French crisis takes a new turn
Paris: Student and striker disorders in a half dozen French cities threw a new shadow of crisis over France today as the campaign for crucial Legislative elections got into full swing.
For the second night running students milled through the French capital setting fires and clashing with riot police.
A young auto plant worker was shot to death yesterday in Sochaux, in Eastern France — the first striker to fall since the walkouts began in mid- May.
The spark that touched off the new student rioting was the death on Monday of Gilles Tautin, 17, a school student. Fellow students blamed the death on gendarmes. Witnesses said the youth along with other students plunged into the Seine river to escape the gendarmes wanting to check their identities. Officials said the boy was drowned.
With two “martyrs” the prospects seemed intensified for continued student and worker disorder at a time when the De Gaulle government had seemed to have resolved France’s greatest post- war crisis.
The Communist Party newspaper Humanite laid the death of the worker Pierre Beylot, squarely on to “the Gaullist police”. The paper said: “The government has decided to provoke the workers. It substitutes police intervention, bloody repression, for negotiation which could end a conflict which continues.”