When French riot police raided the Paris 3 University campus in Censier at dawn on Monday morning, evicting student protesters, the ghost loomed large of the student uprisings of May 1968, reports The Guardian.
Emmanuel Macron, the first French president born after that civil unrest, has faced several protests this spring. These have ranged from student sit-ins against the introduction of more selective entry requirements for university admissions, to train strikes over changes to state railways, and opposition to a new immigration law. Macron has said the demonstrators are in a minority and vowed to press on with his planned liberal overhaul of the economy.
But 50 years on from the student protests, the month of May is especially loaded with historic symbolism, which the government has brushed aside and trade unions would like to capitalise on.
One student protester, Antoine Guégan, knows better than most that comparisons are not clear cut between protests this year and the events of May 1968, which also saw a massive, nationwide general strike against a global backdrop of protests from Prague to the US.
Guégan, 27, was part of the Censier campus student takeover that was raided by police this week. His father, Gérard Guégan, staged sit-ins at the same campus, aged 27, in May 1968.
For three weeks, Guégan had sat up into the early hours debating how to fix society from behind the student barricades at Censier.
“It’s terrifying to see that this is becoming the norm for riot police to be sent into universities,” said Guégan, who is doing a doctorate on representations of slavery in American cinema and teaches at the campus while studying at another university in Paris’s suburbs. He will join labour day protests against Macron in the French capital on Tuesday.