May Made Me an Oral History of the 1968 Uprising in France
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May Made Me An Oral History of the 1968 Uprising in France Mitchell Abidor 2018 Contents Acknowledgements 4 Abbreviations 5 Timeline of Events in 1968 6 CHAPTER ONE. Introduction: May ’68 Revisited 8 CHAPTER TWO. Veterans in the Struggle 19 JEAN-JACQUES LEBEL ................................... 19 ALAIN KRIVINE ....................................... 27 PRISCA BACHELET ..................................... 35 HENRI SIMON ........................................ 41 CHAPTER THREE. Students in Paris 48 SUZANNE BORDE ...................................... 48 ISABELLE SAINT-SAËNS .................................. 53 INTERLUDE: SONIA FAYMAN—A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER IN MAY . 58 JEAN-PIERRE FOURNIER .................................. 58 PAULINE STEINER ..................................... 64 PIERRE MERCIER ...................................... 67 CHAPTER FOUR. May Outside Paris 70 JACQUES WAJNSZTEJN .................................. 70 JOSEPH POTIRON ...................................... 76 GUY, BERNARD, DOMINIQUE ............................... 80 MYRIAM CHÉDOTAL AND ELIANE PAUL-DI VICENZO . 89 JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ .................................. 96 JOSÉ AND HÉLÈNE CHATROUSSAT . 101 CHAPTER FIVE. May and Film 108 MICHEL ANDRIEU ..................................... 108 PASCAL AUBIER AND BERNARD EISENSCHITZ . 115 CHAPTER SIX. Some Anarchists 122 DANIEL PINOS ....................................... 122 WALLY ROSELL ....................................... 129 THIERRY PORRÉ ...................................... 136 About the Author 142 2 People say about me: You’re someone who made May, and I answer that it’s May made me. —Thierry Porré Ce qu’il avait vu, était-ce une bataille? Et en second lieu, cette bataille, était-ce Waterloo? —Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank all those who participated in this project, as well as those who made it possible. Jean-Pierre Duteuil (who I never had the opportunity to meet), Helen Arnold, Sebas- tian Budgen, Yves Coleman, Lou Marin, Marie-Pierre Fournier, Philippe Dubacq, and Christophe “Patsy” Patillon all assisted me in locating participants willing to be interviewed. Marie-Pierre is owed extra thanks for having located most of the participants in Saint-Nazaire and Nantes, as well as for having hosted me during my stay in the region and providing a home for the interviews. Space constraints forced me to omit several interviews, and I apologize to those involved. Ev- ery person I interviewed brought something new and interesting, and performing this triage was a difficult task. I apologize to Frank Cassenti, Yves Coleman, Helen Arnold, Daniel Blanchard, Eric Hazan, Catherine Lévy, Colette Danappe, Rémi Drouet, Scylla, and Joël Quélard. Transcripts of their interviews can be found at the Marxists Internet Archive—www.marxists.org—in the May ’68 archive of the French history section. I can’t speak highly enough of the people I interviewed, of their warmth and generosity; people were generous not only with their time, but with the books and newspapers they’d saved since May ’68, feeling these would be more beneficial for this book and its readers than for them. I would like to thank Jim Brook, for his invaluable editorial assistance. And finally, I thank my wife, Joan Levinson, for her patience during the time spent on this voyage through space and time. Note on the interviews: All of the interviews that follow, except that with Jean-Jacques Lebel, were conducted in French. I wanted all of the interviewees to be able to express themselves fully and freely, so even those who speak English told me of their experiences in French. Jean-Jacques, having spent much time in the US, preferred to carry out the interview in English, which he speaks as well as he does French. —Mitchell Abidor 4 Abbreviations CA Comités d’Action CAL Comité d’Action Lycéen CARL Comité d’Action Révolutionnaire Lycéen CFDT Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail CGT Confédération Générale du Travail CNT Confédération Nationale du Travail CRS Compagnies Républicaines de la Sécurité ENS Ecole Normale Supérieure FLN Front de Libération Nationale (Algeria) ICO Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières JC Jeunesse Communiste JCR Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire LCR Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire LO Lutte Ouvrière OCI Organisation Communiste Internationaliste ORTF Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française PCF Parti Communiste Français PSU Parti Socialiste Unifié SNESUP Syndicat National de l’Enseignement Supérieur SouB Socialisme ou Barbarie SRF Société des Réalisateurs de Films UEC Union des Etudiants Communistes UJCML Union de la Jeunesse Communiste Marxiste- Léniniste UNEF Union Nationale des Etudiants de France VO Voix Ouvrière 5 6 Timeline of Events in 1968 January 8 Protest against François Misouffe, Minister of Sports and Youth, at the inauguration of a pool at Nanterre. February Demonstrations in support of Henri Langlois, director of the Cinématheque Française, who was fired by Minister of Culture André Mal- raux. March 20 Offices of American Express near the Opéra attacked by anti-Vietnam War demonstra- tors. March 22 Occupation of the administration tower at Nanterre. April 30 Nanterre campus closed. May 3 Closing of the Sorbonne, occupied by the po- lice prior to the disciplinary hearings for the students arrested at the American Express demonstration. May 6 Violent incidents in the Latin Quarter. Strike begins at the university in Lyon. May 7 Mass demonstration in Paris. May 8 Day of regional action in the region of Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, attracting 10,000 demon- strators in Nantes. May 10–11 Night of the Barricades. May 13 Worker-student demonstrations throughout France. May 14 Occupation of Sud-Aviation Bouguenais, first factory occupied. May 15 Occupation of the Odéon. Strike at Cléon. May 20 Between 6,000,000 and 10,000,000 on strike across the country. May 22 Daniel Cohn-Bendit expelled from France. May 24 In Paris, attack on the Stock Exchange, which is set aflame. In Lyon, a violent demonstra- tion results in the death of a police officer. In Nantes, huge peasant demonstration. May 27 Grenelle Accords. Meeting at Charléty. May 29 Disappearance of de Gaulle. May 30 National Assembly dissolved. Massive pro-de Gaulle demonstration in Paris on the Champs- Elysées. June 1 Gaullist demonstration in Nantes. June 6–10 Incidents at Flins. Death of Gilles Tautin. June 11 7 Demonstration at the Gare de l’Est. June 12 Dissolution of the left-wing groups. June 16 Sorbonne evacuated. July 10 Alain Krivine arrested. CHAPTER ONE. Introduction: May ’68 Revisited On March 15, 1968, the journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté published an article in Le Monde. Echo- ing the words of the nineteenth-century liberal Alphonse Lamartine, his article was headlined “Quand la France s’ennuie” (When France is bored). He entered into the heart of the matterimme- diately, saying that “what currently characterizes our public life is boredom.” The French “don’t participate in any way in the great convulsions shaking the world.” The Vietnam War “moves them, but doesn’t really touch them.” In a world of guerilla warfare in Latin America, mass murder in Indonesia, war and starvation in Biafra, the French view all this “as their business, not ours.” Viansson-Ponté mocks French students who, while their fellows around the world demonstrate and fight, “are concerned with knowing if the girls of [the universities] in Nanterre and Antony can freely access boys’ rooms.” Young workers, for their part, “look for work and don’t find it.” Caring nothing for politicians, “television is there to divert their attention towards the real problems: [skier Jean-Claude] Killy’s bank account, traffic jams, and horse race results.” Boredom is everywhere: even General de Gaulle is bored. Viansson-Ponté’s final words were a warning: “A country can also perish from boredom.” Five days later, on March 20, an anti-Vietnam War demonstration turned violent at American Express near the Opéra and several students from Nanterre were arrested. On March 22, exactly a week after Viansson-Ponté’s article, 142 students at Nanterre occupied the administrative tower in support of the arrested students. The March 22 Movement, its most famous face that ofthe German Jew Daniel Cohn-Bendit, is born. Everything was now in place for the explosion that would occur on May 3 at the Sorbonne, setting off the May–June events. Two months, almost to the day, from the article’s publication, France experienced its first general strike since the Popular Front of 1936, and the most massive popular movement in Western Europe in the twentieth century. In retrospect, Viansson-Ponté’s article seems foolish. But was it? France was, indeed, in a state of political quiet. Still in the middle of the post-war trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years of economic expansion, France was modernizing at a furious pace under the un-modern figure of de Gaulle. Though there had been strikes of varying degrees of importance in the previous couple of years, there was no sign of the kind of worker discontent that would lead anyone to predict what would occur in May and June. No one would have thought that student protests about dorm visitation rights would lead to an upsetting of French society. But it would be the students Viansson-Ponté mocked who would set it all off. After the occupation of the recently opened University of Nanterre by the students whowould become the first members of the March 22 Movement and the temporary closing down ofclasses there, on May 3