The Night of the Barricades
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude L. Foucault - part 27
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 6 - BE CRUEL!
p165
The night of May 10, 1968 began tensely in Paris. In the preceding days, schools throughout France had been rocked by demonstrations. Confrontations between students and police had erupted at Nanterre, at the Sorbonne, and then, it seemed, at virtually every university and lycée in the country... [enjoy that acute accent over lycée now because you probably won't be seeing it again] The mounting vehemence of the protests had left government officials stunned and student leaders astonished. By the night of May 10, nobody knew what to expect.
For a calendar of events for the amazing year 1968, click here. I’ll just mention that besides events in France and Tunis, there was also the “Prague Spring” and the riots associated with the Democratic Convention in Chicago. A list of just the global instances of youth/student revolt that year would be too long. Personally, I spent that summer riding horses in the mountains of Arizona so, not really plugged into the Zeitgeist.
...As dusk gathered, a crowd of some twenty thousand young people flocked into the Parisian crossroads [place Denfert-Rochereau]. Their immediate goals were clear enough: they were expressing outrage at the government, which had shut down the Sorbonne on May 2, after a student demonstration; they were protesting the brutality of the police, who had beaten a number of innocent bystanders; and they were demanding freedom for four jailed comrades.
Their larger goals were no mystery either: critical of the authoritarianism of French education, they talked in terms of radical democracy; schooled in the various catechisms of the left, they also spoke of class struggle, workers’ control -- and permanent revolution.
But on another level, their objectives were anything but clear, even to the demonstrators themselves. Some were silently bewildered. “The fact was that to anyone who asked rationally enough ’What do you want?’ I had no answer,” a professed Maoist recalled years later. “I couldn’t say that I didn’t even know who these comrades were, couldn’t say that I was demonstrating for the sake of demonstrating.”
p166
...Spontaneously, without plan or discussion, the crowd began to move... with the bridges over the Seine blocked by police, back towards the heart of the Latin Quarter...
The students fanned out. Some moved south, down rue Gay Lussac and rue Saint Jacques; others went east, toward rue Mouffetard.
But if the police attacked, how could they defend themselves?
With cobblestones, someone suggested.
In the rue le Goff, at around 9:15, they started digging, A hole in the road appeared, revealing a fine yellowish sand. WIth a can of spray paint, a bystander put the image into words on a black wall: BENEATH THE PAVEMENT, THE BEACH. Near the wall, a pile of stones quickly mounted. Without plan or discussion, a barricade had appeared.
What did they think cobblestones were bedded in? Don't answer!
A barricade!
It made little sense tactically. It made perfect sense symbolically. For a barricade, in the mind of every educated French citizen, was the mythic emblem of revolt, a living image of the revolutionary tradition begun in 1789 and renewed in 1830, 1848, 1871, 1936 -- and now, improbably, in May, 1968.
...before the night was over, there were sixty barricades in all.
The disorder was intoxicating. Billboards were ripped apart, signposts uprooted, scaffolding and barbed wire pulled down, parked cars tipped over. Piles of debris mounted in the middle of the boulevards. The mood was giddy, the atmosphere festive. “Everyone instantly recognized the reality of their desires,” one participant wrote shortly afterwards, summing up the prevailing spirit. “Never had the passion for destruction been shown to be more creative.”
...Lured by the promise of adventure, reinforcements began to pour into the Latin Quarter. On the barricades, the transistor radios carried the news, and the protesters took heart: they were making history! ...
p167
Shortly after 2:00 A.M., the police donned gas masks...
Three hours later, “The Night of the Barricades” would be over. But for a generation of young activists -- and for Michel Foucault as well -- a new world had suddenly appeared.
Dawn revealed a devastated landscape. In the Latin Quarter, the skeletons of almost two hundred automobiles, torched during the night, littered the elegant boulevards where the barricades had briefly stood. No one had died -- the battle, though bloody, had been a kind of game, played with the tacit understanding of its limits by both police and protesters... To protest the government crackdown, the country’s largest trade unions, including the powerful CGT, controlled by the French Communist Party, called for a general strike on Monday, May 13.
That Monday, more than one million people filled the streets of Paris. The student revolt had turned into a general protest against the authoritarianism of the Gaullist state -- and, less clearly but more explosively, against the very order of things in the modern world generally.
...the regime of Charles de Gaulle suddenly seemed vulnerable. Instantly the Sorbonne was occupied by young radicals. Graffiti -- perhaps the most revealing expression of the movement’s true novelty -- began to appear everywhere, defacing the walls, defying reason, apparently aiming to provoke passion, puzzlement, and furious energy all at once.
p168
BE CRUEL!
IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID
WE WILL CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY FOR NOTHING, WE WILL DEMAND NOTHING, WE WILL SEIZE, WE WILL OCCUPY
ACTIONS, NO! WORDS, YES!
I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY, BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITIES OF MY DESIRES
RUN, COMRADE, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU!
QUICK
...Into the old temple of learning [the Sorbonne] poured thousands of unruly young people. Together, they began to debate what form the new world might take. “May everybody be carried away by his enthusiasm without feeling guilty,” suggested one widely distributed manifesto. “All artistic creation is violence, all political action is violence,” another declared. “Violence is the only way for subjectivity to express itself.”
...at the Sorbonne, a “Revolutionary Pederasty Action Committee” met, talked, disbanded, leaving no organizational trace, yet forming one inspiration for the French gay liberation movement that would crystallize in the months that followed.
As a young philosopher named André Glucksmann summed up the May movement shortly afterwards, the uprising had united “all society’s semi-pariahs -- youth, immigrant labour, etc.”; it had obliterated “ghettos” and traditional limits, ending “social and racial segregation, sexual repression, etc.”; it had turned the Sorbonne into “a new ’ship of fools’” -- and in this ship, promised Glucksmann, the ruling class would rediscover “all the perversions that haunt them.”
Michel Foucault had cause to take note: for the Night of the Barricades, it seemed, had unleashed his kind of revolution...
p169
The Night of the Barricades proved pivotal: for the first time in years, Foucault [now living in Tunis] could imagine that a new kind of politics might yet change French society...
p170
By the time that Foucault arrived [at the University of Tunis]... the educational system [there] was lurching toward crisis. In alarming numbers, Tunisia’s best and brightest young people were finding enlightenment, not in the civic religion of national unity sanctioned by the state, but rather in the vision of progress-through-conflict offered by Marx, Trotsky, and Foucault’s old friend and teacher, Louis Althusser, then at the height of his prestige among Francophone radicals. An education intended to bolster the ranks of the state’s modernizing elite was generating, instead, chronic criticism, threatening to crack apart Bourguiba’s civic “monument.” ...
p171
But the student riots of March 1968 [in Tunis], struck him [Foucault] quite differently [he had previously been repelled by the Marxist rhetoric]. The more he saw -- and as one of the most famous foreign teachers at the University, he was allowed to see a great deal -- the more he became convinced that the Tunisian student movement embodied “an utterly remarkable act of existence.” As he came to realize, Marxism in this setting functioned as a kind of myth, in George Sorel’s sense -- a body of images capable of inspiring “a kind of moral energy,” exciting “a violence, an intensity, an utterly remarkable passion,” enabling students to accept “formidable risks, publishing a manifesto, distributing it, calling for a strike: taking risks that might deprive them of their freedom. This impressed me incredibly.” ...
It was, in fact, his first inkling that politics, like art and eroticism, could occasion a kind of “limit-experience.”
p172
[Re: reform of higher education in France in the mid-1960s] “If an honest man, today, has the impression of a barbarous culture,” Foucault remarked in an interview in 1966, “this impression is due to a single fact: our system of education dates from the nineteenth century and there still reigns there the most insipid psychology, the most antiquated humanism.”
Foucault’s outspoken hostility toward any form of “humanism” was the final straw for a number of leftists. For what program of political change could possibly grow out of such convictions?
p172
...”We are apparently in the midst of discussing the problem of humanism,” he remarked to his interlocutor [in a 1967 interview], “but I wonder if in reality we are not in the midst of referring to a much more simple problem, that of happiness. I believe that humanism, at least on the level of politics, might be defined as every attitude that considers the aim of politics to be the production of happiness [Settembrini would have spoken of the elimination of suffering, but it comes to the same thing]. Now, I do not think that the notion of happiness is truly thinkable. Happiness does not exist -- and the happiness of men exists still less.”
Happiness might not be “truly thinkable” according to Foucault’s Sado-Nietzschean view of the world. But the raptures of an unleashed creative energy most certainly were. And no matter what Dumezil or Sartre might think -- or Foucault himself might have supposed before 1968 -- such raptures were by no means of purely personal or strictly literary moment.
The Night of the Barricades, coming on the heels of the student revolt in Tunisia, had shown that something like a shared rapture, shattering customary inhibitions, was possible, at least at certain extraordinary instants. Perhaps even in our own day such an explosion of untamed collective energy might rekindle, as Foucault put it in 1978, “the craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility of an absolute sacrifice” -- a sacrifice of liberty, even of life, “without any profit whatsoever, without any ambition.” ...
The description of Tunis then reminds me so much of the Arab Spring and of the attraction of Islamic State today.
p174
But what kind of revolution did these young men and women embody? Foucault had reason to wonder: for the revolutionary idea of creating an entirely “new man,” an ideal common to both Marx and Nietzsche, pointed in two contradictory directions.
Marx’s new man was to be a creature of joyful harmony, beyond the cruel conflicts between master and slave, boss and worker -- a figure of Promethean freedom and universal understanding, embodying in thought, labor, and love the beatific essence of the entire species. For a “humanism of the Marxist type,” as Foucault remarked in a 1978 interview, the problem was “to recover our ’lost’ identity, to liberate our imprisoned nature, our truth at bottom.” With the end of alienation -- and triumph of communism -- what Marx called “the real individual” would stand forth, whole at last.
Nietzsche’s new man, by contrast, was to be a creature of destructive creativity, beyond good and evil -- a figure of blinding power and daimonic fury, uninhibited by the yearning of ordinary mortals for happiness, justice, or pity. “For me,” Foucault explained in 1978, “what must be produced is not, “as in Marx, “the man identical with himself, such as nature has designed him, or according to his essence.... It is a question, rather, of the destruction of what we are, and of the creation of something totally other -- a total innovation.”
In those heady days in May 1968, students in Paris, like those in Berkeley and Berlin, hesitated between love and hate, harmony and strife, peace and war. Looking for guidance, some turned to Marx, others to Nietzsche. What kind of world did they want? What sort of new men -- and new women -- would they become? ...
p175
...Vincennes [where Foucault was asked to be the chairman of the philosophy department] was to be... a model [reformed] institution, it was to be democratic, interdisciplinary, on the cutting edge of current research. At the same time, it was to be a magnet for dissidents: by drawing radical students out of the Latin Quarter, to a campus located outside of the city limits, the disruptive impact of the militants could be isolated -- this, at least, was the gambit.
The faculty drawn to this ambiguous endeavor included idealists, liberals, and the most intolerant ultra-leftists, insuring a clash of divergent interests. The students drawn to Vincennes, on the other hand, included, just as the planners had hoped, the cream of the militant crop, many of them veterans of the street-fighting in May...
p176
...Foucault’s... department included a Trotskist, a Communist, and -- more fatefully still -- a critical mass of self-styled Maoists, affiliated with the Gauche prolétarienne [GP].
...Tiny though it was, its prestige was great: embodying the most stringent standards of ardor and commitment, the group managed to combine the delight in disorder evinced by a Bakunin with the ruthless genius for tactical maneuver displayed by a Lenin. As no other French group could, the GP promised to carry forward the movement started in May, prolonging the moment by mastering its chaotic energies...
p177
At first glance it is hard to see how a sectarian group like the Gauche prolétarienne, with its ascetic zeal and fanatic Marxism, could ever appeal to Foucault. “The eruption of theories, of political discussions, of anathemas, of exclusions, of sectarianism,” he admitted in 1978, “scarcely interested and completely frustrated me.”
Still, his experience in Tunisia had also taught him that some varieties of superficially doctrinaire Marxism, in some circumstances, might retain some value as a kind of Sorelian myth. He also recognized that most of the militants in the GP, like most student rebels around the world, were at heart “much closer to Rosa Luxemburg than Lenin,” as Foucault explained in 1970. “They have put more trust in the spontaneity of the masses than in a theoretical analysis” -- or in the edicts of a revolutionary elite. Above all, the GP’s defiant style of direct action fit well with his own newfound interest, kindled in Tunis, in terms of rebellion that might provoke “the craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility of an absolute sacrifice.”
As 1968 drew to a close and his new job at Vincennes was about to begin, Foucault wished, as he later explained, to experiment with types of political action that would require “a personal, physical commitment, that would be real and would pose a problem in concrete, precise, definite terms. . . . What I was trying to do from that moment on was to constitute for myself a certain manner of recapturing both what had preoccupied me in my work on madness. . . and also what I had just seen in Tunisia: one rediscovered, then, experience.”
An unfortunate confession: I have been ignoring these “spaced” ellipses until now, rendering them as a regular ellipsis. It just now occurred to me that by rendering them accurately, I can distinguish between where I skip things and where my source skips something. Duh! I apologize for any confusion..
p178
Pursuing a similar interest in “experience” in the 1930s, Georges Bataille (whose work, back in print, was suddenly in vogue among French students) had welcomed “the sudden explosion of limitless riots,” “ the explosive tumult of peoples,” the sanguinary excesses of “catastrophic change.” In an analogous vein, Andre Glucksmann in 1968 had hailed “the madness of renewed revolution.” And in the months ahead, other leaders of the Gauche prolétarienne would call for “executions of despots, all sorts of reprisals for all the extortions suffered over the centuries.”...
...on January 23, 1969... at Vincennes, Foucault joined a handful of other professors and some five hundred students and militants in occupying the administration building and amphitheater of the new campus, which had been opened for classes just days before. The seizure was ostensibly a show of solidarity with students who had occupied the rector’s office at the Sorbonne earlier that day, in response to the appearance of police on the Paris campus. But to paraphrase a good slogan from the American student movement in those days, the issue was not the issue. The main point, one suspects, was to explore, again, the creative potential of disorder -- the Night of the Barricades, revisited. [Or, in other words, to dance with Kali]
...the militants at Vincennes had staged a series of increasingly vociferous demonstrations, aimed at “exposing the myth of Vincennes, the miraculous faculty.” They had denounced the experimental student-teacher assemblies -- during the assemblies, naturally -- as a “vast hoax,”... “Professorial power.” they declared, was “null and void.”
“Down with the University!” chimed in the GP, which also resurrected Voltaire’s anti-clerical slogan: “Crush infamy!”
The occupation of Vincennes lasted less than a day. Police began their assault on the administration building in the predawn hours of January 24. Those still inside, including Foucault, fought back furiously. They clogged the buildings stairways with tables, cabinets, and chairs, The police in response shot tear gas through the windows.
Some surrendered. Others’ including Foucault, fled to the roof. There, they set about hurling bricks at the police gathered below.
Witnesses recall that Foucault exulted in the moment, gleefully lobbing stones -- although he was careful not to dirty his beautiful black velour suit.
p179
“He was very courageous, physically very courageous,” recalls Andre Glucksmann, who fought alongside the philosopher that night: “When the police came at night, he wanted to be in the front ranks, to fight. . . . I admitted that.”... [I’m not sure this paragraph could have been written about any philosopher since Socrates]
p180
...Foucault, like Dr. Frankenstein, had to cope with the monster he had created in the form of the Vincennes philosophy department.
Offering countless courses with titles like “Cultural Revolutions” and “Ideological Struggle,” Foucault’s department naturally attracted dissidents of every conceivable type. Many of his militant colleagues were swept up in the enthusiasm of the moment: in 1970, Judith Miller, a professed Maoist (and Jacques Lacan’s daughter), handed out certifications of course credit in philosophy to total strangers on a bus, explaining afterward in the pages of L’Express that “the university is a figment of capitalist society.”...
In public, Foucault staunchly defended his program, and also the continuing rebellion in the universities. “We have tried to produce the experience of freedom,” he explained in the pages of Le Nouvel Observateur. “I will not say total freedom, but as complete as possible in a university like that at Vincennes.” The teaching of philosophy in France, he argued, had long functioned as an insidious kind of indoctrination, creating a “politico-moral consciousness. A national guard of consciences.” To preserve the traditional curriculum in philosophy, as the government wanted, “would be to fall into a trap.” Besides, added Foucault, “I am not sure, you know, if philosophy really exists. What exists are ’philosophers,’ a certain category of men whose discourse and activities have varied a great deal from age to age.”
“It seems to me that what students are trying to do, in what at first glance may appear merely folkloric, and what I myself am trying to accomplish in the dust of my books, is basically the same thing,” Foucault explained in still another interview in these months. “We must free ourselves from . . . cultural conservatism, as well as from political conservatism. We must see our rituals for what they really are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it is good -- and that is the real theater -- to transcend them in the manner of play, by means of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put ’in play,’ show up, transform, and reverse the systems which quietly order us about. As far as I am concerned, that is what I try to do in my work.” ...
Interesting that the arbitrariness of signs also apply to the appearances of rebellion, like beards and long hair. Today those signs would signify something very different, and you might look for cropped hair, tattoos and other forms of body art instead. This also, again, revives the debate going back to the time of Mary Shelley’s parents and Edmund Burke, of the social value vs danger of altering social controls. Here’s a strange coincidence: “For What It’s Worth” is currently playing here at the Bank Cafe (YouTube link)
p181
...The campus [at Vincennes] was constantly in an uproar, roiled by strikes, marches, and classroom demonstrations. Following the time-honored radical precept that “my closest friend is my most dangerous enemy,” militant students targeted Foucault’s lectures for disruption.
His patience wore thin. It was one thing to express solidarity with the left in interviews, or by pitching stones from roof tops -- that was fun! But it was quite another thing to have to put up, day in and day out, with the insane harangues of the various ultra-left sects that stormed through his classroom.
Foucault had begun to feel, as he once suggested, like Sade at Charenton: staging subversive plays in the asylum, and then having the inmates rise in rebellion against the master himself.
Foucault’s solution was simple. He spent as little time as possible on campus, concentrating instead on his research and reading in the Bibliothèque Nationale. [Jealous now!]
p182
...despite his deepening involvement in the political and social movements around him, his research remained almost entirely focused on the past. “History has a more important task than to be handmaiden to philosophy,” he wrote in his essay on Nietzsche. [“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”] “It has to be a differential knowledge of energies and weaknesses, of heights and breakdowns, of poisons and antidotes. It has to be a science of remedies” -- if only for the historian himself.
Or, as Nietzsche himself once explained in an aphorism Foucault cites, “to live in the present, within a single culture, does not suffice as a universal prescription: too many people of utility who cannot breathe properly in it would die out. With the aid of history one can give them air.”
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