ABSTRACT
Mass demonstrations have been frequent under the Fifth Republic in virtually all economic or political climates. In 1975, not a particularly troubled year, there were 612 demonstrations in Paris, of which 312 necessitated the mobilisation of the police. The Algerian war triggered off massive demonstrations in favour of peace, two of which were repressed with murderous ferocity by the police. May 1968 was, in this as in other respects, in a class of its own, with left-wing students in Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes, Strasbourg and other big university towns mounting enormous carnavalesque processions – and finally giving way, in Paris on 30 May, to a gigantic tricolour-waving pro-Gaullist rally. For demonstrations are not confined to left-wing groups. Even more picturesque than May 1968 was the farmers’ tour de force in September 1991, when the Champs-Élysées was transformed into a wheatfield for a weekend. Demonstrations have brought out doctors, nurses, professors in gowns and, once in 1993, employers from the textile industry, complete with blazer-clad stewards specially hired for the day. Probably the largest demonstration held in Paris since the Liberation, on 24 June 1984, gathered 1.3 million defenders of Church schools against the Socialist government’s reform projects; just under a decade later, some 600,000 supporters of secular education came out against the Balladur government’s plans to raise subsidies to Catholic schooling. Numbers in excess of 100,000 have also rallied in Paris around causes as varied as the future of French farming (almost every year from 1982 to 1991), the social security system (at the CGT’s behest, in 1987 and 1990), anti-racism (in 1990, after an attack on the Jewish cemetery at Carpentras by a group of skinheads close to the FN), health issues (in 1991), the education budget (in 1990) and Alain Devaquet’s plans to allow universities to select students and charge fees (in 1986). Unlike most of the others, the antiDevaquet demonstrations did not pass off peacefully, thanks to troublemakers among the demonstrators and poorly commanded and ultimately violent riot police, who beat one demonstrator to death.
