Diarmaid Ferriter: Who fears to speak of May 1968?

The 50th anniversary of upheavals in Paris and the student protests that sparked a massive general strike of eight million French workers in May 1968 has prompted numerous reminiscences and reflections, including in The New York Review of Books from one of the student leaders, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in which he testily teases out its impact and legacies.

In 1968 as a French-born son of German Jewish parents, he was a 23-year-old sociology student: “The feeling we had in those days, which has shaped my entire life, was: we’re making history. An exalted feeling – suddenly we had become agents in world history.”

Clearly, May 1968 generated a whopping vanity in Cohn-Bendit, who ultimately became a Green Party MEP: “I’m loved in France. As an embodiment of 1968, I have become part of the French DNA . . . I have become the psychoanalyst of the French.”

Beyond his messianic tendencies, he is, however, conscious of how complex movements can, with time, be simplified both by participants and their traducers: the notion that the 1968 dissidents began a process of undermining the church, education, patriotism and the family is “just as absurd as the whole revolutionary myth” (former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been fond of calling for the “liquidation” of the 1968 legacy).

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Yet Cohn-Bendit also maintains that 1968 began a social revolution and that the revolt was “far more American in origin than the Europeans cared to admit” given the Vietnam protests and the African-American civil rights movement of that decade.

Larger community

One of Cohn-Bendit’s interesting assertions is that “we were searching for forms of a larger community” a good summary of the spirit of 1968, but his contention that in contemporary Germany, “we no longer have a flexibility dictated by global capitalism, but a flexibility enacted by humans themselves” seems far-fetched.

Revolt in 1968 was not just about students or workers; it was also about disgust at the Vietnam war, Cold War frontiers and the crushing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. As historian Eric Hobsbawm characterised it, 1968 was a “great awakening to a world on the brink of revolution” and it was the spirit of youth that was striking; youth emerged as a recognisable group “and not merely a period of transition between childhood and adult life”. Even in Yugoslavia, Tito was forced to make concessions to the students, but in Mexico and Pakistan protestors were gunned down. Hobsbawm noted that a post-1968 political movement did not really develop; as he saw it “it was felt to be a cultural revolution, and as such it was major and irreversible” because of the transformation of rules as to what was and was not permissible.

What happened across national boundaries in 1968 was a product of demographic changes, dramatic increases in university enrolments, the arrival of consumer society, the power of the media, the generation gap and the consequences of American and Soviet imperialism. And yet the events happened in national contexts; there was no one size fits all and no organised international movement.

Northern Ireland was also affected and journalist Brendan O'Neill has recently argued that 1968 was crucial there "but tends to get passed over" which shows "how selective radical nostalgia can be". As he sees it "the Troubles were triggered directly by the international, youthful radicalism of 1968" and the demands for equality kicked off seriously in May 1968 with the protests of the Derry Housing Action Committee, which then joined forces with the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association later in the summer of 1968.

Paradox

Where are the contemporary versions of "searching for forms of a larger community" and the "soixante-huitards"? The great paradox is that today, communications across boundaries have never been easier and the destructiveness caused by aggressive globalisation, misogyny, job insecurity and 21st-century authoritarianism are manifest.

Yet all these factors seem to have reinforced alienation, isolation and violence rather than facilitate the kind of emotional idealism and belief in a common cause apparent in 1968 which produced such slogans as “Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible!” and “Take your desires for Realities”. The momentum underpinning the #Me Too movement seemed to suggest that it could become a more broad-based coalition to challenge a multitude of prejudices and oppressions, but it has not developed in that direction.

It is, of course, naive to compare the circumstances of 1968 with today but it is also far too convenient and dismissive of the ever contrary Cohn-Bendit to declare: “I say forget May 1968. It is finished. Society today bears no relationship with that of the 1960s. When we called ourselves anti-authoritarian, we were fighting a very different people.” Of course they were, but we have our own versions of those people today and some of their practices, priorities and methods are scarily redolent of 50 years ago in their determination to shut down dissent, their imperialism and their definition of what is and is not permissible.