In 1967, deadly riots broke out in Point-à-Pitre, capital of the French Caribbean department of Guadeloupe. A construction workers’ strike culminated at the end of May when the French riot police, the CRS, opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators outside the Chamber of Commerce, killing at least 8 and wounding dozens more. In the wake of the violence, the French state moved to investigate its source, pinning blame on the Guadeloupean National Organization Group (GONG), an anti-colonial organization that had, since 1963, worked to organize Guadeloupean workers in both the Caribbean and Paris to agitate for national independence for the French Antilles. French officials arrested more than 20 GONG activists and put them on trial in Paris for subversion.
My paper reconstructs the history and ideology of the GONG, tracing it from its birth among disenchanted Guadeloupean student activists in early 1960s Paris to its effective destruction in the 1968 trial. In my paper, I investigate the GONG’s work organizing Antillean workers in Guadeloupe and Paris, and its debt to Maoism and metropolitan Maoist student groups. I argue that Maoism provided not only an ideology for making sense of the Guadeloupean experience but provided a language that allowed Guadeloupean activists to build solidarity with metropolitan and global Maoist activists. The GONG activists’ 1968 trial for subversion attracted not only attention in the Caribbean but also among French intellectuals and activists. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and anthropologist Michel Leiris, among others, both served as witnesses for the defense, while Maoist and other leftist groups organized solidarity demonstrations and fundraisers. My paper contributes a Caribbean perspective to histories of the French 1960s, looking at how blacks in France participated in and contributed to the student and left-wing movements of the 1960s.