Archive: Paris students in savage battles – 1968
Paris, 6 May
Paris, venue later this week for the opening of the Vietnam peace talks, was stunned tonight after a day and a night of riots by at least 10,000 students on a scale unequalled in post-war years.
St Germain des Pres, the capital’s literary and cultural centre, resembled a battlefield after several hours of fierce clashes between students – supported in some cases by university teachers – and the police. The Place St Germain des Pres and the Rue de Rennes running from the Place to Montparnasse station was an appalling sight late tonight.
Sean O'Hagan on the riots and protests of 1968
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Fierce resistance
Buses with their tyres slashed and windows broken were slewn across the street. Cars upended with windows smashed marked the spots where the hard core of the students put up fierce resistance to the police who, with nerves shattered after a full day of rioting, clubbed the demonstrators when they caught them and sometimes bystanders with a sickening ferocity.
Red Cross workers with helmets ran through exploding teargas grenades to give first aid treatment to the hundreds of casualties. As the police slowly drove the demonstrators up the Rue de Rennes, Red Cross workers carried youths and girls, with heads streaming with blood.
Once the demonstrators threw tear-gas grenades at ambulances as the wounded were being lifted into them. Policemen and journalists with long years of experience of Paris riots almost disbelieved the evidence of their eyes as they viewed the scene of destruction.
A student is arrested by the police on the boulevard Saint Germain on 6 May 6 1968. Photograph: Jacques Marie/AFP
Policemen and journalists with long years of experience of Paris riots almost disbelieved the evidence of their eyes as they viewed the scene of destruction. The roadway was torn up in numerous places where students had armed themselves with stones and pieces of tarmacadam. Shop windows were shattered and the blue pall of teargas hung over the strangely silent Place St Germain, usually the gayest of night spots but tonight like a quarter in mourning.
Minister’s appeal
The Minister of Education M. Peyrefitte in a television broadcast tonight appealed to the students to end the violence and said that a dialogue between the authorities and the students would be undertaken if the riots stopped. He reminded the students that the annual examinations were due to begin shortly.
From early this morning the Sorbonne, which has been closed until further order by the Rector, was ringed by one of the largest forces of Police ever to have been called to deal with the capital’s turbulent students.
The National Union of French Students (UNEF) and the University Teachers’ Syndicate both called for an unlimited nation-wide strike to protest against “police repression,” and to obtain the release of the students imprisoned after last Friday’s disturbances in the Latin Quarter, when more than five hundred were arrested.
The Guardian, 7 May 1968.
The Guardian view: The Sorbonne students’ protest
13 May 1968
The street violence which has been raging in Paris is unlike anything seen in Western Europe since the end of the war. In ten days it has grown from a small demonstration in the forecourt of the Sorbonne to pitched battles across barricades throughout the Latin Quarter and to a nationwide general strike. Each step in the process has had its own logic, but the combined effect is a bitter embarrassment to President de Gaulle on the eve of his tenth anniversary in power and with the eyes of the world on Paris. The Government’s hasty concessions will probably lower the temperature again, although they only restore the position which existed two weeks ago and leave the students’ original discontents unanswered.
The trouble began originally in the Sorbonne’s overflow-annexe at Nanterre, a new campus which was ironically meant as a model for the future. But it turned out to have the academic atmosphere of a railway station. In a dreary suburb, with few cultural amenities and poor libraries, students found they had to live on the campus – miles from Boulevard St Michel, confined in dormitories with medieval rules about visiting, forbidden to hold political meetings, and attending overcrowded classes. Even this would not have been enough to spark off a general outcry, if the authorities had not made a series of foolish blunders. The Rector of the Sorbonne, M. Roche, managed to unite almost the whole student body against himself by closing the whole university to prevent demonstrations in support of a group of suspended students. Excessive violence by the military security police then roused widespread public sympathy.
France has only herself to blame for most of the causes of the recent riots; a colossal expansion of student numbers (which have more than doubled from less than 300,000 in the early 1960s to almost 600,000 now), a supply of teachers and buildings which has not kept pace, authoritarian regulations, a stultifying political climate, harsh and oppressive police tactics. Yet the same prescription was found in the University of California at Berkeley, and can be repeated in Italy, Germany, and to a much lesser extent in Britain.
Paris students meet with brutal repression – archive, 1968
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The crisis in the Sorbonne falls into the pattern which seems to link most Western universities. And many of the issues which the French student leaders are raising strike an international chord in campuses in this country and elsewhere. It would be complacent to ignore them. Students are unhappy about the size and impersonality of universities – “knowledge factories,” as its President once called the University of California. They are unhappy about the loss of freedom, implied in their links with industrial and defence installations, and about the conflict between education and training, which the growing demand for more and more specialists is inevitably bringing up.
The problems of mass universities have become symbolic of the problems of most industrialised societies; students will go on asking questions about the quality of life, and about democratic participation in a mass society where more and more decision-making is left to bureaucrats and technical experts. Utopian and vague though most of their answers still are, the questions are worth raising.