Already in 1978 Régis Debray argued that the revolutionaries of ’68 were as deluded and disoriented as Columbus arriving in the New World. They thought they were headed for the China of the “cultural revolution” when really they had landed on the beaches of “New Age” California. In the 1990s Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello put a different twist on this idea. The former soixante huitards, they argue in The New Culture of Capitalism, helped to break the dead hand of corporate bureaucracy and unleash a more entrepreneurial capitalism.
Madison Avenue has long heralded improbable “revolutions” in car design, clothing, and cuisine. Today it celebrates sixties counterculture. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher turned the tables on the New Left with a market revolution that took “power to the people.” David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, was, like José Manuel Barroso, the market-friendly European Commission president, a former leftist. A center-right or center-left cabinet today is not complete without a Joschka Fischer or Bernard Kouchner. Scratch a neo-con and he turns out to be an ex-Trotskyist or an ex-something else. Bernard-Henri Levy was student gauchiste in 1968.
Although these reversals have a sting, they don’t bury 1968. In the twenty-first century the actuality of ’68 is more palpable than ever. Indeed the Elysées Palace is now occupied by a man who launched his campaign for the presidency promising to exorcise the specter of 1968. There could have been no more telling admission, the more so since accompanied by a warning that this was a question of “hegemony.” Would France still be haunted by revolution or would it at last settle down to a transatlantic entente cordiale and Anglo-Saxon “business as usual”?
Nicholas Sarkozy’s honeymoon with the French public has ended, leaving his counter-revolution stalled. His attempted bonfire of social entitlements was dampened by a succession of concessions to well-placed groups of workers. The overtures to a lame-duck president in Washington failed to anticipate the mysterious sea change under way in the United States, with its own echoes of the sixties. As for Anglo-Saxon economics, it is mortally wounded, with billions hemorrhaging from its banks and insurers every week. In 2008, as in 1968, the French at least bring some flair, so we have Jerome Kerviel—a thirty-one-year-old investment banker dubbed the “Che Guevara of finance”—delighting the French public by bamboozling his employers, the country’s second largest bank, to the tune of a cool seven billion U.S. dollars.
Of course, 1968 was the beginning of the end of the postwar boom, with its protected national economies. The Vietnam War was a powerful agent of economic as well as political destabilization. Today the European powers—who stayed well clear of Vietnam—have been sucked into a front-line role in Afghanistan just as their banks find themselves exposed to subprime defaults in California and Florida.
THE EVENTS of 1968 mark the birth of globalization. They were beamed around the globe by newly orbiting television satellites. At the Chicago convention the demonstrators chanted “The whole world is watching” as Mayor Richard Daley’s cops bludgeoned them. Charles de Gaulle’s reassertion of control, the Tet offensive in Saigon, and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia played out together, as we would say today, in “real time.” Each was a global event and each intermingled with the other to make something new.
For some, 1968 is barricades on the Left Bank and Situationist silk-screen prints. For others, marches against the Vietnam War. By chance I arrived in Prague from Vienna in the early hours of August 21, just as the invading forces were entering from the other border. It is not always realized that the Russian occupation was deprived of outright victory by a massive civic resistance. There was a general strike, the army made available mobile radio and television transmitters that pumped out news and advice from a government that had supposedly been overthrown. In order to regain control, the Russians had to bring back Alexander Dubcek, re-install him as prime minister, and demobilize the population.
In a celebrated passage, Immanuel Kant argued that the real importance of the French Revolution was not that it felled an ancient monarchy or conjured new authorities out of the ground but rather that its message of emancipation had such a general form that it awoke those in distant lands who could construe in it a message for themselves: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” the Marseillaise, the ending of slavery, democracy in arms, and the inclusive nation. These were to have a global resonance. Nineteen-sixty-eight was a renewal of that promise, lending a new twist to classic slogans. All the great upsurges of the year were driven back and contained, though each lived on to haunt the temporary victors—Western imperial militarism, Eastern Stalinism, and the heavy hand of paternalism. The apparent victors—De Gaulle, Nixon, Brezhnev—were dead men walking. They just didn’t know it. What remained alive was the awakened spirit of change.
The difference between now and then is that in 1968 they called for revolution and meant change, while in 2008 people cry out for change and want . . . the world turned upside down—or better, turned the right side up. In 1968, the party hacks beat down the insurgent youth. In 2008, perhaps the insurgent youth get their revenge.
Archaeologists now often date natural and human history with reference to “the Present,” roughly 1949, the year of the discovery of the carbon dating technique and of the adoption of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. There would be a good case for stretching this founding moment to include 1968. As Mark Kurlansky points out, that year, humanity first saw an image of its own frail and lovely planet swimming in the ether. Today we know the message that haunting picture was trying to convey.
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