Challenge: May 68 Succeeds

I've been thinking about this for a while, and thought I might as well ask it in my first post here.

Is there any way that France's May 1968 movement could have escalated into a genuine revolutionary situation rather than fizzling out at the end of the month?

If it's any help, IIRC Tony Judt (who's studied the French left in some depth) claimed it was mostly a lack of a real sense of enmity towards the government that prevented strikers from actually attempting to take control of government buildings on the 30th when de Gaulle was out of the country. I don't know how true that is, though.
 
What exactly was it all about? I never understood that.

It started (really) as a protest about visitation rights between male and female dorms at the University of Nanterre, but thanks to the heavy-handed response that ensued (suspensions of those involved, etc) in early May students and faculty across Paris went on strike. The Communist-led union thought it had a chance to grab some benefits, so it declared a strike, but its members started getting out of its control. Escalation led to the students and striking workers eventually starting to call for an outright revolution, and by the end of the month nearly a quarter of the country had taken to the streets and factories and universities were being occupied.
 
I saw a documentary about it several years ago in which one of the students said that when they heard that the local factories had gone on strike, he and a large group of his comrades went to a factory so they could "smash the machines." they were rather surprised when they were beaten up by the strikers who told them they simply wanted higher pay and would be going back to work. I doubt all but a hard core had any intention of overthrowing the state, the majority were just opportunists trying to address their own grievances.

In hindsight I think it was very similar to the Winter of Discontent in the UK. The vast majority of the industrial action in that case, including the most notorious strikes that left rubbish in the streets of London and the dead unburied in Liverpool were unofficial actions that the union leaders could do little to control. Once people had seen the Ford workers and lorry drivers get big pay rises they saw a chance to have some of that and the crisis just developed a momentum of it's own.
 
I saw a documentary about it several years ago in which one of the students said that when they heard that the local factories had gone on strike, he and a large group of his comrades went to a factory so they could "smash the machines." they were rather surprised when they were beaten up by the strikers who told them they simply wanted higher pay and would be going back to work. I doubt all but a hard core had any intention of overthrowing the state, the majority were just opportunists trying to address their own grievances.

Indeed, for the workers of say the Renault factory in Billancourt, the students were just young bourgeois with very little life experience and very little in common with them in nearly every single way. There was also a huge gap in ideology and expectations, the students and "leftists" groups wanting a full blown revolution along Maoist lines, whereas the PC and most of trade unions only wanted more concessions for the workers.

After Parliament was dissolved by De Gaulle on the 30th May, the following elections resulted in a massive win for the Gaullists and ther were even mass demonstrations in favour of De Gaulle.

A lot of wannabee revolutionaries of May 68 reconverted themselves into centre left politics and put their agenda in motion this way. Mitterand programme of the late seventies and early eighties was extremely radical and could be compared to Michael Foot manifesto in parts (the stuff about nuclear disarmament), but it was not implemented in full in the end for sheer pragmatic reasons.

This is not to say however that things could not have become nastier somehow. With someone like Maurice Papon at the head of the Parisian police, repression will be even more severe than it was and there could be very well be deaths through tabassages (beatings) by the police, or during some kind of stampede. This could pave the way for an intervention by the army to restore order, especially if official buildings are occupied. A National unity government of some kind would be the likely result of the following Troubles in my opinion.
 
There was also a huge gap in ideology and expectations, the students and "leftists" groups wanting a full blown revolution along Maoist lines, whereas the PC and most of trade unions only wanted more concessions for the workers.

This is true, but by the end of the crisis the PC and trade unions were no longer completely representing their members - witness the popular rejection of the Grenelle Agreements on the 26th, which did give significant concessions to the workers.

Obviously this does not indicate that the majority of strikers were in favor of a revolution, but it does indicate that they were willing to break with the official line. If something else had changed - an overt discrediting of the Communists and the CGT for instance, or an economic downturn - could popular opinion have shifted?

And if a more serious conflict did ensue, would the support of the "silent majority" for the Gaullists have been dented by more severe repression, or boosted by increased fear of a leftist takeover?
 
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