Behind the Glass

Robert Merle’s novel looks at a single day on the Nanterre campus of the Sorbonne, Paris’ venerable institution. This day was just over a month before the revolutionary events associated with the May Movement (Touraine, 1971) of nineteen sixty-eight. Built in an industrial zone, occupied in previous centuries by vineyards and other fields, after the Second World War the grounds of Nanterre had been populated then abandoned, by various factories and warehouses, as the Parisian urban center pushed office complexes and suburban residential projects into the area. With the rapid expansion of France’s university system, the Nanterre campus opened in nineteen sixty-four with nearly four thousand students. By nineteen sixty-eight, that number had swelled to fifteen thousand, and students expected to have twenty-five thousand classmates the following fall. On March twenty-second, a group of about one hundred and fifty students occupied part of the administration building of the Nanterre campus. These students took the date as the name of their movement, and we remember them for the central role that many of them played in the dramatic events which precipitated the events of May. As such, it is worth looking into how these students came together in the first place.

Occupation

On March twenty-second students from a variety of groups came together to occupy the eighth-floor of building A on Nanterre’s campus. What began on the ground floor as a sort of open forum for any student to air their opinions or state their proposals for action, was transformed into an evening of further debate in the relative comfort and accommodation of the professors’ eighth-floor meeting room. Where they stood, packed shoulder to shoulder, in the foyer on the ground floor, in the meeting room they draped themselves comfortably over the lounge chairs and organized themselves around the immense wooden table that normally served the faculty and administration. It was another instance of the students flagrantly disregarding the rules and customs of the Parisian university system. It was another instance of the students organizing to express their discontent with the conditions under which they labored as students under the administration of de Gaulle. It was another instance of the students choosing a bit of unmitigated comfort over the prevailing conditions thrust upon them by a relatively unsympathetic bureaucracy.