Rethinking May 68

Abstract

‘May 68’ lives on in French memory through the famous graffiti daubed on the walls of Paris that month — ‘Sous les pavés la plage’ (Underneath the paving stones, the beach), ‘il est interdit d’interdire’ (‘it is forbidden to forbid’) — and through a number of striking visual images. These include the famous screenprint posters produced by the Atelier Populaire installed at the École des Beaux-Arts, and thousands of photographs: of barricades constructed from overturned cars and felled trees; of student demonstrators pelting helmeted riot police with stones. But in this scrapbook of images that compose the collective memory of ‘May’, none is more evocative and enduring than one iconic photograph taken by Gilles Caron on 6 May 1968. It shows the 25-year-old student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, standing on the steps of the Sorbonne, smiling with an expression of mischievous naive incredulity at a helmeted riot policeman looking down at him. The image seems to sum up so much of May 68. It locates it as a Parisian and student event, and it expresses a springtime mood of youthful irreverence, of teasing defiance mixed with good humour — what Pierre Bourdieu dubbed ‘le rire de mai’ (the laughter of May). Looking back on this photograph 40 years later, Cohn-Bendit commented: ‘Many such photographs were taken, but this one is symbolic.