But thanks to American imperialism in Vietnam, the French student movement was given a real blood and guts issue which everybody could understand and students once again swarmed into the streets.

Veterans of France's own Vietnam and Algerian wars, their moral outrage was quickly turned into concrete political action both against the U. S. and increasingly against their own government, whom they accused of supporting the war effort.

AS THE Americans escalated the war, European students escalated their demonstrations. 5,000 students participated in a peaceful five-hour march in Liege in 1966, tens of thousands marched in the more militant demonstration in October, 1967, in Brussels, and then in West Berlin in February, 1968 students fought pitched battles against German police.

The leader in ideology and revolutionary pratique was the German SDS. Convinced that Advanced Industrial Society had developed a complex system to integrate and blunt all opposition within it, they concluded that participation in parliamentary elections, worker-employer councils, student-faculty committees, cte., was all a-big sham. The owners of the big enterprises and the politicians still made the decisions, only "consulting" the people from time to time. To destroy this false impression of participation and open a breech in the system of integration, the political action of SDS became a "refus organisee."

They specifically warned that this refusal must not happen on the fringes of society like that of the American hippies or Dutch Provos, because society can easily contain the marginal revolts of individuals. The only recourse was a frontal attack against society by relusing all legitimacy and doing the illegal. The focal point was direct action, violent and spectacular confrontation through personal insult, scandal, provocation, violent street demonstrations, and breaking of police lines. The aim was to ridicule the es-

tablished justice of society, to show as Deutshke says that "the rules of the game of this absurd democracy are not ours."

This new style of the polities of "total contestation" soon pushed its roots into French soil. In Fall. 1966, members of the Internationale Situationniste, dubbed "les enrages" by the press, shocked France by completely razing the local association of l'UNEF. Influenced more by the Surrealists and Nihilists than Marx or Mao, they succeeded through student indifference in being elected to the direction of l'UNEF. Their first and last official act was to declare the immediate dissolution of the association, burn all its files, and urinate on the crowd passing below the office while singing the International.

Besides its brutal attack on institutions, which was a keynote of the revolt in May '68, the situationnists represented the new spirit and new kind of student entering student polities. Joy and laughter became necessary accompaniments of revolutionary action. "The proletarian revolutions will be celebrations or will not be." declared the situationnists. The new radicals were agitators more spontaneous and less ideological than the propagandists in the groupescules.

No one expected May's revolt. Everyone realized the potential of the student movement, but lacking any one strong organization no one took it seriously. The success and originality of Cohn-Bendit and friends were to avoid abstract polities and instead concentrate on university issues, which gradually led to political issues.

THE BREEDING ground for the student revolt was the Faculty of Letters at Nanterre, France's first attempt to create an American style campus university. The French botched it. No real thought was given to increasing the contacts between students and faculty. After class the professors immediately drove back to Paris. The government simply moved the whole rigidly bureaucratic and authoritarian apparatus of the French university into modern buildings. It changed its skin, but not its soul.

As the expectations of the students were shattered by reality, they became obsessed with leaving the campus. Boredom loomed. For 12,000 students there was only one restaurant nearby and no cinema. Nanterre itself is a "bidonville," a honky-tonk town of shabby houses and grey shacks surrounded by huge expanses of dumps and cheap, concrete apartment buildings. Fitzgerald's ashheaps and Eliot's wasteland, they are Nanterre. A fantastic number required a shrink.

Adding to their frustration was also the fear that even if they made it out of Nanterre, there was little likelihood of finding a job suitable to their education. In the last few years there had been a huge increase in the number of university students, but no similar increase in opportunities. Like American students facing the draft those French students in sociology, philosophy, and literature, who were the great majority of revolutionaries, looked upon their futures with dread and without the hope that ending a war would bring a solution.

What enabled the revolt to break out so quickly and brutally was the rigidity of the university structure, which knew only one way of change-rupture. The government and not the faculty controls the university. They decide everything from how much money is spent to what time the classes are given. There are no "intermediate institutions"-no student-faculty committees which can often muffle and absorb a conflict as at Harvard. If anything goes wrong it is brought straight to the ministry. In a system with such little leeway for evolution, any change was a radical change and any serious challenge liable to topple everything.

The complete failure of the moderate student strike in November 1967 for smaller classes, a library, and less stringent degree requirements convinced the students that the faculty and administration didn't want to and couldn't do anything. Traditionally docile to their professors and fatalistic about their futures, French students goaded by Cohn-Bendit began to challege their professors and then to insult them, shout them down, and denounce them as charlatans in a repressive university.

After Christmas, education stopped at Nanterre, Chaos regned. The fete had begun once more. Informal and having no real ruling clique, the movement at Nanterre, later to be named. The Movement of March 22, accepted all kinds of students. Jokes and songs replaced much of the usual political jargon. Much more spontancity and personal involvement was possible at Nanterre than at the Sorbonne where "revolutionary vanguards" controlled all action and inaction. And for the first time in the history of the French student movement members of more than one groupescule militated in the same organization. Secure that the interests of their groups were not threatened, they gleefully joined March 22's rape of the university.