Reflecting on 1968 (Nothing to do with Harringay...until Liz showed us that of course it did)

Given that members of this group may have an interest in history that goes beyond this area, I found this article and thought some of you guys may find it of passing interest:

Robert Gildea describes a new Europe-wide project to investigate the impact of 1968 and its sometimes bitter legacy

There is an iconic picture of a student during the events of May 1968 in Paris, picking up a cobble stone in order to throw it at riot police, or to strengthen the barricade. It says a number of things about the events: that their epicentre was the Latin Quarter of Paris, that they were a flash which occurred in May 1968 but then faded, and that they involved young, male, middle-class students.

Despite the currency of the term ‘May ’68’, these events were not confined to Paris, nor to May ’68. 1968 was a global movement which exploded in Japan and the United States before it reached Europe. Agitation began in the Netherlands in 1965, in Italy in 1966, in West Germany in 1967, when students demonstrated against the state visit of the Shah of Iran, while in Poland student protest was triggered when the Communist authorities banned the performance of a patriotic play in March 1968. Even in France, students demonstrated in Strasbourg, Nantes and Nanterre before they occupied the Sorbonne. Events in Paris served to catalyse these diverse movements but they did not invent them.

Although the occupations, marches, strikes and happenings peaked in May 1968 and then seemed to die down, the prehistory of 1968 reached back into the 1960s where it had a complex relationship with a wider youth rebellion and counterculture. What appeared in June 1968 to be a political setback was considered by many militants to be ‘only a beginning’, ‘a dress-rehearsal’ for more organized groups, networks and movements which developed into the mid-1970s.

Opinion has always divided sharply about the significance of 1968. For some it was a golden moment of radical change and liberation, an unprecedented experiment in direct democracy, while for others it was a witches’ sabbath of free love and drug-taking which threatened to destroy morality, the family and social order. During the 2007 campaign for the French presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy spoke of the need to ‘liquidate’ the heritage of 1968 once and for all, but then appointed a former ’68 activist, Bernard Kouchner, as his foreign minister. Each time the anniversary of 1968 comes around, its meaning is reviewed and reassessed, now in heroic terms, now as irony, as hopes and dreams were distorted or shattered against reality, and this year is no exception.

Is there any space to say something new about 1968? A research group based at Oxford University is undertaking a three-year project entitled ‘Around 1968: Activism, Networks, Trajectories’. It is a team of thirteen European historians, working on fourteen European countries from Spain to the USSR and from Greece to Iceland. It asks what 1968 meant in Europe, even whether there was a ‘European 1968’, over and above the division of Europe into capitalist West and the former Communist bloc, and into democratic northern Europe and the dictatorships of Franco and the Greek colonels. Were there personal and organizational contacts between activists in different parts of Europe, and did a diaspora of students studying abroad ferry ideas and techniques from one country to another? How did activists in one part of Europe react to events and strategies in others? And how far was 1968 shaped in very different contexts across Europe? To these transnational and comparative approaches the project adds a longitudinal approach, postulating that to understand the wave of activism more fully it has to be studied across a decade, roughly 1965-75.

No study can cover the whole of Europe and this one has decided to go deep rather than broad. It will concentrate on samples of activist networks in each country, locating them by archival research but also undertaking interviews with former activists. A database of activists is being built, enabling researchers to run queries about their profile, while the life-history interviews lead to a deeper understanding of three questions: how and why did young people move beyond their family, school and class background to engage in collective activity? What did they want? And what did it mean to them at the time, and subsequently?

The ‘why’ question leads to consideration of whether and how the events that peaked in 1968 were a generational revolt. In an essay of 1928 Karl Mannheim argued that a generation was defined not by age but by reaction in a similar, conscious way to the same political events. In the 1960s and early 1970s these events were the Algerian war, the Cuban revolution and other Latin American struggles, the Vietnam war, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and the Palestinian uprising in Jordan of 1970. Biologically, there were at least three cohorts belonging to the ’68 generation: one born between the wars and experiencing fascism, Nazism and Communism in their youth; a second of ‘war babies’ born just before or during the Second World War; and a third of ‘baby boomers’ born in the immediate postwar period. Each was inspired by what they saw as the struggles of a suffering humanity against imperialism and dictatorship; in the 1960s some activist leaders made trips to Latin American or Communist China, while the rank-and-file agitated for the victory of the Latin American guerrillas, the Vietcong, or Mao’s Red Guards. The events that shaped this generation, however, go back as far as the Second World War. Some activists in France and Germany were keen to live up to the example of their parents who had resisted fascism or Nazism, while others sought to redeem the failure of their parents to oppose those threats. Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, born in 1943, whose parents had been maquisards in Brittany, explained that ‘activism was a sort of family truth, in so far as I felt if not admiration, then filial piety for my parents, who were on the side of justice’. He became a Maoist and declared, ‘we are the new partisans’, ‘the new Resistance’. By contrast, the daughter of a Pétainist ironmonger born in 1942 never forgave her father for his pro-Vichy views and became a leftwing Catholic militant. Jewish children who had had to go into hiding during the war were profoundly marked by the experience. ‘As a young man’, recalled André Sénik (b.1938), the son of a Jewish shoemaker in Paris, ‘the important thing was not to be like one’s parents. I didn’t want to be the little timid, fearful Jewish boy. I think that the way in which Jews became revolutionaries [in 1968] was a paradoxical way of joining society, in an aggressive way, instead of having to hide.’

A generational revolt might be against one’s parents, but many activists admired their left-wing parents, complaining only that they had ceased to agitate. Often their revolt was against ‘parental’ institutions such as the government, the Catholic Church or the Communist party both when it was in power, in Central and Eastern Europe, and when it was the strongest left-wing party, as in France. Many activists seem to have experienced a ‘crisis of faith’, becoming politically engaged because of a loss of faith, or a progression from one faith to another. Many high-profile French activists broke from the perceived ‘Stalinism’ of the French Communist party in 1965 and became Maoists, Trotskyists or so-called ‘Italians’ of a Euro-communist kind. They were joined in activism by young people who broke from the rigid hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which refused to throw in its lot with struggling humanity. Some of these militants were priests, such as the Dominican Paul Blanquart who evolved a liberation theology which combined Christianity and Marxism and who on a visit to Havana early in 1968 helped draft one of Fidel Castro’s speeches. The parish priest of the working-class Isolotto suburb of Florence, disciplined by his bishop in the autumn of 1968, began to hold alternative masses in the piazza, inaugurating a more democratic model of Catholicism which acted as a focus for Catholic dissidents world-wide. The origins of 1968 in dissident Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism and even the Islam of colonial migrants is one of the major themes of the project.

It is often said of 1968 that it was a ‘failed revolution’. Although many activists paid homage to the Bolsheviks of 1917 or to the Paris Commune of 1871, they did not seize political power. There were occupations of universities and factories, marches and demonstrations, talk-ins and happenings, but no-one attacked the Hôtel de Ville, historically the first target of Paris revolutionaries. Does this mean that 1968 was only a carnival or an enormous party? This project is working with the hypothesis that activists wanted political change and lifestyle change, that politics was being reinvented in new and creative ways and that lifestyle change was also political; to change oneself was also to change the world. When these ambitions came together they were immensely powerful, but they also pulled in different directions and this to a large extent explains the fragmentation of the ‘movement’ of 1968 into a galaxy of competing groups, networks and energies.

It may be that ‘lifestyle’ activism predominated in advanced, democratic, northern and western Europe, and that ‘political’ activism was at the forefront in less advanced, less democratic southern and Eastern Europe. Between 1965 and 1967 the Netherlands was hit by the Provo movement which set out to ‘provoke’ or subvert society through stunts and happenings, by symbolic bombshells rather than by real ones. There is plenty of evidence, however, of countercultural manifestations around 1965 and 1966 in southern and Eastern Europe, such as the Milan capelloni or beatniks and their magazine Mondo Beat, protests in Leipzig by young Beat music fans, and underground art exhibitions, poetry reading and dancing in Leningrad. How lifestyle activism and political activism related to each other across time is also being studied. In some places the ‘years of dreams’ gave way to the ‘years of bullets’ and there was a shift ‘from hedonism to Leninism’. Elsewhere, the counterculture blossomed after the political events of May ’68. French activists went off in the summer of 1968 to subvert the Avignon festival along with the crazy saltimbanque Mouna Aguigui, while in 1970 Catholic-educated Michel-Antoine Burnier, who had chronicled May ’68 in the paper Action, founded Actuel which greeted and promoted cultural subversion, from Crumb cartoons to Stones’ concerts and communal living.

Within each country and between and within networks there were, of course, tensions between political and lifestyle goals. Failure to build a bridge between students and workers in May 1968 provoked a crisis in the French Maoist movement. ‘Going to the people’ was the new agenda, either by taking jobs incognito in factories or by openly espousing the concerns of workers, such as housing and abortion but also experimenting themselves with communal living and free love. One was the Gauche Prolétarienne (GP), the other Vive la Révolution (VLR), which its leader Roland Castro described as ‘libertarian, libertine’. One of the issues that separated them was violence; Castro claimed that he broke with the GP when he was asked to ambush a police convoy en route to the occupied car factory of Flins. The GP, meanwhile, had to confront the question of whether it would meet violence with violence when one of its members was shot outside the Renault factory at Billancourt in 1972. Within VLR issues of sexual preference and sexual politics were as divisive as that of violence. In 1971 gay activists broke with it over what they called ‘puritanical terrorism’ of revolutionary movements and Guy Hocquenghem launched the Front Homosexual d’Action Révolutionnaire, while feminists declared that ‘your sexual liberation is not ours’, since free love subjected women to men’s pleasures, and formed one of the strands of the feminist movement.

One of the most difficult questions to address is why some activists in some countries descended into terrorism, while others did not. Did ‘urban guerrillas’ such as the Red Brigades in Italy, the Rote Armee Fraktion in West Germany and ETA in the Basque country emerge because of a Fascist or Nazi past or Francoist present? Members of the Gauche Prolétarienne in France claim that they practised only verbal violence, calling for bosses to be strung up by the balls, or symbolic violence such as paint-pot attacks on evil foremen. On the other hand a younger group of hotheads, brought up in Toulouse among émigré Spanish republicans, and angered by Franco’s persecution of Basque militants, gravitated to the violence of Action Directe in France in the later 1970s and 1980s.

In 1974 the leader of the Gauche Prolétarienne, Benny Lévy said in conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre that revolution now had to be understood not as a single push at the centre of political power but as ‘partial, local, symbolic’. For four years student revolutionaries had been trying to mobilize workers for the big push. Then, in 1973, the workers of the Lip watch factory in Besançon were not only on strike but organized as a miniature democracy making and selling watches as a co-operative. At Larzac in the Massif Central sheep-farmers had taken it into their own hands to oppose the building of a nuclear base and were attracting the support of students and Occitan regionalists. In 1973 the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes, aggrieved by racist attacks and inspired by the Palestinian Intifada, launched general strikes in the Paris and Marseille
areas. Autogestion, anti-militarism, ecologism, squatters’ associations, gay rights and feminism, immigrant organizations, new forms of regionalism and religious activity were among the movements that emerged out of 1968.

The third main question posed by the ‘Around 1968’ project is, what did it mean in the history of the twentieth century? There is no collective memory of 1968, as there is no consensus about what it stood for, indeed whether it was a good or a bad thing. There will be no unveiling this month of monuments on the sites of barricades in the Latin Quarter or in the courtyard of the Sorbonne or Freie Universität of Berlin. There are, on the other hand, collected memories – recollections and oral testimonies – that can be brought together and from which patterns begin to emerge.

The heroism of the streets was translated, for some, into successful careers in politics, the media, architecture and the arts. Benny Lévy and Jean-Paul Sartre were among the founders in 1974 of Libération, which was staffed by a significant number of Maoist militants. There is also a tragic dimension to 1968, however, that emerges strongly from the project’s interviews. The more activists committed themselves to a cause, the more likely they were to suffer arrest, imprisonment, expulsion from school or university, loss of jobs, déclassement, exile, divorce, childlessness, nervous breakdown or suicide. For many the ‘spirit of ’68’ was decidedly bitter. It is a side of 1968 that demands further investigation.

Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, and directing a collaborative research project on 1968 in Europe.