Militant Protest and Practices of the State in France and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1968-1977
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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 © 2020 Luca Provenzano All Rights Reserved 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