Word: frenchness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...