The Imaginary Revolution

Parisian Students and Workers in 1968

Michael Seidman

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780857456830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

The events of 1968 have been seen as a decisive turning point in the Western world. The author takes a critical look at "May 1968" and questions whether the events were in fact as "revolutionary" as French and foreign commentators have indicated. He concludes the student movement changed little that had not already been challenged and altered in the late fifties and early sixties. The workers' strikes led to fewer working hours and higher wages, but these reforms reflected the secular demands of the French labor movement. "May 1968" was remarkable not because of the actual transformations it wrought but rather by virtue of the revolutionary power that much of the media and most scholars have attributed to it and which turned it into a symbol of a youthful, renewed, and freer society in France and beyond.

Chapter One

SEX, DRUGS, AND REVOLUTION

The radical students who started the chain of events that led to the greatest strike wave in French history lashed out against capitalism, the state, and property. They extended their protests to what they considered the pleasure-denying restraints of bourgeois society and desired “to liberate man from all the repressions of social life.”¹ Repression meant not just police but a wide spectrum of social activities—wage labor, sexual restraint, industrial hierarchy, and academic discipline. As in other Western nations, universities became the launching pad of their assaults. The most liberal institution provided cover for adversaries of the dominant social/political order and fostered those who wished to destroy it and revolutionize society.

Gauchistes—whether Maoists, Trotskyites, anarchists, or even Situationists—who sparked the revolts in the spring of 1968 did not believe that they could make revolution by themselves. As in other periods of French history—for example, 1848—they desired unity with the people or, more specifically, with the workers. They had little faith in the revolutionary role of students or of any other sector of what they considered the petty bourgeoisie. Their movements contained not only autogestion but also what might be called autocontestation (self-criticism). They were heirs of the nineteenth-century revolutionary legacy of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, and they attempted to create a dynamic that would lead to a classless society. These trublions (troublemakers), as one author called them, were overwhelmingly ouvriériste, trusting that the workers—and no one else—must and would make the revolution.² On this fundamental point gauchistes were in agreement. The symbols of student revolutionaries—red flag, black flag, the Internationale, and the clenched fist—were all taken from the working-class movement. Some have argued that the anti-authoritarianism of the radicals made them “premature anti-Communists” who contributed to the demise of that ideology; however, their faith in the victory of the workers placed them squarely in the Marxist tradition.³Apsychoanalyst has also contrasted the “utopian,” “destructive,” and “immature” student radicals to the constructive and rational Communists.⁴ Yet both Communists and radical students believed in the historical mission of wage earners. Throughout the crisis, the PCF (Parti Communiste Français) insisted that “the working class” was the “only truly revolutionary class.”⁵ Like the Communists, radicals were as scientific or as unscientific as the Marxist tradition itself.⁶

Their utopia, which envisaged a nonrepressive society of liberated workers, attracted the efforts of only a small number of students, but they were able to energize greater numbers of the usually apathetic when agitation centered on specific issues that addressed their needs. When activists could speak to immediate problems, they could involve a significant base. The struggles against sexual segregation, against government reforms of higher education, against examinations, and against police brutality built a mass student movement.

The base was potentially large. Students acted from a position of increasing demographic and biological strength. Youthful hormones provided the biological foundation of revolt. The massive numbers of baby boomers in higher education and their improving health, which made them sexually active at a younger age, created a powerful force for sexual liberalization. During the century the average age of menstruation had fallen from seventeen to twelve.⁷ Throughout the same period, the marriage age was increasing. Youth was stronger and better fed, and I.Q. tests demonstrated increasing intelligence. In 1963 more than one-third of the population was under twenty, the largest percentage since the beginning of World War I.⁸ Greater numbers and higher quality promoted a putatively cross-class category of youth.⁹ Young people wanted more independence and expanded autonomy. Economic growth allowed them more purchasing power. Business, advertising, and the media encouraged a youth culture of music, records, and clothes. Afew of these commodities—such as protest music—encouraged critical attitudes towards society. Even apolitical young people from various social classes could agree that the new consumption was considerably more amusing than working. Ahedonistic generation seemed to resist labor and the responsibilities of the adult world. Students actively participated in a fun-loving lifestyle and became its propagandists.

By the 1960s, demographic change had bolstered student power. Numbers of students had increased from 3,000 during the First Empire (1804–1814) to over 600,000 in 1968 or one hundred fold relative to population growth.¹⁰ In 1906 Paris had a student population of 15,000; in 1968 it was 160,000. Enrollment in institutions of higher education multiplied quickly in the twentieth century:

1938–1939	60,000
1955–1956	150,000
1962–1963	280,000
1967–1968	605,000

Between 1950 and 1964, France had the largest increase of any major European nation, but others, such as Italy, also had difficulty accommodating the baby boomers and experienced corresponding university unrest.¹¹

Likewise, the number of professors grew rapidly. The 200 teachers employed in the French universities in 1808 increased to 2,000 at the end of World War II and 22,000 in 1967.¹² Most of the expansion of university teaching in the 1960s took place among lower-ranking instructors (maîtres assistants and assistants), who permitted the French university to become a mass university. Their percentage of the university teaching staff rose from 44 percent in 1956–1957 to 72 percent in 1967–1968. The assistants were generationally and politically close to their students. The growing disparity between the increasing numbers of junior faculty compared to the relative stability of senior faculty posts deepened tensions between younger and older teachers.

The French educational system required that a student pass a national, standardized baccalauréat examination to enter the university. The bac differed from the American high-school diploma in that it was considered the first diploma of higher education, not the last of secondary education.¹³ This indicated the tight administrative connection between the lycée and the university. Indeed, teachers—like their students—could and did move from the lycée to the faculté. It was no accident that turbulence in 1968 would spread throughout both institutions.

Bloated university enrollment was especially severe in the humanities and sciences. Students in these areas increased from 32 percent in 1945 to 65 percent in 1962. In 1945, the more professional law, medicine, and pharmacy programs enrolled 57.8 percent of students, but by 1962–1967, their percentage had declined to 35 percent. Feminization accompanied massification. Only 6 percent of students were female in 1906, jumping to 33 percent in 1950, 42 percent in 1962, and nearly 50 percent in 1965–1966.¹⁴ The less pragmatic disciplines in the humanities and sciences attracted proportionally more male and especially female students than the vocationally oriented options of law and medicine. In the 1960s, requirements for the scientific baccalauréat were toughened, but the bac remained comparatively easy in the humanities. Humanities students suffered overcrowded classrooms and inadequate facilities more often than students in other areas. The former were increasingly insecure economically and professionally and perhaps—as in the United States—more willing to revolt.

Demographic growth had paradoxical effects by increasing both the power and the anxieties of young people. Fears of unemployment may have affected students more than workers. Humanities graduates had traditionally found jobs in education, but this option was less certain in the late 1960s. Female students, many of whom were oriented towards a teaching career, were especially concerned by the specter of relatively fewer opportunities in this domain. Between 1962 and 1968, the number of unemployed persons under twenty-five increased threefold.¹⁵Amath professor at the Faculty of Science in Paris reported that of 1,600 students participating in a degree program in 1968, only 200 had found employment as of June.¹⁶ Even though many of those who participated in the May events were reportedly from families of high-level executives, 52 percent of participants feared joblessness.¹⁷ The days when a university diploma meant easy access to respectable positions were over. Furthermore, both the length of time that it took to obtain a liberal arts degree and the dropout rate were growing.¹⁸ Given the weight of their numbers and deepening economic/social insecurity, it is not surprising that students in the humanities and social sciences led the revolts.

The state made a huge but ultimately insufficient effort to accommodate the youthful influx. It expanded old universities and created new ones, such as Nanterre in the western suburbs of Paris. The budget devoted to higher education exploded sixfold from 605 million francs in 1958 to 3,790 billion in 1968, and the number of professors of all ranks jumped from 5,870 to 25,700.¹⁹ During and after the electoral campaign of 1967, the prime minister, Georges Pompidou, boasted that more universities had been constructed since 1962 than were operating when he became prime minister that year. This expansion transformed higher education. The university of the Third Republic had offered the sons of a comfortable bourgeoisie knowledge of French culture and had provided them with skills to enter law, medicine, and higher education.²⁰ The goal had been to train an enlightened and republican elite. During the Fifth Republic, masses of students came from the less comfortable middle classes whose futures were much more insecure. In 1939, 34.8 percent of the fathers of students were business executives or practiced liberal professions, 16.4 percent were employees, artisans, or small shopkeepers, 1.6 were industrial workers.²¹ The percentage of sons of employees, artisans, or small shopkeepers hardly varied from 1939 to 1950.²² However, their percentage of the student population had risen from 17.2 percent in 1950 to 31.2 percent in 1960, whereas the percentage from the liberal professions had dropped from 17.4 percent in 1950 to 9.6 percent in 1965–1966. The ratio of the number of students from the middle and lower-middle classes to the number of students from the upper classes multiplied fourfold in fifteen years. Yet democratization had limits. Although the proportion of students from working-class families had risen from 1.9 percent in 1950–1951 to 5.5 percent in 1960–1961, it remained the lowest among major industrial nations.²³ By 1968, the minister of education, Alain Peyrefitte, claimed that 10 percent of students came from working-class families. PCF publications put the figure somewhat below that number.²⁴ By contrast, American institutions of higher learning—whose quality varied much more than their French counterparts—recruited roughly 30 percent of their student body from working-class families. Even in Italian universities, students from the working class constituted over 20 percent of the student body.²⁵

Despite the achievement of a more socially diverse student body, the French university system remained solidly bourgeois. The son of a high-level executive was eighty times more likely to enter the university than the son of a rural wage earner and forty times more likely to enter than the son of a worker.²⁶ The student body was gradually becoming somewhat less bourgeois, but professors originated almost exclusively from that group, with seventy-two percent of them the sons of high-level fonctionnaires and only 2 percent from working-class backgrounds. French institutions of higher learning were bourgeois in more than social origin of personnel. In effect, the university perpetuated a bourgeois elite based putatively on achievement. It trained future executives who would run public and private bureaucracies, and it promoted high culture. The latter function gave students from upper layers of society a distinct advantage since they were more familiar with it than their peers from the lower-middle and lower classes.

Nanterre (see map 1) was one of the starting points for revolts against the bourgeois university. Henri Lefebvre, who taught and agitated there, aptly describes it:

[Nanterre] is a Parisian faculty located outside of Paris…Right now it contains misery, shantytowns, excavations for an express subway line, low-income housing projects for workers, and industrial enterprises. This is a desolate and strange landscape. The university was conceived in terms of the concepts of industrial production and productivity of an a...