FOURTH WORLD
25
bookstores, plays an important role - and one of the modern traditions
that has had the most immediate appeal is that of the intellectual
revolutionary: Trotsky, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Regis Debray. Their
precept and example are not, as might be the case in America, de–
fused, rendered anodyne by recuperation within the general university
dialogue; on the contrary, their influence is direct, unmediated, and it
enters a mentality trained to systematic, abstract philosophical thought
(which remains the strength, if also the weakness, of French education)
and particularly aware of Marxist analysis. The May revolt began
among the humanists, in the Faculties of Letters and Social Sciences,
that is, among those equipped with the most useless culture, yet also
the most critical relation to culture, and the analytical tools for its
critique; the intellectual revolutionary tradition, bringing a direct and
dogmatic application of a known type of thinking to action, was clearly
relevant to the creation of a revolutionary sense in this cultural prole–
tariat. It is also notable that those who first touched off the revolt at
Nanterre were often students of sociology, the most modern discipline
the faculty has to offer, a new field relatively unencumbered by the
weight of traditional culture - thus, for the students, a sudden break–
through to contemporary forms of thinking.
When the French student becomes politicized, it tends to be with–
in a framework of abstract philosophical analysis and Marxist dog–
matism; it is nothing like the American student's moralistic and prac–
tical commitment to the civil rights or antiwar movements. This poli–
ticization very often results in pure futility, because of the futility of
French political life itself. The fate of student unionism is instructive.
UNEF, organized after the Second World War on the model of a
trade union, was never able to gain the participation it sought in the
management of university affairs - student centers, student restaurants,
the
cites uniuersitaires,
etc.; in its frustration at the lack of concrete
responsibilities, it became increasingly politicized. It indeed reached
its peak of prestige and membership as a consequence of the Algerian
War, during which it took a militantly anti-governmental position. The
government at one point tried to woo UNEF and depoliticize it; when
this failed,
it
cut off UNEF's subsidy and tried to work with the os–
tensibly "apolitical" FNEF, which in fact has mostly grouped rightist
elements and never gained any real power. But during and after the
Algerian War, UNEF's power was already passing in large part to the
Union des Etudiants Communistes,
which was for a time an intensely
vital organism grouping the Party's young intellectuals around the
periodical
Clarte,
which proposed a far more liberal line than
L'Hu-
