Abstract
What does 1968 mean to the French today?
And yet Emmanuel Laurentin, a French journalist and presenter of The History Factory, a daily radio programme on the station France Culture, told Index that something happened that year that put France on the world map and lives on, even now, in the French consciousness.
“France still has a revolutionary history that continues to exist in a certain way. France continues to dream of having a revolution and, if you look at it, it was the last big revolution that happened in France, and allowed other countries in the world to look at France and regard it as an example,” he said.
For the month of May 1968, the eyes of the world were on Paris. Students and workers took to the streets. They occupied Paris’ Sorbonne University in revolt against the government of President Charles de Gaulle and a general strike was called.
“Perhaps unlike in other European countries, the myth of the revolution has been very strong for a very long time, and particularly since the French Revolution,” said Laurentin. “The idea that a power is no longer legitimate and can be overturned by people on the streets.”
He said the revolutionary aspect of the demonstrations of ‘68 was about fighting on the barricades. “This question of the barricades is really important,” he told Index. “Because when the students of Paris imagined reconstructing the barricades, they had in their minds the barricades of 1832, which are described in Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.
“The barricades mean you take cars, you take cobblestones, you take whatever there is to hand – the grating round the bottom of trees [a typical feature of Paris], trees – and you put objects across the street to prevent the police from attacking you behind the barricades. It is really a revolutionary way of operating.
“There is also this mythological aspect of it, which is very fantastical, romantic, imaginary.”
But the influence of 1968 on France goes far beyond the actual riots of that spring. The young people who took part became influential opinion formers who wrote their stories into history.
“It was a generation of people who then took jobs in the media, became leader writers for newspapers, became editors… and were able to tell about their fights in a heroic fashion,” explained Laurentin.
“The most famous is Danny Cohn-Bendit, but you have lots of people who are less well known who became the big editors of newspapers… Serge July, who became the head of Libération in 1981, a whole load of people who created newspapers, who reinvented newspapers. All the people around the journal Actuel [an investigative underground newspaper of the 1970s and 1980s] were from this movement of May 1968. All these counter-cultural movements of the 1970s were very influenced by that.”
He said they believed they were “more cunning, more lucid” than other left-wing movements in Italy or Germany. Apart from Action Directe, a relatively small militant French group, those on the left in France did not take up violence in the 1970s in the same way that the Italians did with the Red Brigades or the Germans with the Red Army Faction.
“The French, particularly those who wrote the history of France after 1968, have said they were more intelligent than others because they understood that this recourse to violence that happened in other European countries was not the solution and they stopped before they became terrorist movements,” he said.
Could 1968 happen today? Laurentin said there was still a longing for it and it coloured French discourse.
“You’re out with friends for an evening and there’s always someone who will say 1968 was amazing, because 1968 permitted sexual liberation, communication. The state let go of its grip, particularly on the means of communication. A moment of freedom,” he said. “And there will always be someone who will add that there should be another moment like that, always regretting that, unfortunately, that is not possible. It won’t happen now – people are too ground down by the crisis, there’s not enough solidarity, no one would be prepared to go and set up barricades in Paris. There is the impression, and I may well be wrong about this, that there’s a desire for it to happen and the despair that it won’t happen, and it wouldn’t happen again.”
But if it did happen it would be different, believes Laurentin. Young people in ‘68 were relatively wealthy and could always get a job if they walked out. At that time there were only a few thousand students in Paris. Today there are hundreds of thousands throughout the country, a country that has been deindustrialised, so the pact between workers and students would not be possible in the same way.
Students march in Paris, France, during the 1968 riots
CREDIT: M. Vizo/Rex
Despite this, Laurentin thinks the French youth have a detached attitude to work, which means they might “slam the door” on their employers even if they wouldn’t easily get another job. They are, he believes, a lot more free than his generation and this might lead them to take action.
Supporters of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals stage a protest outside the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1 November 2017
CREDIT: Christian Hartman/Reuters
So what would be the difference to protests today? Protests have not gone away as recent demonstrations attest, such as the one at Notre Dame des Landes about an airport being built. The language, though, would be different, he argued.
“The terms that were used in ‘68 have become hackneyed and have lost their revolutionary capacity,” he said. “When you see that Emmanuel Macron entitled his book, his manifesto to become president, Révolution, and the same terms used today like ‘l’imagination au pouvoir’ [‘the imagination for power’] – one of the slogans in 1968 – have become a slogan for sellers of washing machines or holidays, while ‘sous les pavés, la plage’ [literally ‘underneath the cobblestones lies the beach’] – the well-known slogan of 1968 – has become the slogan for the sellers of Airbnb, all the terminology of ‘68 has become bland and flat. It doesn’t have the power it used to have.”
And Laurentin said that the means to create a demonstration today would not be the same, either. “I did a series of programmes on the role of the radio in 1968,” he said. “It was the high point of the radio, the acme of the radio. All the students had a transistor radio. They listened to what was happening in other parts of France during the demonstrations and there were even negotiations that were happening directly through the radio between the demonstrators and the forces of order.
“The radio had this power at that time. Everyone had a radio. Today it is not the same thing. We have social networks, the internet, the smartphone, it changes completely the role of media.”
And it may also be that the revolt will be influenced by what is happening in other places in the world, he said.
“I think the Arab Spring is an example which might nourish the desire elsewhere, including in France… Social networks were really important during the Arab Spring. You might look there, rather than look at our past, 50 years ago, to see new ways of action which could happen if there were the desire for revolt.”
He also sees the relatively new trend of occupying city squares – which young people used during the Nuit Debout demonstrations on the Place de la République in Paris last year – as another way of expressing the spirit of revolt.
“Each period invents its way of taking action. And the way of taking action in ‘68 was typical of the 1960s because it involved students, the radio. It was the means of communication because it was the way of communicating of that time, but it was also a movement that was very much part of the revolutionary history of France, and perhaps today a movement will be much more globalised.”
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