Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968

450 Pages·2013·12.82 MB·English

by  Daniel Singer

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Daniel Singer
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Haymarket Books
Chicago, Illinois
© 1970, Daniel Singer
First published in 1970 by Hill and Wang in New York.
This edition published in 2013 by
Haymarket Books
PO Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
[email protected]
www .haymarketbooks.org
Trade distribution:
In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com
In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca
In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com
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ISBN: 978-1-60846-273-5
Cover design and art by Josh On.
Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the
Wallace Global Fund.
Printed in the Canada by union labor.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
10987654321
Cl,~ RECYCLED
Paper made from
recycled material
.!:,~,S FSC" C103567
To STAND STILL, to mark time on one spot, to be contented
with the first goal it happens to reach, is never possible in
revolution. And he who tries to apply the homemade wisdom
derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice
to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that
the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are
alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book
sealed with seven seals.
-ROSA LUXEMBURG
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Contents
Preface vii
PART ONE The Meaning of May 1
PART TWO The Hidden Powder Keg 37
University in Turmoil 41
Society in Flux 69
"A Class for Itself'? 91
The Dynamics of Youth, or Angry Young Men 106
v
vi
PART THREE The Explosion 113
The Student Uprising (May 3-May 13) 115
The Workers Take Over (May 14-May 27) 152
How Not to Seize Power (May 27-May 31) 186
From General Strike to General Election 206
PART FOUR The Fallout 221
No Peasants on Their Backs 223
Anarchy and Dual Power 232
The "New Proletarians"? 243
Cultural Revolution 260
The Would-Be Soviets 269
The Negative Hero 276
PART FIVE In Search of the Future 297
The End of Marginalism 299
Without a Model 322
The Unwithering State 349
Tests for a Strategy 365
The International Dimension 389
Age of Conflict or Age of Revolution? 404
Abbreviations 411
Index 415
Preface
Is history a succession of disconnected and incomprehensible
happenings? Not just a Martian but a conscientious newspaper
reader may well have drawn such a conclusion watching the
strange French events of 1969. On April 27 by nearly 12 million
votes to 10.5 million the French electorate said Non for the first
time in a Gaullist referendum. The questions put and the bill thus
thrown out were irrelevant. What mattered, and the French voters
knew it, was that a negative answer would send General de Gaulle
into a second retirement at Colombey-les-deux-:E:glises.
vii
viii Preface
For years the great performer had defied the Americans, toyed
with his European rivals, fascinated the Third World. For a
decade the General's tall figure had so dominated the French
political stage as to conceal the social divisions underneath. His
departure, official prophets had warned, would spell crisis and
chaos; after him the deluge. But when he duly went, nothing hap
pened. The country did not stir. It barely noticed.
The presidential election that followed in June was as puzzling
for our serious newspaper consumer. He had learned that the
main threat to Gaullism came from the left. France had a strong
Communist party that was being gradually integrated into a pop
ular front coalition with other left-wing groups. There was a
strong possibility that France would be the first western country
since the cold war to include Communists in its government. But
here, in the presidential stakes, instead of a single candidate rep
resenting the united left, like Fran~ois Mitterrand against General
de Gaulle back in 1965, were four of them running under their
own colors. Their forces were so dispersed they could not even
get through the heats, and none of them was present in the final
race where the two top contenders run for the presidency of the
Republic.
In the place of the expected leftist, he saw somebody com
pletely unknown, a man ignored by the vast majority of French
men only a few months earlier. Alain Poher, the recently ap
pointed leader of the Senate, looked too innocuous, too much the
average little middle-class Frenchman, to be true. He seemed to
be one of those strange figures that suddenly pop up on the his
torical stage .o nly to fall back into oblivion. This is exactly what
he did, having fulfilled his function-which was to ensure a con
servative succession.
Yet what must have floored our informed observer completely
was the choice of the successor. It was none other than Georges
Pompidou (I nearly wrote Caligula's Horse), the man who, in
political terms, was a pure invention of General de Gaulle, the
private secretary whom De Gaulle had imposed on the French
nation as Prime Minister and who had served him in this new
Preface ix
function for six years. Admittedly, in 1968, as Pompidou revealed
he had acquired a political life of his own, he was dismissed. But
did Frenchmen throw out their monarch to replace him by his
discarded dauphin?
The rise and fall of Charles de Gaulle will figure prominently
in all future serious discussions about the role of the hero in his
tory, a perfect illustration both of the hero's significance and of
the ultimate limitations of his importance. As to the seemingly
incomprehensible antics that followed De Gaulle's departure, the
story has not been told from its real beginning. Go back to May
1968, to the traumatic crisis that shook France then, and all the
pieces will fall neatly into place. The reign of Charles the Tall
did not end in April 1969. It ended the previous May. His power,
prestige, and policies were shattered, and his apparent triumph
at the polls could not put them together again. For the French
ruling class he became dispensable there and then. He had been
tolerated previously, despite misgivings about the risks of his
foreign policy, because he alone was allegedly capable of pre
venting a social upheaval. This was no longer true. The General
was not only dispensable. He was positively a nuisance. After
ten years of the legendary hero, it was high time to switch to a
more conventional form of conservative rule. Pompidou was per
fectly suited for the transition, and the electoral risks were small
since the left was shattered as well.
Formally, the funeral of the stillborn popular front was held
during the presidential election of 1969. In practice, the popular
front, too, was a victim of the previous year's crisis. Not that the
Communists at the time had acted in such revolutionary fashion
as to exclude themselves from the politics of consensus. On the
contrary, they behaved so cautiously as to deserve a medal from
the Gaullist, and the international, establishment. Yet even when
exercising restraint, French Communists showed their power,
while their potential social-democratic allies revealed their weak
ness. The idea of bringing the Communists into the government
as junior partners was thus killed by social realities, and it is dif
ficult to see how it can be revived.