At the start of 1968 France had 550,000 students, well over a third of them located in Paris. Their numbers had nearly tripled since 1960. This spectacular growth was a reflection of the changing needs of French capitalism, which had undergone a feverish technological renewal in the 10 years following de Gaulle's seizure of power in 1958.

But campus facilities had barely expanded to accommodate this rapid growth. The lecture theatres were crammed to bursting and even the new universities built in the early 1960's were already in a dreadful state. There was mass discontent with this as well as the petty restrictions imposed on the youth by the university authorities.

Nanterre in the western Paris suburbs was the centre of this disaffection. The campus was built to house 7,000 students. Yet during 1967-8 there were 12,000 students, while the university cafeteria could only accommodate 100 people!

This explosion in student numbers occurred at the same time as unemployment began to take off. The long boom of the 1950s and 1960s was coming to an end. There were 450,000 registered unemployed at the beginning of 1968. There was a sudden loss of confidence in the future and young people felt society to be closed and unresponsive to their needs.

Youth under 21 did not have the right to vote and there was stifling government control over the media - especially the TV and radio. This led to a dull, old-fashioned conformity at a time when in imperialist countries notably Britain and the USA there was an explosion of youth culture. France seemed embodied in its ageing president, Charles De Gaulle: anachronistic, authoritarian and austere.

De Gaulle's prime minister Georges Pompidou had proposed an educational "reform" designed to get rid of "bad" students. A system of degrees by credits was to be replaced all at once by one based on years of study. This was partly the cause of the student rebellion. However, the most important factor responsible for the politicisation of this new layer of youth was the Vietnam war.

US imperialism's murderous attempt to regain control over South-East Asia, and the courageous struggle led by the Vietnamese people, radicalised hundreds of thousands of youth all over the world. In the month of February 1968 alone, there was a major Paris demonstration every week.

Just as the student movement had clear and definite roots, so too the general strike of May-June did not come from nowhere either. From the spring of 1967 onwards, a series of strikes, occupations and violent confrontations with the police showed that the working class was becoming increasingly combative.

Origins

In 1966, wages and conditions of French workers were low compared with those of other EEC countries. Their wages were the lowest, their hours the longest (up to 52 hours a week in some industries) and their tax levels the highest. As the post-war boom began to fizzle out, the Pompidou government prepared a wave of austerity attacks.

Probably the most significant of the pre-May strikes took place in Caen, in January. There, 4,800 workers in the Saviem industrial vehicles plant went on strike over a long-running wage dispute. The workforce was predominantly young (average age 25), was largely rural in origin and had a very low level of unionisation (6%). And yet these workers, who the bosses no doubt thought would be easy meat, turned out to be extremely combative.

The unions' reaction to Pomipidou's attacks was to try and channel workers' anger into easily controllable campaigns. On the 13 December 1967, millions of workers participated in a day of action against the attacks on the social security and health system. Yet despite the obvious willingness of the workers to fight, the unions merely set the date for another demonstration. The date was May 1968!

The final sign of what was to come can be found in the declining influence of the PCF, especially among the young. The PCF had no real voice among school and college students. It quaintly insisted on maintaining separate youth organisations for each sex! They did have a joint newspaper, with the exciting title "Nous les garcons et les filles"-'We boys and girls'. But the prudish Stalinist bureaucrats were utterly unable to attract a generation that was beginning to experience the pleasures of the "sexual revolution".

But even if we can trace the origins of May to the growing international radicalisation of workers and the youth, no one at the time foresaw the momentous, joyous, explosion of rebellion that was to come. In March, Georges Pompidou addressing the Gaullist youth remarked: "Today, it is difficult to revolt, because there is nothing to revolt against."

Indeed, up until May, the French antiwar movement was nowhere near as radical as the German or the Italian movement. The anti-war demonstrations in Paris were not as militant as those in Berlin, Berkeley or London.

Paris was to be the centre of the May maelstrom: it had the largest concentration of students in the country. On the Nanterre campus, the Trotskyists of the Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire (JCR- Revolutionary Communist Youth), with around 400 members, linked to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and various semi-anarchist tendencies had organised protests against the university reforms (10,000 students had gone on strike in December 1967), against the Vietnam war and for the freedom to display political posters on the campus. These campaigns had regularly led to confrontation with the University authorities and to several pitched battles with the police.

On 20 March, a few hundred students protesting against the war attacked the American Express office in Paris. A JCR member was arrested, and two days later 142 students founded the "Mouvement 22 mars" (22 March Movement) to fight to get him out of prison.

This group was to rapidly become the focus of the student struggles.

Day of Action

The University authorities had forbidden students in the halls of residence to have overnight visitors of the opposite sex. The students rightly demanded to be treated like adults although according to the law most of them were not! Focusing their mobilisation on the repressive nature of the University authorities, the "22 mars" began to organise hundreds of students in regular discussion circles.

An anti-imperialist day of action, planned by the "22 mars" for Friday 3 May was threatened by fascists. Fearing a large-scale confrontation, the Vice-Chancellor of Nanterre declared that the University would be closed until the exams, at the end of June. Faced with this arbitrary and anti-democratic decision, the "22 mars" called a protest demonstration in the Sorbonne University, in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

As the demonstration assembled, the atmosphere was extremely tense. The police were everywhere. Expecting an attack by fascists some 400 stewards controlled access to the Sorbonne and the university authorities threatened to close the University if the students did not leave.

The students had no time to consider their reply, because almost straight away the riot police drew their batons and waded in. In the streets outside, groups of students started lifting cobblestones and hurling them at the police. In a short space of time running battles broke between students and the police.

But at the end of the battle the Sorbonne was occupied by the police, the night air was heavy the acrid smell of tear gas and more than 600 students had been arrested.

One of the lecturers' unions called for a solidarity strike on Monday 6 May, while the main student union at last roused itself from its stupor to call on workers to join a solidarity demonstration in Paris on Monday 6 May.

About 100,000 leaflets were given out at factory gates by mainly by Trotskyists and Maoists. Later, 30,000 demonstrators, still largely students, but now drawing in working class youth marched through Paris beating off two police charges.

Every day of the week, 6-10 May, witnessed a major demonstration. On most nights there were fierce confrontations with the police. The numbers regularly involved grew to 50-60,000.

Night of the barricades

The 10-11 May  the "night of the barricades"  proved to be the turning point. Provoked by the refusal of the minister of education to reopen the Sorbonne and Nanterre, 30,000 students decided to take back the Sorbonne. They surrounded the university and faced repeated baton charges, tear gas grenades and brutal beatings. The students fought back with everything to hand. The streets were denuded of cobblestones, trees were cut down and cars were pushed into the road to form barricades.

Shocked by the police violence, the public was repeatedly showed its sympathy with the students, and as more and more youth flooded into the Latin Quarter, the old university area around the Sorbonne, it was certain that the police would eventually be beaten.

Pompidou, who had been abroad on an official visit, returned to Paris on Saturday 11 May. He immediately took stock of the situation and caved in. All the Universities would be reopened and the reform would be shelved. But it was too little, too late.

On Monday 13 May a massive victory celebration took place with between 600,000 and one million demonstrators thronging the streets. All over the country, millions of workers went on strike to express their solidarity with the students and to protest against police violence.

Working class movement

The government and the union leaders hoped that was the end of the matter. But the movement, which until then had been limited to students and individual young workers, became transformed into a national working class movement. At the Sud-Aviation aero plant in Nantes, the workers had been fighting for higher wages for some time. Inspired by the students' victory, on 14 May they occupied the factory, locked the manager in his office and called for solidarity from other workers in the town.

The next day, the Renault plant at ClÈon went on strike. Finally, on Thursday 16 May, the Renault Billancourt plant, the symbol of the French industrial working class, and a fortress of the PCF and the CGT trade union, went on strike. Significantly, it was young workers who began the movement, against the advice of the local union leaders.

Within a few days, and without a call from any union, 10 million French workers were out on strike: around two-thirds of the workforce. More than four million of them remained on strike for more than two weeks. Two million were on strike for more than a month. The demands raised by the strikers were many and varied: pay increases, the removal of authoritarian managers, ending the attacks on the social security system.

Every sector of French society was affected. The industrial working class took action on a scale never before seen. Companies like Peugeot, which had never known a major strike, were paralysed. The mines, the docks and public transport were all on strike. The media workers  especially the state-controlled ORTF radio and TV station  fought for workers' control over what was said and shown. Opera singers, actors, footballers, taxi drivers, all took action. The movement, without being called for or co-ordinated by any political party or union federation, had become the largest and longest general strike in European history.

And like every general strike, May 1968 posed point blank the question: "Who rules?"

But if spontaneous actions by young workers, inspired by the students and then drawing in older workers, was enough to unleash this historic event its development, its goals, its organisational expression depended on some thing the anarchists never understand  leadership. The workers had a leadership  even if at first it did not lead. Unfortunately it was a leadership that detested the very thought of a struggle for power. As the general strike grew, the trade unions  and especially the PCF-controlled CGT  did all they could to turn this revolutionary force into ephemeral or petty reforms. The Stalinists' desperately struggled to limit the influence of the revolutionary groups on the workers.

L'Humanite, the PCF's daily paper, originally attacked the youth who had participated in the "Night of the Barricades" as "provocateurs" and "scum".

Following the occupation of Billancourt, demonstrations went from Paris to the Renault plant virtually every night. Yet the CGT kept the factory gates firmly shut and put up posters warning the workers against "people from outside the labour movement" who "serve the ruling class".

Where occupations had been launched, the unions systematically tried to weaken the independent organisation of the workers, wherever they could send them home and preventing the occupation becoming a living centre of political education. Where strike committees existed they were generally composed of local union leaders.

The CGT also did its best to keep the labour movement separate from the students. On 24 May, two enormous but separate demonstrations took place in Paris, one called by the CGT, the other by UNEF. In the provincial towns, this kind of tactic was more difficult, to impose and the two movements tended to mix together, threatening the bureaucrats' influence and showing the possibility of forging a united attack on the government.

Miserable deal

Deeply shaken by the demonstrations and by the abject failure of De Gaulle to restore order, Pompidou began a marathon set of negotiations with the union leaders who were nearly as frightened of the movement as he was. The agreement they reached  7 per cent increase in wages, shelving of certain attacks on social security, increase in the minimum wage  were a few stale crumbs from the capitalists' table.

As soon as they tried to sell this miserable deal to the workers, it became obvious that it was not enough. When Georges Seguy, leader of the CGT went to Billancourt to explain the agreement on 27 May, he was booed and shouted down in the PCF's industrial stronghold! Throughout the country, it was the same story. The strikers would not go back to work; they would not accept the agreement. The sense of expectation of the need for some fundamental change had taken hold of the entire working class. Reeling from the shock of rejection, the PCF and the CGT tried had to raise their sights, to turn the movement into pressure for a change of government.

They called another demonstration, on 29 May. Again 600,000 people marched, this time under the slogan "for a people's government". The smell of 1936 and the Popular Front was in the air. De Gaulle flew to Germany to a cabal of his closest military aides, while ministers began to burn their secret archives.

And yet, the next day, the tide began to turn. De Gaulle returned from Germany, having decided against the "last and fatal arbitration" of using the army against the strikers. Instead, judging well the electoral cretinism of those who led the workers, he called a general election and mobilised his supporters in a massive reactionary demonstration on the Champs-Elysees.

The PCF was only too willing to channel the revolutionary flood into the parliamentary watermill. It called on workers to return to work and to settle matters at the ballot-box. Pointing to the electoral victory of the Popular Front in 1936, the Stalinists assured the masses that the "people's government" demanded on 29 May could be produced without bloodshed and suffering by the upcoming elections.

At first there was considerable resistance from workers and students. But without any alternative objective, disappointed but not defeated, the workers slowly returned to work. In a number of factories the police had to evict the strikers and on 16 June they recaptured the Sorbonne.

Failure of leadership

But woe to those who abort a revolution. When the elections took place at on 23 June, the PCF's hopes were dashed. To their astonishment the Stalinists lost over half their seats, falling from 73 to 34 deputies. Even more staggering was the vote in the constituencies around the major factories. For example, around Flins, the PCF lost 25 per cent of its votes as compared to a year before. The Gaullists won 55 per cent of the vote and were swept back into office.

How could it end like this? First, it must be remembered that the electoral system was profoundly undemocratic. Youth under 21 did not have the right to vote, and an estimated 300,000 youth of voting age were not on the electoral roll because of the government's refusal to update it. Second, the PCF had just dramatically betrayed the May general strike. Young workers and students were hardly inclined to vote for it  or even to vote at all. "Elections, piege ‡ cons" (roughly translated-'Only fools vote') was a popular slogan in June and afterwards.

Most importantly the general strike and the factory occupation movement had not generated committees or councils of delegates elected by the strikers who could have provided a check to the betrayal of the union leaders and a forum for the workers to select an alternative leadership.

The real task in those weeks was to bridge the gap between the workers' struggle for immediate improvements in wages and against dictatorial management, for more democracy, and the desire for a different class power.

This bridge could have been built through a fight for transitional demands to establish workers' control in the factories and through calls for a workers' government, exposing time and again the reformist leaders refusal to fight for power. These demands should have been linked to defence of the workplace occupations from the CRS, another critical issue. The hold of the reformist union leaders could have been weakened and broken by such methods. It could not be done simply by denunciations.

Unfortunately the young Trotskyists of the JCR (direct predecessor of today's LCR and Voix Ouvriere (direct predecessor of today's Lutte Ouvriere) had little or no roots in the factories. The lesson that many young revolutionaries in France and across Europe learned from this outcome was that a revolutionary Leninist party, rooted in the factories, was essential if mass historic struggles by workers and youth were not to end in betrayal and defeat.

Despite its sad finale, May 68 played a fundamental role in shaping today's French class struggle. De Gaulle lost the mystique of invincibility. In little more than a year he lost a referendum and resigned, The Gaullist "strong state" was scaled down and reformed by Pompidou. The PCF began the decline, which has continued unabated ever since. And May '68 continues to reverberate in today's class struggle. Even more importantly, it contains a series of lessons, which are of fundamental importance to a new generation of workers youth. For us the task is not to repeat May 68, but to surpass it.

The Trotskyists in May 68

During May, there were three major Trotskyist groups.

• Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), the French Section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

• The Jeunesses Communistes RÈvolutionnaire (JCR), a youth organization linked to the French section of the Fourth International (United Secretariat), the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI).

• Voix OuvriËre (VO, Workers Voice) group, today Lutte Ouvriere (LO, Workers Struggle).

OCI

Although claiming to be the representative of "Orthodox Trotskyism", the OCI was most conservative of the Trotskyist groups in May 68. During the "Night of the Barricades" 1,000 students of the OCI marched to the barricades. Then they marched away again. The reason for this extraordinary act of political cowardice was revealed by Charles Berg, a leader of the OCI: "20 or 30,000 students could not beat the thousands of riot police. I have no hesitation in saying that we were correct, having gone in orderly ranks to the barricades, to call on the students to break up their demonstration which was necessarily going to be transformed into a bloodbath." (Combat, 17.5.68)

When it came to the workers struggle, the OCI saw it as a glorified trade union struggle. For the OCI the key questions were those of the attacks on social security, the 40-hour week, guaranteed jobs, a generalised wage increase and for the abrogation of the university reform and the government's economic plan. (Informations OuvriËres 387, May 1968)

The OCI failed to raise the key question of workers' control in the occupied factories. By putting its main emphasis on the fight for "the weapon of victory: a national strike committee" without focusing on the key question of rank and file control of the strike, the OCI showed it was obsessed with maintaining its links with the trade union leaders, even where these bureaucrats were sabotaging the movement by negotiating with the government.

JCR

The JCR was right at the centre of events in the first half of May. They played a key role in setting up the "22 mars". Daniel BensaÔd, today a central leader of the Fourth International, was one of the founders of the movement.

The JCR's militancy marked an important radicalisation compared with its parent organisation, the PCI, which had been carrying out "deep entry" into the PCF since 1953. At its foundation, in 1966, the JCR too accepted this perspective: "The revolutionary party will only be created through the building of a left tendency in the PCF." (JCR leaflet, Caen 1966)

But by 1968 the JCR youth, headed by Alain Krivine and Daniel Bensaid, had broken with this schema but had failed to adopt any serious tactics aimed at breaking the PCF and the CGT's organisational stranglehold on the workers. In practice, they often followed the initiatives of the leader of the "22 mars" movement, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Although they pointed out the necessity of links between workers and students, this remained a position on paper: the real battles, according to the JCR, were to be fought on the streets of the Latin Quarter.

VO

In a similar way, the third "Trotskyist" organisation, Voix Ouvriere, also eventually made a "turn" towards students. When the first protests against the University reform took place in autumn 1967, VO explained that the students had no chance of winning and called on "the best of the university youth to break with their social milieu and put themselves at the service of the workers and of socialism." (Voix Ouvriere, 29.11.67, p4).

After the foundation of the "22 mars" however, VO woke up to the fact that one such important "service" was to get involved in the battles around the Sorbonne.

Political power

Thus while all three Trotskyist organisations called on the students to orient to the working class, they were all short on concrete proposals for how this could be done. There was no consistent campaign for links with particular factories or for speakers from them to come and speak to the students. Above all they were unable to give to the young revolutionary workers or the students clear tactics to defeat the reformist leadership of the labour movement.

Voix Ouvriere, although more militant, was also heavily affected by economism. At the height of the strike it declared, "Long live the general strike! Down with the reactionary Gaullist police state!" But for VO, the real objectives of the strike were very different:

The occupiers will not go home, work will not begin again until the workers have at least obtained full satisfaction on the following demands:

1. No salary below 1,000F

2. Return to the 40-hour week (or less, where possible) without loss of pay, with the work divided up between all workers

3. Payment of all strike days, without which the right to strike means nothing.

4. Full union and political rights in the enterprises: for the right to circulate newspapers and ideas, for the right to assembly in the enterprises. (Voix Ouvriere 20.5.68, p1)

These demands, repeated over and again by VO, were nothing more than what the workers were already raising, with a sliver of a transitional demand thrown in (i.e the sliding scale of hours in demand no 2). The incredible experience gained by workers through occupying their plants was ignored. No attempts were made to make the fight for workers' control central. Nor was the need to overthrow De Gaulle and the Fifth republic placed at the forefront of their agitation.

The JCR understood better than the other two organisations the importance of raising slogans that went beyond the current consciousness of the workers and students. They called for the nationalisation of occupied factories under workers' control based on factory committees. They also called for the opening of the books and warned workers against the trap of "co-management". i.e participation by the unions in the management of the plants. (Avant-garde jeunesse 14, 27.5.68, p5)

There are, however, two yawning gaps in the programme of all three organisations. First, none of them warned clearly that the reformists  and especially the trade union leaders  would try to sell out the strike. The key question of fighting for elected strike committees and local co-ordinations uniting students and workers as a way of preventing the union leaders and the PCF from signing deals with the bosses and was never raised.

Second, the question of overthrowing the Fifth Republic and all its anti-democratic structures and installing a workers government based on workers councils was not raised as a real alternative to PCF's parliamentary cretinism and the antiparliamentary cretinism of the anarchists.