were given instructions to re-occupy university buildings, factories and offices. In the ensuing parliamentary elections, the ruling Gaullist parties won a crushing victory, increasing their vote by more than a fifth and securing an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly. The workers returned to work. The students went on vacation.
The May Events in France had a psychological impact out of all proportion to their true significance. Here was a revolution apparently unfolding in real time and before an international television audience. Its leaders were marvelously telegenic; attractive and articulate young men leading the youth of France through the historical boulevards of Left Bank Paris.[173] Their demands—whether for a more democratic academic environment, an end to moral censorship, or simply a nicer world—were accessible and, despite the clenched fists and revolutionary rhetoric, quite unthreatening. The national strike movement, while mysterious and unsettling, merely added to the aura of the students’ own actions: having quite by accident detonated the explosion of social resentment, they were retrospectively credited with anticipating and even articulating it.
Above all, the May Events in France were curiously peaceful by the standards of revolutionary turbulence elsewhere, or in France’s own past. There was quite a lot of violence to property, and a number of students and policemen had to be hospitalized following the ‘Night of the Barricades’ on May 24th. But both sides held back. No students were killed in May 1968; the political representatives of the Republic were not assaulted; and its institutions were never seriously questioned (except the French university system, where it all began, which suffered sustained internal disruption and discredit without undergoing any significant reforms).
The radicals of 1968 mimicked to the point of caricature the style and the props of past revolutions—they were, after all, performing on the same stage. But they foreswore to repeat their violence. As a consequence, the French ‘psychodrama’ (Aron) of 1968 entered popular mythology almost immediately as an object of nostalgia, a stylized struggle in which the forces of Life and Energy and Freedom were ranged against the numbing, gray dullness of the men of the past. Some of the prominent crowd pleasers of May went on to conventional political careers: Alain Krivine, the charismatic graduate leader of the Trotskyist students is today, forty years on, the sexagenarian leader of France’s oldest Trotskyist party. Dany Cohn-Bendit, expelled from France in May, went on to become a respected municipal councilor in Frankfurt and thence a Green Party representative in the European Parliament.
But it is symptomatic of the fundamentally apolitical mood of May 1968 that the best-selling French books on the subject a generation later are not serious works of historical analysis, much less the earnest doctrinal tracts of the time, but collections of contemporary graffiti and slogans. Culled from the walls, noticeboardsand streets of the city, these witty one-liners encourage young people to make love, have fun, mock those in authority, generally do what feels good—and change the world almost as a by-product.
The situation was very different in Italy, despite superficial similarities in the rhetoric of the student movements. In the first place, the social background to Italy’s conflicts was quite distinctive. The extensive migration from south to north in the course of the first half of the decade had generated, in Milan, Turin and other industrial towns of the north, a demand for transport, services, education and above all housing that the governments of the country had never managed to address. The Italian ‘economic miracle’ arrived later than elsewhere, and the transition out of an agrarian society had been more abrupt.
As a consequence, the disruptions of first-generation industrialization overlapped and collided with the discontents of modernity. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers—typically from the south, many of them women— were never absorbed into the established unions of skilled male workers in the industrialized north. Traditional worker/employer tensions were now multiplied by disputes between skilled and unskilled, unionized and unorganized workers. The better-paid, better-protected, skilled employees in the factories of FIAT, or the Pirelli Rubber Company, demanded a greater say in management decisions—over shift hours, wage differentials and disciplinary measures. Unskilled workers sought some of these goals and opposed others.
Italy’s post-war economy was transformed by hundreds of small engineering, textile and chemical firms, most of whose employees had no legal or institutional recourse against their bosses’ demands. The Italian welfare state in the 1960s was still a rather rough-and-ready edifice that would not reach maturity until the following decade (in large part thanks to the social upheavals of the Sixties), and many unskilled workers and their families were still without workplace rights or access to family benefits (in March 1968 there was a nationwide strike to demand a comprehensive national pension scheme). These were not issues that the traditional parties and unions of the Left were equipped to address. On the contrary, their main concern at the time was the dilution of the old labor institutions by this new and undisciplined workforce. When semi-skilled women workers sought backing from the Communist trade union in their complaints about accelerated work-rates they were encouraged instead to demand higher compensation.
In these circumstances, the chief beneficiaries of Italy’s social tensions were not the established organizations of the Left, but a handful of informal networks of the ‘extra-parliamentary’ Left. Their leaders— dissident Communists, academic theoreticians of worker autonomy, and spokesmen for student organizations— were quicker to identify the new sources of discontent at the industrial workplace and absorb them into their projects. Moreover, the universities themselves offered an irresistible analogy. There, too, a new and unorganized workforce (the massive influx of first-generation students) faced conditions of life and work that were deeply unsatisfactory. There, too, an old elite exercised untrammeled decision-making power over the student masses, imposing workload, tests, grades and penalties at will.
From this perspective, administrators and established unions and other professional organizations in schools and universities—no less than in factories and workshops—shared a vested, ‘objective’ interest in the
The protean adaptability of Italian radical politics in these years is well captured in the following set of demands circulated in a
The late-Sixties cycle of protests and disruptions in Italy began in Turin in 1968 with student objections to plans to move part of the university (the science faculty) to the suburbs—an echo of the protests taking place in suburban Nanterre at exactly the same time. There was a parallel, too, in the subsequent closure, in March 1968, of the University of Rome following student riots there in protest of a parliamentary bill to reform the universities. But unlike the French student movements, the Italian student organizers’ interest in the reform of academic institutions was always secondary to their identification with the workers’ movement, as the names of their organizations—
The labor disputes that began in the Pirelli company’s Milan factories in September 1968 and lasted through November 1969 (when the government pressured Pirelli into conceding the strikers’ main demands) furnished an industrial counterpoint and encouragement to the student protesters. The strike movement of 1969 was the largest in Italian history, and had a mobilizing and politicizing impact upon young Italian radicals out of all proportion to
