“We are all German Jews"
The commemoration of contestation in France’s May 1968
History is a story we tell about the past, and our stories shape the partitions by which we divide up time. In discussions of France’s conception of its history and values in the latter half of the 20th Century, one clear delineating moment in time routinely gets invoked as the origin of a new societal split: May ’68. For one exhilarating month of May in 1968, an antiauthoritarian youth movement united students and workers in mass protest and public debate. Over 50 years later, the events of 1968 are still recalled and interpreted in dramatically divergent fashions by those clinging to a political identity dependent of a certain definition of 1968’s legacy. Conservative politicians regularly point to the movement as the source of France’s moral rot which has destroyed traditional values through hedonistic exuberance, whereas those on the left approach it with a mixture of frustrated cynicism and nostalgia. This bittersweet outlook reflects the fact that the participants of 1968’s movement lost a political battle, but won the cultural war by reshaping society. This essay will analyse the myth of this movement and its memory as refracted through one of its most prominent figures, Daniel Cohn Bendit, and the various ways in which his image was invoked both during and after the movement. Cohn Bendit became a synecdoche for 68: Successive commemorations made his very identity into a symbol for a period and a mindset.
I intend to proceed in the eight following parts, wherein I shall:
(1) outline and provide a survey of relevant theories of memory and history
(2) retell the stories of Daniel Cohn Bendit’s origins
(3) replace the start of the protest movement within its global and local context
(4) cover the first third of May 1968’s events and their contemporaneous coverage, crystallised in their apotheosis on the night of the barricades from May 10th to 11th,
(5) cover the second third of the month of May, the general strike and demonstrations, in the streets, on their walls and in the Odeon public theatre
(6) cover the last third of the month, by observing the response from power going from local enforcement up to labour advances and the president’s frenzy
(7) analyse the ways in which Dany Cohn Bendit later showed self awareness about the media’s role in his prominence, and the critiques towards his former self, and doing a close reading of the story of Daniel Cohn Bendit’s expulsion and return, how his photograph and biography wound up on posters and placards, and how he became the movement’s symbol and martyr of sorts
(8) compare and contrast the way in which the movement’s successive anniversaries and commemorations put into conversation divergent narratives, and how what is chosen to be remembered at a given time illuminates how different people incorporated their memories of 1968 into their identity.
(1) Theories of memory and history
(2) The origins of the story of Dany Cohn Bendit
a) Early biography
b) Physical attributes
c) Swimming pool story
(3) The Context of 1968 from global to local
a) Global Context
b) National Context
c) Context of Nanterre’s campus
d) The inciting events of March 22nd
e) Aftermath of March 22nd
(4) First third of May - Contemporaneous coverage of May 68, night of the Barricades
a) May 1st to May 10th
b) Contemporaneous media coverage
c) May 11th: Night of the Barrica
5) Middle Third of May - Strikes and symbols
a) General Strike
b) Odéon Théâtre
c) Sartre and symbolic power
d) Slogans
Table of contents:
(6) Last Third of May - Responses at different levels of Power - Political advances
a) Protestors’ feelings towards police
b) Grimaud, Salaud?
c) Pompidou and Grenelle’s advances
d) De Gaulle leaves
e) De Gaulle speaks and his followers march
f) June Elections
(7) Memory and Myth-making of Dany as a symbol
a) Expulsion and return
b) Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands
c) Photograph
d) Breaking down borders up to Schengen
(8) Legacy, Divergent Commemorations and Generational arguments
a) Cohn Bendit’s self-critique
b) Early historical commemorations repressed by power
c) Cohn Bendit’s comeback commemorations and relationship to media
d) Memory of 68 as omnipotent and impotent
e) “68 = Cohn Bendit?”, constrained within and expanding out of the movement
f ) The right invokes the spectre of 68
(1) Theories of memory and history
In Tropics of Discourse (1978), Hayden White argues that “most historical narratives are verbal fictions, which are as invented as found”. Every historian builds a story of the past merely by selecting and curating what is worthy of being collected and retold. As Pierre Nora sees it in Sights of Memory (1984), history is always a reconstruction: it obliterates memory and fixes a narrative where contradicting voices are occulted.
Since there is no way of omnisciently observing past events, our brains look for a narrative to understand the past as part of what shaped our understanding of our present situation. Our memories can only be successively re-examined from a later perspective, which means memory gets reframed whenever it is accessed. In the science magasine La Recherche (July 2017), the neuropsychologist Francis Eustache describes reconsolidation theory: “each time we recall an event, its trace becomes fragile and we re-encode it differently. […] Our memories depend a lot upon our personal context and our point of view: we conserve certain elements and not others. […] Memory selects pertinent informations to create a coherent representation of the self and one’s environment”. This process of remembering is analogous to a historian’s curation in that they unconsciously bend reality by omission to tell a story that leads to their present. Also in La Recherche (July 2017), the historian Denis Peschanski observes that “sorting is at the heart of the memorialisation process. [...] Memory and forgetting are not opposed, they operate in tandem. […] A person’s memories are interpreted through the vectors of collective memory, i.e. their social circle and the media they are exposed to, in order to build a coherent narrative and to forget elements that disturb it”.
In Collective Memory (1950), Maurice Halbwachs posits that it’s impossible to remember anything outside of the larger group context in which it is expressed. Indeed, even in times of stability, we tend to link the stories of our childhood to the shared cultural and geopolitical events that segment them. As Halbwachs sees it, there is no individual memory without collective memory, and history begins after collective memory ends. Jan Assman corroborates this latter idea that once history is fixed and objectivised, it ceases to be a part of the collective memory, and shifts into what he refers to as ‘cultural memory’ in Collective Memory and Cultural Identity (1995). As Assman puts it, “Once a text is fixed into place it becomes the locus through which a culture sees itself. […] The objectivisation of culture leads to the concretion of identity.” Assman also argues that our past is unset because it reflects on our current identity, and all memory is connected to identity as a result of the reframing process involved in recollection.
In How Societies Remember (1989), Paul Connerton observes that when interpreting the past, we privilege what Assman called ‘cultural memory’, which is to say anything inscribed or fixed. This may come from a desire for objectivity, but it only enshrines the perspective of a given text. In Connerton’s view, “past factors tend to influence, or distort our experience of the present”. He focuses on how we sustain our knowledge of the past through ritual performance, commemorative celebrations and actions that re-perform our idea of the past.
There is certainly an element of commemorative ceremony in the mass demonstrations and student barricades of May 1968 that recalls the last general strike, occupation of factories and mass demonstrations in May-June 1936. The 1936 movement had itself started at a rally commemorating the Paris Commune socialist uprising of April-May 1871 which overran Paris with barricades, just as it had been 23 years prior in the Revolution of 1848. All of these movements could arguably be cast as participants performing in hopes of replaying out France’s narrative of revolutionary popular uprising leading to radical change that it has retold itself since 1789. In fact, “the memory of revolution is part of French culture”, as John Merriman at Yale’s History department says in a 2007 lecture about May 1968. Of course, May 1968’s protests themselves have since inspired subsequent commemorative ceremonies, such as April-May 2016’s ‘Nuit Debout’ movement of occupations and public assemblies.
In Volume 3 of Sights of Memory (1992), Pierre Nora described his frustrations with the movement of May 1968 as being singularly focused on these rituals: “There was no revolution, nothing tangible or palpable. […] May 68 has been the purely symbolic recapitulation of historical phantasmagoria. 68ers wanted to act, they only celebrated in an ultimate festival and a memetic revival of the end of the Revolution. […] The event only has meaning in a commemorative sense, it embodies the empire of commemorative memory.”
This paper will marshal the aforementioned theories to analyse how the memory of 1968 has become fixed through divergent interpretations. Half a century later, those who lived through it have usually reframed it as a part of their identity through re-examination through the decades. Their desire to testify to what happened and its significance may reflect anxiety that we will lose the movement’s spirit once they die and the historical record obliterates their voice, leaving us with clashing fixed interpretations.
(2) The origins of the story of Dany Cohn Bendit
a) Early biography:
Erich Cohn-Bendit was a 31 year old atheist Jewish lawyer for the International Red Aid in Berlin in 1933 on the night of the Reichstag fire. He and his wife Herta fled to Paris the following day, on suspicions that the Nazi Gestapo would come arrest him after listing him as a jewish communist sympathiser. Erich and Herta spent a few years among Paris’ left wing intelligentsia with their son Gabriel, born in 1936, until the German occupation once again led them to seek refuge elsewhere to escape persecution. They hid in the small town Moissac in the South of France, near Montauban, which became home for Jewish refugees from Spain and Germany. Erich and Herta conceived their son Daniel as soon as possible following the Normandy landings of D-Day in June 6th 1944, as he was born on April 4th 1945.
The Cohn Bendit family moved back to Paris after the war, where Daniel attended the Buffon middle school until 1958. He then emigrates to Germany to join his father, who dies the following year, and attends a German high school. This experience allows him to contrast both educative systems and later expose their limits. After living in Berlin for a year by 1959, and having legally spent the first 14 years of his life as a stateless person, Daniel Cohn Bendit chooses German citizenship to avoid having to do compulsory military service with the French army. Daniel rejected being pigeonholed to a single national identity: when he was first interviewed on a radio programme in April 1968, Daniel Cohn Bendit introduces himself thusly: “I was born in France in Montauban, I spent a great part of my life in France. My parents were expelled from Germany, but, if you want, I am neither French nor German, because I don’t give a damn about nationalities”. In his 2008 book, Forget 68, Daniel Cohn Bendit presents his multipolar cultural background: “I was Franco-German, Germano-French. I had finished my exams in Germany, and I was very influenced by American counterculture. I had been in 1964 to the USA to participate in the Newport jazz festival where cultural renewal was bustling”. In May 68, Avatars of a Generational Posture (2011), Sarah Sindaco asserts that “it is obvious that that Daniel Cohn Bendit felt first and foremost culturally French, which is part of why he returns to Paris for his higher education to study sociology at Nanterre” in 1967 on an orphan’s scholarship, which allowed him to host fellow student activists at his Paris apartment in the 15th. Within his first weeks at university, he joins a non-aligned anarchist activist group called “the enraged”. In L’Express in 1993, the Cohn Bendit of this moment is retroactively described as “23 years old, joyful and insolent. He handles irony like a grenade. He talks all the time. He absorbs everything.”
b) Physical attributes:
The historian Arthur Conte commemorated this spirit 20 years later in his article France between Celebration and Chienlit [Disorder] from the May 1988 issue of the magasine Paris Match. In this piece, Conte describes Cohn Bendit with an accumulation of qualifiers: “Daniel was a young oddball, all red haired and chubby. […] The movement saw Cohn-Bendit as their emperor: this stupefying red-head of 23, small, stocky, restless, electric, boisterous, scruffy, verbose, cavalier, cynical, aggressive, disarming his adversaries with enormous bursts of laughter, a virtuoso at sarcasm, a ‘Peter Pan’ impersonating Savonarola [who preached against the greed of Catholic indulgences], with this extraordinary blue-eyed vision, dazzling and jocular, in a childish gaze dotted with freckles, under a mane of a blonde warrior from the East.” This epigrammatic thick description paints a portrait of man whose stature was unimposing, but who was able to command admiration and respect from his peers through his childishly naive ironic questioning, using his excited demeanour and idiosyncratic perspective to laugh away the arbitrariness of prevailing dogmas of his time. During the events of 1968, the words used by commentators on television to describe the youthful student leader were less flattering. Indeed, Michel Droit, who was De Gaulle’s preferred interviewer, referred to Cohn Bendit as “this chubby paunchy little ‘boche’ with a body like a soap bar.” Let’s unpack ‘boche’ and ‘physique de savonnette’ here, as they were insults meant to otherize Cohn Bendit as a German and as a Jew: boche is a derogatory slur for Germans, derived from Alboche after France’s 1870 defeat against Prussia. It first appears in print in Boutmy’s 1883 Dictionary of Typographers’ Slang as “applied to Belgians and Germans because they struggle to understand instructions because of their lack of intellectual vivacity and their ignorance of French”. Michel Droit defended himself in a TV panel on Antenne 2 on May 2nd 1978, saying there was nothing negative or pejorative about his use of the term boche. As far the reference to Cohn Bendit’s body looking like a bar of soap, it’s a tasteless antisemitic dog whistle to the rumor that Nazi guards spread themselves to terrify Jewish camp inmates by threatening to “make soap out of them” (as quoted in Vasily Grossman’s 2003 Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry). Despite being refuted by the Yad Vashem Memorial and Yehuda Bauer’s research, this Nazi taunt has survived as a meme from schoolyards to modern message boards, sustained by the normalising winking acquiescence of conservative commentators like Michel Droit. As far as physical descriptions with less sinister implications, his fellow organiser of the movement of May 1968, the urbanist Roland Castro described how Cohn Bendit’s image broke with the predominant codes of masculinity of the era in an interview on France 3’s Côté docs on April 26th 2008: “Dany Cohn Bendit is an extremely feminine guy. He isn’t an archetype of machismo with a gun in his chest”. Cohn Bendit personally feels that a lot of qualities were projected onto him, but that his attitude itself was shaped in reaction to his growing notoriety, as he shared in an interview on France 3’s Le Divan on May 17th 2016: “when you are publicly known, people look at you differently”.
c) Swimming pool story
The myth of Daniel Cohn Bendit began outside the opening of a university swimming pool on January 8th 1968. Indeed, his classmates Hamon and Rotman in their 1987 book Generation describe “the swimming pool [as] the birthplace of the legend of ‘Dany’”. According to the French General Intelligence service’s police archives from the following day (excerpts of which were declassified for publication in L’Express in March 1998), “The Minister of Youth and Sports, François Missoffe visited Nanterre’s new sport facilities from 5:20pm to 5:40pm. At Mr Missoffe’s exit, 50 students were waiting for him and shouted hostile cries. The minister wanted to engage a dialog. A student of German origin, Marc Daniel Kohn-Bendit (sic) spoke up to ask him to talk about the sexual problem. The minister thought it was a joke”. Cohn Bendit took the opportunity to raise the issues of sexual rights such as contraception, abortion and gender diversity, wrapped in his trademark provocative tone. According to Cohn Bendit’s own account in his 2008 book, Forget 68, “We decided to call him out. I asked him if he had a light, and I told him ‘I read your 600 page white paper on youth, it’s all about this pool, but what is the point? you don’t mention the real problem of the youth today which is sexuality!’” According to the 1987 account in Hamon and Rotman’s Generation, the minister responded that with a pudgy face like his, it was no surprise that he had problems in that department, and that he should avoid diving in. In this account, Cohn Bendit is said to have responded by saying aesthetic labelling was the domain of Hitler Youths, which is perhaps hyperbolic but breaks a taboo on French antisemitism and collaboration. Cohn Bendit’s own account in his 2008 book, Forget 68, recasts the interaction as Missoffe responding with “If you are having problems, go take a dive in the pool to calm down” and himself retorting “That’s an utterly hitlerian response!”. Contemporaneous police notes frame Cohn Bendit’s claims derisively, and quote him as saying: “The construction of a sports centre is a hitlerian method, destined to attract the youth towards sports to distract it from real problems, whereas we should concern ourselves with ensuring the students’ sexual equilibrium.” Through its retellings, the story of Dany’s provocation of the minister at the opening of the swimming pool became conflated, such as when France 2’s TV presenter Thierry Ardisson in March 1999 introduces Cohn Bendit as having tried to push the minister into the pool, to which Dany responded by saying that they only wanted to call him out, though he says the subject of their dispute no longer matters, only that it was civil and they never wanted to drown him. And yet this image has remained, even in Jacques Lamalle’s Anthology of 20th Century Press Drawings (2012), where the event is described as “the very gaullist minister for youth was almost thrown into the water of the pool that he had come to inaugurate by a young red-headed anarchist named Cohn Bendit”. While retellings distort the picture, most versions agree on the fact Dany made an allusion to Hitler in defiance to a representative of the government, which was poorly received by the university administration. Dany’s behaviour on that day, along with “his political agitation in anarchist movements in the university”, apparently constituted grounds for his expulsion in the eyes of Nanterre’s reactionary dean Grappin, who put in motion a procedure to kick Cohn Bendit out of the country. The reaction of both the forces of power and the student body to Dany’s attitude and predicament foretell his fate at the end of the movement of May where he becomes its embodiment and its martyr of sorts. Students staged solidarity protests against the expulsion of their classmate and friend for such inane motives. Cohn Bendit’s name first appears in newspapers in the coverage of these solidarity protests on January 27th. According to Le Monde of February 17th 1968, Dany wrote a letter to Missoffe explaining that he had no intention of personally insulting him and that he only wanted to raise awareness of an issue. The minister responded by extending an invitation to him for “a general discussion on youth”. By the time Cohn Bendit appeared in front of the expulsion commission of Paris’ police prefecture on February 16th 1968, he had already received this letter, and knew that he had already diplomatically disarmed the situation.
(3) The Context of 1968 from global to local
(a) Global Context
In terms of historical context, 1968 was a year filled with protests spreading around the world. It was the year of America’s peak involvement in Vietnam, a military nadir that was met by the Viet Cong’s January Tet Offensive. Images of American atrocities committed with napalm on the Vietnamese combined with the mandatory draft putting the country’s young men in harm’s way combined to make the war unpopular domestically and further tarnished the image of American imperialism abroad. The anti-Vietnam war protests that turned violent outside the August 1968 Chicago Democratic convention were the first recorded occurrence of the chant “the whole world is watching!”, which is both a call for America to act with exemplarity, but also speaks to the observed global contagion of the protest movement. Indeed, the climate of anti-Vietnam war sentiment, and burgeoning hippie subculture calling for self-determination fueled student protests from Berkeley to Berlin, as well as Tokyo, Mexico, Prague, Dakar, Rome. In her 1998 book, May 68, Night and Day, the sociologist Christine Fauré underlines that the particularity of the Italian and French student movements is that they exit the walls of their university and join up with workers to make demands collectively. In his 2008 book, Forget 68, Cohn Bendit says: “1968 was a planetary revolt. […] If you make a book today, all you have to do is put the digits 6 and 8 on the cover, and automatically, people from [all over the world] think about the revolt of the late 1960s. [...] This revolt cannot be reduced to one country, though it manifested itself with a particular intensity in France since it lead to a general strike.” In this same book, the sociologist Jean Viard corroborates: “It is the first political event of globalisation. [...] A ‘planetary hum’ of simultaneous uprisings that wasn’t coordinated by any parties, or organised structures.” During the parliamentary sessions of May, representatives of de Gaulle’s government routinely blamed the Communists for being behind the apparently spontaneous instability. On July 17th 1968, the first legislative session after the snap election that put an end to the movement in France, Robert Fabre from the centre-left presented a more nuanced and structural diagnosis of the underlying motivations for global protests: “We live in a world in effervescence, where the problems of youth are being raised just about everywhere. In this world, even though entire peoples have been threatened with extermination, there has yet to be a general revolt of human conscience”. In this moment, globally shared media representations of brutal repression with napalm and foreign imperialism helped create a pacifist antiauthoritarian fellow-feeling among those born after the carnage of the second world war, haunted by its horrors as a model of what to avoid.
(b) National Context
Before riding this global wave of protests in 1968, France witnessed the images of agitation as foreign, in opposition to its perceived internal stability. According to the American documentary film Confrontation (1970) by Drescher & McCreary, “the [French] government televises long programs on student unrest in Berlin and New York to contrast external disorder with internal tranquility, but the students are making other comparisons, [such as] the vociferous expression of youth elsewhere with the rigorous paternalism of their own system”. As Cohn Bendit put it in his 2008 book, Forget 68, “when the revolt movement began to emerge everywhere on the planet, nothing seemed to move in France. When it finally arose in France, it expressed something that had been gestating in society and consequently emerged from its depths.” While French students had protested the law reforming universities in November 1967, and held a march against the war in Vietnam on February 7th 1968, one group of male students on Nanterre’s campus got noticed on February 14th 1968 by occupying the women’s dorm in protest of the fact that dormitories were segregated by gender and that trespassing into the dorm of the opposite sex after 9pm could get them expelled. On March 15th 1968, Pierre Viansson-Ponté pens an editorial at Le Monde entitled “When France is bored”, decrying the fact that the activism expressed by French students seems anodyne and trivial in the context of international movements protesting authoritarianism. As Viansson-Ponté puts it: “[young protestors around the world] feel like they have conquests to undertake, outcries to be heard, and a sentiment of the absurd to oppose to the absurdity [of society]. French students, [on the other hand] are preoccupied with knowing whether the girls of Nanterre and Antony will be able to freely visit boys’ rooms, which is, with all due respect, a rather limited conception of the Rights of Man”. Here, Viansson-Ponté appeals to France’s nostalgic pride and moral influence with a sarcastic reference to its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from 1789, whose values became enshrined into the UN Declaration of Human rights 20 years prior to his article’s publication. This is meant to undercut the relatively mundane ostensible interests of French students, but the article’s publication itself speaks to the bubbling revolutionary expectation and mindset that was gaining society. If anything, the article helped frame the next step for the movement, which was to transcend individual concerns and insert them into larger societal struggles.
(c) Context of Nanterre’s campus
It is no coincidence that the student revolt started in Nanterre. The cohort of French students attending higher education in 1968 were born in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, and it included a higher proportion of what Julie Pagis refers to as “first generation intellectuals”, her 2014 book May 68, a cobblestone in their history. Pagis argues that these university students were the first in their families to experience “ascendent social mobility” which “fed their dispositions to overturning the social and educative order”. They also happened to be far more numerous than those who sat in the same lecture halls just a decade prior: the number of students grew from 80000 in 1938 to 200000 in 1958, and 500000 in 1968 (as cited in John Merriman’s 2007 Yale lecture). To accommodate this growing demand and relieve pressure on the Sorbonne, de Gaulle’s government builds new educational facilities while maintaining their rigid hierarchy and ‘chalk and talk’ lecture format, in which students were forbidden from questioning their instructors’ soliloquies. Among these new buildings were a new American-style university campus with a focus on sociology in Nanterre, which first opened its doors in 1962, on the Western outskirts of Paris, as a perpetually-in-progress construction site amidst some of the worst slums in the country. When the 1967 school year started, it was already filled to the brim with 15000 young people. In a 2011 lecture, the Belgian historian Jean Michel Dufays describes the circumstances of “these new students for whom nothing had been prepared” as creating a “powder keg for revolt”. Dufays argues that the university was “cut off from everything, surrounded by muddy fields and north African workers’ slums”. In his 2008 book Forget 68, Cohn Bendit recalls how students felt stuck within the campus in terms of socialising: “When we were in university, we were glued to it, because it was surrounded by shantytowns and a desert, as opposed to Paris!”. In Jacques Lamalle’s Anthology of 20th Century Press Drawings (2012), this dynamic is described as fertile ground for a political awakening: “The decor is less enchanting than the historical streets of the Latin Quarter. The city of Nanterre had quickly urbanised from its agricultural traditions and became very working class and underfunded. Was [exposure to poverty] sufficient to quickly raise consciousness of social realities [among the students]?”. While there was an increasing level of class diversity among university students, lower classes were heavily underrepresented in higher education: in 1964, 2% of university students were children of farmers or factory workers (as cited in John Merriman’s 2007 Yale lecture). L’Express in 1993 describes this dynamic as the elite confronting the material realities of inequality: “The children of the bourgeoisie are living amidst severe poverty for the first time.” Drescher & McCreary’s Confrontation (1970) argues that these largely privileged students were struck by their exposure to this extreme poverty: “they contrasted their middle class backgrounds with the dreariness of their campus and the misery crowding up around it. […] They opposed their study of man and society with the prospective futility of being unable to affect their social environment from within a napoleonic university hierarchy.” These students’ curriculum itself was an influence: in his 2011 lecture, the Belgian historian Jean Michel Dufays argues that “Nanterre’s situation was favourable for revolt because its young people wanted to act with solidarity towards workers and the third world. It is in the academies of letters and humanities that students are most prone to activism because their studies push them to analyse social issues. Revolutionaries are not found or made in law school or medical schools.” The faculty also played a part: the professors of Nanterre’s sociology department included Alain Touraine, Jean Baudrillard and Henri Lefebvre, who decided to teach in the muddy construction site to approach pedagogy in novel and subversive manners. Indeed, Touraine published an article in Le Monde on March 8th 1968 which giddily described “the birth of a student movement in response to an underestimated crisis of universities”. Another element of faculty support came from Daniel Cohn Bendit’s professor Baudrillard, who sent him a letter endorsing his goals and methods on March 23, the day after his loudest activist gesture so far: “Dany, with what you have accomplished today to shape the debate, you are extraordinary! Be wary of leftist forces’ efforts to indoctrinate you, which would bring you to destroy everything that can be born out of this formidable novelty that you are shaping” (as reprinted in Cohn Bendit’s 2008 book). In the Winter 2003 Issue of the Philosophy journal Le Philosophoire, Beaudrillard reflected on the movement’s success for its linkage of politics to the concerns of everyday life: “May 68 brought us down from the transcendence of History towards an immanence of quotidian life, and this movement elucidated all matters such as sexuality which had been forgotten and occulted by historical idealism”.
(d) The inciting events of March 22nd
The aforementioned circumstances retroactively help explain why Nanterre became the birthplace of this movement as a bastion of political activism. At the time, French university students’ geopolitical concerns were interpreted through the prism of rejecting imperialism and foreign adventurism. Many of them felt a personal connection to this cause, as some of their older siblings had been enlisted to fight France’s wars of decolonisation that brutally tried to maintain control of North Africa and Indochina in the first half of the decade, which fostered solidarity with the anti-colonial movement in Vietnam, where the US were seen as exacerbating the quagmire that the French had left behind. On March 20th, the student-led National Vietnam Committee organised a demonstration “in support of the Vietnamese people’s victory against American imperialism”, which culminated in an attack on the storefront of the French headquarters of the American Express bank, next to the Palais Garnier Opera house. This futile but mostly harmless symbolic gesture led to the arrest of 6 students, including Nanterre’s Xavier Langlade. His classmates at Nanterre decide to organise a meeting to call for the release of the 6 jailed students. In the afternoon of Friday March 22nd, Cohn Bendit uses a loudspeaker in the courtyard to convoke a general assembly of students at 5pm. The students belonging to divergent political affiliations (situationists, maoists, trotskyists) put aside their habitual squabbles and converge during this meeting to synthesise their convictions as being opposed to “the repression” exerted both in Vietnam, and the repression of the paternalistic university system against their locked up classmates. By the end of the meeting, the students, riled up by antiauthoritarian fervor and a desire to reverse the power of speech, decided to subvert hierarchy by taking over the university’s boardroom on the 8th floor. Nanterre was still in construction at the time, and the only tower that had been completed housed the administration. The students decided to storm this ivory tower after living under its shadow, and they infiltrated it through the cleaning personnel’s entrance. Cohn Bendit astutely declares at the end of the meeting that this method will garner media attention for their cause with will allow the movement to sustain itself: “We have to break away from traditional methods of contestation, which have become impotent. […] In order for the public opinion to speak about what happened and be alerted, we suggest occupying Nanterre’s faculty building and staying the night to determine our will to spearhead the fight to liberate all the victims of repression.” From the top of Nanterre’s tower, 142 students collectively contribute to writing a manifesto until 2am, champagne in hand. Dany recalls this moment in his 2008 book Forget 68, “we took over the place and stayed there, we created a tribe”. They initially named themselves “the movement of the 142”, but quickly rebranded themselves to the more impressive sounding “the movement of March 22nd”, which didn’t constrain their ranks to a small tribe, but rather referenced Castro’s “26th of July movement” which overthrew Batista’s dictatorship. The students disbanded in the night after calling for a day of political debate on the following Friday, March 29th. Their suggestion was rebuffed by Nanterre’s dean Grappin, who closed the university on the preceding evening. Undeterred by the police presence surrounding their campus, the students organise discussions in their dorms around political themes and exchange with visiting German student activists Rudi Dutschke and Karl Dietrich Wolff from SDU. On April 2nd, the students are able to freely hold a “chatty Tuesday” in Nanterre’s amphitheatres, and 1500 students participate in the general assembly of the movement of March 22nd for themed debates ranging from East to West: “Eastern countries, university structure and anti-imperialism”. While Cohn Bendit had earned a reputation for mediating and calming heated disagreements, he was arrested on April 27th for being the visible spokesperson of the movement of March 22nd after it distributed a bulletin which included instructions for making molotov cocktails. Cohn Bendit’s friends immediately announce a protest for April 29th, and intone that “We will respond to the escalation of political repression with the escalation of our violence”, clearly missing his diplomatic flair. Regardless, they were persuasive, as he was released within hours.
(e) Aftermath of March 22nd
The students were successful in meeting Cohn Bendit’s stated goal of commanding attention, as they appeared in the General Intelligence’s notes on March 23rd: “Speakers including the anarchist militant Cohn Bendit took turns to denounce police repression in France. Mr Cohn Bendit suggested using the microphone and announcement system to spread political propaganda throughout the faculty. This suggestion was rebuffed but strongly risks being applied in the days that follow”. According to Jacques Lamalle’s Anthology of 20th Century Press Drawings (2012), Nanterre’s 22 March movement also caught the eye of “the most enlightened editorial offices, [which] began to whisper among themselves about this campus endowed with a sociology department like no other […] where contestation is both political and societal.” Cohn Bendit became the movement’s de facto interlocutor with the media, and used his platform to amplify his movement’s message at any opportunity. He introduces himself in a radio interview broadcast in mid April 1968 thusly: “I am a political militant at Nanterre and that’s all.” In this contemporaneous interview, Cohn Bendit alludes in passing to his foundational myth but brushes it aside: “I had a contention with the powers that be because of my interventions with Mr Missoffe, but all that has been resolved. As for the rest, I am a student in Nanterre participating in a movement where we have created a political current.” Cohn Bendit already introduces the question of the legacy and memory of the events and frames the conditions for its success: “This current can develop positively, not in its numbers, but rather in its strength of contestation, only if we work at it. We will know if this day was positive if people continue to hear and talk about the movement of Nanterre. After next year, we will know whether this movement was a historic date or whether we stayed confined in the university, in which case our movement will have been a failure.” Here, Cohn Bendit demonstrates an awareness of the weight of shaping history, and a desire to do so. This mindset was named in 1977 by the sociology professor Alain Touraine from Nanterre, who eventually marched with his students, as the concept of “historicity”: “Participants in profound societal change, though they may not be consciously aware of their status, are driven to be the desire to make history […] and become part of the self-production of society.” Cohn Bendit retrospectively corroborates Touraine’s observation in his March 18th 2008 Boston lecture: “It was an incredible exciting moment in our lives. We felt that we were making history, not that history was coming on us, but in that time, we could influence history which changed a lot of things.” The historian Philippe Artières notes in his 2008 book A collective history of 68 that “historians began collecting the students’ tracts at the sorbonne, which is a strong gesture towards the past” meant to encourage them to envision themselves as historical actors. This process is illustrated by the students’ chant of “This is only a beginning, let’s continue the fight!”. In April 1968, Daniel Cohn Bendit was already self-mythologising as part of his de-facto role as a symbol and spokesperson and took this position to muse on the next steps that would allow the movement to sustain itself. At the national council of the student union UNEF in April 1968, he prophesied: “A movement will create itself, there will be occupations of universities, and all universities will end up being occupied!”. In a radio interview in April 1968, Cohn Bendit made it clear that he envisioned the movement as spreading from academia towards society: “It’s clear that the movement of March 22nd doesn’t want to stay within the university but wants to extend itself outside of universities, which is to say that students refuse the function that has been assigned to them by society, they refuse to become the future executives of the society which exploits the working class and the peasantry.” In this case, though Cohn Bendit’s intentions to link the movement to the working class are noble, he describes them clumsily. Nonetheless, he gets his wish in the subsequent weeks: workers and students eventually march hand in hand on May 13th for a general strike which leads to occupied factories in and around which workers take the opportunity to discuss together, while some students join the dialog.
(4) First third of May - Contemporaneous coverage of May 68, night of the Barricades
(a) May 1st to May 10th
After the political agitation on the campus of Nanterre of the month of April 1968, the school’s dean Pierre Grappin was hoping that the month of May would be less momentous. After hearing that the students declared May 3rd as “anti-imperialist day”, Grappin fears that far right agitators would come in and turn the event bloody, so he decides to suspend classes on May 2nd, close off the university and bring 6 of the movement’s leaders, including Cohn Bendit, in front of a disciplinary council. To clear the campus, Grappin called in the police who enforced his orders with batons. In doing so, Grappin throws fuel on the fire, by giving this student movement new sympathetic martyrs to fight for, as well as authoritarian antagonists, and especially nowhere to go outside Nanterre’s muddy construction site. This leaves the disruptive protestors free to roam Paris’ streets and form meetings across the capital, quickly investing the Sorbonne, located in the city’s historical centre, to hold a solidarity meeting against the arrest of the 6 student leaders. L’Express in 1993 writes about this meeting: “The Sorbonne decides to host the movement of March 22nd within its walls. That day, Nanterre enters into Paris. In the [fancy] Latin Quarter, these nobodies from the suburbs are looked upon with condescension and contempt”. The very next day on May 3rd, rumors circulate that the far right wing movement Occident will seize the opportunity to attack congregated leftists in the Sorbonne. Some students who caught wind of this rumor prepare to defend themselves by wearing helmets and breaking the wooden bars off chairs and tables to build makeshift protections. According to the police report filed to General Intelligence on the following morning, only approximately 20 students were thusly equipped. An unaired video pulled from the national audiovisual institute’s (INA) archives also shows a student tearing out the Sorbonne courtyard’s cobblestones, joking that he is preparing “complete antifascist material”, which could apply to his desire to throw them at either the far right student agitators, or the riot police with whom they felt aligned. The Director of Education for Paris, Jean Roche, like Grappin before him, fears that the situation can only get worse, so he decides in turn to have the Sorbonne evacuated by the police. Upon hearing that the students were no longer allowed to be within the school’s walls, Cohn Bendit speaks into a microphone to an assembled group of students: “If people can no longer enter these walls, it’s evident that we no longer have the right to be here. Since the administration has decided to brand those of us who are still here as outlaws, we are de facto occupying the Sorbonne.” The police force the students out, and their altercations with the 2 dozens of amateurly armed students degenerates into violent clashes and the first night of riots. On May 5th, the tribunals condemn the students to jail time for disturbing public order and attacking the American Express branch. On May 6th, Cohn Bendit is called to a disciplinary council at the Sorbonne. Outside, in the streets, students chanted “free our classmates!” and they pooled donations to help fund the legal defense of those facing justice. They received excess funds, and ended up celebrating at a fancy restaurant. As Cohn Bendit reflected in France 3’s Le Divan on May 17th 2016: “What was intolerable is that we took half the money to dine at la Coupole”. In a talk at Boston University in March 2008, Cohn Bendit also recalled that some students stole from the luxury delicatessen Fauchon and redistributed it to people on the streets. On May 9th, 3000 students who have been kicked out of the Sorbonne organise a sit-in on the streets of the Boulevard Saint Michel. Cohn Bendit speaks into a megaphone, surrounded by a sea of sitting students: “Dear officers, we would like to inform you that we will not be fighting today! We would like to meet you at 6:30pm at Denfert Rochereau to discuss our next steps”.
(b) Contemporaneous media coverage
In 1968, French media were largely operating in the service of power and at its mercy. In 1963, the Gaullist minister of Information Alain Peyrefitte created the “service of interministerial liaison of information”, which distributed transcripts that the government wanted to see appear in all outlets. Jacques Lamalle describes the dynamic in his Anthology of 20th Century Press Drawings (2012): “The opposition party almost never appears. […] Journalists demonstrate an unbelievable servility towards those in power.” Two hours before the 8pm TV news, the government had to be sent a script and grant its approval to the coverage. Ministers were able to call in and disrupt the program with minimal notice, forcing newsrooms to scramble. Throughout the month of May, Paris’ police prefect, Maurice Grimaud, was a fixture of the 8pm nightly TV news broadcast to disseminate the official version of events. His omnipresence on these reports inspired the movements’ slogan and poster which declared “The police talks to you every night at 8pm”. Another of their posters displayed a flask labelled with the words “Press - Not suitable for swallowing”. In his 2008 book, Forget 68, Cohn Bendit describes the movement’s absence from state-sanctioned media: “Because of the ORTF [Office of Radio-diffusion and Television, which held the quasi-monopoly of broadcasts], on the official radios or on television, we didn’t exist”. In a talk at Boston University in March 2008, Cohn Bendit recalls that “During the first two weeks, the TVs weren’t allowed to show any pictures of the movement. […] The [unfiltered alternative was] private radios with direct live reports from the street”. Because of the government’s censorship, French people could hear the protests via radio reports but were only allowed to see images of their aftermath. Jacques Lamalle also describes the mood in newsrooms who were being constrained: “journalists are angry that the government banned them from covering and amplifying the ‘events’. The coverage, live or pre-recorded, of the nights of riots was essentially done by peripheral radios Europe 1 and RTL, where the French State only disposed of indirect interests.” These rebellious radios, where the median age was 25 years, were called ‘peripheral’ because they were installed outside of the country to circumvent regulation: Europe 1 was based in Felsberg in Germany and RTL was based in Junglinster in Luxembourg, though the French government bought controlling shares of stock in both of them via its ‘financial society of radio-diffusion’ (SOFIRA). They covered the protests by airing chants, negotiation sessions between the students and with university academy, as well as interviewing participants. In an interview on a peripheral radio on May 11th, Cohn Bendit declares: “Power possesses radio and television, and the parliament eats out of its hand. We are going to practice direct democracy and directly explain ourselves in the streets”. In this call, he uses free radios to discredit other sources and invite interested people to join the debate directly. As part of the larger general strike starting May 13th, the ORTF’s technical staff joins the protestors on strike on May 17th, and TV anchors join them on May 20th. By process of elimination, the reporters who stayed on air were the ones who were least sympathetic to the marchers’ causes. The Prime Minister George Pompidou criticised the fact that radio announcers aired the perspective of protestors in addition to the version of law enforcement. On an interview on France Inter in June, Pompidou railed against free radios’ coverage of May: “I simply must underline the unavoidable but harmful role that radios played in enflaming and provoking the situation under pretenses of information. Between the concern to elicit the protestors explanations and being complicit in calling for protest, there is just a small step that was sometimes gladly taken.” The Finance Minister Michel Debré referred to the peripheral radios Europe 1 and RTL as “radios barricades”, and ultimately had their phone lines shut off. The journalist Patrick Pesnot, who was reporting on the events for RTL, recalls in a 1998 interview that he would personally knock on doors to ask to borrow people’s telephone lines to broadcast, and that he was never rebuffed.
(c) May 11th: Night of the Barricades
On May 10th, Cohn Bendit speaks to a boulevard full of restless displaced students and quickly senses the crowd’s desire to storm the Sorbonne’s campus and seize it back from the CRS riot police. Contemporaneous recordings on peripheral radios capture Cohn Bendit’s address to the students: “We won’t budge until our classmates are freed! We should all form discussion circles, but let’s form a circle around the police!”. As he retells it in an interview on France 3’s “Côté docs” on April 26th 2008: “Police were still occupying the university. There are groups who want us to fight them to dislodge them. At that moment, I had the idea to avoid this confrontation by encircling the police with barricades”. He also retells this version of the stratagem in his 2008 book Forget 68: “Everyone said we had to take back the Sorbonne which was occupied by the cops. I exclaimed: ‘No one is going to take the Sorbonne. We are going to surround it, we will encircle the cops and tell them that they will only be able to leave once we can enter’. That’s why we created completely absurd barricades.” The events of the night of May 11th became known as “the night of the barricades”, and they were documented in the newspaper Le Monde of May 12th 1968 in an article by Kosta Christitch, Bertrand Girod de L’ain and Jean-Pierre Quélin. The article refers to Cohn Bendit as the “organiser of the movement of March 22nd”, and attributes him the watchword of “occupation of the Latin quarter without attacking police forces”. Le Monde also takes pains to mention that Cohn Bendit’s address to the students never pronounced the word “barricades” but that, nonetheless, “small groups tear up the metallic grids holding in trees, uproot signposts, and use them to tear up the cobblestones and unpave the streets. This initiative [is rejected by some] protestors concerned with maintaining the demonstration’s peaceful appearance. The partisans of building barricades argue that they only do so defensively in order to ward off any attacks”. Dany Cohn Bendit, along with other representatives of the protestors, spends the first half of the night regularly engaged in negotiations with the university board. So long as these talks were underway, police were given orders to hold their fire and to only use their batons sparingly, as the government was weary of escalating the conflict because of the youth and relative privilege of the participants. Meanwhile, the students take the opportunity to erect 60 barricades within a radius of 500 metres – see the attached map below from l’Évenement’s coverage in June 1968, First History of the Revolution of May. These barricades of stacked cobblestones, cars and metallic grids each stood between 1 to 3 meters, with the tallest standing at 10ft on rue d’Ulm. The urbanist Baron von Haussman tried to curb the ease with which insurrections could take advantage of Paris’ narrow sinuous streets and strove to make the city easier to navigate and police by building large avenues. To occupy and defend a section of the Haussmanian boulevard Saint Michel, the students had to build 6 barricades, one to block off access to each intersecting street. Most of the protestors moved away from Haussman’s wide axes and broke up into factions disseminated across the small streets between the campuses of the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure, with many successive barricades on rue du Gay Luissac and rue d’Ulm. In her 1998 book, May 68, Night and Day, the sociologist Christine Fauré talked about these successive barricades and described them as ineffective: “the interceding barricades were more symbolic than practical”. Drescher & McCreary’s Confrontation (1970) also frames them in terms of symbolic and concrete power: “barricades are a weapon of civil strife, a sign of crumbling authority. They are effective only as long as the state cannot or will not employ full military force [like tanks]”. Philippe Artières’s 2008 book A collective history of 68, paraphrases Cohn Bendit as saying “Everyone was doing whatever they wanted without knowing. There were 10 barricades one after the other on rue Gay Luissac, it had no military signification, but everyone wanted to erect barricades”. Artières corroborates the argument that the barricades’ signification was more emblematic than militaristic: “The barricades aren’t there to be effective […] The streets are unpaved to replay history, and retell a story evoking the Paris Commune uprising of 1871. […] The barricades are a symbolic method for the students to write themselves into history”. Artières’ perspective on how barricades were built to replay the scenes of the Paris Commune of 1871 brings to mind Paul Connerton’s commemorative ceremonies, where participants sustain the past through ritual performance that re-enacts its fixed elements which left an impression on their minds, such as the early photographs of 1871 and 1848’s barricades. Pierre Nora also argued that the students’ barricades are meant to evoke the memory of previous revolts rather than plan one in the present day. After the students have built their commemorative barricades, at 1:45am, Cohn Bendit emerges from the negotiations with the university board and declares them inconclusive: “We told the provost that what is happening in the streets tonight is that a whole youth is expressing itself against a certain society. We told him that in order to avoid any bloodshed, all police forces must exit the latin quarter and so long that our three demands are not met, we know that the protestors will remain behind their barricades”. Fifteen minutes later at 2:01am, the 6255 policemen get permission to open fire and throw tear gas grenades at the students, who respond in turn by burning down their own barricades with gasoline. Le Monde describes the air as becoming “unbreathable” in certain streets by 2:40am. Residents who felt sympathetic towards the students tried to clear the air by throwing buckets of water from the windows of their apartments, which the police take as an invitation to fumigate their homes with tear gas. Intelligence reports from the following week document the tips that police received from resentful neighbours signalling which residents aided the protestors. By 3:30am, police has advanced through most of the barricades. At 4:30am, the few students who continued to resist throw molotov cocktails from the rooftops of rue Thouin, above the Place de la Contrescarpe, before retreating to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, until police chase them out with grenades. At 5:30am, Daniel Cohn Bendit takes to the airwaves of the peripheral radio Europe 1 to urge for the disbanding of the protest. He intones in a very calm voice: “Given the police’s cruelty, it is not necessary to lead rearguard battles. I call on all unions, all left wing parties, to enter a general strike on Monday, in solidarity with the students and the young workers.” Cohn Bendit recalls this prophetic call to strike 40 years later in his 2008 book Forget 68: “On the morning of the night of the barricades, at 6am, I use my hoarse voice to call for a general strike. Four days later, the general strike started”. The following morning, Cohn Bendit makes a public appeal to the authorities on the airwaves of RTL to offer a compromise that would calm the students: “I would like to ask you to remove the police from the Sorbonne, and leave us the campus for 3 days. We will hold a great festival with rock groups and then withdraw from the premisses. Afterwards, we can discuss the university reform and everyone will be happy”. This offer reads as somewhat naive and disconnected from larger political claims, but it captures the need to meet and respond to the students’ agitation. This counter-cultural spirit of this offer to link music and protest speaks to his desire to recreate what he had witnessed at the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival where the young Dany Cohn Bendit had seen Dylan and Baez perform, but his offer was not considered. In spite of the violence of some altercations, the night of barricades remained relatively bloodless: 460 students were arrested, 360 people were wounded, but no one died. Le Monde’s article from May 12th concludes that the “calm that now reigns in the latin Quarter threatens to be perturbed at any moment”, speaking to the feeling that this second big night of protests ended on an unresolved note, and presaging the announced mass demonstration of May 13th.
(5) Middle Third of May - Strikes and symbols
(a) General Strike
The Prime Minister Pompidou, who had been a former professor of Letters himself, feels some level of sympathy towards the protestors and wants to tamp down the movement’s ire by meeting some of their demands. He holds a radio address on the following evening, Saturday May 11th at 11pm to announce that condemned students are to be liberated, and that the Sorbonne will reopen on Monday. On Monday May 13th, which happens to be the 10th anniversary of President de Gaulle’s return to power, hundreds of thousands of people march across Paris to ask for social changes within corporations and an improvement of the conditions of life. The police’s head count was the most conservative, as it numbered 200,000 marchers from République to Denfert Rochereau, while Europe 1 counted 800,000 on its report of the day of the march, and Jacques Lamalle’s Anthology of 20th Century Press Drawings (2012) describes the day as having “at least 1 million people marching across Paris”. This march embodies Cohn Bendit’s stated dream of rallying the students’ and workers’ causes and putting them in conversation. At the head of the procession, Cohn Bendit marches arm in arm with Georges Séguy, head of the CGT workers’ union, carrying a placard that reads “workers, teachers, students, solidarity”. The protestors call for a general strike, following the model of the previous one that swept the country in 1936 in a ceremonial fashion even though few workers had lived through it, because it remained fixed in history. Within 9 days of the announcement, by May 22nd, 11 million workers are on strike out of a country of 48 million people of all ages, i.e. more than one person out of five. Workers all over the country occupy their factories, especially the younger ones who do so against the wishes of their unions, starting at Sud-Aviation on May 14th and ultimately reaching hundreds of occupied factories. One such factory was the Renault automotive factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, which students tried to enter on May 16th to talk with the workers, only to be rebuffed by representatives of the CGT union who refused to let them cross the picket line. The CGT representatives were acting on behalf of the French Communist Party, which mistrusted the student revolt, which they characterised as young bourgeois breaking social norms, but not particularly aligned with their Soviet ideology. The moment of this rejection became enshrined by conservative commentators who retold it at most commemorations, such as the Gaullist Pierre Charpy on France 3 in May 1983, who used the anecdote to push the narrative that the workers rejected the condescending leftist students. In an interview with workers outside the Boulogne Billancourt factory for the national 8pm TV news broadcast of May 15th 1968, the interviewer’s frame is trying to factionalise the protest between workers and students by asking the workers whether students are allowed the enter their occupied factory. The workers respond by refusing to play into the framing of the question: they express their gratitude for what the students’ movement has started, tell the interviewer that their union forbade them from letting the students in, and that they enjoyed sharing lunch and discussing ideas with them regardless. Aymé Halberer, a member of the Renault’s CGT union, was interviewed on Antenne 2 on May 17th 1978, looked back on the events 10 years later: “It was a delicate step because it was the first time that we had occupied a factory since 1936. When we heard on the radio that some groups of students wanted to join the workers inside the occupied factory, we sent a statement asking the students not to enter to avoid favoring a police intervention. That being said, we dialogued with the students in front of the factory doors. [...] Outside of a small minority of students who came to lecture the working class, some of whom held a romanticised view of revolution, the great majority of students discovered the reality of the workers’ world and the pressures exerted by management [...] and that the conditions were not realised to start an adventure that could have ended under dramatic conditions”.
(b) Odéon Théâtre
After launching a movement that led to a general strike, the student activists were eager to spread the participative societal debates and discussions that were routinely being held on the Sorbonne’s campus, like Nanterre before it, by students in their occupied amphitheatres to those outside of the universities. They decide on the evening of May 15th that the dissemination of this mode of debate can best be accomplished by taking over the Odeon theatre. This theatre is located a few streets away from the Sorbonne campus and the scene of the night of barricades, but also opposite the Luxembourg palace which houses the Senate’s chambers. The Odeon’s director Jean-Louis Barrault refused to call law enforcement when his theatre became overrun with protestors. It remained under their control as a “popular theatre” until its evacuation in June, when the government regained control of the premises and Barrault was forced to step down for abetting the takeover. The students claimed themselves as followers of the movement of March 22nd, and read out a statement for the radio: “we took revolutionary action on a site of bourgeois culture [...] not to attack a theater company but […] to create a place where workers, students, artists and actors can encounter each other and [...] hold an uninterrupted political meeting”. The participants invited anyone who stepped inside the theatre to stand up and use the stage to voice their perspective on their role in society and the protests. To make this message clear, an enterprising student wrote the following message above the entrance of the occupied Odeon theatre: “When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater, all the bourgeois theaters should be turned into national assemblies”. Cohn Bendit appears in archive footage pontificating from the stage of the Odeon that “We are not a phony small revolt of enraged students. Once the working class entered into struggle, capitalism itself became threatened”. The Odeon became a place where all could speak freely, playing out a living experiment in direct debate. Drescher & McCreary’s Confrontation (1970) captures the discursive attitude of the moment, with more of a focus on building ideas than seizing power: “The theater, like the lecture halls before it, is filled with endless discussions […] The students appear to be launching a new civilisation. The mood is one of exhilaration rather than determination, of self indulgence rather than self defense. No Robespierre or Trotsky, not even a Cohn Bendit rises to galvanise the assembly to revolutionary fervor or determined action. […] An increased share in decision-making and guarantees for expression become both the means and ends of the revolution”. The director of the Living Theatre, Julian Beck, came to witness the discussions and called them “real living theatre, the most beautiful drama I have ever seen”. In his Anthology of 20th Century Press Drawings (2012), Jacques Lamalle picks up on the sense that the Odeon’s debates successfully accomplished the students’ goal of democratising the culture of political participation: “every street became an agora where citizens could immediately accost each other”. Lamalle also underlines that the occupied Odeon became a hedonistic space for the protestors to enjoy each other’s company, calling it a “joyous temple to sexual liberation”. Elie Arié wrote in the far left news magasine Marianne in April 2016 to argue that the Odeon theatre, where anyone could speak and receive a standing ovation, marked the origin point of contemporary neoliberalism’s individualistic narcissism and groupthink. The Odeon’s participative mode of deliberation was experienced as a form of liberation of speech that brought a lot of new voices to the table that could make demands in the first person, from feminists to workers, who moved away from affiliation to seemingly abstract universalist ideologies and towards advocating for their unhindered interests.
(c) Sartre and symbolic power
On May 18th, President Charles de Gaulle comes back early from his trip to Romania to vent his frustration with the movement and declare that “Recess has ended”, or to put it in the form of an action movie catchphrase, “Playtime’s over”. On May 19th, Cohn Bendit meets with the activist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, and their exchange is published in Le Nouvel Observateur of the following day. In their interview, Sartre makes Cohn Bendit reflect on what his movement is creating: “Many bystanders criticise you for looking to ‘break everything down’ without knowing, or at least saying, what you want to put in place of what you demolish.” Cohn Bendit responds: “What has happened in the last fortnight is a refutation of the theory of the ‘revolutionary vanguard’ as the force leading popular movements. At Nanterre and Paris there was [...] a desire for action on the part of some young people disgusted by the inaction of the ruling classes. Because it was more conscious theoretically and better prepared, the active minority was able to light the fuse and make the breach. […] We must avoid immediately creating an organisation which would inevitably paralyse us. […] It is this disorder that allows people to speak freely. […] Now that speech has been liberated, people must express themselves. What they say is vague and often trite and uninteresting, but it allows them to ask themselves the follow-up question of ‘what do we do about this?’. We will have to find new formulas”. Sartre praises the movement for broadening people’s minds: “Your action puts the imagination in power […] You have more ideas than your elders. We have been made in such a way that we have a precise idea of what is and isn’t possible. […] Your imagination is much richer than that of prior movements, and the phrases that one can read on the walls of the Sorbonne prove it. [...] You are expanding the sphere of possibilities, don’t give up!”. Cohn Bendit responds to Sartre by predicting the movement’s half-tint legacy, and presenting incremental compromise as inevitable: “We shall make particular proposals, and no doubt a few of them will be accepted because they won’t dare refuse us everything. That will be some progress, of course, but nothing basic will have changed and we shall continue to challenge the system as a whole. Besides, I don’t believe the revolution is possible overnight like that. I believe that all we can get are successive adjustments of more or less importance, but these adjustments can only be imposed through revolutionary action”. The day after his interview with Cohn Bendit, Sartre praises him at a meeting at the Sorbonne: “Dany is maintaining the movement on the real level of contestation on which it must stay. The CGT [workers’ union] only acted as followers, they had to walk along with the movement to try to control it. They wanted to avoid this savage democracy you have created, which disturbs institutions”. By May 22nd, 10 million workers have entered on strike and taken over their factories to party and discuss without any central coordination. As a result of this prolonged general strike, some infrastructure is breaking down as deliveries and services are no longer met, and trash begins to pile up. On May 22nd, hundreds of thousands of protestors march in the streets to reject representative authority: they chant “elections are a trap for idiots”, “voting changes nothing, the struggle continues”, and “voting is whoring, election is prostitution”. Since the protestors were more interested in symbolic power than electoral legitimacy, they put up a banner covering up the word “Representatives” in “Chamber of Representatives” to read “Chamber of Sellouts”, but refuse to set foot within it.
(d) Slogans
The “phrases written on the walls” that Sartre refers to as proof of the young generation’s ingenuity in his interview with Cohn Bendit are referencing the practice of written self expression that swept minds in 1968. Antoine Lefébure, who had been a student in Nanterre at the time, testifies in L’Express from March 1993 that “from the 23rd of March onwards, normal students started writing on the walls”, and that one of the first things written was “Be realistic, demand the impossible”. Alexandre Skirda, in his 1987 book Individual Autonomy and Collective Force, praises these messages for awakening people from their slumber: “Subversive inscriptions rehabilitated revolutionary lyricism, subjectivity made its shattering return and everything became possible once more”. In a talk at Boston University in March 2008, Cohn Bendit exclaims: “the movement’s emotion was represented on the walls of Paris in written poetry”. Drescher & McCreary’s Confrontation (1970) paints the following portrait: “every wall becomes a writing surface, covered with slogans, questions, statements, humour. Posters created by the art students bedeck the streets of Paris”. Indeed, students at the Beaux Arts hosted the “Atelier Populaire”, or “Public Workshop” on their campus, where they invited people to vote by show of hands and deliberate which posters and catchphrases would get produced serially and plastered around the city. In a 1988 TV report on Antenne 2, the anchor says that the slogans that adorned Paris’ walls “are the ones who really remained in history”, presumably in opposition to the movement’s lack of immediately visible political impact. This is an illustration of what Jan Assman identified as our tendency to rely on fixed objectified cultural artefacts when forming historical narratives. In his 2008 book, Forget 68, Cohn Bendit says that the form this expression itself gave it universalist meaning: “The walls of Paris protected the anonymity of the poet, but the poet who spoke to everyone and in whom everyone recognised themselves. It is not one, but thousands of people who wrote. We will never know who”. During the days of May, daily washing crews washed away some messages, leaving only the most memorable and catchy aphorisms to reappear on the streets over the next days. These street poets quickly discovered that inscribing onto the blinds of closed storefronts gave their epigrammatic messages the best chance or surviving clean-up, since they were not exposed during work hours. The most successful poetic constructions were often symmetrical, e.g. “the walls have ears – your ears have walls”, written in the Lycée Condorcet, which criticises not only the surveillance state, but also the fact that people have internalised barriers of mindset and access that prevent them from hearing certain ideas. 20 years after the fact, a former student named Alexandre reminisces about the prophetic quality they attributed to declarations that could break taboos: “I remember this inscription we wrote on the post office on rue des Archives, ‘down with the old world!’. I would look at it and think that the old world would disappear because we’d written it. We had a biblical idea of the power of speech!” (as quoted in Nicolas Daum’s 1988 book, Revolutionaries in a Parisian Village). One of the slogans to which the movement often gets reduced in its memorialisation is “It is forbidden to forbid!”. It was actually derisively coined by the conservative satirist Jean Yanne on his weekly radio broadcast on France Inter on Sunday May 5th as a parody meant to mock the movement’s reflexive rejection of authority. The students of the movement took it earnestly and appropriated it by writing it across the streets themselves. Cohn Bendit looked back on ‘it’s forbidden to forbid’ in an interview on France 3’s “Côté docs” on April 26th 2008: “What is forbidden? Why do we forbid things? Is it morals, conventions? It is a beautiful slogan because it seizes the profound emotions of the epoch, this antiauthoritarian fervor to oppose oneself to authorities whose legitimacy is rejected”. He also re-examines the phrase in his 2008 Boston University talk: “It is an illustration of Hegelian Marxist theory because it means that it’s not only forbidden to forbid, but also forbidden to forbid to forbid. Now, try to organise a society around this!”. In his analysis of the slogan, Cohn Bendit belies the fact that the movement’s messaging was more focused on shifting perspectives than gaining power to redistribute or building an organisation. Nonetheless, the questions that it did raise forced French society to re-interpret its moral precepts from the Enlightenment with a more equitable outlook, and subsequently bolstered many activist causes for self-determination.
(6) Last Third of May - Responses at different levels of Power - Political advances
a) Protestors’ feelings towards police
The protestors were not revolutionaries in the sense of seeking to violently seize the reigns of power. This is why the conflict remained relatively bloodless, with only 4 deaths across France linked to the events, even though there were hundreds of arrests, and many more wounded protestors. Unaired video footage retrieved on INA from the night of May 3rd features an anonymous protestor speaking to a camera after being hit in the ear, who decries that “the police were just looking for people to strike with their bats”. To respond to the violence, students set up improvised infirmaries in the cafés of the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The students who received and witnessed repressive violence naturally antagonised the riot police who was enforcing it, and expressed this by chanting “CRS = SS”. CRS is the abbreviation of Republican Security Companies, the riot control section of French police, and SS refers to the Nazi Schutzstaffel. The boldness of students making this link and breaking this taboo speaks to the pervasive notion of shame and unspoken evil that was associated with France’s collaboration in the second world war, but also the naivety of this simile could only come from children born immediately after the Second World War ended and did not witness its horrors firsthand. One of the reasons for the students’ animosity towards the Paris police is the lingering resentment towards the way that former Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon had run the department from 1958 to 1967, marked by the bloody massacre of 200 pro-Algerian protestors during the FLN demonstration of October 17th 1961 during which police beat protestors and threw their bodies into the river Seine, according to the historian Jean-Luc Einaudi in his 1991 book The Battle of Paris. As far as the students were concerned, given its bloody reputation, the Paris police department was the embodiment of evil, and its figurehead in their eyes became Paris’ police prefect Maurice Grimaud, due do his frequent interventions on the nightly TV news. In the American documentary film Confrontation (1970) by Drescher & McCreary, the protestors can be seen chanting “Grimaud, Salaud!”, calling the police prefect a “bastard”. And yet, in spite of being a symbol of authority for the protestors, Maurice Grimaud was calming his troops behind the scenes.
b) Grimaud, Salaud?
Let us now take a moment to consider this uprising from the perspectives of those who were in power. Maurice Grimaud’s rise to police prefect of Paris is surprising, given that he had studied literature, held left-wing sympathies, and he claimed to have “no attraction to police matters” in 1962 when taking the position of head of General Intelligence. Indeed, intelligence agencies tend to be to the relative left of law enforcement due to the nature of expertise each institution requires and values. When De Gaulle merged intelligence services under the police force, he appointed Grimaud to replace Papon as an olive branch to better tie both institutions, which had a history of resenting each other. Maurice Grimaud says in his 1977 book, In May, Do What You Fancy, that he immediately knew upon accepting the job that he wouldn’t act like his predecessor: “I knew with great certainty that I would bring to my functions a method that would not be Maurice Papon’s”. During the 1981 presidential campaign, Papon was a controversial minister in the incumbent Giscard government, which prompted the investigative journal Le Canard Enchaîné to uncover that he had deported Jewish children during the war. No longer concerned about being euphemistic in describing his predecessor’s excesses, Grimaud explicitly criticised Papon at a conference at the Sorbonne on September 27th 1991: “During the nine years that it spent under Maurice Papon’s command, the Parisian police was constantly pushed to react swiftly and strongly to every threat to public order”. Internally, Grimaud contrasted his approach by being much more mindful of the unintended consequences of a cycle of repression in order mitigate violence. On May 1st, Grimaud refused to arrest Cohn Bendit, against the wishes of the Ministry of Education. The Prime Minister Pompidou resolved the dispute by siding with Grimaud. Grimaud justifies his decision to avoid fanning the flames of discontent by opting for relatively tepid repression to the Ministry of the Interior Christian Fouchet in a letter on May 2nd, in which he says that if the police had fought back any harder against the student protestors, “they would have all agreed to forget their misgivings towards university administrations and transfer responsibility onto us to denounce power’s repressive machinations”. On May 6th, Grimaud tries to reign in his overzealous police forces by telling them to tolerate a certain level of social disorder in the Latin Quarter because of its university background. The sociologist Jean Pierre Le Goff says in Planet Bac (2010) this attitude reflects the mindset that “in the eyes of the most enlightened elites, the student revolt is seen as the revolt of their own children”. According to a declassified report from General Intelligence’s archives from the day following the night of the barricades, May 11th 1968, Grimaud was “extremely irritated by radio reports of his forces using chlorine grenades and requested the analysis of the contents of the remaining grenades” to ensure they were appropriate. When de Gaulle wanted to forcibly evacuate the Odéon theatre on the night of the 20th of May 1968 by infiltrating it through the Resistance’s old tunnels, Grimaud called a halt to the operation in the middle of the night. He explained his thinking in a March 1999 interview with Politique Autrement: “I did not want to awaken a war in the Latin Quarter which had been enjoying a fragile peace for 6 days. […] I preferred to see the revolutionaries change the world indoors than to find them assaulting policemen in the streets. […] I was convinced that the General de Gaulle knew full well that his own image would not have survived the internationally broadcast spectacle of 10 or 20 cadavers of young people splayed out under law enforcement’s frustrated bullets”. On May 28th, Grimaud sent a letter to every worker within the police department, without informing his superiors at the Ministry of the Interior beforehand, as a personal communication coming from their direct superior: “Hitting a protestor that has fallen to the ground is akin to hitting oneself by tarnishing the image of all police forces. It’s even worse to hit protestors after arresting them and on your way to interrogating them. […] Tell yourself this and repeat it around you: every time that an illegitimate act of violence is committed against a protestor, dozens of his classmates will seek to avenge him. This escalation knows no bounds”. The Ministry of the Interior Christian Fouchet criticised Grimaud’s measured approach in his 1971 book, At the Service of the General de Gaulle: “Grimaud was more turned towards intellectual speculation than police action”. Fouchet, presumably nostalgic for Papon’s more muscular style of repression, apparently told de Gaulle that Grimaud was “traumatising police officers who don’t appreciate feeling disavowed”. In an interview on Antenne 2 in April 1977, Grimaud looks back on his former sparring partner charitably: “I never had a contemptuous or vengeful attitude towards Cohn Bendit. I estimate that the movement imperilled our institutions and I was resolved to stop them in their tracks but I think that Cohn Bendit and I respected each other in a certain way. I know him better now, I was moved by reading his book in 1975. He gave himself to this revolution with perhaps some unrealism but a lot of faith. When he was banished to Germany, he got cut off from his bases and from his friends. He has become an unhappy man without his reason for being. I am personally grateful to him for never playing the card of material provocation. His weapons were provocation, contestation and spontaneity”. At the time of the interview, Cohn Bendit was still indefinitely banned from setting foot in France. Grimaud personally fought alongside Cohn Bendit’s classmates to get his ban on entering the country lifted, and publicly advocated for him being allowed to return, which he was ultimately able to do in December 1978. In this same 1977 Antenne 2 interview, Grimaud deems that the movement was effective on a longer horizon by reshaping culture: “May 68 isn’t over, this phenomenon extends itself, comes back, resurfaces. A number of things that have happened since would not have existed and or formulated themselves the way they did if May 68 hadn’t been. The radical feminist movement and the ecological movement source their vocabulary to May 68”. Cohn Bendit first spoke to Maurice Grimaud as part of his appearance on Antenne 2’s TV set via satellite, since Cohn Bendit was still exiled in Germany in April 1977. He already tried to systematise the nature of their passed antagonism in order to depersonalise it: “there is a logic of repression in policing that is not due to the men who run the police but are due to the structure and the nature of a state defending its power”. In an interview on France 3 in May 1983, Cohn Bendit praises the police prefect but distinguishes him from those who enforced his orders: “Grimaud tried to moderate his troops but he couldn’t be everywhere. He was very honest, but his troops weren’t him”. At a conference at the Sorbonne in September 1991, Grimaud demonstrates that he didn’t feel like Cohn Bendit was a serious threat, but that rather: “With a subtle mixture of vehemence and irresistible humour that granted him popularity and authority, he halted many times the risks of serious escalation. He is among those to whom we owe the fact that May did not finish in a bloodbath”. In his 2008 book, Forget 68, Cohn Bendit credits Grimaud with limiting the level of violence, and for “fighting to keep me in the country by saying: ‘it might also be thanks to Cohn Bendit that we are able to avoid violence and deaths! He is the most reasonable among the so-called enraged’”. In a letter to the historian Alain Frerejean on March 30th 2008, Maurice Grimaud outlined the importance of maintaining dialog between the commissaries of Paris and reasonable protestors, so that they wouldn’t lose sight of each other’s humanity: “The total absence of contact creates two radically opposed factions with similarly dogmatic conduct, propitious to extremism”. In a June 2016 Interview on TV5 Monde’s show Internationales, Cohn Bendit shares this even handed approach and parallel between police and protestor violence: he asserts that there will always be riot police who sign up for the job in order to get a chance to hit protestors, not because they’re ordered to do so, but because they’re fascist and frustrated, and on the other side, there are some protestors who are just looking to vent their anger onto the police. When interviewed by AFP for Grimaud’s obituary in August 2009, Cohn Bendit praises him for: “playing a very important role because he tried to explain the limits of police action to the police. He was a real republican. He always supported me, he protested against my expulsion. He was a police prefect outside of the norm”.
c) Pompidou and Grenelle’s advances
The Prime Minister Georges Pompidou was on a trip in Afghanistan during the first days of May, and returns on May 10th, the day of the night of the barricades. Even in the apotheosis of the altercation, Pompidou also feels a level of sympathy towards the student protestors, having been a professor of Letters himself, and immediately tries to find compromises on his radio address on the following day, on May 11th at 11pm by freeing the jailed students. He tries to further demonstrate this kinship by opening the next session of parliament on May 14th with the following statement: “The introduction of radio and television put young people in contact with the outside world from an early age. […] In [the students’] eyes, modern society is soulless and materialistic. I only see as a precedent in our history this desperate period that was the XVth century where the structures of the Middle Ages were crumbling, and where, already, students were revolting at the Sorbonne. At this stage, it is not the government that is at issue, but our civilisation itself”. Pompidou made this speech on the second day of the general strike. Raymond Aron was a confident of government members and conservative columnist at Le Figaro. He shared his impression of the government’s dynamic during an interview on Antenne 2 on October 25th 1981: “The General de Gaulle was furious and envisioning extreme measures, he would ask ‘what are we waiting for to shoot at them?’. Pompidou was convinced it was necessary to let things develop and wait for public opinion to turn against the students. Pompidou wrote to me that his main goal was to avoid bloodshed. He accepted the paralysis of the country for days until people became exasperated”. Pompidou’s closest advisor Edouard Balladur looked back on the strategy in a May 27th 1998 interview on France 2 in which he was cultivating his machiavellian image: “We needed to separate the social movement from the student’s movement, so we gave the unions reasons to go their own way”. Pompidou takes the initiative to negotiate with workers unions and sets up meetings with them at the minister of Labour on rue Grenelle on May 25th. He consciously sidesteps the students from the negotiations, while promising university reform at a later date, in an aim to break off the workers from the students and deal with both issues separately. These meetings culminate in the Grenelle agreements of May 27th signed in the Châtelet Hotel. According to Drescher & McCreary’s Confrontation (1970, this doesn’t entirely go according to plan: “Pompidou […] seeks to divide the workers from the students by repeating the pacification strategy of Leon Blum in 1936. On May 27th, the workers are accorded large economic gains. The union leadership is satisfied. But the rank and file reject the offer and hoot down the leaders”. When the head of CGT, Georges Séguy, presents the agreement to the ‘workers’ fortress’ at Renault Boulogne Billancourt, he gets booed and whistled at because they initially reject the agreement. Eventually, the movement peters out, with sometimes violent efforts to regain control of factories from the last striking workers. This repression leads to the 3 deaths of the movement, which happen in June: 2 workers are killed in the Peugeot factory on June 11th, and the high schooler Gilles Totin is killed on June 10th. Some factories remain occupied until June 17th. Ultimately, all workers get to benefit from the marginal gains offered in the Grenelle agreements, namely: higher salaries (an increase by 37% of the minimum wage, of 14% for public employees, and 10% for all employees), reduced work hours (from 52 to 40), a lowered retirement age, and the requirement that every business larger than 10 employees form a local union chapter, ensuing that someone would fight for better working conditions, and incidentally increasing the unions’ membership and influence. Ultimately, the President de Gaulle, to whom Pompidou reported, disapproved of his subordinate seeking publicity and using conciliatory negotiating tactics that arguably helped legitimise the movement. According to Jacques Lamalle’s Anthology of 20th Century Press Drawings (2012), “The General finds Pompidou suspicious for having affirmed himself too loudly in the previous weeks, and replaces him with the austere and icy Maurice Couve de Murville”.
d) De Gaulle leaves
Charles de Gaulle never properly understood what the protestors were demanding, but felt threatened by their reflexive rejection of authority, which he assumed was headed towards an insurrection. For fear of granting any more importance to the movement, de Gaulle stays mostly silent about the protests and strikes until May 24th, when he appears on French TV screens making a speech aimed at quelling the protests in a condescending tone: “The youth is too often worried about the future. [...] Young people have triggered a tidal wave of disorder, of abandonment or disruption of labour. As a result, our country is bordering on paralysis. [...] We are rolling towards a civil war that would lead to ruinous usurpation.” The former hero of the French Resistance declares himself “ready to defend his country once again”, and announces that he will solicit a mandate from the people by calling a vote. Privately, de Gaulle was apparently fuming at his ungrateful countrymen, according to his close advisor Jacques Foccart, whose Elysee Journals held his notes of the going-ons from within the presidential palace. In the second volume of his Elysee Journals, which documents the period of 1965-1969, and was posthumously published in April 1998, Foccart relays de Gaulle’s frustrations after bearing witness to a parliamentary debate discussing whether the government should step down on May 21st 1968: “Our partisans don’t want to fight and the others are incapable of leading anything. The French people only come to me in moments where they feel like I can be of service to them. It was the case in 1940 and 1958. They only need me when they’re terrified. If the country wants to go to sleep, if I can’t save it against itself, I will leave because there is nothing left to be done. France as we have it in this month of May is a dead France”. In Foccart’s journals on May 28th 1968, de Gaulle is also recorded expressing a lack of confidence in his cabinet: “I have no government, my ministers are incapable. I tell them what needs to be done, but they don’t do it. I told the police prefect that we had to retake the Odeon, and in turn it was explained to me that this wasn’t possible”. On May 29th, de Gaulle calls Pompidou to postpone their cabinet meeting and to tell him that he’s flying out to his country house in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. De Gaulle took off from the heliport at Issy les Moulinaux in the South of Paris at 11:20am, flanked by his wife, his son, and by two men in uniform, his own closest aide, François Flohic and the General Lalande, neither of which initially knew their true destination. De Gaulle requested his pilot fly them to Baden-Baden, in Southwestern Germany, at the official residence of the commander of the French Forces of Germany, Jacques Massu. Massu was a general who had fought in Algeria and ran a putsch in May 1958 in response to the French Fourth Republic’s offer to negotiate with the Algerian fighting for liberation from colonialism. Massu could not fathom the possibility of granting Algerians independence and had threatened to conduct an assault on Paris using paratroopers stationed in Rambouillet unless a new regime was installed that was less amenable to holding talks with Algerian nationalists. By halting the prospect of peace negotiations via threatening a military coup on Paris, Massu ensured that the Algerian independence conflict would last another 4 years, during which he ordered the torture and executions of many more Algerians. Massu’s military junta led to the drafting of the Fifth Republic, which marked de Gaulle’s political comeback and centralised power under him. De Gaulle later fired Massu from his position of military governor of Algiers in January 1960 as punishment for boasting in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung about the Army’s power and implicitly about the military’s ability to foment another coup. After his firing, Massu rose through the ranks to become a 5 star general in 1966, at which point he gets appointed as the head of French forces in Germany. On May 29th 1968 at 3pm, Massu was not expecting de Gaulle: when his aide François Flohic phoned him from the air, Massu was napping at his official residence and had to be awoken by his wife, according to Flohic’s retelling on the radio France Inter in September 1996. A somnolent Massu provides the presidential helicopter his lawn’s coordinates and camouflages their arrival using smoke grenades. The first thing that de Gaulle says to his general upon stepping out of the helicopter is “Massu, tout est foutu”, or “everything is done for”. In his 1996 radio interview on France Inter, Flohic interprets this remark as de Gaulle lamenting that “everything we have done since June 18th 1940 has been ruined”, evoking his foundational radio address broadcast from the BBC in London that called for a Resistance movement and internationalised the conflict after capitulation. According to Flohic’s account, Massu reassured de Gaulle by telling him that “A man of your prestige still has the means to act”. Massu retells the encounter in a May 1998 TV interview on France 2, where he says that de Gaulle told him “the communists have blocked everything. I’m no longer asking for anything. I’ve stepped away to see what I must do”, and that he tried to lift his spirits. Flohic corroborates that de Gaulle’s morale seemed low, and his version of events as retold in 1996 includes de Gaulle asking him what was going to happen next, to which Flohic responded “The General de Gaulle cannot go down into history without fighting until the end”. De Gaulle decides to fly back into France at 4:30pm to his originally stated destination of Colombey. Meanwhile, since the President had obfuscated his plans, the government panics when its members discover that their leader hasn’t landed where he said he would. At 2pm, the General Secretary of the Elysée Palace bursts into Prime Minister Pompidou’s office to tell him that “the general has disappeared!”. Pompidou gets briefed on de Gaulle’s whereabouts two hours later at 4pm, after French areal defense notices the President’s helicopter in Baden-Baden. The first radio broadcast reporting on de Gaulle’s disappearance airs on official radios at 5:34pm: “The General is not at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. We are still ignorant as to what destination he left towards this morning on board of his DS”. De Gaulle finally landed in Colombey at 6:15pm, and the journalists are left to piece together his day based on his appearance in the evening. The Press coverage on the following morning of May 30th is shocked by the President’s disappearance and write him off as finished: In Le Monde, Pierre Vilansson-Ponté writes “the only way out is to step down”. André Ribaud in Le Canard Enchainé pre-emptively celebrates the president’s downfall by conflating the man with all patriarchal authority: “Never again will we celebrate the power of only one, nevermore will this young France be ruled by old men like Pétain and de Gaulle”. Ribaud takes the opportunity to quote Balzac’s historical novel About Catherine de Medici (1842) in which the following line appears: “With the exception of Charlemagne, all French kings named Charles finished miserably”. The Communist newspaper L’Humanité ponders: “De Gaulle at Colombey, retirement or political manoeuvring?”. Massu kept his knowledge of De Gaulle’s excursion to visit him in Baden-Baden seeking support as a state secret until de Gaulle’s son-in-law Alain de Boissieu made it public in his 1982 book To Serve the General. Once the incident became publicly known, it is naturally linked in the French imagination to Louis XVI’s cowardly retreat to Varennes, such that Jacques Lamalle makes the parallel explicit by referring to it as “the Flight to Varennes-Baden” in his Anthology of 20th Century Press Drawings (2012). Indeed, both Louis XVI and de Gaulle’s secret retreats were about defining their legitimacy as the representatives of France, between the revolutionaries threatening to topple the given order held by the seat of power, which was left empty in both cases while the leader sought the support of armed allies abroad to defend it. In de Gaulle’s case, it can be argued that his disappearance was designed to provoke a psychological shock by showing the French people that he was indispensable to functioning order, or that he needed to mend fences with his army in the eventuality that he should have to call on them to disband the protests by starting a civil war. Lamalle lists various hypotheses: “Is this a veritable retreat? A staged production to create panic in public opinion by letting it catch a glimpse of the horrors of a possible chaos? Or the will to reconcile himself with the military chiefs still upset by the ‘Algerian surrender’? The debate lingers on”. In addition to first publicising the event, de Gaulle’s son-in-law Alain de Boissieu’s 1982 book To Serve the General also seeds the idea that de Gaulle wanted to be needed. Boissieu shares the fact that his father-in-law confided in him before leaving that “I have decided to leave the Elysée: nobody will attack an empty palace. I want to plunge public opinion and the government into the worry of my disappearance”. On June 7th 1968, de Gaulle told his favourite interviewer Michel Droit that he had considered stepping down in this moment, which may have been true or an attempt to make himself sympathetic: “On May 29th I had the temptation to step down, and at the same time I thought that if I were to leave, the menacing subversion would surge and engulf the Republic, and so, once again [alluding to his call of June 18th 1940], I took my responsibilities”. In this interview, de Gaulle appears to rank the peaceful student protests, two weeks of a general strike and public assemblies on the same level as the nazi collaboration and systematic extermination of Jews. It’s perhaps a touch hyperbolic, and speaks to de Gaulle’s megalomania. In his 1996 radio interview on France Inter, De Gaulle’s aide François Flohic praises the way his boss was able to turn the situation around: “I witnessed him spin a successful operation out of a situation from which there seemed to be no issue. Once again, I told myself that the general is a great actor. His disappearance provoked a real shock in public opinion because there were no alternative solutions that could replace him”. Cohn Bendit feels that de Gaulle’s alarmist overreaction stemmed from his inability to understand the movement, as he shared on France 3’s “Côté Docs” on April 26th 2008: “De Gaulle understood nothing of what was happening. He had a vision of the movement which was one of the revolutionary movements that build to a crescendo towards seeking power. That’s why he leaves to Baden-Baden to see whether General Massu and his army are ready to intervene if need be”. In his talk at Boston University in March 2008, Cohn Bendit expounds on de Gaulle’s motives: “De Gaulle thought [our movement was going to storm] government buildings. He fled to Baden Baden to hold a negotiation with Massu: […] de Gaulle agreed to grant amnesty for far-right generals of the OAS [the Secret Army Organisation, paramilitary terrorists] who had tried to assassinate him [for ending the war in Algeria and granting its independence] because he needed to unite the French right with the far right against the uprising of the left. The far right was very skeptical of de Gaulle because [he had given] up Algeria. […] In exchange for the army’s compliance, he needed Massu to give the signal that he would grant the generals amnesty, and then did so half a year later”. Indeed, de Gaulle freed all the OAS’ far right terrorists from prisons, including Raoul Salan from the prison of Tulle, and allows the others to come out of hiding. The law that grants these liberated nationalist extremists their amnesty passes almost two months later on July 24th 1968.
(e) De Gaulle speaks and his followers march
On the morning of May 30th, the day after his German expedition, de Gaulle writes a speech for a radio address to be broadcast across all French radios that afternoon. The American documentary film Confrontation (1970) by Drescher & McCreary uses a very MacLuhanian analysis to argue why radio was a better suited medium for de Gaulle than his televisual address from the week prior, in a frame reminiscent of the mythos surrounding Kennedy and Nixon’s 1960 debate performances as received on radio or TV: “No longer can the tired face of an old man be seen, only a voice, calling to France as it did on June 18th 1940”. De Gaulle’s aide Flohic makes this same link explicit in his September 1996 France Inter radio interview, in which he answers the question of why de Gaulle chose a radiophonic address by musing that “it could be to link to his character in the war as a disembodied voice”. On May 30th at 4:30pm, de Gaulle’s gravely voice gets carried over the airwaves down to transistor radios across France’s households: “I will not step down. […] France is under threat of a dictatorship from subversive communism. […] I proposed a referendum to give citizens the opportunity to let me know whether they still keep their faith in me via the only acceptable way, democratically, [...] unless some people intend to muzzle the French people by preventing it from expressing itself at the same time as they prevent it from living”. In this speech, often seen as the bookend of the May events, de Gaulle inflates the threat posed by the protestors by invoking the spectre of soviet totalitarianism. He also makes the shrewd political move to frame the movement of the last month as a tyrannic inconvenience halting the functioning and progress of society at the expense of a silent majority eager to conserve the status quo, and directly connects their fear and frustration to their ability to voice it at the ballot box. The psychological impact of shortages helped this ‘silent majority’ identify itself by weighing its pragmatic necessities. This perspective was amplified by contemporaneous TV coverage, which not only overemphasised the violent aftermath of clashes with police, but also focused on the inconveniences of slowed society with interviews about food and gas shortages. For the elderly, this evoked the memory of rationing during the War, as did the re-opening of the black market. The communist newspaper l'Humanité conspiratorially pit the blame for these shortages onto those in power: “Bosses are looking to artificially provoke bread shortages and the power has deliberately organised the fuel shortage”. This demagogical argument wasn’t very persuasive, although it is worth noting that gas began flowing in the days following de Gaulle’s speech, just in time for the Pentecôte weekend holidays. Many Parisian bourgeois who would have otherwise been inconvenienced by being sequestered in Paris for the holiday weekend are moved to show their irritation: one hour after de Gaulle finishes his speech, at 6pm, a massive demonstration descends onto the Champs Elysées walking towards place de la Concorde in support of de Gaulle. Official radios report 400 thousand marchers, though Jacques Lamalle deems that these numbers were inflated by the government. At the head of the procession were de Gaulle’s loyal ministers André Malraux and Michel Debré, the latter of whom gave the following sycophantic defense of his boss: “a great journalist wrote yesterday that ‘de Gaulle is alone’, we are clearly demonstrating that”. Debré’s sarcastic response implicitly criticises the media’s presumed anti-government bias, in spite of the tight control that power exerted over broadcasting. L’Express in 1993 describes the Gaullist marchers as “united by fear”. The protestors wave oversized French flags and portraits of the President while chanting “Stop the violence!”, “Unite France”, “France belongs to the French!”, “Cohn Bendit in Germany!”, “The redhead belongs in Peking!”, “Cohn Bendit to Dachau”. These chants recast Cohn Bendit as a foreign agitator, even though by then, he had already been banned from setting foot in France, the country of his birth, while some frothing reactionaries were still joking about exterminating him.
f) June Elections
De Gaulle’s radio address on May 30th featured his solicitation for a new mandate by calling for a vote after disbanding Parliament and forming a new presidential cabinet. Unions quickly became wary of endorsing disruptive actions for fear of being accused of impeding the democratic process. On June 12th 1968, the day where a protest against “expulsions of workers and students” was supposed to take place, the new Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin formalises this new norm into rigorously enforced law by banning all public protests, breaking up revolutionary groups, tracking and disrupting even the smallest public assemblies. Cohn Bendit looks back on this belated political response as ingenious. At a talk at Boston University in March 2008, he highlights how de Gaulle won because he seized an opportunity were there were no serious alternatives: “In our thinking of the time, we had said that an election was stopping the process of protest, so we were against elections. So it was only left between de Gaulle and the communist party”, neither of which were appealing to the protestors. Consequently, the election had to be read as a mandate for the incumbent President. On June 29th 1968s, on day before the vote, de Gaulle made his case for his version of events: “Last month, everything was going away. Our country was scandalised by university anarchy, paralysed by the general strike, and there was reason to think that the Republic would disappear along with liberty. On May 30th, after finally feeling the awakening of the international instinct, I called to the people who responded to me in their depths, and everything was repaired. Such is the page that was just inscribed in the tormented book of our history”. In this speech, de Gaulle seizes the importance of the moment that transpired by speaking to the desire to historicise it, but he uses the gravitas of his office to trivialise it as a halted inconvenience. De Gaulle’s party achieved the best score in its history on June 30th 1968, gaining 110 seats and obtaining its first absolute majority. And yet, the disruption of the May events clearly moved de Gaulle out of step with some elements of French culture, and he stepped down from power 10 months later after the country voted against his next referendum.
(7) Memory and Myth-making of Dany as a symbol
a) Expulsion and return
Daniel Cohn Bendit is notably absent from the previous section covering the last third of the month of May, because he was forcibly pushed out of the narrative. On May 21st 1968, Cohn Bendit travelled to Frankfort with a photographer and a journalist from the magasine Paris Match to talk to German students. At 1:20pm, the Ministry of the Interior Christian Fouchet takes the opportunity to issue an expulsion order labeling Cohn Bendit as a criminal foreign national troubling public order by sending out the following telegram: “Extremely urgent. Oppose the entry into France of the German National Cohn Bendit born in Montauban”. Dany presents himself at the Franco-German border of Forbach to try to join his French friends on that evening, but he discovers that he has been ordered to stay back in Germany. On the following day, on May 22nd 1968, hundreds of thousands of protestors descend on the streets in support of Cohn Bendit and collectively chant “We are all German Jews!”. His first occasion to speak to the public comes the day following this demonstration of universalist solidarity in his honour came on the airwaves of RTL on May 23rd 1968, where he sounds moved and shaken by the ban: “I am in Frankfort. I am free to circulate in Germany. [By extension, Cohn Bendit is addressing the fact that this has ceased to be the case in his native France.] Tomorrow I am meeting with socialist students in Starbruck to realise the Franco-German entente of youth by walking together to the border to return in France. We will issue a collective statement declaring that it is unacceptable for anyone to be forbidden to go anywhere and the international solidarity between students obligates them to help me pass into France. As a revolutionary militant participating in a movement, it is my duty to return home to continue my fight within this movement”. On May 24th, the following day, Cohn Bendit walks up to the Franco-German border very publicly, accompanied by the Starbruck socialist students, only to be rebuffed once more. After noting that this was Dany’s second rejection at the border, Pierre Dupuch, the police prefect of the Moselle region, correctly suspects that he may find clandestine means to enter and issues his own expulsion order on May 24th at 10:48pm: “If the German Cohn-Bendit is discovered on the French territory, detain him and notify military leadership”. On May 28th, Cohn Bendit is able to surreptitiously sneak into France by riding in the back seat of a car. He dissimulated his identity by dyeing with his signature fiery red hair in black and hiding his trademark blue eyes behind sunglasses. He also impersonated a Spaniard, as he retold in his March 2008 Boston lecture: “When I came back in Paris illegally with black hair and sunglasses, I was announced as a Spanish comrade”. Dany in disguise entered a public assembly at the Sorbonne and made a spectacle of his reveal by asking for permission to speak, presenting himself as a Spanish envoy, then dramatically removing his sunglasses. Cohn Bendit further expounds in his March 2008 Boston lecture: “There were 3 000 people in the sorbonne amphitheatre but they weren’t interested until I put away my sunglasses and everybody recognised me by my eyes. And then it was incredible, because it was announced on live radio, and an hour later you had more than 30 000 people in the sorbonne all chanting ‘We are all German Jews!’.” When retelling this moment in a 1993 interview with l’Express, Cohn Bendit described the moment where he was recognised and cheered in person as “being overwhelmed with a wave of pleasure. But that’s also when I understood that it all had to end”. The following morning, on May 29th, the southwestern squadron physically escort him out to the German border, effectively banishing him out of the country indefinitely. Ironically enough, Cohn Bendit gets pushed out to the Franco German border a few hours before de Gaulle crosses it for his secret retreat to Baden Baden. Cohn Bendit spends the next decade unsure of when or whether he’ll ever be able to set foot in his birth country. He turns down an offer from American journalists who want to film him crossing the border, but instead repeatedly requests to be allowed back into France. Cohn Bendit’s face reappears in motion in French media on Antenne 2 in April 1977, almost a decade after he was kicked out of the country, confined inside a TV placed on an armchair relaying the video feed of a satellite interview conducted from Switzerland. Maurice Grimaud was also interviewed on this panel and objects to its extraneous setup: “It seems absurd to keep him at a distance as though he could light the place on fire. Our country has signed the Helsinki accords [in 1975] which grant the free circulation of men and ideas: Cohn Bendit is a man, he has ideas, even though I may not share them, so it would be honourable for the government to end this measure”. Cohn Bendit appears hurt that the government is unwilling to reconsider its ban in this footage, he exclaims that “France is a so-called country of asylum and refuge, but in reality, it’s the country of expulsion!”. The ban on Cohn Bendit’s entry is ultimately lifted on December 20th 1978 by President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, after a petition and a sustained campaign from advocates that ranged from Dany’s classmates and friends to Jean-Paul Sartre and the police prefect Maurice Grimaud.
b) ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands’, ‘We are all German Jews'
Daniel Cohn Bendit quickly became a lightening rod for the ire of the far left and the far right for his zeal in embodying the student movement and his desire to challenge prevailing dogmas. The leaders of political institutions who despised Cohn Bendit used their media outlets to antagonise him by emphasizing his foreignness to otherise him, however these efforts backfired since they were ultimately reappropriated by the movement’s partisans. Indeed, the fascist far-right weekly newspaper Minute on its May 2nd 1968 front page article written by the despicable Jean-Marie le Pen described Dany thusly: “This Cohn Bendit, because he is a Jew and a German, thinks of himself as a new Karl Marx”. The soviet-aligned far-left newspaper L’Humanité publishes its May 3rd 1968 front page article article by Georges Marchais, the secretary of the Communist party. In this article, Marchais rejects the burgeoning student movement: “The micro protest groups unified under what they call ‘the movement of March 22nd Nanterre’, led by the German anarchist Cohn-Bendit […] are merely fake revolutionaries that must be unmasked because they objectively serve the interest of Gaullist power”, which was an attempt to label him as a chaotic foreign agent, witting or not. Marchais’ dog whistle fell on deaf ears among the students: a video of the morning of May 3rd from INA’s archives shows a student reading the editorial out loud in the Sorbonne’s courtyard to guffaws, jeers. The student reading out Marchais’ words emphasized the word “German” and he can be seen repeating it with his finger in the air, met with interjections from the other students: “Don’t forget Jewish!” “And he takes himself for Karl Marx!”. This unaired newsreel demonstrates the pleasure with which these humanities students relished in the media’s coverage that was shaping and distorting of their narrative, but also and their sensitivity to the precise terms with which their movement’s most prominent representative was being dismissed for his German Jewish identity. To reclaim Cohn Bendit’s otherised identity as part of the movement’s aims of universalist solidarity, students began chanting “We are all German Jews!” as part of their demonstrations as early as May 6th. It rose in prominence following Cohn Bendit’s expulsion on May 21st 1968, as he recalled in a 2008 lecture at Boston university: “Society was completely shaken. I am only a symbol, I am an abstraction in this. But the greatest moment of this time was after I was expelled, there was a big demonstration where everybody shouted ‘we are all German Jews. This is 23 years after WW2, to say in France ‘we are all German’ is not natural, to say ‘we are all German Jews’ is doubly unnatural! To have crowds of [people of all genders, ethnicities and creeds shouting these words in unison] means that in this moment you had a feeling of a need for solidarity to think emotionally about another society where everybody can be with one and other without thinking of the differences”. In his 2008 book Forget 68, Cohn Bendit looks back on the May 22nd 1968 protest held in his absence but in his honour at which “We are all German Jews” became the canonised watchword: “I think it is the greatest anti-racist and anti-nationalistic demonstration that ever was! It means ‘We are all human beings, we are all together!’. […] It was also the beginning of France’s thinking on multiculturalism and acceptance of difference as unifying factors. The recognition that difference can unite us and give strength to society”. The historian Jacques Baynac writes in his 1978 book Mai Regained about the united crowd of May 22nd as forming “not a mob but a body”. The protest’s epigrammatic humanistic catchphrase also bears resemblance to the “I am a Man” signs that the Memphis sanitation workers carried on their February-April 1968 strike. In L’Express on April 16th 1998, Cohn Bendit looked back on “We are all German Jews!”: “this slogan reclaimed Georges Marchais’ racist insult when he had called me a German anarchist to play up anti-‘boche’ phobia. The students at Nanterre responded by shouting out what he hadn’t dared to say: ‘German Jew’. […] This slogan served to support the refusal of exclusion under all forms: ‘We are all immigrants’, ‘We are all foreigners’, ‘We are all undocumented’. It translates an identification of a part of the youth with those on the margins of society. It’s a catchphrase that has had an autonomous life. It survived as a symbol of solidarity. […] It supports its own metamorphosis. I wish it a long life”. The format of the phrase allowed for successive permutations in a mimetic fashion to express solidarity towards a given oppressed or excluded group. In 2008 during the Chinese Olympic games, it morphed into “We are all Tibetans”. After the 2015 terror attacks on the satirical magasine Charlie Hebdo, Parisians marched down the city’s streets in unprecedented numbers (over 1.5 million) on January 11th carrying home made placards that read like the latest modern iteration of this slogan of universalist solidarity, often following this format: “I am Jewish. I am a Cop. I am Charlie. I am Ahmed [in reference to Ahmed Merabet - the Muslim policeman whose last moments confronting the terrorists were morbidly immortalised on film]”.
c) Photograph
The students attending the Beaux-Arts who had turned their school into a public workshop in order to vote on and produce posters for the movement only ever produced one that depicted a participant of the movement. It is a serigraph adapted from a legendary photo in which Cohn Bendit looks into a riot policeman’s eyes, with the captions “We are all German Jews” underneath it. The general assembly of the public workshop voted to reject the initial version of the poster because they felt squeamish about the term Jew, because Jewish people didn’t use it to describe themselves at the time. The assembly opted to change it to the more relatable if less flattering “We are all undesirables”. This tagline accompanying Cohn Bendit’s image was further fixed as one of the icons of the movement by the mass production and city-wide plastering of this photo across the walls. Jan Assman writes in Collective Memory and Cultural Identity (1995) about how the dissemination of fixed tangible objects like this image helps form the cultural memory from which a group derives awareness of its unity. The image of Cohn Bendit depicted on this poster is part of what made his outlook a reference point for the identity of some followers of the movement, and allowed his instant of youthful exuberance to persist as a story and an ideal. Le Monde Magasine of January 6th 2018 speaks to how the photo forever fixes Dany in memory: “Cohn Bendit, the little jokester, smiles at a cop for eternity”. On the panel of “Everyone is talking about it” on France 2 in March 1999, Cohn Bendit looked back on his attitude in approaching riot policemen as he did in this captured moment: “When you approach a cop alone, they won’t hit you because it’s not what they are expecting. I don’t have bodyguards, I believe in the insolence of non-violence. I approach people and tell them ‘hey, come, let’s discuss!’”. In a meeting for his retirement from the European Parliament in 2014, his fellow Green Party parliamentarian Eva Joly joked about this unguarded attitude: “You made us believe that someone could look into a CRS’s eyes while mocking him without being bludgeoned with a baton in the face”. On France Inter on March 23rd 2008, the historian Philippe Artières analyses what this image represented: “The little Dany Cohn Bendit embodies a juvenile style, which the photographers understood well. He faces the CRS riot police as a game, laughing at them. It may be hard to perceive today, but there is an enormous amount of joy”. On March 1st 2009 on France 5, the interviewer Patrick Poivre d'Arvor asks Cohn Bendit to ponder why he was a magnet for camera lenses: “We always see you in the spotlight in all photos – why were you immediately identified, was it the smile, a sort of innocence? Where did this spontaneity come from?”. Cohn Bendit responds: “I played in theatre when I was very young. I liked it, I enjoy performing. The ludic side of 68 was playing out Revolution, performing the emancipation of our own lives. My expression was conveying some part of that. For journalists and photographers, the public servants, professors, unionists were not representing the photogenic picture they were looking for. It’s that image of me which emerged as a symbol for being in the image of the insolence and desire to live of 68”. The renowned photo of Cohn Bendit was taken by the photographer Gilles Caron, who had shot for Resnais, Truffaut and Godard, and flew in from covering the Biafran war to come capture what was happening in Paris. Gilles Caron captured Cohn Bendit locking eyes with a riot policeman on May 6th outside the Sorbonne, as he and 5 classmates were being cheered along on their march to the university’s disciplinary council. The May 1988 issue of Paris Match describes this moment captured on film: “Eye to eye. Dany the red facing the helmeted and harnessed order: the photo became the very symbol of May 68. Daniel Cohn Bendit’s mane becomes the flamboyant panache that delights contestation. A blue and malicious gaze, a chubby face dotted by a constellation of freckles, Dany the red is omnipresent. Protests, radios, televisions, amphitheatres: the leader of the ‘enraged of Nanterre’ provokes, disturbs and criticises. From the first days of May onwards, this irreverent student gets noticed and always finds the right turn of phrase. In June 68, he had declared ‘I am not necessary. In two months I will no longer be known’. An error of judgement”. One month into his indefinite exile, Cohn Bendit expressed concern about his inability to be part of the memorialisation of May 68, which reflected his frustration with being unable to participate in the events’ subsequent historiography while exiled from the country. In his absence, Cohn Bendit’s legacy was sustained by the photo, which he places as the beginning of his public narrative in March 2016 on the panel of France 2’s “We haven’t gone to bed yet”: “my story was born from a smile”. He looks back upon this image in his 2008 book Forget 68: “Many photos of this type were taken, but Gilles Caron’s one is symbolic. I think the symbol that the protests seized upon to appropriate is this smile that makes liberty rhyme with pleasure. […] It is a smile of an incredible insolence facing something completely rigidly fixed. And it erupts into people’s minds and their homes. […] My son put this photo as my [flip] phone[’s homescreen] as a surprise. He told me ‘you see, it’s you!’. But he’s telling me this now, 40 years later! Nonetheless, it’s true that this photo remains something that marks me, that describes and defines me profoundly”. In an interview with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir on April 12th 2014, Cohn Bendit reflected on the role that this photo played in his life: “It’s true that I owe a lot to Gilles Caron. […] This photo is emblematic because at 23 years old, I am mischievously fighting power. That’s how I became known. […] After this photo, once I became a known face, I did not change, but women discovered in me things that they had not seen previously. […] I was carried by this formidable photo”. In his March 2008 Boston lecture, Cohn Bendit says that this picture became his international calling card: “I’m always surprised that I’m recognised on the street around the world where I’ve never been before because this picture is in the collective memory! It’s not me, it’s the memory of a generation who said you can fight against power with irony, and you can really make a difference with it”.
d) Breaking down borders up to Schengen
After Cohn Bendit sneaked back into France on May 28th in violation of the ban on him crossing the Franco-German border, one of the most prominent chants was “We don’t give a damn about borders!” or “Borders, we don’t care!”. Cohn Bendit later invoked this catchphrase on March 13th 1997 on France 2 where he talked about his desire to seek a second term in the European Parliament with the French Green Party after having spent his first term with the German one. The journalist Marie Pierre Farkas interviews him in Frankfort and and frames him as a historical figure on the French scene: “You may not be nostalgic, but it seems you would like to come back to France as a candidate for the 1999 European elections, wouldn't that be a wink and a nod to history?”. Cohn Bendit responds by saying his return “would be like coming full circle to close the loop of history more than a wink. It would mean that ‘we don’t give a damn about borders’ has become a reality, and you can be a representative in Germany and then in France”. In an interview with Arté’s “Vox Pop” on February 20th 2014, Cohn Bendit invoked the symmetrical construction of the slogans of 68 to talk about the downsides of protectionist thinking and instead help envision trade as non-zero sum but mutually beneficial: “If we close our borders, we not only close the borders from outside to inside, but also from inside towards outside”. In an interview on France 3’s “Côté Docs” on April 26th 2008, Cohn Bendit expounded on “borders, we don’t give a damn”: “This slogan came in response to my departure order and ban of entry. […] It was premonitory because it draws this European [Schengen] area without borders. […] This watchword anticipates ‘no more borders’ as a civilisational progress”. In his March 2008 Boston lecture, Cohn Bendit echoed the idea that this phrase held a progressive vision: “It was really the beginning of the feeling of today’s Europe, where in 27 countries you no longer have any borders […] That moment in the 1960s was the first articulation of what could be Europe without borders”. A study published in an Autumn 1968 issue of Sciences & Vie showed that 64% of the interviewed French public though that borders and passport controls would be abolished by 2000 and that 50% believed that “Europe will form a single country”. Cohn Bendit became fond of retelling a hypothetical story to illustrate Europe’s progress that was intricately tied to his biography and journey. In his March 2008 Boston lecture, he narrates: “I am the child of a military intervention, born in 45. Imagine if at my birth, I am able to speak and I tell my parents ‘in 50 years there won’t be any soldiers, policemen, controls or borders anymore between France and Germany.” When telling this parable in Strasbourg on November 18th 2013, he added: “I tell my parents ‘there will be no more soldiers on the the banks of the Rhine river, and besides, there will be free movement in a large part of Europe’”. In the version he tells at his last speech as a representative at the EU Parliament on April 16th 2014, he adds: “Imagine me telling my parents ‘the Rhine river will no longer be a border but a common river’”. Cohn Bendit follows this setup with his parents’ response, as he did in a December 2012 press conference in Brussels: “My parents would have said: ‘We have a problem. He speaks too early and he talks rubbish. […] If you asked the French people in 1952 [alluding to pacifist and statesman Robert Schumann’s proclaimed desire for Franco-German rapprochement] if they wanted to reconcile with the Germans, most of them would tell you they had no time for the dirty ‘boches’! […] History doesn’t advance by a spontaneous consensus of peoples. History advances by the work done by politicians, intellectuals, people who feel that something isn’t working. You have to be impatient, and to know that it can take some time”. In a March 2009 interview on France 5, the presenter Patrick Poivre d’Arvor introduces Cohn Bendit as “the living symbol of Franco-German reconciliation”. Cohn Bendit has always proclaimed himself as holding a proud European vision, and made it part of his identity when he told Gala in June 2009: “My natural territory is Europe”. Cohn Bendit linked this vision to his political ambition for Europe as early as April 1977 on his satellite interview on Antenne 2: “I don’t feel myself as either German or French, I think I would rather be European. [...] I’m more European than the politicians of today that are deciding what Europe must be”. Cohn Bendit laid out the premisses for his vision of ‘what Europe must be’, i.e. a federal union, in a tribune in Le Monde on November 26th 1998, during his first French campaign for European parliament: “Europe makes social progress possible in the context of a supranational area of integration. […] It progressively takes the place of traditional nation-states to provide social programs and substitutes their weaknesses with a new ability to act economically and financially”. On Antenne 2’s June 7th 1999 news broadcast, Cohn Bendit developed this idea of redistributive federalism: “Europe will formulate legislation of social harmonisation that will create an equalized playing field”. On the panel of “Everyone is talking about it” on France 2 in March 1999, Cohn Bendit described himself as one of the only ones willing to speak about a federal Europe, to which the presenter Thierry Ardisson responded: “we clearly see that we’re going towards that, but you’re the only one taking it on proudly!”. Dany linked this vision to his legacy in a 2008 interview with the website rue89: “I participated in 68 which transformed France and Europe […] I am contributing to building the European utopia. It may not be a lot, but I’m not ashamed to defend it”. In 2010, Cohn Bendit co-founded a transnational group in the EU Parliament called the Spinelli Group in support of European federal construction. He spoke alongside Guy Verhofstadt, who also co-founded the Spinelli group, at a public debate on December 4th 2012: “Europe will allow us to reconquer our sovereignty to become major actors in the globalisation we are currently subjected to”. Cohn bendit cements his vision for Europe in last speech as a representative at the EU Parliament on April 16th 2014 in which he sets his horizons on a larger timescale: “Why didn’t the European Union come to light 100 years ago, before the first World War? […] There were nation-states that wanted to unify Europe in a hegemonic manner. […] We needed the defeat of nazi Germany and the defeat of the great colonial states in order to finally allow the EU to be created to safeguard that there would be no hegemonic states over Europe. […] The European crisis stems from those who say that truth can be found in only one country, but there is no such unique truth or ideology. […] We need a vision for the future of Europe. […] I am in favour of the United European States, I think that federal Europe is the future of social good. […] The centralised model of the French Republic is incompatible with the modern world which is why federalism is the future. We will have the sense of the common European interest”. Cohn Bendit was an early backer of Macron after they met in a June 2016 debate at Sciences Po on Europe and Macron convinced Dany that he wanted to define a European sovereignty. At a campaign rally for Macron in April 2017, Cohn Bendit argues that his vision of more pan-European identity and syncretism is beginning to materialise by citing that 40% of marriages of young people in Europe are marrying across nations. Cohn Bendit credits this to academic exchange programs like Erasmus, and calls for more extensive ones to create a new reality of the European cultural mélange.
(8) Legacy, Divergent Commemorations and Generational arguments
a) Cohn Bendit’s self-critique
The successive anniversaries of May 1968 became opportunities for various actors of the time to present their historical narrative of events and choose which stories to retell. This selection of what to inscribe into the record belies which memories of the events became incorporated into a given narrator’s identity, and reflects how people defined themselves in reaction to them at a given moment. Because 68 lends itself to divergent narratives, it is a contested event and whenever it is invoked, someone is making an argument about its legacy. As an illustration, let’s go through occasions of Cohn Bendit distancing himself from some of his prior turns of phrase. In his April 1977 satellite interview on Antenne 2’s “Apostrophes”, Cohn Bendit said that “In May 68, I felt the obligation to say a whole lot of things at a moment where these things might not have been appropriate”. In this same April 1977 interview, when asked by Bernard Pivot whether the slogan equating riot police to nazis, “CRS = SS”, was an instance of pushing things too far, Cohn Bendit is still attached to it: “I don’t think that phrase is exaggerated. […] In 68, policemen were tired. […] I saw frustrated policemen take someone out of a car and beat him up”. In a France 3 retrospective from May 1983, Cohn Bendit shows more distance to his former self from 15 years prior: “When looking back at clips of what we were saying, our language is completely archaic, which is to say it is speaking about something else. We are talking about Revolution as though we were in the XIXth century. We didn’t know how to talk about what was happening, we were talking in the past. […] Our language is symptomatic. Hearing myself then, I feel like the me of today would be able to speak a lot better about May 68 during May 68 than I was able to then”. Cohn Bendit shows similar contrition in his 2008 book Forget 68: “Some of my speeches, my calls to the peasants, to the workers, were classic and outdated”. In his March 2008 Boston lecture, Cohn Bendit recognises the errors of his language which inadvertently was embracing authoritarians: “We won culturally and socially because society had changed, but we lost politically. We had demonstrated for ‘freedom in the name of the Chinese cultural revolution’ or ‘in the name of Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Mao’, which is a certain level of madness. […] We defined ourselves as in favour of Spain in 1936, for the workers’ council in 1917 against the bolsheviks, we were for council in the German revolution, we were for all the movements who have lost in History. We were the fanatics of the losers. In our political views, we were backwards”. Pierre Nora echoes this critique of 68’s emphasis on the past in Volume 3 of Sights of Memory (1992), in which he argues that the 68ers’ use of revolutionary language confined the movement to the past by forcing itself to replay out the French tradition. Nora feels that this language constrained their possibility of making their own claims about the present. Cohn Bendit spoke along similar lines on the set of Apostrophes on Antenne 2 in September 1986: “I still think that we need a very profound social change. It’s very on that we discovered that the great mistake in 68 was that we felt a drive for democracy, but we were using a vocabulary that was marxist, Leninist or anarchist of the XIXth century that prevented us from moving further towards democracy. [...] Today, we are true democrats, we defend a certain idea of democracy that goes much further that what old democrats had defended here and there”. In an interview on France 2 on March 13th 1997 in which Cohn Bendit was teasing a run in the European elections two years later, which ended up being his first time appearing on a ballot in France, he was quick to reject a particular former slogan of 68: “When we were saying ‘elections are a trap for idiots’, we were shooting ourselves in the foot!”. In a TV debate as part of this campaign in 1999, Cohn Bendit finally disavowed another slogan: “There have been errors in the values of the movement in which I recognised myself. Writing and shouting ‘CRS = SS’ was one of the stupidest things we could have said”. Cohn Bendit was awarded an honourary doctorate from his former alma matter of Nanterre in December 2014. He seized upon this occasion to pay a regretful homage to Pierre Grappin, who had been the school’s dean during the events of May 68 and tried to shut down the movement 46 years prior: “In the heat of action, Pierre Grappin, a hero of the Resistance, was called a nazi. Calling him a nazi showed that these people didn’t know what the nazis were”. In an interview with Libération on March 8th 2001, Cohn Bendit is self aware about how the evolution of his politics has constantly been put under a microscope – which permits this very documentation – because of the symbol he embodies, forcing him to be publicly introspective about his trajectory: “Ever since 1968, my political thinking and practice are in permanent inventory. […] Joining the Green party is passing from a theoretical revolt to thinking about institutions. This evolution no longer says ‘down with authority!’, but ‘what authority?’. We’ve grown out of the ‘it’s forbidden to forbid’. It’s really grotesque. It was a poetic challenge from the situationists in 1968”. Here, Cohn Bendit reframes the former slogan as lyrical but immature and incompatible with his current positioning. In his March 2008 Boston University lecture, Conn Bendit also expresses regret with regard to the movement’s legacy in terms of violent offshoots: “This was a moment in our lives. But then life, the world and society continued. But we have to account for the responsibilities of our generation. […] There were terrorist groups that came out of our movement. We can’t say ‘we are the good guys’ and the bad guys have nothing to do with us. This is not true. If we were to say this, we would behave like our parents, not taking responsibility for history. [Cohn Bendit is alluding to collaboration in France and nazism in Germany]. We have to take responsibility for our history. If you look at the worst ideas that emerged from 1968, you arrive at the red army fraction in Germany, the red brigades in Italy, and the red army in Japan. It’s very interesting that the strongest leftist terrorist groups were in these countries [because they were all fascist under the Second World War]. In these societies, the problem was to fight the fight that the parents hadn’t fought. The French didn’t have this problem because the leftists later reclaimed themselves in the tradition of the resistance. So if they tell themselves every French was in the resistance, it makes a debate about collaboration very difficult”. In this same Boston lecture, Cohn Bendit argued against the notion that the ends can justify the means: “You can’t do politics only with a moral impetus of ‘we are fighting for a better world, and to fight for this world, we can do what we judge is necessary’. We have also criteria of how and what you do, even if you think you are a freedom fighter. That this could happen from our movement demonstrates that in our movement you had an incredible impulse for freedom and democracy, but you also had an impulse of a totalitarian view of society and action. This is also a responsibility that we take”. In an interview on France 3’s “Côté docs” on April 26th 2008, Cohn Bendit gets asked whether he has any regrets and answers by singing the Edith Piath song “I regret nothing” then saying: “I don’t see why I would regret anything. It was an extraordinary moment in my life. The only thing that I have been trying to demonstrate over the last 40 years is that it wasn’t the only one”. On TV5 Monde on June 19th 2016, Cohn Bendit answered this same question with content assurance: “I made lots of mistakes, but I still foresaw some things correctly”.
b) Early historical commemorations repressed by power
The same event can be viewed and reinterpreted from many prisms, which becomes apparent when divergent commemorations are put into conversation. When narrating history, the person retelling an event is usually reframing it as the first part of a narrative that they cast themselves at the end point of. We look to framing the past to use it in the present. Conservative commentators were profoundly shocked by the assault on tradition and breaking symbolic taboos of the movement, and were quick to hysterically condemn it as a totem to excess and disorder. One such figure was Raymond Aron, a columnist for Le Figaro who witnesses the marches of 68 while looking down from the offices of the newspaper. In an interview on Swiss television on June 13th 1968, Aron declares himself as “not able to be an objective observer because I lived these past weeks in angry indignation which makes me incapable of lucidly seeing what happened. […] We have just lived 4 weeks that none of us will forget”. Aron summed up the events of the past month as a “psychodrama that could have turned into a drama”, which is a callous reduction of the events for something he described as a threat to moral order that needed to be dismissed because it was “all in people’s heads”. What Raymond Aron didn’t know is that ‘in people’s heads’ happens to be where most cultural change begins and collective memory forming happens. In this interview, Aron dismissed the movement as stuck trying to relive the French revolutionary past: “Everyone involved imitated their great ancestors and unearthed revolutionary models enshrined in the collective unconscious. Ever since 1789, the French people have always magnified their revolutions in retrospect into huge parties during which they live out everything they have been deprived of in normal times”. By pinning the movement to a desire for historical revolution, Aron is trying to recast the protests and their demands as a momentary outburst before a return to order, because it showed him a vision of a more open society which he dreaded: “This revolution was just replaying out the rites of those that preceded it, but it is anachronistic today. […] All social hierarchies were put into question. The base was discussing the summit. […] Society was being remade on every street corner, all of France spoke of what needed to be done while words of little significance were on everyone’s lips”. Some left wing intellectuals and artists such as the playwright Eugene Ionesco also criticised the movement for being too focused on shaping minds, but deplored its unwillingness to go for more radical means. Ionesco shared these thoughts in an interview on Antenne 2 on June 7th 1975: “These people didn’t even want power. [...] Imagine Lenin passing in front of the empty Douma and not setting foot inside. […] There were too many young rich people in this movement. […] The results have mostly been changes on people’s thinking, revolutions are mostly mental”. In July 1968, the British government commissioned a propaganda newsreel to enshrine the movement as dangerous and avoid any contagion by showing the most violent images of altercations in Paris in an effort to present the protest as barbaric. Pathé’s newsreel describes the movement thusly: “These May events […] shock the world […] by the fact took place in one of the most civilised capitals. Not since liberation in 1944 have the streets seen such a battle”. The newsreel focuses on sensationalistic war imagery and implies that the protestors are uncivilised. It accuses the marchers of “justifying chaos with esoteric theories about the consumerist capitalist society and anti-americanism” and presents Cohn Bendit as “the German student leader who was arrested and sent back to Germany”, at which point de Gaulle held an election and order returned, according to this piece of British propaganda. The French government commissioned their own propaganda film about May 68 which was released on May 24th 1971, in which Christian Fouchet, who was Interior Ministry during 1968 appears in an attempt to cement the movement as a failure. Fouchet’s voice can be heard narrating commentary over images of riots in an exasperated tone: “Why all these excesses, these cobblestones, these barricades? Facing our services that maintained order in as restrained a fashion as possible. […] Could the students who spent their days protesting imagine that the result would be […] a formal rejection of their disorder?” Fouchet presents a very hagiographic portrayal of de Gaulle in this film, in which he goes so far as to call his former boss a genius. The American documentary film Confrontation (1970) by Drescher & McCreary paints a much more laudatory portrait of the movement, even in its backwards-facing aspects: “The ritual of revolution was played with gusto [...] by new actors holding old symbols in new contexts that subtly alter their meaning. The old disinherited join the new, and for a brief moment, the XIXth and XXth centuries seem to overlap. [...] The incipient revolution collapsed, or was it an exercise in political education? […] The explosions were of words and symbols, not dynamite and gunshots. What destruction occurred was of property, not life. The original aim was to transform social relations, not replace the government elite”. Drescher & McCreary’s documentary colours the movement’s end and legacy in a half-tint: “Another cycle of confrontation ended by strengthening the conservative reflex, while it subtly changed some patterns, attitudes and institutions. The confrontation of May 1968 has become a living part of French social memory, it has revealed new areas of fragility in modern industrial society but at the same time it has made evident the difficulty of rapidly transforming social values”. The writer and critic Philippe Sollers describes a dynamic where the memorialisation of 68 itself is being put into question, 8 years after the events in an interview on Antenne 2 on May 14th 1976: “All social and political forces will obstinately try to erase away as much of the memory of 68 to establish the horizon for the 1978 elections. In fact, everything so far is happening as though over the next 2 years, the memory of 68 will be like a spectre that everyone will try to conjure”. In this 1976 interview, Sollers is playing into the narrative that this movement was definitional for many but had to be kept subterranean because of governments’ desire for it to be confined to the past.
c) Cohn Bendit’s comeback commemorations and relationship to media
In an April 1977 interview on Antenne 2, Cohn Bendit was still in exile and shared how being forcibly disconnected from France after spending a moment in its spotlight made him lose his references: “Being on worldwide news for three weeks, with all that goes along with it, gave me enormous problems. I was disoriented and it took me a long time to get over it and find some new roots, connections with people, to once again find dimensions in which I may express myself. […] I acted as a loudspeaker because it was essential for us to spread our message via the media, and we couldn’t appear on it as a group. This role, thankfully or unfortunately, I still have it today, since I am the one talking to you this evening even though I wasn’t allowed to attend in person”. Cohn Bendit also uses the opportunity of this 1977 satellite interview to criticise the nefarious impact of the dominant frame of coverage of the events of 1968 which report on it as an urban civil war: “What irritates me when we talk about May 68, is that within 5 minutes we’re talking about the battles with law enforcement. [...] The coverage always shows a clip of ‘Cohn Bendit’ speaking a sentence, and then 3 minutes of spectacular fights. Many young people who didn’t live through it or who don’t know, and many people got scared during May 68 because they didn’t understand, because we hadn’t been able to explain it, think that May 68 was just about a giant brawl. […] The fights came about because power was defending itself against people who were calling it into question. [...] Politicians were afraid […] of the strength of the idea that people wanted to live in a society that was entirely different and didn’t resemble the society in which we were obligated to live”. The magasine L’Express in 1993 also complained about how the sensationalised memorialisation of 68 via violent scenes doesn’t corroborate with the collective memory its descendants: “the imagery of 68 that has remained are shocking photos. Policemen hitting. Torn up cobblestones. However, in the memory of those who were present at the time, May was first and foremost a party, an intense moment of love and dialog. Scuffles but not violence. And jubilation. Nevertheless, the kids of May are facing tragedy. There is in these days a possible rapport with death. A desire for the epic”. In an interview on France 3’s Côté docs on April 26th 2008, Cohn Bendit echoes this same lament: “We are trapped by the images. There are hundreds of thousands of images of crucial moments in the streets, but there aren’t all these images of moments where people are just talking to each other. Entire amphitheatres filled with people, workers and young people endlessly discussing together. […] There are images of an incredible beauty. So we show the violence and 40 years later, 68 is only this irruption in the street of violence”. Dany is lamenting that the selection of what gets fixed into memory influences how the movement gets remembered, and wants to include the public discussions as part of the memorialisation. On a panel on Antenne 2 on May 2nd 1978 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the events during which Cohn Bendit was still banned from France, his fellow participant in 68 André Glucksman describes him by underlining this diplomatic aspect of his character: “Cohn Bendit doesn’t have a violent bone in his body. He is a man of discussion, there is not one single photo where you will find him brandishing a baton or wearing a helmet. He is a man of dialog”. Glucksman also takes this broadcast to underline that it is exceptional, and expresses concern that the memory of 68 will become lost if it isn’t fixed: “the only debate on May 68 on French television is this one. […] Such are the effects of a discrete governmental censorship exerted over the events”. Once Cohn Bendit was allowed back onto French territory in December 1978, he frequently crossed the Franco-German border to visit his friends and stop by a television panel or two, such that he became criticised for taking a prominent place. On April 23rd 1982, on the panel of Apostrophes on Antenne 2, the author Jean-Edern Hallier criticises the fact that “Cohn Bendit has become a product” and argues that “we must get rid of the conformity he pushed”. Dany responds by calling this ridiculous and jokes that he “has tremendous market value” as a provocative figurehead, since they keep inviting him on TV. In a France 3 retrospective that aired in May 1983, the presenter André Campana introduces Cohn Bendit as “a symbol of 68”, which he deflects by responding “In any case, I am the media’s darling”. In a December 2008 interview with the magazine Medias run by the humanitarian turned fascist Robert Menard, Cohn Bendit responds to the accusation that he is “the press’ favourite child”, which is to say too close to those covering him: “I have a natural relationship with journalists that leads to an objective complicity with them. They like that I can’t shut up and I say everything, it’s as simple as that”. In his 2008 book Forget 68, Cohn Bendit credits the media with building up his image: “I was made by the media […] which played a constructive role”. He recalls enjoying being able to make journalists laugh, and that they appreciated that he wasn’t just reciting the usual leftist dogma. This attraction granted Cohn Bendit exposure which helped make his idiosyncratic irreverence iconic: “All of a sudden, they saw a guy who was talking, who surprises them, a guy who says things differently and makes references to the United States”. On France Inter on March 23rd 2008, the historian Philippe Artières argues that “the radios [during 1968] were looking to construct a figure of a double to put in contrast with the stern society that the Général de Gaulle presided over, and found Cohn Bendit’s laughter”.
d) Memory of 68 as omnipotent and impotent
In the retrospective that aired in May 1983 on France 3, Cohn Bendit lays out his movement’s legacy as he sees it 15 years later: “May 68 was a first attempt, not only in France but around the world, from a part of the youth to talk about its needs for another way of life. What came afterwards was sexual liberation and the evolution of [hierarchical] relations between teachers and students, and bosses and workers”. The philosophy professors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari began collaborating after meeting in the aftermath of May 68. Deleuze and Guattari see May 68 as foundational but unprocessed, as they write in May 68 Never Occurred in 1984: “It was a clairvoyant phenomenon, as though the whole society bore witness to everything intolerable within it and envisioned the possibility of something else. […] The deadlock of our current crisis directly flows from French society’s incapacity to assimilate May 68”. While Deleuze and Guattari felt frustrated with the legacy of 68 for being unresolved, two authors from the reactionary right publish an antithetical book the following year that argues 68 was not weak but rather too influential and sets up the movement as a straw-man responsible for all moral ills. These Gaullist conservative writers, Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry, publish The Thought of 68, essay on contemporary anti-humanism in 1985 in which they refer to the inheritance of the movement as “intellectual terrorism” for “presenting all human beings as traversed by forces exterior to them” and “liquidating the idea of a subject who is responsible for who they are”. Renaut and Ferry are trying to discredit the movement’s dissemination of sociological theories that argue for palliating structural inequities to create a fairer society. Renaut and Ferry object to the notion of taking context into account because they argue that doing so removes people’s agency by putting into question those who benefit from the status quo, like themselves. The political science professor Alain Garrigou, who teaches at Nanterre today, analysed the evolution of interpretations of May 68 on France Culture in January 2018: “In the 1980s, the press begins to talk about 68 as a real unified event. Two authors made a lot of money by publishing The Thought of 68 in 1984, which was a hilarious notion to those of us who had thought the event was a mere fantasy that didn’t exist. Through these repeated invocations, 68 ended up existing”. In September 1986 on Antenne 2, Cohn Bendit laments that the most prominent memorialisations of the movement are made by people trying to tarnish its memory as extreme of ineffective: “We are only able to speak about 68 in a negative manner in France”. On Antenne 2 on March 22nd 1988, 20 years after helping to incite a revolt, Cohn Bendit reflects on the demographic dynamics that brought the anniversary to prominence: “I want to avoid the risk of appearing like a combat veteran trying to relive our good old days. I think that among a lot of journalists active today, 68 was a great moment in their life. That’s why the media are talking a lot about 68, because of the youth of the journalists that are now in power in the media”. In this same interview, Cohn Bendit talks about how 68 invoked the past and ultimately bound it off: “May 68 transmitted a whole revolutionary mythology that endured until the 1970s and also marks the end of this mythology. It initiated the end of communism and leftism, but all this had to be rekindled before completely collapsing”. The historian Patrick Rotman gave his read on the movement’s outcomes in an interview on France 3 in May 1993: “The students projected marxist speeches onto their aspirations, but spontaneously, they were seeking better relations with teachers and parents, and looking to live in a society that was a bit less stuck up. [...] From a political standpoint, 68 is an absolute failure. From the cultural point of view, it’s an absolute victory”. L’Express in March 1993 salutes the movement’s broad aims: “The movement of March 22nd was able to mix genres, from cultural to political”. This same article in L’Express makes a compelling inventory of the social progress that it attributes to the movement 25 years after the fact: “May 68 was a premonition that anticipated the profound changes happening today. […] Out of 15 little days of folly emerged values that are at the heart of contemporary debate, namely: generosity, humanitarianism, women’s liberation, relations between parents and children, ecology, regionalism”. In this same magasine, the sociologist Alain Touraine, who had participated in the movement as a teacher, describes the students’ thirst for immediacy as creating “a historical separation”: “from this date onwards, France hesitates, cracks, skids. It hasn’t regained its spirits since”. Cohn Bendit also appears in L’Express of March 1993 in which he epigrammatically sums up why his attitude was successful: “Irony disarms hatred”. In this interview, Cohn Bendit describes the movement as antiauthoritarian more so than revolutionary, and concludes by criticising the media’s attempts to retell and describe the events of 68: “Everything that has been said does not begin to resemble what was felt”.
e) “68 = Cohn Bendit?”, constrained within and expanding out of the movement
In 1995, the historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel wrote the article “1968: History, Memory and Commemoration” in the academic review Espaces Temps. Zancarini-Fournel argues that “Decennial commemorations have been the pretext for some actors-stars to spread their ego, practically the same ones since twenty years. […] Magazines periodically return to the question of ‘Where are they [the 68ers] now?’, thus establishing the generational ‘Who’s Who’, where a small number of economic and media success stories are emphasized”. Zancarini-Fournel resents the way in which individual narratives were collapsed under the media’s affection with figures like Cohn Bendit: “These common sites forge a generational memory. […] This global memory is opposed to individual memories. It erases subjectivity under a supposedly shared experience and occults paths deemed atypical, deviant, failures, suicides. […] This process is akin to laundering memory. Generational memory becomes moulded and sustained by commemorations”. While Zancarini-Fournel is frustrated that 68 gets reduced to Cohn Bendit, Cohn Bendit himself expresses frustration with being boxed in to his 23 year old self. On the panel of “Everyone is talking about it” on France 2 in March 1999, he laments “being confined in the cage of 68” and wants to talk about another subject: “Please, I beg of you, it’s been 30 years now! Life has continued to be fun. I get the impression that you want to put me in a cage where, no matter what I do or where I am, genetically, I am being provocative”. Cohn Bendit also expresses exasperation with being pigeonholed on May 17th 2008 on LaTéléLibre when the presenter John Paul Lepers asks him whether the spirit of 68 is over: “I am the spirit of 68. Because everyone tells me all the time, Cohn Bendit is 68”. In an interview on April 12th 2014 with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, Cohn Bendit reframed his expulsion as part of what connected to the mythical unfinished aspect of 68: “I had an incredible chance: because I had been expelled from the country, I was the sun of 68. Everything that didn’t work afterwards didn’t concern me, I wasn’t there. […] Every time I built a story, I had another attention on me because this history of 68 was always in the background”. Cohn Bendit exposes the perils of being stuck in the past by analogy on “Internationals” on TV5 on June 19th 2016: “nostalgia is like sex, if it’s only good the first time, it’s not worth it!”. He made a similar crack at his March 2008 Boston lecture: “when you’re 23 years old, the first time you make love is wonderful, but if it’s the only one time in your life, it’s terrible!” The conservative columnist François Bousquet appeared on CNews on October 23rd 2017 to make the inverse complaint in an effort to cast the movement as obsolete: “We always drag out the same people […] we never make it out of it. Cohn Bendit had a formidable Wahrolian 15 minutes in 68 that has turned into a lifelong annuity. […] I want to renew the cast”. The journalist Nathan Sperber wrote an article titled “No, Cohn Bendit, 68 did not revolutionise society” in Le Nouvel Obs on May 14th 2008. Sperber’s article shares Zancarini-Fournel’s desire to undo hagiographic memorialisation of the events of May by depersonalising them and replacing them in a larger context: “these cultural transformations […] are the product of a long process of social change within western societies. […] May 68 was the symptom, more than the cause, of the cultural liberalisation of western societies. […] These transformations are the product of dynamics of cultural diffusion that were set into motion […] before 1968 and […] outside of France. In its cultural dimension, May 68 was at best a catalyser, at worst an epiphenomenon”. Sperber wants to refute the causal link between 1968 and the change that followed it, but one could also consider the events of May 68 to be a link on the chain of progress, dependent on the circumstances that preceded it and upon which more change can be built. Sperber instead chooses to accuse Cohn Bendit of taking credit: “today [in 2008], the movement’s veterans wrongly pretend to be the authors of social and cultural transformations that have nothing to do with them. […] They make bragging declarations to maintain the illusion of a cultural impact that never existed”. At the bottom of Sperber’s article on Le Nouvel Obs’ website, a commenter by the name of Joseph Lescu eloquently rebuts the author’s premise: “You could sequentially take each element of French history to empty it of its content. […] If 68 was unimportant, why does our president make the tarnishing of its legacy a preliminary condition to his autocratic administration 40 years after? Why all this press coverage? Why did you write this article?”. The radio presenter Patrice Gélinet appeared on France Inter on May 28th 2008 to bemoan the fact that only part of the story of 68 gets retold: “We always talk about the ascending phase, the student phase, the enthusiasm, the utopias of May 68… People never talk about the way in which it ended, of the deception of those who lost. This deception turned into nostalgia, which is why 68 gets talked about in this tone nowadays”. His guest, the historian Jean-François Sirinelli responds by arguing that the end of the movement is why it’s remembered fondly: “I was stunned as a historian by this wave [of commemorations] for a 40th anniversary, whereas no one talked about the 50th anniversary of de Gaulle’s return. […] I’d go even further than nostalgia and call it melancholia on behalf of 68ers approaching their 60s or older, who have the lived memory of an odd and bitter month of June, which explains all these rekindlings and these resurgences of nostalgic melancholia over the decades”. In spite of this skepticism, Sirinelli praises the movement’s cultural impact. He argues that by being a stress test on institutions, “May 68 was a formidable historical particle accelerator. It hastened the mutation of French society, which ultimately accelerated the rhythm of our national history”. Alain Touraine, the sociology professor at Nanterre who supported the movement, appeared on March 20th 2008 at the National Audiovisual Institute’s (INA) headquarters to argue that contemporary progress depends on the bases left by 68’s participants. Touraine analogises that the comfortable French people are standing on the shoulders of giants: “The seed that the people of 68 planted in the earth became a tree, and we get to have a picnic under it”. Joshchka Fisher was the German minister of foreign affairs under Schröder, and has been a close friend of Cohn Bendit’s since they met in 1968. Fisher gives an interview to Le Monde 2 of May 10th 2008 in which he talks about what 68 represents to him: “68 was more of a symbolic date, a focal point on which social changes that had nothing to do with May 68 were crystallised, the arrival into adulthood of a new generation after the catastrophe of the second world war. A large political event such as the Vietnam war and the Prague Spring work more profoundly on history than what we associate with May 68. It remained as a set of symbols, a cultural disruption out of which emerged a freer and more egalitarian society”. Cohn Bendit tempered the laudatory portrait that some leftists reconstituted of May 68 by arguing that it was a moment fixed within its context, and contrasting it to the situation in which he is speaking. On “Internationals” on TV5 Monde on June 19th 2016, Cohn Bendit says: “68 wasn’t a revolutionary period, but rather a period of promethean revolts for freedom and autonomy because we weren’t scared of anything. We knew nothing of unemployment, AIDS ands climate change. We wanted to own our future, and modern protest can’t afford to be as ambitious”. Cohn Bendit had made a similar argument on Europe 1 on March 9th 2016: “In 68, we were promethean, we could dream of socialism, but all that is over now. Compared to the youth of today, unemployment was negligible in 68, the contraceptive pill was nice, but we knew nothing of AIDS and environmental destruction”. In his March 2008 Boston lecture, Cohn Bendit ran through a similar list: “In our time, we could say ‘we’ll take the world’, we could say ‘the future is ours’, and ‘we want to have power over our future’. Our generation today says ‘we have no future’. But we didn’t know about unemployment, AIDS, global warming, or globalisation”. Cohn Bendit’s 2008 book Forget 68 gets its namesake from the eponymous passage in which he writes that: 68 was an accelerator of history, it changed a lot of things, but today we live in another world. Always running back to 1968 as though we could redo it… no, forget it! […] The dream of leftists is still to replay the same musical partition. […] Their historical marxism reduces itself to a conservative ideological determinism. This is how they forget that, in the horizon of the past, communism is not a mirage but a devastating madness”. Cohn Bendit was admonished by the far left for this posture. He reflected upon how they felt about him when being awarded his honorary doctorate from Nanterre in December 2014: “I am considered by many to be a traitor, my thought of today is no longer that of 68, my social situation is no longer what it was in 68”.
f) The right invokes the spectre of 68
Nicolas Sarkozy made the decision to revive the debate over 1968 as a campaign issue for his first presidential run of 2007, which kept it on people’s minds for commemorations and spurred Cohn Bendit to defend its legacy. In a disingenuous demagogical campaign speech at the Bercy Arena on April 29th 2007, Sarkozy embarked on a 20 minute screed against the legacy of May 68: “See how the cult of money as king, of short term profits, of speculation, how the excesses of financial capitalism were carried by the values of May 68. since there are no more rules, no norms, no morals, no respect, no authority, since everything is equivalent, then everything is permitted. See how the contestation of all ethical reference points, of all moral values, contributed to weaken the morals of capitalism, how it prepared the terrain for the capitalism with no scruples and no ethics of golden parachutes and hooligan bosses!”. This piece of pandering is particularly dishonest, given it gets clapped in the arena by the heads of giant corporate entities in attendance, who correctly appreciate that it lets them off the hook while twisting 68’s demands for liberty into individualistic accumulation. Sarkozy is using the appeal to morals as a dog whistle to christian dogma, in a nakedly populist effort to rally workers behind cultural values after his party has failed them economically. Sarkozy continued: “The heirs of May 68 had imposed the idea that everything was relative and of equivalent value, and that there was therefore no longer any difference between good and evil. […] That the students were worth their master. […] Besides, there more no more values, no more hierarchy, they had succeeded, there was nothing left, and they weren’t worth much themselves. […] The heritage of May 68 must be liquidated once and for all!”. Sarkozy’s revisionism and antagonism towards 68 became a fixture of his campaign rallies and talking points. Cohn Bendit came back onto the French media scene in response, as though he had been called away from Strasbourg and Brussels by his own ‘bat signal’: the tarnishing of 68’s legacy. On France 2’s 8pm broadcast on April 30th 2007, the day following Sarkozy’s speech, Cohn Bendit was interviewed and appeared hurt: “Telling all these people ‘you have no values and morals’ isn’t true, it’s insulting”. In an interview with Richard Werly in Le Monde on May 1st 2007, Cohn Bendit described himself as very sad, stupefied, and angry: “who was in the streets in May 1968? Not just us, the contesting students. More than half of France entered into strike at one point!” He accused Sarkozy of trying to wash them out of history with his emphasis on the terms ‘liquidate the heritage’: “He is behaving as a pure Stalinist. […] It’s a bit as though he were to say he wants to liquidate surrealism!”. Cohn Bendit uses this interview to reframe the motivations behind Sarkozy’s choice to link his election to a rejection of 68’s heritage rather than campaign as an incumbent since his party was in power: “Sarkozy’s strategy is to cement as much as possible the right and the far-right, united by this common hatred of 68”. In his 2008 book Forget 68, Cohn Bendit looks back on Sarkozy’s successful electoral manoeuvre from the past year: “In 2007, Sarkozy understands that in order to win the elections, he must target those who are over sixty, among whom he reassembles all those who formed the blue wave of June 1968”. Le Nouvel Obs corroborated this analysis of the right’s instrumentalisation of the memory of 68 in an article published on May 14th 2008: “Ever since Sarkozy’s Bercy speech, the right has been using May 68 as a scarecrow to rally the most conservative sections of its electorate”. Cohn Bendit says that he came back for commemorations of May 68 in 2008 because he didn’t want to stand idly by while the movement was deformed into a negative caricature, as he told the AFP on April 23rd 2008: “I had decided not to do anything to commemorate 68. All that is Sarkozy’s fault. If he hadn’t made that moronic speech in Bercy, I wouldn’t have been obligated to speak. From the moment he talked rubbish, we couldn’t take off and let him hold the field”. In his March 2008 Boston lecture, Cohn Bendit expounds on the contingency that brought him back: “I had decided last year not to follow any invitations for the 40th anniversary, my son told me ‘you can’t go every time, everybody knows what you say, don’t spend your time on something that you don’t need to talk about anymore’. And then, Sarkozy […] loudly spoke out that he wanted to finish with the heritage of 68. It’s very difficult for me to accept to disappear, so I was challenged, not only personally, we were challenged. The interesting thing of Sarkozy’s speech was ‘think about something bad that’s happening in society today and if you want to know who is responsible for it, go to 68’. […] I decided to respond by avoiding the trap of nostalgia and the trap of saying everything was terrible”. The French sociologist Jean Viard writes in 2008’s Forget 68 to credit Sarkozy for unwittingly revitalising the left’s support for 68 as it forced them to claim it: “I would say Sarkozy unified the memory of 68 and of the left. By defining himself as ‘against 68’, it became the first time that someone like Ségolène Royal defines herself as ‘in favour of 68’. The socialists would never speak of 68 until then”. Conservatives flirting with the far right made 68-bashing into a familiar refrain that has become red meat for a France that defines its bigotry as traditionalism, such as Eric Zemmour and Laurent Vauquiez, both of whom routinely use their time in the media’s spotlight to accuse “elites” of “deconstructing France since 1968”. Vauquiez, now the president of the traditionalist conservative group called “The Republicans”, took to the pages of Valeurs Actuelles in October 2017 to decry the intellectual heritage of 68: “It is Michel Foucault who started to dissect disciplinary institutions, it is pierre Bourdieu who sees all societal organisations as symbolically violent, and finally it is Jacques Derrida who theorised this deconstruction so dear to the French elite according to whom, in order to succeed in globalisation, we should renounce what forms the DNA of our country”.
Conclusion:
Because May 68 lends itself to a multitude of retrospective interpretations, the analysis that is given of the events tends to be speak volumes about the identity of the person proffering it. I have a strong memory of hearing my economics and social sciences professor Frédéric Dorothé joking with our classroom in 2008 that the concrete visible changes made by May 68 could be summed up to “tarmac”, in reference to the urban planning response to torn up cobblestones, which was to unpave streets in a more orderly and systematic manner than the students that preceded them, then lathering them with hot tar. Dorothé meant his comment to criticise the movement for merely leading to superficial adaptations such as this one meant to curb this specific means of protest. Hearing this had a strong impact on my conception of this event, because it built upon my vague notion that May 68 was positive but somehow unresolved. Jan Assman argues that people remember what is linked to their identity, and May 68 is a strong delineation point in terms of political positioning, which is why politicians on the far left and right keep rekindling it to their own ends. Subsequent protests that follow May 68 are impregnated with its memory, trying to conjure up what the protestors projected onto the moment. This process was apparent in the commemorative aspects of the language and actions of the 68ers. Both the cases of the protests during and after May 1968 would therefore qualify as what Connerton refers to as “commemorative ceremonies”. The screenwriter Dan Frank retells his memory of witnessing 68 as a young teenager in a video for “Toute L’Histoire” in May 2017: “May 68 is a wave that propagates itself over a very long time”. France lives with the fruits of May 68, its utopian moral contestation challenged the dominant hierarchies and accelerated the demands for self determination and progress. On France 2’s “We haven’t gone to bed yet” on October 4th 2014, Cohn Bendit retold an anecdote that encapsulates one such ripple: “In Hong Kong, the day before yesterday, as part of the umbrella revolution, I found the slogan, written in French ‘Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible’ [be realistic, demand the impossible]. It made me tear up. It was 3 students from Hong Kong who had spend 10 years in France. They brought it back to Hong Kong”.
