FOURTH WORLD
17
more, "objectively" (as Communist doctrinaires like to say), Gaullist
foreign policies are quite acceptable to the Party, and the dangers of
a seizure of power in complicity with the "groupuscules" and in neces–
sary alliance with the Socialists might be greater than its advantages.
The CGT and the Party moved to alliance with the students only under
pressure from intellectuals and younger workers in their ranks, and only
when they saw possibilities for exploiting the movement, and perils in not
doing so. Throughout the crisis, the CGT and the Communist Party oper–
ated basically on three principles: to answer worker unrest by using the
protest unleashed by the students to their own ends; to "recuperate" the
protest by channeling it into purely professional demands: wages, hours,
working conditions, union privileges in the factories; to preserve intact
the traditional policy of "no enemies to the left" by playing as much as
necessary at a revolutionary stance, which in tum meant attempting to
isolate and disalm "extremist" and "irresponsible" elements like Cohn–
Bendit - who had, to be sure, denounced them as "Stalinist slobs": the
students were themselves lucidly aware of the danger of "recuperation"
by the traditional organisms of the Left.
The government's policy was substantially similar: it knew that it
could satisfy the union's demands with nothing more elaborate than
money, and that satisfaction of these demands would allow it to
isolate and ignore the students. The grand alliance of May 13 seemed
virtually to have given way to a complicity between the official repre–
sentatives of the proletariat and the government. The students, feeling
themselves more and more isolated and betrayed, took to the streets
again, and when news of the government's decision to bar Cohn-Bendit
from France (against which CGT and Communists protested not a whit)
reached them, and was followed by De Gaulle's "referendum speech,"
calling for a participation to
be
instituted by government fiat, and dis–
missing the student movement with disdain, the bloodiest night of all
followed, the night of May 24, which saw barricades not only in Paris,
but in Nantes, in Bordeaux, in Lyon and several other provincial cities,
a night when many young workers, despite the CGT's directives, joined
the students, and when the violence of the police reached a paroxysm
verging on sadism. It was a night of collective trauma for Paris, but the
two organizations with real power, the government and the CGT, went
on as
if
nothing had happened, and over the weekend of the 25th and
26th negotiated the "Rue de Grenelle Protocol."
The CGT was satisfied, and all seemed over. But when union rep–
representatives returned to explain the agreement to the workers in the
factories on Monday, group after group, sector after sector, the workers
