May '68: utopia revisited

By Hosni Abdel-Rehim

"We who belonged to that spring heard the sounds of rebellion and responded," she said. Cixous was describing the generalised feeling of alienation and disempowerment that unleashed May 1968.

What in effect remains of those tumultuous days 30 years ago, when French students occupied the streets of Paris and the universities, believing for a fleeting historical moment that they had actually seized and held the power to shape their own destinies?

This question was debated in France throughout May 1998 on television specials, during commemorative events and in extensive press coverage focussing on testimonies, oral history and even fiction written by the May '68 generation.

"May '68 was about a generation claiming the right to make history, to become part of it -- but collectively," writer Serge July said in the French daily Libération. Its ominous background: nine years of a murderous war in French Indochina (Vietnam, 1945-54), eight years of attempting to suppress Algerian independence (1954-1962), the epic militant strikes of French miners in 1993, the US-Vietnam war and the explosion of Southern liberation movements all over Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.

In many ways May '68 represented a rebellion against this heritage, symbolised by the autocratic yet ambiguous figure of President Charles De Gaulle. An acclaimed nationalist leader and hero of the French resistance during the Second World War, Gen. De Gaulle was also at the forefront of the Algerian War -- desperately clinging to France's slipping hold over its last colonial stronghold. The aging general stubbornly struggled to maintain l'Algérie Française against all odds and until the bitter end.

Many analysts believe that May '68 developed within this particular historical conjecture as a self-styled, spontaneous, revolutionary movement. In an effort to break with the imperialist heritage, French students self-consciously sought revolutionary slogans, rejecting reform on principle.

Recollecting the movement's aspirations, July wrote: "History-in-process could only have one name: revolution. Revolution, a magic word which encompassed very different visions and desires: nationalist revolutions for countries of the South, a cultural revolution in China, and especially cultural revolution in the North." He added: "Finally, the political revolution would shatter the world's order, catapulting the working class to the space occupied by those who monopolise all power -- and this revolution would express and synthesise all the others."

Hence the May '68 slogans were replete with the vociferous chants and banners promoting the political heroes of the day: Ernesto Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and the Cuban guerrillas, Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh. Intellectuals and cultural ideologues co-existed with the revolutionaries: Franz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth, a classic on colonial domination and exploitation, philosopher Jacques Derrida who had already laid the groundwork for his theory of literary deconstruction.

Revolutionary pop culture also became part and parcel of the youth jargon. The students appropriated and reiterated John Lennon's phrase: "Those who do not profoundly hate the present cannot really love it."

Besides the universities, the striking students occupied official buildings, subverting the establishment canon in the process. Traditional cultural practices were thrown into crisis. Orchestras went on strike and the Cannes Film Festival was cancelled.

Artists, writers and musicians set up discussions to re-evaluate their role in society. Writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras and others addressed the Sorbonne students in solidarity. The Odéon theatre was occupied and turned into a permanent forum, under the slogan, 'When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theatre, all bourgeois theatres must become national assemblies,' wrote sociologist Ian Birchall in Revolutionary Rehearsals, describing the street scene during those distant days.

Despite its militancy, May '68 slowly fizzled out in June, just as it had spontaneously erupted in May. Lacking a coherent political programme and strategy, and having failed to significantly mobilise the workers, the movement gradually lost its momentum and drive.

The most powerful Communist-affiliated trade union, La Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), had a heavy hand in preventing the formation of a significant labour-student alliance, taking the stand that workers should not ally with a bourgeois movement.

Capitalising on the students' disarray, De Gaulle, who had fled the capital at the height of the insurgency, returned to Paris and had the police forcefully evacuate the universities in June.

After successfully mobilising and regrouping the Right against the students, De Gaulle organised massive counter-demonstrations gathering one million people against the Left under the banner 'Keep Algeria French' and 'Cohn-Bendit to Dachau concentration camp'. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, of German-Jewish descent, was one of the most prominent and charismatic student leaders of '68.

The question of the May '68 heritage remains. What was the impact and the legacy of this movement that transcended national borders, inspiring student uprisings and demonstrations worldwide?

After May '68, students rallied, held sit-ins and protest marches in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Germany, Poland, the US and other parts of the world.

French historian Jacques Julliard believes that the movement's legacy is especially relevant today in France. "Over the past five years we have witnessed a renaissance of radical forms of protest which one can interpret as being modelled after May '68," he wrote in the French daily Le Monde. "This became especially evident after the 1994/95 mass strikes... The conflict erupted over the power-relation between the people and the ruling elite on the basis of growing divergence over neo-liberalism; globalisation was frightening, when economic progress became synonymous with social regression."

Some analysts believe that another evident parallel between May '68 and now is related to the class base of the leftist movement's leadership. Distanced from the working class like the 1968 student cadres, the current leadership consists of artists, writers and intellectuals with no tangible grassroots base and whose concerns cannot relate to the daily struggle of the marginalised. "The French social movement is thus afflicted by a conflict between the petit-bourgeois and the workers," wrote Julliard.