France: riot police attack student protesters at the Sorbonne

Camera crews inside the building recorded the riot police, wielding batons and firing tear gas canisters, smashing their way through doors and flimsy barricades of piled-up chairs. The building was cleared in less than fifteen minutes.

The Sorbonne occupation was part of nationwide student actions being carried out against the government’s CPE (First Job Contract) measure. The new law will impose a two-year trial period for newly employed young workers, during which time employers will be allowed to sack the workers without cause. The bill was rushed through the National Assembly and passed on March 8. The day before, nearly 1 million youth and workers across France demonstrated against the institutionalised job insecurity represented by the CPE.

Since then, student strikes have spread from ten to 45 of France’s 88 universities. University teachers have also begun a strike movement. Mass meetings involving thousands of students have been held at various universities to approve indefinite strike action. Four thousand packed a stadium in Toulouse in the largest of the meetings.

University and high school students’ organisations have called for national strikes and demonstrations on Tuesday and Thursday of this week, and on Saturday there will be a national day of protest, sponsored by all of the trade union federations alongside the student organizations.

The violent break-up of the Sorbonne occupation underscored the government’s fear that this centre of the student and worker uprising of May-June 1968 might once again become the focus of mass opposition In 1968, following battles between students and police at the Sorbonne, 10 million workers struck in alliance with the students and occupied their workplaces, prompting then-president Charles De Gaulle to temporarily flee the country.

The current struggle against the CPE is developing to the point of throwing into question the survival of the centre-right government of Villepin and President Jacques Chirac. Libération commented that Villepin “is on a tightrope.”

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/fran-m14.shtml