By Alberto Giovanelli

More than half a century ago, a student revolt backed by a prolonged general strike challenged the French government in search of a transformation of society, an outburst that shook the government and marked a milestone not only in the modern history of the European power but also spread to much of the world.

Once again, we understand that reviewing the causes and consequences of a social process in a central country is undoubtedly topical because it forces us to think about and try to respond to the new challenges facing revolutionaries around the world.

In 1968 in France, several generations converged in their quest to subvert the old structures, the moral and cultural order, an outburst that questioned hierarchies, customs, and that spread throughout the country and shook the economic readjustment of France after World War II.

While unemployment was widening the gap of social inequality and leaving a large part of the population in misery, the youth, who had been born after World War II, wanted to be heard and to collectively promote social changes to modernize a society ruled by the patriarchal authoritarianism of President-General Charles de Gaulle, who had been in power for a decade.

However, the French May was not the only outburst that took place in the world in 1968, a year in which the youth also took to the streets in Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Japan, among others.

The difference was that in France the popular response was multisectoral and ended up paralyzing the country with a prolonged strike, which lasted between three weeks and a month.

Although the demonstrations and strikes were baptized with the name of French May, they began in March and lasted until the end of June, when De Gaulle’s conservative government managed to accommodate itself better than expected to a scenario as unprecedented as it was surprising.

The ’68 started with a whole generation of politicized youth, formed in the anti-imperialist mobilizations, inflamed by the call to carry out “one, two, many Vietnams”. A very active and combative vanguard had been formed in France and in many other countries, raising the banners of Che Guevara, Mao, Trotsky, anarchism. It was this youth political vanguard that was the most dynamic factor in both triggering and taking French May as far as possible.

The clash of that youth vanguard, and of the student movement in general, with the overall repressive, authoritarian, Bonapartist, paternalistic regime of De Gaulle, which in addition to the daily suffocation at all levels of life – including verticalism in education and puritanism in sexual morality – responded to any conflict by sending in the police, sanctioning and expelling students from the faculties, in addition to letting aggression by ultra-right-wing groups run rampant.

On March 22 a group of students demanding change occupied the university of Nanterre under the leadership among others of Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Dany the Red) and the young Trotskyist leader Alain Krivin. A revolt began at the university on the outskirts of Paris and the self-styled “March 22nd Movement” would rebel as one of the most active groups during the demonstrations.

Hundreds of university students joined the rebellion, which was joined by intellectuals and cultural figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault, who also disagreed with the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, in festive demonstrations that raised slogans such as “No banning”, “Imagination to power” or “Let’s be realistic, let’s ask for the impossible”.

At the beginning of May, the university of Nanterre was closed to prevent student occupation but the students moved to the emblematic Sorbonne.

The repression inside the Sorbonne, a place considered untouchable in the French collective unconscious, spread the rebellion to the rest of the country and was crucial in allowing the social struggles that would mark the French May to converge a few days later.

The situation forced De Gaulle to encourage his more extreme allies to break the massive strike with volunteer militants and ultra-right-wing groups to intimidate the students.

The repression heated up tempers and led to what is known as ‘The Night of the Barricades’, which took place on May 10, a turning point in the revolt. The young members of the Revolutionary Communist Youth, under the leadership of Krivine, played a very important role in the development of student-worker unity and radically confronted the claudicating policy of the Communist Party and the CGT.

The workers’ unions, despite the French Communist Party (PCF), joined the protests and called for an indefinite strike as of May 13, initiating a political cycle of unprecedented radicalization.

The French labor movement massively joined the conflict initiated by the students, through the general strike and the occupations of enterprises, with its own class demands. These were formulated in terms of trade union demands -much more radical than those admitted by the French CP and the CGT-, but even beyond them there was a more general discontent with exploitation and alienation, a generic rejection of the capitalist system and its mercantile logic. This, however, did not mature into an alternative global-political formulation, into a clear program.

Globally, the political-union leadership of the workers’ movement was maintained by the CP and the CGT, whose Stalinist orientation made them profoundly opposed to any possible revolutionary development. There were local and partial overflows but no tendency to the development of new directions more to the left. Nevertheless, Trotskyism was an important current in the French May, contributing to the radicalization of the protest and to the construction of an incipient revolutionary alternative.

The working class was empirically located to the left of the CP both from the point of view that the “Grenelle agreements” (relatively small concessions that the government promoted to defuse the conflict) were not enough for them and from the point of view that the De Gaulle government had to fall, a question that the CP itself had to sustain discursively without ever wanting to take it to the end.

But there was no program of its own for the positive, no articulation of a workers’ own way out, and even less of the political-organizational tools to carry it forward. In the absence of this, the political strategy of the PC-CGT ended up imposing itself, consisting of letting the government survive, lifting the strike and directing everything towards the elections.

For that reason, the process of ’68 reached an objective limit that was impossible to overcome. Everything that does not advance goes backwards. If the problem of revolutionary leadership cannot be solved, things sooner or later return to normal. Without advancing towards dual power or insurrection, the general strike will necessarily end, whether with more or less partial triumphs, with more or less political conquests.

The French May leaves us innumerable lessons, not only the intervention in strikes and conflicts, but also a policy of electoral construction, of intervention in the media, of maturing of political and political-organizational cadres. It questions us about the necessary elaboration of a theoretical, political and discursive baggage, the formation and political education of a whole group of militants and sympathizers, the conquest of influence over broad masses through the advancement of positions in the trade union organizations, and their training from the experience in the small and big events of the daily political and trade union life.

The French May demonstrates that the construction of that political tool in which we are engaged from the LIS, is unavoidable if we want to profoundly transform reality, and that without it no amount of spontaneous effort of the workers’ movement and the youth, no amount of radicalization in the methods can be enough on its own.