|
1968 was a year of revolution in Europe. Like most European revolutions
since 1789 (the date, of course, of the French Revolution), 1968 had in
origins in France. Beginning as a student protest in a Parisian suburb,
what would become known as les événements (the events) quickly
spread to a general strike involving millions of French workers that
momentarily paralysed the French economy. It had reverberations thoughout
Europe, igniting similar protests in cities throughout Europe. The Rolling
Stones, iconic 1960s band (in contrast to today's sad ageing rockers)
wrote a song `Street Fighting Man' expressing the spirit of the times.
It is now common for some cultural commentators to divide social
attitudes in Europe into pre- and post-1968 periods. For many, 1968 marks a
sea change in social attitudes in Europe, a time when different ways of
thinking, talking, dressing and living became possible. The historian Eric
Hobsbawn takes a more cautious view, describing the events of May 1968 as
`neither an end nor a beginning, but only a signal'. 1968 was the
expression of a discontent with the direction the Western world had been
taking and expressed a different set of aspirations.
In part, the events of 1968 express discontent with a number of
developments in postwar Europe:
The baby boom that took place from the mid 1940s throughout Europe had
created, by the middle of the 1960s, many thousands of new undergraduates.
The higher educational systems of Europe, however, were poorly equipped to
deal with the new era of mass higher education. Throughout Europe,
especially Italy and France, lecture halls were overcrowded, courses
over-subscribed and an educational infrastucture was unprepared for a new
generation of mass undergraduates. In Italy in the mid-1960s, the problems
of overcrowding, an antiquated curriculum and, distant and authoritarian
teaching staff caused riots. However, the events had little impact on
Italian society in general.
There had also been student protest in West Germany. Anger at the
coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, which
they viewed as a progressive and reforming party, led to the first student
protests. When the Western-backed Shah of Iran visited West Berlin there
were street riots in which one student was killed, further hardening the
attitudes of student radicals against the `establishment'. Many of the
student radicals ihad US conections, like Karl Deitrich Wolff who had
participated in civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations
in the US, Rudi Dutschke, who had an American wife, and Ekkehard
Krippendorf who had studied in the US. Again, these protests did not have
further consequences or attract support from other sectors of West German
society. Some have argued that memories of Gemany's postwar devastation
and privation militated aginst any attempts to bring down a government
that had delivered such prosperity in so little time.
Only in France did student discontent have an impact beyond the narrow
confines of a campus revolt. Let's look at what happened there now. In
order to cope with increasing student numbers, a new campus at
Nanterre-la-Folie on the outskirts of Paris had been built in 1965. At
that time, les bidonvilles, or shantytowns were a common sight on
the fringes of most of France's major cities. The contrast between the
well-heeled students at the Nanterre campus and the impoverished
inhabitants of the shantytowns was a sharp one. Workers joined in
frequently without the approval of the union leaders Surprisingly, these
events took place in the context of a France that had extricated itself
from its bitter colonial wars and was enjoying rising prosperity - les
Trente Glorieuses were at their peak.
1968 may be interpreted as sympomatic of a generation gap, of a youth that
no longer shared the values and the culture of its parents. The 1950s had
seen the beginnings of what we might call a youth culture. By the 1960s
that youth culture had developed, fragmented and grown further apart from
adult culture. A youth with its own taste in clothes (jeans, mini skirts),
music (Beatles, Rolling Stones), and more disturbingly for older
generations, in drugs and sexual freedom emerged. Moreover, it was a youth
culture that had become more politicized.
Mass demonstrations, sit-ins, and street fighting was a recurrent feature
of most western societies of the mid- to late 1960s (e.g. the USA, the UK,
West Germany) and even one or two Eastern bloc countries (e.g. Poland,
Czechoslovakia). These were strange disruptions against a backdrop of
increasing affluence. Whereas one might have expected stability and even
complacency on the part of an affuent West, most societies were wracked by
often violent conflicts.
1968 may be seen as a rebellion against consumer culture and complacency
that has an echo for us today as recent protests in Seattle, or the work
of Naomi Klein underlines. The generation of 1968 rebelled against the
very consumer society their parents had helped to create.
The growing affluence in Europe and America made television ownership the
norm. In France, a country which embraced television relatively late, some
60% of French homes had a television set in 1968 (Tarnero p.14). For the
first time in history perhaps, television played a key role in relaying
images and sounds of conflict and injustice to other countries throughout
the world. The most televised event in the world in the mid- to late 1960s
was, of course, America's war in Vietnam. Scenes of bombing, of massacres,
of an under-developed Third World country taking on the might of an
advanced First World nation caught the imagination of millins of young
people around the world. Many felt themselves caught up in a kind of
zeitgeist, and felt part of a spontaneous movement that was
international(ist) in character. The Vietnam war symbolized all that was
wrong with the capitalist West and its powerful `military-industrial
complex'.
A rejection of the Cold War and its easy certainties - an unredeemably
evil communist empire pitted against the freedoms of the capitalist West.
Vestigual imperialism was a key target, with America's war in Vietnam as a
target of youth anger and protest. During the Chicago Consipracy trial,
Tom Hayden, one of the defendants, claimed that "We want to join with the
new humanity, not support a dying empire".
Many young people experienced long-distance travel to the East (e.g.
India, Afganistan) often in a battered VW camper van, experienced at first
hand the culture and lifestyle of other cultures. Their heroes tended to
be alternative ones to their parents, and many came from the Third World: Che
Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong.
Although the student radicals of Paris were largely middle-class, their
initial protests were taken up by large sections of France's
working-class. Despite the prosperity, the longest period of economic
growth in France's recent history was coming to an end without the working
class gaining their fair share of the newly created wealth. There was
increasing anxiety about unemployment, which had started to rise by the
end of the 1960s.
1968 played a role in changing the ways in which many people thought about
their identities, their history, their environment and their political
rights and responsibilities. We might underline four main areas in which
1968 had clear consequences:
Sous les pavés la plage
Il est interdit d'interdire
Tout est politique
L'imagination au pouvoir
Student Protest in Europe
Parisian Beginnings
Youth in Rebellion
An Anti-Imperialist Rebellion
A Working Class Rebellion
The Aftermath of May 1968
Some May `68 Slogans
(Under the paving stones the beach)
(It is forbidden to forbid)
(Everything is political)
(Power to the Imagination)
Web Sites
Further Reading