FRENCH STUDENT RIOTS A MUDDLED OUTCRY WHICH ESCAPES SENSIBLE CRITERIA

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31678, 14 May 1968, Page 16

FRENCH STUDENT RIOTS A MUDDLED OUTCRY WHICH ESCAPES SENSIBLE CRITERIA

(By the Farit correspondent of the "Financial Times." London.) (Keprinted by arrangement.)

, ,J )uring the Commune of Paris in 1871, a dignitarv of the newlv-reas°nabl-v at insfienFprotetarians in arms, asked. What do these gentlemen want exactly?” The “information gap is just as wide today as French adults stare in fascination, and to some extent horror, at France’s noting student population

Some 10,000 students have been on the rampage through out Paris. On one day alone 665 people were injured in pitched battles with the police, of whom 205 were policemen and 460 students. Barricades were thrown up, paving stones hurled, automobiles and buses overturned, tear gas and fire hoses brought into play. Security tropp reinforcements were brought in from the provinces to cope with the rioters. Property damage reached . hundreds of thousands of pounds: 475 students were arrested. Minister’s Answer Why? The Education Minister, Mr Alain Peyrefitte, had an answer, which he broadcast. to the nation on television. It was all the fault of a handful of leftist agitators. Why thousands of innocent, order-loving French students should charge through the streets of Paris at -the command of a few left-wing “enrages” (hot heads), however, he never managed to explain. Of course Mr Peyrefitte is partly right. All of France’s students have not been rioting. And the French student movement has its own social structure. Students from Mr Peyrefitte’s old school, the super-elite Ecole Nationale (('Administration, have not been out in the streets. Nor have those of the Paris Medical School or Lower School nr the Sciences Po (politics). The troops ot the student movement come principally from three schools much less tempted to identify themselves spiritually with the established order; Nanterre. the overflow-annexe of the University of Paris built some years ago in the Paris suburbs, and which has become France’s great “Red University,” the Sorbonne; which is to say Paris University's liberal arts departments, with a high proportion of future school teachers; and the Beaux-Arts. the University’s Art School. Arts Flavour The movement in general has something of a lowermiddle class arts undergraduate flavour, not unknown in other countries.

But an explanation of the present commotion requires much more than a Nancy Mit-ford-like U and non-U pigeonholing—and to some extent this is even misleading, since the students are living out their ideas in a hermetically sealed “Cuban,” “Chinese,” revolutionary world as much cut off from their own families as from the rest of the French population. And in fact Mr Peyrefitte should not be too severely judged for failing to under-

stand th: state of mind of the 1 students and their leaders, for t to * torge extent their behaviour escapes reasonable i criteria. < The students have their 1 justifiable grievances—even i Mr Peyrefitte recognises this ■ —many of them concerned I with reforming France’s i “Napoleonic” teaching sys- i tem. There are also “ad hoc” issues. The rector of Nan- ; terre’s refusal to allow stu- ! dents to hold political meet- 1 ings in University lecture halls unleashed giant demon- ; strations and the temporary i closing of the university. I Sight Lost But once student demon- ( strations have got under way . they have seemed to lose ; sight of their object, and few observers feel student leaders ' are conducting their campaigns in a practical way realistically calculated to attain their goals. The leaders’ language and thought, moreover, are curiously opaque, Although “revolution” and “revolutionary” are among their most frequently spoken words, and they seldom let more than half an hour pass without an impatient declaration on Vietnam, a reference to their dead Cuban revolutionary “Che” Guevara, or an appeal to revolutionaries of the world to join them, their ideas seem to have really little relation to the nonstudent world either in France or abroad. They despise, of course, France’s Communist Party, l and the trade unions, and ' indeed every other group or ' institution which has won itself a respectable position ■ in French society. The poli- i tical activists are divided : themselves among the West fanatic Leftist splinter groups: Maoists, anarchists.

Trotskyites, Castroists and all the passionate dissidents. But how have such a band of hot-headed ideologues—quarrelling violently among themselves much of the time in the best Leftist tradition —come to have such a vast influence over France’s student population? Most of the students, after all—U or nonU—are destined to be absorbed into France’s “establishment” by virtue of their training and acquired skills. “Ever the most radical among us," one of them said recently, “will not be able to escape being absorbed and mounting the social ladder.” But it is precisely this that disgusts the student leaders and many of their followers —their powerlessness to change the nature of a society they are convinced is essentially oppressive, and the inevitability of their absorption into it Romantic and Utopian The revolt is, almost by this definition, romantic and Utopian. The University, they say, is the humble servant of a society which bases its prosperity on the oppression of the proletariat and of underdeveloped countries. And university students are nothing but the future managers, the future exploiters, * the future watchdogs of this * oppressive society. The students offer no practical programme for the world in which they find themselves. They have op- ‘ posed many projects even for university modernisation. They are high-minded and “pure” as the French say, but since what they hate with such violence seems to include almost the entire structure of Western society” it is hard to see how Mr Peyrefitte will be able to give them satisfaction.