Even for armchair anarchists who are way too young to have been there.
The events of May ‘68 centred on the Sorbonne, the second university occupied by students after Nanterres (a newer, more clinical style campus). Artists and poets supported the occupation and this (somehow) resulted in public opinion shifting in favour of the students. The country was gearing up for an international conference on Vietnam, but it was also struggling with a deeper undercurrent of frustration with conservative rule which the government of Charles de Gaulle did not see coming.
Police tactics used at the time were hotly discussed and easily condemned. The Guardian‘s article of May 7 says the police "clubbed the demonstrators when they caught them and sometimes bystanders with a sickening ferocity" and the protests were "unlike anything seen in western Europe since the end of the war". Immigration border checks were also used against organisers. The banning of Daniel Cohn-Bendit from French soil inspired one of the first anarchist border camps, a common feature of European protest today.
It took two weeks for the student rebellion to balloon into a general strike. Though initially sanctioned by unions, strikes were largely spontaneous in nature; union negotiations arrived at agreements but workers still did not return to work. The Sorbonne became a "people’s university" (which sounds revolutionary, but probably meant having too many meetings).
De Gaulle announced a dissolution of parliament and a full election rather than a referendum and went into hiding in Germany. By then, censorship of media coverage on the State channel had resulted in a TV strike and de Gualle had to make his announcements on the radio.
Notoriously, the Communist Party of France (PCF) accepted the referendum offer and encouraged everyone to go home. After two months of police violence, communist betrayal and students running riot, there was an enormous backlash against the inconvenience of it all, and de Gaulle was returned to power with a greater majority than the precarious one he’d held since 1967. The spectre of revolution had secured his leadership, but also fatally wounded it. He remained in power until the following April.
The movement’s strengths were its diversity and spontaneity, which is why it’s so often quoted by anarchists when they’re trying to tell people what to do. But those strengths are also what makes soixante-huit hard to pin down as a piece of history, to slot neatly into our narrative of post-war European development as tending inexorably toward democracy.
"Reducing the revolt to something with identifiable causes dilutes its ‘insaisissable’ [elusive]nature that made it so difficult to control and such a focus of interest and controversy." writes commentator Chris Reynolds.
May ‘68 is remembered as the moment when France changed from a conservative to a liberated country, but the current conservative Government suggests the liberation was always half-cocked. Hilariously, President Nicolas Sarkozy criticised the "moral and intellectual permissiveness" of the period in his 2007 election campaign. France may be wed to an idea of itself as a liberated State but the French keep returning to that demanding mistress authoritarianism.
Although the history of May ‘68 records a failure, it is held up by Marxists and anarchists alike as a vision of what is possible. The left loves its own failures, especially when the Communists and the anarchists can argue over who was to blame. As to why it was possible, and whether it would be possible again, it is impossible to say. The events happened in specific social and historical contexts.
It is easy to simplify the revolt as a result of demographics – lots of young people with heaps of free time, an unjust war (Iraq anyone?). But it is also clear from the current era of summit protests that political actions have moved off campus. Voluntary student unionism may have crippled the student activists in this country, but that hasn’t prevented anyone from building barricades elsewhere.
A quick look at the APEC and G20 protests will illustrate that technologies of surveillance have altered the policing of protest movements. Police at G20 had the media-savvy trick of making no arrests on the day then rounding up protesters across the country for months afterwards on painstakingly collated evidence. I’m not sure how much all this is costing the taxpayer but it’s costing the protesters a packet – it seems like there’s a new benefit gig every week – and now the Victorian Police will be compensatedfor their losses.
The methods of ‘68 have certainly been influential – if we remember nothing else, we remember the slogans. Many of the aesthetic techniques of the Situationists which infected the revolutionary attempt have since been seized upon by artists and media makers – the popularity of culture jamming, including shows like The Chaser, owes its existence to the Situationist International and intellectuals such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem.
As Naomi Klein has pointed out in No Logo, corporations are also appropriating the aesthetics and tactics of street artists and jammers. But for a generation which grew up after punk these double ironies are a fact of culture.
Perhaps the hardest thing of all about continuing the anarchist project is the art of navigating its tired language. Take crimethinc, at its best a movement which breaks revolutionary ground for a new generation of youth, at its worst a set of dirgeful instruction manuals for emos. It is part of the pleasure of youth to be alienated from the mainstream, but it is also true that times have changed. Information and choice are everywhere, and you can get a bottle of chardonnay for seven bucks. But are we any more free or merely saturated in images of freedom?
The Guardian has a virtual tour of the period here.