In April 2024, my university’s Palestine Committee, comprising (but not limited to) students, began to organize general assemblies (assemblées générales in French or, more simply, AGs) on the Clignancourt campus.
What are these assemblies? In a nutshell, they aim to decide whether the campus should close on a particular day, or for several days, to protest the Sorbonne’s investments in Israeli universities and armament companies. This movement echoed those launched by students in American universities, such as Columbia; all condemned the Israeli government’s actions in the Gaza Strip and its occupied territories.
During the AGs, students outside don Palestinian flags and speak into megaphones. Huddled in the campus courtyard, they hold up placards. “Cessez le feu immediat” (“Immediate Ceasefire”) or “Arretez le Genocide” (“Stop the Genocide”). Speakers line up to defend the cause, leading students in chants of “Free, free Palestine.”
The first time this happened, I looked on with a mixture of curiosity and, I must admit, doubtfulness. I knew that blood had been spilled on both Israeli and Palestinian sides. And yet similar protests in American universities had been far from successful. I could not help but draw parallels with the May 1968 university revolts I had learned about in high school. These had stemmed from the Nanterre university outside Paris, taking root in the capital – namely in the Latin Quarter’s Sorbonne – and winning over campuses throughout France, opposing the Vietnam War and Charles De Gaulle’s flailing conservative government.
Here, on the battlefield of the Clignancourt campus of Sorbonne, was a full-circle moment that I thought I would see only once. After all, I reflected, it would not be the Sorbonne without a bit of political agitation to end the year.
Nothing, not even the elation of the Paris Olympics, could diminish the looming shadow of the conflict in the Middle East.
While the second exam period was around the corner, the curricula in both subjects had been mostly covered. To adapt to the situation, certain English teachers made their in-class tests home assignments while others outright canceled them. Nevertheless, I got through a chunk of four three-hour history exams unscathed. A five-month summer vacation moved the memory to the backburner of my mind.
Then again, the historian in me would now point out, even the Hundred Years War had truces. Some lasted five years, others forty. All that I had left behind in the late spring of 2024 was a truce in the battle between pro-Palestine demonstrators and the Sorbonne administration. The world kept turning, guns kept being fired and sold. Nothing, not even the elation of the Paris Olympics, could diminish the looming shadow of the conflict in the Middle East.
When we students returned to the Clignancourt campus in mid-September, we did not step onto a battlefield where the rubble had cleared, but one where more was going to fall.
Then, one day in October, I had looked keenly out the windows of the library. The gathering was timid and inconsequential. I shrugged it off, telling myself that the first semester was no time for sweeping political action; if anything was to be done, it would not be until after our first midterms. This was a resolution that the AG later decided.
The battle was brewing. AGs were picking up again, their announcements blaring on the history and English WhatsApp groups in red, white, and black letters: AG DEMAIN DANS LA COUR DE CLIGNANCOURT, 10:00, AG DANS L’AMPHITHEATRE 13:00, and so on.
Militarily speaking, how would a strategist have read this? A preamble to a declaration of war? If such was the case, then the administration practiced anything but an appeasement policy.
“We ask for the Sorbonne to divest from its partnerships with Israeli institutions and companies complicit in the Gaza genocide,” the demonstrators cried, through chants of “Palestine vivra, Palestine vaincra” (“Palestine will live, Palestine will win”).
“We don’t like the sound of that,” replied the administration in so many words. The frustration grew, and the French word for blockade — blocus — prevailed. It was the first motion to be proposed in the AG. With massive support (from the few actual students who were present), Clignancourt was officially blocked a first time. Call this the first fall of Fort Sorbonne. It certainly felt that way to us.
By now, you may be wondering how the blockades are organized once they are voted on. It is a fair question: how can a minority of students demand and obtain the closure of a campus that houses about six thousand students? The simple answer is that there is no simple answer. The results, whatever they are, are communicated via WhatsApp. The students aware of the AG in progress keep one eye on the teachers’ courses and another on the quick-fire messages volleyed back and forth. The suspense is worthy of Hitchcock.
We, of the Clignancourt battalion, have not yet gone over the top at this point. The proverbial whistle of the blockers has not called us out from the trenches into enemy fire. Things seem to move fast and slow at the same time, until one of the demonstrators knocks on the door and announces that, following a democratic vote (in which most students are not able to vote), the campus blockade is formally underway.
My teachers’ reactions are as gloriously unpredictable as the blockades themselves. Some, like my professors in American civilization and European media history, respectfully contain the demonstrators’ zeal and wrap up their lecture in time.
Then there are others. My translation teachers are overcome by revolutionary fervor and you almost think that they are ready to start a counter-blockade of their own. One of them even responded, “And what if we don’t evacuate?” but admitted defeat when the demonstrators explained that security would otherwise have to lead students out one by one.
The teacher of English-to-French translation, or version in French academia, would never cave so easily. A slight, feisty woman with a sharp Southern French accent, a roll to her English r’s, and fierce brown eyes, she flatly refused to finish her class and evacuate or even let students leave the classroom.
Occasionally, the blockers pass us by during our exams and when we leave, the campus is devoid of people.
Once we leave the campus, the Clignancourt building stands like a lifeless Leviathan. The soldiers return to their barracks and prepare to repeat the process the next day.
Unless a blockade is approved for several consecutive days, which it usually is not, our mornings are riddled with uncertainty. WhatsApp messages go back and forth, inquiring about the campus situation.
You might think that the answers to such messages would be clear, but they are even more frustrating than the questions themselves.
What all the ambiguity boils down to is this: Even if no student can access the first floor on account of the stairs being blocked by demonstrators, even if the more lucid teachers cancel their classes, campus is not closed until the administration says it is . . . and this can take time. Once the announcement is made, you might think everyone heaves a sigh of relief. Wrong again. Because the soldiers of Fort Sorbonne know full well that the same thing will happen tomorrow.
Occasionally, we hear about meetings between the demonstrators and the administration to discuss changes and demands. They are mostly dialogues between the blind and the deaf.
Life goes on for the errant soldiers of Clignancourt, as the campus fast becomes the laughingstock of the Sorbonne academic community. This is not helped in the least by the administration’s decision to implement security checks in and outside of the building and metal detectors, which led some students to nickname the campus “Air Clignancourt,” “Sorbonne State Penitentiary” or, in my case, “Overkill City.”
On my last partial day on campus, I was greeted by a phalanx of security guards checking my student card, my bag, and my person (with a pat-down and metal detector wand).
In a university that prides itself on embodying the ideals of free expression that the French Republic holds so dear, why are students allowed to sacrifice others’ right to learn for the sake of a cause, no matter how just?
Ultimately, another AG happened and yet another blocus, or blockade, was pushed forward. But instead of an effective and painless evacuation, the campus bled out students at a glacial pace. Students were left in a state of limbo for hours in the lobby, siting uncertainly while the blockade was – or was not – happening. The security guards strolled around undisturbed, as if they were saying “my work here is done.” Many protesters reported inappropriate remarks made by the security guards to female students, adding insult to injury.
The topsy-turvy situation continues until the campus administration announces a complete closure for the two weeks preceding the Christmas break.
In lieu of in-person sessions, most teachers arrange alternatives, scrambling to fit in material and ensure that the voices of history do not get lost in the cries of the blockade.
But, in a university that prides itself on embodying the ideals of free expression that the French Republic holds so dear, why are students allowed to sacrifice others’ right to learn for the sake of a cause, no matter how just?
Truly, these questions are what French history teachers, from middle school to university, term problématiques — key questions seeking to reconcile two or more paradoxical facts that we are trained to come up with to guide our essays.
Still, I put forth these weighty questions. If my thoughts pigeonhole me as being a “Karen,” a “Zionist,” an “anti-Palestinian,” or a myriad of other things, then that is a deep shame. For it only speaks to the speed at which real, nuanced discussion is fading away, whether on or off any campus.
– This essay was written before the ceasefire deal was finalized.