May Made Me: An Oral History of the 1968 Uprising in France by Mitchell Abidor

Author:Mitchell Abidor [Abidor, Mitchell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2018-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

JOSEPH POTIRON

Joseph Potiron, born in 1932, is a legendary figure on the left in Brittany. Living on the same tenant farm he grew up on in La Chapelle-sur-Erdre, outside Nantes, he has long been active in radical circles, and during the events in May played a central role in supporting the striking workers in the region.

When I think of peasants I think of individualists, yet you’re a peasant syndicalist. How do you square this circle?

It’s quite simple. I’m from a region of small farms, of people of modest means. The period around ’68 that of the trente glorieuses, which everyone considers something really great. But the trente glorieuses were years that were paid for by someone, or by a multitude of people, notably by small farmers, who were in the process of disappearing at that time, or rather who were being made to disappear. But it takes time to kill a farmer: he never gives up hope. They were being led to believe it was all their fault, and they didn’t understand why they were disappearing. And they still don’t.

It was also being paid for by the OS [ouvrier spécialisé], the unskilled workers who were at the bottom of the social scale. And maybe it was because I was the fifth of seven kids, but I thought about solidarity, particularly between workers and peasants, because I considered all of them workers, and since I was an adolescent I’d seen that their exploiters were the same.

Because of this, I necessarily found myself part of combative movements. I fought because I was a peasant, because I heard myself called “hick,” because people denigrated the world of the farmer. At the theater, in films, for people of “quality,” it was acceptable to ridicule the work of the farmer. We were boors, we weren’t civilized, we were less than dogs …

In the region of Nantes there had been major strikes in ’53, strikes in Saint-Nazaire and Nantes, and there were major movements in 1955 when I came back from my military service.

At the beginning it wasn’t that I was there in support of all their activities, that of the workers. First there were peasant demonstrations, rough ones, starting in ’66, and I increasingly came to think about solidarity with the world of the workers. But I thought that the students were people who were of no interest to us, since they were the sons of the bourgeoisie. And then on March 22 I heard Cohn-Bendit interviewed at Nanterre, saying we don’t want to replace the capitalist system, we want to blow it up and start something new. I saw that this was what I’d been waiting for for years without knowing it. And that day said something to me. Of course, I didn’t know all that was involved, but for me there was no other solution, there was no way to reform the system, and that we had to get rid of it.

And when things happened in Paris on May 3, did it take long to reach you here?

There was a demo of farmers on May 8 here in Nantes.

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