What is documented for 1967
In 1967 the Paris student world was noisy but not yet violent. There was plenty of organising, argument and small-scale protest, but no large street confrontation of the kind that came in May 1968. The Latin Quarter, the district of the Sorbonne, the Mutualité meeting hall and the École Normale Supérieure, was the centre of this world, and Latin Quarter politics in 1967 are best described as a competition between rival groups of the left, along with a union under strain and a growing campaign against the Vietnam War.
This article looks at those groups and disputes, and avoids describing the later events as though they had already happened.
UNEF and the university reforms
The main student organisation was UNEF, the Union nationale des étudiants de France. It had played a significant role in the 1950s and early 1960s, notably in opposition to the Algerian war, and it ran student welfare services. By the mid-1960s, though, its membership had declined and it was divided between competing political tendencies. Leadership disputes and splits drained it of influence.
Its biggest campaign issue was university policy. The Fouchet reforms, named for Christian Fouchet, who was Minister of Education until April 1967, restructured the first stage of university study, and critics saw them as introducing selection and subordinating education to the needs of the economy. Fouchet moved to the interior ministry in April 1967 and was replaced at Education by Alain Peyrefitte. Concern about restricted entry and about crowded lecture halls and poor facilities grew through the year. Students, especially in the humanities and social sciences, argued that the system was being reorganised without their involvement. These themes of university reform demands would grow louder in the following year.
A crowded left
Outside UNEF, the student left was splitting into many small groups, whose quarrels were a defining feature of the Latin Quarter. A few of the main ones were:
- Communist students. The Union des étudiants communistes had long been tied to the French Communist Party, but it was under strain as younger members objected to party discipline.
- Maoists. In late 1966 a group of students, many from the École Normale Supérieure, broke away to form a pro-Chinese organisation, the Union des jeunesses communistes (marxistes-léninistes). They admired the Chinese leadership, and in 1967 they tried to build links with factories, sometimes sending students to work in industry.
- Trotskyists. Several Trotskyist groups were active, including the Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire, founded in 1966, with Alain Krivine as its best-known figure, and a rival tendency called the Fédération des étudiants révolutionnaires.
- Anarchists and others. Small anarchist groups, as well as a left-wing socialist party and its student supporters, took part in meetings and demonstrations.
The membership of each was limited, probably in the hundreds, not the thousands, and numbers are uncertain. The importance of these groups lay in their readiness to organise and to debate. Many of the people who would be prominent in May 1968 were already active.
The Vietnam committees
The most effective cause for uniting different groups was opposition to the American war in Vietnam. The Comité Vietnam National was founded in 1966 and brought together intellectuals, trade unionists and students, including the mathematician Laurent Schwartz. It held meetings and marches. Alongside it, smaller local committees, some of them reportedly started by the Maoist students, tried to organise protest in schools and neighbourhoods and to be more confrontational. The committees disagreed over tactics, with the national body favouring broad public appeals and the local ones favouring street action.
The wider antiwar mood was encouraged by the Vietnam War escalation, and by the international tribunal on American actions in Vietnam organised by Bertrand Russell, in which the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre took a leading role and which held sessions in Europe in 1967. Many French intellectuals took part, and de Gaulle himself had called for American withdrawal from Vietnam in a 1966 speech in Cambodia. This meant that antiwar protest in France was not entirely hostile to official thinking, unlike in the United States, where antiwar protests clashed more directly with government policy.
The Strasbourg scandal of 1966
One episode from 1966 deserves attention because it echoed into 1967. In the autumn of 1966, students at the University of Strasbourg won control of the local student union. They included supporters of the Situationist International, a small group of radicals who attacked consumer society and the art world. The new leaders used union funds to print and distribute a pamphlet entitled “On the Poverty of Student Life”, largely written by the Situationist Mustapha Khayati. It attacked students as passive consumers of culture and ridiculed the union, the university and the left alike.
The pamphlet caused a scandal, with the press covering it widely. The local authorities and the courts intervened and the union was removed from the Situationists’ hands in December 1966. Nevertheless, the text circulated well beyond Strasbourg, and thousands of copies were reportedly printed and passed around. The Situationist ideas that it popularised, which were also developed in Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle, published in November 1967, formed part of the language used in the graffiti of May 1968.
What happened in the streets
For most of 1967 the activism took the form of meetings, leaflets and marches in the Latin Quarter, usually kept within the law. There were clashes with police at some events, and groups on the extreme left and right occasionally fought each other in the district, but the scale was small compared with 1968. A few of the Latin Quarter tensions with the police in 1967 arose around antiwar events, and records of the specific incidents are thin. It is better not to describe any large protest in the Latin Quarter that year than to guess at one.
The decisive changes came in 1968. The police action at the Sorbonne in early May, followed by the street fighting of the following days and the night of 10 to 11 May, turned what had been a scene of small groups into a mass movement. The 1967 groups supplied the people and the language, but not the scale.
Why it matters
The student activism of 1967 explains why the explosion of 1968 spread so quickly. A large number of experienced organisers, a vocabulary of critique, a cause in the Vietnam War and a government that seemed deaf to university concerns were all in place. In that respect the French story resembles the rise of the European New Left in other countries, though the French situation was shaped by its own traditions, including the strong presence of the Communist Party and the labour unions.