FOURTH WORLD
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ites, but never could have been completed by them: it turned the stu–
dents into revolutionaries for whom the insurrectional gesture would
become normal. As they retreated step by step before the barrage of tear
gas and shock grenades and fell beneath the police clubs, when, espe–
cially, they were piled into police vans and taken to Beaujon Prison,
made to run the gauntlet between two rows of police who tripped them
and beat them when they fell, when they spent a night and a day in
a crowded cell, without food, water or first aid, when girls were stripped
and beaten in the streets, apartments were invaded and ransacked by the
police, there was no longer any question of being "apolitical." A real
solidarity was born, a movement that had discovered the repressive na–
ture of established authority, and now knew the power of the crowd in
the street, and the romance of power.
A new impetus and direction emerged : up to the night of May
10-11, the student's demands had been simple and immediate: release
our comrades, call off the police, reopen the Sorbonne and Nanterre.
These were virtually granted by Pompidou on his return from Afganistan,
the evening of the 11th. But already plans were underway for Monday,
May 13, the day of the general strike, when the massive Communist-led
trade union, the CGT
(Confederation Cenerale du Travail)
and the
Communist Party, which had at first denounced the student demon–
strators as "adventurers" and ludicrous "groupuscules" - serving notice
that there could be no alliance between official party Communism and
intellectuals inspired by Maoist, Trotskyite or Castroist models - under
pressure from their younger members announced that they would join
in a mass demonstration to protest the brutality of the police repression.
UNEF - the
Union Nationale des Etudiants de France,
the largest stu–
dent union, though much weakened in recent years by serious internal
divisions - was founded on an ideal of
ouvrierisme,
on a dream of alli–
ance between manual workers and the progressive forces among the
intellectuals inspired by Maoist, Trotskyite or Castroist models - under
Jacques Sauvageot, along with Alain Geismar of SNE Sup.
(Syndicat
National de l'Enseignement Superieur,
a teachers' union) and Cohn–
Bendit turned in calling for a solidarity of workers and students against
the police state. The results exceeded their dreams: well over half a
million people went into the streets of Paris on May 13, marching under
the red flag to the strains of the
Internationale.
Suddenly there dawned
a real possibility of a union of students and workers that could create
an irreversible movement to destroy the old order.
What happened on the evening of May 13 was, in retrospect, per–
haps the single most significant gesture of the whole incredible month.
