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Title: Behind the Barricades Author: Jacqueline V. Date: September, 1968 Language: en Topics: France, May 1968, revolt, barricades, Black & Red Source: Black & Red Number 1, September, 1968, page 39 Notes: Scanned from original.
[Note in original: The following account was narrated to several
co-workers of the first issue of Black and Red by Jacqueline V., one of
the thousands of students who participated in the struggle in France
last May.]
The police entered the Sorbonne on the 3^(rd) of May and there was a
spontaneous demonstration outside. The second step which was very
important was the 6^(th) of May, when thousands of people demonstrated.
On that day we were sort of going around wondering what we could do. The
police were there. The student union had prepared a demonstration for 9
in the morning, and none of the union people were there. They said the
demonstration was postponed to 6 in the evening, far from the student
area. So everyone was surprised. Not everyone knew about it. There were
thousands of people going around. They had never been in the street
before and didn’t know what to do.
At one point you could see a group singing the International” and
walking right toward the cops. Of course when the cops took a few steps,
they rushed back in all directions and it was obvious that something
really bad could have happened--when you rush back and you have
thousands of people behind, it can be a perfect mess. They were running
in every direction, and there were cops all around. The cops had left a
way to get in, but there was no possibility of getting out. All those
people went around for hours and hours, and after a while they sort of
concentrated and gathered around a large demonstration which went all
around shouting slogans.
The fight began about one in the afternoon, or thereabouts. Then people
began to defend themselves. The policemen were coming and sending
teargas and things like that. The students’ idea was to put a car in the
middle of the street to prevent the cops from coming too quickly. It was
spontaneous, you know, when you feel cops coming towards you; and we
were not so numerous. We just pushed a few cars into the street, so
there’d be something to keep the police from moving so quickly. This was
obvious in the evening, when the official demonstration took place and
went on peacefully without anything happening. Then suddenly, when we
were on Saint-Germain, the police attacked, and began to throw tear-gas
and all that. So of course there was a panic, a real panic, and people
rushed back. Those who had been in demonstrations in 1961 and 1962 knew
that if people just rushed back they could kill each other. The only
thing there was to do was to push a few cars in the middle so that it
wouldn’t be as bad. People took anything they could find. If there was a
construction site in the street, they would tear off a few pieces of
wood. Then the others had time to move back slowly instead of rushing
back like mad.
It started more or less like that. People took grills from around the
trees and used them to dig up cobblestones on the street. They took the
grills, and by hitting hard on the cobblestone street, they could
separate stones.
But when it was said that people came prepared, it just wasn’t true.
Hardly anyone had anything in his hand when he went to the
demonstrations. I even saw pictures of girls with heels and dresses.
People saw the point of having these cobblestones. Of course there was
all the past of Paris: the French Revolution, the Paris Commune; people
had read about it. They began to make lines and to pass each other the
cobblestones. Some of the stones would be used to throw at the police,
and some would just be piled here and there; it was the same idea as
when the cars were used: to prevent the police from rushing ahead.
The point was not to stay there. The point was that there was a
demonstration which was attacked by the police, and the point was to
prevent people from being badly hurt, and to stay there just a while.
The point was not that we’re here and we’re going to stay here. People
were rushing back. They’d build another barricade, fight with the police
for a while, and then move somewhere else. The point was to keep
demonstrating, and not to be pushed away in five minutes. At the same
time there were so many people who just rushed back. It really was
self-defense. The police were driving hard, and the students were trying
to find a way to make them go a bit slower.
Two people can’t just go in front and fight with a hundred cops. But if
they had those cars, and could throw stones, even if just for ten
minutes, then the others had time to congregate in another street and go
on with the demonstration.
The great night of the barricades, the night of May 10–11, there were
talks on how the problem could be settled. It must be said that on May
6^(th) the student union’s three points had been: Let’s liberate our
comrades from jail, get the police out of the universities, and let us
have our courses again. And that was all The union didn’t even ask for
anything else. And it’s surprising that the government didn’t accept
right away; it would all have been over. I don’t mean it would really
have been over, but it would have stopped things for a while. They made
a ridiculous mistake. Here was a peaceful demonstration asking these
three things--and they sent the police against it Which is quite funny,
in a way.
On the night of the barricades, on the 11^(th), thousands of people
gathered, and the unions felt they couldn’t just tell people: Okay,
you’ve been demonstrating for half an hour, now you can go home. That
was really too much. They said, Okay, we’ll stay here until the
conversation shows we’ve gotten something. And we were listening to the
radio, to the ministers, to see if something at least had been obtained.
But nothing happened. And all those people were there. So they thought:
well, if we stay here, we must have something to defend ourselves.
Otherwise the police can come, and in ten minutes everything will be
over. So they surrounded themselves with all these barricades. And the
police had orders not to attack. They were waiting for orders, and they
waited until 2 o’clock in the morning, when the discussions reached no
conclusion.
So at 2 o’clock in the morning both the students and the police were
waiting for an answer from the government; but of course the students
thought: here we are, thousands of us, and we can’t do anything against
the police. So they surrounded themselves with barricades. There were
sixty barricades that night, surrounding a certain area.
But everything was just spontaneous. The barricades sometimes faced one
way and sometimes the other way. People didn’t know where to stand. They
were building barricades here and there. I even heard an Anarchist say:
“It should have been planned before.” And sometimes it really looked
funny.
I was walking around the barricades and helping out here and there. And
I came to a small street where I saw three boys who had two barricades
for the three of them. They were small barricades on a very small
street. They asked me to send some people. I went and found some friends
and told them those three really needed help. When we got back there,
their whole barricade was completely destroyed. They said, “Look, you
know, the man came and explained that he was a worker and he needed his
car badly. So we gave it back to him.” Then we helped them build a new
barricade.
There was no plan, no preparation, no one who’d decided: We will do this
and that, this and that way. Of course there were lots where houses were
being built, or things like that, and people used everything they could
find. But they didn’t arrive with a huge car entirely filled up with
things with which to build the barricades. Everything on the spot was
taken and used to make them. A tree here--a small tree--and everything
we could take from construction sites. And cobblestones. When there were
no cobblestones, people made long lines so the cobblestones could get to
streets which had no stones.
At the beginning of that night, just in front of the Luxembourg Station,
people were fighting with each other because some of them didn’t want to
build barricades. They said, “We’re just going to wait for the police
here; we’ll just stand, and that’s all.” And the others said, “You can’t
just do that; we must defend ourselves, we must have cobblestones, or
something.” Because nobody had anything at all. But this was on one
spot. Very few people, really, didn’t want to build those barricades. At
this particular place a few people didn’t want to.
Nothing was really prepared, coordinated, organized. Nobody was the head
of anything. People got organized on the spot. They didn’t need somebody
giving orders. Nobody was giving orders, or maybe everybody was giving
orders. But there was no mess. It was the first time I realized that
anarchism was not simply a mess, but that it could really work. Someone
would say, “we need people here,” and someone would go there. Some
people came and said things here and there, but what they said had to be
what the others were waiting for. Somebody could say things for a while,
and someone else could come. And it did work, that’s what’s wonderful.
There was never an “I don’t want to receive orders from you” or anything
of that sort.
The barricade building lasted from 9 at night until 2 o’clock in the
morning. And it was really something quite out of the common, being
inside the barricades. It was estimated there were about fifteen
thousand people inside the sixty barricades.
People threw things from the buildings: cigarettes, or things to eat and
drink; and among the students well, you had a cigarette and you gave it
to somebody. It was just complete freedom. That’s funny to say. But
inside those sixty barricades, surrounded by the police, there was a
feeling of complete freedom. An atmosphere which was completely
different, something I had never experienced before. All those people
working. It was something entirely new. Whether you knew people or not
didn’t matter at all. Anyone who merely came to have a look could feel
this atmosphere, could see people working without chiefs, without
orders, without spending time electing anybody. There was no time to
elect anybody. And there was no problem about that. No one in the group
tried to take the head of everything. And no one came with a plan,
saying, “There must be a barricade here. Ten people come here to build a
barricade.” There was nothing of that sort. If anyone thought, “Okay,
let’s build a barricade here,” everybody was in it.
The only things people had--and they only had them if they’d experienced
this before--were some spectacles for the gas. They had experienced
teargas and things like that. It was rather picturesque: everyone trying
to defend himself from the gases, wearing funny things on their heads,
scarves on their noses. It wasn’t a matter of anyone being prepared. You
went to the building sites and found some helmets the workers had left
there. You took them and put them on. But there was no “urban guerrilla”
prepared ahead of time and which had experience.
The police attacked at two in the morning. THEY received orders. So they
attacked, and it took them three and a half hours to get rid of all
those barricades. But even at that moment the point was not to stay
there for days and days. It was just to stay there a while and show
them. It took the cops quite a while, and some barricades were even
re-taken by the students.
What the students used were just the cobblestones, which they threw, and
anything else they could find to throw; and standing it as long as they
could. Only very few people had other things, but really few, like five
or ten, had other things, like slingshots. But that was all. That was
the main weapon, THE weapon. And these were really useful. You can’t
throw stones very far by hand. And the cops threw those gases so far
that you couldn’t reach them by hand. That was about all. A few
anarchists had Molotov cocktails. But there were only about six Molotov
cocktails for 15,000 people. And that’s only because the anarchists had
always had these theories, and all those books about this and that. But
these were not really people trained for urban guerrilla war or anything
of that sort. And they didn’t really use them properly, I guess, because
I didn’t hear about anything much happening.
The cops had launchers with which they could send teargas grenades--and
many of them at the same time. They began to throw chlorine gases. And
here there was something funny. On the radio you could hear the
reporter, who was on the spot at the demonstration, saying, “Now they’re
sending chlorine gases, and I can’t stand it any more.” And the
announcer in the radio station saying, “Oh, you don’t know whether it’s
chlorine gas or not.” And the reporter said, “But I can smell it.” So
the announcer said, “But you can’t say it, I’m sorry. You can only say
that this kind of gas is different from the kind you’ve smelled before.”
Which was obviously so funny. The reporters who were on the spot
couldn’t help telling what was really going on. But the one who was in
the studio was trying to quiet things down, because he knew there’d be
trouble afterwards.
Another time the reporter said, “The police are setting the barricades
on fire,” and the announcer said, “How’s that? It can’t be possible.” So
the reporter said, “Oh, yes, they throw grenades, and the barricades get
on fire.” Then the announcer said, “All you can say is that you saw them
throw grenades, and then the barricades got on fire. But you can’t jump
to conclusions. You don’t know why they’re on fire.”
When the reporter said, “Now the police are throwing grenades into
apartments,” the announcer said, “Oh, that must be accidental; they
can’t be doing it on purpose.” So the reporter said, “But they are doing
it on purpose, because those people were siding with the students. Sure
they’re doing it on purpose.’ And the announcer said, “It can’t be
true.” That was during the night. On the next day the radio no longer
spoke of chlorine gas or anything else of that sort.
People often asked about those who had their cars destroyed during the
demonstrations. They must have been bitterly opposed to the
demonstrators. This in fact isn’t true. Those people lived in the area
where the fights took place, and they could see the fights from their
apartments. They could see how the police behaved, how they beat people
who were already wounded, even going into infirmaries to get the
identity papers of those who were hurt.
Those people who actually saw the fights and really sympathized with the
students often helped them by taking them into their apartments. The
police sometimes went to the apartments to arrest them. Some apartments
were damaged by the police. If the cars of these people were destroyed
during the fights, they felt that this wasn’t so important after all,
when thousands of young people were badly wounded.