1968: When the Communist Party Stopped a French Revolution. By Mitchell Abidor
Part
of a series reflecting on the
tumultuous political events of 1968 and their legacy fifty years on
For fifty years,
the events of May–June 1968 in France have had a collective hero: the striking
students and workers who occupied their factories and universities and high
schools. They’ve also had a collective villain, one within the same camp: the
French Communist Party (PCF) and its allied labor union organization, the
Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), which together did all they could to
put a brake on a potential revolution, blocking the students and workers from
uniting or even fraternizing.
This reading of the
events is often found in histories, most recently Ludivine Bantigny’s 1968.
De Grands soirs en petits matins. I heard it fairly
consistently from rank-and-file student and leftist participants in the May
events whom I interviewed for my oral history of May ’68, May Made Me. Prisca Bachelet, who helped the students at Nanterre
organize their occupation of the university administrative offices on March 22,
1968, and who was present for every decisive moment of the May–June days, said
of the CGT leaders that “they were afraid, afraid of responsibility.” Joseph Potiron, a revolutionary farmer in La
Chapelle-sur-Erdre, near Nantes, said the strikes “ended when the union leaders
pushed the workers to return to work.” For the writer Daniel Blanchard, the
occupations were a fraud: “The factories were very quickly occupied, not by the
workers but by the local CGT leadership. And this was an essential element in
the demobilization of the strikers.” Éric Hazan, at the time a cardiac surgeon
and now a publisher, viewed the Communists’ actions as “Treason. Normal. A
normal treason.”
There is an element of
truth in this characterization of the Communists, though only an element: the
party line modified with events, and the general strike and factory occupations
would not have been possible without Communist participation. In late April,
before the beginning of les évènements, the PCF had issued warnings
against the anarchist-leaning March 22 Movement, formed at the University of
Nanterre and led by, among others, Daniel Cohn-Bendit; the party secretariat
instructed its cadres to ensure the students not be allowed to approach factory
workers should they march to the factories. On May 3, the party newspaper L’Humanité carried
an article about the students at Nanterre headlined “The Fake Revolutionaries Unmasked.” But by May 7, just days
after the beginning of the uprising on May 3, the party leadership spoke of
“the legitimacy of the student movement.” Though the Communists continued to
stand firmly against students entering the occupied factories, this change in
party attitude opened the door the following week to the CGT and PCF’s call for
the workers to go on strike throughout France and join the students on the
streets. In fact, the first major worker-student march was the first workday
after the violence of the Night of the Barricades on Friday, May 10.
Huge marches that
included both students and workers were held, starting May 13, when the workers
joined the students on strike. But the unity was deceptive. Alain Krivine, the
founder and leader of the Trotskyist Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, said
about these marches that “there were common worker-student demos but we didn’t
have the same slogans: they had theirs, we had ours. There was never any real
connection with them.” Hélène Chatroussat, at the time a Trotskyist in Rouen in
Voix Ouvrière, admitted that when they went to factories and saw the workers
behind the gates occupying them, “I said to myself, they are many, they’re with
us… so why don’t they tell the Stalinists [the PCF] to get lost so we could
come in and they could join us?”.. read more:
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/19/1968-when-the-communist-party-stopped-a-french-revolution/
