Managing (in)security in Paris in Mai ’68

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Corrigendum (https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2018.1447839).

Abstract

This article reframes the extensive literature on the policing of protests in Paris in Mai ’68 around (i) the concept, borrowed from Critical Security Studies, of the management of (in)security and (ii) Peter Manning’s understanding of the dramaturgical function of policing. In the absence of direct archival evidence about how police felt during May, the article attempts a reconstruction – based on archival and secondary sources – of officers’ experience of insecurity by highlighting the contrast between Mai and customary practice in managing demonstrations as ‘co-productions’ with the services d’ordre of trade unions and political parties. It is argued that the response of rank-and-file officers to Maurice Grimaud’s strategy was widespread insubordination, contrary to the impression given in accounts by Grimaud himself. The role of le Service d’action civique (SAC) as clandestine policing auxiliaries is also discussed. The article concludes that the spread of police ways of knowing protestors into the wider population in the last week of May constituted a form of (in)security governance which worked by allowing ordinary people to feel sufficiently afraid to reaffirm their support of the regime and its frontline functionaries.

Résumé

Cet article prend appui sur le concept de gestion de l’(in)sécurité, issu des études critiques de sécurité (Critical Security Studies) ainsi que sur les travaux de Peter Manning sur le caractère théâtral de l’action de la police. Nous tentons de reconstruire l’expérience affective des policiers et gendarmes mobiles, et notamment leur sentiment d’insécurité quand éclata soudainement une crise dans la co-opération traditionnelle entre les services d’ordre syndicaux et les forces de l’ordre dans la gestion des manifestations. Dans les rangs de la police et de la gendarmerie, la plupart vécurent douloureusement les événements de Mai 68 et répondirent par une insubordination sans précédent à la stratégie « attentiste » officielle, tant vantée par son auteur Maurice Grimaud. Nous nous penchons également sur le rôle joué par les membres du Service d’action civique (SAC), le service d’ordre gaulliste, en tant qu’auxiliaires violents et clandestins des forces de l’ordre. Pendant la toute dernière semaine de mai, la savante diffusion d’une manière de comprendre les manifestants, que nous qualifions de « policière », auprès de l’ensemble de la population, ainsi qu’une nouvelle gestion des manifestations qui permit à la population d’en avoir peur, ramenèrent enfin la majorité silencieuse à réaffirmer haut et clair son soutien au régime et à ses fonctionnaires.

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Corrigendum

Notes

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Corrigendum (https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2018.1447839).

1. Except where finer distinctions are pertinent, I use the term ‘the police’ (and cognates) to refer to members of all three of les forces de l’ordre as constituted in 1968, namely the municipal police, CRS, and Gendarmerie Mobile (GM).

2. Indeed, very occasionally the expression ‘le service d’ordre’ is also used to refer to the police (e.g. Clémençon 1999, 58).

3. The expression ‘le service d’ordre’ refers here, unusually, to the police. See also n. 2, above.

4. Kristin Ross (2002, 37) mistakes this last exception for the rule in a misleading definition of services d’ordre as ‘small groups specialised in physical street combat with the police, or with far-right groups like Occident, Ordre Nouveau, or Jeune Nation’. Pace Ross (2002, 25), it is not surprising that during the factory strikes and occupations trade union SOs carried out auxiliary policing work, in her extended sense, by excluding students who marched to join the factory workers, turning them away at the gates of Billancourt and Flins, since this was entirely consistent with their customary role in policing demonstrations by excluding those not deemed to belong there.

5. See also pp. 77–8. Mai figures very prominently in Maintenant (Comité invisible 2017), so much so that it may not be too fanciful to see in the title a projection of Mai into the now. The book advances a radical theory of the convergence of anti-capitalist emancipatory struggles today around militant anti-police activism. Mai is characterised as a ‘destituant’ insurrection (Comité invisible 2017, 74), by contrast with the ‘constituant’ aspirations of Nuit Debout.

6. Charpier (2005, 166) suggests Lecavelier had a more prominent organising role and that his liaising between the SAC and the far right, including members of Occident and returning mercenaries, was done with the approval of a representative of the Ministère de l’Intérieur.

7. The pressure brought to bear during these interrogations was, Audigier (2003, 125) asserts, more a matter of psychological terror than physical brutality. This first use of fake ambulances is ironic given all of the fuss made by Grimaud later in the month about protestors using fake ambulances to transport weapons: Operation Zig-Zag instituted on 25th May involved searching all vehicles purporting to belong to the Red Cross (PP FB 29).

8. Jacques Foccart recalled Pierre Debizet from Gabon to lead the SAC in May 1968, sending a signal to other OAS sympathisers that their return was welcome if they could contribute a similarly muscular defence of the regime (Péan 1990, 365). He also masterminded the creation of the CDRs to lure back those nationalists for whom the SAC was too tainted by its past defence of De Gaulle in his pursuit of Algerian independence (Pozzi 2009, 67). The release of Salan and Argoud on June 18th and the amnesty of OAS exiles including Bidault and Soustelle, possibly demanded or recommended by Massu (Shephard 2011, 78), also helped draw the Right back together by reintegrating more radical elements.

9. ‘Probably’ because the handwritten note about two of those arrested and taken to Beaujon, which refers to a ‘Carte Association des Français Libres’ and a ‘Membre du Comité de Soutien au Général de Gaulle’, is dated 25/4/68, which I think is probably a mistake and indeed it is included with the material in the box for 24th–25th May.

10. In 1974 Libération published what purported to be an internal SAC memorandum detailing plans to intern around 50,000 left-wing activists in stadia across France (Mathieu 2013, 148). Audigier (2003, 155) argues that the note was probably authentic because the government or SAC could have sued for defamation but chose not to.

11. Grenades were also used in the confined space of François Maspero’s bookshop, La Joie de Lire, on 6th May: there is a report (PP FB 4) of Madame Maspero demanding a toxicological analysis of the gas in police grenades. Corrosive liquid probably from grenades could also be used by police to cause severe burns to the genitals, as in the case of a sixteen year-old identified as an apprentice baker by Le Canard enchaîné (17 July 1968) and by police in their own arrest record as an electrician, where they misleadingly refer merely to ‘brûlures par acide’ (PP FB 11).

12. That said, although Brunet (1990) gently mocks them with urbane derision, in my view he does not persuasively refute allegations that SAC detachments were involved as agents provocateurs working in connivance with the Paris police on 5 June 1971 and 23 March 1979. See also Hamon and Marchand (1983, 193–96).

13. A note to police sent by Grimaud on 13th May explained the complex instrument used to award this pay rise: ‘Je suis heureux de vous informer que le taux de l’indemnité de sujétions spéciales est majoré de trois points pour l’ensemble des personnels de police.’ (PP FB 4).

14. Marcellin’s loi ʽanti-casseursʼ of 1970 gave legal meaning to this category by making organisers of demonstrations in which damage to property occurred criminally liable for it. The delegitimising police concept of the ‘casseur’ has been a particularly successful police legacy of les années 68 (Fillieule 1997, 100; Dufresne 2007, 27); the political basis of the conceptual distinction on which it rests has only recently been exposed to sustained critique (Comité invisible 2017, 59).