http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2008/03/19_paris68.shtml
What veteran of '60s protests can view Serge Hambourg's photos and
not murmur, 'We'll always have Paris'?
By Jonathan King, Public Affairs
19 March 2008
Most Americans look back on 1968 with characteristic parochialism, as
a year of largely domestic tribulations and (occasional) triumphs:
the assassinations, two months apart, of RFK and MLK; the political
theater and police violence surrounding the Democratic convention in
Chicago; the hard-fought race for the presidency that brought Richard
Nixon the prize he had so long sought. Even the year-end excursion
into lunar orbit by the crew of Apollo 8, which yielded an epochal
photo of our borderless One World brightening the darkest gloom of
space, is viewed as a quintessentially American achievement.
But 1968 was also a meaningful year far beyond our borders, for
reasons that had little to do with America's multiple strains and
stresses. There were popular revolts around the globe: in Mexico and
Czechoslovakia, Senegal and India, Poland and Argentina. None,
however, appeared to develop as rapidly, and to threaten the
underpinnings of a major industrial economy so directly, as did the
student protests in Paris that May, which in a matter of days engaged
millions of French citizens, including a great many industrial
workers, in mutual rebellion against the established order,
threatening for a brief but heady few weeks to revolutionize the nation.
A number of the pictures taken by Serge Hambourg, a press
photographer for the weekly magazine La nouvel observateur, during
those eventful days make up "Protest in Paris 1968," an exhibit on
display through June 1 at the Berkeley Art Museum. The majority of
the images, taken between May 9 and 13, capture the days of action
and debate that followed the May 3 police attack on student
demonstrators at the Sorbonne, which resulted in hundreds of injuries
and arrests. Two nights of pitched battles between students and
police across the Left Bank were followed by the declaration of a
general strike across all of France; it began to seem likely that the
government of President Charles de Gaulle would collapse as the
nation's economy, in essence, shut down.
Paris was no Berkeley
Viewing Hambourg's images of marchers, onlookers, and police, exhibit
visitors d'un certain age will notice dissimilarities between Paris
'68 and, say, Berkeley or Columbia in the same era. The protesters
occupying Hambourg's frame are, in the main, neat of dress and short
of hair, resembling the best-and-brightest participants in Berkeley's
Free Speech Movement of four years earlier far more than the hippies
and yippies who stood out on the campuses of "Amerika" '68. Their
banners, posters, and placards call for change not in their country's
foreign policy but in the hierarchical conditions under which French
students studied and French labor labored. Indeed, it's the
partnership that developed between students and labor in France that
May that seems most foreign to an American viewer accustomed to
regarding campus protests, then as now, as the exclusive province of
students, with passivity, if not outright hostility, the dominant
response of working-class citizens.
Which is not to say that French workers and students were unified in
thought before the events of May 1968 brought them out on the streets
to pass before Hambourg's lens. The labor movement was the redoubt of
Stalinist apparatchiks, as ossified in their own approach to dealing
with the nation's rulers as de Gaulle's most loyal legislative
deputies were in theirs. Indeed, the leaders of the French Communist
Party opposed the student-protest movement from the start, urging its
members to steer clear of such "adventurers" in favor of acquiescence
in the continued efforts of union leaders to improve the lot of labor
incrementally, through negotiation with industry and government.
The millions of factory workers who chose to ignore their titular
leaders, joining forces with the protesting students of France as
together they were caught up in the tide of events, were encouraged
by the notion that radical reform of working conditions might be
achieved by popular revolt. In the same manner, the mass of largely
bourgeois students came to believe that by their own actions they
could affect the structure and fundamental philosophy of higher
education, which was characterized by one of their leaders, Alain
Geismar, as "completely inadequate to an advanced country, with its
compartmentalization of the various disciplines [and] its retention
of a grading system dating from August Comte and of faculty
structures inherited from the Empire."
It's the knowledge and, for some viewers, the memory of this
attempt at unified political action on behalf of the nation's
exécutants (order-followers) against its dirigeants (order-givers)
that infuses some of Hambourg's photos with a certain wistfulness,
even as they capture a nascent political movement in its dynamic,
albeit brief, public flowering. One such image is reproduced on this
page: It depicts the leading edge of a march passing before the
building housing Socialist Party headquarters, to the façade of which
is fastened a banner celebrating solidarity between students and
workers an alignment envisioned by only the most ideological among
the U.S. students who marched for peace and social justice throughout
the late '60s and early '70s.
Ultimately, the French rebellion of 1968 was short-lived, brought to
an end by a confluence of events: negotiations between unions and the
government, counter-demonstrations by Gaullists and other right-wing
sympathizers, and the removal by police of protesters from the last
contested sites in Paris. All of the government's modest reforms and
efforts at co-optation were achieved by mid-June, just a month after
the height of the Paris protests.
Was it all for naught, then? Hambourg's photos foreshadow little,
except insofar as they conclude in this exhibit just at the point of
Gaullist counter-revolt. Perhaps it is enough to suggest that
something of the flavor and fervor of 1968, as it was experienced not
just in Paris and Berkeley but around the world, still determines our
collective memory of that year a recollection that for many goes
beyond sad memories of martyred leaders and blood-red streets,
dwelling for as long on the hopes and dreams of those who were alive
then, engaged in the work of conceiving and building a better world.
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