'68 at 50

April 27, 2018 2:14 PM

The New York Review of Books reflects on the political events of 1968 and their legacy fifty years on: Power to the Imagination by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Claus Leggewie; Enoch, Bageye and Me by Colin Grant; When the Communist Party Stopped a French Revolution by Mitchell Abidor. Also, from CNRS, an interview with historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel: 1968: a Turning Point in History?
posted by sapagan (6 comments total)

Sous les pavés, la plage!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:20 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I love the NYRB backward-look series, and '68 was a formative year for me, so I'm eating this up. That Abidor piece (and thanks for naming the authors!) changed the whole way I thought about France in that revolutionary year.
posted by languagehat at 3:41 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n'as pas besoin de lui.

I was born in May of 1968. I maintain that some of that spirit resides within me, along with Camus’ invincible summer.
posted by sonascope at 6:56 PM on April 27, 2018

I asked the question mentioned in the last link; can 1789 and 1968 be compared, at university. 'Sure, just replace blocked streets and other stuff with sabers and hayforks.' Well ask a silly...but she said: "What else was happening that make these two dates in French history comparable" Great stuff was bandied about and "What else "Oh, that silence. i said,"It was happening almost everywhere "
posted by clavdivs at 7:06 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Very interesting.
(Not to downplay the focus on France, but it is also worth mentioning that Mark Rudd wrote about the Columbia University protests of '68 in the New York Times.)
posted by gudrun at 9:21 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Another important perspective on May ‘68 by Nabila Ramdani in The Guardian. Excerpt:

Examine the photographs and films of those who took to the streets, and you will see that they were overwhelmingly white. The leaders were predominantly middle class too, as were those who produced the music, poetry and other literature that sealed the 1968 myth.

Yes, workers from minority communities participated in the strikes that accompanied the rioting, but lack of identity papers often excluded them from the trade unions that joined the students. As today, many from immigrant backgrounds stayed away from officialdom because of the constant menace of deportation.

They were particularly fearful of the police. Contrary to the misinformation, the brutal reputation of the armed and baton-wielding CRS was not earned in 1968, but during the Algerian war. After one peaceful pro-independence demonstration in Paris on 17 October 1961, up to 300 Algerians were murdered by the CRS. Many were thrown into the Seine and drowned, close to the Sorbonne. Thousands more were rounded up, beaten, even tortured. British historians Jim House and Neil MacMaster described this massacre as “the bloodiest act of state repression of street protest in western Europe in modern history”.

There is a messy but thorough article about the 1961 Paris Massacre on Wikipedia.
posted by Kattullus at 10:59 PM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]