14
PETER BROOKS
geance, loading the demonstrators into paddy wagons. Here was a clear
violation of sacred ground, the Sorbonne courtyard, by Authority in its
ugliest guise, the police; there followed the first demonstration in the
Latin Quarter, the arrest of several demonstrators, who were given up to
three months in prison, and the closing - for the first time in its his–
tory - of the Sorbonne. The students, supported by a number of profes–
sors, responded with a strike. The Latin Quarter was invested by police,
Garde Mobile and CRS
(Compagnies Republicaines de Securite,
tough
riot-control troops) speeded from the provinces. Monday, May 6, the
demonstration began with the cry of "Liberate our comrades"; it was
quickly surrounded by the police, and the inevitable clash of violence
followed. The government, with Prime Minister Georges Pompidou in
Afganistan and President de Gaulle closeted to study Rumanian, could
offer nothing better than denunciations of "foreign agitators." The lock–
out of the Sorbonne continued ; the arrested students were still in prison.
And on the night of Friday to Saturday came the first Night of the
Barricades, open war between the forces of Order and the forces of
Adventure, a night which had the resonance of 1830, 1848 or any of
those dates of heroism and violence when French regimes collapsed under
pressure from the Street.
THE BARRICADE BLOCKS THE STREET BUT .oPENS THE WAY,
pro–
claimed one of the Sorbonne graffiti. That night of May 10-11 com–
pleted the process of giving the students both an enemy and an army.
From the moment the government had recourse
to
the police, the poli–
tical "groupuscules" were no longer alone; the student movement had
begun to gain cohesion. It was a cohesion born of solidarity with the
imprisoned comrades and also the union of sport: especially the night
of the "long march" on May 7, when the students traipsed thirty
kilometers through Paris bringing their salute to all different quarters,
there was a sense of play, of joyous camaraderie, of release from com–
petition and tension. The barricades, too, had an element of play, as
sociologist Edgar Morin pointed out: they were a mime of the famous
historical gestures.
1
But that night of May 10-11, when the students faced
the helmeted and shielded CRS chanting CRS,SS! and singing the
International!!,
formed teams to rip down signposts, overturn cars, dig up
cobblestones and erect a fortress on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, saw the
creation of a real community where before there had been an amorphous
and only marginally politicized mass. The attack of the forces of Order
achieved what may have been begun by Anarchists, Maoists and Trotsky-
1.
See Morin
et al., M ai
1968:
La Breche
(Paris, Fayard, 1968) .
