Kristin Ross on how May '68 is remembered in France

The Nature of Mass Demonstrations

John Berger (1968)

Seventy years ago (on 6 May 1898) there was a massive demonstration of workers, men and women, in the centre of Milan. The events which led up to it involve too long a history to treat with here. The demonstration was attacked and broken up by the army under the command of General Beccaris. At noon the cavalry charged the crowd: the unarmed workers tried to make barricades: martial law was declared and for three days the army fought against the unarmed.

May 1968, France: The LibCom Reading Guide

Libcom

Key texts

• Paris: May 1968 - Maurice Brinton's diary - A vivid and exciting eyewitness report by a member of Solidarity on the events in Paris in May 1968.
• Worker-Student Action Committees, France May '68 - Roger Gregoire and Fredy Perlman - In-depth look at the worker-student action committees formed during France May '68
• May-June 1968: A Situation Lacking in Workers' Autonomy - Mouvement Communiste - Detailed history and critical analysis of the May-June 1968 movement in France.
• Obsolete Communism: A Left-Wing Alternative - Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit - Excellent book on France 1968 by two participants, giving an account of the revolt as well as how it was co-opted with the help of the unions and French Communist Party.

Itinerary of a Thought

Jean-Paul Sartre, New Left Review, 1969

How do you envisage the relationship between your early philosophical writings, above all L’Etre et Le Néant, and your present theoretical work, from the Critique de la Raison Dialectique onwards? In the Critique, the typical concepts of L’Etre et Le Néant have disappeared, and a completely new vocabulary has taken their place. Yet when reading the passages of your forthcoming study of Flaubert published in Les Temps Modernes one is struck by the sudden re-emergence of the characteristic idiom of the early work—thetic consciousness, ego, nihilation, being, nothingness. These notions are now juxtaposed in the text with the distinct set of concepts which derive from the Critique—serialization, totalization, practico-inert, collectives. What is the precise relationship between the two in your current thought?

Street-Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties

by Tariq Ali
 

One of the world's best-known radicals relives the early years of the protest movement.

In this new edition of his memoirs, Tariq Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. It is a story that takes us from Paris and Prague to Hanoi and Bolivia, encountering along the way Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Henry Kissinger, and Mick Jagger.

Ali captures the mood and energy of those years as he tracks the growing significance of the nascent protest movement.

Between Existentialism and Marxism

This book presents a full decade of Sartre’s work, from the publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, the basic philosophical turning-point in his postwar development, to the inception of his major study on Flaubert, the first volumes of which appeared in 1971. The essays and interviews collected here form a vivid panorama of the range and unity of Sartre’s interests, since his deliberate attempt to wed his original existentialism to a rethought Marxism.

May '68 and Its Afterlives

May '68 & its Afterlives

by Kristin Ross, 2002

During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications.