The students in Nanterre believed themselves to be "direct-action revolutionaries" -- a concept popularized by Regis Debray, who had befriended Che in Bolivia. World War II icon de Gaulle, for his part, was overwhelmed. The only thing he cared about was law and order, because Paris was hosting the Vietnam War peace talks.
Paris was crammed with global media covering the Vietnam talks. When the Ministry of Education decided to shut down Nanterre, the heart of the action switched to the Sorbonne. The police invaded the Sorbonne. And then the government closed the Sorbonne for the first time in its venerable 700-year history. Jean-Paul Sartre supported the students. But he could not possibly be arrested. De Gaulle's words, according to legend, were "One doesn't arrest Voltaire."
By now, in tandem with the soundtrack -- from The Byrds and Steppenwolf to Hendrix and Cream -- a solidarity current flowed among all the student movements around the world, in essence because of TV, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, or Dany the Red, later admitted ("We were the first television generation. We had a relationship with what our imagination produced from seeing the pictures of each other on television").
See you on the barricades, babeAs compiled by a delightful book for American audiences connecting France with what was going on in the United States, by 1968 the Vietnam War was costing US$30 billion a year. Washington was financing the war with gold reserves -- which had plunged to half of the post-World War II high of $24.6 billion. The US might have been about to run out of gold -- and the price of gold was bound to skyrocket.
The My Lai massacre -- a slaughter of nearly 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by the US Army's 23rd Infantry Division -- happened in March 1968. Up to 56 million American homes had TV, and satellites for the first time were relaying footage from Japan to New York City in real time. The Pentagon could not possibly control the PR war any more. The entire March issue of Harper's magazine was led by a devastating Norman Mailer essay praising the anti-war movement.
Already in February, at least 100,000 people had marched in Paris under pouring rain waving North Vietnamese flags and chanting "US Go Home" -- echoing the "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" sung at a previous demonstration in Berlin. American soldiers were applying for asylum in France, Sweden and Canada. Robert Kennedy, then senator for New York, had stated in Chicago in early February that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.
Protesting against the war in Vietnam may have eventually metastasized into street violence in Paris, but that was only one aspect of May 1968. TV networks from all over the world were roaming Paris. It was impossible to find better TV than the anti-riot police (the CNRS) in pitch battles against stone-throwing middle class students in the Latin Quarter.
Yet, in parallel, even more important was an explosion of The Word, a sort of non-stop proto-Facebook live. Suddenly, in a rigid, highly codified society still stuck in the rural, Catholic mores of the 19th century, everyone in Paris was talking like mad -- on the Metro, in the queue at the cheese shop, on the barricades, and mostly in the occupied Odeon theater (last month I had the chance to witness a fantastic re-creation by graduating students at the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts).
In a Gramscian sense, the old order -- based on tradition and unquestioned authority -- collapsed. No wonder a great deal of freedoms taken for granted by millennials in the young 21st century exist because of May 1968.
But as much as the students yearned for it, the revolution -- televised or not -- did not happen in May 1968. That was a volcanic eruption against a stagnant, suffocating system, a cultural revolt drenched in sex, music, fashion, esthetics -- and by the way not a CIA plot previewing the 21st century color revolutions. Then what came afterward was, predictably, cosmetic reform -- not revolution.
In a Freudian sense, if May 1968 killed the Father Figure (at least in the West), the offspring today is a multitude of neoliberal barbarisms, with defunct paternalist Capital opening the playing field to the brutality of hyper-concentrating global finance Masters of the Universe.
Half a century ago, baby-boomers pampered by new, lush consumer society also thought they could steer an historical turnaround by politically revolting against both imperialisms -- Soviet and Western; in fact revolting against the entire Cold War framework. Now, in a post-truth vacuum occasionally filled by xenophobic populisms, crass "democraships" and the gospel of TINA ("there is no alternative"), the prospects for a May 1968 revisited are dim.
It's a recurrent theme among millennials to despise 68ers for their dismal collective failure to change The System. Yet it will be up to millennials to come up with a strong, credible sociopolitical alternative -- complete with its own kick-ass political economy.
Across the West, that could spring up not from elite universities, but from young masses of immigrant sons and daughters left to rot in dystopian peripheries. What they need is political leadership and a roadmap -- as it's always possible to let the chaos raging inside oneself bloom and generate one, two, a million dancing stars.
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