The May ‘Events’ — What Were They?

Abstract

In May 1968, a student protest against restricted visiting-rights in university hostels sparked off a movement which brought virtually the whole of France to a halt, yet culminated anti-climactically in an increased Gaullist majority in the July general election. What happened was variously described as an aborted social revolution of a qualitatively new kind, a gesture of youthful revolt against a tired and patronising society, a symptom of all that was wrong with established French politics alike of the Right and of the Left, a toytown pseudo-revolution staged by an insignificant group of spoiled and idle rich, and the greatest strike in history. The fact that the last two judgements came from members of the Parti Communiste Français, the PCF, (the former is a not unfair condensation of the statements made by its General Secretary, Georges Marchais, at the time; the latter the verdict of Louis Althusser, then the Party’s leading intellectual, nine years afterwards) is sufficient indication of how difficult it was, and remains, to assess exactly what happened in 1968. This is figured in the very manner in which it is generally referred to — either simply as ‘May’ or as les événements’ (‘the events’) — anodine lowest common denominators for a date, and a series of movements, that were immediately recognised as some kind of watershed in French history.