Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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358

were marrying at some point in their lives. The

divorce rate had doubled since the beginning

of the 1960s: nearly one in every two new

marriages would end in divorce.

Falling marriage rates do not, however,

mean that couples no longer want to live to-

gether. The number of unmarried cohabiting

couples has increased significantly, together

with the proportion of extramarital births, in-

dicating that the institution of marriage is not

seen as the only environment in which cou-

ples can live together and raise children. By

the early 1990s, about 13 per cent of all co-

habiting couples were unmarried, but the pro-

portion of consensual unions in the 20 to 24

age group reached 82 per cent for men and 73

per cent for women. From a level below 6 per

cent in the mid-1960s, the proportion of all

live births outside marriage had risen to 33

per cent. Whereas, in the 1960s, extramarital

conception was usually legitimized by mar-

riage, by the 1990s couples were no longer

deciding to get married when they were ex-

pecting children, and the children of unmar-

ried cohabitees had acquired the same rights

as those of married couples. One in three chil-

dren conceived outside wedlock was born to

a mother aged under 25, but more extramari-

tal births were occurring in reconstituted fami-

lies, following divorce or separation. The

number of births to women living alone re-

mained constant at around 3 to 4 per cent,

while a growing proportion of lone parents

were likely to be either separated or divorced.

Marriage can no longer be seen as a stable

and enduring relationship, and unmarried co-

habitation even less so. By the early 1990s, 10

per cent of children had experienced life in a

lone-parent family and 13 per cent in a recon-

stituted family.

LINDA HANTRAIS

See also: demographic developments

Further reading

Hantrais, L. and Letablier, M.-T. (1996) Fami-

lies and Family Policies in Europe, London

and New York: Longman (an analysis of

concepts of marriage and cohabitation

within a family-policy framework).

Saboulin, M.de and Thave, S. (1993) ‘La Vie

en couple marié: un modèle qui s’affaiblit’,

La Société française: données sociales

1993, Paris: INSEE (a succinct account of

trends in marriage and cohabitation).

Marxism and Marxian thought

As a corpus of ideas inspired by the writings

of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marxism

comprises an economic and social theory, a

theory of the politics of class struggle and a

materialist philosophy of history. Adopted by

the international Communist movement, it has

been interpreted and developed in a variety of

ways, mainly in response to different percep-

tions of the needs of the political struggle. El-

ements of Marxist thought have also been in-

corporated within theoretical frameworks,

deriving from other traditions.

The influence of Marxist thought on French

intellectuals was at its height in the two dec-

ades following World War II. To a great ex-

tent, this was a result of a political rather than

a theoretical choice. The French Communists

had emerged from the war with their political

reputation greatly enhanced, as a result of

their leading role in the national resistance

against the Nazi occupier. Although their iden-

tification with the political interests of the

Soviet Bloc was to lead once again to their

isolation from mainstream French political life

with the development of the Cold War from

1947, their credit remained high with a large

number of intellectuals for two main reasons.

First, the French Communist Party (PCF) was

the largest single party in France and attracted

the support of a majority of the working class.

Second, the polarization of international poli-

tics fostered a climate in which intellectuals

felt that they had to take sides in the conflict

between East and West; many felt that, over-

all, the forces for peace, progress and a better

economic and social order were on the side of

Marxism and Marxian thought

359

the Soviet Union, in its battle to defend itself

against imperialist designs on the part of the

USA.

Although by the early 1950s more intellec-

tuals than ever before were members of the

PCF, philosophers such as Louis Althusser,

writers such as Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard,

scientists such as Marcel Prenant and Jacques

Monod, the mathematician Jean-Louis

Desanti, the historian Emmanuel Le Roy

Ladurie, to mention just a few, or ‘fellow trav-

ellers’ sympathetic to it, such as Jean-Paul

Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, there were

considerable ambiguities in their relationship

with Marxist theory. On the whole, intellectu-

als joined the party for political reasons, rather

than because of any theoretical commitment

to Marxism. The party’s ouvrièrisme, or dis-

trust of anyone without working-class creden-

tials, meant that intellectuals constantly had

to prove their loyalty to the leadership of the

working class, by renouncing the right to in-

dependent thinking. What passed for theory

in party circles was a version of Marxism sim-

plified into dogma and passed on to party mili-

tants in the form of selected extracts and quo-

tations from a limited number of texts by

Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, especially the

latter’s History of the Communist Party of the

Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course,

which summarized Marxist philosophy in a

schematic exposition of the laws and tenets of

dialectical and historical materialism.

The loyalty of the Communist intellectu-

als, along with their willingness to sacrifice

theoretical integrity to the requirements of

politics, was put to one of its most severe tests

at the time of the Lysenko affair in 1948.

Lysenko was a biologist who claimed to have

disproved the theories of classical genetics,

with his work on the transmission of acquired

characteristics into new generations of agri-

cultural crops. The political significance of

this claim resulted from the endorsement of

his thesis by the full weight of the Soviet re-

gime. In French Communist circles, it gave

rise to the theory of the ‘two sciences’, in

which Lysenko became the champion of ‘pro-

letarian’ science, as against the ‘bourgeois’

science of geneticists like Mendel and

Morgan. The importance of the scientific evi-

dence was minimized in favour of the test of

political loyalties and French Communists,

including some of the most distinguished sci-

entists of the time, were called upon to toe the

party line.

During this period, developments in Marx-

ist theory were taking place, but on the whole

from outside the French Communist Party.

Previously unpublished texts, such as Marx

and Engels’ The German Ideology and Len-

in’s Philosophical Notebooks, had begun to

be published in French in 1937 and 1938.

The publication of Marx’s Economic and

Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) in 1937

was to have a significant effect on the devel-

opment of a new current, which presented

Marxism as a humanism, in which the pre-

dominant influence was Hegel. Bridges were

built between Marxist and non-Marxist phi-

losophers, in which the work to popularize

Hegelian philosophy done by Jean Hyppolite

and Alexandre Kojève, especially the latter’s

1947 Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (In-

troduction to the Reading of Hegel), played

an important role. Marx was portrayed as a

mainstream philosopher, following in and

continuing the Western European philosophi-

cal tradition. At the same time, Catholic

thinkers, such as the priest, Jean-Yves Calvez,

with his 1956 text La Pensée de Karl Marx,

(The Thought of Karl Marx) attempted to

synthesize elements of Christian theology and

Marxist thought. Of the group including

Georges Politzer, Paul Nizan and Henri

Lefebvre, which had begun work in the 1930s

and drew on psychoanalytical and other theo-

ries—such as Politzer’s Critique des

fondements de la psychologie (Criticisms of

the Foundations of Psychology), Lefebvre’s

Dialectical Materialism (Le Matérialisme

dialectique) and Lefebvre and Guterman’s La

Conscience mystifiée (The Mystification of

Mind)—only Lefebvre, who survived the war,

was able to produce substantial new work in

the postwar period. Lucien Goldmann, much

influenced by Lukács, was to provide a bridge

between literature and sociology, with his

Marxism and Marxian thought

360

‘genetic structuralism’, in The Human Sci-

ences and Philosophy (Les Sciences humaines

et la philosophie) and The Hidden God (Le

Dieu caché).

Jean-Paul Sartre, claiming that Marxism

was ‘the indispensable philosophy for our

time’, (Sartre 1985) was to develop his own

original version of this philosophy, culminat-

ing in the publication of the Critique of Dia-

lectical Reason (Critique de la raison

dialectique) in 1960, which attempted to theo-

rize the possibilities of individual, group and

collective action in history.

In spite of the many significant differences

between these different strands of Marxist

thought, what they all had in common was an

emphasis on the philosophical and ethical ele-

ments of Marx’s thought; his contribution to

economic and political theory was largely ig-

nored. Thus, in these hands, Marxism became

primarily an analysis of the alienation of the

individual and the possibilities available to the

individual to transcend this alienated status.

Marx’s analysis of the mode of production of

the capitalist system, and the class relations

which were built upon it, had little or no role

to play in work of this type.

Within party ranks, theoretical work was

tightly controlled by the party leadership. The

works of Maurice Thorez, party leader from

1930 to 1964 and subject of a mini personal-

ity cult in his own right, were required read-

ing, and all were expected to defend the party

analysis of French state monopoly capitalism

and Thorez’s theory of the progressive impov-

erishment of the French working class, in the

face of all the evidence to the contrary.

With the death of Stalin in 1953 and the

revelations and criticisms of the excesses of

his regime, first expressed within Communist

circles with Khrushchev’s secret report to the

Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist

Party in 1956, it appeared that the lid might

be lifted and greater intellectual freedom al-

lowed. The Italian response to the revelations,

which was to lead toward a more pluralist

approach and ultimately to the development

of Eurocommunism in the 1970s, found fa-

vour with a significant strand of French Com-

munist intellectuals. The French party, how-

ever, was reluctant to follow the Italian exam-

ple and was slow to tackle the issue of de-

Stalinization of the party machine. The Soviet

suppression of the Hungarian uprising, also

in 1956, led to many intellectuals leaving the

party. None the less, attempts were made,

most notably through the works of party phi-

losopher, Roger Garaudy—such as

Humanisme marxiste (Marxist Humanism),

Perspectives de l’homme (Perspectives for

Mankind), De l’Anathème au Dialogue (From

Anathema to Dialogue) and Marxism and the

Twentieth Century (Marxisme au XXe

siècle)—to appeal to a broader intellectual

public and build bridges with humanists, So-

cialists and Catholics outside the PCF.

If Sartre had been by far the most influen-

tial figure in the 1950s, defending the integ-

rity of the intellectual within a loosely Marx-

ist framework, the 1960s were to see an at-

tempted theoretical revolution from within the

party, which was to have a profound effect on

the newer generation of intellectuals, whose

political education had been vouchsafed by the

Algerian war. Louis Althusser, from his intel-

lectual base at the École Normale Supérieure,

put the case for the development and mod-

ernization of Marxist theory, through a reread-

ing of the classical texts in the light of contem-

porary theories: the epistemology of

Bachelard, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, the struc-

turalism of Lévi-Strauss and the psychoanaly-

sis of Jacques Lacan.

At the same time, he developed new con-

cepts—theoretical practice, the autonomy of

theory—which gave a privileged role to theo-

retical work, and stressed the status of Marx-

ist theory as a science, with its own objective

validity, beyond all political considerations.

All of this was set against the split in the inter-

national Communist movement, following So-

viet attempts to disavow the legacy of Stalin,

and the inspirational force of the new path

followed by the Chinese Maoists.

The events of May 1968, when the explo-

sion of the student movement sparked off a

country-wide workers’ revolt, represented

both the high point and the beginning of the

Marxism and Marxian thought

361

end of this type of Maoist-inspired Marxist

militancy. Althusserian theory had little (if

any) role to play in the actual political events.

The Paris Maoists mostly moved on to a fac-

tory-based militant politics and the Union of

the Left, bringing Socialists and Communists

together in 1971, brought the more pedes-

trian concerns of ballot-box politics to the top

of the agenda. Already by the end of the

1970s, even before the collapse of Soviet and

eastern European Communist regimes in

1989, Marxism had long ceased to be the in-

dispensable reference for French intellectuals

which it had once been. This was in spite of

the fact that, during this decade, Marxism

had in fact penetrated the academic barrier

which had been set against it in previous dec-

ades and permeated many of the university

bastions which had denied it entry. The de-

cline of the PCF; the failure of the Union of

the Left, which split in 1977; the subsequent

election of François Mitterrand as president

of the Republic from 1981 to 1995; and the

political domination of the Socialists during

this period—all this contributed to the

marginalization and demise of Marxist influ-

ence, together with the failure of more radical

political action to transform in a fundamental

manner the French social and political sys-

tem. Many of the most important intellectual

figures of the 1980s and 1990s, such as

Foucault, acknowledge, but fleetingly—if at

all—any debt to Marxist theory.

The key difficulty for French Marxism

throughout the postwar period has been the

harmonization of theory and practice. Marx-

ism developed as a theorization of the eco-

nomic exploitation and political oppression

of the working class in a bourgeois society

dominated by capitalist class relations. It was

further developed by Lenin and others into a

theory of the strategy and tactics of the inter-

national proletarian revolution. On both

counts, French Marxists have found it diffi-

cult to reconcile the theory with the reality of

postwar French politics, in which a belief in

the possibility of the proletarian revolution

has receded, along with the increased prosper-

ity of an ever smaller working class, albeit in-

creasingly at the expense of an expanding,

marginalized subclass of the unemployed and

underemployed. On the whole, they have not

looked beyond the borders of France, to take

on board the globalization of capitalism and

set the specific difficulties of French working-

class politics within a wider international

framework. As a result, they have been un-

able to resolve the difficult problem of the di-

vorce between theory and practice.

MARGARET MAJUMDAR

See also: class; Humanité, L’; parties and

movements; Temps modernes, Les

Further reading

Anderson, P. (1976) Considerations on West-

ern Marxism, London: New Left Books (ex-

amines French Marxist thought within the

context of the development of Western

Marxism).

Caute, D. (1964) Communism and the French

Intellectuals (1914–1960), London: André

Deutsch (a useful overview for the earlier

period).

Furet, F. (1995) Le Passé d’une illusion: essai

sur l’idée communiste au XXe siècle, Paris:

Robert Laffont/Calmann-Lévy (an up-to-

date polemic).

Kelly, M. (1982) Modern French Marxism,

Oxford: Blackwell (an analysis of the most

important strands of recent French Marx-

ist thought).

Lagueux, M. (1982) Le Marxisme des années

soixante: une saison dans l’histoire de la

pensée critique, Montreal: Hurtubise (a fo-

cused study on 1960s Marxism).

Poster, M. (1975) Existential Marxism in

PostWar France: From Sartre to Althusser,

Princeton: Princeton University Press (an

overview of the intellectual history of the

period).

Reader, K. (1987) Intellectuals and the Left in

France Since 1968, Basingstoke and Lon-

don: Macmillan (a study of the impact of

the events of 1968 on the consciousness of

Left intellectuals in France).

Marxism and Marxian thought

362

Maspero, François

b. 1932

Publisher

The doyen of left-wing publishing in France,

who made available the work of figures as di-

vergent as Mao Ze Dong and Régis Debray in

affordable editions. He left the Communist

Party in 1956 and thereafter was associated

with the ‘new Lefts’ that flourished in and af-

ter May 1968. His bookshop La Joie de Lire,

just off the Boulevard St-Michel, was long re-

nowned as the intellectual epicentre of the

revolutionary movements of the time, stock-

ing material often difficult or impossible to ob-

tain elsewhere. His 1989 text Roissy Express

(Les Passagers du Roissy Express) is an itiner-

ary through the working-class suburbs

(banlieues) that were to prove so inflammable

in the following decade.

KEITH READER

Mathieu, Georges

b. 1921, Boulogne-sur-mer

Artist

There were two principal intellectual referents

for Mathieu’s work—the Surrealist concept of

‘automatic writing’, and Merleau-Ponty’s Phe-

nomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie

de la perception) of 1945. Merleau-Ponty’s

identification of self with body (‘…je suis mon

corps’) was paramount in defining Mathieu’s

technique. Working rapidly, on a large scale,

Mathieu added suggestive signs or ideograms

to his paintings, earning himself the title of

‘calligraphe occidental’ (Western calligrapher)

from Malraux. In 1957, Mathieu made a

painting (15 m long) in just one hour prior to

an opening, working in the window of a To-

kyo gallery before an ecstatic audience. This

‘direct universality’ of the sign identified with

the body was the particular achievement of an

artist whose paintings are also of extreme el-

egance and restraint compared with their more

‘heroic’ American counterparts.

SIMEON HUNTER

See also: art informel; painting

Matisse, Henri

b. 1869, Le Cateau, Picardy;

d. 1954, Nice

Artist

Matisse, whose reputation as leader of the

Fauves soon after the turn of the century se-

cured his enduring membership of the artistic

avant-garde, continued to produce important

and influential work in the years following

World War II. The increasing critical recogni-

tion of abstraction as an alternative to the figu-

rative tradition in painting would seem to have

played a part in the radical simplification of

form that characterized Matisse’s postwar

work, although this development can be seen

to have had a more immediate cause.

Ill-health and the after-effects of surgery

meant that, from 1941 to 1944, Matisse was

often bed-ridden, with the result that the art-

work he continued to produce during this pe-

riod was necessarily small in scale. Numerous

drawings produced between 1941 and 1942

were followed by the design and illustration

of a number of literary works, whose authors

included Montherlant, Pierre Reverdy and

Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du mal). In 1943,

Matisse agreed to design and illustrate a book

entitled Jazz for the Greek publisher Tériade.

Physically unable to paint at this stage, he

made collages using cut-outs from sheets of

paper pre-painted in gouache with motifs

drawn from dream, folk art and circus life.

These were reproduced via stencils for the

book.

Matisse continued to use his papiers

découpés in his designs for the screen-printed

Maspero, François

363

hangings Oceania, the Sea and Oceania, the

Sky, and for the tapestry commissions, Poly-

nesia, the Sea and Polynesia, the Sky (1946),

using the marine imagery of Jazz on a much

larger scale. His designs for the windows and

vestments for the Chapelle du Rosaire at

Vence, on which he worked from 1948 to

1951, were also realized through the same

process. Papier découpé was used as a picto-

rial medium in its own right from 1950, when

Matisse reworked the theme of the Moroccan

odalisque. He found that, by cutting directly

into the painted surface, he was able to re-

solve the conflict between line and colour

which he had experienced in the execution of

his paintings, while the formal simplicity of

the imagery imposed by this technique ena-

bled him to resolve what he perceived as the

‘fashionable’ division between realism and the

non-representational. The sharp edges pro-

duced by the scissors when cutting out the

motif clearly defined not only the figure but

also the ground as a positive element, once

the motif was collaged on to the support. La

Piscine (1952), in which this traditional picto-

rial distinction between figure and ground was

so obviously lost, became one of the most ‘ab-

stract’ of Matisse’s works and illustrated his

assertion that, for him, expression resided

above all in the entire arrangement of the pic-

ture—the place occupied by the figures as well

as the empty space surrounding them. The

same could be said of Matisse’s papiers

découpés of 1952/3, L’Escargot, in the Tate

Gallery, and Souvenir de l’Océanie, where any

vestige of recognizable figuration has all but

given way to an expression of the rhythms

sensed in nature through the simultaneous in-

terplay of colour and form. His 1952 series of

Blue nudes, which seem to have been carved

from blocks of pure colour, recall his sculp-

tures of the female form made over forty years

earlier.

After his health had recovered enough to

allow him to resume oil painting, Matisse pro-

duced his last series of Interiors. In Le Silence

habité des maisons of 1947 and his Grand

intérieur rouge of 1948, in which the figures

depicted lack solidity and the formal values of

colour and form dominate, he seems to be ap-

proaching the abstraction of his papiers

découpés. These gouache cut-outs, far from

being the decorative doodlings of an old man,

as has often been suggested, are arguably the

culmination of an artistic journey, his way of

resolving the conflict between colour and

form, abstraction and figuration, which had

occupied him throughout his long career.

CAROL WILCOX

See also: painting

Further reading:

Gowing, L. (1979) Matisse, London and New

York: Thames and Hudson (covers the

whole of Matisse’s career, stressing the sig-

nificance of the cut-outs in the last phase).

Néret, G. (1994) Henri Matisse, Cut-Outs,

Cologne: Benedikt Taschen (brief commen-

tary and good reproductions of Matisse’s

last works).

Mauclair, Jacques

b. 1919, Paris

Director, writer and playwright

The founder of the Théâtre du Marais in 1971.

His vast repertoire of acting and direction has

included Ionesco works, including Victims of

Duty (Victimes du devoir), and plays by

Pirandello, de Filippo and Adamov.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Mauriac, Claude

b. 1914, Paris;

d. 1996, Paris

Writer and memorialist

Mauriac, Claude

364

The son of the novelist François Mauriac, at

the Liberation Claude Mauriac became Gen-

eral de Gaulle’s private secretary (1944–9) and

editor of the Gaullist intellectual monthly,

Liberté de l’esprit (1949–53), before gaining a

reputation as a novelist. In the 1950s he be-

came associated with those writers experi-

menting with the nouveau roman, but his

major achievement is the cycle of memoirs

known as Le Temps immobile (Time Immo-

bile), in which the relationship between

memory and chronology is explored.

MARTYN CORNICK

Major works

Mauriac, C. (1958) La littérature

contemporaine, Paris: Albin Michel.

——(1974–88) Le Temps immobile, 10 vols,

Paris: Grasset.

Mauroy, Pierre

b. 1926, Cartignies

Politician

Rooted in the northern tradition of working-

class, municipal Socialism and mayor of Lille

from 1973, Mauroy was chosen by

Mitterrand in 1981 to be his first prime min-

ister and was one of the main architects of the

‘Socialist experiment’ of the early 1980s. De-

spite also having been behind the U-turn to-

wards a policy of economic ‘rigour’, his im-

age is inextricably associated with the sup-

posed errors of the 1981–4 period and with

old-style Socialism. As first secretary of the

Parti Socialiste between 1988 and 1992, he

argued for a form of social democracy which

would entertain a ‘critical relationship’ with

capitalism.

LAURENCE BELL

See also: parties and movements

Further reading

Pfister, T. (1985) A Matignon au temps de

l’Union de la Gauche, Paris: Hachette (an

account of Mauroy’s premiership by one

of his aides).

May 1968

Viewed with hindsight, the events of May and

June 1968 mark a turning point in the history

of the Fifth Republic, so much so that during

the next decade France would undergo a proc-

ess of irreversible change that constitutes a wa-

tershed in modern French history. As opinion

polls consistently show, May 1968 is the event

most frequently recalled by the French since

1945. Part of the fascination resides in the para-

doxical nature of the events themselves: on the

one hand, no one could have foreseen the sheer

scale of the crisis, despite the signs of discon-

tent which had existed for some time; on the

other hand, the events may be said to consti-

tute a ‘failed’ or a ‘non-revolution’ which ended

up transforming France and particularly the

French people in a quite fundamental way. Al-

though interpretations of May are varied, of-

ten determined as much by political orientation

as by the degree of hindsight characterizing

them, one thing is certain: after May 1968

France would not be the same again.

It is important to note the international

context in which the events occurred. As

David Caute (1988) records, the social and

political crises of 1968 were not limited solely

to France. French unrest was part of a much

wider groundswell of protest across the globe.

Indeed, the student movement developed in

the United States, where, from the early 1960s

onwards, the SDS (Students for a Democratic

Society) protested about enduring inequalities

there. The event which did most to catalyse

the wider spread of student protest was, how-

ever, American involvement in the Vietnam

war. During April 1967, student draftees in

the United States signalled their opposition to

Mauroy, Pierre

365

the war by burning their draft cards, and al-

most half a million people took part in anti-

war demonstrations and marches. The civil

rights movement also added momentum to the

protests. Across Europe during 1967 and into

1968, in major cities in Britain, West Ger-

many, Poland, Spain and Czechoslovakia, as

well as in France, students protested against

what they considered to be state oppression

and authority, whether originating at home or

inflicted abroad. Already during 1967, French

students had begun to protest about general

conditions in higher education, especially

about the regime prevailing in university resi-

dences; although these protests may have ap-

peared trivial, they were symptoms of a pro-

found malaise in French higher education.

In analysing the unrest in France it is com-

monplace to divide the events into three suc-

cessive phases: the university or student crisis,

2–12 May; the social crisis, 13–27 May; and

finally the political crisis, from 27 May to 23

June. Because of demographic factors (princi-

pally the ‘baby-boom’ generation of the im-

mediate postwar years having attained univer-

sity age), pressure on the university sector in

France had reached a critical point. In just five

years, student numbers had doubled from

250,000 in 1963 to over 500,000 in 1968.

Dissatisfaction regarding both the curriculum

and the distant and authoritarian delivery of

teaching, combined with anxieties about dis-

ciplines taught and the inadequate prepara-

tion of university courses for the world of

work, all led to explosive pressures on the sys-

tem. Symbolic of the half-hearted measures

taken to deal with the crisis was the opening

in 1963 of Nanterre University, situated to the

west of Paris. Designed to relieve ever-grow-

ing student numbers at the Sorbonne in cen-

tral Paris, Nanterre was an impersonal, out-

wardly soulless concrete and glass develop-

ment situated in a bidonville (a sort of urban

wasteland). The student protest movement

focused on Nanterre, where the central admin-

istrative building was occupied on 22 March

1968. A movement named after this date was

created, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a sociol-

ogy student who had followed the protests in

Germany. Sharing ideals with two of the most

active unions in higher education (the stu-

dents’ Union National des Étudiants de

France, or UNEF, and the lecturers’ Syndicat

National de l’Enseignement Supérieur, or SNE-

Sup), the movement of 22 March brought to-

gether small groups of revolutionary student

militants (mainly Trotskyists, Maoists, Revo-

lutionary Communists and anarchists).

Among their aims were the rejection of the

values of consumer society, opposition to the

Vietnam war, and the creation of a new, liber-

tarian society in which power would be de-

centralized, and in which conventional moral,

religious and social constraints would be chal-

lenged, if not severed. Protests against the

university represented a starting point for

these objectives and, although their aims and

politics were certainly not universally shared,

these militant groups nevertheless struck a

chord with the larger student body. At a more

general level, the protests reflected young peo-

ple’s increasing dissatisfaction with the values

and culture of the society in which they had

been brought up: to this extent, May 1968

was a clash of generations, in which youth

protested against both parental authority and

the monolithic character of Gaullist France.

By 2 May 1968, student disruption of

classes had reached such a level that the au-

thorities decided to close Nanterre University.

This served only to move the protests from

the periphery to the centre of Paris, resulting

in students and their leaders occupying the

Sorbonne on Friday 3 May. At the request of

the university’s director, the police moved in,

making 500 arrests. However, the unrest

spilled over into the Latin Quarter, with stu-

dents erecting barricades, and the police re-

sorting to the use of tear gas and increasingly

violent retaliation, the effect of which was to

escalate the protests, causing major disruption

in the area and adding weight to the students’

cause. In its turn, the Sorbonne was closed on

6 May, and classes suspended. Now the whole

student body was free to join in the protests,

which began spreading to the provinces. By

the end of the week, during the night of 10–

11 May the unrest reached a crescendo, with

May 1968

366

police charging the barricades and demonstra-

tors burning cars and smashing shop win-

dows. At last the prime minister, Georges

Pompidou, having just returned from a ten-

day official visit to Iran and Afghanistan, ad-

dressed the situation by appearing to make

some relatively minor concessions to student

demands. However, the unrest had gathered

such momentum that on Monday 13 May

(coincidentally the tenth anniversary of the

Algiers insurrection which had signalled the

beginning of de Gaulle’s return to power in

1958), a wave of strikes and demonstrations

unfurled, with trade union representatives

marching with students for the first time. In

over 150 provincial towns throughout France,

the unrest spread. Thus began the second, so-

cial, phase of the crisis.

It was partly the violence of the police re-

pression which caused trade union leaders to

join the students, a gesture of solidarity which

brought the crisis into the world of work. A

huge demonstration of 200,000 people marched

to the place Denfert-Rochereau in Paris. Increas-

ingly, strikes took hold across provincial France:

on 14 May, the Sud-Aviation factory in Nantes

stopped work; on 15–16 May, large car facto-

ries in the Paris region were occupied by work-

ers; coal and steel production in the Lorraine

was disrupted. As the week went on, more and

more workers downed tools or occupied their

workplace, with schoolteachers, public service

employees, banking and transport staff and

broadcasters among them. Estimates vary as to

the numbers involved; by 18 May there were

between 3 million and 6 million strikers, and

by 22 May the figure had risen nearer to 10

million. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in

the third week of May 1968, France was facing

almost total paralysis. What distinguished the

strikes from those which had occurred during

former periods of social strife in France (e.g. in

1936 or 1947) was that they did not merely

encompass employees in the traditional work-

ing classes (the car industry, coal and steel)—

white-collar workers in both public and private

sectors were also extensively involved. Apart

from demands for higher wages, much of the

social unrest was aimed at improving working

conditions, and was especially concerned to

modify the rigid hierarchical structures that typi-

fied Gaullist France (what the sociologist Michel

Crozier characterized as the ‘stalemate society’).

Most importantly, employees demanded more

consultation with their bosses and a greater

degree of devolved responsibility. Of course,

such changes have to evolve over the longer

term, but during the upheavals of May 1968

demands for greater autonomy (autogestion)

were made for the first time. Measures would

be introduced to achieve greater worker par-

ticipation during the 1970s and the early years

of the Mitterrand presidency.

At length Prime Minister Pompidou re-

sponded to union demands by convening con-

sultative meetings at the employment ministry

in the rue de Grenelle in Paris (25–27 May).

As a result of these so-called ‘Grenelle nego-

tiations’, undertaken by representatives of the

employers’ organization (the CNPF, or Conseil

National du Patronat Français) and the trade

unions, Pompidou proposed an increase of 35

per cent in the minimum wage (known as the

SMIC), a 10 per cent salary increase (to be

delivered in two stages), and increased trade-

union rights in companies. By the time the

Renault workers rejected these proposals on

27 May, after they had been communicated

by the leader of the Communist CGT union

(Confédération Générale du Travail), the cri-

sis had passed into its final, political, phase.

Coming after General de Gaulle’s ineffec-

tual public intervention in the crisis on 24 May

(a rather stilted televised broadcast proposing

a referendum), and coinciding with the rejec-

tion of the Grenelle negotiations, if there was

any ‘revolutionary’ potential in the unrest, then

it was at this point that it became most mani-

fest to the Left. At a meeting held at the

Charléty sports stadium on 27 May, the possi-

bilities of a united left-wing front were dis-

cussed, and it even seemed that Pierre Mendès

France (a veteran left-wing politician and fer-

vent opponent of de Gaulle), who was present

at the rally, might be a candidate to lead the

movement. Mendès France, however, remained

silent. The next day, François Mitterrand, then

leader of the FGDS (the Centre-Left Fédération

May 1968

367

de la Gauche Démocrate et Socialiste), held a

press conference at which he announced his

intention to stand as presidential candidate,

and put forward the idea of a provisional gov-

ernment headed by Mendès France to fill what

many believed had become a vacancy of po-

litical power. Mendès France stated that he

would be willing to lead the united Left should

de Gaulle stand down. The impression that

there was indeed a political vacuum was rein-

forced by de Gaulle’s sudden and unexplained

absence from Paris. Rumours abounded: where

was the saviour of France? It turned out that

in the morning of 29 May the president had

gone to Baden-Baden in West Germany to con-

sult with General Massu, the army commander

there. The reasons behind this visit remain

clouded by controversy, but in the immediate

aftermath of his return to Paris de Gaulle

turned potential disaster into triumph.

On 30 May, after a cabinet meeting, at 4.30

p.m. de Gaulle made a radio broadcast. Using

forthright language, raising the spectre of ‘to-

talitarian communism’, and declaring that if

need be he would take exceptional measures

to restore order, de Gaulle postponed the ref-

erendum, dissolved the National Assembly

and announced a general election for the end

of June. The appropriateness of this action

seemed to be confirmed when a huge proces-

sion, apparently spontaneous, but in fact care-

fully orchestrated by de Gaulle’s entourage,

took place the same evening: around 400,000

people marched down the Champs-Élysées in

support of the general. Pompidou reshuffled

his cabinet, and passed decrees to begin im-

plementing the proposed increase in the mini-

mum wage. Over the next few days and weeks

before the elections, work gradually resumed

in the factories and, to forestall any further

student unrest, on 12 June the government

banned all demonstrations and dissolved

eleven revolutionary student groups. The elec-

tions took place on 23 and 30 June. Any lin-

gering doubts there may have been about the

general’s actions were dispelled when the

Gaullist party, the UDR (the Union pour la

Défense de la République), gained a spectacu-

lar electoral victory. In the first round, the

party gained 46 per cent of the poll, an out-

right majority over the other main contend-

ers. After the second round (a week later), the

Gaullists were returned with no fewer than

294 seats out of a total of 485, with the other

major parties (the Communists and the FGDS)

losing at least half the seats they had held be-

fore the election. The Gaullist party (renamed

the Union des Démocrates pour la

République) won an unprecedented victory:

for the first time in a century, a single party

was able to form the government without the

support of any other political formation. The

silent majority, so it seemed, had taken revenge

on those militating for revolution. However,

the events of May and June inflicted a severe

shock on French society: the demands which

had been made by students and workers could

not be ignored, and the reform process began.

In the immediate term, the new government

addressed the crisis in the university sector

through legislative reforms. In November 1968,

the loi Edgar Faure set out to overhaul the sec-

tor by introducing greater autonomy into uni-

versities, which were reorganized into more

modern teaching and research units incorpo-

rating disciplines the student body demanded.

Students were given a greater say in manage-

ment, and a number of new universities were

opened to cope with rising demand for places.

As for the world of work, employees gained

salary increases, better mobility and extended

rights in the workplace. The strikes had pro-

tested against the hierarchical rigidity of the

world of work in France. In the years which

followed, the bosses’ organization (the CNPF)

gradually responded by introducing increased

responsibilities for workers; participation and

autogestion became keywords during the 1970s

as French industry modernized and adopted

fairer working practices. In the political domain,

notwithstanding the Gaullist party’s triumph

over the divided Left, May 1968 marked the

beginning of the end of de Gaulle’s own long

political career. Maurice Couve de Murville was

appointed to replace Pompidou as prime min-

ister on 10 July 1968. However, opinion polls

showed that it was de Gaulle’s own standing

and credibility which had suffered, not

May 1968