Three Phases in the Emergence of a Student-Based Social Movement in France

Abstract

In France today, the very expression 'student movement' is widely associated with the movement of May 1968. Whether in nostalgia or relief, the 'events' are spoken of as a distant historical landmark, with whole pages devoted to them in school history textbooks and the protagonists seeming somehow like retired war veterans. Subsequently, any events which might point directly to the idea of a student movement have been consigned by the collective consciousness to oblivion. Who recalls the longest strike ever to occur in French universities (December 1975 to May 1976), or sees the sign of a student movement in the university demonstrations of Spring 1983? Yet the widespread idea that a kind of explosion originating in the universities was triggered off by students only simply to vanish after 1968 should be rejected. For May 1968 gave expression for the first time to a new social and student movement. It was followed for some years by a sombre period in which this movement was overwhelmed and snuffed out by extreme left-wing tendencies which it often threw up and which very quickly turned it upside down and caused it to disintegrate. The 1976 student struggle marked the end of this long period with, as it were, the death throes of the above-mentioned tendencies which in their final flicker fueled the combat while simultaneously extinguishing what little significance they retained as the expression of a social movement. And after some years in which universities got over their 'leftist' experience in a period of relative calm characterised by the absence of argument and confrontation, the expression of such a movement was given new life, albeit very weakly, by the 1983 demonstrations.