May '68; Students & Workers

[bricolage]

I often hear the line that it was student activism/student revolt that was the starting point for the wider struggle of May 1968 but am not sure to what extent this is true. So is it the case that the workers were spurred on by the students or was it something else?
Cheers.

[this is an invasion]

The uprising started (as far as I know) with student occupations. Connections with workers were made after the occupations started in order to generalize the revolt.

[bricolage]

The uprising started (as far as I know) with student occupations.

Yeah but was it these occupations that were of primary influence on striking workers or was it something else. I don't want to say coincidence because there are never really any pure coincidences but I mean what was more important.

[this is an invasion]

Yeah but was it these occupations that were of primary influence on striking workers or was it something else. I don't want to say coincidence because there are never really any pure coincidences but I mean what was more important.

I'm not sure. I haven't read nearly as much as I would like to on May 68.

It's a good question because there wasn't any real economic crisis going on at the time of the revolt.

[x359594]

I often hear the line that it was student activism/student revolt that was the starting point for the wider struggle of May 1968 but am not sure to what extent this is true...

In early 1968, Henri Langlois was effectively fired as head of the Cinematheque Francaise by French Minister of Culture Andre Malraux. Citing administrative incompetence, Malraux terminated the archive's subsidy and moved to appoint a new head. Langlois and Georges Franju had co-founded the archive in 1936 with 10 movie prints from Langlois' own private collection. By 1968, Langlois had built the Cinematheque into the premier movie archive in the world, with over 60,000 prints. Langlois was one of the pioneers of film preservation, and while he had rescued many films from destruction, he was never one to respect the niceities of copyright law.

The firing sparked protests from Parisian film students, from others among Paris' half-million strong student community who frequented the Cinematheque to view the films, and from such French film makers as Francois Truffaut and Jean Paul Belmondo. The French nouvelle vague directors had learned about the movies at the Cinematheque, and they vocally supported Langlois. French directors Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Jean-Luc Godard, and Truffaut proudly proclaimed themselves as "children of the Cinémathèque."

There were major protests held in front of the Cinematheque that were broken up by the police. Truffaut was clubbed and Godard was also roughed up as well as several student demonstrators. The turmoil helped trigger the student protests of May 1968, and the police repression led to sympathy strikes by the working class that eventually involved eleven million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the French workforce.

For a contemporary history see Prelude to Revolution (1970) by Daniel Singer and for the ideological background Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (1969) by Daniel Cohn-Bendit