This month marks forty years since the 'events' of 1968 that came close to bringing down the French government. A cause for celebration for some, of regret for others, writes David Tresilian in Paris Forty years ago this month protests against the status quo broke out worldwide, perhaps nowhere more so than in France where students were joined by trade unionists and even members of the middle classes in a month of sometimes violent strikes and protests that threatened to bring down the French government. France this month is commemorating these events, even as the student activists of 1968 are now coming up for retirement. Anyone younger than middle age will have no memory either of the 1960s or of the events of 1968, though this has not prevented the events of the time from continuing to divide France along political lines and having continuing contemporary resonance. For the French right, the events of 1968 represented an attack on society from which the country has not yet recovered. According to Nicolas Sarkozy, France's current right-of- centre president, many of the country's present ills, from the economic malaise to the crisis in the suburbs, can be laid at the door of the events of 1968. "In this election," Sarkozy told French electors during last year's presidential elections, "what is at stake is the question of whether the heritage of May 1968 should be perpetuated or whether it should be got rid of once and for all." This heritage "has imposed a moral and intellectual relativism upon us," he said, its inheritors having "imposed the idea that everything has the same value and that there is no difference between right and wrong, between true and false, or between what is ugly and what is beautiful." Ridding France of the ideas inherited from the 1968 protests and from the 1960s more generally, Sarkozy has said, is the intention behind his government's programme. For France's left, on the other hand, the 1968 events heralded a period of social and cultural change that made the country less hierarchical and much less rigid, greatly expanding the scope for individual freedoms. Demands expressed by the protestors of the time for better and more flexible education, for women's rights, for sexual freedom and for liberation from the weight of traditional attitudes were later in large part conceded, possibly as a result of the events of 1968. These contrasting points of view are unlikely to meet any time soon, any more than they did 40 years ago when some 800,000 people marched down the Champs-Elysées in Paris in support of General de Gaulle's government at a time when the protestors' barricades were still going up in the streets and the country was largely immobilised by strikes. In the meantime, the 1968 events have been the subject of a blitz of publicity in France over the past few weeks, with newsstands and bookstores flooded with commemorative material. Great acres of newsprint have been put out by French newspapers to mark the 40th anniversary of the1968 events, those on the left of centre perhaps outdoing those on the right, and French publishers have taken advantage of the anniversary to put out dozens of books, reaching, according to one estimate, some 80 new titles. These run from memoirs by the major players of the time to works of history and sociology and coffee-table books of photographs, artworks and archival images. Since the beginning of this month, the French newspaper Le Monde has been re-running all its front pages from May 1968 in chronological order, adding commentary for those for whom the events of 40 years ago are already well over the horizon. French television has been broadcasting documentaries about the time along with interviews with the remaining actors, among them the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit. In what is one of the ironies of the present commemoration, the latter is now a member of the European Parliament. Films, some well-known, others much less so, that take the 1968 events as background have been rebroadcast, among them Bertolucci's The Dreamers and Milou en mai by Louis Malle. The French Bibliothèque nationale in Paris has also organised an exhibition of the poster and street art of the time, which, produced by striking students from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, gives perhaps the most immediate taste of the period. The slogans on these posters betray the influence of the "ma"tres à penser" of the time, some French, some from the wider European or American New Lefts. Summed up by hostile commentators as "la pensée 68" -- "1968 thinking" -- or lumped together as simply the expression of the "anti-humanism" of the "soixante- huitards," the work of these writers has nevertheless now been institutionalised in universities worldwide. It includes the work of authors associated with the wider intellectual history of the 1960s, such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, along with that by authors from older generations, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan. Such authors' various involvements in the 1968 events, or their distance from them, have been the subject of expert scrutiny in France during the current anniversary. While the 1968 protestors' demands were likely to have been born as much out of frustrations about the rigidities of French society as they were out of concerns about the correct way to teach Hegel -- particularly given the seductive images of Californian hippies and "swinging London" reaching France at the time -- these authors nevertheless provided intellectual context for the protests in the shape of criticisms of ideology, power and consumer society. In their rejection of what they saw as mainstream society and of the "entertainment industry" that, they believed, supported it by distracting attention from the war in Vietnam and from other social issues, the student protestors also took their inspiration from German Frankfurt School authors such as T. W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, the latter then working in the United States. Though the author of an influential account of the workings of the media in mass societies and of the malign influence of the entertainment industry in particular, all written in formidably Hegelian vocabulary, Adorno fatally blotted his copybook by asking police to clear the Frankfurt School's premises in Frankfurt, then in the process of being trashed by students. Marcuse's notion of "one-dimensional man," of similar provenance and explored in his celebrated book of the same name, became a kind of rallying cry against everything the protestors saw as wrong with 1960s France. The background of Marcuse's work lay in western Marxism as did that of many New Left authors, developing themes of "reification," "alienation" and "commodity fetishism" highlighted as inevitable features of capitalist society. Another emblematic work from the period, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, looked to pre- war Dadaism and Surrealism to promote the ideas of creative destruction found in Debord's own brand of "situationnism," which sought to appropriate mainstream society's own tools to use in acts of sabotage against it. Intellectual history of this sort is being excavated in France to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1968 events, with Le Monde, for example, running profiles of mostly ex-Maoist thinkers from the period and tracing their subsequent conversions. Written in highly abstract terms, this is perhaps the kind of material that could only ever find mainstream publication in France. However, despite the great quantities of material produced to mark the present anniversary, there seems to be little agreement about what the meaning of the 1968 events might be for the present younger generations. The1968 protests took place at a time of sustained economic growth and something like full employment and some years before the first oil shocks in the 1970s. Young people entering the job market in France in 1968 could look forward to stable employment in a way that today's young people cannot, and the welfare policies of the time meant that those in work, the vast majority, could look forward to lifelong benefits. None of this is now the case, and many young people in France, like young people everywhere, are having to get used to the idea of being significantly worse off than their parents. Under these circumstances, the 1968 student slogans resurrected for the 40th anniversary of the events have a faded air, something borne out by more recent student demonstrations in France. These have been less about reforming capitalism in the interests of more satisfying, less one- dimensional lives, as was perhaps the case in 1968, and more about the simple defense of the status quo. The demonstrations that took place across France in the first few months of 2006 against changes in employment law were joined by large numbers of students and young people, for example, these being particularly targeted by the changes. Universities across France were closed for weeks or months, and, in a striking echo of 1968, riot police cleared the Sorbonne in Paris of striking students. Unlike in 1968, however, student discontent did not lead to more generalised protests; unlike in 1968 also, the students aimed to prevent change rather than to promote it. There has also been little sign of common cause between student demonstrators protesting against legal and educational reforms that, they feel, are particularly aimed at them and young people in France's city suburbs, whose rioting in 2005 and then again in 2007 drew the world's attention to France's social problems. One of the most striking features of the 1968 protests was the way in which student demands swiftly became more generalised, raising the spectre of an alliance between striking students and workers. Difficult to imagine under most circumstances, there seems little prospect of anything like this at present. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 1968 in Paris Following conflict between the students and authorities at the University of Nanterre to the west of Paris, part of the University of Paris system, the university was closed on 2 May 1968, causing students elsewhere to mount protests in solidarity. On 6 May, demonstrators marched through Paris, the march ending in violence when police used tear gas against the demonstrators, and rocks and paving stones were thrown. Further protests followed, with growing numbers of university and high- school students demanding the reopening of Nanterre, the release of the arrested students and an end to police brutality. Further demonstrations followed on 10 May, and the first barricades went up in the Latin Quarter, the traditional university area, on the left bank of the Seine. Riot police responded with brutality, and arrests continued throughout the night. As the demonstrations and the authorities' heavy-handed repression continued, public attitudes began to swing behind the students, and unions called a general strike for 13 May accompanied by a demonstration that saw hundreds of thousands of people march through the capital. What had started as a student protest was now becoming a more generalised protest against the government of General de Gaulle and prime minister Georges Pompidou. Pompidou announced the release of the arrested students and the reopening of the Sorbonne, but this did not satisfy the strikers, and students occupied the Sorbonne, declaring it a "people's university" and setting up action committees across Paris. Over the days that followed, workers across France started to down tools and occupy factories, starting with a strike at Sud Aviation near Nantes on 14 May and spreading to the Renault factories at Boulogne-Billancourt outside Paris. By 17 May, 200,000 workers were on strike, a figure which increased to two million the following day and then ten million the following week. By this point, public transport was on strike, newspapers were not being distributed, state television was off the air and even the jury of the Cannes Film Festival had resigned, closing the festival. Agreements signed with the unions on 27 May providing for wage increases were rejected by workers, and on the same day a meeting at the Sebastien Charlety stadium gathered 30,000 students, with speakers demanding the overthrow of the government and the holding of fresh elections. On 30 May de Gaulle, having visited French forces stationed in Germany presumably to secure their support in the event of martial law, went on radio to announce the dissolution of the National Assembly and elections on 23 June. Demonstrations of support for de Gaulle took place across France, including a march of 800,000 people in Paris. Workers gradually went back to work, students were evicted from the Sorbonne, and right-wing parties won an overwhelming victory in the June parliamentary elections. The events were ending.
