Censier University was on strike from 23 February and blockaded from the following day. Efforts to mobilise around the CPE had begun around one month earlier through the UNEF students’ union. Around 20 people got together after a fairly huge meeting on the question of the sale of Censier to discuss how to organise against the CPE. We set up a mobilising committee which formed the motivated core who mobilised for the mass meeting of 200 people on 23 February. The meeting voted for the strike and the next day the ferment began: selective blockade, banners, posters, calls on students to join the mass meeting that afternoon where 400 people voted to carry on the strike and the blockade. From the moment the blockade was in place many questions started to be asked—how to spread things, reach the biggest possible number of students, organise the debates, the chairing, etc.
The movement didn’t come from nowhere. There had been other experiences, other student movements, other strikes. A number of students had been part of the struggle against the LMD university reforms in 2003, a movement which was very small compared to this one, but for them it was clear that they needed help from workers to win. The fact that lecturers and support staff had joined us was crucial not just for organising the blockades and the debates but in order to say that we’re not just fighting against the CPE but also against the CNE—it’s the same logic, and it affects all workers, not just the youth.
We insisted from the start on the importance of reaching out to as many students as possible. The first commission which was set up was information/reception—a table with the text of the CPE and arguments against it, and then, as things developed, a big banner, an ‘information point’, coffee, cakes and a discussion space in the entrance hall. The aim was that every student who arrived at the university and saw they couldn’t go to classes should be informed about the action we were taking.
As time went by, the blockade, combined with the huge work of reception and information, meant that the mass meetings got even bigger. What was at stake was really to ensure that as few students as possible left for home once they saw the university blockaded. From the outset the blockade was a means to organise ourselves and to take control of the campus, to make it a place for debate. The debates we had weren’t just about casual employment: we had debates on Argentina, on the anti-war movement, and so on.
The mass meetings
We argued that mass meetings should be held every day to inform as many students as possible about the CPE and to decide every day, in a democratic manner, the renewal of the strike and the blockade. At the outset the mass meetings always started with information about the CPE, and after a week this was expanded to cover the law on equality of opportunity.
Organising the meetings and holding debates which covered all questions allowed us to reduce their duration, which could be as long as four hours, but also meant everyone could intervene ‘when they wanted on what they wanted’. Our demands, the preparation of demos, the commissions, every proposal that came out of the debate was marked on the blackboard and voted on at the end. We tried to ensure that the chair was rotated regularly because it’s an important job which teaches you a lot.
The lecturers and the support staff joined us in an organised way after a week of the blockade. Mass meetings of just under 100 lecturers and support staff voted not just to strike but to participate in the blockade of the university with the students, and then to participate with the students in organising debates. Their involvement also allowed us to become aware of their conditions of work, to discover people like the university cleaners who we’d passed by every day without even seeing them. It’s because the university became ours, and because we cleaned out the lecture theatres and classrooms that we were occupying all day, that we got into discussions with them. They backed the movement because their children were at university but above all because they knew what precarious working conditions meant. In fact, most of the cleaning staff at Censier had, on top of the job at the university, another equally precarious job. That was why they couldn’t come to the mass meetings. They nevertheless had a lot to teach us, not just about their working conditions but about how to organise a strike. Two of them had taken part in major strikes, one at Roissy airport, the other at the H&M clothing chain.
The question arose very quickly of making our university a place of animation and debate and giving each student a task which allowed them to convince ever increasing numbers of people and to take the movement forward. Several commissions were created—the blockade, reception/
information, animation, reflection, action, external relations, press, administration, postering, liaison with lecturers/students. Each had a clear role and its size depended on its functions. People elected to report back from each commission made up the strike committee, which met in open session every day. This way of working, from the bottom up, meant that we could involve more people and give the movement a broad leadership.
A number of debates took place in the university, on precarious employment, for example, to which people were invited from the outside—workplace inspectors, social workers, casual workers, contract workers in the arts, doctors—and drew in around 100 or 150 students.
Spreading the action
There were certain activities—blockades, etc—during the first part of the movement which were complementary and not in opposition to the big demonstrations. We went to see the workers at Citroen, for example, meeting the union reps and leafleting the workers as they left the factory. Later there were debates in the movement about the kind of action which should take place. We always argued for mass leafleting rather than minority blockades which didn’t develop the movement or involve the maximum number of people. There was much greater emphasis on links with workers after the first big demo, not just the blockades, but on leafleting supermarkets and other attempts to persuade workers to go on strike. And after the big demonstration on 28 March there were blockades at a big sorting office involving students and postal workers, and a blockade at the Gare de Lyon, where trains were stopped for quite a while.
As in all movements, people generalised and had political expectations. This was our weak point; we remained quite movementist and it was the students and the new comrades who joined the Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionnaires (JCR) who pushed us to up our game and introduce politics into the movement.
Our big weakness was that most of our groups turned around what we were pushing in the movement. We didn’t sell the paper, either on campus or on demos. We did begin to correct that, because the new comrades want politics—there’s really a demand from them which showed us that we weren’t political enough in the movement. They more or less said to us, ‘I’ve joined a revolutionary organisation, not the movement—I’m in that already—so now what is it to be revolutionary today? What are your ideas?’
We had initiated the setting up of an alternative to neo-liberalism on campus in mid-December. This anti-neoliberal collective only intervened late in the movement, but it really developed, to involve around 60 people, and we have been able to hold meetings of about 100 people in our local area. At a big meeting to discuss the anti-neoliberal charter, where all the collectives were represented, there was a big debate on building a political alternative, on the possibility of a unity candidate for next year’s presidential elections, bringing all the groups and parties of the anti-neoliberal left together in a campaign with a perspective of building a new force on the left. In the wake of the movement the main student union, UNEF, is recruiting massively. More broadly in terms of developing an anti-neoliberal political alternative it’s very important that the anti-neoliberal collectives develop on campus as well, and those that are growing are doing so on the basis of a new anti-neoliberal alternative on the left.
Chronology of the anti-CPE movement
16 January 2006 Prime minister Dominique de Villepin announces the creation of the Contract of Initial Employment (CPE) as an amend
30 January Students take part in a week of mobilisation against the CPE.
7 February First mobilisations of students and workers against the CPE: 400 000 take part in 187 demonstrations.
9 February The government passes its Law on Equality of Opportunity, including the CPE, by decree.
14 February Students blockade the University of Rennes.
7 March Half France’s universities now on strike. One million demonstrate across the country.
11 March Riot police break up the occupation of the Sorbonne after three days.
14 March Student day of action. Demonstrations and mass meetings take place all over France. Nantes train station is occupied by students.
16 March Students demonstrate across France, as more schools and universities join the movement.
18 March 1.5 million demonstrate across France. In Paris riot police trample SUD-PTT union activist Cyril Ferez, leaving him in a coma.
23 March Paris demonstration ends with violent clashes between groups of youths, demonstrators and police.
27 March Nearly a quarter of high schools estimated to be on strike.
28 March Three million demonstrate across France.
29 March Poll shows 83 percent of population oppose CPE.
30 March Groups of students block roads and railway lines all over France. Constitutional Council declares CPE is legal.
31 March President Chirac announces on television that he will ratify the CPE, but declares that it
will not be implemented. Spontaneous demonstrations break out in many towns and cities.
2 April Student coordination meets in Lille and calls for indefinite general strike.
4 April Three million demonstrate across France for the second week running.
5 April Blockades of roads and railways, occupations of town halls, ruling UMP party offices and sorting offices continue throughout the week.
10 April The CPE is scrapped.