Workers' Liberty

It was as if a conscience-stricken god said to himself one day in the mid-60s: “I suppose I have been a bit rough on the poor old Trots; setback after setback, massacre after massacre, blow after blow, for four decades now....

Editorial, Workers Fight No 7, June 1968

The May 1968 general strike in France is often bracketed with the other events of that year. Although student activism did play an important role in “detonating” the factory occupations movement in France, to see the general strike as just one among many acts of “resistance” is to denude it of its class content. It was a tooth-and-nail struggle in which the working class withheld its labour power, brought the de Gaulle administration to its knees and had the ability to take state power from the ruling class.

The first factory occupation in 1968 took place at the Sud Aviation aircraft plant at Bouguenais near Nates. François le Madec, a CFDT union activist at the factory, gave this account of the first night of the strike in his 1988 book L’aubépin de mai (The Hawthorns of May). Translated by David Broder.

In 1968 I was a 14 year old student at a posh school in the centre of London. Events of that year did not pass unnoticed even among the sons of the bourgeoisie. The film If made an impression and, even if we didn’t machine gun our teachers, there was at least one organised protest there demanding the right to party unconstrained by school rules on Saturdays.

If you’ve been listening to the Radio Four’s series, 1968, a selection of old radio news broadcasts from each day of that year, you will know that it has got quite exciting (as exciting as Radio Four gets), covering events and France over the last two months.

In 1968 I was student at Cambridge university.

Like many teenagers in 1968, my political education was as an observer for many years of a number of major struggles throughout the world. The civil rights movement in the US; the events in China, which were mystifying as portrayed by the media and explained meaningfully by no-one, and the horrors of the US war in Vietnam.

“At the time I was a student in Bordeaux, active in the French students’ union UNEF. Politically I was hesitating between the PCI [the ‘Lambertist’ group] and Lutte Ouvriere, or, as it was then, Voix Ouvriere. I had friends in the PCI, and my brother was in VO. After May-June I made my choice for VO.

The newspaper Le Monde of 15 March 1968 published an article by the journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté asserting that “what defines our public life at the present time is boredom”. The revolt of the youth, erupting spontaneously, came to break that boredom, pulling the working class into the general strike. How to explain this explosion, when it was fashionable to talk of the “embourgeoisement” of the working class?

3 May 1968: the rector of the Sorbonne (in Paris) demands the intervention of the police to clear the courtyard where left-wing activists are holding a meeting. The police round up everyone. Students in the surrounding area react and demonstrate. The police charge and make more than 600 arrests. All further demonstrations are banned, but the student union UNEF calls a campus strike for 6 May. The Communist Party declares that “these false revolutionaries are behaving objectively as allies of the Gaullist regime”.

In March 1968 students at Nanterre near Paris started a campaign to visit each others’ rooms in halls of residence after 11pm. Their campaign drew in students from all over France, who added their own grievances, their own demands.