FRANCE ENRAGEE: The Spreading Revolt

THE spirit of revolution, whose modern roots were struck in France nearly two centuries ago, reappeared with a vengeance again last week and shook the Fifth Republic of Charles de Gaulle. It began with rebellious students, but it spread with ominous speed through the ranks of France's workers, creating a tempestuous alliance that often before has had explosive consequences. The situation was serious enough to cause the Premier of France, Georges Pompidou, to declare on nationwide television that the rebels were bent on "destroying the nation and the very foundations of our free society." It became grave enough so that Charles de Gaulle, in what must have been one of the most humiliating moments of his career, cut short a visit to Rumania and returned home to face the greatest challenge of his ten years in power.

The turmoil had all the more impact because the French under De Gaulle have seemed to be inoculated against the passions of public misbehavior--and, some contend, even against the natural volatility that has marked their past. In the Third or Fourth Republic, last week's troubles would not have seemed too abnormal. But under De Gaulle, it appeared as if France had come to regard disciplined stability as its new norm; never before had the Gaullist government proved ineffectual at suppressing defiance. "I respect only those who resist me," De Gaulle once said, "but I cannot tolerate them." This time, the pent-up suppressions and frustrations created by ten years of orderly Gaullism not only erupted in force but swiftly widened into large-scale social revolt. The blow was doubly painful; the events irrevocably tarnished De Gaulle's authority when he was already at an age (77) that would scarcely allow his reign to stretch for many more years.

The convulsion was part carnival, part anarchist spree, increasingly spurred on by Communists--but, more than anything, it was a spontaneous spark of national temper. Rebellious students, struggling only two weeks ago to prepare for the exams that would determine their place in French society, bent their energies to completely paralyzing France's universities and tying up many lower schools as well. Inspired by the students' example and glad of the chance to vent their own grievances, striking workers seized scores of factories in the worst epidemic of wildcat work stoppages since the days of Leon Blum's weak Popular Front government in 1936. By the weekend, the fast-spreading wave of strikes had squeezed transportation to a crawl, crippled mail service and both Paris airports, and spread into dozens of manufacturing industries. Barring the remote possibility that the government could find a way to reverse the trend immediately, France faced this week the grim prospect of an unofficial general strike.

Deep Discontent. Serious trouble began when students rioted in Paris' Latin Quarter against the shutdown of the suburban Nanterre branch of the University of Paris, closed by the authorities in fear of disturbances caused by student agitators. The upheaval soon spread across much of the country, fired by the deep discontent that permeates France's system of higher education. Compared with the U.S., few youths in France get to universities at all, and those who do find themselves immersed in a selerotic setup that educators insist was out of date in Napoleon's time.

French universities suffer from vast overcrowding (4,000 seats in the Sorbonne library for 40,000 students), a shortage of professors, medieval teaching methods, and harsh examinations designed to weed out students wholesale. On top of that, students bemoan antiquated curriculums. Most resented of all is France's grotesquely centralized educational bureaucracy. Last week, most major French universities or departments followed the lead of the University of Strasbourg and simply decided to secede from the system, declaring themselves autonomous.

Thus, the protest over the Nanterre closing commanded ready support. Thousands of students soon joined the original demonstrators, and took control of the Latin Quarter as if it were their sovereign territory. Students overturned and burned cars, set up barricades of uprooted paving stones, and fiercely battled police for control of the streets. The government at first used stern measures, sending thousands of police in waves to storm the barricades and beat the students to the ground with rubber truncheons. Then, alarmed by the growing toll of injuries, the government lost its resolve to smash the student revolt; it withdrew its police, and in effect ceded the field to the students. By that time, much of France had rallied to the students' side--and the spread of revolt began in earnest.

Forty Abreast. The country's major labor unions opened the week with an illegal but half-successful one-day general strike. More than half a million Frenchmen--led by student militants who were joined by workers, teachers and opposition politicians--staged one of the largest protest marches in Paris history. Forty abreast, they paraded for five hours through midcity, singing the Communist Internationale and chanting such slogans as "De Gaulle resign" and "De Gaulle to the museum." No violence marred that procession; police stayed carefully away. But in provincial cities, cops and students fought battles with tear gas and paving stones.

Police did not interfere when students by the thousands occupied France's 23 universities, forcing classes to halt. Youthful orators railed against the established order at interminable meetings, but failed to agree on what should replace it. At the Sorbonne, the 700-year-old heart of the University of Paris and the hub of the previous week's violence, bearded youths and miniskirted coeds sat in the courtyard singing occasional ribald songs against the Gaullist government. Now and then a jazz band struck up a tune or a pianist played an instrument dragged from an auditorium. With no police around, students even donned helmets and directed traffic on the Left Bank.

Hundreds of flags flapped from balconies: black anarchist, red hammer-and-sickle, blue and red Viet Cong, and red, white and blue Cuban. French "Red Guards" strung up posters proclaiming such sentiments as "It's forbidden to forbid" and "Humanity will not be happy until the last capitalist is hanged with the entrails of the last bureaucrat." The stone bust of Auguste Comte, the 19th century French philosopher-reformer who coined the term sociology, was draped with a red bandanna; a red flag adorned the statue of Louis Pasteur. Inside, in jampacked auditoriums, thousands applauded allright debates that ranged over every conceivable topic, from the "anesthesia of affluence" to the elimination of "bourgeois spectacles" and how to share their "revolution" with the mass of French workers. Speaker after speaker demanded that the sit-ins continue until demands for academic reform were met. In other classrooms, students climbed into sleeping bags and dozed.

In essence, the debates amounted to a bizarre bull session, frequently floundering in chaos. "The trouble with the world is that youth isn't being listened to and isn't being used," complained Student Alain Bedu. One recurrent and oddly revealing idea--that formal examinations ought to be abolished--met friendly rebuttal from many professors who joined in the dialogues. "Ending exams is not reasonable," said Professor Alfred Kastler, Nobel-prizewinnmg physicist. "You would be the victims. It would lead you and the university to feudal capitalism: selection by the fortune of parents." Students of every persuasion were heard respectfully, with no jeering. There were Maoists, Trotskyites, ordinary Communists, anarchists and "situationists"--a tag for those without preconceived ideologies who judge each proposition as it arises.

The students deliberately revived battle cries of historic French revolutionists. "A has les ordonnances [Down with decrees]," proclaimed posters on the Sorbonne's two main doors. The message gibed at the De Gaulle government's minor resort to government by decree last year, but the phrase echoed the slogan of the insurrection that toppled King Charles X from the French throne in 1830, after he issued four suppressive decrees. Taking the name from the general assembly that led to the French Revolution of 1789, students summoned an "estates general" of students and professors to meet in Paris this week; it will consider how to reform French education.

Among the student strike leaders last week, few were more in evidence than a chubby, confident sociology major named Daniel Cohn-Bendit, 23, a self-styled anarchist who says he aims for "the suppression of capitalist society." At Nanterre, it was "Danny the Red" who stirred up so much trouble among its 12,000 students that authorities panicked and closed the place down. That lifted Cohn-Bendit from obscurity to notoriety, and all week long he moved from rally to rally, haranguing the Left Bank students as they groped for a sense of direction in their revolt against the government.

A more serious challenge to Gaullist order than the student outbursts was the actions of France's workers. By midweek the success of Cohn-Bendit's enrages (the enraged ones) at seizing universities had emboldened militant workers to try a similar tactic. The trend began at Nantes, where 2,000 striking Sud-Aviation workers moved into their plant, welded the gates closed against police interference, took the manager hostage for their demands for higher pay. Soon auto workers struck and occupied three more plants of nationalized Renault, the country's largest industrial complex.

At this point, the government became really alarmed. Premier Pompidou telephoned De Gaulle in Rumania, then switched his tactics from serenade to thunder. He went on nationwide television to condemn "provocateurs" While pledging again that the government would heed students' "legitimate demands," he called on all Frenchmen to "show that you reject anarchy" and vowed that the government would fight to "defend the Republic." He backed up his warning by mobilizing 10,000 reservists from France's 60,000 gendarmerie, the country's paramilitary national police. Paris police even received printed instructions characterizing the situation as "pre-revolutionary."

In keeping with his plea for calm, Pompidou refrained from using force against strikers in schools or factories. After all, earlier repressions had only sown the seeds of more revolt. Heavy guards were thrown around the Eiffel Tower, the Paris Opera and other national monuments. But police remained on the sidelines when Parisian student insurgents twice captured the stateowned Odeon Theater, hung its colonnaded facade with anarchist and leftist flags, packed its 1,200 seats for more all-night debates. It was only at this point that strikes became epidemic.

Workers seized the rest of Renault's plants, a government arms factory in Bayonne, the big Berliet truck plant near Lyon. Strikers hoisted red flags over several plants of chemical-making Rhone-Poulenc. On the Riviera, even the Cannes Film Festival was abruptly canceled in mid-run--but not before tempers flared into a fist-swinging free-for-all among many of the 1,000 movie notables gathered at the festival palace.

A distributors' strike made daily papers scarce in Paris. Reporters, producers and announcers walked out, protesting against continued Gaullist slanting of the news over the nationalized radio-television network. For a time last week, students considered making a protest march to the studios, which would likely have touched off an ugly student-police clash. To avoid it, the conciliatory government gave three student leaders, including Cohn-Bendit, air time to denounce the government. Angrily, the Communist labor unions demanded--and got--similar treatment.

By last weekend, strikes engulfed the whole country. Most trains halted, as did Paris subway traffic. Air France canceled all flights. Postal workers left their posts. Police demanded immediate pay increases. The economic consequences of all this could be severely painful, since the wage demands, if granted, would clearly shove France into a new round of price inflation that could easily add to unemployment as French factories became less competitive throughout the Common Market.

Complete Remake. Most of the students were out to tear down the old French society and remake it completely, beginning with the schools. For a starter, they demanded the resignations of French Education Minister Alain Peyrefitte, Interior Minister Christian

Fouchet and Paris Police Chief Maurice Grimaud, whom the students held responsible for the violence on the barricades. As for the workers, their demands varied from factory to factory and included higher wages, a shorter work week, earlier retirement, more say in management.

Ideologically, the students and Communist unions had an uneasy marriage. Many students consider the Communists part of France's establishment. The Communists in turn first hooted at the student militants, later rebuffed them when they sought to aid striking workers; they were far from eager to have youthful romantics clutter up an increasingly promising upheaval. Late last week, however, the Communists changed their mind and decided to "reaffirm the solidarity of the workers with the students and teachers." Thus, by making common cause, those two disturbed segments of French society vastly increased their threat to the government. At week's end Communist Party Boss Waldeck Rochet suddenly called for a popular-front government that would include the Communists.

For all its surprising strength, the rebellion would have to get far worse before it could really threaten De Gaulle's power. His term runs through 1972, and most Deputies have their own reasons for not wanting to bring him down in the meantime. Yet suddenly France appeared once again unpredictable and enragee. An episode of its history seemed to be ending--and with it a good deal of Charles de Gaulle's power to insist on his own way at home and abroad.

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