Daniel Guérin and the immigrant workers’ movements of the 1970s
Paper to Daniel Guérin International Conference,
Loughborough University, 17-19 September 2004
Daniel Gordon, Edge Hill College of Higher Education
Among the major themes with which the life and work of Daniel Guérin is associated
is that of anti-colonialism. What this paper intends to show is how Guérin’s wellknown part in the dismantling of France’s colonial empire fed, after decolonisation,
into a rather less well-known role in the prehistory of France’s contemporary internal
anti-racist movements. To begin with, it may be observed from a reading of Guérin’s
collected autobiographical and journalistic works that his anticolonial activism,
though partly derived from direct experience of the colonies, also in part arose from
personal contacts with migrants from the colonies to the metropole. From Gandhi in
1931 via Messali Hadj in the aftermath of the riots of 6 February 1934, through his
interview with Ho Chi Minh in 1946, to his meeting with the young Mohammed
Harbi in 1954, Guérin’s early political career was peppered with encounters with anticolonial militants who had travelled to the West.1
But what happened to Guérin’s anti-colonialist internationalism after the struggles for
decolonisation had apparently successfully culminated with Algerian independence in
1962? A clue to answering this question is given in the concluding lines of his 1973
collection of writings, Ci-gît le colonialisme, where Guérin argued that, even at that
late date, and despite the liquidation of the vast majority of the European colonial
empires, ‘la décolonisation est loin d’être parachevée’.2 On his “still to be done” list,
featured amongst other things, France’s neo-colonial foreign policies; its remaining
colonies, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Djibouti, Réunion, Tahiti and the
Comoros islands; conservative post-colonial elites keeping countries’ wealth to
themselves; and Zionism. And also, crucially, what Guérin called ‘interior
decolonisation’:
Il reste, également, encore beaucoup à faire en matière de décolonisation intérieure, à savoir celles
des minorités opprimés: décolonisation des Noirs américains, décolonisation des travailleurs
immigrés, arabes, portugais, etc. dans les pays occidentaux du continent européen; décolonisation
des hommes de couleur en Grande-Bretagne, décolonisation des Irlandais du Nord catholiques,
décolonisation des Canadiens français, décolonisation économiques des pays d’Amérique du Sud,
décolonisation des pays vassalisés par l’URSS3
Guérin thus linked the problem of colonialism to the problem posed by the oppression
of immigrant and other minorities within the Western states themselves. Out of this
collection of causes dear to the hearts of the New Left, Guérin is most readily
associated with the first. His interest in matters African-American, which he had
turned his attention to in the 1950s,4 had more recently been revived by the Black
Power movement. In 1966, Guérin wrote the introduction to the French edition of The
D.Guérin, Au service des colonisés 1930-1953 (Paris, 1954), 14-15, 21; D.Guérin, Quand L’Algérie
s’insurgait 1954-1962: un anticolonialiste témoigne (Claix, 1979), 34.
2
D.Guérin, Ci-gît le colonialisme: Algérie, Inde, Indochine, Madagascar, Maroc, Palestine, Polynésie,
Tunisie: témoignage militant (The Hague, 1973), 187.
3
Guérin, Ci-gît le colonialisme, 188.
4
D.Guérin, Negroes on the March. A Frenchman’s Report on the American Negro Struggle (New
York, 1956).
1
2
Autobiography of Malcolm X (translated by Anne Guérin)5 and in December 1967 in a
talk at the Mutualité he posed the explosive question ‘Le Pouvoir Noir peut-il
révolutionner les Etats-Unis?’6 Yet Guérin, always as harsh a critic of his own society
as that of others, was also aware that France’s own problems of racism had not gone
away with the granting of formal independence to its colonies. Rather, he seems to
suggest with this notion of interior decolonisation, they had been posed in a new way
with the appearance of large-scale labour migration from both North Africa and
Southern Europe to France.
Guérin’s interest in ‘interior decolonisation’ can perhaps be viewed as a product of
two major social developments of the 1960s and early 1970s. On the one hand, these
were the peak years of immigration in postwar France, which had seen some three
million immigrant workers migrate in largely unplanned fashion to fill vacancies in
the building and car industries, many of whom were living in some of the worst
housing in Western Europe in the shantytowns that surrounded Paris and other major
cities. On the other hand, the revolt of May-June 1968 had sharply radicalised
substantial sections of the intelligentsia, who believed that revolutionary
transformation was again possible, and saw outsider, marginal elements including
immigrant workers as among the key possible agents of this.
This had a profound impact on Guérin, for as the dissertation by Nicolas Norrito
argues, the aftermath of 1968 served as a kind of ‘second youth’ for Guérin, as he
sought to transmit his knowledge and experiences to a new generation of militants.7
Though too old to be in the thick of things - he was by then well into his sixties Guérin instead played a supporting role to the soixante-huitards from behind the
scenes. Going through his correspondence for these years at the Bibliothèque de
Documentation Internationale Contemporaine in Nanterre, the impression I formed of
Guérin was as a kind of benevolent and indeed rich uncle figure to young marginal
leftists of all kinds. The nickname ‘Tonton’ given to François Mitterand, might
equally have been coined for Guérin. Given his status by then as an elder statesman of
the far left, he received many requests for help, some of them directly financial. In
1972 for example he was asked for a loan by an unknown individual in Aix linked to
a small groupuscule called ‘Revolution!’8 The same year, he received a circular sent
from the Comité de soutien d’Africasia, which described itself as ‘un organe
d’information et de réflexion anti-impérialiste conséquent’. Sent to 20 select
comrades, the letter asked for 20 million old francs each, as a contribution from
European democrats to the liberation struggles of countries which their countries
exploit.9 In this avuncular role Guérin was not unique. Though we tend to think of
1968 as being about fresh-faced 19 year olds hurling paving stones at the police, a
significant behind-the-scenes role was also played by intellectuals of a similar vintage
to Guérin, who had the clout and the respectability to be able to speak up for their hotheaded young comrades without too much risk of punishment.10 The obvious example
L’Autobiographie de Malcolm X (Paris, 1966).
Published as the pamphlet Le Pouvoir Noir (Paris, 1968).
7
N.Norrito, ‘Daniel Guérin: une figure de la radicalité politique au vingtième siècle’, Mémoire de
DEA d’histoire contemporaine, Paris X – Nanterre, 1999, 79-80.
8
Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Université Paris-X, Nanterre (hereafter
BDIC), F DELTA RES 688/36, M.d’Alverny to D.Guerin, 7 October 1972.
9
BDIC F DELTA RES 688/36, Circular, [1972].
10
For a detailed account of older intellectuals’ relationship with 1968, see B.Brillant, Les clercs de 68
(Paris, 2003).
5
6
3
is Sartre, but of those who became particularly involved in immigrant solidarity work,
the names of novelist Claude Mauriac11 or indeed Michel Foucault12 also come to
mind.
The marginality of those to whom Guérin came to the rescue was usually political, but
in many cases also by being foreign. At a time when Interior Minister Raymond
Marcellin was obsessively sniffing out plots by international leftist subversives,13
there was a certain appropriateness to Guérin’s concern for foreigners in trouble. The
highest profile example was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, brought up partly in France but a
West German citizen. Guérin was in contact with Cohn-Bendit as early as November
1967, well before ‘Red Danny’ became known to a wider public.14 He went on to
provide some financial subsidy15 to Cohn-Bendit’s Mouvement du 22 mars, the group
of confrontational students at Nanterre University formed when a university building
was occupied on 22 March 1968 to protest the disciplining of two students for
breaking the windows of an American Express office as a statement against the
Vietnam War. In that sense, Guérin contributed to a sequence of events that led
directly to the events of May 1968.16 When Cohn-Bendit was expelled from France
for his role in the events, Guérin sought to overturn the order, writing articles on
Cohn-Bendit’s behalf.17
But as befitted a man who has been aptly described as an ‘éternel minoritaire’,18
Guérin was also interested in more obscure figures who did not become causes
célèbres. When some hundreds of foreigners were expelled from France for their real
or alleged part in the events of May 1968,19 Guérin stepped in. As a member of the
Union des écrivains, he signed a petition denouncing the expulsions,20 and was also a
member of the Comité pour la liberté et contre la répression, formed by leading
intellectuals in June 1968 to campaign against the expulsions and other measures
carried out as the Gaullist regime attempted to restore order. 21 Guérin intervened
personally in a number of cases, including marginal ones. For example, during the
tale end of the events, an isolated group of young men in Bordeaux threw Molotov
cocktails at police stations and a Gaullist office, for which they received prison
sentences ranging from two to four years. Though almost all were workers of French
C.Mauriac, Et comme l’espérance est violente (Paris, 1976).
D.Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London, 1993), 305-313.
13
R.Marcellin, L’ordre public et les groupes révolutionnaires (Paris, 1969), 23-32, 37-55, 69;
M.Rajsfus, Mai 68: sous les pavés, la répression (Paris, 1998), 174-196.
14
BDIC F DELTA 721/29 bis, D.Cohn-Bendit to D.Guérin, 10 November 1967.
15
BDIC F DELTA RES 688/25, Mouvement du 22 mars, receipt for 1050 francs; Norrito, ‘Daniel
Guérin’, 79.
16
During the events themselves Guérin signed petitions against police violence and participated in
initiatives including the Union des écrivains: Brillant, Clercs de 68, 180, 182-183, 271, 275.
17
Le Monde, 24 May 1968; BDIC F DELTA 721/29 bis, Copy of D.Guérin to D.Cohn-Bendit, 6
January 1969, D.Guérin, ‘Pourquoi Daniel Cohn-Bendit a pu être expulsé’, n.d.
18
Norrito, ‘Daniel Guérin’, 83.
19
D.Gordon, ‘ ‘‘Il est recommandé aux étrangers de ne pas participer’’: les étrangers expulsés en maijuin 1968’, Migrations Société, no. 87-88 (May-August 2003), 45-65.
20
Brillant, Clercs de 68, 393.
21
The committee brought out four issues of its newsletter Pour la liberté between January 1969 and
April 1970, consultable at the BDIC. Some documents from the committee’s work are included in the
Guérin archive (BDIC F DELTA 721/107).
11
12
4
nationality, one was a 25 year old Algerian student, Mohamed Gheraïa.22 Guérin
seems to have befriended Gheraïa, who wrote to him from La Santé prison giving an
account of his involvement with the group, requesting a donation to their campaign
and copies of his books. Partly as a result of pressure from Guérin, the men were freed
in July 1969 as part of an amnesty to mark the new presidency of Georges
Pompidou.23
Guérin also corresponded at length with a British woman of anarchist leanings,
Colette Kay, whose husband Martin Kay, an English teacher, had been expelled
during the events. He sent telegrams on the Kays’ behalf to the secretary general at
the Elysée Palace, and the wife of the Education Minister, both of whom were known
to him personally. This seems to have done the trick: in November 1968, Martin
Kay’s expulsion was reported to have been overturned.24 Less successfully, he also
sent a telegram to de Gaulle on behalf of Schofield Corryel, founder of the Paris
American Committee to Stop War.25 Guérin also received a request for translation
work from a Portuguese refugee expelled for his part in the May-June events, who
having returned clandestinely to France was looking to work illegally. 26 At around the
same time, he contacted a member of the government of Monaco about the possibility
of a Greek refugee couple being allowed to live there.27 There is even a whole file in
the Guérin papers on Boris Fraenkel,28 the libertarian writer whose main claim to
fame is that in the early Sixties he was Lionel Jospin’s mentor in a Trotskyist
groupuscule called the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste.29 Born to Russian
refugee parents in what was then Danzig, and a long-term resident of France, Fraenkel
was issued with an expulsion order when in June 1968 he was caught at what the
French police suspected to be the Paris headquarters of the German revolutionary
group SDS, though as a stateless person he could not be removed from the country
and was instead ‘assigned to residence’ in the Dordogne.30 Unlike many of Fraenkel’s
erstwhile comrades, Guérin does appear to have made some attempt to keep in touch
with him during his years of confinement.31
Alongside the cosmopolitanism of the New Left intelligentsia itself, the years
immediately after 1968 also saw the rise of a tentative relationship between this
intelligentsia and immigrant workers. Tentative links were first forged during the
L’Aurore, 15 July 1968; Le Figaro, 18 July 1968; Rouge, 16 October 1968 and 24 December 1968;
Pour la liberté, January 1969.
23
BDIC F DELTA 721/107, M.Gheraïa to D.Guérin, 3 May 1969, Y.Joffa to D.Guérin, 27 June 1969,
M.Gheraïa to D.Guérin, 30 July [1969], J-J Langlois to to D.Guérin, 2 February 1970.
24
BDIC F DELTA RES 688/36, C.Kay to D.Guérin, 19 September 1968, D.Guérin to Goutier, 24
September 1968, C.Kay to D.Guérin, 6 November 1968, C.Kay to D.Guérin, 10 December 1968,
C.Kay to D.Guérin, 10 December 1969.
25
BDIC F DELTA 721/107, telegram from D.Guérin to C.de Gaulle; Le Monde, 11-12 August 1968
and 15 August 1968; Centre des archives contemporaine, Fontainebleau, 19910194, article 13, liasse 4,
R.Corryel to R.Marcellin, 22 March 1969.
26
Anon to D.Guerin, 5 November 1968.
27
BDIC F DELTA RES 688/36, F-D Gregh to D.Guérin, 11 April 1969.
28
BDIC F DELTA RES 688/36, file in bundle for 1969.
29
Le Nouvel Observateur, 10-22 September 1999; G.Chérel, Le fils caché de Trotsky (Paris, 2002), 7587.
30
UNEF/SNESUP Commission témoignages et assistance juridique, Ils accusent (Paris, 1968), 194195; Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 June – 2 July 1968; Droit et Liberté, December 1968; Pour la liberté,
January 1969; Le Monde, 26 March 1969.
31
Letters in BDIC F DELTA RES 688/36, bundle for 1970-1971.
22
5
events of 1968 themselves, when many immigrant workers participated on strikes and
demonstrations and when their exploitation became a component of the May
movement’s critique of French capitalist society, and groupuscules came to view
immigrants as promising potential recruits. From 1968 onwards, a variety of usually
short-lived committees, tracts and newsletters started to appear to express the theme
of solidarity between French and immigrant workers. 32
Nevertheless, such solidarity was only to be found in exceptional circumstances, such
as the general strike of May-June 1968. For the most part, pro-immigrant
campaigning was at this embryonic stage an affair of intellectuals – both a new
generation of revolutionaries forged on the barricades and their patrons among older
elite but dissident intellectuals, whose radicalism had been given a second wind by
1968 – i.e. people like Guérin. The first group, sometimes with the assistance of the
latter group, undertook spectacular, exemplary actions in an attempt to break the sea
of indifference that characterised public attitudes to a still largely invisible immigrant
population, segregated in shantytowns and hotel rooms. For example, in January
1970, when five African workers died in a fire in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers
because they had lit a makeshift fire when their landlord cut off the heating in midwinter, the headquarters of the employers’ organisation, the CNPF, was occupied in
protest. The CNPF occupiers comprised a motley crew of young Maoist militants and
well-known intellectuals, including Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras and Pierre VidalNaquet.33
It is in this context that we can place Daniel Guérin’s decision to become directeur de
publication of one of the early newssheets, Le Paria, of which three issues appeared
between December 1969 and May 1970.34 Having a directeur de publication was a
formal requirement for all newspapers, which meant a named individual taking legal
responsibility for the contents. Well-known intellectuals, who would be unlikely to
face serious repression, therefore either volunteered for or were asked to take on this
role, to act as protection for the activities of more hotheaded younger comrades, the
best-known example being Sartre’s role as directeur de publication of the often
incendiary Maoist paper La Cause du Peuple. The role was even more important in
the case of foreign nationals, who could not freely start newspapers and associations,
and who faced the ever-present risk of expulsion for intervening in French political
life. So, while there is little indication in the Guérin archives that he took much of a
day-to-day role in the running of Le Paria,35 he fulfilled an essential function as
directeur de publication. He shared the post with Maurice Clavel36 - writer and
philosopher, former wartime associate of General de Gaulle turned Maoist
sympathiser (and TV critic of Le Nouvel Observateur) - who was an outspoken critic
of Raymond Marcellin’s treatment of foreigners in France.37 Clavel also personally
Y.Gastaut, L’immigration et l’opinion en France sous la Ve République (Paris, 2000), 37-51, 149164; D.Gordon, ‘Immigrants and the New Left in France, 1968-1971’, DPhil dissertation, University of
Sussex, 2001.
33
Gastaut, L’immigration et l’opinion, 60.
34
They can be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the BDIC.
35
The only apparent reference in his papers is a reply from Guérin’s secretary to Bernard Lévy of the
Ecole Normale Supérieure, 28 January 1972, asking him to excuse Guérin for the delay in replying to a
letter of 22 September 1971, explaining that ‘Il l’a retrouvée dans la Boîte Postale du Paria!’ (BDIC F
DELTA RES 688/36).
36
Norrito, ‘Daniel Guérin’, 80.
37
M.Clavel, Combat de franc-tireur pour une libération (Paris, 1968); Brillant, Clercs de 68, 406-408.
32
6
participated in the CNPF occupation, when he was reported to have been pushed
down the stairs by CRS riot police.38
Le Paria’s title was - though also appropriate for Guérin, the outsiders’ friend - in
conscious imitation of the journal of the same name founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1922,
which it cited as the only previous example of a journal common to French and
immigrant workers in the communist movement.39 Its style, however, was
unmistakably post-1968, similar to other gauchiste papers of the time like La Cause
du Peuple, with big headlines and cartoons. It shared the political tropes characteristic
of this rather ultra-leftist phase, notably an extremely optimistic outlook, a constant
celebration of revolt for revolt’s sake, frequent invocations of May ‘68 and a good
deal of PCF-bashing. An example of this boundless optimism is its coverage of the
massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Paris on 17 October 1961, now notorious40 but
which at this time was little known or discussed outside far left circles. Le Paria
devoted some five pages to the massacre in its first issue, curiously emphasising that
Cette manifestation fut un succès, tant par son déroulement que par ses répercussions 41
- a far cry from the victimist reading of 17 October 1961 prevalent today, in which the
demonstration is remembered for its terrible repression and seen as anything but a
success.
However, Le Paria does appear to have broken new ground in its theoretical analysis
of the situation of immigrant workers in France, which it presented in its first issue.
Traditionally the French Left had believed, and to a large extent still did, that there
was such a thing as ‘la classe ouvrière française’ – one unified working class, which
was the key to any future social transformation, which foreign workers could and
should join, but which had explicitly or implicitly some kind of special universal
historical destiny linked to that of the French nation. By contrast, Le Paria proposed
the notion of ‘la classe ouvrière de France’, of which French workers were merely one
component amongst many: a position which perhaps reflected more accurately the
situation in French industry by 1969, where a large proportion of semi- and un-skilled
posts were occupied by foreign workers. Since they were judged likely to return to
their home countries eventually (an as it turned out inaccurate assumption shared by
virtually all observers at this time), Le Paria argued that immigrant workers should
not simply be used to swell the ranks of the French proletariat in its struggles, but be
assisted in their own separate struggles.42 But - old habits die hard - Le Paria still
envisaged all nationalities uniting together to destroy capitalism. The theme of unity
was underlined by the way that Le Paria was intended for all nationalities of
immigrant, Spanish and Portuguese as well as Algerian and Moroccan. Nevertheless,
it had a particularly large amount of material devoted to West Africans, who were
prominent in a number of disputes over housing in 1969-1970, such as the Ivry rent
strike. A feature article about Africans in the first issue demonstrated a growing
awareness that simple sloganising about unity was insufficient, noting that French
militants were often baffled by the communitarian consciousness, the role of griots
J-P Sartre, ‘Justice et Etat’, in Situations X. Politique et autobiographie (Paris, 1971), 69.
Le Paria, December 1969.
40
Recent publications include J.-L.Einaudi, Octobre 1961. Un massacre à Paris (Paris, 2001);
Association 17 octobre 1961 contre l’oubli, Le 17 octobre 1961, un crime d’état à Paris (Paris, 2001);
a full bibliography can be found at http://17octobre1961.free.fr/pages/dossiers/biblio.htm.
41
Le Paria, December 1969.
42
Le Paria, December 1969.
38
39
7
and marabouts and the language barriers that prevented a simple transplantation of
French leftist methods of organising into the African hostels.43
Le Paria met with only modest immediate success: despite the cover price of only one
franc, it appears to have sold around 600 copies per issue, meaning it was financially
reliant on donations from a few leading activists, such as Guérin himself.44 Rather
more widely read, it may be presumed, were its A3-sized supplements handed out for
free. Some 150,000 were printed for the January 1970 issue, reflecting the way that
the Aubervilliers fire had, unusually for that period, suddenly brought the immigration
issue to the forefront of public consciousness. With translations into Spanish and
Arabic, the supplement justified the occupation of the CNPF with the slogan ‘Non au
capitalisme assassin’, and presented a photo of one wall slogan that summed up how
the New Left in this period viewed anti-racism and anti-colonialism as one and the
same: ‘L’impérialisme tue à Aubervilliers comme au Tchad’ (the latter a reference to
the French-assisted counter-insurgency operation then underway in Chad).45
Despite the demise of Le Paria, and despite the fact that his published output includes
relatively little on the subject, throughout the early 1970s, Guérin continued to
intervene in support of immigrant workers, North African students and political
exiles. For example, he intervened in a dispute between students living in the
Moroccan hall of residence at the Cité Universitaire in Paris.46 In 1970, Guérin
received a letter from a supporter of the overthrown former Algerian president Ahmed
Ben Bella, living in exile in Marseille, asking for his help in finding work.47 When
journalists at the magazine Jeune Afrique went on strike in 1971, Guérin sent them
money.48 From 1972 onwards, campaigning shifted from actions on behalf of
immigrant workers to actions by immigrant workers themselves, and Guérin
continued to play his behind-the-scenes role. Guérin was in contact with many of the
major political figures from this period, such as Sally N’Dongo, the leader of the
Union Générale des Travailleurs Sénégalais en France. The UGTSF was the prototype
of the many attempts at this time to set up gauchiste-leaning unions of workers from
individual countries as a rival to the official fraternal organisations judged to be
pawns of home country governments and too subservient to the French authorities.49
In 1972, Guérin supported an appeal started by N’Dongo to set up an autonomous
African workers hostel and cultural centre in Nanterre, to be named the ‘Centre
Patrice Lumumba’, as an alternative to the existing hostels for Africans, which were
frequently run on authoritarian lines by ex-colonial administrators.50
A key event was when a number of Tunisians, led by the Maoist activist Saïd Bouziri,
went on hunger strike in eastern Paris in 1972-1973 to obtain residency permits and
43
Le Paria, December 1969.
Le Paria, 21 February 1970, reported sales for the first issue of 600 francs and that Guérin had given
500 francs.
45
Le Paria, supplement to December 1969 issue.
46
BDIC F DELTA 721/87.
47
BDIC F DELTA RES 688/36, M.Bouhadiche to D.Guérin, 4 May 1970.
48
BDIC F DELTA RES 688/36, annotations on cutting from Le Monde, 5 May 1971.
49
S.N’Dongo, ‘Itinéraire d’un militant africain’, Partisans, no. 64 (March-April 1972), 99-110;
S.N’Dongo, Voyage forcé: itinéraire d’un militant (Paris, 1975); A.Adams, ‘Prisoners in exile:
Senegalese workers in France’, in R.Cohen et al, Peasants and Proletarians: the struggles of Third
World workers (London, 1979), 307-330; Gastaut, L’immigration et l’opinion, 163-164.
50
BDIC F DELTA 721/99/11, cutting from Politique Hebdo, 20 January 1972.
44
8
protest against the proposal of the government to make it harder to obtain a renewal of
residency permits (known as the Marcellin-Fontanet decrees). Guérin was asked to
join Bouziri’s support committee51 only two days after it was founded in November
1972,52 and in January 1973 telephoned a communiqué to Le Monde in support of the
hunger strikers.53 The committee, which soon changed its name to the Comité de
défense de la vie et des droits des travailleurs immigrés, sparked a nation-wide protest
movement that was eventually successful in achieving the regularisation of the hunger
strikers and 35,000 others and a watering down of the governments’ proposals, and is
therefore seen as an important point in the development of an autonomous immigrant
workers’ movement in France. It was in fact, the first movement of sans-papiers, a
phrase which came into existence during the strike.54 Guérin was concerned, though,
about splits within the movement over tactics: some considered it was too
groupuscular, took too many risks and was over-reliant on the support of French
intellectuals, ‘progressives’ and students as opposed to workers:
Ce type d’action groupusculaire, spectaculaire, sans soutien de masse derrière, non seulement
expose les travailleurs immigrés à la répression mais les coupent encore plus des travailleurs
français55
By this point, Guérin was also serving as directeur de publication of a second
immigrant workers’ journal, Al Kadihoun, of which four issues appeared between
June 1972 and May 1974.56 Despite the subtitle ‘revue des travailleurs arabes en
Europe’, Al Kadihoun appears to have originated among a small group of leftist North
African students, who espoused a distinctly Maoist-tinged Marxism, mixed with
elements of pan-Arab nationalism. Influenced, like many of their contemporaries, 57 by
both the Arab defeat of 1967 and by May 1968, the group had during May ’68 set up
a pro-Palestinian stand at the Sorbonne and also participated in the Sorbonne-based
thirdworldist Comité des Trois Continents. Nevertheless, they were not entirely
complimentary about the French soixante-huitards, observing from their experiences
in 1968 that many on the Left in France were totally ignorant of revolutionary
movements in the Third World, ascribing this embarassing lapse to French
revolutionaries being ‘dominated an alienated by the oppressive culture of their
bourgeoisie’.58 Given this suspicion of French leftists’ intentions, it was quite a
compliment that when, four years later, the group launched with the newspaper Al
Kadihoun, a turn from theory towards going to live and work amongst immigrant
workers, they chose Guérin to be its directeur de publication (legal restrictions
51
BDIC F DELTA 721/96/5, P.Denais to D.Guérin, 9 November 1972.
BDIC F DELTA 721/96/5, tract by Comité de défense de la vie et des droits des travailleurs
immigrés, 27 November 1972.
53
BDIC F DELTA 721/96/5, Handwritten note, 10 January [1973?].
54
J.Simeant, La cause des sans-papiers (Paris, 1998); M.Abdallah, J’y suis, j’y reste: les luttes de
l’immigration en France depuis les années soixante (Paris, 2000), 35-38.
55
BDIC F DELTA 721/96/6, tract, Travailleurs Français Immigrés 11ème – 19ème, ‘Pourquoi nous
quittons le comité de de vie et des droits des immigrés’, enclosed in D.Guérin to ‘Chers Amis’, 8 June
1973.
56
These four issues of its foreign edition in French (the original being in colloquial Arabic) can be
found at the BDIC and at the Bibliothèque Nationale. There are also several leaflets issued by the
group, as well as letters indicating his involvement from June 1972 onwards, in BDIC F DELTA 721/
96/6.
57
See for example the autobiographical reminiscences of Afif Safieh, successively president of the
Belgian and French branches of the General Union of Palestinian students, Children of a Lesser God?
(London, 1999), 24-27.
58
Al Kadihoun, February-March 1973.
52
9
preventing them from performing this role themselves). Its first issue proudly
declared:
Le révolutionnaire français Daniel Guérin, bien connu pour ses prises de position anti-nazies et
contre l’antisémitisme en 1940, antisionistes en 1967 et pour son action en faveur des ouvriers en
grève de Pennaroya, a bien voulu accepter la charge de Directeur de publication d’Al-Kadihoun.59
Though it did attract some worker militants - by 1973 intellectuals had gone from
being a majority to a minority within the group60 - Al Kadihoun appears to have
foundered on a communication failure between the haute-Marxist theorising of its
originators, who had a propensity to rather wordy articles replete with footnotes and
political jargon, and its intended worker audience. As they admitted in one editorial:
les travailleurs arabes (comme la majorité des autres travailleurs) n’aiment pas lire et n’ont pas
l’habitude de se pencher sur des textes61
As has already been observed above, the reader of Guérin’s papers cannot help but
notice a certain tension between his revolutionary politics and his establishment
connections. Arguably this applied as much to the North African establishment as to
the French one. On the one hand he was directeur de publication of Al Kadihoun
which poked fun at the authoritarianism of postcolonial leaders like the Tunisian
president Habib Bourguiba;62 on the other hand he exchanged New Year cards with
those same leaders,63 who he knew from the independence struggles of previous
decades. While the young North African leftists with whom Guérin associated were
sharply critical of government-sponsored fraternal organisations of emigrants such as
the Amicale des Algériens en Europe, Guérin was invited to the Amicale’s
celebrations for the 10th anniversary of Algerian independence in 1972.64
The way that Guérin attempted to resolve this tension was by putting his connections
to work on behalf of immigrant workers and young leftists. So since Guérin had the
ear of North African ambassadors in Paris,65 he attempted to use his influence to
persuade them to take a more proactive role in support of the struggles of their
citizens in France. For example, in late August and September 1973, there was an
outbreak of racially motivated killings in and around Marseilles, incited by a vitriolic
editorial in a local newspaper following the stabbing of a French bus driver by a
mentally ill Algerian, and aggravated by the Middle East oil crisis. Many Algerians in
the Midi responded by going on unofficial strikes in protest; there was even a strike at
a factory in La Ciotat, where Guérin had a second home.66 The Amicale des Algériens
en Europe, however, did not support the strikes, fearing that they were organised by
extreme left groups hostile to the Algerian government, like the Maoist-influenced
Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes, which was growing in influence at the time. On
4 September, Guérin wrote to the Algerian ambassador, ‘regretting’ the Amicale’s
59
Al Kadihoun, 5 June 1972. Pennaroya was a reference to a strike by mainly Moroccan factory
workers in St Denis and Lyons in 1972 that was an early example of a growing tendency of immigrant
workers to lead strike movements.
60
Al Kadihoun, February-March 1973.
61
Al Kadihoun, February-March 1973.
62
E.g. cartoon of Bourguiba on the back cover of Al Kadihoun, February-March 1973.
63
Amongst his New Year cards for 1968 can be found one from Bourguiba: BDIC F DELTA RES
688/36. BDIC F DELTA 721/87 contains one from the Algerian ambassador.
64
Invitation in BDIC F DELTA 721/87.
65
For example, BDIC F DELTA 721/96/5, D.Guérin to M. l’Ambassadeur, 20 September 1973.
66
Gastaut, L’immigration et l’opinion, 290-294.
10
failure to support Algerians on strike.67 On the same day, he made another
intervention in the crisis by writing to an official at the Hotel Matignon (the prime
minister’s office) protesting against the governments’ decision to expel a Swiss
pastor, Berthier Perregaux, for taking too active a role in support of immigrant
workers, rather than deal with the racist attacks.68
Although later in the 1970s more of Guérin’s time seems to have been taken up with
anti-militarism,69 he remained a committed anti-racist to the end of his days. In 1974,
at a time of growing concern about anti-Arab racism in the South of France,70 Guérin
spoke at a meeting of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme in a café opposite Nice
railway station. As a result, he received a letter from a local school teacher informing
him about racist remarks by the mayor of the village of Tourette-Levens, who had
apparently refused to allow North African children to attend a summer school being
held there.71 During the 1981 presidential election, Guérin supported an appeal in the
anti-racist magazine Sans Frontière to give foreign residents the right to vote.72 The
last demonstrations Guérin went on before he died were in support of the student
movement of 1986,73 against both selective entry to university and the RPR
government’s attempted tightening of nationality law, demonstrations in which many
young people of North African origin participated, and one was killed.74 The
multiracial ‘Black, Blanc, Beur’ nation that France had become in fact, if not always
in mentality, by the time of Guérin’s death in 1988 could scarcely have been imagined
by the France into which he was born in 1904. It is reasonable to judge that Guérin
contributed at least a modest role in this transformation.
67
BDIC F DELTA 721/96/5, handwritten draft of D.Guérin to Ambassador Bedjaoui, 4 September
[1973].
68
BDIC F DELTA 721/96/5, handwritten draft of D.Guérin to G.Belorgey, 4 September [1973].
69
Norrito, ‘Daniel Guérin’, 80.
70
See F-N Bernadi et al, Les dossiers noirs du racisme dans le Midi de la France (Paris, 1976).
71
BDIC F DELTA RES 688/26/1, Letter to D.Guérin, 1974.
72
BDIC F DELTA 721 96/5, D.Tartier to D.Guérin, 7 May 1981.
73
Clash!, October 1988
74
Gastaut, L’immigration et l’opinion, 552-554.