1968 Revisited: A French View

...It affected even a man like Raymond Aron, ordinarily so careful to keep passion in check...

...they had a program: the conquest of state power...

...He asks them to break out of the "magic circle" in which some would keep them...

...It gives rise, for varying lengths of time, to a kind of wildcat democracy, which, though all trace of it may be lost, even lost forever, nevertheless reveals specific aspirations of the modern world...

...Professors, for instance, were often heckled by students in the lecture hall...

...It was indeed this practice that helped spread the challenge to authority from one milieu to another, from universities to high schools or hospitals, sometimes to factories, definitely to the family, and even to the churches...

...This kind of approach is not limited to May '68...

...Such turmoil, of course, is only one component of revolution, but it is sufficiently out of the ordinary that we may not ignore it...

...I am not unaware of its ambiguities...

...On the other hand, it unleashes a will to selfassertion, to separate the true from the false, not only among those who previously never doubted their prerogatives but also, and most important, among those accustomed to silence and submission...

...Tocqueville distinguished two aspects of the emergence of the individual: an isolation that induces a turning inward of the self and independence...

...In all cases there was a remarkable liberation of the word, a proliferation of pamphlets, harangues, sermons, and slogans, and, at the same time, the advent or sudden broadening of a public space in which people who had hitherto been unaware of each other's existence, either because they really were strangers or because they had been indifferent despite sharing a common life or place of work, now came together and engaged in intense dialogue...

...I emphasized that the students' audacity had been accompanied by a new kind of realism...

...At the moment, it is most often burial ceremonies that are being held for May '68...

...I concluded by suggesting that "the revolution has matured," because the people who set its style had not sought confrontation with the existing regime in order to replace it with another and because their desire to changer la vie, however radical, was not based on the myth of a "good society," a community devoid of differences and conflict...

...Which only goes to show, it may be argued, how impossible it is to assess events as they happen...

...Let those who recall only the ludicrous words and deeds while ignoring the salutary shaking of conventions take a long fresh look at revolutions...

...An explosive mix of protest was generated by the archaic character of prevailing moral standards and institutions, on the one hand, and modernization, with all its destructive effects, on the other...

...In that feverish atmosphere, how could SUMMER • 1988 • 341 anyone have maintained the objectivity that understanding requires...

...The changes that have occurred since 1968 in relations between women and men, parents and children, teachers and pupils, and even in the forms of struggle against racism (which, instead of trumpeting a principle appeal to the image of the friend, the "buddy"), seem to me to bear the stamp of that demand...

...But if you forget the enthusiasm, the excesses, the outrageousness, the conversion of previously peaceable and silent individuals into impassioned partisans, you will never come close to the reality of revolution...

...Moreover, the sympathy, even support, they received was never more than moderate...

...In this instance, only a very small fraction of them nurtured that project...

...he will be a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman...

...It is only too tempting to conclude that history could well have done without them...

...The opposite danger would undoubtedly be to dissect revolutions by looking for signs of an absolutely clear beginning...

...But he tells his students what the May activists would have wanted to hear...

...It must not (unless it is to be destroyed not by revolution but by a totalitarian movement) be confused with capitalism, or with the rule of bureaucracy, or with the empire of SUMMER • 1988 • 345 technology, no matter how inextricably and tragically it may be linked to them...

...if you look beyond the emotions of the moment and separate the arguments developed by commonly respected thinkers from the spectacle of the rise of an anonymous social power and of the fragility of democratic rights, then you will ask yourself whether May '68 was not perhaps a symptom, the expression of discord deeply concealed in democratic society...

...All those little incidents, taken together, were what really determined the nature of May '68...

...Nevertheless, the turmoil that swept society for a time, though it led neither to insurrection nor to civil war (I might even say, to pacify those who find this discussion ridiculous, that it achieved no lasting tangible result), was in some respects reminiscent of the stirrings of revolution in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, in America and France in the eighteenth, and in Russia in the twentieth...

...A student, he felt, was above all else a person who still enjoyed the ability to feel and want: "Soon he will be narrowed, limited by a specialized trade...

...Picon, who introduces Michelet's lectures in a lovely preface, believes that his conception of history is best summed up in a single sentence: "Order is Michelet's clearest enemy...

...Reading his lectures, I felt myself in good company...

...Some wanted a different government, though not a different system...

...Reference to great principles was no longer enough...

...I was then dividing my time between Paris and Caen, and though I did sometimes encounter people who remained unruffled, I never met anyone who was indifferent...

...Theory as such aroused distrust like that inspired by party discipline...

...A naive observer might wonder about the reason for this oblivion...

...it is a general feature of thought...

...the bulk of them never dreamed of it...

...It is a failure to understand that the assertion of individuals as individuals—in their own initiatives and in their refusal to bow to arbitrary rules or to let themselves be ordered around by professional revolutionaries speaking the same wooden language—was itself part and parcel of the will to forge a great public space within which answers could be given to questions of common interest...

...The image of disorder most often provokes condemnation or indignation...

...This was in sharp contrast to most other commentaries, which tended to note only the movement's messianism and utopianism or else chided it for its inability to crystallize clear principles...

...For a small number of people, of course, this challenge to the powers that be was combined with the hope of a complete overthrow of existing institutions...

...The memory of all the expressly political discussions and the streetfighting now tends to make us forget that...

...But to follow his inspiration, he would have undoubtedly rediscovered in the privatism and narcissism of our contemporaries one of the manifestations of conformism...

...And if you do not see it, in vain will you seek to understand it...

...The smashing of taboos, the overturning of the conventions that assign each person a given place and role in society, the flowering of hitherto closely watched speech, and the proliferation of individual or collective initiatives herald not so much an uprising (the traditional image of revolution) as a kind of 342 • DISSENT decompartmentalization of society, the opening of a breach that allows a new circulation of individuals and a new exchange of ideas...

...Twenty years later, we commemorate nothing...

...they dreamed of destroying the class enemy and of a SUMMER • 1988 • 343 never-ending prosecution of villains...

...There was, I say again, no revolution in 1968...

...Democracy is a system that allows itself to be shaken and does not disarm the hope for change...

...The essential thing was the idea that the opportunities for action were here and now, in full view of others, in situations often reminiscent of stage productions...

...How, then, can I justify this last comment without falsely labeling May '68...

...Must the 1968 "revolution" therefore be called "indifferent" because it broke with this ideology...

...My essay had a somewhat provocative title: "The New Disorder...

...There is no doubt that he would recognize it everywhere, where the public sphere is deserted, or where it is filled by individuals...

...If you insist on judging extraordinary feelings and actions by the standards of ordinary conduct, then you will see only delirium or, as some have put it, collective psychodrama...

...TRANSLATED BY JON ROTHSCHILD 346 • DISSENT...

...Perhaps it is best to recall a few little *In La Breche, in collaboration with E. Morin and J. P. Coudray (Paris: Le Seuil, 1968...

...And must the young people who rebelled against the dogmatism and authoritarianism of the bureaucrats be considered "soft" just because they had no blood lust...

...Or a student would interrupt to urge the audience to join in a spontaneous demonstration...

...The plain fact is that at the time it was impossible to make sense of the events without abandoning the stance of mere onlooker...

...This is one of the aspects of the revolutionary phenomenon...

...But the emergence of a new public space, the liberation that I see as inherent in revolution, along with the dissolution of the hallmarks of social life—all this I find in May '68...

...Then the celebration mechanism takes effect, as rival schools each seek to appropriate the primordial message...

...Hence the instances of heckling, of provocation (which only rarely became persecution), the object of which was to expose not only what conventional discourse concealed but also the belief in the existing order that sustained it...

...Gaeton Picon had republished the volume, astonished to discover a language so close to that of May '68...

...As we know, it was cleverly exploited by the far right and by fascists, who relentlessly condemned the licentiousness, weakness, unruliness, and divisions of "bourgeois society" and proclaimed themselves the champions of a new order...

...But the particularity of the events threatens to vanish in the course of the analysis...

...This sense of independence is not in contradiction to a sense of community...

...The broader population was divided...

...The professors saw this as more than a mere assault on conventions: confidence in their authority had been undermined, and they were compelled, whether they liked it or not, to abandon their usual roles and become actors in an unpredictable adventure...

...But what I saw as important—and still find striking—was that the most creative elements, though they did take up some themes of Marxism or critical sociology, transformed them by deciding to take the side of people: those (preferably the ones closest to them) who were responsible for running an institution, but also anonymous people encountered in the street, those whose habit it had been to obey and to tailor their desires to suit whatever was asked of them...

...He invited that student to "do what is not done for him," to give himself a "countereducation...

...Well, I do not think that the difficulty of properly characterizing May '68 should prevent us from using revolutionary precedents to clarify it—provided that we do not become prisoners of a definition...

...If May did not bring about a revolution, it was not only because it was essentially a movement of students, as I argued then, but above all because democracy is a system within which conflict, however intense, is accommodated as a matter of course...

...Commentators have had much to say about the power of the word and the shaking of authority...

...The main reason was that the agitation was essentially confined to the world of the campus, even though its effects did reach a considerable portion of the population...

...Several years ago, quite by accident, I came across the text of the lectures given by Jules Michelet at the College de France in 1847...

...PARIS incidents...

...They, of course, had a goal: the establishment of a fully rational society...

...He denounces the intolerable division of labor in the university, designed to adapt them to the needs of the adult world...

...Isn't there a kind of torpor that impedes its exercise, that makes traditional authority and a kind of automatic obedience seem natural, and that silences dissent when the stakes are low...

...But they have not been attentive enough to the change that occurred with the incorporation of conflicts of ideas into the fabric of personal relations...

...The passion was widely shared in 1968...

...No one who worked in a university at the time—or in a high school, scientific laboratory, hospital, or any of the countless other places in which protest took hold—was able to interpret the events dispassionately once his authority, or that of his colleagues, had been challenged...

...and he would not have confused it with the sense of independence that seemed to him equally essential to democratic life...

...He had a vivid enough sociological sensibility to understand that isolation brings with it the seduction of the individual by common opinion...

...Just a few remarks would send temperatures rising...

...They were suddenly called upon to defend their teaching, to justify the prevailing rules, the system of courses and exams...

...There are those who demand a scientific analysis of May '68, who ask that its causes be detailed and its effects be measured...

...The wider it spreads, the more active society becomes, the richer public debate and the more vital the fabric of relations between individuals and groups...

...Tocqueville was so intent on demonstrating the continuity of French history from the ancien regime to the July monarchy that in the end he came to see the revolution as a futile and costly detour, however convinced he was of its extraordinary and universal import...

...The great revolutions I mentioned saw an unexpected convergence of demands mobilizing sometimes contradictory interests and beliefs...

...My point is that a new language and a new style of action were born in 1968...

...The students of 1968, of course, would not have appreciated the historian's patriotism nor the bombast of this or that formula...

...Causes, I would agree, most often deserve a place in interpretation...

...they obeyed the discipline of a party...

...This author has a particular model of how to structure society, the one upheld by Marxist ideology as espoused by the members of the Communist party...

...How many historians have denied that the term "revolution" can properly be applied to the events that shook England in the 1640s or America during the War of Independence...

...Many refused to ask themselves hard questions, but even they were touched in some part of themselves that they had tried to ignore...

...Every revolution has this paradoxical trait...

...Rereading my old essay, I find that it suffers from a failure to situate May '68 more clearly within the framework of democratic society...

...The quality of this new space, this new field of discussion, was such that individuals who had lacked the competence or authority to speak or act in their own names suddenly improvised a public existence, sought interlocutors who became, in their eyes, substitutes for a universal addressee, and strove to legislate either for their own milieu or for all society...

...It is not my intention to assess whether it was naive to apply social criticism to people, nor how dubious it may have been, since we were still pursuing abstract monsters: the System, Society, Power...

...I am tempted to reply that the insignificance accorded May '68 is proof that the society in which we live is a prisoner of vanity...

...On the one hand, it so inflames passions that some, whichever side they are on, lose sight of the distinction between the real and the imaginary, the possible and the impossible...

...he was keenly aware of the relationship between individualism and conformism...

...If, on the other hand, you try to understand what is really being said in a confused but resolute protest whose boldness surprises not only its targets but first and foremost its own participants...

...Some analysts, claiming that events always outstrip the consciousness of the participants, tend to disdain their passions...

...And I would add that now, twenty years later, those who seek to minimize the impact of May 1968 and do not try to make the past come alive as any good historian should are abandoning the mainspring of understanding...

...at most they can detonate one...

...Intellectual fashion is always so inventive...

...These themes are still worked, indeed they are inexhaustible, but it is now considered vulgar to speak in terms of condemnation...

...Under extraordinary circumstances, on the other hand, doesn't it suddenly become necessary to make judgments, to look afresh at those who stand above and below us, and to speak openly...

...I appropriated the image in an effort to show that May '68 was not an attack on the established order designed to replace it with a better one—to be inaugurated through the inevitable terror and rigid ideology —but represented a demand for a kind of disorder that would be in society's interest, a permanent challenge to the powers that be, and that it was very much concerned to assert its own legitimacy and to win recognition of it...

...Yet the sense of independence sharpens the desire to think and act in ways that challenge constraints that are deemed arbitrary...

...In other words, individual freedoms and political freedoms sustain one another...

...No longer is capitalism on trial, with Marxism presiding, nor is the consumer society, mass culture, or media manipulation in the dock, with critical sociology presiding...

...Perhaps his only error was in not registering the diverse modes of conformism, struck as he was by the rise of a social force capable of shaping us all to the same mold...

...He calls upon them to distrust "grand modern mechanics" and combat those who have only contempt for "the action of the word...

...Earlier I denied that a revolution, or even the onset of a revolution, occurred in 1968...

...When the workers, blue- and white-collar alike, did mobilize, they raised limited demands that did not threaten state power...

...Linked to the thesis that the democratic revolution is merged with the progressive unleashing of individualism—a thesis whose paternity he attributes to Tocqueville, although it constitutes only one articulation of his interpretation —Lipovetski unhesitatingly discerns behind the appearance of communitarian aspirations a final thrust of individualism...

...often it even seemed suspect...

...Students cannot make a revolution...

...It is so much more refined to point to the realm of appearances, to talk not of social dissolution (which would suggest that there had once been cohesion) but of the abandonment of any scenario for the human drama...

...Particularly symptomatic is Gilles Lipovetski's interpretation of May '68: "A revolution without goals, without program, with neither victims nor villains, and without political leadership, May '68, despite its lively utopianism, was a soft and sloppy movement, the first indifferent revolution...

...To attempt to describe what happened in May 1968 as a 344 • DISSENT counterposition of collectivism and individualism in which the latter was hidden behind the former is to neglect what was most important...

...But it must be wondered what objectivity really means even under ordinary circumstances...

...Today he is a man...

...But at least I gave no credence to expectations that the May events heralded a revolution...

...I highlight it not to celebrate what I have called wildcat democracy...

...Doesn't life in a democracy require, as a matter of principle, that we all use our own judgment...

...He is still interested in men...

...In this I see not so much a sign of the expansion of individualism as a new demand to bring what used to belong to the realm of pure theory back to the level of the practical...