Remembering the May Events

Abstract

In May of 1968 ten million French workers transformed a student protest into a revolutionary movement by joining it in the streets. In the short space of a month France was overthrown and restored, but not without suffering a shock which resounds to this day. Like many an unsuccessful revolution before it, the May Events triumphed in the political culture of the society that defeated it in the streets. In the perspective of ten years, it now appears that May '68 inaugurated a new era in French political life, which still continues.

The May Events lay at the intersection of two histories: not only did the new left of the sixties peak in France in 1968, but France gave the first signal of the political instability that has overtaken much of Southern Europe in the seventies. In 1968 no one imagined that the Events would be relayed by an electoral movement such as Eurocommunism. Then the talk was all of the “senility” and “sclerosis” of the official opposition parties. In fact the May Events overthrew not the Gaullist state, but the narrow ideological horizons of the old left it challenged in challenging capitalism in new ways. The Events transformed the popular image of socialism in France, contributing to the collapse of moribund Stalinist and social democratic traditions, and to the rise of an aggressive Eurocommunist movement. Some of the most important ideas of May continue to live through this movement.

The paradoxical survival of themes and hopes from the sixties in the mainstream politics of France in the seventies testifies to the need for a new interpretation of both the May Events and their Eurocommunist successor. In the pages that follow I will reconsider the May Events in the light of four of these themes, which have a continuing relevance. They are: the struggle against technocracy; a new and more libertarian image of socialism; the rejection of authority relations in the workplace; the ideological crisis of the middle strata. In challenging both the French establishment and its official opposition around these themes, the May Events radically altered the cultural presuppositions of the French political system, with consequences that are still unfolding. The remembering of May 1968 is therefore also a moment in the dialectics of the present.