26
PETER
BRO O K S
manite
- with the inevitable result that the Party finally purged UEC
and liquidated
Clarte
in 1965. With the smash of UEC and the weak–
ening of UNEF, the most politicized students gradually formed into
the revolutionary "groupuscules" - the
Federation des Etudiants R evo–
lutionnaires
(Trotskyite),
Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire
(Cas–
troist-Guevarist ) ,
Union des Jeunesses Communistes Marxistes-Leninistes
(Maoist ),
M ouvement du
22
Mars
(Anarchist), etc. - which, though
hardly so powerful and influential as the government tried to make out,
undoubtedly played a catalytic role in the May revolt.
In general, then, against French bourgeois society and the U niver–
sity it controls, both still infected by a nineteenth-century concept of
privilege, and of culture as privilege, the students, who abstractly con–
ceived are those who are being trained to assume the privileges, have
become a ghettoized proletariat feeding on a myth of revolution. Their
relation to the culture distributed by the society they are being con–
ditioned to enter is one of unease, alienation, rejection. The self–
conscious core of this paradoxical proletariat has forged the tools for
a critique of the system (inadequate tools perhaps, but that only
makes the critique more unsubtle, hence more revolutionary) and the
rest of the students have had sufficient grievances in the inefficient
functioning of the University to make the creation of a mass revolt
easy - a revolt against the university, against its culture, against the
dominating class of society. After all, they have nothing to lose but
their relatively useless diplomas. And this is what happened, first at
Nanterre, then at Paris: a revolt which began as an attack on the
University's administration of culture rapidly passed through this repre–
sentation of society to attack society itself.
The sclerosis of the University had not gone unperceived by p ro–
gressive observers both without and within its walls, and in fact an
intelligent critique of the system, and a number of concrete proposals of
reform, were articulated in 1966 at the Colloquium of Caen (the second
such meeting - the first
was
convoked by Mendes-France in 1956) which
brought together academics, government bureaucrats and representa–
tives of management. The "Fifteen Points" of Caen were, in retrospect,
probably not visionary enough, yet their institution would have done
major good. It clearly would have been in the interests of the Gaullist
image of modern France to institute them, despite the high financial
cost: its utter failure to enact a real reform of the University, which
had clearly been moving toward crisis since the Liberation, must be to
the eternal discredit of the Fifth Republic, even if it manages to capi–
talize effectively on its crisis-born reform bill. That it did not attempt
