We are now as far from the events of 1968 as the people involved were from the end of the first world war. Cliche has long since reduced much of what occurred to “student revolt”, but that hardly does these happenings justice, partly because it ignores the workers’ strikes that were just as central to what occurred during ’68 and the years that followed, but also because the phrase gets nowhere near the depth and breadth of what young people were rebelling against, not least in France.
This was the last time that a developed western society glimpsed the possibility of revolution focused not just on institutions, but the contestation of everyday reality, which is still enough to make the simple phrase “May 1968” crackle with excitement – even if you were not around when les évenéments took place. I was born in 1969, but what happened in France and beyond retains a magnetic allure.
To mark 1968’s 50th anniversary, Christian Dior and Gucci have respectively launched a celebratory collection and ’68-themed ad campaign, proof if any were needed that the year’s legacy has been commodified in a way that plenty of its agitators and thinkers would have seen coming. But there are also more cerebral commemorations: a series of events, focused on liberties and utopias, at Nanterre University, the suburban campus where the French unrest first flared up; and at King’s College in London, workshops, film screenings and symposiums on ’68’s protests and what they have come to signify.
The leftwing publishers Verso are reissuing a handful of texts, including Tariq Ali’s memoir-cum-history Street Fighting Years and the Raymond Williams-edited May Day Manifesto (1968), arguably the founding text of the British New Left. The same company is also publishing a new book titled Opening the Gates, the compelling story of an attempt at co-operative socialism that took root in the early 1970s at a watch factory in eastern France. Allen Lane, meanwhile, has published The Long ’68, by British historian Richard Vinen, an exhaustive work whose narrative runs across Europe and the US.
By a neat historical coincidence, these commemorations happen just as France experiences one of its characteristic spasms of division and protest. Railway workers are in the midst of three months of rolling strikes, against President Macron’s plans to introduce his country’s transport system to competition and new labour arrangements. At the same time, students are protesting against plans to make university entrance more selective, and proposed changes to the baccalaureate exam system.Thirty years ago, the 20th anniversary of 1968 was the focus of a fortnight-long season on Channel 4, which included a Jean-Luc Godard movie, the three-hour film of 1969’s Woodstock festival and a smattering of documentaries. This was some people’s introduction to a huge historical moment that had rather been forgotten. The members of a Mancunian rock group called the Stone Roses were captivated by footage of one young Parisian, as guitarist John Squire recalled, “chucking stones, with a really nice jacket and desert boots”. They wrote a hymn of cross-generational admiration titled “Bye Bye Badman”, which took its place on an album whose sleeve featured the French tricolour and three slices of lemon – a reference to the fact that the latter had been used in Paris to nullify the effects of tear gas. Meanwhile, others, like me, programmed their VHS recorders for the wee hours and amassed their own ’68 archive.
If your mind was ever open to that year’s mixture of subversion and confrontation, it will probably have stuck with you. Most of the time, mundane reality wins out, but from time to time, an explosive critique of modernity bursts through and demands action, even if it just as quickly recedes. This, perhaps, is the essential story of 1968 and its enduring legacy.
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Vinen, a specialist in French history at King’s College, tells me that the title of The Long ’68 reflects a conception of the year’s events that runs deep in French intellectual life. “The French have a phrase, les années soixante-huit: the ’68 years,” he says. “It’s an established feature of the way the French write about what happened. They tend to take it from about ’62 – the end of the Algerian war – till, quite often, the election of [President] Mitterrand in 1981. But actually, France is one place there is a real explosion in ’68 itself, really focused around May and June.”
The book is objective and factual: his sources include police reports and dispatches filed from Paris by British diplomats, but his text still conveys a sense of events so convulsive and all-encompassing that they exude a deeply romantic sense of ordinary reality somehow being suspended. As Vinen recounts, an initial confrontation between students and the authorities at the Nanterre campus – partly over restrictions on male-female living arrangements – spread to the Latin Quarter, and by some process of cause and effect almost impossible to explain, led in turn to a general strike that soon involved 10 million people. “It looked likely that De Gaulle, who had ruled France for 10 years, would fall,” he writes. But this was only the start:
“For a couple of weeks, the country seemed to hover on the edge of some kind of revolution – though no one really knew what kind. The leaders of the Communist party, which had been talking about revolution for 50 years, were mystified by, and usually hostile to, the student protest. All sorts of groups were touched by the apocalyptic mood.“There were working-class protests all over the world, but this huge concentration of a general strike in May ’68 was specific to France,” he says. Herein lies an element of the story that the foregrounding of students has sidelined: a restive mood among industrial workers, which he partly puts down to the fact that large swathes of France only began to industrialise after the second world war. “You had a group of workers who’d come into industrial work relatively recently and had never accepted its disciplines and structures, or the disciplines of their trade unions,” he explains. “The other country where that was true was Italy.”
The Italian “Hot Autumn” of 1969 was fictionalised in We Want Everything, a 1971 novel by the Italian author Nanni Balestrini, only published in English in 2014. Telling the story of a discontented worker at Fiat’s vast Mirafiori factory in Turin, it captures the mood in Italy during the “Cassa del Mezzogiorno”, the postwar attempt by the Italian government to bring industry to the deprived south of the country.
The failure of that effort fed into a revolt against something much more fundamental: work itself, and a regimented, bureaucratic vision of life pushed by both the left and right. Towards the end of the book, there is a speech:
“We say no to the reforms that the unions and the [Communist] party want us to fight for. Because we understand that those reforms only improve the system that the bosses exploit us with. Why should we care about being exploited more, with a few more apartments, a few more medicines and a few more kids at school? All of this only advances the State, advances the general interest, advances development.”
The sense of a malaise unanswered by politics defined the spirit of ’68 across the world. As workers and students saw it, communism – whether in central and eastern Europe, or the communist parties in the west – was as much of a blight as capitalism, something vividly illustrated by that year’s so-called Prague spring, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. More generally, the traditional leftist idea that the state could be the bringer of liberation was dramatically undermined by a widespread conviction that traditional power structures were so problematic as to be almost useless. This latter idea runs through 1968 in the form of a vivid leitmotif: ranks of police – in Paris, London, Chicago – charging at crowds of young protesters.
Among the best films about 1968 and its meaning is A Grin Without a Cat, by the French director Chris Marker, and one of its most compelling moments comes during a sequence dedicated to the unrest in Paris. “All of a sudden, the state reveals its repressive side, the one which is more or less diluted in daily life,” says the narrator. “But now, it has to make a show of strength. And to do so, it sends in the police force, with all kinds of gear and contraptions you didn’t know existed. Fine: for the demonstrator, the state appears as a vision, like the Virgin Mary at Fatima. It’s a revelation.”
Power, and the eternal human tendency to try to negate it: such has been the story of wildly diverse revolts, from the first stirrings of punk rock to the Occupy movement. The latter was criticised for its lack of specific demands, but this missed the point. “What we have in the United States is an oligarchy and what we need is a people’s democracy,” said one protester at Occupy Wall Street. “So we’re occupying this country. We start out at Wall Street, then we spread out and occupy the country and take it back.” Perhaps unwittingly, he was following a famous edict that had been daubed on to a Parisian wall in 1968: “Be reasonable – demand the impossible.”
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Hari’s Kunzru’s 2007 novel My Revolutions centres on a character, Chris Carver, who is changed forever by the events of 1968. He takes part in sit-ins at the LSE, the famous anti-Vietnam demonstration outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, and then becomes one of the core members of a group who move from direct action to terrorism.
There are echoes here of the German Red Army Faction, otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, but the basis of the story is the Angry Brigade, the London-based group who cut their teeth in the midst of 1968’s tumult. From the summer of 1970 onwards, against a background of rising industrial strife, the Angry Brigade launched a series of bomb attacks whose targets included the embassies of far‑right regimes, the home secretary’s house and the Miss World competition. (In 2002, a journalist from the Observer interviewed the former Angry Brigade member Hilary Creek, who briskly captured the contexts of what she had been involved in: “Basically, I’m not ashamed of anything I have done, going from the student protests at Essex to the organisation for the Vietnam war demonstrations, squatting and the early women’s movement. Some of the things we did I am proud of and we still see the effects now.”)
Kunzru is a perfect example of someone who came of age long after ’68, but was dazzled from a distance. “Thatcher got into power when I was nine and the Tories left when I was 27,” he says. “So the idea of living your young life at a time when you believed that everything was about to change and you were on the brink of remaking the world was almost unimaginably distant.” There was also, he felt, a job to be done writing about ’68 and its aftershocks in terms of moral and political complexity, because “there was so little written about what happened back then that wasn’t in the service of mythmaking”.
“I was writing in the early years of the war on terror,” he explains. “The question of radicalisation was on everyone’s minds. I wanted to write a book about how you go about deciding to use violence in support of your political beliefs.”
The main characters in My Revolutions shape their view of the world into an exacting, almost neurotically judgmental sensibility, which captures how much the thinking of some ’68 activists marked a clean break with the live-and-let-live mores of the hippies. In one passage, Carver and a character called Anna go to a chi-chi party in north London. She says:
“Look at these people. Look at them, Chris. They’re blind. They’re happy to ignore everything around them, just pleased to be having a good time. And, as far as I’m concerned, that makes them culpable. It makes them complicit in everything they’re ignoring. Vietnam, the lot. It makes them pigs.”
The scene is redolent of another Parisian graffito: “To call in question the society you live in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.” Later in the book, Kunzru’s characters act this demand out with the aid of LSD:
Anna told Leo she didn’t really think he believed in building the revolution and Leo defended himself and made a counter-accusation and gradually we were all drawn in, putting one another to the question, everyone an inquisitor.
Kunzru says this scene drew on the kind of ritualised self-criticism practised by Maoists, and by the American violent protest group the Weather Underground (or “Weathermen”), whose activities decisively began in October 1969 and lasted well into the 1970s. But the scene makes a wider point about one of the plotlines of the years after ’68: the way that revolutionary zeal tends to burn out, and the fact that radical left politics has an tendency to sooner or later turn inwards.
Even during ’68 itself, the revolt quickly dissipated, symbolised by De Gaulle’s landslide win in legislative elections, and by the arrival in the White House of Richard Nixon in the following year. So what of ’68’s essential spirit endures? “In the long term,” says Vinen, “it helped create a new kind of left. Partly a less economic left; in some ways, a less working-class left. I think in Britain, there are a lot of ways that ’68 fed through into a leftwing Labour party in the 1980s, but also a lot of ways in which the left was rethought, some of which ended up in New Labour. In all countries, there’s a sense that it ties in with a left that involves new kinds of issues: things which may not be very important in ’68 itself, but became important – feminism, gay rights, environmentalism. That’s one part of its legacy.”
Another small but vital literary and political legacy centred on two immensely powerful books. Although it was first published in 1967, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle became the key text that conveyed the profound critique of modernity that motivated some of ’68’s most imaginative rebels. In the age of Facebook, fake news and the sense that our online lives have taken precedence over real existence, it has an amazingly prophetic aspect, evident in its opening sentences: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”
Its companion piece is The Revolution of Everyday Life, written by Raoul Vaneigem, a forceful voice in Debord’s organisation the Situationist International. Among this text’s insights is an attack on the supposed importance of work that chimes with a 21st-century conversation sparked by automation: “In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity,” Vaneigem wrote, “the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.”
The ideology captured in these books has long been a kind of ghost within western culture and politics, periodically making itself known at moments of crisis and contestation. In late 2011, the writer and activist Paul Mason watched this happen in the wake of student protests at the Conservative party’s London HQ, when what he called a “makeshift anarchism” was afoot, and plans were forming for a new action. “The posters proclaiming this new demonstration … had begun to borrow the imagery of Paris ’68,” he wrote, in Why It’s Kicking off Everywhere. “But since Marx is out of fashion, and Lenin and Mao have been branded left fascists, who else is there to study but the Frenchman whose musings have become required reading in the era of Lady Gaga: Guy Debord?” When people who had come of political age around this time were drawn into a new Labour party by Jeremy Corbyn, their links to the politics of 40 years before quickly became clear. These newcomers have cohered into an imaginative, questioning tendency whose gatherings, which grew out of Momentum and take place alongside the Labour party conference each year, go under the very ’68ish title The World Transformed.
Clearly, then, even at 50 years’ distance, the ideas at the heart of 1968’s events live on. “Their brave utopianism and their willingness to think outside the terms they were given – that’s an intellectual legacy we can still draw on,” says Kunzru. “The way the language of capital has robbed us of our dignity as citizens is something we can fight with the intellectual tools they gave us.” His point brings to mind yet another Parisian graffito, arguably even more relevant to our time than it was to the era when it was written: “Are you a consumer or a participant?”
