France's May 1968 uprising, 50 years on: 'It's harder for the youth today'
It was the police
evacuation of Sorbonne University on 3 May 1968 that brought Gérard Guégan, a
leftwing writer, into the student uprising. From a working class communist
family in Marseille, with a father who had been in the French resistance during
the second world war, Gérard Guégan was living in banlieue outside
Paris. He had recently been sacked from a job at a publisher after setting
up a trade union, and was taking a book manuscript to a publisher in Paris’s
Latin Quarter when he saw police dragging student leaders from Sorbonne and
putting them into vans.
“What surprised me
were not the arrests by police – we’d seen plenty of those during
demonstrations over the Algerian war years before,” he said. “It was the fact
that the passersby stood up against them. As the police vans drove off, stones
were thrown at them. It was passersby and people in the street who were doing
that.” He stayed in Paris and joined the
protests at a time when he felt strangers were suddenly striking up
conversations in the street, rules were being broken and there were running
battles between police and students wearing motorcycle helmets with bin lids as
shields, some throwing not just stones, but petrol bombs.
Gérard Guégan will
speak this week at an anniversary
symposium held at the Nanterre campus where the May 1968 student
revolt began. The site is currently barricaded by anti-Macron students. “What
interests me is whether we’ll be heckled by today’s student protesters – I’m
all for that, I’m all for dialogue,” he said, adding that it was right young
people were “ticking off” the president. One of Gérard Guégan’s
favourite slogans from May 1968 was “Be realistic, ask for the impossible”. He
said: “We were constantly thinking of what we called dreams, and what could be
called utopia … Everyone was convinced that something massive was happening.”
His son, although “an
eternal optimist”, said the current mood is more subdued. “There is something
inaccessible about the notion of a dream. Today is about profound convictions,
how it’s possible to live in a nightmare, but to think about how we can and
should be doing things differently,” he said.
