The Cruelest Month

Libération : Pourquoi 68 revient-il tous les dix ans comme un leitmotiv obsédant ? Est-ce un mythe ? Un modèle ? Un repoussoir ?
Jean-Pierre Le Goff : C’est un peu tout cela à la fois. La société française oscille entre fascination et rejet, ne parvient pas à trouver la bonne distance, à insérer 68 dans l’histoire. La fascination, c’est d’abord celle d’une génération qui a vécu sa jeunesse comme un moment fort de transgression et qui, depuis, a eu du mal à vieillir. L’imaginaire bloqué sur le passé, une partie de cette génération a saturé l’espace public d’images et de discours - c’est l’effet «arrêt sur images». S’y ajoute une autre génération, celle qui suit, les «héritiers impossibles», qui n’ont pas connu directement l’événement, qui en ont une image mythifiée et se font les gardiens du temple d’un événement qu’ils n’ont pas vécu. Pour ces deux catégories, 68 est une question identitaire, difficile à aborder sans susciter immédiatement un réflexe qui empêche tout recul réflexif et critique : «Ne touchez pas à 68 !» ... Ainsi 68 est-il devenu au fil des ans un mythe. Les médias y ont largement contribué. La diffusion en boucle d’images de barricades et de charges de CRS donne la fausse impression d’une vraie révolution. ... Enfin, le discours dominant attribue à Mai 68 des courants qui ne lui appartiennent pas en propre, comme le féminisme, qui n’est venu qu’après - 68 fut assez macho - ou l’écologie. On peut donc parler d’une mise en récit médiatique qui réduit l’événement à une série de clichés.
- Libération, Feb. 23, 2008

It has now been forty years since May '68, and yet we still haven't gotten over it. The intellectual legacies--in critical theory, New Left history, etc.--are still with us, as are the endless revolutionary appeals to the spirit of May. For Frenchmen, those few weeks are a metonymy for the whole complex of political and social changes brought on by the reaction to postwar capitalism; Americans use the vaguer designation "The Sixties," which loses in vividness what it gains in verisimilitude. Intellectuals, for a change, follow the French practice--how could they not, given Debord and Foucault?

What is implied in treating those events as a watershed of such tremendous significance? Politically, the suggestion is that May could somehow exculpate all the sins of dreary communists, bureaucratic anarchists, self-satisfied existentialists. May proves that it is still okay to be a Marxist, as long as you're only "tendance Groucho"! The revolution was so close, and that might mean we could swing it again, for real this time! These subtexts are in the end the only reason we think the events of '68 are even relevant in the first place.

That is problematic. The enragés were fond of saying that those who make a revolution halfway only dig their own graves; that is precisely what happened. May's failure ensured that it would be turned into a spectacle--that the mediating image of the revolution would be substituted for the genuine liberation sought by the Situationists. Indeed, all the vaunted consequences and cultural shockwaves touched off by May, all its attendant hopes and fears, are the result of the image, not the fact. The latter should have produced pessimism rather than euphoria--surely it is not much of an encouragement to see a new Paris Commune crushed as easily as the old. But the intelligentsia swallowed the spectacle hook, line, and sinker.

There is some irony here. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord criticized the anarchists for putting too much trust in "the mirage of a definitive solution that will supposedly be achieved by a single blow ... on the day of the general strike or the insurrection." The inevitable result of such a strategy was that the anarchist critique had to remain merely ideological, since that magical day of the general strike could not be realizable. The application to May is obvious: a revolution for a week is not a revolution, and pretending that it is is ideology.

Yet would-be radicals continue to gaze longingly back to those days, as if they could have anything to teach us. If it were not for the false optimism of the May generation, perhaps the baleful Marxist juggernaut would have finally broken down by now and been replaced with something more compelling. (For all the talk about the end of Marxism, intellectuals sure have a hard time getting rid of its ingrown idiocies). The alternative to May is to give up on revolutions--to give up on politics.