Crash Course in Politics

Students loudly challenge the Socialist government

In Lyons they burned tires. In Montpellier they solemnly bore empty coffins through the streets. And in Paris last week, more than 2,000 high-spirited students marched down the Champs-Elysees, shattering traffic lights with rocks. As the mob charged toward the National Assembly, black-uniformed riot police armed with plastic shields, bullet-less carbines and tear gas panicked and began forcing the demonstrators back with truncheons. Undeterred, 8,000 medical students later staged a sit-in while others blocked traffic, tore up construction material and smashed a police bus. With such skirmishes continuing throughout the week, the outbursts became the most widespread since May 1968, when rioting students rocked the autocratic government of President Charles de Gaulle and virtually paralyzed the nation.

Unlike the unruly leftist masses that rampaged through Paris for more than a month in 1968, this year's protesters were mostly clean shaven, well dressed and older. Generally more conservative, they were concerned with education rather than with politics. Ironically, the Socialist government that they were challenging is similar to the one that their predecessors had desperately wanted 15 years ago.

Some kind of turbulence had seemed imminent ever since French students fathomed the implications of an almost impenetrable, 68-article scheme for restructuring French education, proposed last September by Education Minister Alain Savary. The plan threatens, for example, to curtail subjects like art restoration and comparative Literature that are not deemed useful to society. As originally drafted, moreover, it suggests that all high school graduates be allowed to enter a university. Some 75% of them would be eliminated through competitive exams after two years, thus implicitly encouraging students to pursue technical training. The protesters also object to a provision that would allow more than 30% of the councils that control universities to be composed of nonuniversity delegates, many of them Socialist and Communist union representatives.

The first opponents of the Savary plan were medical students, who took exception to a provision that would allow only the best of them to become specialists. Later, leading professors at university hospitals joined the campaign, charging that the proposed reform would compromise the independence of medical schools. But the dispute seemed fairly abstruse until the doctors went on strike, forcing many hospitals to empty up to half their beds.

While medical students dramatically broadcast their disgruntlement by releasing laboratory mice in Rouen and hanging a combative banner from the Eiffel Tower, the dissension snowballed. Law students declared a strike two weeks ago; last week economics faculties and the liberal-arts Sorbonne followed suit. In response, the government postponed its plans to present the Savary reforms to the National Assembly this week.

The protests have highlighted a growing impatience with the government's methods, all the more pronounced because students were among the most jubilant celebrators when the Socialists came to power in 1981. Although the protesters have remained studiously apolitical, they contend, with some justification, that the government failed to inform or consult the public before announcing the Savary plan. Comparisons with 1968 may as yet be overblown, but the message of the present unrest is no less forceful or urgent. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.