Again the Days of May

Suddenly, Paris seemed to have slipped two years back in time. Clouds of acrid tear gas hung over the chestnut trees of Left Bank boulevards, just as they had during the shattering evenements of May 1968 that tore France apart and led directly to the fall of Charles de Gaulle. Thousands of angry Maoist students and tough riot policemen clashed in short but bloody street battles. Long-haired gauchiste (leftist) students in blue jeans and suede jackets stopped motorists in the Latin Quarter and flipped their cars over to form makeshift barricades. Rocks, bricks and chunks of metal flew at the cops, who responded with lightning baton charges that left hundreds injured, including many innocent passersby. Nearly 1,000 students were arrested.

The immediate cause of the rioting was the conviction last week of two young Maoist editors on charges of inciting murder, pillage and arson (sample quote: "Not one bourgeois will leave revolutionary Paris alive") in their newspaper The People's Cause, a shrill bimonthly with a circulation of 20,000. After the two young editors were arrested, French Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre took over as editor. Two days before his predecessors were to be tried, Sartre presided over a protest meeting in the Latin Quarter and urged a crowd of 3,000 to unite in protest. Thunderous cheers went up when one leftist leader shouted: "The only good policemen are in the hospital!"

Frustrated Martyr. The renewed activism, coming in the wake of student protests in Paris and suburban schools as well as a series of bombings and fires, was too much for the government. At a Cabinet meeting, Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin urged that the 2,000 member Proletarian Left Movement be suppressed for plotting to "destroy and overthrow the constitutional regime and to incite citizens to arms against the authority of the state." The government quickly complied. The following day the two editors of the Proletarian Left's newspaper were convicted and sentenced to prison, one for eight months and the other for a year. Sartre, 64, seemed outraged that he, too, had not been martyred. "It's a scandal," he declared. "There have been three editors of The People's Cause who are accountable, and only two are in the stand. Why have I been treated differently?"

Anticipating trouble, the government mobilized more than 10,000 police in Paris alone. When the protests began, they measured up to neither the Maoists' fondest dreams nor the government's worst nightmares. But they were bad enough to litter the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain areas of Paris with bricks, glass, smoldering autos and wrecked shops. At the same time, the unrest spread to Marseille, where leftist students, demonstrating at a factory, battled police. In Rouen, four girl students were injured when an explosion shook one of the university dormitories.

The rioters were mainly hard-core Maoists, but many of their complaints are shared by more moderate students. The complaints include a feeling that the Establishment is not responsive to education problems; endless rises in the cost of living; and what students see as broad political repression. Writing in Le Monde last week, Sartre warned that "May 1968 was not a blaze without a tomorrow." The week's events left Frenchmen wondering whether tomorrow might not be upon them.

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