As I write this, I look at the pictures of those Paris days in the anthology of 1968 photographs, published as a volume thirty years later. 2 Several of the most impressive were taken on the final day of the Marx Conference – I can still recall the sting of tear-gas after the burning of the Latin Quarter – but my most lasting memory is captured in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s undated picture of a massive student march of protest – a vast, overwhelmingly male, tie-less, clenched-fist concourse of juveniles, still, almost without exception, with the respectable short bourgeois haircuts of the pre-hippy age, almost concealing the presence of an occasional adult face. Yet these occasional adult faces are what I remember most vividly, because they represent both the unity and the incompatibility of the old generation of the left – my own – with the new. I remember my old friend and comrade Albert (‘Marius’) Soboul, holder of the chair in the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, upright, solemn-faced, dressed in the dark suit and tie of an academic grandee, marching abreast of men young enough to be his children who shouted slogans of which he profoundly disapproved as a loyal member of the French Communist Party. But how could a man in the tradition of Revolution and Republic not ‘descendre dans la rue’ on such an occasion? I remember Jean Pronteau – still a senior Party member at that time – who had commanded the 1944 Paris insurrection against the Germans in the Latin Quarter, telling me how moved he was by the sight of barricades going up, spontaneously, at the exact corner of the rue Gay-Lussac where they had been built in 1944, and no doubt where they had been during the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. If noblesse oblige , then so, surely, does a revolutionary tradition.
And indeed, nothing shocked me more at the time than the meeting to which I and several other visiting Marxists from the UNESCO jamboree were invited by, was it the Institut Maurice Thorez or some other academic adjunct to the French Communist Party?, at which points of Marxist interpretation were to be discussed, while the students marched. Nobody appeared to take cognizance of what was happening outside. I caused a few moments of awkwardness by pointing this out. Did we have nothing to say, I asked, about what was happening on the very streets through which we had passed on our way to the meeting? Could we not at least declare our general support? Alas, thirty-four years later I cannot for the life of me remember whether those of us who felt as I did managed to shame the gathering into making such a declaration. It seems unlikely.
The Magnum 1968 collection includes another picture that encapsulates at least part of my feelings at the time. (It is also, I need hardly add, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, that genius at catching the historic moment.) An elderly member of the middle class stands, with arms folded behind his back, looking reflectively at a poster-covered Parisian wall and a rough wooden door – presumably to some yard or building site. The top layer of posters has been half-stripped from the wall, leaving breeze-blocks and older movie posters half-visible. On the door there is an accumulation of political posters – a Communist Party poster on top of some text about student power, a half-torn sheet calling for struggle for a democratic society opening the way to socialism, and on top of it all a large graffito written with the basic armament of the 1968 revolutionary, the spray-paint can. It reads ‘Jouissez sans entraves’, which the editors have translated bashfully as ‘Let it all hang out’. (It really means: ‘Let nothing stop orgasms’.) We cannot tell what Cartier-Bresson’s elderly citizen made of the walls of Paris, which were the chief victims and public witnesses of the student revolt. My own reaction was sceptical. As every historian knows, revolutions can be recognized by the vast floods of words they generate: spoken words, but in literate societies words written in enormous quantities by men and women who do not usually express themselves in writing. By this criterion May 1968 was something like a student revolution – but its words record an odd kind of revolution, as anyone could see who watched the walls of Paris at the time.
The truth is that the characteristic posters and graffiti of 1968 were not really political in the traditional sense of the word, except for the recurring denunciations of the Communist Party, presumably by the militants of the various left-wing groups and factions, almost invariably descended from some Leninist schism. And yet, how rare were the references to the great names of that ideology – Marx, Lenin, Mao, even Che Guevara – on the walls of Paris!3 They would later appear on badges and T-shirts, as icons symbolizing the overthrow of systems. The student rebels reminded theorists of a long-forgotten Bakuninist anarchism, but if anything they were closest to the ‘situationists’, who had anticipated a ‘revolution of everyday life’ through the transformation of personal relations. That (and their very Gallic brilliance in devising memorable slogans) is why they became the mouthpieces of an otherwise inchoate movement, although it is almost certain that hardly anyone until then had heard of them, outside a small circle of left-wing painters. (I certainly had not.) On the other hand, the 1968 slogans were not simply the expressions of a drop-out counter-culture, in spite of an obvious interest in shocking the bourgeoisie (‘LSD tout de suite!’). They wanted society overthrown and not simply side-stepped.
For middle-aged leftwingers like me, May 1968 and indeed the 1960s as a whole were both enormously welcome and enormously puzzling. We seemed to be using the same vocabulary, but we did not appear to speak the same language. What is more, even when we participated in the same events, those of us old enough to be the parents of the youthful militants patently did not experience them as they did. Twenty postwar years had taught those of us who lived in the states of capitalist democracy that social revolution in these countries was not on the political agenda. In any case, when one is past fifty, one does not expect the revolution behind every mass demonstration, however impressive and exciting. (Hence, incidentally, our – and everyone’s – surprise at the disproportionate political effectiveness of the 1968 student movements which, after all, overthrew the presidents of the USA and, after a decent face-saving interval, of France.) Moreover, for us brought up on the history of 1776, 1789 and 1917, and old enough to have lived through the transformations since 1933, revolution, however intense an emotional experience, had a political objective. Revolutionaries wanted to overthrow old political regimes, domestic or foreign, with the aim of substituting new political regimes which would then institute or lay the foundations of a new and better society. Yet, whatever drove most of these youngsters on to the street, it was not this. Unsympathetic observers, such as Raymond Aron (seeing himself in the role of de Tocqueville commenting on the Paris of 1848), concluded that they had no objective at alclass="underline" 1968 was simply to be understood as collective street-theatre, ‘psychodrama’ or ‘verbal delirium’, because it was merely ‘a colossal release of suppressed feeling’.4 Sympathetic ones, such as the sociologist Alain Touraine, author of one of the first and still one of the most illuminating books written about those extraordinary weeks, thought their implicit aim was a reversion to the pre-1848 utopian ideologies. 5 But one could not really read utopia into the general antinomianism of slogans such as ‘It is forbidden to forbid’, which probably came as close to expressing what the young rebels felt – whether about government, teachers, parents or the universe. In fact, they did not seem to be much interested in a social ideal, communist or otherwise, as distinct from the individualist ideal of getting rid of anything that claimed the right and power to stop you doing whatever your ego and id felt like doing. And yet, insofar as they found public badges to pin on private lapels, they were the badges of the revolutionary left, if only because they were by tradition associated with opposition.