The May-June Revolt in France, 1968

Also see 1968 revolutions.

In May and June of 1968, a wave of riots and occupations swept France and nearly 10 million workers went on strike. The uprising enjoyed strong popular support; on May 8, a poll by the French Institute of Public Opinion found that four-fifths of the country sympathized with students in Paris who had been rioting for several days. With the influence of the Situationist International, radically anti-authoritarian and utopian slogans appeared on walls across the country. "Be realistic: demand the impossible." "Live without dead time." "Boredom is counterrevolutionary." "Happiness is hanging your landlord." "No forbidding allowed."

The economy was brought to a halt, and the conservative president Charles de Gaulle even temporarily fled the country. However, workers stopped short of actually reopening and self-managing the factories they occupied, and in June the country re-elected de Gaulle. An Anarchist FAQ offers the following explanation for why the revolt failed in the short-term:

So why did this revolt fail? Certainly not because "vanguard" Bolshevik parties were missing. It was infested with them. Fortunately, the traditional authoritarian left sects were isolated and outraged. Those involved in the revolt did not require a vanguard to tell them what to do, and the "workers' vanguards" frantically ran after the movement trying to catch up with it and control it.

[I]t was the lack of independent, self-managed confederal organisations to co-ordinate struggle which resulted in occupations being isolated from each other. So divided, they fell. In addition, Murray Bookchin argues that "an awareness among the workers that the factories had to be worked, not merely occupied or struck," was missing.

The Communist Party played a role in suppressing the revolution. Crimethinc summarizes the conclusions of May 1968 participants Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit: "The Communist CGT union negotiated a settlement with the government to get the workers back to work, and when the workers they claimed to represent refused en masse, they functioned as strikebreakers."

In the longer term, however, it can be argued that the uprising dramatically changed world history. Immanuel Wallerstein argues that the world revolution of 1968, in which France figured prominently, transformed global political common sense. New cultural mores of anti-racism, feminism, and sexual revolution entered the mainstream, and a critique of US imperialism and the bureaucracy of the Old Left became vastly more legitimate.

Some anarchists and libertarian Marxists argue that the workers', feminist, black liberation, indigenous and other struggles of the 1960s caused the breakdown in the 1970s of Keynesian policies and the so-called golden age of capitalism. "As the revolt against exploitation grew," John Holloway writes, "both in its monetised and non-monetised forms, the extraction of surplus value became more and more difficult for capital." According to this explanation, the struggles succeeded in putting the entire world capitalist system into a major crisis. Neoliberalism, then, was a counter-revolution, an attempt by the ruling class to "recover after the revolution of 1968."

From An Anarchist FAQ:

A.5.7 The May-June Revolt in France, 1968

The May-June events in France placed anarchism back on the radical landscape after a period in which many people had written the movement off as dead. This revolt of ten million people grew from humble beginnings. Expelled by the university authorities of Nanterre in Paris for anti-Vietnam War activity, a group of anarchists (including Daniel Cohn-Bendit) promptly called a protest demonstration. The arrival of 80 police enraged many students, who quit their studies to join the battle and drive the police from the university.

Inspired by this support, the anarchists seized the administration building and held a mass debate. The occupation spread, Nanterre was surrounded by police, and the authorities closed the university down. The next day, the Nanterre students gathered at the Sorbonne University in the centre of Paris. Continual police pressure and the arrest of over 500 people caused anger to erupt into five hours of street fighting. The police even attacked passers-by with clubs and tear gas.

A total ban on demonstrations and the closure of the Sorbonne brought thousands of students out onto the streets. Increasing police violence provoked the building of the first barricades. Jean Jacques Lebel, a reporter, wrote that by 1 a.m., "[l]iterally thousands helped build barricades. . . women, workers, bystanders, people in pyjamas, human chains to carry rocks, wood, iron." An entire night of fighting left 350 police injured. On May 7th, a 50,000-strong protest march against the police was transformed into a day-long battle through the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter. Police tear gas was answered by molotov cocktails and the chant "Long Live the Paris Commune!"

By May 10th, continuing massive demonstrations forced the Education Minister to start negotiations. But in the streets, 60 barricades had appeared and young workers were joining the students. The trade unions condemned the police violence. Huge demonstrations throughout France culminated on May 13th with one million people on the streets of Paris.

Faced with this massive protest, the police left the Latin Quarter. Students seized the Sorbonne and created a mass assembly to spread the struggle. Occupations soon spread to every French University. From the Sorbonne came a flood of propaganda, leaflets, proclamations, telegrams, and posters. Slogans such as "Everything is Possible," "Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible," "Life without Dead Times," and "It is Forbidden to Forbid" plastered the walls. "All Power to the Imagination" was on everyone's lips. As Murray Bookchin pointed out, "the motive forces of revolution today. . . are not simply scarcity and material need, but also quality of everyday life . . . the attempt to gain control of one's own destiny." [Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 166]

Many of the most famous slogans of those days originated from the Situationists. The Situationist International had been formed in 1957 by a small group of dissident radicals and artists. They had developed a highly sophisticated (if jargon riddled) and coherent analysis of modern capitalist society and how to supersede it with a new, freer one. Modern life, they argued, was mere survival rather than living, dominated by the economy of consumption in which everyone, everything, every emotion and relationship becomes a commodity. People were no longer simply alienated producers, they were also alienated consumers. They defined this kind of society as the "Spectacle." Life itself had been stolen and so revolution meant recreating life. The area of revolutionary change was no longer just the workplace, but in everyday existence:

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth." [quoted by Clifford Harper, Anarchy: A Graphic Guide, p. 153]

Like many other groups whose politics influenced the Paris events, the situationists argued that "the workers' councils are the only answer. Every other form of revolutionary struggle has ended up with the very opposite of what it was originally looking for." [quoted by Clifford Harper, Op. Cit., p. 149] These councils would be self-managed and not be the means by which a "revolutionary" party would take power. Like the anarchists of Noire et Rouge and the libertarian socialists of Socialisme ou Barbarie, their support for a self-managed revolution from below had a massive influence in the May events and the ideas that inspired it.

On May 14th, the Sud-Aviation workers locked the management in its offices and occupied their factory. They were followed by the Cleon-Renault, Lockhead-Beauvais and Mucel-Orleans factories the next day. That night the National Theatre in Paris was seized to become a permanent assembly for mass debate. Next, France's largest factory, Renault-Billancourt, was occupied. Often the decision to go on indefinite strike was taken by the workers without consulting union officials. By May 17th, a hundred Paris Factories were in the hands of their workers. The weekend of the 19th of May saw 122 factories occupied. By May 20th, the strike and occupations were general and involved six million people. Print workers said they did not wish to leave a monopoly of media coverage to TV and radio, and agreed to print newspapers as long as the press "carries out with objectivity the role of providing information which is its duty." In some cases print-workers insisted on changes in headlines or articles before they would print the paper. This happened mostly with the right-wing papers such as 'Le Figaro' or 'La Nation'.

With the Renault occupation, the Sorbonne occupiers immediately prepared to join the Renault strikers, and led by anarchist black and red banners, 4,000 students headed for the occupied factory. The state, bosses, unions and Communist Party were now faced with their greatest nightmare -- a worker-student alliance. Ten thousand police reservists were called up and frantic union officials locked the factory gates. The Communist Party urged their members to crush the revolt. They united with the government and bosses to craft a series of reforms, but once they turned to the factories they were jeered out of them by the workers.

The struggle itself and the activity to spread it was organised by self-governing mass assemblies and co-ordinated by action committees. The strikes were often run by assemblies as well. As Murray Bookchin argues, the "hope [of the revolt] lay in the extension of self-management in all its forms -- the general assemblies and their administrative forms, the action committees, the factory strike committees -- to all areas of the economy, indeed to all areas of life itself." Within the assemblies, "a fever of life gripped millions, a rewaking of senses that people never thought they possessed." [Op. Cit., p. 168 and p. 167] It was not a workers' strike or a student strike. It was a peoples' strike that cut across almost all class lines.

On May 24th, anarchists organised a demonstration. Thirty thousand marched towards the Palace de la Bastille. The police had the Ministries protected, using the usual devices of tear gas and batons, but the Bourse (Stock Exchange) was left unprotected and a number of demonstrators set fire to it.

It was at this stage that some left-wing groups lost their nerve. The Trotskyist JCR turned people back into the Latin Quarter. Other groups such as UNEF and Parti Socialiste Unife (United Socialist Party) blocked the taking of the Ministries of Finance and Justice. Cohn-Bendit said of this incident "As for us, we failed to realise how easy it would have been to sweep all these nobodies away. . . .It is now clear that if, on 25 May, Paris had woken to find the most important Ministries occupied, Gaullism would have caved in at once. . . . " Cohn-Bendit was forced into exile later that very night.

As the street demonstrations grew and occupations continued, the state prepared to use overwhelming means to stop the revolt. Secretly, top generals readied 20,000 loyal troops for use on Paris. Police occupied communications centres like TV stations and Post Offices. By Monday, May 27th, the Government had guaranteed an increase of 35% in the industrial minimum wage and an all round-wage increase of 10%. The leaders of the CGT organised a march of 500,000 workers through the streets of Paris two days later. Paris was covered in posters calling for a "Government of the People." Unfortunately the majority still thought in terms of changing their rulers rather than taking control for themselves.

By June 5th most of the strikes were over and an air of what passes for normality within capitalism had rolled back over France. Any strikes which continued after this date were crushed in a military-style operation using armoured vehicles and guns. On June 7th, they made an assault on the Flins steelworks which started a four-day running battle which left one worker dead. Three days later, Renault strikers were gunned down by police, killing two. In isolation, those pockets of militancy stood no chance. On June 12th, demonstrations were banned, radical groups outlawed, and their members arrested. Under attack from all sides, with escalating state violence and trade union sell-outs, the General Strike and occupations crumbled.

So why did this revolt fail? Certainly not because "vanguard" Bolshevik parties were missing. It was infested with them. Fortunately, the traditional authoritarian left sects were isolated and outraged. Those involved in the revolt did not require a vanguard to tell them what to do, and the "workers' vanguards" frantically ran after the movement trying to catch up with it and control it.

No, it was the lack of independent, self-managed confederal organisations to co-ordinate struggle which resulted in occupations being isolated from each other. So divided, they fell. In addition, Murray Bookchin argues that "an awareness among the workers that the factories had to be worked, not merely occupied or struck," was missing. [Op. Cit., p. 182]

This awareness would have been encouraged by the existence of a strong anarchist movement before the revolt. The anti-authoritarian left, though very active, was too weak among striking workers, and so the idea of self-managed organisations and workers self-management was not widespread. However, the May-June revolt shows that events can change very rapidly. "Under the influence of the students," noted libertarian socialist Maurice Brinton, "thousands began to query the whole principle of hierarchy . . . Within a matter of days the tremendous creative potentialities of the people suddenly erupted. The boldest and realistic ideas -- and they are usually the same -- were advocated, argued, applied. Language, rendered stale by decades of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, eviscerated by those who manipulate it for advertising purposes, reappeared as something new and fresh. People re-appropriated it in all its fullness. Magnificently apposite and poetic slogans emerged from the anonymous crowd." ["Paris: May 1968", For Workers' Power, p. 253] The working class, fused by the energy and bravado of the students, raised demands that could not be catered for within the confines of the existing system. The General Strike displays with beautiful clarity the potential power that lies in the hands of the working class. The mass assemblies and occupations give an excellent, if short-lived, example of anarchy in action and how anarchist ideas can quickly spread and be applied in practice.

For more details of these events, see participants Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit's Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative or Maurice Brinton's eye-witness account "Paris: may 1968" (in his For Workers' Power). Beneath the Paving Stones by edited Dark Star is a good anthology of situationist works relating to Paris 68 (it also contains Brinton's essay).