Postwar Paris has remained no stranger
to
political battles in its
streets. Violent demonstrations
accompanied the Communist withdrawal
from the coalition government in 1947.
In the 1950s, the Left took to the
streets again in protest against the
colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria.
And, in 1961, in one of the most
shameful episodes in modern French
history, some two hundred Algerians were
killed by the police during a civil
rights demonstration.
This " secret massacre ",
which remained covered by a veil of
total official silence until the 1990s,
took place during the Algerian war. It
began with a peaceful demonstration
against a curfew on North Africans
imposed by de Gaulle's government in an
attempt to inhibit FLN resistance
activity in the French capital. Whether
the police were acting on higher orders
or merely on the authority of their own
commanders is not clear, but, according
to hundreds of eyewitness accounts,
including some from horrified policemen,
the police opened fire on the protesters,
clubbing people and throwing them into
the Seine to drown. For weeks afterwards
the French media remained silent, in
part through censorship, in part perhaps
unable to comprehend that such events
had happened in their owncapital.
The state attempted censorship again
during the events of May 1968 ,
though with rather less success.
Throughout this extraordinary month, a
radical, libertarian, Leftist movement
spread from the Paris universities to
factories across the country, producing
a general strike by nine million
workers. This general dissatisfaction
with society, big business and
institutionalized oppression sparked a
growing Women's Movement and political
interest in civil rights.
Elections were called in June to
return the Right to power. The occupied
buildings emptied and the barricades in
the Latin Quarter came down. For those
who thought they were experiencing the
Revolution, the defeat was catastrophic.
But French institutions and French
society did change, shaken and loosened
by the events of May 1968. Most
importantly, it opened up the debate of
a new road to socialism, one in which no
old models would give all the answers
