Wakeman Rosemary. The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958

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276 | chapter six

vocative procession. In his analysis of popular festive forms, Bakhtin noted

that “folly is an inverted wisdom.” In the case of the monôme, the spoof of

learning was “an expression of criticism and deep distrust of ofﬁcial truth.”

It was “a language of fearlessness, a language with no reservations and omis-

sions, about the world and about power.”

By the mid-1950s the nonsensi-

cal performance had taken on an even more politicized form. It activated

hidden possibilities. The call to “form a monôme” became the incendiary

spark that ignited student resistance in the Latin Quarter. Rather than

naive or nostalgic, the increasingly aggressive and violent escapades were

a crucial framework for the evolution of political action. It was a conduit

from traditional student revelry to deliberately articulated protest against

educational conditions, and then in its most powerful form to a student

movement against both the war in Indochina and the Algerian War. The

student occupation of public space became modern rather than archaic.

No longer a parody of youthful foolishness, it had been transﬁgured into

a more transparent political dialog, a more intentional form of collective

action in the public arena.

During the early reconstruction years, student politics were largely in-

spired by the communist Resistance. Student leaders either had served in

the ﬁght against fascism during the war, or in the case of the youngest among

them, intended to carry on the ﬁght when they reached adulthood in the

postwar years. The Left Bank was a bastion of communist intellectual muscle.

Many young francs-tireurs found camaraderie around the communist newspa-

per Action and the Left Bank Communist Party cell on the rue Saint-Benoît.

The Communist Party’s UJC and UEC were prominent hubs of student

political solidarity. The École normale supérieure on the rue d’Ulm was the

inner sanctum of a young generation of communist intellectuals that in-

cluded Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Louis Althusser, and

Pierre Bourdieu. Despite the idealized imagery of Left Bank existentialism

and political activism, the conditions suffered by even the most prominent

of young intellectuals were in reality miserable. Their memoirs are ﬁlled with

accounts of their poverty and daily struggle. The communists understood

the dreadful student conditions on the Left Bank as a mirror of the state of

affairs for the working classes in general. During the 1947 strike wave, the

communist student newspaper Clarté took up the question of whether the

Latin Quarter was “a world apart:” Since the Middle Ages the Latin Quarter

had been considered

the left bank | 277

a distinct little community, closed to the center of the capital: a commu-

nity with its own rules, customs, and history. But the tragic experience

of the occupation and the Resistance, which united young students and

workers in combat, the difﬁculties of daily life, the worry about tomorrow,

have broken down the walls of the Latin Quarter. And now, . . . are we

going to close in on ourselves, jealously guarding our intellectual “isola-

tion,” or, on the contrary, are we going to openly breath in the winds of

change that are crossing the nation?

The Latin Quarter was the terrain of class struggle, the battle zone against

rival Trotskyites, against the American imposter, and against French colonial

repression. Communist youth organizations were at the forefront of demon-

strations against American imperialism and French colonialism throughout

the 1950s. Students and young people were everywhere in the protests and

riots against General Ridgway in 1952, including the clashes on the rue des

Écoles and the carrefour de l’Odéon. The young Resistance ﬁghter and sea-

man Henri Martin, tried and incarcerated for his propaganda against the war

in Indochina, became a communist symbol of heroic youth. The campaign

to have him freed became a cause célèbre, with petitions, songs, leaﬂets, and

grafﬁti dedicated to Henri Martin as a sign of resistance. In yet another layer

of emblematic street naming, communist municipalities in the Paris region

proclaimed “Henri Martin” streets. The communist magazine Regards, Sar-

tre’s Les Temps modernes, and Esprit all joined the campaign.

Once again,

at the end of the decade, a 1958 special issue of Clarté on the Latin Quarter

described an illustrious history that included “the polytechniciens on the

barricades of ’48, the Communards shot in the Luxembourg gardens . . .

Jaurès joining Hugo in the Panthéon . . . the student strikes, the protests on

the Boul’ Mich’.”

Despite intense engagement by the PCF and its youth organizations, as

the 1950s wore on the power of the Resistance and revolutionary communism

waned for the majority of struggling students. The decade was generally an

era of more moderate “student syndicalism.” The Union nationale des étu-

diants de France (national students’ union, or UNEF) emerged as the most

popular student organization in France. It was recognized as the legitimate

political voice of the majority of students, with about eleven thousand mem-

bers in Paris in 1950.

Its headquarters on the rue Soufﬂot that joined the

boulevard Saint-Michel and the Luxembourg gardens to the Panthéon acted

278 | chapter six

as the focal point for student activism in the Latin Quarter. Its leadership

largely ignored raucous political divisions for a national unity platform in

keeping with the atmosphere of the reconstruction years, and with the hint

of political apathy among rank-and-ﬁle students. The Communist Party

had relatively little inﬂuence over its policies, many of which were centered

on democratizing the university and improving educational conditions. But

virtually every political persuasion found shelter under its wing. The major-

ity of French political parties established a student section. Thus, along with

left-wing Catholic movements, the Jeunesses Socialistes, and the communist

UJC, the UNEF shaped the opposition to the government’s paltry support

for university education and the conditions of student life. However, it would

be incorrect to consider student dissent to have been limited just to these

issues. Student action was heavily informed by the general atmosphere of

political struggle during the 1950s and by the agonizing crisis of decoloniza-

tion. The UNEF gained a distinguished reputation on the Left for its early

condemnation of the French war in Indochina and eventually for its stance

against the Algerian War.

Between 1947 and 1958 there were nine major student strikes and protests

in Paris. The most important, and most successful, protests took place in 1947

and 1953. The June 6–7, 1947, student movement coincided with mounting

cold war tensions, the ouster of the PCF from government, and the unrest that

ended in the strikes and “great fear” of the autumn. Food and coal shortages,

inﬂationary price spirals, and the deteriorating conditions of daily life pro-

duced near desperation and panic. For students, the misery was all the worse.

Their protests centered on a planned government cut in student subsidies at

the same time university inscription fees were to be increased. Demanding

the right to a free public education, this ﬁrst UNEF-led student strike of the

postwar years paralyzed the university and ultimately forced the Ministry of

Education to back down. It was an indication of the growing demographic

and political power of “students” as a postwar category of understanding.

The framework of political dissent followed a prescribed mental topography

and known rituals that were generally tolerated by the police as long as they

remained within tacitly accepted spatial boundaries. Strikers ﬁrst prevented

entrance into the Sorbonne. Then the crowds amassed at the UNEF ofﬁces

on the rue Soufﬂot and marched down the boulevard Saint-Michel and

back up to the starting point on the rue Saint-Jacques and the Sorbonne.

The trajectory symbolized the civic right of student protest and entitlement

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to the public space of the Latin Quarter. Even a certain level of ritualized

violence in traditional clashes with police within this privileged zone was

deemed acceptable. However, these customary practices rapidly broke down

when students attempted to escape the constraints of the Latin Quarter. The

Cité internationale universitaire, for example, along the border of the 14th

arrondissement between the porte d’Orléans and porte de Gentilly, was a

terrain newly claimed by students and defended in their interests. Violence

there was far more insidious and the reprisals swift. During the 1947 strikes

police faced off against students armed with pieces of scrap iron and water

cannons.

Student challenges to more ofﬁcial sites in Paris were perceived as direct

threats both to the capital and to the Republic. In November 1948 commu-

nist students attempted to stage a memorial “march to the Étoile” to com-

memorate the November 1940 protest against Nazi occupation down the

Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe by ﬁve thousand university and lycée

students. Although this 1948 march was one of numerous commemoration

ceremonies staged during the late 1940s, it was interpreted as an ominous

danger: ﬁrst because of the growing antagonism to the communist presence,

and secondly because the agreed-upon sanctuary of the Latin Quarter had

been breached. Youth groups’ prospects for asserting their presence beyond

the tightly controlled and partitioned space of the Latin Quarter depended on

their ability to “jump scale” and expand their spatial range.

The boundaries

around the Latin Quarter were perceived as impermeable by the state appa-

ratus and its security forces. The cortege began at the traditional gathering

point at the Sorbonne and continued down the boulevard Saint-Michel to

the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where the battle with waiting police

units ensued. Not to be dissuaded, protesters reassembled and headed for

the place de la Concorde singing the “Marseillaise,” the “Chant des parti-

sans,” and the “Chant du départ.” The police gave chase, and the students

scattered, using whatever means they had to make it to the Arc de Triomphe.

Their numbers having dwindled to hundreds, they once again clashed with

police at the avenue George V.

This ritual restaging of the public protest and

repression of the occupation associated the government of President Vincent

Auriol with fascism. The use of the symbolic space of the Champs-Élysées

and the Étoile pointed to the broader—in this case communist-led—student

engagement in postwar politics that broke free of the established conﬁnes of

the Latin Quarter.

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In March 1951 the UNEF called for a student strike in the Latin Quarter

to protest cuts in student social security. On March 16 a stream of several

thousand students marched up the boulevard Saint-Michel to UNEF head-

quarters on the rue Soufﬂot, where they listened to speeches berating the

government. Shouting for the resignation of the minister of education, the

crowds once again attempted to break the cordon around the Latin Quarter.

They headed for the Chamber of Deputies via the boulevard Saint-Michel

and the quai des Grands-Augustins, where they were blocked and assaulted

by police. The clashes and street ﬁghting between law enforcement and ﬁve

hundred to six hundred students stunned the Latin Quarter. Smashed win-

dows and cars littered the street. The crowd was pushed by police up the

boulevard Saint-Germain to the place de l’Odéon. The ﬁght reached its height

on the corner of the rue Saint-Dominique and the rue de la Bellechasse when

some six hundred students tried again to reach the Chamber of Deputies.

Breaking out of the agreed-upon zone of student protest, about half the

crowd reached the assembly and disrupted trafﬁc until the police regained

control. The atmosphere of violent inversion and deﬁance opened the way

to a more general breaking of the rules by onlookers. When students pelted

police with coins along the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a horde of

homeless vagrants suddenly appeared amid the melee, scrambling to pocket

the sudden treasure lying on the street.

The taking of collective action in

the spaces of the city was multidimensional—messy, ﬂuid, and boundless in

its capacity for invention.

The December 15, 1953, protests against cuts in the education budget

were far larger, and ultimately far more successful. They followed the ritual

route from ﬁery speeches at the UNEF ofﬁces on the rue Soufﬂet, down the

boulevard Saint-Michel. Despite “absolutely no provocation,” according to

the socialist student newspaper, they were charged by police at the rue des

Écoles in what the paper termed “traditional scenes of violence.” These clashes

were particularly brutal. Protesters were hemmed in by police barricades on

the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the rue des Écoles in an attempt

to constrain the melee to customary spatial territory. Lines of city buses ﬁlled

with shocked passengers waited along the edges of the violent clash until traf-

ﬁc could be reestablished.

The media coverage of these events in the streets

of the Latin Quarter were a key ingredient in visually encrypting symbolic

sites such as the courtyard of the Sorbonne, the Boul’ Mich’, and boulevard

Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It reinvested power back to the localized level. A

the left bank | 281

wounded and bloody Jean-Marc Mousseron, president of UNEF, became a

media martyr, asserting student demands during radio and television inter-

views from the hospital emergency room. The protests and violence ignited

a storm of protest by politicians from every side as well as by the Socialist

and Communist Parties and the Conseil général de la Seine. The minister of

the interior, Léon Martinaud-Deplat, and the prefect of police, Jean Baylot,

were accused of overreaction and police brutality. The left-wing newspaper

Libération reported the Latin Quarter closed to trafﬁc and under a “state of

siege,” with the National Assembly across the Seine to the place de la Con-

corde and down the rue de Rivoli under police control:

Such is the spectacle organized by the prefect of police. Why? Because

thousands of students protested along with their professors on the bou-

levard Saint-Michel—and with a good part of the National Assembly—to

obtain a budget commensurate with the needs of national education,

above all places to work, rooms to live in, restaurants to eat in, scholar-

ships to study, and decent treatment for their professors.

But the struggle for control over urban space pitted students against a police

force determined to put a stop to the threat of unruliness and disorder. In

response to the accusations, Baylot justiﬁed the repression with the need to

maintain trafﬁc circulation along the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés and

defend the National Assembly from protesters. The National Assembly itself

ﬁnally voted unanimously to condemn the brutality used against students

during the demonstration. Even more, the Ministry of Education conceded

and increased university funding.

The June 1954 monôme du bac fed into the controversies swirling around

the Latin Quarter as an uncontrollable, rowdy stage for student struggle. The

festivities were clothed, literally, in the farcical masquerade of Carnival, with

the Beaux-Arts marching band masked in false beards and wearing bowler

hats, striped shirts, and black tights. They entertained some three thousand

would-be baccalauréats at the foot of the fountain on the place Saint-Michel.

“In another time,” reported the Le Parisien libéré, “the students would be

looking to scandalize the bourgeois . . . but now the festivities are harmless.

Following established custom, students sang under the good-natured eyes of

the police.” When an on-call ﬁre engine was surrounded by heckling students,

ﬁremen jokingly responded by spraying them with hoses. The band led the

282 | chapter six

crowds up the Boul’ Mich’ to the rue Soufﬂot and played a concert under

the windows of the UNEF headquarters. But the frivolity and lighthearted-

ness of the festivities concealed the subversive quality of the Latin Quarter’s

collective realm. Nothing could be taken for granted. The entertainment was

suddenly interrupted by hundreds of students rioting through the streets,

breaking windows, torching cars, and molesting bystanders. A bus was set

ablaze on the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés. When a beloved local street

singer refused to perform at the “rites,” he was sprayed with talcum powder.

Fights broke out between police and a diehard group of some two hundred

young people in front of the gare du Luxembourg. Ten police and ﬁfteen in-

nocent bystanders were hurt. Paris Match condemned the free-for-all monôme

du bac with graphic photographs of the ﬁghting and damage. Baylot reacted

by promising that “the street would no longer be left to badly brought up

children.”

Held midway through the decade, this 1954 march was indicative of

the transitional path between folkoric ritual and modern student action.

The staging of a farcical village fête shifted into agitational theater and then

into vandalism and violence as forms of deﬁance. This dialectic between

the structure of ritual and the antistructure that was embedded within it is

what made public performances such as the monôme so dynamic and potent.

The twisting of the traditional into spontaneous street action could easily be

described as détournement. Given the spreading lettrist and eventually situ-

ationist message on the Left Bank, the notion of employing prankster art and

festival for subversive ends aptly characterizes the role of the monôme rite. It

was a transformative site in which traditional student identity transmuted

into modern political form. As evidence of this provocative quality, the mu-

nicipal council engaged in a semantic debate about the monôme in July 1954,

comparing it in particular with the UNEF-sponsored protests in December

1953. Some argued that the monôme processions were a good-natured habit,

that they were “peaceful” and should be tolerated as long as they remained

within their prescribed spatial boundaries. From this perspective, the repres-

sion of the 1954 monôme was deemed “police brutality.” Other, irate municipal

councilors berated the “spontaneous” gatherings, the “rioting” and disorder

that extended to the quays of the Seine, the cars sprayed with talcum powder

and pelted with stones, the inﬁltration by “foreigners” into the Left Bank,

and the ﬁghts with police. They were a threat to the public and warranted

direct police action. Still others saw in the mônome a justiﬁable demonstration,

the left bank | 283

or manifestation, of student dissent.

This unsteady concoction of meaning

epitomized the growing fears of disintegration that permeated discussion

about the surfaces of the city. Spatial practices in the Latin Quarter were no

longer predictable, but instead had fractured into a heteroglossia of indeﬁn-

able incidents.

As a formula for student expression, the monôme disappeared by the end

of the decade, replaced by the manif. The transition between the two forms

of action had always been ﬂuid, with UNEF, communist protests, and the

monôme all sharing ritual practices and spaces. Although the historian Jean-

Yves Sabot shies away from calling the students of the 1950s a “reconstruc-

tion” or “cold-war” generation, he describes them as an intermediary cohort

that acted as a bridge between archaic student practices and modern politi-

cal ones. The moderate UNEF suited their mainly consensus sensibilities

and their emphasis on Left Bank student conditions. Although many of the

problems of everyday life in the Latin Quarter were in the process of being

resolved by the mid-1950s, the grievances about student subsidies, access to

student restaurants and housing, and educational reform still ignited ferocious

protest. In March 1956 ﬁve thousand students staged a demonstration march

down the Boul’ Mich’ to commemorate the death of a professor killed in a

tragic laboratory accident blamed on poor equipment. They gathered at the

place de la Sorbonne and marched in cortege to Jussieu and the site of the

proposed Faculty of Science, for which the ground was yet to be broken.

As students, they still imagined themselves as something of a distinctive caste

occupying the protected territory of the Latin Quarter. In May the same

year, after ﬂeeing their exam rooms, some three thousand students shouting

the ritual call “Formez le monôme!” marched down the boulevard Saint-

Michel, interrupting trafﬁc. Waiting police columns charged the marchers,

who threw everything from cheese to bottles of ink at their adversaries. The

result was dozens hurt and over one hundred arrests.

Even when their

protests broke out of this domain into broader spaces of resistance, traces of

customary student identity and ritual were retained. Only the communists

attempted to recast students in the image of an oppressed working class. But

it was clear by the closing years of the decade that these Latin Quarter strat-

egies were unlikely to withstand the escalating police repression. However,

this transitional student cohort did, Sabot argues, lay the groundwork for a

generation of future enragés who reached the age of about twenty between

1954 and 1962.

284 | chapter six

The UNEF itself did not possess sufﬁcient unity or inﬂuence to absorb

the complexities of the student movement as it evolved over the decade. In

a mirror of French society as a whole, the political idiom of student protest

was increasingly fractured by the polemics of the cold war and decoloniza-

tion, and ultimately by the Algerian crisis. The old guard within the UNEF

insisted on maintaining its national unity stance. But the generation informed

by the Resistance, by the miserable living conditions of the early postwar

years, and by the opening salvos of the cold war was giving way to younger

leaders. The organization splintered into battling clans and lost its privileged

position as a semiofﬁcial student mouthpiece able to negotiate with govern-

figure 30. Students protesting the lack of professors and government funding for educa-

the left bank | 285

ment authorities. Its “majority” radical faction increasingly distanced itself

from mônome practices and from Mousseron (who led marches in support of

French Algeria through the Latin Quarter). Instead, the UNEF allied with the

powerful French labor unions in support of Algerian independence and then

with the illegal Union générale des étudiants musulmans algériens (union

of Algerian Muslim students, or UGEMA). The reality was that young male

students were directly impacted by the military call-up to ﬁght in Algeria.

Student protesters and action committees often spearheaded by various com-

munist groups and the UNEF were increasingly likely to join with Algerian

demonstrations in the streets.

The Left Bank became a paciﬁst, antiwar

stronghold. In 1955 the new radio station Europe 1 began playing Algerian

protest songs that were banned on all other stations. Boris Vian’s antiwar Le

Déserteur (Vian and Berg, 1954) became the neighborhood anthem. Sung by

the Algerian singer and songwriter Mouloudji (a regular of the Saint-Germain

scene), it warned the president of France to stuff his war:

Mr. President

I am writing you a letter

That maybe you will read

If you have the time

I’ve just received

My call-up papers

To leave for war

Before Wednesday night

Mr. President

I don’t want to go

I’m not on this earth

To kill poor people

This isn’t meant to annoy you

But I have to say

Wars are insane

The world has had enough of them

Since I was born

I have seen brothers die

I have seen fathers leave

And children cry