HAPPENINGS
521
tion. There was an outbreak last night near the Bastille but it was
quickly crushed: the maintenance of public order is now at the top of
De Gaulle's agenda, and there is plenty of evidence that it will be
maintained if necessary by brutal repression and at the expense of justice.
As to the Communist Party, it can hardly be thought of as a revolution–
ary agency any more, having been offered a revolution and publicly
declined the offer. M. Waldeck-Rochet,
its
secretary-general, said a few
days ago that the most pressing danger to the party came from "left–
ists."3 And there is no other united organization capable even of
thinking in such terms. There is a lot of ideological spirit but very
little political strength.
The trouble with the May
revolution
was that it was swallowed
whole by bourgeois democracy, just as Marcuse had feared.' What
prevents the continuing alliance of the students and workers
is
that the
students have already enjoyed and seen through the benefits of bour–
geois society while the workers are still struggling for those benefits ;
the students are ready to destroy what the workers still dream of at–
taining. "The students did not go to the barricades for a few more
lecture-rooms, and I think we are safe in saying that the young workers
who joined in did not do so for a seven percent raise," said Alain
Geismar of
S.N.E.Sup. (Syndicat national de l'enseignement superieur,
the university teachers' union) at a rally on May
27.5
But
it
is easy for
the privileged to overrate the idealism of the underprivileged: th e
workers got their raise and went back to work.
It
is therefore in the universities rather than in the country at
large that further developments are to be looked for (not that a too
repressive regime might not blow up in an even more spectacular way
later on, only the government would have to be quite remarkably stupid
for this to happen). How the
rentree
in October will be managed is
hard to visualize at this point.
6
Something has to give somewhere
eventually, the French university system being about a half-century
behind in its attitudes and resources, and the chaos this year is un–
believable - courses unfinished, examinations postponed, candidates for
advanced degrees refusing to take them, and so on. In fact while the
tension generated among the students by the war in Vietnam was the
3. Le Monde,
July 11, 1968.
4. Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man,
Boston, Beacon Press, 1964.
5. Alain Ayache, ed.,
Les Citations de la revolution de mai,
Paris, Pauvert
1968, p. 81.
6. In fact, under the leadership of the new Minister of Education, M. Edgar
Faure, the French government has ill three months radically o\'t° rhalllc·d
the entire system of Univ('rsity administration.
