Arguably the most important cultural and political event for post-1945 France was the May 1968 failed revolution. The young people who participated in this now hold many key positions in France, and more importantly their ideals and world view have played and are playing a crucial role in reshaping French collective values and society. As has been pointed out by French sociologist Mathieu Bock Côté, the then prime minister and later president Georges Pompidou quickly understood what was unfolding in 1968, being hostile to it and considering it to be a ‘threat to civilisation.' For some time the conventional wisdom was that May 68 had led to the liberalisation of a society that badly needed it and had been the origin of many decisive and positive changes in France. However, this verdict was later contested by increasingly important segments of French society, and the then presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy said in April 2007 that it was necessary to know whether the May 1968 legacy should be perpetuated or wiped out once and for all, implying the second option was the proper one. Sarkozy also said that Socialist Party candidate Segolène Royale had tried to distance herself from this legacy but had been unable to fool anybody. In other words, Sarkozy was saying that this legacy was leftist and increasingly unpopular and of course many people criticised him for this. May 68 was a revolution against authority, any kind of authority, especially, of course, if it was authoritarian. Its motto was ‘it is forbidden to forbid.' The younger generation was against political authority, parental authority, traditional authority, masculine authority, teachers' authority, the authority of rational argument and so on. Of course, many institutions and social relations in France were marred by ingrained authoritarianism and badly needed a substantial aggiornamento, however. The central intuition was similar to Tocqueville's writings on democracy in the 19th century. Democracy is not only a political system needing appropriate political institutions, but it is also a state of society where the dominant process is the progressive equalisation of conditions. The battle for a democratic political system had been more or less won in France, and now it was time to win the battle for the democratisation of social relations and for greater equality. Any kind of relationship based on authority needed to be reviewed and criticised. Moreover, traditional authority, or the ability to give instructions and get obedience with no need for discussion or threats, needed to slowly disappear. Thanks to May 1968, the 1970s saw the advent of a much more permissive society in France. The liberation of women, the sexual revolution, the legalisation of abortion, radically new conceptions of education within the family structure or at school, the rise of a generalised and unbridled individualism, the collapse of Marxist utopias, the accelerated de-Christianisation of society, the discrediting of Western traditions – all these phenomena and others originate in 1968. Some of them are widely accepted, and others are more controversial. It is interesting to note that this happened while the opposite process occurred in the Arab world at the same time with a strong return to religion and tradition. I have always claimed that the consequence of these two opposite developments was huge: the West was no longer deemed superior and was no longer seen as a model. If you claimed, rightly or wrongly, that the advent of the permissive society was the ineluctable consequence of the enlightenment, you gave strong ammunition to those in the Arab world who hated the latter. The main thinker of these times, of our times, was the great Michel Foucault. Though a gross over-simplification, I would say that he always paid subtle and unrelenting attention to power and to authority and to their relations with discourse and with the notion of truth. Power relations lay everywhere in each interstice of society and in each action. For instance, if I say “what I write is the truth,” I am trying to discredit other explanations in an unnamed power play. Foucault's influence has been tremendous. Two products of the spirit of these times are still relevant now: the discrediting of the nation-state and the educational crisis. I have already said that in many segments of the elite in France a world view prevailed that saw nationalism and nation-states as the mothers of all ills – of world wars, of racism, of the persecution of minorities and of the suppression and exclusion of smaller identities. The evil concept is sovereignty, which allows the state to claim a monopoly of legal violence and education. When you do not like authority, you do not like sovereignty. The centralised nation-state, especially if it tries to create and impose a single identity and a single language upon a heterogeneous population, is even worse than others. It is bad in itself and is worsened by the fact that European populations now include important minorities of non-European origin that have their own cultures, identities, histories, demands and grievances. Creating a national identity is at best difficult now and is more oppressive than ever. It also seems to suppose that nothing good can come from others' identities, which is tantamount to racism. This is not to say that the nation-state should disappear in the immediate future. Instead, its missions should be redefined. The welfare state can still be useful to help the poor, to provide services, and to protect minorities and threatened identities. The writer is a professor of international relations at the Collège de France in Paris and a visiting professor at Cairo University.
