16
PETER BROOKS
As the mass of demonstrators reached the Place Denfert-Rochercau, the
official terminus of the march, the order to disperse was given, and
most of the workers, firmly directed by CGT militants, did so. Large
groups of students, however, refused to disband, and continued on to
the Boulevard Montparnasse shouting that they were going to march
on the Elysee. Police cordons blocked the bridges to the right bank; a
parley ensued, the student leadership prevailed over the hotheads, and
the march was transmuted into a mass meeting on the Champ de Mars.
And it was here, as the students debated what to do with their move–
ment, that someone pronounced the inspired word: occupy the Sorbonne.
The police had been withdrawn from the Latin Quarter, the occupation
was performed peacefully, and the first night of the Cultural Revolution
began.
This act determined the course of future events, not only for the
student movement, but for the nation. Because if the students had bor–
rowed a gesture from the workers' tradition - especially the famous sit–
down strikes of 1936 - the workers needed this example to rediscover
the gesture for themselves. The next day, the workers at the Sud- Avia–
tion plant near Nantes occupied their factory and announced an un–
limited strike. Then Renault followed, first in the Cleon plant, then at
Flins, then at Boulogne-Billancourt. Then came Rhodiaceta at Lyon, then
the technicians and journalists of the state radio and television. The
students reacted immediately: workers were invited to the Sorbonne and
the other occupied faculties to join in debate on the future of the crisis
and the future society; a student delegation was dispatched to bring a
fraternal salute to the strikers in Boulogne-BiIIancourt. As the whole
economic life of France moved toward paralysis, and the students
threatened a march to join the strikers in the television studios, the
government took fright: the evening of the 16th Pompidou went on the
air to warn that the Republic was in danger, and that it would be
defended. More busloads of CRS moved into the capital; and the strikes
spread.
And so the student revolt was transformed into a potential social
and political revolution.
If
this showed the remarkable success of the
student movement, it may also have meant its downfall, at least
in
the
short run. Because the two organizations that officially speak for the
workers, the CGT and the Communist Party, never really wanted a
revolution. The Communists were hostile from the outset to the students,
who were in revolt against all established authorities and hierarchies,
whether of the Right or the Left, and threatened the Party's claim to
be the exclusive spokesman for the revolutionary proletariat. Further-
