May 1968 in France was one of those events that became instantly a distinct historical moment. Nearly contemporaneously with the events themselves, “May '68” became an object of conscious—and contentious—reflection, research, and analysis. By October 1968, the Bibliothèque nationale had already listed 124 books on the May–June events.Footnote ¹ The leading scholarly labor and social history journal in France, le mouvement social, immediately prepared a special issue on May 1968. Successive anniversaries have been marked with waves of scholarly and popular articles, books, films, interviews, colloquia, and other commemorative events and gatherings. The graphic depictions of May '68—photographic and other—have become enduring iconographic images that reappear with each anniversary.

May '68 has often been presented as a romantic student/youth revolt, at times reduced to the night of the barricades in Paris's Latin Quarter on May 10, when students, inspired by vague revolutionary dreams and youthful angst, battled police. But the movement was much more than that. A general strike paralyzed much of the country and involved millions of workers.Footnote ² Sustained studies of the upsurge in labor militancy have been the exception, however. In the immediate aftermath of the period, virtually the only historian to underscore the importance of the largest strike of the twentieth century as a social movement was Denis Woronoff, known primarily as a French Revolution specialist. The writings published on the thirtieth anniversary, in 1998, shared this historiographical imbalance, focusing almost entirely on the student upsurge and the street demonstrations of the period. Books published around the fortieth anniversary of the May–June events amend this neglect of labor militancy. With the anniversary has come a particularly rich bevy of research and writing on various aspects of the period, its antecedents, and its legacy, as demonstrated by the three books under review. All of them spotlight social struggles beyond the student revolt and, to various degrees, focus attention on the labor struggles of the period. Furthermore, while scholarly and popular publications on May 1968 have always devoted an inordinate amount of attention to Parisian events, these books move beyond Paris and take a nationwide focus.

These books also raise and offer answers to the questions, why did historical writing on May 1968 take the form it did, what accounts for the marginalization of the vast labor struggles of the period, and why are labor struggles now receiving long overdue scholarly attention?

Xavier Vigna's L'insubordination ouvrière dans les années '68, published on the eve of the fortieth anniversary, does much to correct this inattention to workers. It spotlights the grassroots labor rebellion and the role of far-left labor activists that more institutionally focused accounts neglect. In doing so, it explores a previously untold story of one of the legacies of May '68: the formation of a seasoned cadre of rank-and-file militants, often members or sympathizers of far-left Maoist and Trotskyist organizations, who played an important role in labor protest during May 1968 and in the years afterward.

Vigna presents an in-depth and wide-reaching analysis of workers’ collective action during the period. As the title implies, this book takes a broad view of the workers' revolt as sustained “insubordination.” In its scope, the book is reminiscent of the type of labor histories of an earlier generation. Vigna also offers a sustained analysis of the intersections between the labor process, skill, and collective action, filling in important gaps in our knowledge of these issues for that period. An interesting chronology of workers' struggles from 1965–1974, including strikes, occupations, and industrial violence, is included at the end of the volume. L'insubordination ouvrière dans les années '68, therefore, represents an expanded view of the labor protest of May ‘68. While most accounts set the strikes in the context of the broader political situation and therefore have an institutional focus on the organized official trade union movement, Vigna spotlights a largely untold tale of a vast rank-and-file wave of protest that lasted years beyond May '68. This book is remarkable not only for its quality, but for its focus on a subject that seems to many to be particularly untimely today—the struggles of factory workers, who represented thirty-seven percent of the labor force in France at that time. In the preface, French social historian Serge Wolikow expresses admiration for Vigna for having “dared” to study a subject—workers, especially factory workers—that has been largely abandoned by historians who sense little interest in the subject. For Wolikow, Vigna has made such a strong case for the importance of the worker insubordination of the period that historians henceforth seeking to understand the last few decades of French history will have to acknowledge that history.

The other two books under review represent part of Michelle Zancarini-Fournel's long-term research projects on May '68. Le moment ‘68 focuses on the various interpretations of the conflicts, both social and cultural, associated with May 1968 and its aftermath. It discusses in depth many of the new sources that have appeared in recent years. The book also seeks to reestablish the importance of the June 1968 labor strikes.

May 68: une histoire collective, 1962–1981, an 847-page collection of essays edited by Zancarini-Fournel and Phillipe Artières, consists of chapters and short entries by sixty historians. It aims—quite successfully—at calling attention to the worker, women, and immigrant struggles that were as much a part of May '68 and its aftermath as the student uprising. This book sets May '68 in a broad time span beginning in 1962 and closing in 1981. The period is divided into four unequal sections: 1962–1968, May–June 1968, 1968–1974, and 1974–1981. Each section comprises seven parts: an overall narrative account of events, a short entry on a film of the period, a section entitled objects (the guitar and the miniskirt for the 1962–1968 period, truncheons and tear gas for the May–June 1968 period); elsewhere (Vietnam and Chicago for 1968), Lieux (places) refer to literal and figurative spaces (Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory and structuralism are discussed in the 1962–1968 section). Actors refers to groups and individuals, including fifteen brief “portraits” of such figures as Pierre Overney, the young Maoist activist murdered by right-wing assassins at the gates of the famed Renault plant at Billancourt, political parties, unions, the striking steel workers of 1979, and feminist activists. Finally, each section finishes with a particular issue or key event. The selections are skillfully edited and represent current scholarly approaches. Some of the entries are based on newly available sources from political and union organizations, police archives, and private collections. Each selection ends with a carefully selected list of articles and books on the subject to guide the interested reader to further sources of information. Two wide-ranging chronologies are included at the end of this collection. They effectively underscore the length and breadth of the revolt both in France and internationally. The first chronology is on events in France from 1962 to 1981. A second, “Elements for a worldwide chronology,” begins in 1955 with the Bandung conference of Third World countries, the death of James Dean, and the Montgomery bus boycott, and ends in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan to the US presidency. Contributors range from established scholars such as Claude Pennetier, Nicolas Hatsfeld, and Xavier Vigna, as well as younger, less well-known scholars. United States historian Thomas Holt also contributes a section on the US civil rights movement.

The editors consciously attempt to break out of the mold of past histories. Rather than republish the standard images of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, they offer a series of ninety-two previously unpublished photos found in a Humanité (the French Communist Party newspaper) warehouse. Many of the photos underscore what the editors regard as the origins of May 1968. The section begins with a march of striking miners in Decazeville in January 1962. A photo of students carrying a banner reading Non au Fascisme during a demonstration in Nanterre against the far-right terrorist group, the OAS, dates from February 1962. A shot of a demonstration for peace in Vietnam was taken in February 1965. Some of the shots of occupied factories in May 1968 have a feel similar to some of the well-known photographs of occupied factories in 1936. The periods have much in common, from the scope of the strikes—both broke the record for the largest number of workers on strike in French history up to that point—to the great hopes for social change that both periods stimulated among broad layers of working people and progressives. As we will see, all three books provide rich material for a sustained comparison between 1936 and 1968.

Time Frames and Cycles of Protest

Indeed, the question of time frames and cycles of protest is a central concern of all three books. All set May '68 into a larger historical framework. Zancarini-Fournell points out that historians generally date the May–June period as beginning with the police occupation of the Sorbonne on May 3 and closing with General De Gaulle's speech on May 30, even though the campus and factory occupations continued until the end of June. In contrast, Zancanrini-Fournel and Artières trace the origin of May '68 to the 1961 Decazeville coal strike, which led to the 1963 general coal strike. They close the period in 1981, the year of the election of François Mitterand to the presidency. In her essay opening the 1962–1968 period, Zancarini-Fournel argues strongly for the role of the movement against the Vietnam War in laying the foundation for many of the struggles of 1968. For Xavier Vigna, the 1968 May–June strikes opened a cycle of worker insubordination that continued until the defeat of the Longwy steel strike in 1979. By extending “May '68” forward and backward in time, these books challenge perceptions that the events of May '68 were isolated from previous and subsequent social and labor protest, and lay the groundwork for more studies focusing on these struggles.

Le moment 68 in particular underscores how deeply scholarship on May '68 has always reflected current intellectual fashions. For example, in recent years some French labor and social historians have turned to oral histories and a concern with memory. This turn has stimulated interest in the many personal accounts that movement participants produced between 1968 and 1971 and led to increased interdisciplinary dialogue in France between sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, particularly those involved with oral history. Zancarini-Fournel discusses an interesting case of how a collection of French peasants’ oral histories of their experiences during the period led to a broad awareness of a little-known aspect of the events of the time—agricultural workers' participation in the strikes. These disclosures enabled agricultural workers to be included for the first time in the state-funded social benefit programs that industrial workers had won—an enormous and little-known progressive reform of French society (le moment 164).

May '68 and the Cultural Turn

Zancarini-Fournel sees May 1968 as “a political and social defeat, yet a cultural victory.” Is this a reasonable assessment? In spite of a political crisis so great that President Charles de Gaulle fled to Baden Baden, his party was returned to power in the parliamentary elections held just a few weeks later, certainly a political defeat for the workers and students. It is perhaps less clear, however, that the challenge of May 1968 was a social defeat in terms of what was won. The tripartite Grenelle accords involved a twenty-five percent raise in the minimum wage, seven percent increases for other workers, and beefed-up legislation guaranteeing collective bargaining. On the other hand, the fact that the workers rejected the accords as insufficient suggests that they believed that far more could have won on the social plane. Zancarini-Fournel is on solid ground in considering May '68 a cultural victory, reflected in part, she thinks, by a culturalist trend in the teaching of May '68 in high schools. Indeed, the trenchant critique of postwar French consumerist society, the mise en cause of traditional gender roles, and an enduring counterculture of opposition to bourgeois values that emerged out of the May experience has been reproduced across generations.

Zancarini-Fournel traces the origin of the cultural approach to trends that predated the uprising by several years. She finds novelist Georges Perec's 1965 critique of new patterns of consumption, Les choses (The Things), to be of particular significance for the period. Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International, developed a radical theoretical critique of postwar boom consumption that struck a chord with many radical youth at the time. Situationists were not only theoreticians; some were in the leadership of the Nanterrre student movement, where the rebellion began in March 1968. Zancarini-Fournel sees British cultural historian Arthur Marwick's book The Sixties, Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States: 1958–1974, as the “crystallization” of the culturalist approach to historical writing that emerged from May '68 (13). The culturalist focus of historical writing on May '68 has certainly provided a broad understanding of the radical and contestatary nature of the period, but it has at the same time obscured much of the labor protest of the period.

New Repertoires of Collective Action

All three books under review employ Charles Tilly's notion of repertoires of collective action in the sections on popular protest. The strikes of the period drew, of course, heavily from existing repertoires, including the formation of strike committees, sit-downs, and street demonstrations, but new forms of collective action also arose among both workers and students. The student movement that began in March 1968 at a poorly planned, overcrowded campus on an abandoned World War One airfield at Nanterre found its spokesperson and symbol in the Franco-German anarchist and sociology student Daniel Cohn-Bendit; the movement developed its own repertoires of collective action, including demonstrations and occupations. The daily forums held by the striking students displayed principles of direct democracy (‘68 Une histoire collective, 234). Free speech and direct democracy were instituted through the general assembly (AG)—mass meetings of strikers at which major decisions were made. An occupation committee was reelected every evening. One of the first actions was a decree declaring the University of Paris autonomous under people's control and open to workers day and night.

One of the new forms of labor collective action in factories and shops was the grève bouchon, or cork strike. This involved strikes in strategic sectors of the production process, where the halting of production would paralyze production in other sectors. Strikes of this type at Renault-Le Mans and Peugeot-Sochaux automobile plants in 1969 were particularly effective in halting production.

Vigna also looked at rarer forms of collective action, such as sabotage, the sacking of offices, and the sequestering of management as reflections of heightened antagonism between workers and management. Sabotage has been a rare but enduring form of industrial protest since the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1968 the Maoist group La Gauche prolétarienne supported sabotage as an anticapitalist form of struggle. Whether or not they were due to its influence, acts of sabotage were recorded at Citroën in July 1968. By 1971 occasional acts of sabotage of tools and production had spread to other large automobile plants (Vigna, L'insubordination, 98).

Sequestering of management occurred in 1968 at the Renault plant at Sochaux and at other large manufacturing plants. In 1971, 100 (out of 4,000) strikes involved a sequestration (Vigna, 105). Sequestration was not an entirely new form of struggle. Some occurred in the 1936 and 1947 strike waves (103). Vigna sees them not just as an expression of anger at a perceived injustice, as with the sequestration of four managers following the firing of a fifty-five-year-old worker and father of six in 1970, but also as a reaction to a harsher Taylorist shop-floor regime.

The pinnacles of worker insubordination were those strikes where workers would continue production (107), as they did during the strike at Lip in 1973. When the workers at the Swiss-owned watch factory in the eastern city of Besançon learned of plans to close the plant, they occupied the factory, sequestered management, and seized and sold 25,000 of the watches they had produced. Production strikes were so radical because they implicitly raised the question of worker control over production and called into question notions of capitalist private property.

Vigna fills in important gaps in our knowledge of the labor process and the construction of skill in manufacturing in France, and how these processes stimulated much of the labor protest of the period. He sees the May–June 1968 strikes as the focal point of a vast protest against a harsh shop-floor regime, piecework pay systems, speed-ups, and continual parcelization of tasks, which represented the end of the Fordist compromise: increased production in exchange for wage increases (327). The increased international competition and falling rate of profit in the postwar period, which contributed to this Taylorist offensive, are beyond the scope of Vigna's study. The material that Vigna offers on the labor process and shop-floor conditions builds upon the account of one of the period's most remarkable participants, Robert Linart's L’établi. Linart was an emblematic figure of his time. A philosophy student who studied with Louis Althusser, he entered the Citroën factory in September 1968 and remained until July 31, 1969, as part of the practice of far-left groups (particularly Maoists) of sending their members into factories and unions, a move called the établissement. The inspiration for the établissement came from a 1957 writing by Chairman Mao calling on intellectuals to live two or three years like the worker and peasant masses (Zancarini-Fournil, Le moment 68, 55–56). The descriptions and analysis offered by Linart are a valuable source of information on the labor process and shop-floor life in manufacturing units in France at the time. There was clearly a strong Taylorist regime at work, involving speed-ups and piecework. The social construction of skill and its connection to ethnic inequality is powerfully underscored by Linart's description of the way immigrant workers were assigned the lowest of the three levels of the semiskilled category (ouvrier specialisé, or OS) and were systematically passed over for promotion. In fact, Linart was trained on the assembly line by a North African worker over whom he was soon promoted.

Immigrants, Women, and Labor

The unskilled Algerian immigrant worker who showed Linart the ropes in the auto factory was one of a large number of immigrant workers who came to France at that time. From 1968 to 1975 the number of immigrant workers in France grew from 881,000 to 1,140,000, increasing from 14.9 percent to 19.06 percent of the workforce. Yet, with the notable exception of Bernard Gronotier's book Les travailleurs immigrés en France (1970), serious scholarly attention to immigrant labor only began in the 1980s, when Gérard Noiriel began sustained research on immigration and immigrants.Footnote ³ Other French social historians have followed his lead, and immigration has now become an established part of the social and labor research agenda in France. Research on the contemporary manufacturing working class in France now puts the present issue of postcolonial ethnic minorities front and center, a reflection of the large numbers of children of north and sub-Saharan African immigrants who entered the labor markets in the automobile industry and elsewhere in the 1990s. Sociologists of labor like Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux have produced high-quality, in-depth studies of the contemporary labor force in French manufacturing that underscore the role of workers from immigrant families in the growing sector of subcontracted labor, particularly in the auto industry.Footnote ⁴

Vigna also shows how women were excluded from skilled categories altogether in most cases. Women workers appear regularly in his history Insubordination, but with the exception of the sections on the labor process and skill, they mostly round out the picture of the workers' struggle of the period. One of the best insights of women's labor history is that the social relations surrounding work are built on socially constructed gender assumptions. These include notions of skill, worth, union and political activism, and politics. Vigna discusses women auxiliary groups and the good work they did supporting striking male occupation workers, but we do not see how the notions and practices of union activism themselves are gendered and how they contribute to gender inequality. Gender issues in general do not figure prominently in these books, certainly a weakness given the advances in women's history and gender studies in recent years.

The Left against the Far Left

The struggles between the established Left—the Socialist Party (SP)—and especially the Communist Party (PCF) on the one hand, and far-left groups claiming authentic revolutionary Marxism on the other figure prominently in all three books. The far Left consisted essentially of two political clans: one inspired by Trotsky's critique of Stalinism identified with the Fourth International founded by Trotsky in 1938 and the other inspired by Chairman Mao's teaching. The political differences between the far-left groups and the PCF ranged from differences over analysis and strategy concerning French politics to their international and historical affiliations. While the PCF was one of the most powerful pro-Moscow Communist parties outside of Eastern Europe, the Maoists identified with the Chinese rivals to the Soviets. The Trotskyists traced their political origins to the struggles between Trotsky and Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1968 the PCF was still referring to Trotskyists as “counterrevolutionary,” and Trotskyist veterans still remembered the Stalinist repression of the 1930s.

The far-left groups were more than an irritant to the PCF and the allied trade union confederation, the CGT. They became obstacles to the PCF's overall political strategy aimed at forging an electoral alliance with the Socialist Party that would come to power through parliamentary elections, an electoral strategy called the Union of the Left. How much worker support did Maoists and Trotskyists have? While their actual influence was quite limited, they did succeed in capturing the attention of many younger workers, who in turn raised contentious questions in their unions. Vigna cites recent research suggesting that there were as many as 2,000 Maosit établis alone. He characterizes far-left influence among workers in general as slight but not marginal (272).

The French Communist Party entered the period as the leading party of the working class. In 1968, one quarter of all French voters voted Communist. With its 350,000 members and 22.5 percent of the vote in the 1967 elections, the party would have seemed well placed to lead the revolt. Instead, the crisis that the student uprising provoked surprised and annoyed the PCF. Claude Pennetier's contribution on the PCF, the CGT, and 1968 in the edited volume underscores the breach between the revolutionary voices and the reformism of the SP and PCF. In response to the occupation of the Sorbonne on May 3, Georges Marchais, the PCF general secretary, could hardly contain his anger at the far Left. His remarks on “the German anarchist Cohen-Bendit” as well as his characterizations of the students battling the police in the Latin Quarter as “agents of the state and sons of bourgeois” and the student movement as a “groupuscule” seriously damaged the party's relationship with the student movement and many young workers. Militant students and youth shouted “we are all German Jews” in response to the government's baiting of Cohn-Bendit and “We are just a groupuscule” to Marchais and the PCF. George Séguy, leader of the PCF-allied CGT trade confederation, also fulminated against the students, who thought they could “bring revolutionary theory to the working class.” These remarks were disastrous for the PCF's hopes to lead the student movement.

In the 1980s, the PCF began to lose influence. By the early 2000s, the steady electoral decline of the party had become a complete collapse as its share of the vote fell to less than two percent in national elections. Reading the edited volume in light of current labor politics in France sheds light on the party's long-term decline. The hostility of the party to the far Left and the way the latter often outflanked it have come full circle in the last two years as the party collapsed as a force on the national political scene (although it still controls hundreds of municipal governments) while the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) candidate Olivier Besancenot won around five percent of the vote and 3.5 million votes in recent presidential elections. In December 2007, polls indicated that Besancenot would have won twelve percent of the vote had national elections been held at that time.

The film selection for the 1962–1968 period by Antoine de Baecque in 68: Une Histoire Collective is Jean-Luc Godard's La chinoise, about a group of five young Maoist revolutionaries. The film was greeted with fanfare because it was released at a time of great popular interest in the emerging Maoist movement, an interest stimulated by the international friction between the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties. The film was poorly received, however, in all quarters. It came across almost as a political comedy about five young people learning about revolution in a bourgeois apartment painted in red and other violent colors. The Maoists hated its depiction of them as comfortably middle-class revolutionaries. Their newspaper, L'Humanité nouvelle, denounced “this ideologically reactionary and fascist film that prepares public opinion for an attack against China and repression against Marxist-Leninists” (59). The pro-Soviet PCF was equally displeased.

La chinoise brings to mind another film that reflects the political tensions on the Left at the time, Alain Resnais's La guerre est finie (1966). In the film, Yves Montand plays an exiled Spanish communist working with other exiles to coordinate anti-Franco actions from France. He comes into contact with a group of young, middle-class student revolutionaries who have developed a trenchant critique of the tactics of the old Left. The debate between Montand's character and the young leftists, in which they argue that calls for a general strike (as does Montand's group) are ineffective and should be replaced by terrorist bombings, reflects part of the debates on the Left and far Left.

Vigna's account of far-left labor activism, rank-and-file militancy, and the evolving fortunes of the Left and far Left in France also sheds light on the evolution of May '68 historiography and some of its debates. As we have seen, the PCF and the CGT found far-left agitation an obstacle to their decidedly nonrevolutionary goals. Rather than leading striking workers to a real showdown with the Gaullist state, they hoped the strikes would strengthen their bargaining position with the Socialist Party as a part of a broad left-wing electoral alliance. Accordingly, Communist Party historians and those influenced by them have argued that the strikers only desired gains on the bread-and-butter level and thus shared neither the revolutionary aspirations of the far Left nor the leftist students’ critique of the very consumer goods they hoped to obtain through the strikes.Footnote ⁵ In the last few years, labor historians, particularly those working on the automobile industry (including Patrick Hassenteufel and Nicolas Hatzfeld), have described impressive patterns of rank-and-file militancy during that period that directly challenged the conservative line advocated by the CGT. That work contradicts the arguments of Seidman, the PCF, and others about the receptivity of striking workers to the ideas of radical students and revolutionaries and suggests that far more might have been obtained through the struggles of the period.Footnote ⁶

May–June 1936, May–June 1968

Vigna's new information on labor struggles and the new archival sources discussed by Zancarini-Fournel and her colleagues provide fresh material for sustained comparative social-science historical research on May–June 1968 and May–June 1936. The comparisons and contrasts are striking. In both cases, mass strikes, which were general in some sectors, included factory occupations and began in the most organized industrial sectors, especially metalworking industries. In both cases the government hosted tripartite talks at the prime minister's residence. And in both cases the far Right was mobilized: against the government in February 1934 and in defense of the government in 1968. The 2.6 million strikers in the May–June 1936 strikes made those strikes the largest by far up to that point, and the seven to ten million on strike in 1968 have yet to be surpassed. In 1936 and 1968, the Socialist and Communist parties were resolutely opposed to a Bolshevik-style revolution and in favor of negotiated agreements on bread-and-butter issues, as well as a parliamentary road to power. CGT leader Georges Séguy's firm statement opposing a general strike on May 18, 1968, and similar statements by the PCF seemed to echo General Secretary Maurice Thorez's well-known declaration that “one must know how to end a strike,” uttered during the June 1936 mass strikes. The June strikes followed the election of the Popular Front and the formation of the government of SP leader Leon Blum in May. In 1968 the strikes and student protests occurred under a right-wing government and led to new elections, resulting in a right-wing victory.

The information that all three books provide about the shop floor and patterns of industrial militancy help fill important gaps on the evolution of these issues in twentieth-century France. They complement the general picture of labor struggles from 1830 to 1968 that Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly painted in their book Strikes in France.Footnote ⁷ In the 1968 period, large factories were more strike prone and militant than smaller shops, a reversal of earlier patterns. Prior to 1936 it was the smaller industrial establishments that were far more militant and strike prone. These patterns of industrial protest reflect a complex interplay between Taylorism, skill, and traditions of protest. The institution of Taylorist methods, which began shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, eroded skill, thus shifting the balance of power between labor and capital in favor of capital. But this was a gradual process. Some occupations and smaller shops in general remained bastions of skilled-worker presence and protest while newer, larger factories used mechanized, semiskilled labor. The mass strikes of 1936 marked the enormous entry onto the stage of industrial protest of semiskilled workers, by then the majority of the labor force in most large industrial units. The strike patterns of 1968 underscore how industrial change continued in the same direction. By 1968 the locus of workers' militancy had solidly shifted from the skilled sectors of the working class to the semiskilled majority.