1968 Paradox

May 1968 - a watershed in French life

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Nanterre, France: Forty years ago, students in neckties and bobby sox threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that France's sclerotic postwar system change. Today, students worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits are marching through the streets demanding that nothing change at all.

May 1968 was a watershed in French life, a holy moment of liberation for many, when youth coalesced, the workers listened and the semi-royal French government of President Charles de Gaulle took fright.

But for others, like the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, only 13 years old at the time, May '68 represents anarchy and moral relativism, a destruction of social and patriotic values that, he has said in harsh terms, "must be liquidated."

The fierce debate about what happened 40 years ago is very French. There is even a fight about labels - the right calls May '68 "the events," while the left calls it "the movement."

While a youth revolt became general in the West - from anti-Vietnam protests in the United States to the Rolling Stones in swinging London and finally the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany - France was where the protests of the baby-boom generation came closest to a real political revolution, with 10 million workers on strike and not just a revulsion against stifling social rules of class, education and sexual behavior.

For André Glucksmann, a prime actor then and still a famous "public intellectual," May 1968 is "a monument, either sublime or detested, that we want to commemorate or bury."

It is a "cadaver," he said, "from which everyone wants to rob a piece." Glucksmann, 71 and still with a mop of Beatle-like hair, wrote a book with his filmmaker son, Raphaël, 28, called May 68 Explained to Nicolas Sarkozy.

In a stinging campaign speech a year ago, as he ran against the Socialist candidate, Sarkozy attacked May 1968 and "its leftist heirs," whom he blamed for a crisis of "morality, authority, work and national identity." He attacked "the cynicism of the caviar left."

In 1968, Glucksmann said, "the hope was to change the world, like the Bolshevik revolution, but it was inevitably incomplete and the institutions of the state are untouched." Now, he said, "We commemorate, but the right is in power." As for the French left, he said, "it's in a state of mental coma."

For Raphaël Glucksmann, who led his first strike at high school in 1995, his generation has nostalgia for their rebel fathers, but no stomach for a fight in hard economic times.

"The young people are marching now to refuse all reforms, to defend the rights of their professors," he said. "We see no alternatives. We're a generation without bearings."

The events (or movement) of 40 years ago began in March at Nanterre university to the west of Paris, where a young French-born German named Daniel Cohn-Bendit led demonstrations against parietal rules - when young men and women could be together in dormitory rooms - that got out of hand. When Nanterre was closed in early May, the anger spread to central Paris, to the Latin Quarter and the Sorbonne, where the student elite demonstrated against antiquated university rules, and then outward, to workers in the big factories.

Scenes of the barricades, the police charges and the tear gas are dear to the French, recaptured in every magazine and scores of books, including one by the photographer Marc Riboud, now 84, called: "Under the Cobblestones," a reference to a famous slogan of the time from the leader-jester Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament, "Under the cobblestones is the beach."

Known then as "Dany the Red" for the color of both his politics and his hair, Cohn-Bendit is also thought responsible for other famous slogans of the time: "It is forbidden to forbid" and "Live without limits and enjoy without restraint!" - with the word for enjoy, "jouir," having the double meaning of sexual climax. The injunction was especially potent in a straight-laced country where the birth-control pill had been authorized for sale only the year before, said Alain Geismar, another leader of the time.

Geismar, a physicist who spent 18 months in jail - but later served as a counselor to government ministers - wrote his own book, "My May 1968." Now 69, the former Maoist uses an Apple iPhone. He happily displays his music catalogue, which is mostly Mozart.

The movement succeeded "as a social revolution, not as a political one," Geismar said. While the de Gaulle government responded with police and mobilized troops in case the students marched on the presidential palace, the idea never occurred to student leaders, who talked of revolution but never intended to carry one out.

Most significant, Geismar said, the movement was "the beginning of the end of the Communist Party in France," which deeply opposed the revolt of these young leftists who it could not control, but who managed in important ways to break the party's authority over the big industrial unions.

French society in May 1968 "was completely blocked," Geismar said. A conservative recreation of pre-World War II society, it had been shaken by the Algerian war and the baby boom, its schools badly overcrowded.

"As a divorced man, Sarkozy couldn't have been invited to dinner at the Élysée Palace, let alone be elected president of France," Geismar said. Both the vivid personal life and political success of Sarkozy, who has foreign and Jewish roots, "are unimaginable without 1968," he said. "The neo-conservatives are unimaginable without '68."

André Glucksmann, who still supports Sarkozy as the best chance to modernize "the gilded museum of France" and reduce the power of "the sacralized state," is amused by Sarkozy's fierce campaign attack on May 1968. "Sarkozy is the first post-'68 president," Glucksmann said. "To liquidate '68 is to liquidate himself."

But there is also a fashionable absurdity to the commemoration. The designers Sonia Rykiel and Agnès B discuss their views of May 1968 in every magazine, there are documentaries and discussions on every channel and a Parisian jeweler, Jean Dinh Van, born in Vietnam, has reissued a silver cobblestone pendant he made at the time "to celebrate 40 years of liberty" - and, in his case, success. (The smallest, with chain, sells for $275.)

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And here's a comment from Sott.net, which fits by means of a broader bird's view, explicating this crazy controversy:

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Again, the Protocols of the Psychopaths who wrote them, come to mind:

The Protocols repeatedly affirm that the first objective is the destruction of the existing ruling class ("the aristocracy", the term employed, was still applicable in 1905) and the seizure of property through the incitement of the insensate, brutish "mob". Once again, subsequent events give the "forecast" its "deadly accuracy":

"In politics one must know how to seize the property of others without hesitation if by it we secure submission and sovereignty. . . The words, 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity', brought to our ranks, thanks to our blind agents, whole legions who bore our banners with enthusiasm. And all the time these words were canker-worms boring into the wellbeing of the people, putting an end everywhere to peace, quiet, solidarity and destroying all the foundations of the States. . .

This helped us to our greatest triumph; it gave us the possibility, among other things, of getting into our hands the master card, the destruction of privileges, or in other words the very existence of the aristocracy . . . that class which was the only defence peoples and countries had against us. On the ruins of the natural and genealogical aristocracy . . . we have set up the aristocracy of our educated class headed by the aristocracy of money. The qualifications of this aristocracy we have established in wealth, which is dependent upon us, and in knowledge. . . It is this possibility of replacing the representatives of the people which has placed them at our disposal, and, as it were, given us the power of appointment .... .

We appear on the scene as alleged saviours of the worker from this oppression when we propose to him to enter the ranks of our fighting forces; Socialists, Anarchists, Communists . . .

By want and the envy and hatred which it engenders we shall move the mobs and with their hands we shall wipe out all those who hinder us on our way . . . The people, blindly believing things in print, cherishes . . . a blind hatred towards all conditions which it considers above itself, for it has no understanding of the meaning of class and condition. . . These mobs will rush delightedly to shed the blood of those whom, in the simplicity of their ignorance, they have envied from their cradles, and whose property they will then be able to loot. 'Ours' they will not touch, because the moment of attack will be known to us and we shall take measures to protect our own. . . The word 'freedom' brings out the communities of men to fight against every kind of force, against every kind of authority, even against God and the laws of nature. For this reason we, when we come into our kingdom, shall have to erase this word from the lexicon of life as implying a principle of brute force which turns mobs into bloodthirsty beasts. . .

But even freedom might be harmless and have its place in the State economy without injury to the wellbeing of the peoples if it rested upon the foundation of faith in God. . . This is the reason why it is indispensable for us to undermine all faith, to tear out of the minds of the masses the very principle of Godhead and the spirit, and to put in its place arithmetical calculations and material needs . . ."

". . . We have set one against another the personal and national reckonings of the peoples, religious and race hatreds, which we have fostered into a huge growth in the course of the past twenty centuries. This is the reason why there is not one State which would anywhere receive support if it were to raise its arm, for every one of them must bear in mind that any agreement against us would be unprofitable to itself.

We are too strong, there is no evading our power. The nations cannot come to even an inconsiderable private agreement without our secretly having a hand in it . . . In order to put public opinion into our hands we must bring it into a state of bewilderment by giving expression from all sides to so many contradictory opinions and for such length of time as will suffice to make the peoples lose their heads in the labyrinth and come to see that the best thing is to have no opinion of any kind in matters political, which it is not given to the public to understand, because they are understood only by him who guides the public. This is the first secret.

The second secret requisite for the success of our government is comprised in the following: to multiply to such an extent national failings, habits, passions, conditions of civil life, that it will be impossible for anyone to know where he is in the resulting chaos, so that the people in consequence will fail to understand one another . . .

By all these means we shall so wear down the peoples that they will be compelled to offer us international power of a nature that by its possession will enable us without any violence gradually to absorb all the State forces of the world and to form a Super-Government. In place of the rulers of today we shall set up a bogey which will be called the Super-Government administration. Its hands will reach out in all directions like nippers and its organization will be of such colossal dimensions that it cannot fail to subdue all the nations of the world". [Douglas Reed, Controversy of Zion]