Pierre Alechinsky Portrait Prints

Pierre Alechinsky - Mai 68 Original French Poster - Mai 68 Tchou Editions, Paris, printed in 1968. Dimensions: 48 x 32.5 cm Paris, May 1968: The revolution that never was Even without retrieving that bundle of yellowing French newspapers from the top shelf in a closet, it is easy to remember the night of May 10, 1968, in Paris. It is far less easy, 40 years later, to discern what it was all about. Adolescent hormones, the death of communism, the death of capitalism or, as André Malraux suggested at the time, the death of God? Malraux, the writer and politician and the French culture minister at the time, may have been alone in invoking God's death as an explanation, but no one doubted that May 10 provoked an entire society to a rare assessment - call it an examination of conscience, if you will - of its fundamental values. A week earlier, the police had been called in to occupy the Sorbonne, and Paris began to witness daily student marches, usually culminating in skirmishes between students throwing stones and the police firing tear gas. By May 10, the number of student demonstrators was estimated at 20,000. At every street leading to the Sorbonne, they found their way blocked by vans and ranks of riot police. This time, the students did not disperse. As darkness fell, they began prying up cobblestones, ransacking building sites and turning over parked cars to construct their own barricades facing the police ones. For hours, the silent inner ring of police barricades stretching around much of the Latin Quarter stood surrounded by a noisy outer ring of student barricades. At 2:15 a.m., the police got the order to assault the student barricades. As the interior minister said, "The streets have to be clear for traffic." Continue reading the main story It took three hours of brutal fighting to do that: clouds of tear gas, Molotov cocktails, exploding automobile gas tanks, cobblestones hurled at the police, students chased down and beaten, more than 300 people injured but fortunately no gunfire - and no deaths. When the radio reported a fire on Rue Gay-Lussac that fire trucks could not reach because of the street fighting and barricades, two young Americans living nearby began deciding what to take with them in case of urban conflagration: 1) the 2-year-old daughter; 2) passports and money; 3) the notes for the dissertation. After that, it didn't matter. France woke up shocked. So, presumably, did President Charles de Gaulle, who had gone to bed early. Events accelerated. The left mounted a huge march of solidarity with the students, who reoccupied the Sorbonne. Workers began occupying their factories. Within another week, France was closed down by the general strike that revolutionaries had always dreamed of. The story, of course, did not end in revolution, for which few people over 30 really had any stomach anyway. On May 30, de Gaulle put his foot down. He addressed the nation briefly on the radio. He announced new elections and hinted at using military means to restore order. A deftly prepared demonstration immediately flooded the Champs-Élysées with hundreds of thousands of citizens previously maintaining a low profile. Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main story The Interpreter Newsletter Understand the world with sharp insight and commentary on the major news stories of the week. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. May passed into June. Workers and students won some changes. The elections swept de Gaulle and his supporters back into power. Was it all merely a spring rainstorm? Hardly. For two astonishing weeks in May, an entire nation had been caught up in a frenzy of self-examination. Committees were formed to restructure secondary schooling, the university, the film industry, the theater, the news media. Everyone was a talking head. What the talking heads were talking about were ideas spawned by a crazy array of leftist groups: revisionist socialists, Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists, surrealists and Marxists. They were anticommunist as much as anticapitalist. Some appeared anti-industrial, anti-institutional, even anti-rational. Three positive objectives and one great fear dominated their views. The objectives were self-management by workers, a decentralization of economic and political power and participatory democracy at the grass roots. The great fear was that contemporary capitalism was capable of absorbing any and all critical ideas or movements and bending them to its own advantage. Hence, the need for provocative shock tactics. "Be realistic: Demand the impossible!" was one of the May movement's slogans. To many critics, all this was only the final twitch of a quasi-religious socialist utopianism that had long inspired workers and intellectuals rebelling against the pains of industrialization. Other critics preferred psychological explanations: May 1968 was a Freudian fling of adolescent revolt against Mom and Dad. Or it was a nostalgic bout of playacting, a childish re-enactment of the storming of the Bastille and other Greatest Hits of France's Revolutions. Or it was, paradoxically, an unwitting reinforcement of the individualist consumer capitalism that it claimed to oppose. On the other side, the anti-authoritarian spirit of 1968 was eventually seen as a wellspring of the successful rebellion against Soviet-bloc communism in 1989. The link was made graphically by book jackets rotating 68 to read 89. After all, Prague Spring...