Paris, May 1968, on those who were there and those who weren't
This is from a text by French anarchist Alexandre Skirda, published in French on the 40th anniversary of 10 May 1968, and translated by Paul Sharkey for the Kate Sharpley Library for an English edition on the 50th anniversary. I post it here for the 48th anniversary. Skirda. whose parents were Ukrainian and Russian, was a historian of the Russian and Ukrainian anarchists, and of their repression by the Bolsheviks and Stalinists. The introduction and last five paragraphs are my translation from Jean-Louis Roche's blog, while the middle bit of text is extracted from the Anarchist Library. The addition of italics and bold is my own.
The Anarchists in Paris, May-June 1968
The commemoration of the 40th anniversary of May '68 gives rise to all sorts of interpretations, often contradictory. Between the right's desire to "liquidate" it and the boasting of some and others presenting themselves as ex-sixty-eighters, self-glorifying with cymbals, bass drums and media drums, the essential is passed over in silence: who were at that moment on the barricades and confronted the forces of law and order during the night of May 10, '68, which served as a detonator for the period?
Those who were there and those who were not
For a start, we need to clear up some terminological confusion: in those days, there were groups mostly made up of students or young people, professing libertarian or like-minded beliefs...; other anarchist groups [which were more non-groups], and [the main anarchist organisations]. Most of the Parisian members of these organisations were there, almost as if they had arranged to meet up that evening; some 300 to 400 of them in all, out of the several thousand demonstrators. To these we should add a not inconsiderable number of members of surrealist, Lettrist, Situationist and ultra-left groups (the so-called “revolutionary Marxists”) who were also there at that fateful hour.
Besides these and among those who were not there and who were not participants that famous night there were the very people who described themselves as “leftists”, i.e. who stood to the left of the Communist Party and used rabble-rousing tactics to seduce its supposed working class clientele, meaning every possible variant of Trotksyists and Maoists. The media mistakenly applied the term “leftist” to those involved in May. By contrast, it was these very “leftists”, nothing but hijackers, not to say “carrion-eaters”, who claimed the credit. Despite the stubborn facts of the matter, for they were completely side-tracked and baffled by the situation. To their mind, the students were just petits bourgeois, the younger generation as a whole of no importance and so they paid scant heed, having tunnel vision about “the workers”, the majority of whom could not have cared less. And again its was these “leftists” who pushed the anti-imperialist campaign against the US war in Vietnam, whereas libertarians had, for the most part, recovered from Third World-ism, chastened by trends in post-independence Algeria and they had no illusions left about African dictatorships spawned by decolonisation nor about Castro-Guevarism, a Stalinist caricature of a revolution which had done away with the libertarian participants who had helped it succeed.
So there was a clear dividing line and indeed acute hostility between these two schools of thought. The [libertarians] had mobilised on behalf of anti-Francoist struggles in Spain and anti-capitalist struggles in France and across the globe, including those targeting the state capitalism of the so-called “socialist” Eastern bloc. And here we should remember how the anti-totalitarian uprisings in East Berlin in 1953 and of the Hungarian workers’ councils in 1956, crushed by Moscow’s tanks, had been pronounced “fascist” and “reactionary” by the Communists and their loyal following (many a future Trotskyist and Maoist among them). And this at a time when Stalin’s crimes had just been exposed a little while before at the 20th congress of the CPSU in 1956, by the very same Khrushchev who went on to mow down the rebels in Budapest. The mask was off now and many had quit the “progressive camp” which in their view had become the despicable embodiment of a totalitarian dictatorship wherein falsehood was king. For all that, there were still “leftists” around who would sing the praises of the Marxist-Leninist dinosaurs and kowtow to their Vietnamese or Castro-Guevarist disciples.
[10 May:] The student unrest over the past several weeks had finally crystallised in a determination to kick over the traces, not only on the part of committed students but by the young generally. And when Dany Cohn-Bendit that evening used a megaphone to spread the watchword (probably the only thing for which he deserves credit, the man being otherwise “hard to stick”) “Take over the Latin Quarter” since the police had “taken over the Sorbonne”, this was well received and a number of demonstrators immediately set to work; using the stems of road signs (snapped by rocking them backwards and forwards) as pick-axes, they set about digging up the cobbles from the streets located between the Place Edmond Rostand (across from the Luxembourg Gardens), the Rues Soufflot, Gay-Lussac, Saint-Jacques, Claude Bernard and the backstreets around the Pantheon up as far as the Contrescarpe and the Rue Mouffetard.
Remarkably, what few leftwing or “leftist” students there were on hand tried to talk them out of lifting the cobbles and building barricades, cursing the builders as “provocateurs”. They were promptly seen off: a number of these “calming influences” were hotly advised to go back to their prayer-stalls at the Centre Richelieu (situated on the corner of the Place de la Sorbonne and the Boulevard Saint-Michel, it was at that time the main stronghold of the Catholic students and since replaced by a second hand clothes store). In a short time, this entire part of the Latin Quarter was covered with barricades. An earthmoving machine, conveniently present on rue Gay-Lussac, was put to use by a skilled technician. It was only when the police charged around midnight that cars parked there were erected and used as ramparts; It is even likely that their fire started with the rain of grenades thrown by the police, setting fire to the gasoline spilled on the ground.
The clashes were extremely violent: many young people refused to retreat and, like real suicide bombers, engaged in hand-to-hand combat. I saw with my own eyes, on rue Gay-Lussac, a young man hiding, a paving stone in his hand, behind a carriage entrance to wait for the first line of police officers to be in front of him, in order to throw the paving stone at them! We dare not imagine what happened to him afterward. Let us here clarify the myth of throwing paving stones: you would have had to be an Olympic shot put or javelin champion to be able to throw them effectively more than 4-5 meters: they were only good for building barricades and were, above all, only a symbol of Parisian revolutionary traditions. It is worth noting that the local residents, who were outraged by the police brutality, sided with the students, threw buckets of water to mitigate the effects of the tear gas grenades and gathered protesters from their homes. This did not prevent the police from entering the buildings and pursuing the protesters into the apartments...
[13 May:] That evening, the old house was invaded by a joyful and unbridled crowd. A piano, installed in the courtyard, played jazz tunes, covering all the surrounding hubbub. Announcements began to be made over loudspeakers, various coordinations were organized, the fight continued and grew. Finding myself in the Rollin gallery, from where the announcements came over the loudspeaker, I witnessed the first inscriptions on the walls, in particular that of "Jesus Christ, the toad of Nazareth"!, as well as down below at the entrance to the large amphitheater, the addition of "prohibited" above "no smoking", the first word crossed out and completed with "re" at the end, which gave the famous "prohibited to prohibit", promised a confused future. There was also the famous bubble inscribed by the situationist René Vienet on the painting - in the so-called pompier style - by Philippe de Champaigne, down below in the central corridor of the courtyard of the Sorbonne: "Humanity will only be happy the day the last bureaucrat has been hanged with the guts of the last capitalist"!... There will thus be numerous inscriptions on the walls, works by surrealists, lettrists and situationists, regulars of this kind of expression, neglected until then. Let us recall the one concerning the communists and their supporters: "When they speak of revolution, they have a corpse in their mouth!". These were so many large-caliber projectiles fired against the dominant ideologies. I had no idea then of the resounding success that this scriptural mania, both poetic and brutal, would subsequently have.
The party was in full swing all night, and did not stop for several weeks. A considerable crowd went there every day, mostly onlookers, but also all the leftists, "rejected from the barricades", who came to take advantage of the place and the atmosphere to display large portraits of their idols Marx, Mao, etc., and to spread their junk literature. There was also a stand of the FA [Anarchist Federation] and anarchists which was very successful. The large amphitheater, which was always full, saw rare moments like that of the conference of Gaston Leval on anarchism: it was filmed and sequences sometimes appear in documentaries on May 68. It was still phenomenal to see this old propagandist, son of a Paris Communard in 1871, insubordinate for almost more than thirty years of the war of 1914, a complete autodidact who became a pedagogue of Francisco Ferrer schools in South America, then an extraordinary reporter on 200 Spanish communities of 1936-39 (see his book Libertarian Spain 1936-39), this tireless apostle of libertarian ideas went to speak in the great 'Temple of Academic Knowledge'! He was a good speaker, he spoke with clarity and precision, and the audience gave him a triumph...
Let's get back to our sheep of June 68: the CGT made the Lebrun bus depot, at Gobelins, vote on the resumption of work, the majority of voters expressed themselves in favor of continuing the strike; then, the CGT members made another bus depot vote in the 15th arrondissement of Paris (or elsewhere, my memory fails me), telling them that those of Lebrun had voted for the resumption. Therefore, this depot had to comply with this decision. At that point, the Lebrun depot was asked to vote again, informing them of the other depot's positive vote. This time, the resumption was adopted and the buses began running again. This served as a general signal: the metro logically followed suit, and all the strikers in general too—including myself—so as not to lose their jobs. The whole country joined in. The trick was done, and well done; the government and the statists were relieved to see this never-ending strike over and the state chariot begin to roll again.
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