During a recent visit to France, I had an opportunity to witness the ongoing French commemorations of the “May events” that shook that country to the core forty years ago. Parisian bookstores prominently displayed a massive literature on those events, while magazines were filled with nostalgic evocations of the three or four weeks that are said to have changed the world. Le Monde, the house journal of the establishment Left, went so far as to reproduce, each day, the front page of the newspaper on the parallel day in May 1968. Those old front pages perfectly captured both the obligatory leftism and the indulgence toward “Youth” that dominated that venerable paper’s response to the implosion of the French social and political order. One article by Maurice Duverger was representative of the atmosphere of 1968: that famous political scientist cheerfully seconded the student movement’s call for the abolition of exams, since examinations took professors away from precious scientific research and at the same time reinforced the alienation of the young. In the giddy, carnival-like atmosphere of the time, this passed for serious analysis.

Today, a majority of the French (or at least of the French intellectual class)—and not all of them on the Left—look back nostalgically to the “turning point” that was May 1968. Some of this is the self-indulgence of a generation that is no longer so young. Some of it is compensation by a Left that now reluctantly admits that revolution, even of a “mimetic” kind, is no longer a serious option for France and Europe. But the “commemorative” character of the French response to the fortieth anniversary of the May events risks obscuring the farcical dimensions of that eruption; more seriously, it risks obscuring 1968’s truly revolutionary and ideological dimensions as well. Lost in the celebration of 1968 as the birth pangs of an unproblematic “postmodern democracy” is a concrete feel for the nature of the event itself.

A Global Phenomenon

We often forget that “1968” was a truly global phenomenon. Americans easily recall Berkeley and Columbia, and Europeans recall Paris and the Sorbonne. But that momentous year also saw unrest in Dakar, Mexico City, Tokyo, and elsewhere: the rise of a revolutionary New Left throughout the Western world, and in a different key the quasi-miraculous “Prague Spring” in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia. The latter gave undue hope to some on the Left that Leninist-Stalinist tyranny could be transformed into “socialism with a human face.”

There were both general and particular causes at work. “1968” surely had deep roots in cultural and social developments that were in the process of transforming the entire Western world. After the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), for example, the Roman Catholic Church suffered from self-inflicted wounds. That hoary institution transformed itself seemingly overnight from an authoritative bastion of traditional wisdom to a church in apparent freefall. Its “progressivist” elements did not hesitate “to kneel before the world,” celebrating socialism and revolution, secular humanitarianism, and every “democratic” development in society at large. In America, the moral promise of the civil rights movement, rooted in an appeal to American principles of liberty and equality bolstered by biblical religion, were co-opted by the Black Power movement and other manifestations of identity politics. The Women’s Liberation movement and the recently manufactured birth control pill (it was introduced in France in 1967) conspired, for better or worse, to sever sexuality from a natural order and individual liberty from its larger familial and social contexts. In France, social institutions as diverse as the Church and the Boy Scouts scrambled to adopt less hierarchical “power structures” in the years immediately before 1968. Everywhere an ideology of liberation challenged the old bourgeois ethos of self-command and self-control. “1968” was in some important respects an explosion in a dramatic process already well under way rather than the unanticipated announcement of a new world.

May 1968

Despite these major social and cultural transformations, nothing in France seemed particularly out of the ordinary on the eve of May 1968. No one anticipated that ongoing disputes about the organization of the French university system would give rise to momentous social and political upheavals. Unrest at the University of Nanterre, fueled by the activism of anarchist revolutionaries led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, soon spread to the Sorbonne. In the days after May 3, that august institution was more or less commandeered by student radicals. Students clashed with police even as they—and sympathetic professors—“contested” the traditional structures of state and society. Student protesters combined violence with a festive atmosphere celebrating their emancipation from traditional educational obligations and social and cultural restraints. In the face of this rapidly deteriorating situation (and of public opinion’s remarkable indulgence toward the student “revolutionaries”), the government of Prime Minister Pompidou began to lose nerve.