal prosecutions during violent actions were also demonstrated one year later during protests in Frankfurt am Main. Prior to the 25 November 1978 anti-Shah demonstration in Frankfurt am Main, police attempted various administrative expedients learned during the anti-nuclear demonstrations like banning helmets, masks, and “mask-like” objects, material that could be thrown or used in mêlée confrontations, and rucksacks.943 But police later concluded that militants had merely deposited their “armament” in parked cars and depots along the march route.944 Ten companies of 70 police; 12 water cannon; and around 100 officers of the criminal police were deployed against a 7,000-person demonstration that achieved a rare level of violence; police subsequently counted 186 injured officers, and

250,000 DM worth of damages, but arrested a mere 19 demonstrators. As the police report

942 Ibid., 8.

943 Knut Müller, Der Polizeipräsident in Frankfurt am Main, “Einsatz-, Verlaufs- und Erfahrungsbericht aus Anlaß einer Demonstration der CISNU am Samstag, dem 25. November 1978, in Frankfurt am Main,” December 6, 1978, HStAS EA 2-303 Bü 1871, 3. Cf. Bericht über die Arbeitstagung ‚Erfahrungsaustausch über die Demonstration vom 25. November 1978 in Frankfurt/Main am 12. Dezember 1978 an der Polizei- Führungsakademie, Münster, Bundesarchiv, B106 388494.

944 Ibid., 10.

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concluded, “There were few arrests…In this situation the officers were entirely engaged in the protection of their own persons and the breaking of the resistance, so that they considered their goal achieved when the perpetrators took flight.” In January of 1979, the Frankfurt Police reported to the Hessen Interior Ministry that investigations were underway against 26 persons, with 238 investigations pending against unknown perpetrators.945 Polizeipräsident Knut Müller subsequently advocated for the articulation of a unit of undercover police officers and photographers to each uniformed police company in order to allow more planned arrests.946

The government subsequently reinforced its capacity for securing arrests and criminal convictions. It further integrated the criminal police into protest functions, redeployed the emergent counterterrorism and anti-criminality apparatus for protest interventions, and expanded the use of preventative surveillance and arrest in the preparation for demonstrations

(Vorfeldsarbeit), all moves exhibited at the Brokdorf II demonstration of February 1981. Thus, both Spezialeinheitkommando (SEK) and Mobileeinsatzkommando (MEK)–the elite counterterrorism and anti-criminality units of the Länder trained to intervene against armed terrorists and violent criminals—were integrated into protest governance.

By 1981, of course, deploying MEK and SEK units against demonstrators and left-wing radicals was not new. Belying their status as specialists for deployment against hardened criminals and terrorists, these units had been used regularly since their inception in the context of the housing struggles. Thus, one of the first public deployments of the SEK in West German history occurred

945 Knut Müller, Polizeipräsident in Frankfurt am Main, “Überprüfung der personellen und materiellen Gegebenheiten bei der Vollzugspolizei in Frankfurt am Main,” January 1979, Bundesarchiv, B106 388494, 20.

946 Ibid., 30. 391 392

during the eviction of the occupied housing at Eckhoffstraße 39 in Hamburg in 1973. In the context of militant protest, Frankfurt police deployed 14 members of the Hessen SEK as arrest units and

12 officers of the MEK for reconnaissance purposes around the Ulrike Meinhof demonstration of

May 10, 1976.947 Following the serious injuries sustained by police officer Jürgen Weber from a

Molotov cocktail, a Sonderkommission of police put out a wanted list (Fahndung) featuring the faces of ex-Revolutionärer Kampf members; raided some 14 houses using the SEK and MEK; and promised a 50,000 mark reward for information on those responsible for the incident. This improvised police action re-deployed counter-terrorist and anti-criminality dispositifs to pursue those responsible for throwing Molotov cocktails and clearly assimilated militant Spontis to armed terrorists.948

In February of 1981, however, the use of the SEK and MEK was organized on the federal level: the Länder sent 180 members of the SEK organized into arrest units (Greifeinsatz), over 140 members of the MEK, and 700 members of the Kripo to the banned Brokdorf II demonstration

(60,000 persons) in Schleswig-Holstein on 28 February 1981. Similarly, in the context of the

Häuserkampf of 1980-1, SEK units were deployed in order to evict the residents of occupied homes during the eviction of the occupied block at Dreisameck in June of 1980 and were deployed as special “grab”-units during the subsequent protests in Freiburg.949 Thus, by 1980-1, militant

947 Polizeipräsident Knut Müller, “Bericht: Demonstration am 10 Mai 1976,” Frankfurt, 11 May 1976, B 106 371801, 2.

948 Kraushaar, Fischer in Frankfurt, 134–40.

949 Polizeidirecktion Freiburg, “Erfahrungsbericht: Einsatz zur Räumung und zum Abriß der besetzsten Häuser Kaiser-Joseph-Straße 282, 284 und 286, Schreiberstraße 2, 4 (“Dreisameck”) in Freiburg in der Zeit vom 08.06.80 bis zum 13.06.80 einschließlich,” Freiburg, 30.10.1980, HStAS EA 2-303 Bü 1089.

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demonstrators were fair game not only for uniformed police or plainclothes officers of the criminal police, but also for the elite anti-criminality and counter-terrorism units of the Länder. Indeed, it was precisely as armed struggle went into irreversible decline that SEK and MEK units seem to have been more regularly redeployed for interventions involving gewalttätige Störer in protest contexts and housing occupations.

Regardless, the number of arrests made by these units during the demonstration itself was hardly significant. At Brokdorf II, the SEK units were deployed as grab units while undercover

MEK squads were divided into six groups and directed “to identify criminal acts in the mass, and to follow the agitator,” in order to secure arrests under advantageous circumstances.950 The initial analysis of the demonstrations conducted by the police of Schleswig-Holstein asserted that the

SEK were “highly successful” as arrest teams (“everywhere officers of the SEK were active, there was a readily recognizable corresponding effect on the police adversary”) but noted that the

“qualitative success” of the MEK units was potentially disproportionate to the mission at hand and reported that a new concept needed to be developed.951 In all, over 760 members of the

Kriminalpolizei were deployed at the demonstration out of a total of some 10,000 police.952

Nevertheless, arrests at the demonstration itself were modest, and significantly higher number of police were reported injured than arrests were effected. What had changed were the number of

950 Ibid., 24.

951 Fleischfresser, Landespolizeidirection Schleswig-Holstein, Erstanalyse, Itzehoe, March 13, 1981, 22- 24B106/113118.

952 POR Röper Landespolizei Schleswig-Holstein, “Bereitstellungbefehl,” Itzehoe, 20 February 1981, B106 113118.

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preventative arrests: police undertook some 181 arrests prior to the demonstration itself.953 This too, fit into the approach outlined in the internal security manual Führung und Einsatz der Polizei.

§§§

Well into the post-war period, governments managed demonstrations by deploying masses of uniformed police officers who showed force toward a tolerated demonstration and who had recourse to mass baton assaults and firearms to disperse a hostile or illegal assembly. Although public officials and their police counterparts on both sides of the Rhine devoted significant technopolitical efforts to refining the systems of “crowd control” and “crowd dispersion” after

1968, they also concluded that mass interventions were an insufficient and potentially even counterproductive response to militant protestors. Police tactics originally correlated to the principles of interwar mass psychology, such as the deployment of large battalions of uniformed police in imposing lines, blockades, and mass baton interventions, were never phased out in either

France or West Germany. However, the difficulties of facing up to the mobile tactics of militant protestors led both the French and West German government to introduce a new model of public order operations that partially superseded that of the interwar period and early Cold War.

The new public order model was correlated to an interpretation of violent demonstrations that identified violence as the work of specific groups of criminals or political extremists. Police in a demonstration were supposed to learn the motivations of the demonstrators by infiltration and surveillance; to identify and arrest violators of the law, if possible; and to prepare materials for criminal prosecutions. To this end, arrest squads, police photographers, and undercover officers

953 Illegible, Abteilung Polizei, “Demonstration in Brokdorf am 28. Februar 1981,” Bonn, March 3, 1981, 3, Bundesarchiv, B 106 113118.

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were further integrated into the network of protest management. If 1968 radicals had adapted thought-forms and material objects from Third World insurgency movements in order to define new cultures of combative protest, police and public officials realigned protest governance according by drawing on the principles of counter-revolutionary operations as they had been articulated in European empires in the recent past and on newer mechanisms from the struggles against violent criminality and terrorism. Thus, while it is certainly true that the aims of the police in protests were to use minimal force and to secure arrests of the “violent” actors—and not to kill protestors—, only a superficial gaze can conclude that the military aspect of the new model of public order was purely an issue of outward appearances.954 To be sure, the new operational turn of the police in the seventies had modest effects in the raw numbers of arrests and prosecutions.

Yet officials typically interpreted the limitations of the police in confrontations as evidence of the insufficient operationalization of surveillance, mobility, and targeted aggression rather than as signs of the inherent limitations of those principles. State officials thus reinforced the operational turn in police tactics not in spite of its shortcomings, but because of them.

954 Pace Busch et al., Die Polizei in der Bundesrepublik, 352. 395 396

Conclusion

A large number of the organizational forms of New Left radicals were ephemeral: consider the practice of entering the factory and attempting to radicalize the working class known as

établissement955 or Betriebsarbeit.956 Similarly, armed struggle by the radical left in Europe can be placed into a before/after chronicle even if some urban guerrillas only came in from the underground over a decade after the main events of 1977-1978 in West Germany and Italy. In the intellectual and political fields, ideologies of revolutionary Third Worldism957 and retroactive efforts to recover the revolutionary purity of the Third International958 likewise belong to the past.

Yet if certain initiatives of the New Left are now of purely historical importance, the militant demonstration is not one of them. In contemporary Europe, protest remains a sensitive domain where competing understandings of legitimacy, power, and violence are at stake, and throwing projectiles at the police, practicing small-group tactics alongside a broader demonstration and recourse to Molotov cocktails have never truly gone out of fashion in continental Europe and

955 See the special issue on this phenomenon in Les Tempes modernes 2015/3-4 (Nos. 684-685). The most brilliant account to have been produced out of établissement is Robert Linhart, L’établi (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1978).

956 For Germany, a recent contribution is “Linke Betriebsintervention wilde Streiks und operaistische Politik 1968 bis 1988.“ Arbeit-Bewegung-Geschichte, vol. 50, no. 1 (January 2016). Early looks back include Autonomie, no. 9 (October 1977).

957 Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950-1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Christoph Kalter, “From Global to Local and Back: The ‘Third World’ Concept and the New Radical Left in France,” Journal of Global History 12, no. 1 (March 2017): 115–36, https://doi.org/10.1017/S174002281600036X.

958 Terence Renaud, “German New Lefts: Postwar Socialists between Past and Future,” New German Critique 46, no. 2 (August 1, 2019): 117–49, https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-7546206.

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remain common political rituals of the far left—rituals that occasionally serves as a catalyst for broader cycles of militancy. In France, autonomes were committing vandalism and confronting police on 23 March 1979 and organizing campus resistance at Jussieu in 1980. In West Germany, the specific type of militancy practiced by Frankfurt Spontaneists and Maoist protestors of the

KBW as part of a transnational post-1968 politics went through major resurgence in the early eighties under the impetus of the Autonomen and the notorious Black Bloc.959 Contemporary ultra- lefts have renewed these practices; thus, the 1968 movement and the leftism it inaugurated served as vanishing mediators for a new, conflictual form of protest that remains a permanent virtuality in the present. Similarly, the critique of the behaviors of police officers in protests continues to be part of militant strategy, and film, photography, and other media have rendered police intervention more visible than ever in our twenty-first century. Thus, phenomena of political radicalism, violence, and police overreaction continue to define protest movements like the gilets jaunes or more circumscribed incidents like the 2017 G20 demonstrations in Hamburg.

Western European protest governance as we know it is also largely an artifact of the events of 1968 and the seventies. Alternative means of constraint like “tear gas,” explosive grenades, water cannon, and chemical sprays remain key elements of crowd control in contemporary Europe, and French and West German police continue to mediate physical constraint through updated versions of the arsenal defined after 1968.960 Meanwhile, it suffices to consult recent debates on

959 See Geronimo, Fire and Flames.

960 The only notable novelty in the French arsenal is the French lanceur de balles de défense (LBD)—a controversial “less lethal” anti-riot weapon descended from the baton round deployed by the British Army in Northern Ireland in the seventies. For the LBD, see Sebastian Roché, “Les violences policières en France,” Esprit, January 2020.

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the latest major operations of the maintenance of order or federally-coordinated Polizeieinsatz in the context of protest to see that a hybrid form of police intervention combining blockades and mass interventions of uniformed police, on the one hand, and extensive surveillance and use of specialized units to pursue militants, on the other, remains contemporary.961 Meanwhile, rigid, directly coercive tactics continue to define contemporary French public order operations, in contrast to the more flexible modes of intervention used in West Germany.962 Thus, the disjuncture between French and West German approaches to public order identified in this dissertation remains salient.

Recent histories of 1968 have often shown how the political movements of the late sixties yielded to the search for feminist, ecological, and other alternatives, as new utopias replaced the

1968 articulation of direct democracy and neo-Marxism.963 Within the general contours of these histories, the main controversies tend to involve irreconcilable presentations of the original principles of 1968, the value of those values, and the question of whether the political and social configurations that followed represented the fulfillment of core principles or rather were the result of a counter-offensive by other political and economic groups that disaggregated the movements and co-opted various leaders and ideological motifs.964

961 For France, see Mamère and Popelin, Rapport fait au nom de la commission d’enquête.

962 Fabien Jobard and Olivier Fillieule, “Un splendide isolement,” La Vie des idées, May 24, 2016, http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Un-splendide-isolement.html.

963 For humanitarianism, ethics, and re-legitimated capitalism, respectively in the French-language historiography, see Eleanor Davey, Idealism beyond Borders : The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954-1988 (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics; Boltanski and Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme.

964 On the French scene, the contours of this debate were laid out in the late seventies. See Debray, “A Modest Contribution”; Henri Weber, “Reply to Debray,” New Left Review 1, no. 115 (June 1979): 66–71. 398 399

On the whole, this dissertation sustains the second view. It shows that one of the lasting impacts of 1968 militancy was a reconfiguration in the governance practices of the police. For 1968 radicals, confronting the police was part of a political strategy to encourage a revolutionary movement: prominent 1968 figures like Rudi Dutschke had theorized that demonstrations could expose the state as simultaneously vulnerable and authoritarian and set the revolutionary dialectic on its correct course. In a similar vein, for post-1968 revolutionary left organizations, militant demonstrations were intended to contribute to the combativeness of the working and popular classes and to generate the consolidation of mass movements. Yet the social revolutionary leftists of 1968 could determine neither their reception by the public nor the effects of their militant practices on the state, and the police rearticulated its practices of physical constraint and operational principles to become more effective and offer a lower profile to critics. Although the transnational government effort to secure claims to a monopoly of legitimate force in demonstrations was destined to remain unfinished so long as antagonistic actors conducted militant encounters and preserved a left counter-public, the innovations to protest management in the seventies meant that already-asymmetrical power relations were further defined by government agents. In this respect, the consolidation of the right to demonstrate in the seventies and eighties— the point d’honneur of West German social democracy and the later French Union of the Left— was contingent on and rendered possible by a sustained, organized effort to master the potentialities of violent protest or direct action. The paradox of the government response to New

Left protest is that states subjected radicals to new techniques and practices of surveillance,

The most sophisticated version of the co-option thesis is Boltanski and Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. 399 400

disempowerment, and coercion, but that these practices were less susceptible to unveiling as violence than those inherited from the interwar period.

As a historical-critical intervention, this dissertation has attempted to show this dynamic at work, tracing how police reformers and modernizing experts acted in response to the various critiques of police violence—both practical and discursive—in an effort to build more efficient ways to defeat protest movements and to isolate them from potential bases of support. It would be absurd to claim that novel practices of physical constraint and specialized surveillance and arrest units represented the “fulfillment” of the aspirations of 1968 radicals, but militant protest in its political and adversarial dimensions did launch processes of reflexivity that led to fundamental differences in European governance. Moreover, police reformers were at least somewhat responsive to critiques of indiscriminate, excessive, and inhumane force and did attempt to incorporate them. Although this dissertation has detailed only two elements of protest governance after 1968—the introduction and reinforcement of alternatives to the baton and the bullet, on the one hand, and the consolidation of specialized units for surveilling and interdicting “violent” groups, on the other—public order law and the legitimation discourses of the government would also demonstrate the impact of the New Left on the practices of the state.

This dissertation has not asked whether militant protest tactics or those of the police were effective—rather, it has focused on the historical emergence and adversarial dynamics of these practices, tracing the history of militant protest as a practical activity and various efforts to manage it. Despite reforms that aimed to routinize the governance of protest, militant protestors frequently found that the police were considerably more vulnerable and less empowered to maintain order than was typically assumed, even though the “military” outcome of confrontations was rarely in doubt. Similarly, police were typically more successful at obstructing militant protestors than they

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were at avoiding incriminating controversies or at achieving viable prosecutions or arrests. Insofar as protests combined large numbers of demonstrators and small groups willing to confront the police, they continued to pose irreconcilable alternatives between political legitimacy and police dominance—rendering impossible the Weberian agenda of a state monopoly on legitimate force.

In this sense, the period begun in 1968 remains our own. Nevertheless, one of the major implications of this dissertation is that 21st century social movements must do more than act out modes of militant action defined by the 1968 generation if they are to achieve broad contemporary resonance.

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Bibliography