An eye opener
While wandering the Boulevard Saint Germain, near the Musee de Cluny, in Paris in 2008, I came across an exhibit out on the sidewalk that caught my eye. There were large standing posters, about seven feet high by maybe three or four feet across, depicting black and white images of students running from police in riot gear and people sitting out on dirty city streets, with a wall of broken furniture, maybe a car or two thrown in, behind them. There were pictures of people marching in the streets, hands raised, and shots of Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir standing before a microphone, giving impassioned speeches.
At first I wondered, what could these pictures be? Despite the very French background (images of the Sorbonne, Notre Dame and the Odeon Theater lingered in the background), these pictures seemed to come out of the American Civil Rights Movement. Protests like this took place in France? I wondered. What on earth could they be so upset about in the sixties?
It started with the students
What I found helped me understand the nature of protest and the history of people who take to the streets when they get really pissed off. The May 1968 Riots started with the student protests at Nanterre, a university just outside of Paris. They were fed up with the strict rules of the school, overcrowding and the lack of access to a varied education. They were also upset about economic inequality and America’s war in Vietnam.
This led to protests at the Sorbonne, the most sacred of French institutions of higher learning. When a few weeks of protests came to a head, the University president sent in the police, who came with riot gear to subdue the students. What started as a peaceful protest quickly blew up into something more and soon, the students at the Sorbonne were discussing their own protests as the University’s administration, led by Dean Roche, considered shutting the school down completely.
It grew with the workers
The May 1968 Riots did not stop there. After the Sorbonne closed, labor unions joined the protests, demanding higher wages to make up for years of wage stagnation that lead to economic inequality and more of a say in how their union was structured.
As the people took to the streets, the police retaliated against the students and the workers. When the Sorbonne was finally reopened by the University Administration, the students occupied the entire university, setting up camps in lecture halls and classrooms where they gave their own lectures as the Communist Party of France came in to discuss the cause of the workers.
History on repeat
As an MFA student from America living in New York City just after the Gulf War began, I was fascinated with all I learned about the May Riots. A few months after I came home from that trip, Occupy Wall Street was in full swing in New York. And while that movement did not last forever, the idea that the people of America could once again take to the streets to express their disapproval of a government’s decisions became clear.
Post-Covid, protests have not gone away. In fact, in many ways, the need for them has gotten stronger as the issues of the May 1968 Riots remain alive and well in America, in France, and throughout the world.
Economic inequality and the lack of worker representation that the unions protested in France in ‘68 rears its head today. Injustice has not gone away either, whether it’s in the form of the stripping away of rights already awarded to people (like the Dobbs decision) or a lack of accountability in many police departments throughout America. And so, the protests have remained as well.
A complicated history
One issue I wrestled with the figure of Charles De Gaulle, as he is for all intents and purposes the villain of this story. De Gaulle ordered the closing of the Sorbonne and sent the police after the protesters and when things got too bad.
It was De Gaulle’s conservative politics that the students and the labor unions found so distasteful. And when I think about De Gaulle, I know he would not have gone anywhere near championing LBGTQ+ rights or the rights of BIPOC people. He didn’t even really want to grant women any freedoms.
But I remembered learning about De Gaulle in history class. De Gaulle was a General in the French Army during World War II. When the puppet Vichy government called him and his troops back home because France had surrendered to the Nazis, De Gaulle said, “You surrendered? No effing way. I have not surrendered.”
De Gaulle then took his troops to England. There, he worked with Winston Churchill trying to oust Hitler while giving weekly radio talks on illegal channels to the French people to comfort them while their country was occupied.
But what constitutes utter bravery and determination in one instance is not always right for every instance, and De Gaulle’s unwillingness to back down when his own people asked for change speaks volumes about the fact that there is not a one-size-fits-all way to govern.
It is the issue of compromise that is so important, and something I wanted to explore in After the Barricades. How can a society go so against the wishes of its own people?
Turning protest to fiction
The novel After the Barricades came to me quickly. But the story itself took more time and as I researched the history of the Riots, I realized they did not happen in a vacuum.
Part of the reason for the protests was the history of social unrest. The history of protest goes back past World War II, to the General Strike of 1932, and all the way to the French Revolution in 1848, more than one hundred years before the ‘68 Riots.
But these issues are not limited to France or the 1960s. We see today history repeating itself in America where race, reproductive rights, climate change and gun rights protests abound. We see it in France with the Yellow Jackets and in Iran, where brave women and supportive men have taken to the streets to fight for gender equality.
Sometimes, when things haven’t changed in a while, when the status quo has run its course, it takes a little more than a polite ask to get the job done. That may be a tough road, but the only way for change, as the May 1968 Riots have shown us, is to hike that rough road to the end and then, when you think it’s over, keep a vigilant eye, just in case the wheel of history tries to turn in a backward direction.
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