Battle of the Sorbonne

"This is real guerrilla action," said Paris Police Chief Maurice Grimaud. Indeed it was. In a year that has been marked almost everywhere by student upheaval. Paris last week captured the record for the largest student riots so far in 1968. While the city prepared for the opening of Vietnamese peace talks, students staged the sharpest street fighting since the end of World War II. By week's end, the gulf between the government and students--who were joined by France's major unions--had widened into a serious anarchical challenge to Charles de Gaulle's government.

The trouble began two weeks ago, when authorities abruptly closed the Nanterre College of Letters, a suburban branch of the 150,000-student University of Paris, because a small band of Maoist, Marxist, Trotskyite and Guevarist militants had thrown the campus into a turmoil with strikes and threats of gang war. Next day the Nanterre leftists streamed into Paris' Latin Quarter, began demonstrating in the Sorbonne campus quadrangle.

After the university called in police to eject them, bloody clashes brought 600 arrests and forced the Sorbonne, France's oldest university, to close.

Burning Cars. That served only to rally broad support for the troublemakers. Massing by the thousands along the Boulevard St, Germain and cross streets, students ripped up paving stones and steel posts, bombarded steel-helmeted police from behind barricades of overturned and burning cars. The police fought back with nightsticks and tear-gas grenades in a battle lasting some seven hours.

Obviously embarrassed by such disorder on the eve of Viet Nam peace talks, Charles de Gaulle warned that further violence would not be tolerated. Yet the clashes continued: 30,000 students marched up the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe, singing the Communist Internationale on the way. By midweek, student strikes and demonstrations had spread to a dozen provincial cities, and even high school pupils picketed in large numbers to demand the release of 100 jailed rioters. Nanterre reopened, but students and nearly half the faculty struck in sympathy with the stillshuttered Sorbonne.

To insulate the Right Bank peace-talk site (and the U.S. delegation) from violence, police cordoned off all major bridges across the Seine. On the other side, students chanting "De Gaulle assassin!" massed and marched. Then, after flickering hopes for a compromise with the government faded, they rebuilt their paving-stone-and-auto barricades. Late at night, the gendarme phalanxes charged--and nearly a square mile of Paris turned into a battlefield. As retreating students hurled Molotov cocktails and set fire to many autos, the explosion of their gasoline tanks mixed with the pop of police tear-gas grenades. In a belated weekend effort to restore calm, Premier Georges Pompidou proclaimed on radio and television that reform of the university system was "indispensable," and promised to reopen the Sorbonne this week. He even hinted that appeal courts would deal lightly with already convicted student leaders.

Smoldering Hostility. The seeds of the student revolt have long existed in France's archaic system of higher education. Overcrowded to a point that stifles learning, lamentably short of professors, and managed by a mammoth but mediocre bureaucracy that resists change. French universities annually flunk some 20% of their 550,000 students while another 50% give up and quit. Resentment against the system erupted in the rioting.

Astonishingly, no lives were lost, but before the week's carnage ended, 1,158 combatants were hurt (596 of them police) and 1,081 arrested. In support of the rioters, Communist, Socialist, Christian Socialist and teachers' labor unions ordered an illegal 24-hour general strike, a move that could leave France without railroads, buses, subways, electricity, schools and other public services.

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