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From Socialist Worker, No 85, July 1968, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
AS THE PLANE came down below cloud cover we saw a large marshalling yard with nothing moving, but it was not until we reached the centre of Paris that we saw signs of the huge students’ and workers’ upheaval that had shaken France for nearly a month.
We passed factories flying red flags and covered with slogans proclaiming “ unlimited strike of occupation.” The streets were covered with political posters, handwritten and printed, revolutionary and reformist. Passersby were reading them and discussing with one another.
We could fee! that the atmosphere was still charged in early June, even though it had declined from its revolutionary peak of a week earlier after de Gaulle’s speech.
At seven in the evening we reached the Sorbonne, the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris, now transformed into the headquarters of the student and revolutionary movement.
The courtyard is a great quadrangle with high buildings on all four sides. Around the edges were dozens of stalls selling literature and advertising different political groups. On the walls were a thick covering of posters appealing to workers and students from every tendency on the left.
The most prominent were the Trotskyist groups Voix Ouvrière (Workers’ Voice) the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire and the Maoist groups l’Union des Jeunesses Communistes (Marxiste-Leniniste) and the Parti Communiste Marxiste-Leniniste de France. There was a sparsely manned Communist Party stall with few customers; their posters were the only ones to be defaced by rude political comments.
Suddenly over the loudspeakers came an appeal. Someone called: “Comrades, comrades!” and explained that Occident, the student fascist group, had attacked the Faculty of Law where the more conservative committee of occupation had allowed them to set up a stall, but now called for help to throw them out because of their threats of violence.
The Sorbonne “service d’ordre” marched off to the law faculty at the head of 700 students, and we went along, expecting the worst. The fascists only numbered about 30 but were all heavily armed and effective fighters. They were no match for the service d’ordre, who soon disarmed them and allowed them to leave unhurt, marching singly between rows of jeering students.
That evening we attended a Voix Ouvrière meeting in the Sorbonne. It was a regular reunion of their militants from all over Paris, some 250 strong. Comrade A. gave a quick situation report and analysis: the unions were trying to get the workers back to work, but many sectors were resisting their pressure. Another commented on possible political reasons for the Kennedy assassination.
One of us made a short speech about reactions in Britain to the French events, and then we heard business-like reports from the factories of the day’s events. The meeting ended with the distribution of tasks for the following day to everyone – leafleting, picket reinforcement, and participation in Comités d’Action.
VO’s analysis was that the strikes were led by a militant minority of workers, overwhelmingly young, who had rejected the reformism and stalinism of the Communist-led CGT (Central Trade Union). It was still necessary to win the majority of workers to a revolutionary position. The CP had an immense hold on the working class, and only a mass revolutionary movement or party could offer a real alternative.
VO and the JCR had formed a joint co-ordinating committee and were working closely together, but both, saw complete unity as a lengthy process. But even if not completely unified, the revolutionary movement hoped to be in a position to act effectively and decisively when the next working-class upsurge occurred.
The next day we took part in a demonstration organised by the comité d’action in the 14th district. About 500 marched through the working-class areas, shouting such slogans as “Power to the workers” and singing the Internationale. The march stopped and held discussions with pickets outside factories which were still on strike.
Perhaps a majority of the demonstrators were students, but there were many young workers and a few older ones. Most were unattached to any group; the most influential group in that comité d’action was the pro-Chinese UJCML, who are very active on the streets without much political direction.
The action committees sprang up in districts, factories, schools and faculties, uniting many different tendencies in common activity. During the climax of the strikes many of the committees took on the functions of feeding the strikers and attempting to link up the militants – though in most cases the factory strike committees were controlled by the CGT, and were not elected.
On Friday June 7, the CRS, the riot police, attacked and expelled the occupying strikers from the Renault factory at Flins, 50 km from Paris. The CP and CGT did nothing. The student and revolutionary organisations called a demonstration at the Gare St. Lazare, where they hoped to take trains en masse to Flins with the help of railwaymen.
But we didn’t get to Flins. The French railways refused to carry the demonstrators, and the CGT backed them up, instructing their members to double up their engine-drivers for fear of “intimidation by disruptive elements.”
Our job was to hold as many CRS in Paris as possible. We were split up as we attempted to get down to the other Renault factory at Billancourt. The march broke into several smaller columns in order to escape from and outflank the CRS.
At one stage we were running down an empty street with CRS behind us and blocking the side exits. The only fighting on that occasion was a victorious encounter with a few thugs from Occident.
We managed to break off down a side-street and reached Billancourt by Metro. In the dark outside the factory gates, closed by the CGT, masses of demonstrators talked with strikers. Later tear-gas was used by the CRS to prevent strikers and demonstrators commandeering buses from the nearby bus-depot to 20 to Flins.
The hostility of the CP to the “splitters and provocateurs” was brought home to us when a group of us were physically presented from distributing VO leaflets in a suburban market place. Before we had been there five minutes, the local Communist toughs had arrived, ripped our leaflets from us and torn them to pieces.
During those days, the battle at Flins grew. Attempts to retake the factory by strikers and students met with vicious repression, ending in the drowning of a high-school pupil who fled from the CRS. The battle continued in the surrounding fields and villages for several days.
The drowning was announced in the Sorbonne to a packed, silent courtyard. A meeting was announced for the next day to decide what protest action to take, but the anger of the students and workers present was so great that a spontaneous march of several thousand started off through the Latin Quarter.
Hemmed in by huge forces of armed CRS – 80 of the 92 companies in France were deployed in Paris that night – the demonstration marched around the Quarter. Barricades seemed to spring up almost spontaneously, Human chains formed to pass forward cobble-stones, and traffic-signs and street benches were torn up.
Then the CRS attacked with teargas and offensive grenades which exploded violently and can be nasty if you are too close. Stone-throwing demonstrators forced the CRS back for a while; police cars were burnt out with Molotov cocktails.
Eventually the cops forced everyone back into the Sorbonne and patrolled the surrounding streets. Small guerrilla bands kept them busy until seven a.m.
Further violent demonstrations took place the next day, after the announcement that two workers had been killed by the CRS at the Peugeot factory at Sochaux. Guerrilla bands spread the fighting to many suburbs of Paris, and showed their attitude to the elections by tearing down and burning the government-provided election hoardings, until then used only by the CP.
A new phase in the struggle started on Wednesday June 12. The government banned all demonstrations, and dissolved JCR, VO, UJCML and the March 22 Committee, soon followed by other left groups. A last moment of light-heartedness took place as each group cheered itself in turn as the list came over the Sorbonne loudspeakers, followed by the entire courtyard singing the Internationale, and giving the clenched-fist salute.
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