Something in the air

’68 will do as shorthand. Most of ’68, as it were, didn’t happen in 1968. It was, at most, the centrepoint of a long accumulation of radical protest. It began with duffle-coated marches against nuclear war, a well-mannered and respectful movement whose spirit persisted to the end of the decade. (In October 1968, a rally against the Vietnam war finished with demonstrators linking arms with policemen and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’). It continued into the 1970s with real political violence — the Baader-Meinhof gang and many other groups. It is not very much like 1848 as a year of political upheaval, more the symbolic statement of a large-scale change of mind. That change of mind is probably still happening.

Richard Vinen’s excellent, cleanly focused book on the subject makes it plain that the événements of May in France form the central episode. The way that a protest among students spread from institution to institution, and then to trade unions and the entire workforce was something quite new, and baffling. What did they want?

Discontent started for particular reasons — a student protest against Vietnam, or, Vinen says, ‘concern about their conditions of study and prospects of getting jobs’, a very un-1968 motivation. Fairly soon, protest seems to have become an end in itself. Some of the workers who went on strike did so without presenting demands.

Much of the French establishment had lot of sympathy for the protestors, with the thrilling sight of (not very effective) barricades, chic slogans and the hurling of paving stones. André Malraux, the minister of culture, was having lunch one day with the writer José Bergamín; afterwards, he dropped Bergamín off at the occupied Sorbonne on his way to the National Assembly. General de Gaulle was not one of these, and indeed hardly believed in the protestors’ identity.