Julian Jackson - The Mystery of May 1968

French Historical Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Fall 2010) DOI 10.1215/00161071-2010-014Copyright 2010 by Society for French Historical Studies

review article

the Mystery of May 1968

Julian Jackson

The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968, by Michael Seidman (London, 2004)May ’68 and Its Afterlives, by Kristin Ross (Chicago, 2002)68: Une histoire collective, 1962–1981, ed. Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (Paris, 2008)Le moment 68: Une histoire contestée, by Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (Paris, 2008)Mai–juin 68, ed. Dominique Damamme et al. (Paris, 2008)Mai 68, by Boris Gobille (Paris, 2008)La rébellion de 1968: Une relecture sociologique, by Louis Gruel (Rennes, 2004)Mai 68: L’événement Janus, by Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris, 2008)Mai 68 expliqué à Nicolas Sarkozy, by André Glucksmann and Raphaël Glucksmann (Paris, 2008)From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought, by Julian Bourg (Montreal, 2007)Forget 68: Entretiens avec Stéphane Paoli et Jean Viard, by Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Paris, 2008)Mon mai 1968, by Alain Geismar (Paris, 2008)Ils ont tué Pierre Overney, by Morgan Sportès (Paris, 2008)Choses vues: Une éducation politique autour de 68, by Daniel Lindenberg (Paris, 2008)Le jour où mon père s’est tu, by Virginie Linhart (Paris, 2008)La Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (1968–1981): Instrument du Grand Soir ou lieu d’apprentissage? by Jean-Paul Salles (Rennes, 2005)L’insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68: Essai d’histoire politique des usines, by Xavier Vigna (Rennes, 2007)Ouvriers bretons: Conflits d’usines, conflits identitaires en Bretagne dans les années 1968, by Vincent Porhel (Rennes, 2008)La pensée anti-68: Essai sur les origines d’une restauration intellectuelle, by Serge Audier (Paris, 2008)

Julian Jackson is professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London, and a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society. His many books include The Fall of France (2003), awarded the Wolfson History Prize for 2004, and De Gaulle (2003).

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Introduction

“From here it is a great mystery,” remarked Michel Foucault, viewing the Paris events of May 1968 from Tunis. Charles de Gaulle, closer at hand, described them as “insaisissable.” If this sense of elusiveness has persisted ever since, it is not for lack of interpretations; the problem is an excess of them. By October 1968 the Bibliothèque Nationale cata-log listed 124 books on May. An article in 1970 identified eight distinct schools of interpretations.1 For this reason some have dubbed May “an interpretation in search of an event,” and each ten-year anniversary has witnessed a mini-avalanche of publications. Before reviewing some recent contributions, I will briefly discuss the previous literature so as to offer a historiographical context for them. One influential narrative, written by two French journalists for the twentieth anniversary, is Génération.2 It offers a vivid group portrait of the student leaders of 1968, following their trajectories until 1974, when the Revolution was no longer on the horizon and they reentered the mainstream. The problem with this account is that it reduces “1968” to a few charismatic figures in Paris alone, and even in Paris it omits rank-and-file activists and occasional participants. More impor-tant, it passes over the fact that ’68 witnessed the largest strike move-ment in French history: workers are absent from Génération except as a backdrop to the Latin Quarter. In the same year as Génération, two French political scientists offered a reading that does not concentrate on personalities but tries to situate ’68 in a longer durée.3 Their start-ing point is the “gap between the strength of the movement and the insignificance of the results.” Was ’68, they ask, a genuine “rupture” or merely an “epiphenomenon” or “parenthesis”? They conclude that it was an “intermediary moment” in a longer history of “modernization,” sandwiched between the trente glorieuses and the economic crisis of the 1970s. It is sometimes hard for the reader to negotiate the labyrinth of overlapping cycles of “modernity” identified by the authors, but the analysis represents an ambitious attempt to analyze the significance of May 1968. A new interpretive current developed in the 1990s anticipated by Gilles Lipovetsky’s essay L’ère du vide (1983). Lipovetsky argues that the true legacy of ’68 (one slogan had been “Take your desires for reality”) was the narcissistic individualism of the 1980s regardless of the intentions of the historical actors of May. A historical embodiment

1 Jean Touchard and Philippe Bénéton, “Les interprétations de la crise de mai–juin 1968,” Revue française de science politique 20 (1970): 503–44.

2 Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Génération, 2 vols. (Paris, 1987–88).3 Jacques Capdevielle and René Mouriaux, Mai 68: L’entre-deux de la modernité (Paris, 1988).

THE MYSTERY OF MAY 1968 627

of this thesis—in time for the 1998 anniversary—is Arthur Marwick’s huge comparative study, The Sixties. Marwick argues that between circa 1958 and circa 1974 the West—Britain, America, France, and Italy—witnessed a “cultural revolution” that included the end of censorship, the collapse of the traditional family, feminism, gay liberation, and so on. This book has acquired a classic status, although of its eight hun-dred pages, only seventy-five cover France, fifteen of these on May (only two on the strikes).4 The social upheavals of the period 1968–74 in France are dismissed as “sporadic violence” with “somewhat of a routine quality.”5 The problem with Marwick’s book is that while “the sixties” certainly did happen, so too did May 1968, and he offers no explanation of how the events of that year fit in. Were they part of the same changes? Did they accelerate or inflect them? In France, these questions were addressed in 1998 by the sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff whose book on ’68 devotes some hundred pages to the “events”—May 1968 certainly “happens” in his account—and the remaining two-thirds to May’s “impossible legacy,” split between two contradictory currents of “gauchisme,” a Marxist-Leninist one and a “libertarian” one.6 When the former had exhausted itself by 1974, nothing stood in the way of the latter. This inaugurated the “rise of exacerbated individualism,” which “undermined the ethical and rational foundations of politics.” In short, Le Goff bemoans what Marwick celebrates. Stripped of its polemical scaffolding, Le Goff provides a compelling account of ’68 except that, like Marwick, he entirely ignores the factory strikes. It is not quite true that the social movement of the factories is completely absent from writing on May. In 1991 a group of social his-torians published the proceedings of a colloquium devoted to the May strikes both in and outside Paris.7 But apart from the fact that this book attracted little attention, it entirely ignores the students. The result, as the authors themselves recognized, was that “something of the spirit of May has been left out.” Broadly speaking, then, we can identify three distinct approaches to May 1968: a dominant one focusing exclusively on the student leaders in Paris, a marginal one focusing on the strike movement, and a third that subsumed May 1968 into its alleged cultural consequences. It is this third interpretation that has entered popular consciousness. It was the one Nicolas Sarkozy had in mind when, during his 2007 presi-

4 Recently, however, it has been challenged by Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 1956–1963: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London, 2005), in which he argues that for Britain the “so-called revolution in sexual attitudes of the later sixties had been long underway and the sixties revealed a fundamental continuity with older periods of British history” (xii).

5 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford, 1998), 618.6 Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68: L’héritage impossible (Paris, 1998).7 René Mouriaux et al., 1968, exploration du mai français, 2 vols. (Paris, 1992).


dential campaign, he announced the need “to liquidate once and for all the inheritance of 1968,” which he diagnosed as “an intellectual and moral relativism” undermining the difference between “true and false, the beautiful and the ugly.” This opportunistic gesture directed to the conservative electorate had little influence on Sarkozy’s victory, since a poll in 2001 showed that 72 percent of the population had a “posi-tive” image of May, compared to 58 percent in 1988 and 48 percent in 1978. At the same time, 75 percent believed that it represented “sexual liberty” and “equality between men and women,” and only 25 percent saw it as “a revolt against the established order.”8 So most people in 2001 shared the “cultural revolution” interpretation, but, unlike Sar-kozy, they viewed it as positive.

General Interpretations: Understanding May

Examining some recent publications on May 1968, this article will divide them into three categories: general histories, testimonies by former participants, and studies of specific aspects of May. The 2008 anniver-sary “season” was preceded by two important American books, which deserve preliminary discussion. They offer such extreme interpretive polarities as to vindicate Edgar Morin’s observation that all interpre-tations of ’68 tend to be binary: “Either it is a determined event which had to occur or just a random accident . . . either sublime and great or monstrous and absurd, either important or insignificant.”9 Michael Seidman’s Imaginary Revolution certainly fits the more negative of Morin’s alternatives. As a contrarian historian impatient with progressive pieties, Seidman’s view of May 1968 is that the “events” were a mere hiccup in the rapid evolution of French society since the early 1960s. He sets out to challenge the “generally positive image” offered by “media spinmeisters.” For Seidman, Gaullist France, far from being a “blocked” society, was adapting flexibly to the changes generated by economic growth. The leftist students were an isolated minority, and the mass of students had limited grievances, which the authorities were accommodating. For example, the issue of whether male students could visit female dormitories, that disrupted Nanterre in 1967, had already arisen at other campuses, and the students had prevailed. For Seidman, “Much of the battle for sexual freedom seems to have been fought and often won prior to 1968,” because the admin-istration had responded “with a certain amount of tolerance” (38, 39).

8 Jean-Pierre Rioux, “L’événementmémoire: Quarante ans de commemorations,” Le débat, no. 149 (2008): 14.

9 Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, and Cornelius Castoriadis, Mai 68: La brèche; suivi de Vingt ans après (Paris, 2008), 232.


The preoccupation of the authorities on the Nanterre campus was less to defend moral order than to protect property from wanton vandal-ism by extremist students. As for the strikes—to which Seidman does devote due attention—the workers’ demands are shown to be entirely traditional. Strikers wanted higher wages so as to enjoy the benefits of the consumer society and were not interested in new ideas like autoges-tion. The extensive factory occupations only mobilized a tiny minority. Most workers, displaying “passivity,” “had little desire to become . . . involved” (229). Finally, the state in ’68 was never close to collapse: Paris was always fed and food transporters always had access to petrol. The strength of Seidman’s book is the extensive research, includ-ing the archives of trade unions, universities, and police. He provides much new information, especially on policing. But while his skepticism is bracing, it produces an analysis that lacks nuance and is too driven by his “revisionist” parti pris: for example, if few workers participated in occupations, this does not necessarily make the rest “passive,” as was demonstrated by the violent response when the authorities evacuated Peugeot’s Sochaux factory in June. Talking about young “malcontents” (as Seidman does twice) in lycées and factories does not advance the analysis. Seidman is so dismissive of May that he makes no attempt to enter sympathetically into the students’ vision of the world. His narra-tive is largely Paris-centered, and by stopping it in June, he does not prove one way or the other that the events had no longer-term impact. The real problem with this book, however, is that if French society was already changing so fast, the universities were so tolerant, the state was so in control, and the workers were so contented, why did May 1968 happen at all? Kristin Ross’s book is less a history of ’68 than of its representations: a polemic against the “cultural revolution” interpretations. Starting from the observation that the strikes have been erased from collective mem-ory, Ross notes how the resulting “interpretive vacuum” has been filled by sociologists who present a “1968” eviscerated of its politics. For Ross, far from being a cultural revolt of “youth,” ’68 was a political revolt of “a historically situated cross-section of workers and students” and had “little do with the social group—students or ‘youth’—who were its instigators” (3). It was less about individual than about collective revolt, less about “liberty” than about “equality,” less about humanitarianism à la Bernard Kouchner than about tiers-mondisme à la François Maspero. It repre-sented above all a struggle against “social determinations” and offered the prospect of “displacements that took people outside of their loca-tion in society” (3). One intuition of Ross’s stimulating book is to high-light the importance of the Algerian War in understanding May. Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman had already shown how the war politicized


a generation of student leaders, but Ross goes farther, showing how the memory of the war affected perceptions of police violence in ’68. In her archaeology of discourses on May, Ross gives a voice to some neglected actors or interpreters of the events such as the Cahiers de Mai group or the philosopher Jacques Rancière. All this is welcome, but while providing a mouthpiece for these discourses, she does not analyze them critically. We are reminded how contemporary activists read the situation in France, but this is not the same as saying that their reading was right rather than informed by large doses of wishful think-ing or paranoia. Thus when Ross tells us that de Gaulle’s victory in June revealed democracy to be a thin veneer and allowed “the direct domi-nation of the bourgeoisie” (59), we are served a gauchisme réchauffé that deserves no “afterlife.” Another oddity is Ross’s rant against largely unnamed sociologists. She seems to have in mind Edgar Morin’s writ-ings about the rise of “youth” as a social category, but sociological read-ings of ’68 cannot be reduced to this. (What of other sociologists, like Luc Boltanski, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Crozier, Henri Lefebvre, Serge Mallet, and Alain Touraine?) Equally, however indulgent one tries to be toward the “methodologies” of cultural studies, one wonders why so much credence is given to interpretations offered by the writers of ’68-inspired polars like Didier Daeninckx: do they hold some key to the truth about history? The main objection to Ross’s book, however, is that someone wanting to protest against the exclusion of a particular version of May should be so ready to exclude all others. What Ross dis-misses as the soft cultural ’68—changes in relationship to authority, changes in the dynamics of families, women’s control of their bodies, gays’ control of their lives—are surely not just “lifestyle issues,” even if their relationship to ’68 is complicated. May 1968 was a protean upheaval whose meanings are plural. While criticizing Kouchner and Cohn-Bendit for wanting to tell us what the “movement really meant” (157), Ross ends up doing the same herself. It is striking that of the general histories published in France in 2008, the two most important are collective volumes—as if the sheer complexity of the events defies synthesis. Both volumes are coedited by academics of different generations: one by Dominique Damamme and a group of sociologists and political scientists whose driving force is the sociologist Boris Gobille, author of an important thesis on writers in 1968; the other by the historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, a student at Nanterre in 1966, and the much younger historian Philippe Artières.10

10 There are also two other recently published collective works: Antoine Artous, Didier Epsztajn, and Patrick Silberstein, eds., La France des années 68 (Paris, 2008); and Jacques Capde-vielle and Henri Rey, eds., Dictionnaire de mai 68 (Paris, 2008). But although these volumes contain some good articles, they offer no global interpretation.


Both Gobille and Zancarini-Fournel also simultaneously published shorter books that summarize the conceptual approaches of their col-lective volumes. Their analyses converge in many respects, and some historians contribute to both volumes. They both challenge the narra-tive of a three-stage crisis—the student phase (May 3–12), the workers’ phase (May 12–25), the political phase (May 26–30)—conforming per-fectly to the classical unities of time (May), place (Paris) and theme (stu-dent contestation). The aim, in Zancarini-Fournel’s words, is to break “May 68” out of these spatial and chronological constraints, “inserting the crisis event [évènement critique] . . . in the medium term, articulat-ing it within a shorter and a longer time frame” (12). This does not lead Gobille and Zancarini-Fournel to endorse the depoliticizing “cultural” interpretations of May, and both propose to “give May back its cutting edge [son tranchant]” (Damamme et al., 13), viewing it as the “epicenter of a large process of contestation, a galaxy of diverse social, political, and cultural movements whose juxtaposition and interrelationship caused profound mutations” (Zancarini-Fournel, 11). In other words, inserting May 1968 into a longer history is not the same as subsuming it into all the changes that come afterward. On the contrary, Zancarini-Fournel and Gobille aim to salvage ’68 from the “sixties”—rereading those years through May rather than reading May through its alleged “consequences.” These two volumes offer a showcase for the most interesting research being done on ’68 in France today and provide fascinating new insights. For example, an article on the Nanterre campus in the Artières and Zancarini-Fournel volume uses unpublished sources to show how the immigrants of the surrounding bidonville viewed the students rather than, as is usually the case, viewing events only through student eyes. An article in the Damamme et al. volume mines the archives of a lycée in Nancy to trace the evolution of relationships between pupils and teachers over the period. In both volumes the student and workers’ movements receive equal attention. One particularly interesting fea-ture of the Artières and Zancarini-Fournel volume is its illustrations. Instead of clichéd images of ’68, like the endlessly reproduced photo of Daniel Cohn-Bendit smiling at a policeman by the Sorbonne, the volume draws on a stock of previously unpublished photographs taken by correspondents of the Communist newspaper L’humanité. More of these photographs are reproduced in the catalog of an exhibition orga-nized in 2008 at the Departmental Archives of the Seine–Saint-Denis (where the photographs are housed).11 They present myriad anony-

11 Danielle Tartakowsky, Mai 68: Instantanés d’Humanité; Catalogue de l’exposition présentée aux Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis, mai 2008–juin 2009 (Bobigny, 2008).


mous faces of ’68, many of them workers in occupied factories. We see workers in the Renault factory warming their hands around a brazier, playing volleyball, folding blankets after the night’s occupation; we see the grave faces (not everyone was smiling in ’68) of North African, Asian, and black workers (not everyone was white in ’68) listening to a trade-union leader. We see in Epinay-sur-Seine middle-aged demon-strators (not everyone was young in ’68) marching under a banner for university reform. We see striking taxi drivers picnicking on the Rue de Rivoli, watched by smiling onlookers. At a factory in Saint-Ouen we see men reading and women knitting (gender roles were respected in these strikes, as in the occupied Sorbonne). Much of this imagery is framed by the photographers’ own memories of 1936, but they offer us an unfa-miliar “May” and furnish us with images of what has been hitherto a non lieu de mémoire. Despite a broadly similar approach, these two volumes are very different. Artières and Zancarini-Fournel, with sixty-one contribu-tors, take what one reviewer calls a “polyphonic” approach.12 They present a kaleidoscope of articles, overlapping with and reflecting each other. Each of the four chronological sections opens with an essay on an emblematic film, followed by collections of articles on symbolic “objects” (the guitar, the pill), events “elsewhere” ( Japan, America, Holland), “places” (Nanterre), and “portraits” of key actors. Coher-ence is provided by Zancarini-Fournel’s narrative introductions to the four sections. Totaling 170 pages, these introductions are the structural spine of the volume. Zancarini-Fournel is the historian who popular-ized the term “the 1968 years” in a seminar series she co-organized at the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in 1994–96. This resulted in 2008 in a landmark book, which presented many of the ideas (and historians) that reappear in her new collective volume.13 “The 1968 years” are seen as beginning in 1961 or 1962. For Zancarini-Fournel, this date is important not only as the end of the Algerian War but also for the opening in Grenoble of the first (illegal) family planning clinic in France—a direct challenge to the law forbidding advertisements for contraception. In this first section (1961–67), “Fields of Possibilities,” she also discusses the crisis of the French Left as the Communist Party lost its hold on the young, the impact of anti–Vietnam War protest, and various strikes that preceded May 1968. The second section, “The Epicentre,” focuses on ’68 itself but has as much to say about events outside Paris as it has about events in it. The third and longest section,

12 Xavier Vigna, “Clio contre Carvalho: L’historiographie de 68,” Revue internationale des livres et des idées 5 (2008): 17–22.

13 Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand et al., eds., Les années 68: Le temps de la contestation (Brussels, 2008).


“Change the World, Change Life, 1969 to 1974,” shows how the pro-tests of ’68 spilled out into the next decade in multifarious ways. Know-ing where to end “the 1968 years” is as hard as knowing when to open them, but 1974 is clearly a watershed. It saw the collapse of the Mao-ist Gauche Prolétarienne (GP), the arrival of the economic crisis, and the election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who set out to neutralize the radicals of ’68 by incorporating some of their demands into legislation. The last and shortest section of the book, “The Beginning of the End,” running from 1974 to 1981, follows the dying embers of the radicalism of ’68 and its absorption into mainstream politics. Overall, Zancarini-Fournel’s narrative offers the best available history of “the 1968 years,” unpicking the interrelationships between the national and the regional and highlighting different regional chronologies. For example, there were significant disturbances in western France before ’68: in Quimper in October 1967, demonstrators chanted “Che Guevara is in Brittany.” A big demonstration of workers and students in Brittany on May 8, 1968, under the slogan “L’Ouest veut vivre,” had been planned long before the events of Paris, which came to overshadow it. This is a richly informative volume, but despite Zancarini-Fournel’s narrative, it does not offer an entirely coherent history of “the 1968 years.” The authors would probably reply that the book’s fragmented structure reflects the kaleidoscopic nature of the events, but the range of topics treated is such that the “polyphony” risks becoming a cacophony. Miniskirts, transistors, the Little Red Book, punk, humani-tarian doctors, tiers-mondisme, the “new philosophers”—one can see why these articles are here, but their juxtaposition does not necessarily answer questions about their relationship to each other, and to ’68. Writ-ing history must be about more than compiling a scrapbook. Zancarini-Fournel herself is aware of this when she remarks, for example, that it is not clear how the violent protests of Languedoc winegrowers in 1976 belongs to a narrative of ’68. Equally, how does ’68 fit into the his-tory of French feminism or gay liberation? The feminist Mouvement de Libération des Femmes was founded in 1970, and the gay Front Homo-sexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire in 1971. In both cases, the influence of America was probably just as important as the memory of May 1968, even if May inflected the forms that French activism took. The Damamme et al. volume is less “polyphonic.” It is corseted within a tighter interpretive framework and consequently covers less ground. It is divided into three chronological sections. The first (1946–68) analyzes the crises of various institutions before ’68—the churches, the Communist student organization Union des Etudiants Commu-nistes, the lycées, and so on—the second focuses on ’68, and the third (1969–75) traces the impact of May in the following decade. As in the


Artières and Zancarini-Fournel volume, linking May 1968 to its “conse-quences” can be problematic. For example, in a detailed oral history of women in Auxerre that examines “the diffusion by capillary action of feminist ideas in an average provincial town,” May 1968 figures less than the development in the 1960s of an “autonomous youth culture,” which created a “form of socialization as resistance”—or even than the organization of Tupperware parties in “forging links between women” (388). One conclusion of the micro-history of the Nancy lycée men-tioned earlier is that one “can observe well before the 1970s” many developments “attributed to that decade” (75). Key changes in the dis-ciplinary regime of the lycée are traced to the early 1950s. This volume, however, is not primarily concerned with “conse-quences,” and the specificity of its approach lies in two areas, which are effectively summarized in Gobille’s short book, which probably now represents the best introduction to May 1968 in France. First, while taking care to avoid an overconcentration on Paris students, Gobille enjoins us to return to the “event.” He draws on the work of the politi-cal sociologist Michel Dobry to explain how common exposure to the same “crisis event” (the term is Pierre Bourdieu’s) fused together a series of distinct latent crises, which might otherwise have developed according to different chronologies.14 He pays detailed attention to the escalation of the May events, showing how the crossing of certain “thresholds” (seuils) created a dynamic that transformed participants’ perceptions of what was possible. He draws an analogy with Timothy Tackett’s work on how the members of the National Assembly of June 1789 became the revolutionaries of 1790—not by starting with strong ideological conceptions about what they wanted to achieve but in con-fronting the events of the summer of 1789.15 The Revolution created revolutionaries, not the other way around. One important “threshold” in Gobille’s analysis of the crisis was the famous “Night of the Barri-cades” on May 10–11, 1968, when, with Prime Minister Georges Pompi-dou out of the country, the government oscillated between repression and negotiation, while the prefect of Paris, Maurice Grimaud, desper-ately tried to restrain the violence of his increasingly frustrated police forces—all while the events were relayed live by radio journalists on the scene.16 Gobille’s attempt to conceptualize the development of the crisis rather than just describe it is interesting, although one occasion-ally wonders whether the theoretical scaffolding provided by the “soci-

14 Michel Dobry, Sociologie des crises politiques (Paris, 1986).15 Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the

Emergence of a French Revolutionary Culture, 1789–1790 (Princeton, NJ, 2006).16 For this analysis he draws on Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “La nuit des barricades,” Société et

représentations 4 (1997): 165–84.


ology of crises” really offers more explanatory force beyond that of contingency. The other key to Gobille’s reading of May 1968 is that it offers a global interpretation of the crisis, which links the social movement of factory workers and professionals (doctors, lawyers, architects, etc.) with the student protest. For Gobille, this was a crisis that unmasked the “arbitrariness of the symbolic and social order” as an “immense fiction resting on the naturalization of the sediments left by history” (Damamme et al., 286). Like Ross, he sees May 1968 as an aspiration to break down not only vertical barriers of authority but also horizon-tal ones that assigned individuals to social functions. The Mouvement du 22 Mars called for “the destruction of every kind of compartmen-talization imposed by society.” Gobille cites numerous encounters (métissages, as he calls them) between students and workers through-out France—the often-screened footage of students being turned away from the gates of the Renault factory at Billancourt is another example where our stock visual images of May 1968 tell only part of the story—but he also cites other examples in which traditional social roles were called into question: doctors challenging their relationships to their patients or theater directors the relationships between them-selves and their audiences. This is a compelling reading of ’68 even if there is some romanticism in Gobille’s approach—May 1968 also wit-nessed much verbal violence, intolerance, and nihilism—and whether one views all this, as Gobille does, as a moment of “dissident lucidity” uncovering the arbitrariness of the social order or, as Seidman would presumably do (and Raymond Aron certainly did), as an unrealistically utopian vision of how a modern society can function, is ultimately a question of ideology, not history. Gobille’s analysis is significantly informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, for whom one of central “enigmas” of the social sciences is “the problem of the consent of the dominated to their domination and to the legitimacy of the dominant values” (Damamme et al., 23). Gobille does not, however, subscribe to Bourdieu’s own reading of May 1968, which has been resoundingly demolished by the sociologist Louis Gruel in a stimulating general study of May. Bourdieu’s interpretation developed the conclusion of his famous book, Les héritiers, published in 1964 with Jean-Claude Passeron. This work challenges the idea that the French universities in the 1960s were an effective instrument of social democratization, arguing that they reproduced existing patterns of social domination because students from a bourgeois background were better able to “master the signs and emblems of distinction” of the dominant classes. It concludes that the explosion in student num-bers was creating a “structural disparity between aspirations generated


by the system and opportunities it offers,” resulting in a “devaluation” of qualifications. It was this argument that Bourdieu subsequently applied to ’68, which he interpreted as a revolt of middle class students radicalized by a threatened decline in status (déclassement).17 But Gruel destroys the empirical evidence for any such déclassement in the 1960s—this actually occurred in the later 1970s, when there was little student protest—or for the claim that student activists were mostly from middle class backgrounds. No less tellingly, he finds the theme of déclassement completely absent from the student demands in ’68 (something that did not worry Bourdieu, who saw student “conformist anti-conformism” as an incapacity to understand the reality of their predicament, his ver-sion of Marxist false consciousness). This leads Gruel, drawing on his own experience as a student activist in the 1960s, to analyze the trajec-tories that took students into radicalism in the 1960s. One interesting point is the importance he attributes to Catholicism in the background of many activists, a theme brought out also in the collective volumes of Artières and Zancarini-Fournel (an article on left-wing Catholics) and Damamme et al. (an article on the crisis in the church in the 1960s). The expectations raised by Vatican II, the legacy of the “worker priests,” and the crisis of the Catholic student union parallel to that in the Com-munist one are all part of the prehistory of May 1968. It is interesting in this context how many of the Maoist établis—students and intellec-tuals who went to work on the factory shop floor to learn from the masses and radicalize them—were from Catholic backgrounds: Mao-ism could be lived as a kind of transposed religious vocation.18 One could also mention the leadership role played in the famous strike at the Lip factory in 1973 by the union activist Charles Piaget, who had participated in the Jeunesse Ouvrière Catholique and by the Domini-can Jean Raguenès, who had participated during May 1968 in Paris in a Comité d’Action pour la Révolution dans l’Eglise. Finally, Gruel shows how the radicalization of student activists occurred against the back-ground of a generalized crisis of authority affecting a whole series of institutions in France in the 1960s: the church (after Vatican II), the army (after the Algerian War), the political parties (after the rise to power of de Gaulle). This created the conditions by which the mass of less politically active students allowed themselves to be represented by leaders whose “strategic and tactical ambitions, beliefs and rituals” they did not necessarily share. The spark that created this convergence—Gruel’s seuil, so to speak—was the evacuation of the Sorbonne by the

17 Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Paris, 1984). The interpretation of ’68 is contained in the chapter “Le moment critique.”

18 Marnix Dressen, De l’amphi à l’établi: Les étudiants maoïstes à l’usine, 1967–1989 (Paris, 2000).


police on May 3, when student onlookers were shocked to see evacu-ated students bundled into police vans for security checks, something that would have seemed routine to seasoned student leaders, who were used to dealing with the police. The idea that there was not one student generation but at least two—the “leaders” born in 1940–45 and radicalized by the Algerian War, and the “foot soldiers of May” from the baby-boom generation born in 1945–53 and politically “virgin” in ’68—is also a theme of a new history of May 1968 by Jean-François Sirinelli. This idea, first for-mulated some twenty years ago,19 was once pithily encapsulated by the journalist Laurent Joffrin as representing a convergence of the gen-eration of Lennon with the generation of Lenin. Otherwise it must be said that Sirinelli’s book is disappointing. It is essentially a straightfor-ward narrative that barely looks outside Paris or beyond the end of May 1968. Interpretively, it is in the “cultural revolution” tradition, and Siri-nelli is interested more in the emerging youth culture of the 1960s than in the student leaders whose ideology he dismisses, for example stig-matizing the protests against the Vietnam War as largely “disconnected from reality” (341). This book is impervious to the new historiography on May described above. Paying lip service to the strikes, Sirinelli urges us to “keep a sense of proportion” and avoid a “historical rehabilitation of the social movement,” since there was not a “general” strike—while in the next phrase admitting that, involving half the workers in France, it was a “social movement without equal” (255). What is an adequate sense of proportion for such an event? For Sirinelli, the denouement of May showed that “democracy . . . had remained from the beginning to the end in harmony with the social organism”—which is to dismiss with the flick of a phrase the following years of contestation (322). In short, Sirinelli reads like Seidman without the research.

Remembering May: Witnesses

Every anniversary produces a crop of books by former activists. One contribution in 2008 was from André Glucksmann in the form of a dialogue with his son Raphaël, one of the “new philosophers,” that famous group of former gauchistes who irrupted onto the literary scene in 1977, renouncing their former commitment to revolution in favor of a crusade against totalitarianism. Glucksmann’s book was provoked by Sarkozy’s attack on May 1968, which embarrassed him because he had announced his support for Sarkozy’s election campaign. He sets

19 Daniel Bertaux, Danièle Linhart, and Beatrix Le Wita, “Mai 1968 et la formation de générations politiques en France,” Mouvement social, no. 143 (1988): 75–89.


out to “explain” to Sarkozy that May 1968 was really anti-Marxist and antitotalitarian. Glucksmann’s own excursion into Maoism, “however brief ” (in fact, no briefer than most others and more rhetorically vio-lent than many), is retrospectively dismissed as having “nothing to do with the May spring.” His conclusion is that the real “inheritor” of May is Sarkozy himself.20 One could hardly imagine a more impoverished version of the “cultural revolution” interpretation of May, where the fact of having been divorced twice and of encouraging the French to abandon complexes about wealth—enrichissez-vous as the subtext of jouissez-vous—is enough to make one a soixante-huitard. Books on the legacy of May do have problems in dealing with the “new philosophers.” There is an article on them in the final section of the Artières and Zancarini-Fournel volume, but it is not clear if they are being presented as the realization of May or as its betrayal. One inter-esting attempt to place them in an intellectual context is Julian Bourg’s From Revolution to Ethics. He traces “a paradigm shift” in French thought between ’68 and the 1980s that involves a move from the centrality of political revolution to a new preoccupation with ethics. It is not intu-itively difficult to see how the anti-Stalinism of ’68 gauchisme could have mutated into the anti-Marxist antitotalitarianism of the 1970s,21 but the importance of Bourg’s book is to unpack how this “ethical turn” occurred. He shows how “almost in spite of themselves” the Maoists of the GP, who “spoke in terms of revolution and class warfare,” simul-taneously “brought democratic questions into public discourse” (free-dom of the press, popular participation, human rights). For example, the Prison Information Group (GIP), founded by Foucault and others, was “caught between the languages of rights and revolution” and ended up prioritizing the former over the latter (80–95). The same was true of a number of other such groups, like the Health Information Group, all originally inspired by the Maoist practice of the “investigation”—going to farms or factories to investigate the real lives of farmers and workers. In the longer term, Bourg argues that this contributed to a democrati-zation of information in a large range of institutions and helped embody ethical imperatives in civil society. Bourg argues his case effectively, although at times his account seems to teeter on a rather neat teleol-ogy as we follow his thinkers on their journey to the ethical end point. Another contribution of Bourg’s book is to challenge the dichotomy between right-wing denunciations of May as the harbinger of moral col-

20 He was not the first to make this assertion. See Pascal Bruckner, “Sarkozy le soixante-huitard,” Libération, May 14, 2007.

21 See also Michael Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Anti-totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York, 2004).


lapse and leftist celebrations of May as the harbinger of cultural libera-tion, and between right-wing celebrations of May as paving the way for the victory of “Anglo-Saxon” liberal individualism and leftist denuncia-tions of the same fact. For Bourg, “The energy of contestation, often revolutionary in rhetoric but democratic in substance” that exploded in May has found concrete embodiment in the thickening of associa-tional life in contemporary France (345). In short, France was changed by May 1968, but that does not mean France has become America. The nouveaux philosophes are part of Bourg’s story, and if one wants to take them seriously, it would be more advisable to read his book than Glucksmann’s self-justifying 2008 pamphlet. As Bourg remarks pithily, they are an example of “the historical significance of tedious books” (236). Glucksmann’s support for Sarkozy was vigorously denounced by the most famous soixante-huitard, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who had rallied in 2008 to Sarkozy’s Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal. In his own book on ’68 Cohn-Bendit’s interpretation is, ironically, not so different from Glucksmann’s. May 1968, Cohn-Bendit tells us, was a cultural “revolt,” not a social “revolution,” not about “class struggle.” He dismisses his own speeches of the time appealing to peasants and workers to join the struggle as “classiques, ringards” (29). The real meaning of the events was that young people wanted to “take control over their own lives” (beg-ging the question of why cultural libertarianism needed to clothe itself in Marxism). Cohn-Bendit’s conclusion is that ’68 “won culturally and lost politically” (77). We should “forget” it and move on. In fact, “for-getting 68” was not so easy, as Cohn-Bendit discovered in 2009 when, as head of the Green list in the European elections, he appeared in a television debate with the centrist candidate François Bayrou. Exasper-ated by Cohn-Bendit’s opinion-poll success, Bayrou declared how “hor-rified” he was as a “father” that Cohn-Bendit had recounted his experi-ences of working in an “alternative” center for children in Frankfurt in the 1970s.22 Cohn-Bendit had described his unease when confronted by the “desire” of the children with whom he sometimes exchanged “caresses.” This passage had aroused no comment when originally pub-lished in 1975, but it was resuscitated in 2001 in a journalistic campaign to portray Cohn-Bendit as a pedophile. Cohn-Bendit silenced his crit-ics by ascribing his words to the “provocations” of the period. Reviving these insinuations in 2009 was seen as a dirty tactic and clinched Cohn-Bendit’s victory over Bayrou, but the affair was an illustration of the degree to which even the “cultural” legacy of ’68 could be problem-

22 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Le grand bazar: Entretiens avec Michel Lévy, Jean-Marc Salmon, Maren Sell (Paris, 1975).


atic.23 It was revealing that Cohn-Bendit tried to explain away his ano-dyne remarks rather than defend them. The discourse of “the 1968 years” about “liberating” the sexuality of children is little covered in the books reviewed here—except by Bourg, who analyzes the impasse into which it led its most extreme protagonists and by an interesting article by Anne Simonin in the Damamme et al. volume on the recep-tion of the writings of the “pedophile” writer Tony Duvert: “censored in the 1960s . . . openly diffused in the 1970s . . . and becoming clan-destine in the 1980s” (423). Does today’s paranoia about “child abuse,” which has replaced celebration of the “sexual liberation” of children in the 1970s, really demonstrate the much-heralded “cultural” victory of ’68? The theme merits further exploration. If Cohn-Bendit was the most famous student leader in ’68, two other figures also played leading roles in the events. One was Jacques Sauva-geot, head of the Union Nationale des Etudiants de France (UNEF), the other Alain Geismar, secretary general of Syndicat National de l’Enseigne ment Supérieur, the union of university lecturers. In 2008 Geismar also published a memoir of his role in the events. During the 1960s, radicalized by the Algerian War, Geismar had participated in debates about modernizing the university system—but this did not put him on the extreme left. He emerges as a textbook case of a revolution-ary created by the event: “It was the situation which in my case turned me into a revolutionary” (62). Once violence erupted in Paris in May, Geismar tried to act as a passeur between the students and lecturers. Then, alienated by the police violence, he rallied to the Mouvement du 22 Mars in a state of high emotion: “the first act of my engagement in a new logic” (80). Soon he was convinced that France had entered a “genuinely revolutionary conjuncture” (142). In 1969 he coauthored a book titled Vers la guerre civile and joined the GP. Arrested in June 1970, he spent eighteen months in prison. By 1974 he had turned his back on revolutionary activism and returned to teaching. Now an adviser to the Socialist mayor of Paris, he accepts that “I went down the wrong track after May,” but he does not regret his engagement, believing that May had “profoundly transformed the patterns of relationships between people” (247). He remains nostalgic about his own experi-ence, describing “the intensity of these moments of happiness experi-enced by those who discovered the joy of finding themselves united together in a movement of liberty which broke down the isolation sepa-rating individuals from each other” (247). Geismar’s memoir is interesting for his reflection on his disengage-ment from the extreme Left and the reasons that the GP’s advocacy

23 “Retour sur les polémiques autour de la génération 68,” Libération, June 6, 2009.


of revolutionary violence did not develop into terrorism. He admits that “we looked over this precipice” but says that he personally had been deeply shocked by the murder of Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics in September 1972 (158). In fact, earlier that year the GP leadership had already rejected the terrorist route after the shooting by a Renault security guard of the young Maoist activist Pierre Overney. A few days later Robert Nogrette, an employee of Renault’s personnel department, was kidnapped by the Maoist Nouvelle Résistance Popu-laire (NRP) as revenge, but he was soon released unharmed. This story is told in Morgan Sportès’s lively new book, which, although not pre-sented in the form of academic history, is based on research in police archives and extensive interviews (including Overney’s two brothers). Overney, the son of agricultural workers, had worked for a year at the Renault factory before being sacked in 1970 for political activities. Con-tinuing as an active GP militant, he was involved in many of its publicity stunts, such as the pillaging of the luxury store Fauchon in May 1970. He participated in regular brawls at the Renault factory gates. The book conveys not only the verbal violence of the Maoists but also the real physical violence directed against factory foremen and Communist trade unionists. In this highly charged atmosphere someone was almost bound to be killed—and it happened to be “Pierrot.” It is salutary that someone has thought it worthwhile to give an identity to a boy remem-bered today only for his death and for the massive crowd accompany-ing his funeral cortege to Père Lachaise (Althusser allegedly remarked that “it is gauchisme they are burying today”). This is an angry book about a life destroyed through the verbal irresponsibility of middle-class Maoist leaders who could take up successful careers once they had abandoned the cause. There are many murky aspects to the story. The Communists believed that the Renault management was trying to undermine them by allowing the handful of Maoists in the factory a free hand; the police had an infiltrator on the executive committee of the GP but allowed many of its activities to go on, possibly to encour-age a political atmosphere that would justify repressive measures. The Nogrette affair is particularly obscure. It is not clear why the GP leader Benny Lévy ordered his kidnapping. Although a leader of the GP, Geis-mar was not himself privy to the decision to kidnap Nogrette, but he says that he accepted it while opposing those who wanted Nogrette assassinated. This seems to have been a moment of truth when the terrorist temptation was rejected, but Geismar does not satisfactorily explain why. The reasons that Italy and Germany but not France witnessed wide-spread terrorism in the mid-1970s have aroused much discussion. One historian, comparing France and Italy, has sought the answer in the


responses of the respective regimes: in Italy a fragile state responded with extreme repression (seven thousand workers suffered legal penal-ties for their participation in the strikes of the “hot autumn” of 1969), while in France the state was more secure and less repressive.24 In Italy the terrorist bomb attack in the Piazza Fortuna in 1969 unleashed sev-eral years of right-wing “Black Terror.” The Left believed that the army and police were complicit in these attacks, giving credence to the idea that the political system had never been properly cleansed of fascism after 1945 and creating the conditions that gave rise to Red Terror. This argument is accepted by Zancarini-Fournel, who writes that “the French exception [in relation to terrorism] resides as much in the atti-tude, broadly legalistic, of the State, as in the responses, broadly moderate, of the extreme leftist groups” (Artières and Zancarini-Fournel, 428). Zancarini-Fournel, however, also notes that people have glossed over examples of political violence—even if not on the Italian level—that did occur in France after 1973. Several foreign diplomats were killed in France after 1974 by French activists, and in March 1977 a group call-ing itself the Noyaux Armés pour l’Autonomie Populaire did “execute” Overney’s assassin, Jean-Antoine Tramoni, after his release from jail. So if the GP itself never tipped into terrorism, its rhetoric caused others to do so. Furthermore, in the 1980s there was a terrorist organization, Action Directe, whose founder had been a member of the Action Com-mittee of his lycée in 1968.25 Perhaps, then, Action Directe should be seen as part of “the 1968 years,” not as an aberration—as presumably Geismar would wish us to view it. Of the same generation as Geismar (b. 1939), the historian Daniel Lindenberg (b. 1940) was not a major player in the May events. His book on ’68 offers us the memories of a “simple passerby in a period still full of mystery” (mystery again; 15). A Sorbonne student in the 1960s, Lin-denberg participated in the famous UNEF demonstration of October 1960 against the Algerian War, a “foundational event” because it was the first time since the Liberation that “a youth organization rebelled openly against the Party” (151). Lindenberg was subsequently at the heart of the political ferment of 1960s Paris, and this book evokes that lost world—“We were closer to 1900 than 2000”—with nostalgia (158). He recalls the bookshops, which were also centers of sociability and dis-cussion; the cafés; the newspaper kiosks, where revolutionary literature could be bought; the cinemas, which provided much of their politi-cal education; the seminars (Lacan at the Ecole Normale Supérieure

24 Isabelle Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil: L’après 68 en France et en Italie (Rennes, 1998).

25 See Robert Gildea, “Forty Years On: French Writing on 1968 in 2008,” French History 23 (2009): 108–19.


[ENS], Barthes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales); and above all the cult authors—Nizan, Sartre, Malraux, Gramsci (read till the pages fell out), Lukács, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Lapassade (“omnipresent in our sixties sorbonicoles” [74]), Cornelius Castoriadis (“one of the great gurus of our little world” [12]), and so on. There are a few excursions outside the “little world”—to the La Borde clinic in the Loir-et-Cher (“one of the mythic sites of our generation”) to attend seminars by left-wing psychiatrists like Félix Guattari or to Berlin for the anti–Vietnam War demonstration in Berlin in February 1968. The American counterculture, however, is barely present except filtered through “our own vision of the world” (128). The French had their James Dean in Paul Nizan. In this fascinating excavation of the intel-lectual archaeology of May, Lindenberg resists the attempt to impose any simplistic coherence on this “ideological mishmash.” It included Marxism in “a libertarian idiom,” “christo-gauchisme,” and numerous other currents, some rather similar to the famous “nonconformists” of the 1930s about whom Lindenberg has written perceptively. Some of these 1930s thinkers were indeed still alive in the 1960s and were much excited by ’68. There were also many on the right—even the extreme right—who were surprisingly sympathetic to ’68 because it seemed to rehabilitate ideas about which the Left had previously been suspicious, regionalism being the most obvious. The final memoir to be considered here is not by a former activist but by the daughter of one: Robert Linhart, a member of the brilliant group of ENS students under the spell of Louis Althusser. Although Althusser remained faithful to the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), many of his pupils broke with the Party to form the Maoist Union des Jeunesses Communistes Marxistes-Léninistes. They kept aloof from the May events because they did not take seriously the actions of “bour-geois” students. Linhart had a nervous breakdown and, after emerging from hospital, became one of those Maoists who decided to work in a factory as an établi. Then he turned to writing, including a classic book on his établi experiences. His daughter Virginie has childhood memo-ries of spending summers with her father in the Cévennes, sleeping under a portrait of Mao and playing with children from a local “alter-native” commune where no child “belonged” to any adult in particular. In 1981 Linhart attempted suicide and then relapsed into depressive silence, an extinct volcano. Virginie was fifteen at the time. Opening as an attempt to explain the enigma of her father, her memoir becomes an exploration of the lives of other children of soixante-huitard leaders. She finds no single story to tell about them—Geismar’s son tells her that “there is no us” (60)—although all of them seem to have experi-enced acute embarrassment at seeing their liberated parents always in


the nude at home. The son of Benny Lévy expresses “real detestation” for ’68—une grosse merde (45)—but most are not so violent. Virginie Lin-hart says of herself, “I am perpetually negotiating in my head between the values which were inculcated in me when small and the world I now live in” (37). This is also a story of broken lives. Thomas Piketty, an economist, recalls that his parents, who were not part of the elite, aban-doned their studies to become full-time activists, then moved into the country to sell goat cheese, only to find, once the utopian dream had passed, that they were unemployed and unemployable, anonymous vic-tims of the youthful illusions of ’68. One fascinating theme of this book is the importance of Judaism, and the memory of the Holocaust, in the trajectories of many of these individuals. Linhart remembers that her grandmother, who spoke French with a Yiddish accent and whom the Holocaust had “made mad with anxiety until the end of her days,” had allegedly wanted to strangle Robert on his birth in April 1944 to pre-vent his falling into the hands of the Germans. Linhart suggests that her father was brought up with a sense of “shame” and “profound guilt at being alive” (96). This was a silent shame, and what made ’68 such a luminous event, as one of her interlocutors remarks, was that it offered the chance to “pass to the other side, to the side of life: ’68 was about leaving Survival and entering into Life” (78).

Aspects of ’68

Given the considerable attention paid to former Maoists like Linhart, Geismar, and Glucksmann, Salles’s study of the Trotskyist Ligue Com-muniste Révolutionnaire (LCR) is especially salutary. Unlike the Mao-ist groups, the LCR still exists, in the new form of Olivier Besance-not’s Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste. This longevity partly undermines the argument that ’68 was a “political defeat and cultural victory,” the swansong of Marxism and the triumph of libertarianism. On the con-trary, thanks to May, a peripheral Trotskyist group with only 350 mem-bers became an enduring feature of French politics, reaching a peak of about 3,800 activists in 1976. After a trough, its membership rose back to 3,000 in 2002, when Besancenot scored 4.25 percent of the vote in the presidential elections. Salles, a former LCR activist, provides a scrupulous narrative. He shows that the LCR was most successful in lycées and universities and that, despite its ouvrierist rhetoric, it did in the mid-1970s absorb some countercultural themes, like the decrimi-nalization of soft drugs, feminism, defense of gays, regionalism. Thus the boundaries between so-called political and cultural gauchisme were more porous than sometimes suggested. Regarding violence, the LCR, while rejecting individual acts of terrorism, accepted the necessity of


“revolutionary violence” despite ambiguity about what this meant. A turning point—equivalent to the Nogrette kidnapping for the GP—was a violent demonstration in Paris in June 1973 against a right-wing meeting. The LCR organizers only just prevented some demonstrators from assaulting two policemen trapped in a burning van. According to Salles, the leadership drew the lesson that it was necessary to “avoid the adventure of minority violence” (71). Nonetheless, he notes continu-ing ambivalence on this issue. The LCR denounced the killing of Tra-moni, but it was only around 1978 that the organization began describ-ing such acts as “assassinations” rather than “executions.” Finally, Salles observes that once the gauchiste tide had turned, the state proved tol-erant in reintegrating those who wished to pursue careers in educa-tion. Some, however, never took that path, and there were about twenty suicides, including that of Michel Recanati, an organizer of the June 1973 demonstration, whose story is recounted in Romain Goupil’s film Mourir à trente ans. Salles shows that even in its heyday the LCR’s presence in factories was insignificant. It supported the emblematic strikes of the 1970s but had little influence on them. To find out what was occurring in the fac-tories, one must read Xavier Vigna’s brilliant book on the strike move-ments of these years. Vigna starts with a detailed account of the strikes of “May” 1968, demonstrating not only their geographic extent but also their variable chronology: in one Moselle factory the strikes only started on May 30 and finished in July. Vigna shows that the strikes revealed deep class antagonism: in the Loire, organizers of the Communist Con-fédération Générale du Travail (CGT) kidnapped their bosses after a car chase and locked them in the factory. There were numerous cases of what Gobille calls métissage—students visiting factories but also workers visiting students. Above all, Vigna reconstitutes how the par-ticipants experienced the strikes. It was not true (pace Seidman) that workers sought only “traditional” objectives of higher wages. Although the demand for autogestion, launched by the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) nationally on May 16, was not much used in the factories, Vigna suggests that it genuinely echoed an “aspi-ration diffuse” to challenge patterns of authority in the factories. The language used in some strikes was remarkably similar to that of the stu-dents. In the Rhone-Poulenc factory a tract declared, “We have seen how society has been wakened by violence but also and above all by words . . . transforming the factory into a permanent and autonomous center of decision making” (67). In a chemical factory in a small town in the BassesAlpes, nowhere near any students, a local strike leader wrote: “As our action progressed, we came to realize our strength . . . discov-ered that we were not just tools. . . . We ran our factory ourselves. . . . We


spent nights talking with those who were willing accept a dialogue . . . to concretize the great popular élan of May through a profound trans-formation of structures” (81–82). After Vigna, no one can say that the strikes of 1968 have been for-gotten, but another merit of his book is to go beyond that year, showing that it inaugurated a cycle of “working-class insubordination.” In these later strikes, women, unskilled workers, and immigrants played increas-ingly important roles. There were three big strikes involving immi-grants in 1971, followed by an important one at the Penarroya factory in Lyon in the following year. The strikers often employed radical new forms of action, such as sequestering their employers. These actions often took an aggressive edge: in one factory the workers prevented the boss from shaving when they discovered the distress this caused him (revenge for the kinds of petty authoritarianism the workers had suffered for so many years). There were also “productive strikes,” in which workers took over management themselves to prevent a factory closure. The most famous case is Lip, but Vigna notes seventeen similar cases inspired by this example in 1973–75. Overall, Vigna sees this cycle of protest as revealing the “underside of the trente glorieuses,” particu-larly in relation to immigrants protesting against the appalling housing conditions and the lack of any safety provisions: “Our health is not for sale” was one slogan. Opposing factory hierarchies and ever-increasing production targets, the strikers were challenging the “Fordist compro-mise” of the 1960s: higher productivity and reinforcement of factory discipline in return for higher wages. Out of these disparate conflicts, Vigna assembles what he dubs the “fragments of a discourse” on the ideal factory. At its heart was an aspi-ration to greater democratization and a suspicion of established trade unions. He quotes a group of female workers in Montpellier in 1968: “We want to be responsible for our work and its organization, for the working of the factories in our area—to be men and women whose dig-nity is respected” (214). In this period, the CGT, although remaining the biggest union, was on the defensive because it represented, above all, white, male skilled workers. The CFDT, situated somewhere between the extreme Left and the Communists, was much more in touch with the new spirit. It played a key role in many emblematic strikes of the period, including those at Penarroya and Lip. But Vigna also shows that the extreme Left did have some influence. In particular, the Mao-ists enjoyed some success with immigrants (they produced tracts in Por-tuguese and Arabic) but not with women, who were repelled by their machismo. With time, however, the Maoist rhetoric, initially a bracing change from the more formulaic language of the traditional unions,


became itself rather routine, and shrill denunciations of the “fascist” state seemed disconnected from reality. Finally Vigna offers us his periodization for the ’68 years. He iden-tifies a turning point around 1977, when the impact of the oil crisis became more visible. Workers became less concerned with changing factory conditions than with keeping their jobs. In the violent conflicts in Lorraine in 1979, the whole region was mobilized to save the Longwy steel plant, but the protestors looked increasingly to the political parties and the state. Meanwhile, the CFDT, which had in 1968 priori-tized social conflict over politics, had grown closer to the Parti Socia-liste (PS). If “the 1968 years” were about direct action to obtain change because traditional organizations of the Left seemed out of touch, the gradual reinvention of the PS allowed electoral politics to regain plau-sibility. Protest was “reinstitutionalized”; the breach opened up by ’68 was closed. Vigna’s book is based on research in union archives, prefectural reports, newspapers, and extensive use of ephemeral tracts and mani-festos produced during the strikes. One merit of his book is to allow us to hear the workers speak for themselves, but this does raise the issue of how well his sources represent the aspirations of the rank and file. Showing that the extreme Left was in phase with the workers by using material that the extreme Left may often have penned risks a degree of circularity. Possibly more use of oral research might have compensated for this problem. Vincent Porhel uses oral history extensively in his study of social conflicts in Brittany. Where Vigna covers a wide range, Porhel offers detailed microhistories of five social conflicts. He explores the inter-relationship between event, representation, and memory, showing how careful one must be to impose “1968” themes like autogestion and regionalism on the realities of the period. For example, his analysis of the May 1968 strike at the CSF electronics factory in Brest undermines the myth that developed as the strike was under way that the workers had implemented their own version of autogestion. This was well known enough to be reported in the British New Left Review by Ernest Man-del the following year. In fact, Porhel shows that although the CFDT, which had nationally launched the idea of autogestion, was the main union in the CSF factory, the local organizer talked about autogestion only as a “prospect” and did not mean more than a vague desire for greater autonomy from Paris, where many of the factory managers and foremen were recruited. Another much-mythologized strike was that of the “Joint Français” mechanical precision factory at Saint-Brieuc in 1972. The strike became entrenched after the police evacuated the fac-


tory, an event that raised tension locally at the moment of Overney’s death in Paris. The LCR deployed the slogan “We do not work with a rifle at our back.” Later on, the strikers irrupted into the factory again, sequestering the union and employer negotiators. Because the strikers received considerable support in the region, the conflict later became interpreted in regionalist terms: the Breton flag, banned by unions in the ’68 strikes, was brandished by strikers in 1972. Yet all the strikers later interviewed by Porhel downplay the importance of regionalism. The issue came up again in the long strike at the Pedernec poultry abat-toir in 1974. This firm was run in an authoritarian and paternalist way, and many of the workers were overqualified for their work. The strike occurred in the wake of the Lip conflict, and local activists of the left-ist Parti Socialiste Unifié tried to get the strikers to follow its example. But Pedernec’s experiment in autogestion did not go beyond selling a few chickens in a local market, and the memories of Porhel’s interview-ees hardly support the declaration of one publication at the time that the workers were “preparing a Socialist Brittany where the power of the workers would be deployed in autogestion” (210). The final event studied by Porhel was the protracted resistance to the installation of a nuclear reactor in the village of Plogoff. He shows how this conflict that began as an environmental opposition to nuclear power gradually became more a defense of ruralism—a precursor of the conservative “patrimo-nial” politics of the 1980s. When Jacques Sauvageot visited Plogoff for the tenth anniversary of ’68, almost no one went to hear him. In short, a conflict that, like that of the inhabitants of the Larzac plateau, is often seen as emblematic of “the 1968 years” was in fact highly ambiguous. Porhel, then, unpacks some myths about ’68. So too, in a very dif-ferent way, does Serge Audier’s study of the genealogy of the many “anti-68” discourses, of which Sarkozy’s 2007 speech was an archetype. He shows how often left and right-wing critiques of May converge. The locus classicus is Régis Debray’s 1978 diatribe, Modeste contribution aux discours et cérémonies officielles du dixième anniversaire, written during the modernizing presidency of Giscard d’Estaing. For Debray, May 1968 illustrated the Hegelian “cunning of history”: it destroyed the archa-isms of Gaullist France to smooth the way for liberal capitalism and the Americanization of France. This supposedly left-wing critique dovetails with that of liberal conservatives like Marcel Gauchet—informed by American writers like Richard Sennett, Christopher Lasch, and Alan Bloom—for whom ’68 unleashed individualism and cultural relativism, destroying civic responsibility and a sense of duty. One point where Audier’s argument is unconvincing is when he tries to rescue Raymond Aron from this galère. Audier argues that Aron’s famous book denounc-ing the rebels of May 1968 for their utopian nihilism was hardly less


critical than they were of the sclerotic structures of Gaullist France—especially in the universities. He pushes this argument so far that in his reading Aron sounds more like Cornelius Castoriadis stripped of Marx-ism than like the editorialist of Le Figaro with whom most of us are famil-iar. Audier is, however, on surer ground when demolishing the notori-ous 1985 book of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, who denounced what they called the “pensée 68” as a destructive “antihumanism” exempli-fied by thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu.26 Audier shows this claim to be entirely unhistorical by carefully analyzing the relationship of each of these thinkers to ’68. He notes that even François Furet, broadly speak-ing an admirer of the Ferry and Renaut book, had to admit that the spirit of ’68 was more libertarian than antihumanist and that Jean-Paul Sartre was closer to it than those who had proclaimed the death of the subject. Audier’s book becomes also a discussion of the intellectual influ-ences that gave rise to May 1968—a subject broached in several books reviewed above. Many other authors have noted the paradox that in some sense May 1968 was a (provisional) revenge of Sartre over Fou-cault, who had famously written in 1965 that Sartre’s thought was the “magnificent and poignant attempt of a man of the 19th century to think the 20th century.” But when discussing the intellectual back-ground to ’68, we need to go beyond the tracing of “influences” and develop, as is done by several contributions to the collective volumes of Zancarini-Fournel and Damamme et al., a social history of the trans-mission of ideas, of the role of cultural mediators, and of the recep-tion and marketing of ideas. One interesting article in the Damamme et al. collection studies the “politicization” of structuralism before ’68. It quotes Foucault as saying: “I was the choirboy of structuralism. Let us say that I shook the bell, the faithful got on their knees and the non-believers uttered cries of alarm” (173). An article in Zancarini-Fournel’s 2002 collective volume takes us beyond Cohn-Bendit’s famous boutade—“Marcuse? Never heard of him”—to show how Marcuse’s ideas circu-lated in France before ’68 even among those who may have never read him. Even if ’68 did see Sartre thrust into the intellectual limelight again, and then involved in setting up the GIP with Foucault—whom, astonishingly, he met for the first time only in 1971—the modus oper-andi of the GIP moved it closer to the model of the “specific” intel-lectual that Foucault developed in opposition to Sartre’s model of the “universal” intellectual, rendering Sartre’s later support for the GP like

26 Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La pensée 68: Essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris, 1985).


the pathetic fuite en avant of an aging icon desperate to remain in touch with the young. In short, a complex chassé-croisé of ideas before and after ’68 requires detailed analysis and cannot be reduced to some sim-plistic pensée 68 which is so effectively demolished by Audier.

Conclusion

This survey of the literature suggests four more general concluding remarks and possible avenues for future research: After reading many of the books discussed above, it is no longer possible to write about “May 1968” as simply what happened in a few streets in Paris. There is certainly more research to do on the impact of ’68 in France, but it is also necessary to develop transnational per-spectives and examine cultural exchanges: we should remember the importance for Lindenberg of his visit to Berlin in 1968. The Artières and Zancarini-Fournel volume contains many articles on what was hap-pening abroad, but it is not always as successful in making the links to France. One recent transnational history is Gerd-Rainer Horn’s comparative study of “the spirit of ’68” in Western Europe and North America from 1956 to 1976.27 Horn does not confine himself to the “soft” cultural 1960s of Marwick and sees the “larger meanings” of ’68 as having “potentially (and, for some time actually) pointed in a far more radical direction of social change” (231). But inevitably, in a short book the analysis of any one country is rather superficial, and processes of cultural exchange are only touched on. Should the “beat genera-tion” or the “delinquents” of the late 1950s (Teddy boys, teppisti, blousons noirs) really be seen as precursors of ’68, as Horn suggests? Horn offers fascinating snapshots of rebellion—Amsterdam in 1966, Ghent in 1967, Trentino in 1966—without adequately tracing connections between them. As well as transnational history, we need comparative history to under-stand the distinctiveness of what happened in France. There was noth-ing quite like May 1968 anywhere else. The sociologist Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey has noted, for example, that while the shooting in West Berlin of the student Benno Ohnesorg during a demonstration on June 2, 1967 led to significant radicalization of the German student Left—it was a seuil in the German 1960s—it did not lead to general social upheaval, such as what occurred in France a year later. Gilcher-Holtey suggests that this was because Germany did not have the same tradi-tion of political strikes as France.28 Whether or not this is a sufficient

27 Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford, 2007).

28 Gilcher-Holtey, “La nuit des barricades.”


explanation, it is necessary to analyze the specificities of France as well as its resemblances to the rest of the world. In this context, the parallels between 1936 and 1968 are very striking—and not only regarding the occupation of the factories. The utopian rhetoric of “breaking down barriers” is remarkably similar in both cases. How, then, should the particular experience of France in 1968 be related to specific structural phenomena of French society (Crozier’s famous “blocked society”), to traditions of revolution in France, to the impact of the Gaullist Fifth Republic on French politics? In this context, there is more to say about how French historical memories—of the Occupation and the Algerian War—influenced the protestors of ’68. Some examples of this are famous—the slogans “SS = CRS” or “We are all German Jews,” the Maoists creating the NRP—but one intriguing revelation of the studies by Vigna and Porhel is the omnipresence of the memory of Algeria at every level of society and the multifarious ways that it filtered into the social conflicts of the 1960s. For example, in the Pedernec factory, the boss, who had pied-noir origins, was denounced as an “exploiteur colonialiste”; in several con-flicts analyzed by Vigna, younger workers compared their resentment against their foreman to the feelings they had felt toward the officers commanding them in Algeria. Yet however violent their ritualistic denunciations of Gaullist “fas-cism,” the French Maoist students certainly carried less problematic national memories than their Germans and Italian counterparts. The German and Italian contexts did not allow a situation comparable to what occurred on June 18, 1971, when some Maoists even accompanied left-wing Gaullists to the Gaullist memorial of Mont Valérien. Work remains to be done about the way that the French state responded to the crisis of “the 1968 years.” Among the books under review, this subject is treated in depth only in Seidman and in an article in Damamme et al.’s collective volume about how the denouement of May 1968 was an important moment in the transition from the charis-matic Gaullism of de Gaulle to the institutionalized Gaullism of Pom-pidou. No one has reopened the issue of what de Gaulle was doing with General Jacques Massu at Baden-Baden on May 29 except for the author of a new book arguing that the visit was motivated by de Gaulle’s desire to ascertain the intentions of the Soviet Union, one of whose mili-tary representatives had recently visited Massu. Once reassured that the Soviets did not want a revolution in France, de Gaulle, it is argued, felt free to launch his attack on the PCF. In return, de Gaulle kept silent about the Soviet invasion of Prague. The author of this delirious con-spiracy theory is Henri-Christian Giraud, grandson of the conservative general eliminated by de Gaulle in 1943, who has over the years spilled


much ink showing that de Gaulle was a secret ally of the Communists.29 Perhaps de Gaulle’s visit to Baden-Baden is really no more than the petite histoire of ’68, but more remains to be said about the curious mix-ture of flexibility and repression displayed by the French state during and after ’68. All the contributions discussed above invite us to reflect on the appropriate periodization for a study of “the 1968 years.” The chrono-logical frameworks proposed include 1961/62–81 (Zancarini-Fournel and Artières, 1945–75 (Damamme et al.), 1956–76 (Horn), 1965–75 (Sirinelli), and 1968–79 (Vigna). These dates all have their own logic; they represent different attempts to understand the longer-term signifi-cance and meanings of ’68. But there is a danger in becoming too fix-ated on the issue of “consequences.” In a recent book on theater in ’68, the director Ariane Mnouchkine, whose work might seem totally in the spirit of ’68, is quoted as saying, “Every time I am asked, ‘So you were born in 1968?’ I reply, “No, we were born in 1964 or 1959.’”30 Perhaps, then, we need to push even further Gobille’s injunction to return to the event. Like the Paris Commune, May 1968 has a fascinating mythologi-cal afterlife, but it is no less worth discussing in its own terms. We must resist the temptation to ascribe to May 1968 every historical develop-ment that has taken place in France since then. That is not to say, of course, that May had no “consequences,” but tracing them requires us to take full account of the subjectivities of the historical actors—not to mock them for having been caught out by some cunning of history, but to listen to what they have to say, trace how the experience continued to mark their lives and how it was transmitted, and reinterpreted, by them over time. This could be done by microhistories of small groups or by oral histories like the fascinating collection of interviews with former members of the Paris-based 1968 Action Committees (first published in 1978, then reissued and extended in 2008). One protagonist says, “I simply didn’t exist before May,” and another, “When I took up my job again after May 68, things were not like they had been before. . . . 68 has made me become what I am today.”31 The gay activist Guy Hocquenghem, who had been in the thick of the May events, wrote in 1974: “I am fed up with references to May. . . .

29 Henri-Christian Giraud, L’accord secret de Baden-Baden: Comment de Gaulle et les Soviétiques ont mis fin à mai 68 (Paris, 2008). It should be said that conspiracy theories flourish on all sides: there are right-wing Gaullists who believe that the events were an Israeli-Jewish plot to avenge de Gaulle’s negative comment on Israel in 1967 and his pro-Arab foreign policy.

30 Marie-Ange Rauch, Le théâtre en France en 1968: Crise d’une histoire, histoire d’une crise (Paris, 2008), 99.

31 Nicolas Daum, Mai 68, raconté par des anonymes (Paris, 2008), 48, 141. Robert Gildea of Oxford University is coordinating a major transnational oral project on 1968 that promises to advance our knowledge significantly.


May is closer to the nineteenth century than to us in many respects.”32 The remark was intentionally provocative, of course, but it is echoed by Lindenberg’s comments, quoted earlier, that we were “nearer to 1900 than 2000.” The mystery of May 1968 in France comes from our double sense that it seems distant, strange, and evanescent but also that it seems to matter. The challenge of the historian is to render both its strangeness and its distance—returning to “the event”—while find-ing an appropriate chronological framework (“the sixties”? “the 1968 years”?) to explain its longer-term significance.

32 Guy Hocquenghem, L’après-mai des faunes (Paris, 1974), 39.

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Julian Jackson - The Mystery of May 1968