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THE ORIGINS OF THE AGITATION IN FRANCE
The refusal already being affirmed by wide sections of youth in other
countries had been taken up in France by only a tiny fringe of advanced
groups. No tendency towards economic or even political "crisis" could be
observed. The agitation launched at Nanterre by four or five revolutionaries,
who would later constitute the Enrages, was to lead in less than five months
to the near liquidation of the state. This is certainly food for thought. The
profound crisis latent in France exists in all other modern bourgeois societies.
What was lacking was consciousness of a real revolutionary perspective and
its practical organisation. Never did an agitation by so few individuals lead in
so short a time to such consequence.
The Gaullist regime in itself had no particular importance in the origin of
this crisis. Gaullism is nothing but a bourgeois regime working at the
modernisation of capitalism, in much the same fashion as Wilson's Labour
Party is. Its principle characteristic and success lies in the fact that the
opposition in France is even more handicapped than elsewhere in attracting
support for a program with precisely the same ends. We must nonetheless
note two specific features: the Gaullist accession to power by plots and a
military putsch, which marks the regime with a certain contempt for legality,
and de Gaulle's personal cultivation of archaic prestige. It's ironic that this
kind of prestige, so completely lacking in France for one hundred years,
began to reappear only with the recent movement, and precisely by shattering
the plaster prestige of Gaullism.
The modernisation of the French economy and its adaptation to the
Common Market, though undramatic, didn't take place without a certain
recession and drop in real salaries through the expediency of Government
decrees on social security, with a growth in unemployment, especially for
young workers. This was the pretext for the exemplary working class riot in
Caen in January, where the workers overstepped trade union demands and
looted several stores. In March steel workers of the Garnier factory in Redon
were able to bring every factory in the town into their victorious strike,
creating their own links independently of the trade unions, and organising their
own self-defence, forcing a CRS (riot police) withdrawal.
The direct repercussions of the Strasbourg affair were first felt at the
university dormitories of Jussieu, near Lyon, where, for several weeks during
the spring of 1967 the residents ignored every regulation, thus going beyond
the academic debate on the reform of anti-sexual statutes. From the beginning
of December 1967 the "students" of Nantes went further still. After taking
over the local branch of the UNEF, they decided to close the Bureau d'Aide
Psychologique Universitaire. They then organised several invasions of the
university residence halls: men in the women's dormitories, followed by
women in the men's. Finally, in February, they seized the Nantes rectory and
fought the police ferociously. As Rivarol wrote on May 3rd, "it has largely
been forgotten that, as early as February, the riots at Nantes showed the real
face of these 'situationists,' fifteen hundred students under red and black
flags, the Hall of Justice occupied..."
The Enrages group was formed during a struggle against police presence in
Nanterre. Some plainclothes policemen had been photographed and on
January 26th enlarged reproductions were displayed on posters inside the
faculty. This action brought on, at the request of Dean Grappin, the
intervention of sixty uniformed men, who were driven off after a brief
confrontation. Several hundred leftist militants had joined the original
instigators. These included the Enrages as such, along with a dozen or so
anarchists. The Enrages were among the least assimilated elements of the
university system at that time. Moreover these "campus bums" had found
their way to a theoretical agreement with the platform of the Situationist
International. They began a systematic assault on the unbearable order of
things, beginning with the university.
The environment was particularly revolting. Nanterre was modern in its
faculty appointments, exactly as it was modern in its architecture. It was here
that-the cretins of submissive thought pontificated - the knaves of
recuperation, the modernist nullities of social integration, the Lefebvres and
Tourraines. The scene was perfect: the urbanism of isolation had grafted a
university centre onto the high-rise flats and their complementary slums. It
was a microcosm of the general conditions of oppression, the spirit of a
world without spirit. Thus the program preventing the specialists of illusion
from speaking ex cathedra and the use of the walls for critical vandalism were
to have great effect. This opened the exit from the sterile protest regurgitated
for years against the pettiness of the dormitory monitors or the Fouchet
reform, made to order for the UNEF and for all those who coveted
leadership.
When the Enrages began to interrupt the courses of the sociologists and
several others, the UNEF and its leftist infiltrators reacted with indignation.
On several occasions they themselves attempted to protect the professors.
The anarchists, despite intentions of their own regarding the local UNEF
committee, stayed neutral. Among them Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who had already
carved out for himself something of a reputation by excusing himself for
having insulted a Minister, was threatened with no less than expulsion from
the UNEF on a motion by the Trotskyists (known at the time as the CLER
but who later became the Federation of Revolutionary Students). Only
because Cohn-Bendit, a German national, had been called to appear before
the committee on expulsions at the Prefecture (national police headquarters)
did the CLER decide to withdraw their motion. The scandals of the Enrages
were already finding an echo in a certain political agitation. Their song about
Grappin, the infamous "Grappignole," and their first comic-strip poster
appeared on the occasion of the "National Day" of university residence
occupations, February 14. On every side the tone got higher.
On February 14 the Nouvel Observateur wept over Nanterre: The left has
dissolved leaving nothing but the Enrages who include no one but three or
four representatives of the Situationist International."
The same day the Enrages issued a tract making clear that they
had never belonged to the Situationist International and therefore could not
claim to represent it in any way. Repression would be child's play if every
demonstration that showed the slightest radicalism were the result of a
Situationist plot!... [W]e nevertheless reaffirm our sympathy for the
situationist critique. Our accord with radical theory can be judged by our
acts.
On March 22nd the leftist groups invaded the administration building and
held a meeting in the university council room. In the name of the Enrages,
Rene Riesel immediately demanded the expulsion of two observers from the
administration and of several Stalinists who were present. After spokesmen
for the anarchists, a regular collaborator of Cohn-Bendit's, had asserted that
"the Stalinists who are here this evening are no longer Stalinists," the Enrages
immediately left the meeting in protest against this cowardly illusion. They
had, moreover, been accused of wanting to wreck the union offices. They set
about writing their slogans on the walls: TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR
REALITY, BOREDOM IS COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY, TRADE
UNIONS ARE BROTHELS, "NEVER WORK," etc. This ushered in a form
of agitation that was to enjoy a far-reaching success and become one of the
original characteristics of the period of occupations. Thus the gathering of
various leftist elements which would be called in the following weeks "The
Movement of the 142" and then the "March 22nd Movement" began to
constitute itself that evening, without and against the Enrages.
From the beginning, the March 22nd Movement was an eclectic
conglomerate of individuals who joined it under purely personal auspices.
They all agreed on the fact that it was impossible for them to agree on any
theoretical point and counted on "common action" to overcome this gap.
There was nevertheless a consensus on two subjects; one a ridiculous
banality, the other a new demand. The banality was the anti-imperialist
"struggle," heritage of the contemplative period of the leftist groups which
was about to end: Nanterre, that suburban Vietnam, lending its resolute
support to insurgent Bolivia. The novelty was direct democracy in the
organisation. It is true that this intention was only partially realised in the
March 22nd Movement because of the double allegiance of most of its
members, which problem was discretely ignored or never considered. There
were Maoists, JCRs, anarchists of all kinds, from the ruins of the "Anarchist
Federation" to the activists of the "Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth,"
and up to and including the comical, or questionable, adherents of the
"groups of institutional research" (FGERI).
Cohn-Bendit himself belonged to the independent and semi-theoretical
anarchist group around the magazine Noir et Rouge. Because of this and his
personal qualities, Cohn-Bendit found himself in the most radical tendency of
the March 22nd Movement and more truly revolutionary than the whole of the
movement whose spokesman he was to become, and which he therefore had
to tolerate.
Cohn-Bendit, insufficiently intelligent, confusedly informed by various
individuals on the theoretical problems of the period, skilful enough to
entertain a student audience, frank enough to do the job in the arena of leftist
manoeuvres, supple enough to work with their spokesmen, was an honest but
only a mediocre revolutionary. He knew much less than he should have
known and did not make the best of what he knew. Besides, by uncritically
accepting the "star" role, exhibiting himself for the mob of reporters from the
spectacular media, Cohn-Bendit naturally had to watch his remarks, which
always combined lucidity with nonsense, the latter being aggravated by the
distortion inherent in that kind of communication. In April he was still
declaring to anyone that he was a moderate and in no way an Enrage. That
was the time when the press, following a Minister, began to call all the
Nanterre rebels "Enrages."
In a few days the March 22nd Movement had in fact achieved its chief
success, with a bearing on the larger movement as a whole, and which had no
relationship at all with the chatter about the "critical university" pirated
from
the German and Italian examples which had already revealed its inanity.
Whereas all the efforts of the committee on "culture and creativity" had never
gone beyond a revolutionary aestheticism which even some meagre traces of
"situationism" could not make interesting, the simple-minded "anti-imperialist"
project of holding a meeting at Nanterre on March 29 pushed Dean Grappin
to the first and most consequential of a series of administrative blunders
which rapidly extended the agitation. Grappin closed his campus for two
days. The menacing spectre of a "handful of Enrages" was beginning to haunt
the national consciousness.
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