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Title: Impressions of May
Author: Ngô Văn
Date: 1968
Language: en
Topics: 1968, France 1968, May 1968, Vietnam
Source: Retrieved on 2020-05-01 from https://libcom.org/library/impressions-may-ngo-van

Ngô Văn

Impressions of May

Preface

In May 1968, Ngo Van was working in a Paris factory and soon afterwards

he wrote one of the few accounts of what happened by a rank-and-file

industrial worker that was published close to the time. His perspective

was informed by his previous political experience. He had been a

Trotskyist militant in Vietnam in the 1930s and 1940s, imprisoned and

tortured both by the French imperialists and Hồ chí Minh’s Stalinists.

Exiled in Paris in the late 1940s, he soon broke with the French

Trotskyists over their dogmatic commitment to formulae such as the

‘deformed workers’ state.’ In 1968, his political discussions were

focused on a group of workers meeting with the Marxist intellectual

Maximilien Rubel, and committed to socialism through the self-activity

of the working class. Written by an advocate of rank-and-file workers’

councils, Van’s nuanced account is sensitive to, for example,

generational differences in workforce attitudes to les événements and

the historical resonances of the conflicting symbols of the bourgeois

and proletarian revolutions. An acute historical consciousness informs

his observations on the role of the ‘official’ socialists — those of the

Communist Party-led union, the CGT, in particular — in ensuring that the

student radicals were kept away from the workers. This assisted the

trade union leaders in limiting the workers’ political practice to

questions of wages and conditions of work. It helped to ensure that,

once President de Gaulle had assured himself he had control of the

forces of ‘law and order,’ a deal for substantial wage increases —

initially rejected by the rank-and-file — was sufficient to allow him to

restore stability and create conditions for the Gaullists to tighten

their grip on political power.

Introduction to the text

Very few Vietnamese socialists who fought both against the French

colonialists and against the Stalinists survived to tell their stories.

Ngo Van, one who did, wrote of his experiences in Vietnam in Au Pays de

la Cloche Fêlée,[1] a volume of autobiography that appeared in 2000 and

is currently being translated into English.[2] In May 1968, Van was

working in the Jeumont-Schneider factory in Paris. The second volume of

his memoirs, Au Pays d’Héloïse[3] — dealing with his life in France —

reprints one of the very few accounts published at the time from the

viewpoint of a worker in an industrial enterprise of les événements of

May-June 1968.

Van (1913–2005) was born into a peasant family in a village near Saigon

and started work at the age of 14. From 1932 he was active in the

revolutionary anti-colonial struggle, and during the 1930s and 1940s he

participated as a Trotskyist militant in workers’ and peasants’

demonstrations, strikes and protests — undergoing, as did thousands of

others, torture and imprisonment at the hands of the French rulers.

The working class in Vietnam was small, but Trotskyist activists were

influential in the important industries, and encountered the ruthless

hostility not only of the colonial regime but also of the Communist

Party of Indochina under the leadership of Hồ chí Minh. Many Trotskyists

were assassinated by Hồ’s secret police. Those who managed to escape

were driven into exile.

Living in Paris from 1948, Ngo Van had a succession of factory jobs,

interrupted by a stay in a sanatorium recovering from the TB he had

contracted in prison in Saigon. Together with Lu sanh Hanh, the most

experienced of the Vietnamese Trotskyists to escape Stalinist assassins,

he joined the Union Ouvrière Internationale group (UOI), which had

recently left the largest French Trotskyist organisation, the Parti

Communiste Internationaliste, in opposition to its policy of ‘defence of

the USSR’ as a ‘degenerated workers’ state.’

After the UOI folded in 1954, Van’s political work centred on an

informal discussion group inspired by Maximilien Rubel.[4] Most of the

participants were industrial workers. In 1968, when Van was at the

Jeumont-Schneider factory, where he was to work until he retired, he and

others in the Rubel group advocated grassroots workers’ councils,

putting themselves at odds with the Communist Party and Social

Democratic politicians and official trade union leaders.

The text published below first appeared in Informations et

Correspondance Ouvrières, no. 76 (December 1968). For Au Pays d’Héloïse

(published posthumously), Van had written a short introduction

reproduced in italics below.[5]

Impressions of May — Ngo Van

That night the storm broke in Paris. The cobblestones rained down on the

thickheads of the CRS. The barricades appeared in the rue Guy-Lassac in

front of the Sorbonne, erected by the students. Sophie [my wife] and I

contemplated the uprooted trees in front of the exit from the

Saint-Germain metro and on the boulevard Saint-Germain and sensed that

something had knocked authority, power, the State, off balance. ‘La

chienlit’ screamed the panicky de Gaulle before stealing off secretly —

to the French army base occupying West Germany at Baden-Baden — looking

to wipe out the student insurgency by military force.

The Maoists of the Ecole des beaux arts wrote on their banners: ‘After

the rain comes the fine weather.’ What deception! Here we were in the

land of the Paris Commune and they were glorifying the Red Book of a

Hunan peasant! I expressed huge astonishment, and after that was persona

non grata in those quarters, as if I were as bad as the cops…

At the time I was working at Jeumont-Schneider, the electrical-machine

manufacturer. The CGT forbade the workers from uniting with the students

to unleash a general strike.[6] The union kept the workers ghettoised

and chased away students who came to make contact with them.

---

It may seem tiresome, now that everything is ‘normal,’ to recall what

was no less normal, but in a topsy-turvy way, at the end of last spring.

Moreover, what happened here was only one version of what was happening

elsewhere, and everyone knows about that. Nevertheless it is not

pointless to look into the tarnished mirror of the past in order to try

to know oneself.

On the afternoon of Friday 17 [May], we whispered in the workshops that

the trade unions were cooking something up to cope with the rising tide

of unrest. However this was a weekend when nothing happened.

On Monday morning, the workers, having walked down the avenue, which was

decorated with red flags, gathered before the gates, not knowing whether

they were to go in or stay outside. They waited for an order. The shop

steward gave it: ‘Go in, we’ll decide what has to be done.’ As usual the

heavy iron gates closed again after everyone, like robots, had clocked

in — whereas in the nearby factory, Sifa, where they made antibiotics,

something had already happened. The red flag waved over their iron

gates, which were sealed with handwritten white posters bearing slogans

calling for indefinite strike action, for things to change, for work to

be made part of life rather than the destruction of life, and so on…

‘Something is going to happen here, soon,’ I was warned by a young

friend in the CFDT.[7]

And indeed, in the workshops they had practically stopped working, with

some showing impatience as they waited for that something to happen. At

about nine o’clock the shop stewards went round with a duplicated sheet

to be signed: ‘Are you for or against the following demands: minimum

wage of 800 francs, 40-hour week without wage reductions, retirement at

60, repeal of the social security regulations, recognition of

trade-union rights in the works. Are you for or against a general

assembly of the workplace? ’What responsibility are we going to have to

take on, we the eternal signers of petitions, demands, requests, all

destined for the waste-paper bins?

At 10 o’clock the workshops emptied and we gathered in the joinery.

There were about 500 of us, mostly workers in blue overalls. The

foremen, in grey overalls, were there too this time, and there were a

few in white ones. This packing workshop had been, for years, the scene,

at one time or another, of routine hour-long or half-hour meetings of

workers who had stopped work at the call of their unions, meetings never

attended by so many as were to be seen there on this morning of Monday,

May 20. But routine had not ceased to rule — the same people managed the

game and the rest played it.

The shop stewards were on the platform and the crowd, as ever, was

almost silent. The first to speak was a CFDT shop steward, a turner, a

middle-aged fellow with deep, shining eyes and a determined, passionate

air. He praised the students’ courage and said that it was time for the

workers to enter the struggle ‘to open the eyes of the employers and the

government who have for ages refused to negotiate with the unions.’

Shyly, a small red flag was unfurled and then raised behind the group of

speakers. ‘I am not a Communist,’ he said, ‘but I am for the red flag.’

Then he recalled how the emblem had originated: during the barricades of

1848 someone had picked up a shirt steeped in the workers’ blood. This

had served as a flag, and the shirt was said to be still preserved in a

museum in Moscow. This was a bit startling, even so. Collections for the

striking coal-miners or for Vietnam had been conducted with the

tricolour. It was spread out at the factory exit and everyone showed his

‘active solidarity’ by casting his contribution into this sacred rag of

the fatherland. Yes, indeed! We should look silly, before those students

on the barricades, with their red flags and black flags, if we had

brought merely the blue-white-red flag. After the CFDT shop steward, the

one from the CGT confessed that he hadn’t much more to say, and

proposed, as the way to support the unions’ demands, an indefinite

strike with a sit-in. The young workers seemed keen for action, the

older ones seemed worried. The decision was taken by ballot. Everyone

wrote his yes or no on a little piece of paper. The result was

two-thirds for the strike, one-third against: about a score for a strike

without a sit-in.

‘We call on you,’ said the CGT shop steward, ‘to put away your tools and

leave the benches clean.’ We sensed the authority of the ‘official.’

And so the everyday routine was broken, and everyone, shaken, was more

or less dragged out of his apathy. The problem was there, and each saw

it in his own way.

‘Now we must discuss what we have to do,’ said G., a foreman. ‘You want

to overthrow the government, and we need to know where we are going.

Tomorrow there will be no more milk for the babies…’

After the midday meal we gathered in the canteen and elected a strike

committee. Most of the candidates who were put forward to be approved by

the meeting were shop stewards or other members of the CGT and CFDT, but

a few ‘unorganised’ youngsters were allowed in. A strike picket of 40

men, all volunteers for the task, would ensure that the factory stayed

occupied, day and night. The committee invited everyone to come every

day to take part in the sit-in. Actually, this was just to protect the

access to the factory — since only the strike picket was allowed in the

workshops. ‘And why should we occupy the factory? So that the boss

doesn’t lock us out. Once before he played that dirty trick on us, and

then, one by one, summoned the workers he was willing to take on again.’

The young members of the committee were given the job of ‘organising

leisure activities,’ so as to stop the occupiers getting bored — a

boredom, we foresaw, that could be as unlimited as the strike itself.

Among the young workers, who were a very small minority, a vague feeling

developed that a profound change in our way of life was needed — one so

profound that it would imply a change in the structures of society as a

whole. To some of them who went to the Latin Quarter during the nights

of the barricades, it seemed that the leaden lid of the Old World had

been half-opened above our heads and the time had come to blow it right

off. The majority lived through the event passively, as though letting

themselves be carried a little way into the unknown by the wave. The

ones who were already over their half-century and had known 1936 had no

illusions: they remembered well how it had been possible ‘to bring a

strike to an end.’[8]

In the first week many of us came to the factory, and meetings organised

by the strike committee for information and discussion took place

frequently.

After Grenelle[9] the CGT and CFDT showed a lack of enthusiasm for

meetings of the strike committee and mass meetings of the strikers,

using the inter-union meetings that were held nearly every day as the

excuse for calling them as infrequently as possible. Or else they

briskly hurried through the meetings of the strike committee, talking

only about the canteen, or the night-time guard, and that was all.

On Wednesday 21^(st), the young workers suggested that discussion groups

be formed, to consider our demands and other problems.[10] After the

meeting about 30 workers gathered in the conference room (which in

normal times was open only to the managerial staff), because they were

keen on this idea. A very good discussion developed about our demands,

their contradictions and inadequacies. They got on to the question of

the relation between trade unions and political parties, but the

discussion came to a sudden end when the CGT shop stewards intervened,

speaking forcefully and interrupting everyone.

On the first day of the strike the red flag flew alone over the factory

gate, which was sealed with a big red poster of our demands. From the

next day, however, the tricolour was there, side by side with the red

flag. We were to understand later what this signified, when the

Communist Party proclaimed itself a party of order, ‘the first to

denounce the sects of extremists and provocateurs’ and declared that it

had been able to unite ‘the flag of the French Republic’ with ‘the flag

of the working class.’ Monsieur Waldeck Rochet was going too far.[11]

The flag of the Communards is not to be mixed up with the flag of

Versailles. The tricolour is the flag of today’s bourgeoisie and

bourgeois state. It is under these colours that, since 1789, the

bourgeoisie has exploited the workers and sent them to die on the field

of honour; under these colours it has enslaved the black and yellow

peoples.

Does it need saying? Our CGT comrades were the Party’s cell in the

factory, just as Comrade Séguy was a member of its Political Bureau.[12]

At the meetings the workers had little to say, expressing themselves

with difficulty. I record, at random, the things that I recall. Somebody

proposed, one day, that we discuss the demands we had formulated,

reminding us that, in 1936, we had won the 40-hour week and had since

then had always worked between 48 and 56 hours — and now, 32 years

later, we were back at the same point.

‘In these 32 years technology has evolved and production developed,’

said an old worker. ‘Why demand 40 hours and not 35?’ And if, tomorrow,

the employer and the government were to agree to 40 hours, what would

prevent them from conning us just as before? Retirement at 60 would

allow the old workers to enjoy some rest and the young to find work. The

proposal did not arouse much interest among those present and the

committee closed a debate that had not even begun.

Later, after Grenelle, there was no more talk in the strike committee

about the 40-hour week, only about a gradual reduction of working hours;

and no more talk of retirement at 60, only on lowering the age of

retirement…

Some comrades spoke of unity in struggle between the university and the

factory and proposed that we invite the Unef students of the 22 March

movement to come to our factory and tell us about their action.[13] When

the strike committee rejected this, they asked for their proposal to be

put to the vote: this was noted without reply. Although a certain number

of comrades favoured the idea, nobody insisted. The shop stewards and

young members of the CFDT, who were in favour of such an association

between workers and students, did not want to oppose the CGT shop

stewards, for fear of ‘breaking unity of action.’

A group of young workers went to the ‘communist’ Town Hall of

Saint-Denis in order to obtain a venue, away from the factory, where

they would be able to discuss with the students. At first they met with

refusal, on the pretext that there were some suspicious elements in the

Jeumont-Schneider factory. But then, to satisfy these young workers, a

CGT shop steward intervened and they were given a room at 120 Avenue

Wilson, about a 100 metres from the factory. However, the intended

meeting did not take place, as the Unef students did not turn up.

---

It was the day of the demonstration at Saint-Lazare railway station,

organised by the CGT in favour of a democratic government with communist

participation. At the general meeting the strike committee, or rather

the GCT shop stewards, invited those present to take part in this

demonstration in order to ‘support the negotiations between the bosses

and the metalworkers’ union.’ ‘Now you are trying to politicise the

strike,’ somebody said. ‘What are you up to? The demonstration is

intended to give backing to your policy, Séguy said so last night on the

television, and you are trying to make us believe it’s only to support

our demands.’ For her part, the woman shop steward for CFDT proposed

support for a possible government headed by Mendès-France.

At about one o’clock, four or five lads and girls from the 22 March

movement appeared outside the factory and tried to engage in

conversation with the strikers. The CGT shop stewards intervened at

once. A woman challenged the intruders: ‘What do you want? What is your

programme?’ ‘Madame, we aren’t a political party, we don’t want to take

power and we have no programme. We just want to make contact to find out

what is going on.’

In the discussion with the workers one of the lads mentioned Séguy. This

enraged one of the CGT shop stewards, who went for his throat, as though

he had blasphemed. One of the women workers, indignant at the fanaticism

of this shop steward, broke in: ‘You’ve no right to stop him talking,

let him talk. I belong to the CGT, too, but everybody should be allowed

to speak. Even the Trotskyists who came to hand out leaflets. You’ve no

right to bully them.’ And she went on: ‘We can win improvements. Why

make a revolution? Why cause bloodshed?’

Little by little, people began to speak out, especially outside the mass

meetings, on the night-time pickets. As a workmate put it: ‘This strike

will have got the workers talking at least.’ We discussed the events,

the students, fascism especially. Some went in the evening to the

Sorbonne, the Odéon or the Ecole des beaux-arts, and when they came back

next day they brought ideas and the free atmosphere of those places.

Very often, faced with the fiasco of the economic demands presented at

Grenelle, the idea of workers’ self-management was brought up. The

workers were not hostile to the idea but doubted their ability to put it

into practice satisfactorily. They felt that this was a global problem,

to be tackled in a much wider context than the individual factory, or

even France as a whole. We sensed, too, that the trade unions were not

in favour of ending the existing social order.

The entertainments committee invited some Portuguese performers to come

and sing fados. When they arrived, on Wednesday 21^(st),[14] at the gate

of the factory, our Portuguese friends compared the breadth and depth of

the movement with the paltry content of our demands, and this aroused

the distrust of one of the CGT’s women shop stewards.

After the songs were over, an exchange began between the Portuguese and

a CFDT delegate, who asked the performers, ‘Why are you on strike and

what are your demands?’

‘Capitalist society exploits us through the impresarios, the record

companies and the radio, just as it exploits the workers through the

bosses. We don’t call for the 40-hour week (which we ought, by right, to

have had since 1936), or for a minimum wage of 800 francs (because one

needs more than 800 francs to live decently), and anyway why should it

be 800 francs here, somewhere else 600 francs, and over there 1,000

francs? We are on strike, also, out of solidarity with the workers and

the students. We are going into the factories to start a dialogue

between workers and artists to make it clear that there is only one

question for all of us, and that is to challenge the established forms

of society.’

Our friend concluded by saying that we must not let ourselves be

cheated. This produced a violent reaction from the CGT woman shop

steward: ‘You are here to sing, so sing! The workers are our concern.’

The dialogue continued nevertheless, but, soon, our friends were asked

to leave the factory, supervised by the guard on duty, and we ended the

afternoon with them in a cafe´, away from the trade union

representatives.

Apart from these incidents, trade union order did indeed prevail in the

factory. The tools were left intact; there was no smashing of machines

by the students. No conflict, no hostile behaviour of any sort by the

young zealots or the ‘anarchistic’ older men. The manager was there

every day, in his office. He signed for the release of funds for the

canteen, arranged advances of wages for the strikers, now and then had

talks with the shop stewards, took no decision on his own. He, like us,

was waiting and following instructions ...

Then something important happened: the engineers came out on strike. On

the first day, they held their meetings separately. Four days went by

before, by a small majority, they decided on a solidarity strike. They

held out for three weeks, meeting every day to discuss and work out

their own statement of demands. Then they called for a secret ballot of

the entire workforce, for or against going back to work. The majority of

the strikers opposed having such a vote, and the engineers went back to

work. As the factory was closed and guarded by the strike picket, the

engineers worked on sites outside it.

In the middle of the last week of the strike, the big boss agreed to

talk with the shop stewards. Events speeded up. On Thursday, 13 June, at

the mass meeting, the CGT shop steward said that we must resolve the

question as to whether to go back to work and, for his part, he proposed

a secret ballot on this question. On Friday 14 [June], as anticipated,

we went straight to a vote. The polling booths were brought out, just as

for the routine elections when we had to choose the factory committee or

other representatives of the workforce. The majority of the workers were

discouraged and thought that one week more or less would make no

difference, now that the other branches of industry were already back at

work, that the workers’ front had been broken and the metalworkers were

almost alone in continuing to fight.

The canteen was full when the result was announced: 423 votes for going

back to work, 135 for continuing the strike, three spoiled ballots. The

meeting erupted. Those who wanted to ‘go on with the fight’ were

pleased, however, to find that they were so numerous.

The management and the shop stewards hurried to bring the affair to a

close. They proposed that work be resumed that same afternoon, and the

management would generously pay wages for the whole day. On every side

the workers called out: ‘Monday, Monday!’ A clear majority seemed to

reject the bargain offered. At 1pm, what a surprise! The entire

leadership of the CGT and the CFDT was at the factory gates, which were

wide open. Two shop stewards carrying the flags, the red one and the

tricolour, made their way into the factory, followed hesitantly by a

minority of the workers… When they were inside they sang the

Internationale.

Monday morning, everyone was at work as usual: ‘normality was restored.’

---

P.S. On Wednesday 22 [May], two days into our strike, the trade unions

announced their readiness to negotiate with the employers and the

government. At the news of the opening of talks with Pompidou, everyone

thought that, given the paralysis the country was in, and the permanent

insurrectionary agitation by the students, which had spread to the

working class, there was a good chance that the bosses and the

capitalist state would give up something substantial. The hopes of some

went further still: the bosses would surrender quickly, and we would

probably be back at work the following week.

However, as soon as the famous agreement of Sunday 26 [May] had been

announced, and Séguy and Co. had been booed at the Renault works,

everyone felt that they had been conned, and realised that the struggle

would get harder. At the mass meeting on Tuesday, after telling the

strikers the terms of the agreement, the shop stewards themselves, as

though gripped by the general unease, simply proposed a continuation of

the strike.

The feeling that we had been swindled was strengthened when the

government split the movement by granting advantageous conditions to

certain key sectors (electricity, the metro, the railways, the postal

service…) and the trade unions celebrated this as their victory.

[1] Ngo Van, Au Pays de la Cloche Fêlée (Montreuil: L’Insomniaque,

2000).

[2] In the Land of the Cracked Bell, translated by Hilary Horrocks, who,

with Terry Brotherstone, had edited this translation of ‘Impressions of

May’, from a draft by the award-winning translator Brian Pearce, for

Critique

[3] Ngo Van, Au Pays d’Héloïse (Paris: L’Insomniaque, 2005).

[4] Maximilien Rubel (1905–1996). Marxist historian and prolific author;

born Chernivisti, Ukraine; educated there, in Vienna and at the Sorbonne

in Paris. Became a French citizen in 1937; fought in World War II, then

lived, secretly because of his Jewish origins, in occupied Paris.

Participated in the Resistance, and was concerned at the

misunderstanding of Marx prevalent amongst Communist Party members he

encountered. Preferred the term ‘Marxologie’ which he distinguished from

‘Marxism.’ Argued that the ‘self-movement of the working class’ was a

critical concept if Marx’s work was to be developed against official

doctrines. See Ngo Van, Une Amité, une Lutte, 1954–1996 (Paris:

L’Insomniaque, 1997).

[5] The text has been translated, and appears here, with the kind

permission of the publisher of the French edition of Au Pays d’Héloïse,

L’Insomniaque

[6] Confédération Générale du Travail, the leftist union centre linked

to the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). Coordinated activities with the

CFDT (see below) after 1966.

[7] Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail. One of five French

trade union organisational centres. Created in 1964 when the majority of

the Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens voted to be a

secular body — close to the Parti Socialist Unifié (PSU), led by Pierre

Mendès-France. Mendès-France (1907–1982), a lawyer, had been a member of

the Radical Socialist Party (not the mainstream social democrats). He

served with the Free French but resigned from de Gaulle’s

post-Liberation government over its free-market policies. Was later

twice prime minister, negotiating the French surrender in Vietnam.

Opposed de Gaulle’s seizure of power in 1958 and joined the PSU.

Unusually for French politicians of his age and status, he sympathised

with the students in 1968.

[8] When Blum’s Popular Front government was elected in May-June 1936, a

general strike was in progress. The PCF argued that it was not a

revolutionary situation and assisted in the negotiation of the 40-hour

week and wage increases to assist Blum in bringing the action to an end

(the Matignon Agreements of 7 June 1936). On 11 June, PCF leader Maurice

Thorez famously declared, ‘It is necessary to know how to end a strike.’

Strike action was over by the summer and when, in the autumn, workers

returned from the paid holidays they had gained, they found their wage

increases eaten away by inflation. In February 1937, Blum responded to

the flight of capital from the French economy by declaring a suspension

of the reforms gained the previous year.

[9] The Accords de Grenelle were negotiated at the Ministry of Social

Affairs in the rue de Grenelle between May 25 and 27 by Local Affairs

Minister Jacques Chirac, on behalf of the Pompidou government, Georges

Séguy of the CGT for the trade unions, and the bosses’ organisation. In

the medium term, the agreement led to substantial increases in the

minimum wage and in average real pay, but at the time it was rejected by

the rank-and-file, and there was a huge demonstration in the

Champs-Elyse´es on 29 May. Next day, President Charles de Gaulle

returned to Paris from secret meetings at Baden-Baden, dissolved the

National Assembly and called elections for the end of June, in which the

Gaullist party won an overwhelming victory.

[10] ‘Le mercredi 21’ in the original. 21 May 1968 was in fact a

Tuesday.

[11] Waldeck Rochet (1905–1983) was General Secretary of the PCF. Named

after the 19^(th)-century Republican leader René Waldeck-Rousseau.

Joined the PCF youth movement in 1923. Attended the International Lenin

School. Party secretary in Lyon, 1936–1940. Served as a parliamentary

deputy. Arrested in Algeria in 1940 and held by Vichy authorities until

freed by the Allied advance. Fought with the Free French and represented

the PCF in London till returning to Paris after the Liberation. Third in

the party hierarchy after Thorez and Duclos before becoming General

Secretary from 1964 to 1968.

[12] Georges Séguy, born 1927. General Secretary of the CGT, 1967–1982.

Railway workers’ union executive member in Toulouse, 1946–1949. General

Secretary of the national railway workers’ union, 1961–1965. Partisan

fighter during World War II, arrested in 1944 and sent to Mauthausen

camp. Member of the Political Bureau of the PCF, 1960–1970.

[13] Unef 22 March movement. Student movement born on 22 March 1968 at

Nanterre, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Alain Geismar. Organised a

prolonged occupation of the university.

[14] See note 10 above.