May 1968 in Paris, coupled with similar events in other European countries and the anti-Vietnam protests in America are one of the primary elements in the cultural and democratic imaginary of the ‘New Left’. The Paris events are fascinating as a small section of society, students at Nanterre, began a protest which soon expanded to encompass large numbers of workers without Union approval and also several significant sections of the professorial and managerial classes. For a time French bureaucratic society was virtually at a stand still. Amongst the divergent political demands, those of ‘autogestion’ and self-management were clearly popular amongst both students and workers. The students demanded control over the universities and the workers over the factories.

We need to make an analytical separation between the actual events of May 1968 and the meaning that has been attached to it. As for the latter, Dominque Lecourt argues against the fiction that there was a coherent body of ideas, something that is frequently implied in New Left writing. However most commentators would agree that 1968 represented the emergence of something new – qualitatively what that was, will inevitably change over time as the generation of political and cultural influencers born in those days in May occupy different social positions of power in the present. Yet some of the main players in the events that are sometimes upgraded to full scale revolution or downplayed to childish play, must be understood through their previous past. This goes for the ideas of Socialism or Barbarism, perhaps best represented by the personality of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, as well as the International Situationists, the producers of the infamous pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student Life. Maoist currents as well as the role of the PCF also require close scrutiny.

The autonomist themes of ’68 represented for many, like Sartre, Lefebvre and Castoriadis a revolt not in the conventional frame of class politics, but against the whole alienated life of modern societies. Indeed the activities were opposed by many of the major parties of opposition and worker’s Unions. The autonomist demands were as much pitted against Stalinist bureaucracy of the left in the form of PCF as they were against routinised experience of factory life. Thus the strong intellectual legacy of the Socialism or Barbarism’s groups critique of the Soviet Union came to the fore. When De Gaulle called for a new election a year later it was these divisions in the left that allowed for the victory of George Pompidou on June 16, 1969.

"With the events of 1968, the City of Man, in an irreversible decision, loosed the arrow of the revolutionary temporarility of the common. In the face of this kairos of poverty and of love, the City of God is now only a bad stench" - Negri, Time for Revolution p. 261

Chronology of events in Paris compiled from Le Monde

Collection of the Parisien ‘68 posters

("The posters produced by the ATELIER POPULAIRE are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseparable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centers of conflict, that is to say, in the streets and on the walls of the factories. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. This is why the ATELIER POPULAIRE has always refused to put them on sale. Even to keep them as historical evidence of a certain stage in the struggle is a betrayal, for the struggle itself is of such primary importance that the position of an "outside" observer is a fiction which inevitably plays into the hands of the ruling class. That is why these works should not be taken as the final outcome of an experience, but as an inducement for finding, through contact with the masses, new levels of action, both on the cultural and the political plane.")

1.Luc Ferry & Alain Renaut:  French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on anti-humanism, trans Cattani, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 1990

2.Henri Lefebvre –L’irruption 68

3.Richard Johnson – The French Communist Party versus the students, revolutionary Politics in May-June 1968 – Yale, 1972

Chapters in other books

Dominique Lecourt: A Fiction: ‘la Pensee ’68 – in the Mediocracy, French Philosophy since the mid 70s

Arthur Hirsh – Part II & 3 of The French Left; A history and Overview – Black Rose books 1982

Other

Le Livre Noir des Journees de Mai (Combats Seuil, UNEF/ SNE Sup) – contains chronological account of events including much contemporary reportage.