Under the Paving Stones II: Horror of the Nameless Dead!, Research Time, 13/03/2018

Here’s how I knew I was on the right track by using Ian Buchanan’s commentary to help me through this historical investigation. He’s up-front about the role the Algerian War played in conditioning the Paris Uprising a decade later.

Yesterday, I talked about how the popular perceptions of the Paris Uprising is that it was a unified movement of radical socialist and communist students in the city’s public sector universities. But if you learn about how it really developed, you realize how laughable that is. Trouble is, you have to deep-dive.

You often conceive of the year 1968 as the beginning of the new
progressive politics. But like all socially transformative events, it was
also the end and culmination of long-running social tensions, a
unique intersection of tensions and interests that's as remarkable as
it was improbable.

The conditions of the Paris Uprising of 1968 lay in the Algerian War. This was a brutal, decade-long conflict that lasted nearly a decade. The French government had conquered Algeria in the early 1830s, and by the end of the 1840s reformed its administration of the region to become part of France. The provinces of Oran, Alger, and Constantine were just as French as Rouen and Bordeaux.

Pretty much all the Algerians disagreed, but their voices didn’t matter. After the Second World War, France re-established their government in Algeria fairly easily, but the Front de Libération Nationale began a guerrilla war in 1954, which was more effective than any of the last century of independence struggles.

FLN combat against French rule was brutal, frequently using terrorist attacks against French government and military institutions that killed many Arab and European civilians. The French government frequently carried out mass arrests, mass detentions, and massacres.

Despite a vigorous eight-year campaign of borderline war crimes, Algeria won independence from France in 1962. It’s gone through periodic civil war among different factions since then, and settled into an unpleasant but fairly stable one-party dictatorship.

French society – especially in the more urbane, cosmopolitan culture of Paris – experienced anything but stability thanks to the war. The general consensus of Paris’ citizens on politics was an inoffensive liberal social democracy. France’s political party leaders kept up a fitting line on domestic policy.

But there was a general consensus among Parisians that their government was run – no matter which party or coalition of parties was in charge at a given time – by hypocritical war criminals.

Everyone knew that the French army massacres thousands of Algerian civilians – it was collective punishment for the insurgency. The same kind of thing the Germans did throughout France during their occupation and under the Vichy regime. Just what the British was doing in Kenya fighting the Mau Mau insurgency.

Most of us remember the Arab Spring uprisings against the
authoritarian governments of the region. We democrats supported
those revolutions, but it was a very different story 60 years ago
when Europeans were the autocratic governments Arab people
were demonstrating to overthrow.

The French government, throughout the Algerian revolution, publicized their massacres of civilians as victories against terrorists. So far, so familiar.

The brutality of the French in Algeria was bad enough. But France’s leaders made the situation worse by promoting themselves as the champions of the country’s social democratic welfare state.

The government supported French workers organizing for collective bargaining and improved labour conditions while massacring Algerian workers organizing for independence. They were proud democrats in Europe and proud leaders of a military regime in Africa. They were humane architects of the welfare state who happily killed Arabs by the hundreds for a decade.

Yet the government line was that Algeria was France. So by the government’s own words, they were massacring French citizens. Quite a lot of French citizens in France saw that a state military apparatus that had no problem massacring Algerians would have no problem massacring European French if people turned against them.

So radical communist students, socialist factory and trade union activists, and liberal business people all came to the same conclusion. No more. This was the common interest uniting these groups that – in pretty much all other social and political situations – can’t agree on lunch, let alone a common political program.

But they were all united in the desire to overthrow a French government that demonstrated, in their treatment of Algerians, that they were willing to commit mass military violence against their own citizens if the citizens wanted something they didn’t like.

That’s Buchanan's account of how the uncommon alliance of the Paris Uprising developed. Works for me.

Under the Paving Stones I: Sadly High Probability, A History Boy, 12/03/2018

I’m Canadian, not French. So Utopias isn’t going to wade into all the different interpretations, causes, conditions, effects, and affects of the Paris revolutionary riots of May 1968. But I have to bring in a little history.

Because my own political thinking uses a lot of the concepts that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed in the 1970s, May ’68 is a touchstone, a material condition. Anti-Œdipus was a product of the Paris popular uprising, so the social dynamics that brought it about conditioned the creation of the book and its concepts.

Paris’ May uprising was a unique event. Its uniqueness was in how remarkably unlikely the movement’s coalition was – not only the radical communist activists, but also business management students and all the factory workers in the city.

Growing up in Canada, the American narrative of 1960s protests
dominated cultural discussion of that era. The cultures of Europe
were so different that they didn't get much airtime.

That massive improbability was a product of unique and complex conditions that are practically unrepeatable in their exact form. Activists – a primer in two parts on how to learn from history.
• • •
I first learned about May ’68 in an undergraduate political science course – specifically about political behaviour, an introduction to how political scientists investigate how people vote, protest, and get involved with government. It was introduced to me entirely in its dimension as a student movement.

At the time, I worked for a campus newspaper. So part of my job was to report on the activities of the university student union. I found the whole institution* a mess of hypocrisy and self-delusion.

* Yes, that is seriously still their website. It's really sad.

I couldn’t take seriously the idea that a student movement could organize anything sanely, let alone offer up a genuinely inspirational new form of politics. Here was the environment where I was building my first fully self-conscious political conscience, at least regarding student movements.

It’s 2003, 2004. The Iraq War has mobilized a lot of people to fight the myopic imperialism of the W Bush Administration. Among my student union is a sizeable plurality of folks who are dedicated social activists, for whom the campus activists of the 1960s – Abbie Hoffmann, Angela Davis, Daniel Cohn-Bendit – were role models.

Unfortunately, the sudden end of the oil boom three years ago returned
austerity politics to the governance of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Tuition rose again, as rural Newfoundland returned to mass
unemployment, making those CFS messages about increasingly
inaccessible education or unsustainable student debt levels
finally relevant to people's real concerns there. Not exactly how
I would have liked to see the CFS and Newfoundland harmonize.

They worked to put the student union on the progressive side of a revolution against empire and militarism. They did organize some quality anti-war activism. But most of their economic activism was hamstrung by having to stick to a strict script provided by the Canadian Federation of Students – “Students are hurting from high tuition rates! Grants, not loans! Lower tuition!”

Fine for Ontario, reeling from public service cuts after a decade of Mike Harris’ austerity policies. Ridiculous in Newfoundland.

Newfoundland was kicking into an oil-driven economic boom, and Roger Grimes’ governing Liberal Party was reversing its own austerity policies from the Brian Tobin years. My tuition rates went down 25% in the first three years of the century and stayed frozen for a decade.

Social conditions like this couldn’t even unify a students’ union. The dedicated revolutionaries were a vocal minority in a union dominated by residence hall party planners, and middle-of-the-road nerds who wanted to make sure the food court and convenience store kept running smoothly. Plus a couple of man-children and one or two hyper-conservative extremists.

This taught me that there was nothing special about the student movement. So I thought that the paradigm Student Movements™ – France’s May ’68 and the USA’s protests against the Vietnam War – were similar chaotic messes and failures.

The idea of “the student movement” in popular culture is that universities are inherently subversive spaces originates from the Paris Uprising and Antiwar Movement’s model example in Western culture today.

But in real life, the circumstances that made those remarkable movements possible were unique and improbable processes.

The Paris Uprisings of 1968, for example, were made possible by the Algerian War. Ian Buchanan taught me that.