522
PETER CAWS
immediate cause of the trouble, the ground of general student and
[acuity discontent had been prepared long before. But what happened
in May was out of all proportion to that discontent; it was the by now
classic combination of administrative insensitivity and police brutality
that provided the needed catalyst.
About the disturbances themselves I shall say very little, since after
the first outbreak the story is reasonably well known, but it may be
worth stating again how things began and how events led up to this
beginning. On May 3 M. Roche, the Rector of the Sorbonne, looked
out of his window and saw that the courtyard was full of students.
Alarmed by this unusual circumstance, he called the police. The Prefect
of Police, M. Grimaud, thought this an unwise move, and refused to
answer the call without written confirmation from the Minister of
Education, which however was promptly furnished. Although there had
been a good deal of recent unrest in the French universities (some of
it inspired by Columbia) the students at the Sorbonne had, up to that
point, been rather passive, in spite of a good deal of prodding from their
more activist colleagues elsewhere to get into the s\ving of things –
protest, occupy a building, do
something.
But the Rector's call for the
police broke an immemorial tradition of the immunity of the uni\crsity
from local interference; it was an offensc beyond forgiveness.
HL es flie s
a
la Sorbonne, les deux mots
fa
a vraiment tout fait bouger"7
(the
cops at the Sorbonne, those two words really started everything off).
The meeting in the courtyard had bcen somewhat out of the or–
dinary for the Sorbonne, since it was partially organized by the
enrages,
members of the Movement of March 22 who had come into town from
Nanterre, a university in the suburbs whose Dean, M. Grappin, had
(also with the help of the police) closed the campus the previous day.
Both Roche and Grappin had had genuine worries about what might
happen at their respective institutions. The movement of March 22,
'whose sole unifying principle was support of the Vietnamese people
against American imperialist aggression (although the meeting on March
22 at which it was formed dealt with more general ideological concerns
and university reform as well)
,8
had been sitting-in in various buildings
at Nanterre off and on for about a month, and the right-wing student
organization FNEF
(Federation nationale des etudiants de France,
to be
distinguished from the left-wing student union, UNEF) had threatened
to break them up with violent action. At the Sorbonne the fascist action
group Occident had made similar threats, and on May 2 had in fact
7. Emile Copferman, ed"
Mouveme1lt du
22
m ars: ce Il'e ,(
IIn'nll
deb'1ft,
continltons Ie combat,
Paris, Maspero, 1968, p. 23.
8. Ibid.,
p,
17.
