Spring 2002
Volume 28, Number 3

If new memories of 1968 have begun to surface in France in recent years, then it is certainly due in part to the immensely popular labor strikes of the winter of 1995. The strikes awakened new forms of political expression in France, and at the same time they altered what could be perceived and what could be said about the recent past. My concern in this essay has less to do with May '68 itself than with the vicissitudes of its memory: specifically, the way in which a consensus, neutralizing view of a violent rupture that touched the lives of millions in France came to hold sway in the late 1980s. During 1968 in France, unlike in America, the student movement and the workers' movement achieved an admittedly brief but significant union. In fact, May '68 in France was the largest mass movement in French history, the biggest strike in the history of the French labor movement, and the only general insurrection the overdeveloped world has known since World War II.

Twenty years later, however, a very different united front, one made up mostly of sociologists and other "experts," on the one hand, and repentant gauchistes seeking to

See Also Lauren Berlant: '68 or Something (Autumn 1994) Angela Y. Davis: Afro Images: Politics, fashion, and Nostalgia (Autumn 1994) E. P. Thompson: Agenda for a Radical History (Winter 1995) Julie Ellison: A Short History of Liberal Guilt (Winter 1996) O. K. Werckmeister: Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian (Winter 1996)

realign themselves with the new American hegemony on the other, helped put into place a version of '68 stripped of any violence, asperity, or overt political dimensions. During the era of Reagan, Thatcher, and Mitterand, when consensus came to be taken for granted as the optimal political gesture or goal, May '68 became a good-natured "cultural" event, a merry month of youthful free expression and libertarian good will, a benign transformation of customs and lifestyles, a sexual revolution. When the central idea of French May--the union of intellectual contestation and workers' struggle--is forgotten, what remains is merely the prefiguration of an "emancipatory" counterculture, a metaphysics of desire and liberation. This elision also, in some ways, Americanizes or, at least, "Anglo-Saxonizes" what was, in fact, a distinctly different national situation. In the United States and Britain, as Peter Dews once suggested, a person could conceivably become initiated into politics by creeping through the back door of the counterculture. In France or Italy, on the other hand, the largely imported counterculture of the 1970s for the most part represented the waning of what had been a much more vibrant and forceful militancy.1 The ersatz internationalism of the picture of the 1960s promoted during the 1980s--a "Planetary Generation of Libertarian Revolt"--was built as well upon the forgetting of the one international dimension that indeed united insurrections in Japan, France, the United States, Germany, and elsewhere, namely, the critique of American imperialism and that nation's war in Vietnam.

[....]

Only a few commentators remarked on this fantastic genealogy and peculiar theory of history. Despite, or perhaps because of this distorted causality, the Lipovetskian view of May '68 achieved a virtual consensus in the 1980s. Its are traces still with us today in contemporary suggestions that internet technology or the contemporary "communication revolution" are somehow in direct continuity with or prefigured by the 1960s. Consensus, in the literal meaning of the term, means an agreement on the evidence, the sensory givens of the situation: an agreement about what is perceptible. But it is precisely the "sensory givens" that are absent from the interpretation advanced in one version or another by Lipovetsky, Alain Minc, or Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut in the 1980s.6 The consensus, in fact, resides in that absence, in the agreement to ignore the sensory givens. During the twentieth anniversary commemorations on television, for example, very little could in fact be seen of May; documentary footage of street violence that had been screened in 1978 was not shown on television in 1988. Without visual or auditory evidence, the frontal political strivings of May '68, the ferocious anti-Americanism, anticapitalism, anti-Gaullism, and the general strike of nine million people could very well have never occurred. And, despite the consensus interpretation's emphasis on the role played by May '68 in engendering contemporary individualism, its authors showed not the slightest curiosity about the groups or individuals who had acted in the May '68 uprisings. They make no attempt to ascertain what the actors in May '68 thought, what they wanted to do, what words they used, what meanings they assigned to their own actions. The result is abstraction in the service of abstraction--a dismal and often dizzying state of affairs that historian Jean-Pierre Rioux characterized as a full "hegemony of the word, a circularity of commentary."7 With the matter or materiality of May '68 erased, arguments circle back on themselves, and the proof of the conciliatory, good-natured essence of May '68 becomes, as Isabelle Sommier so astutely points out, the consensus that has been reached about that interpretation.8

If actors succeed, however loosely, in edging back into their own narrative, the "ruse of History" is there to sweep the ground out from under them. The results of your actions were the very opposite of what you intended! Poor imbeciles. You thought you were acting in conflict against capitalism, but through the victory of an anarchist ruse of History, your efforts were a--if not the--key step in accomplishing the peaceful synthesis of all social relations, be they economic, political, or cultural, under the aegis of the market. If you had not acted at all--like, say, the Norwegians or the Spanish who had no '68-- capitalist modernization would have still assured the results, lifestyle or cultural in nature, we see around us today. Women would still have come to wear slacks instead of skirts, just as they have done in Norway or Spain; French people would still have begun to systematically "tutoyer" each other. But by being so misguided as to have acted to try to undermine or suppress capitalism, you actually hurried it along!

Régis Debray, from an allegedly different ideological position, had already, at the time of May '68's tenth anniversary, used the same plot. Everything gets played out behind the actors' backs, offstage, as it were. The "ruse of Capital" lumbers along, engineering continuities and repercussions without the actors' knowledge. In fact, capitalist modernization, as the subject or protagonist of Debray's somewhat derisive narrative, is given all the lines and wields all the plot's power. The ruse of Capital uses the aspirations and logic of militants against themselves, producing the exact result unwanted by the actors: opening up France to the American way and American-style consumption habits. Debray's characterization of May '68's goals is, interestingly, identical to that of Lipovetsky: "the emancipation of the individual." Successful in that goal, May '68 actually ends up undoing those constraints that were slowing down the extension of commodity-logic throughout the social field in France. May '68, in Debray's words, was the "cradle of a new bourgeois society."9

1. See Peter Dews, "The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault," Economy and Society 8 (May 1979): 168.

6. See Alain Minc's theory of "capitalisme soixante-huitard," in L'Avenir en face (Paris, 1984); Lipovetsky, "'Changer la vie' ou l'irruption de l'individualisme transpolitique" and L'Ère du vide: Essais sur l'individualisme (Paris, 1983); and Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La Pensée 68: Essai sur l'anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris, 1985).

7. Jean-Pierre Rioux, "A Propos des célébrations décennales du mai français," Vingtième si&egave;cle 23 (July-Sept. 1989): 57.

8. See Isabelle Sommier, "Mai 68: Sous les pavés d'une page officielle," Sociétés contemporaines 20 (1994): 63-82.

9. Régis Debray, "A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary," trans. John Howe, New Left Review 115 (May-June 1979): 46. This article is composed of excerpts from Debray, Modeste contribution aux discours et cérémonies officielles du dixième anniversaire (Paris, 1978), pp. 1-45, 87-90.