The anti-police of Mai ’68 fifty years on

Research on the police in Mai ’68 began in May 1968. Sociologist Evelyne Sullerot, who lived in the Quartier latin, distributed questionnaires about police conduct to other local residents the morning after the first Nuit des barricades (10–11 May), writing up the hundreds of responses in ‘Ce n’est qu’un début’ (Labro et al. 1968; 88–118; Zancarini-Fournel 2008, 20). Student and teaching unions, l’Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF) and le Syndicat national de l’enseignement supérieur (SNESup), issued a press release on 16 May inviting anyone with information about the recent events to come forward: ‘toute personne susceptible de fournir des renseignements de quelque nature qu’ils soient (témoignage oral ou écrit, enregistrement, film, photo, etc. …) relatif aux événements du quartier latin depuis le vendredi 3 mai à 12 heures, est priée de se mettre en rapport avec les comités d’enquête aux adresses suivantes’. As police archives show, the copy of this press release was marked up by an intelligence officer in the Paris police, in its entirety, in red pencil along one side, and the phrase ‘comités d’enquête’ was also underlined (PP FB 35). While accusations of police brutality levelled by students and residents had appeared in the national press as early as Saturday 4 May, the day after the first May rioting (Joffrin 2008; 89), the idea that evidence was to be gathered in a systematic way to support these allegations by victims and those aligned with them clearly caught the eye of police intelligence. As well it might, for by mid-May although surprisingly there had still not been a single death in Paris or the provinces, officers had unleashed ferocious repressive violence against demonstrators whose refusal to recognise the authority of the regime embodied in its street-level functionaries was felt, from de Gaulle down, as an unpardonable affront akin to the crime of lèse-majesté, and which called for harsh and summary punishment: ‘la police rendait la justice sur le terrain, immanente, distribuant les peines à coups de matraque, sous des nuages de gaz lacrymogènes’ (Rajsfus 1998, 14–15).

The first publication resulting from the work of these comités d’enquête (UNEF and SNESup 1968) set out a litany of prudently anonymised accounts of police brutality, including the matraquage of a woman resident not involved in the demonstrations while she was carrying a one-year-old baby (15), attacks on passers-by, among them elderly people, who intervened to try to protect demonstrators (15–16) and on tourists (16); stories of demonstrators repeatedly beaten while lying on the ground and unable to get up (24), as well as of a police officer who threw an unknown white liquid at a young woman who was subsequently hospitalised with severe injuries to her eyes and lungs (27). The prominence given to police violence against women demonstrators in that volume cannot be dismissed as merely a paternalistic attempt to inspire moral outrage in readers against officers who chose to target women and children. As Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (2002) has shown, the police particularly targeted protestors who departed by their mere presence or physical appearance from conventional gendered norms, in other words any women demonstrating and any men with beards or longer hair, punishing such departures by tearing or removing the women’s clothes and cutting or tearing the hair and beards of the men officers referred to as ‘les beatniks’.

Activist research on the police of the kind initiated by Sullerot and the students embodied, by its very existence, a challenge to the state’s presumptive claim to a monopoly over investigative powers in criminal matters. The comités d’enquête recalled the establishment during the Algerian War (1954–1962) of self-constituting panels of activist intellectuals determined to investigate cases of state torture (Maurice Audin, Djamila Boupacha), as well as the Russell–Sartre Tribunal (1966–1967) on American war-crimes in the Vietnam War. They also prefigured activism which resisted the repressive crackdown initiated at the end of May by newly appointed hardline Interior Minister, Raymond Marcellin: by le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, the focus of Perry Zurn’s article in this special issue, or by the several Popular Tribunals established by Serge July and other leftist activists in the early 1970s to investigate miners’ deaths at Lens in 1971 and the murder of a young girl at Bruay-en-Artois in 1972 (Bourg 2007, 73–74), among other issues. The political challenge thus posed can be understood in broadly Foucauldian terms as the establishment of ‘counter-powers’ (Mathiesen 1982), novel sources of discursive production which challenged the state’s investigatory prerogative and reversed the direction of its surveillance into a ‘counterveillance’ (Welch 2011) over official forms of investigation and their objects, thereby casting light on the vested political interests they protect and further.

One striking document of such a ‘counter-powers’ approach, focusing on the police during the Marcellin years (1968–1974) and in continuity with the work of the comités d’enquête in May and June 1968, was published on behalf of the anonymous Comité de vigilance sur les pratiques policières in 1972 by François Maspero: Police. Recueil de coupures de presse. The book is indeed largely composed of press cuttings from major national papers of various political persuasions, covering notorious incidents of police violence such as the assault on journalist Alain Jaubert in May 1971 and the shooting and prosecution of militant activist Christian Riss on 23 June 1971, in whose defence Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach and Maurice Clavel formed un comité de défense. The collection also contained a copy of a letter typed on Préfecture de Police headed paper signed ‘Ordre nouveau dans la police’, apparently testifying to penetration of the Paris police by this far-right extremist group and suggesting in no uncertain terms that any form of unofficial scrutiny of police activities was unwelcome: ‘Saloperies de journalistes, nous attendons avec impatience le jour où nous pourrons mettre la main sur vous; le sourire aux lèvres, nous vous regarderon [sic] crevés, sous les tortures, dans une odeur d’urine et d’excréments’ (Comité de vigilance sur les pratiques policières 1972; 33). In this collection, words and sentences have been highlighted as though by the red crayon of a police intelligence officer of les Renseignements généraux and indeed one of the few pieces of additional introductory prose informs the reader that, ‘Les techniques des Renseignements généraux sont très diverses. La plus élémentaire est l’analyse de tout ce qui est publié par les journaux’ (12). The book offers a visual parody of this elementary form of police surveillance, by highlighting signficant items, but also on occasions manages to insinuate obsessiveness or stupidity by marking the blindingly obvious: ‘police’ and ‘Quartier latin’ (16–17), for example. Activist investigation of the police during May–June 1968 and the Marcellin years inspired a rich tradition of scrutiny of the police by journalists and researchers working independently, or semi-independently, of academic institutions (Dufresne 2007; Hamon and Marchand 1983; Lafont and Meyer 1980; Langlois 1971; Rajsfus 1996; Rigouste 2012). In recent years, ‘counter-powers’ investigatory monitoring of French policing is perhaps best exemplified in the work of activist collectives in the suburbs, such as Vies Volées, who maintained an online record of those killed and injured by the police before official recording on a national basis began in 2016, or in the supporting role of journalist Elsa Vigoureux as second author, with Assa Traoré (Traoré and Vigoureux 2017), of Lettre à Adama, an account of Assa’s family’s struggle for justice following the death of her brother Adama in police custody in the suburbs in July 2016.¹

Despite or because of the voluminous evidence collected by protestors, journalists and local residents of police brutality during May–June 1968, a consensus was quick to emerge within senior ranks of the Paris police that there would be no investigation of any officer. Instead, internal reports responding to allegations praised the sang-froid of the vast majority, spoke of the extreme difficulty of their working conditions and the practical impossibility of reliably determining who may have been responsible for any particular alleged act of brutality (Mathieu 2013, 167–68). No doubt, senior officers also had in mind the catastrophic effect on morale which investigations would likely have had in forces whose capacity for loyalty and obedience had, as I argue in my article in this issue, been sorely tested. Senior officers were almost certainly also aware that violence by police acting in defiance of orders, as well as in over-zealous execution of orders, was so widespread during the disturbances that to have investigated it systematically would have meant investigating thousands of serving officers and diverting resources from Marcellin’s incipient total war on leftist revolutionary subversion.² Indeed, the decision to forego all investigation of officers must have been approved at the highest level of the Ministère de l’Intérieur.

If activist research on the policing of Mai ’68 began during May 1968 and was arguably the very first angle of investigation into the protests, subsequent historiography quickly departed down different paths, even if the police inevitably feature somewhere in almost all accounts. The volume of work published over the last 50 years, much of it at decennial anniversaries of 68, is legendary. Readers new to the topic will find a good place to start in the annotated bibliography in Joffrin 2008, 405–22; which can be supplemented by Fanny Bugnon’s review essay in this issue (‘1968 : permanences et renouveaux historiographiques’) for material published since the 40th anniversary and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel’s analytical overview of the historiography of ‘Le Moment 68’ (Zancarini-Fournel 2008). After the activist research on the police just described, historiographical trends within this vast body of work can be summarised—extremely schematically—in the following movement: from early accounts by key participants or witnesses and sociological interpretations in which the category of ‘generation’ was an important analytical and framing device, through culturalist accounts which emphasised the success of Mai in bringing about cultural change as the flipside of its failure as a political revolution, to a broadening of interest from Paris to the regions and indeed to the international dimension, a similar broadening beyond the student protests to worker resistance, especially in June 1968, and finally an expansion of the scope of inquiry from the month of May, or May and June, to ‘les années 68’, which in one of the most ambitious and compendious edited volumes from the last major anniversary embraces almost two decades (Artières and Zancarini-Fournel 2008). There has lately been some renewed interest in the state’s response (Bernard 2010; Gaïti 2008; Gordon 2007) but only recently has the sharp focus on the state’s frontline operatives, the police, and their methods, which characterised the very earliest activist research, reemerged in the academic literature (Delporte 2015; Jobard 2008a, 2008b; Mathieu 2013; Nivet 2015; Ross 2002; Rudolph 2008).

The articles in this special issue develop this new-old policing-centred approach to ‘Mai ’68’—by which term is understood the student and worker protests in May and June of 1968, primarily in Paris—but they do so by focusing not only on the police and their tactics but also on the ways in which what we call an ‘anti-police’ culture was developed by those they policed. This comprised representations both verbal and visual, techniques, tactics and even learned embodied responses and was part of an activist politics of resistance. Although the choice of a primarily Parisian spatial focus may seem to go against the grain of historiographical trends towards the regional and international dimensions, this restriction is justified in part by the daunting volume of archival and secondary material relating to the policing of events in Paris and its immediate surroundings and in part by the fact that this relatively narrow territorial scope was itself a very significant factor in the policing of Mai and the development of the movement’s ‘anti-police’. Our narrow spatial focus, extended somewhat from central to suburban Paris by Christina Horvath’s article, is balanced by the very wide temporal frame of this issue, which follows the legacy of Mai’s anti-police as far forward as the Nuit debout movement in articles by Alex Corcos and Chris Reynolds.

‘La répression policière’ was the principal explicit mobilising theme of the Mai protests at almost every stage, just as it had been when students at Nanterre occupied the council chamber there on 22 March (Joffrin 2008, 56), the day which gave its name to the unprecedented coalition of warring gauchiste factions (Sommier 2008, 298). Agence France Presse reported that Nanterre students responded to the closure of their campus by resolving to hold ‘une réunion de protestation contre “la répression policière” et contre la fermeture de la faculté’ at the Sorbonne at 2 pm on Friday 3 May (PP FB 35). Leading trade unionist Georges Séguy declared on 7 May that ‘La violente répression policière dirigée contre les étudiants indigne les ouviers’ (PP FB 35; Zancarini-Fournel 2016, 802). A tract seized the following day, preserved in police archives and entitled ‘Halte à la répression policière et patronale’, sought in what it imagined to be a shared exposure to police violence a way of bridging experientially the socio-economic divide between students and factory workers:

Les travailleurs sont les premières victimes de la répression, pour eux elle est quotidienne […] ORGANISONS LA DENONCIATION PUBLIQUE ET PERMANENTE DE LA REPRESSION POLICIERE ET DE LA DICTATURE PATRONALE! VIVE L’UNITE DU PEUPLE CONTRE LA REPRESSION! (PP FB 4, capitalisation in original)

Repressive violence during the first Nuit des barricades (10–11 May) similarly led ‘an initially hostile trade union movement to call a one-day strike in support of student victims of police brutality’ (Gordon 2007, 50). In other words, the movement found in police violence its single most effective source of self-propagation and unification, capable of pulling in those around it and hastening convergence with other struggles:

Ressource immédiatement mobilisatrice, elle provoque la solidarité de franges extérieures au milieu étudiant, choquées par la répression dont il a fait l’objet. Ressource identitaire, elle semble sceller dans l’épreuve le destin d’individus réunis jusque-là autour de motivations catégorielles ou confuses. Elle leur fournit donc une expérience fondatrice ancrée dans le combat. À un troisième niveau, elle est aussi ressource organisationnelle dans la mesure où son éventualité requiert des mesures adéquates, prises par un petit groupe de responsables, ainsi que la création d’un organe spécialisé dans la protection des manifestations. (Sommier 1998, ch. 3 par. 5)

The movement forged its anti-police culture from a potent but eclectic reconstruction of French history after 1940 and remained largely indifferent to the kind of fine technical distinctions between the different forces de l’ordre involved in public order policing which interest some historians of Mai today. The famous chant, ‘CRS–SS’, echoed around the courtyard of the Sorbonne on 3 May before any units of les Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS) were present (Bordeleais 2011, 156), which Kristin Ross (2002, 107) suggests ‘could be read as an act of conjuration. Students in a sense were “borrowing trouble” since the CRS were not yet there—accelerating the situation or bringing it to a head. But they were also interpellating the workers who were also not yet present, and doing so using the workers’ own language’. The chant had last been heard in the Quartier latin in 1964, when it indeed alluded to an earlier struggle between workers and the police, the miners’ strikes of 1948 (Zancarini-Fournel 2016, 800), brutally suppressed by the CRS.³ However, it is doubtful whether those officers who were in fact present at the Sorbonne, Compagnies of the Paris municipal force in their riot apparel, would have been distinguishable from CRS to students not well versed in the insignia of the two units. Nevertheless, the chant’s theme and its visual variations in the posters, produced by the Atelier Populaire des Beaux-Arts, showing a riot policeman with matraque raised, were emotive reminders of a wartime past in which some 40% of the entire police force collaborated too closely with the Nazis to survive purges at the end of the war (Jobard and de Maillard 2015, 108).

Maurice Grimaud, the affable, astute and left-leaning civil servant in charge of Paris’s Préfecture de Police, who was responsibile for policing the Mai protests in the city and surrounding area, recognised in his memoir the mobilising force of the movement’s anti-police when he complained of its ‘campagne très vive sur les “atrocités policières”’, adding that much of this was based on unfounded rumours, for instance that the police were using ‘[des] gaz vomitifs made in USA’ (Tartakowsky 1998, 163), a claim I discuss in my article, and also that they were secretly killing students and disposing of their bodies (Grimaud 1977, 119). The fact that no atrocities of the latter kind took place on this occasion was thanks in no small part to Grimaud’s restraining influence over a Paris municipal force that had shown it was capable of massacring hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in October 1961 under his predecessor as Préfet, Maurice Papon (House and MacMaster 2006). As Nick Hewlett’s article argues, much of the credit later afforded Grimaud for minimising loss of life is deserved: his restraining influence was a key factor in preventing police from killing demonstrators by opening fire on them as they had in 1961, or 1934, or as the French army frequently did in the nineteenth century, and he successfully resisted de Gaulle’s own instruction to forcibly retake the Odéon theatre on the ground that it would almost inevitably involve loss of life (Joffrin 2008, 217–21; Nivet 2015, 10).

A 40th anniversary commemorative brochure published by the Paris police (Lajus 2008) fêted Grimaud as a pacifying hero and reproduced the entire text of the letter he sent to all of his 25,000 staff on 29 May, reminding them of their duty to exercise restraint (6–7; also reproduced in Grimaud 1977, 341–43). However, legendary though Grimaud’s letter has become for such pithy admonitions as ‘Frapper un manifestant tombé à terre, c’est se frapper soi-même’(Grimaud 1977, 342), his decision to send such a letter in the first place was a clear indication that, by the end of the month, the forces over which he presided were engaged in widespread (albeit mainly ‘less-than-lethal’) acts of illegal violence against protestors (Mathieu 2013, 150). Furthermore, as I argue in my article in this issue, the conservative effect of Grimaud’s concern to avoid police firing on demonstrators was to protect the regime he served.

I have referred hitherto in a general way to ‘the police’, yet this is an introductory simplification. French public order policing at the time involved elaborate permutations of three distinct types of unit, hence the preference of some scholars for the comprehensive French term les forces de l’ordre: CRS, Compagnies drawn from the Police Municipale and Gendermerie Mobile (GM). For public order policing operations in Paris units called ‘groupes d’intervention’ were formed in two ways: (i) by combining a Compagnie of the Police Municipale (100–125 officers) with a 75-man squadron of Gendarmes Mobiles or (ii) by combining two units of CRS (220–40 officers in total). Each of these combined units was placed under the command of a Commissaire (Superintendent or District Commander) of one of the nine Paris policing districts (Gaveau 1978, 31–32; Mathieu 2013, 147). Under normal circumstances Grimaud would have been able to rely on requisitioning GM and CRS units from the regions but by mid-May many of these had to be recalled because of violent disorder there: allowing for rest, injury and static duties guarding embassies and major state buildings, Mathieu (2013, 148) estimates that in any one 24 h period in May–June, taking all of les forces de l’ordre together, Grimaud had at most 8526 officers at his disposal to police protestors who sometimes numbered into the hundreds of thousands and frequently into the tens of thousands. Grimaud’s own figure of 10,000 (Grimaud 1977, 177) for the large demonstration of 13 May is slightly higher but of the same order of magnitude. Often seriously outnumbered and facing determined and violent opponents, Grimaud and his senior commanders working from the Salle de Commandement, in the basement beneath the Préfecture on the Île de la Cité, relied on building up large masses of police before intervening against protestors. This meant a lot of waiting around, but Grimaud’s tactic was intended above all to reduce the risk of smaller units getting surrounded and firing on protestors in panicked self-defence. Although Mai led to numerous well-documented improvements in police tactics, equipment and communications, this basic approach of Grimaud’s has become firmly enshrined as the French doctrine of public order policing: ‘ce dispositif est constant, au moins depuis 1968 où il a été rodé et perfectionné’ (Monjardet 1990, 211). This special issue suggests that the protestors’ anti-police culture has been similarly fecund in the 50 years since the events. Among its many meanings, Mai constitutes a key moment in the elaboration of what some scholars of French policing have bemoaned is almost a national tradition of anti-police scepticism: ‘Dans de nombreux pays, la police jouit d’une réputation peu enviable, suscite des sentiments mêlés, mais cela est peut-être plus net et permanent en France où son dénigrement appartient en quelque sorte à la culture nationale’ (Berlière and Lévy 2013, 529).

Oliver Davis (Warwick, UK), special issue guest-editor.

Notes

1. Campaigners against police violence have estimated that 10–15 deaths are caused by the French police each year but until 2016 no centralised official records were kept. Instead, campaign groups such as the ‘Vies Volées’ collective [http://atouteslesvictimes.samizdat.net/?page_id=725] maintained their own online lists (Jobard and de Maillard 2015, 157).

2. This was manifestly a political decision, albeit not one articulated in such terms at the time. The French police tend to be reluctant to investigate and sanction the use of excessive force by officers in the course of their duties. Sociologist Cédric Moreau de Bellaing (2016), who analysed reports from the Paris police inspectorate from 1996 to 2013 and conducted fieldwork in the Paris police training school at around the same time showed that while excessive force by officers on duty was very seldom sanctioned, the use of violence by officers who were off-duty frequently resulted in disciplinary action.

3. The CRS were formed in 1944 from an amalgam of the purged remnants of Vichy’s Groupes Mobiles de Réserve, a force dissolved by de Gaulle in December of that year, and the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur.