Contenu du sommaire : 1907 : une union étudiante est née1907

Thirty years passed between the birth of the first general student associations (Associations générales d'étudiants or AGEs) and their merger into one national union in 1907. The desire of French students to be represented on the international level led to the creation of this organization, with the support of academic authorities. From the start, however, UNEF did not include every general student association; the Paris AGE, for example, joined at a later date. Yet, it was the presence alongside UNEF of corporatist organizations defending the interests of university departments (facultés) that made it into a more assertive organization.

The first years of the twentieth century were marked by denunciations by medical and even pharmacology students about the threats related to an “overcrowded medical profession” and the appearance of an “intellectual proletariat.” Alongside traditional AGEs emerged the Association of pharmacology students in 1896 and the “Corporative” of medical students in 1902, which, with the aid of members of their professions, raised serious questions about the content and structure of university training in these fields. Although supported by the Action française, these organizations nonetheless pushed the student movement towards a kind of proto-unionism.

Active first in religious education and then in public higher education since the early 19th century, Catholic student groups were extremely diverse both in terms of their organization and the nature of their religious leadership. Although the Catholic Association of French Youth (ACJF, Association catholique de la jeunesse française) was founded in 1891, there was no student organization per se until the creation in 1922 of the French Federation of Catholic Students (FFEC, Fédération française des étudiants catholiques), a very conservative group controlled by Jesuits. In contrast with this first group, the Christian Student Youth (JEC, Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne) founded in 1929 and first mostly active in high schools, offered an alternative oriented towards the apostolate and run by bishops.

Founded in 1881, the Lille Student Union was one of the oldest AGEs. It hosted the first congress of the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France at the time of the inauguration of its Maison des étudiants. Far from being a mere organizer of student social events, it acted to serve student needs and build solidarity, in the process encouraging republican ideals— if not always openly. In the aftermath of WWI, it further developed its social activities, opening a restaurant in 1922 and student dormitories in 1929 and 1930. In 1927, it merged with the Union of Female Students (Union des étudiantes) created in 1910.

Around the end of the 19th century student movement sharpened their critique of capitalist society by establishing their own forms and spaces of contestation within the context of the university. Mobilizing first to defend the integrity of knowledge, student groups envisioned their political action as the manifestation of their hard-fought autonomy from the socialist parties. Borrowing from the methods and languages of the labor movement, the student movement eventually established itself as an autonomous group. Such processes led to the founding of UNEF by a small cadre of radical students, despite the fact that UNEF, like labor unions, declared itself as apolitical from the outset.

International comparisons show that although the 19th century generally witnessed the emergence of student organizations on university campuses, the creation of interest-driven national student groups did not just occur overnight. In the process of their emergence, the State, along with various social and political forces, played an important role in the (re)construction of universities and in the development of specific student movements within them. International dynamics also helped influence, export, and import “models” and “references.” In this context, the “national student union”-type organization, which was initially exceptional to France, became the prototypical student organization throughout Europe.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, UNEF's influence over the Confédération internationale des étudiants (Student international confederacy), which it had created in 1919, had greatly diminished. However, the reorganization of the International Secretariat of the university press (Secrétariat international de la presse universitaire) by UNEF enabled the organization to progressively restore its image. Such efforts started to bear fruit at the Vienna Council meeting in January 1937, when UNEF was asked to organize the 1937 CIE Congress. Held in Paris in the context of the 1937 World Fair, the Congress placed UNEF and its president in a powerful position within the student confederacy to defend the prestige and interests of France.

The world of French student politics was not immune from the Cold War. The founding of the Union internationale des étudiants (International Student Union) upon the Liberation of France mobilized UNEF activists, but this dream of unity was short-lived and collapsed when the world split into two antagonistic blocs. As the UIE fell under the influence of the Eastern bloc, French students left its ranks in the extremely tense international context of 1949. Such a decision, however, was only made with great difficulty. Indeed, for this first generation of UNEF leaders, it sadly marked the end of the bold dream of uniting students from all over the world into one organization. In the West, the creation of the CIE/COSEC marked the reorganization of student organizations along Cold War lines. But UNEF, refusing to accept this division, tried to act as an intermediary between the East and the West, notably after a new majority came to power in the student group in 1956.