May was the end of a revolutionary illusion

Fifty years on, the volatile period of civil unrest in France will be remembered all over the world this month as a great missed opportunity

For those of us who were young and politically progressive in 1968, the protests, strikes and other forms of civil unrest that overtook France in May of that year offered hope. The uprising was not simply a fight against something, like our fight against the Vietnam War. It was a fight for something — for a new way of arranging society, for new forms of economic and social and class relations.

The images of May ’68, which changed my life when I was a teenager watching them on TV, are still burnt in my memory: the enormous marches through the streets of France’s major cities; the overflowing crowds of people speechifying and debating in the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne; workers occupying factories and flying red flags over the gates; students occupying universities and being beaten by the police. Workers and students, it appeared, were united against a sclerotic Gaullist state.

These were images of the previously unimaginable: a revolution in the modern West. Revolution was no longer something that happened only in the past, or elsewhere, or in theory. I never questioned this story of a unified rebellion until the past few years, when I conducted dozens of interviews for an oral history of the events of May ’68. I spoke with people from all over France who had been workers, farmers, university students, high school students, office workers and artists during the uprising. These conversations did not make me think that the uprising was a mistake or a source of today’s social evils, as many critics claim. Nor was my admiration for the participants in the protests diminished.

Power structure

In 1968, students and workers alike wanted President Charles de Gaulle out of power, but there was a fundamental split between the utopian aims of the students and the more practical demands of the workers. Once the students occupied their universities, they began holding forums for people to vent their rage at life as it was lived, to propose new worlds. The desires of the students found their purest expression in their slogans, graffiti and posters. What they scrawled and pasted on the walls expressed not just their hatred of de Gaulle and the power structure, but also a desire for an absolute freeing of the human self.

At the same time, influenced by the classic Marxist idea that the working class is the vehicle for revolution, the students strove constantly for worker-student unity, marching to factories and exhorting the workers to join them. They were not the future bosses the workers took them to be, the students declared, but rather were united with them in their struggle.

In some cases, the workers seemed to be receptive. The students and the workers were fighting for radically different things. Bernard Vauselle, who worked at Sud Aviation in St Nazaire, made clear to me that “in ’67 and ’68 it was really the bread-andbutter demands we were interested in, not the political demands.”

Seemingly small issues mattered enormously to the workers, according to Vauselle, such as an official recognition of their unions. Before the uprising, he told me, union supporters “had to distribute our tracts outside the factory,” but afterward “we entered the factory and had our own office.”

The workers I spoke with told me that their first act when occupying a factory was to clean and secure the machinery, something they did out of pride. What could such workers possibly make of the slogan “Never work,” a popular piece of student graffiti? Mistrust of the students ran deep among the workers, as did a lack of comprehension. The gulf between the workers and the students is nowhere more evident than in two gatherings that occurred at the tail end of the uprising, in mid-June. On June 10, a Maoist high school student named Gilles Tautin drowned while fleeing the police outside a Renault factory in Flins, one of the last hot spots of the uprising. The next day, Pierre Beylot, a worker at a Peugeot factory in Sochaux, was shot and killed by the police. If you watch footage of the funeral of Beylot, no students appear to be in attendance.

Students and workers alike wanted President Charles de Gaulle out of power, but there was a fundamental split between the utopian aims of the students and the more practical demands of the workers.

Largest demonstration

If we speak only of the May of the students and the May of the workers, we omit a third May — an “anti-May” that ultimately carried the day, and that the students failed to take into account.

All this goes far in explaining how and why May ’68 failed. But if we speak only of the May of the students and the May of the workers, we omit a third May — an “antiMay” that ultimately carried the day, and that the students failed to take into account. On May 30, 1968, half a million people paraded on the Champs-Elysees in support of President de Gaulle.

You would never know it from the conventional accounts of May ’68, but this march was perhaps the largest demonstration of the period. The France that the students were rebelling against, that they thought was all but dead, turned out to be very much alive — and eager to put the students back in their place.

It was Charles de Gaulle, after all, who emerged triumphant from the elections in June 1968. The political right remained in power in France until the victory in 1981 of Francois Mitterrand and his very un-1968 brand of socialism. Since then, the left has been reduced to a shadow of its former self, while the right and neoliberalism have grown ever stronger.

May ’68 will be remembered all over the world this year as a great missed opportunity. But it was more than that: It was the end of a revolutionary illusion. ■ Mitchell Abidor is a writer living in Brooklyn. His books include The Great Anger: Ultra-Revolutionary Writing in France from the Atheist Priest to the Bonnot Gang and Communards: The Paris Commune of 1871 as Told by Those Who Fought It.