new laws were approved by the legislature in June 1970 and brought into force on 1 January this year. They abolish the right to exemption from conscription for anyone enrolled in a lycee (high school) or institute of higher education.
The French bourgeoisie hope that military discipline, drummed into the youth at a time when they are becoming more conscious critics of bourgeois society, will limit the growing radicalisation among students. This has also been the object of the Belgian government, which in February had to face demonstrations of around 180,000 youth throughout the cities of Belgium in response to an attempt to abolish exemption from conscription.
In France too this attempt to strengthen bourgeois order has been strongly challenged. On 22 March, after the banning of a demonstration called by the "Struggle Committees' of the schools movement, 80,000 demonstrators took to the streets in Paris alone.
COMMUNIST PARTY The most significant outcome of the attempt to ban the demonstration and the response of the "Struggle Committees' to it, was that the French Communist Party was forced to change its opposition to the demonstration of the 22nd and instead endorse it.
The Stalinists have a record of hampering and dividing the fight against these measures, At the time the laws were passed their deputies abstained on the grounds that they contained a "positive" clause: the reduction of the term of national service to twelve months. When the laws came into force at the beginning of this year, the role of the CP was to try to pull back attempts to take action and divert the youth into waiting for the March elections, after which, they said, the measures would be repealed by the Union de la Gauche" (the electoral coalition of the CP and Socialist Party, in the event defeated at the polls by the Gaullists).
Some days before the 22nd, when it became clear that the initiatives of the Struggle Committees had wide support, the CP announced a protest meeting to be held on the 2lst with youth and trade union organisations of the CP and SP. This move was clearly intended to limit the movement and take the initiative away from the revolutionary organisations. But after the ban was announced on the 21stand it became clear that the demonstration would not be halted, the CP had to call on its supporters to join the 22nd demonstration. Trotskyist