Some Reflections on May 1968, Now Half a Century Ago

Like many of us of a certain age, Hitchens was once solidly on the left, but as he became older and wiser, moved to the right, and is now a mainstay of conservative journalism in the UK.

From the Daily Mail

By Peter Hitchens

The madness of 1968, even recalled at this distance, looks like a plague or a panic rather than a rational upheaval. The May events in Paris started with a row about male students having access to female dormitories at the University of Nanterre, which really doesn’t stand much comparison with the defence of the cannons of Montmartre during the Paris Commune of 1871, let alone the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the convulsion’s supposed forerunners. On the other hand, it is a sign of what this was all really about – the dawning of the Age of the Self. Only afterwards did anyone try to think up a political rationale for this curious spasm. Who (I speak for myself) hasn’t at some stage yearned to do battle with the forces of order, especially in the springtime on the picturesque boulevards of the Paris Latin Quarter, where the blue hour of evening brings a unique sense of longing? Well if you haven’t, you haven’t. But I will not pretend. As I watched the wavering images on the TV news, of a Paris I had by then visited once in my life (but by which I had been wholly captivated, immediately and for always), and heard the evocative sound of multitudes chanting slogans in French,  I wanted more than anything to be under the freshly green boughs of the trees on the Boulevard St Michel as dusk came, hurling a cobblestone at the CRS riot squad.

But if that wasn’t available, and for most of us it wasn’t, because travel was expensive and in those days we had enough but not too much money, there was always Grosvenor Square and its squatting concrete symbol, surmounted by a great bronze eagle, of all we affected to despise - the American Embassy. In fact the first big outbreak of trouble there predated the French May events by several weeks (though France's troubles were already gestating). And though it may really have been about sex, drugs and rock and roll, we, being British, pretended before, during and afterwards that it was about Vietnam, a subject on which we could all posture like anything.  A great cause gives dignity and purpose to pubescent ferment. Our petty squabbles with parents and teachers could be given grandeur and virtue, if we claimed it was all really about Vietnam.

Likewise the French student revolutionaries, who sought the mantle of 1789 and 1871, and several other revolts and risings too, I should think, first emerged in a rather comical incident at the Nanterre Campus of the University of Paris. As the historian Tony Judt recounted in his book  ‘Postwar’ (p.409) the grubby student dormitories there had become home to a ‘floating population’ of genuine students, transient radicals, and drug abusers and dealers.

‘Rent passed unpaid. There was also considerable nocturnal movement to and fro between the male and female dormitories, in spite of strict official prohibitions.’ There had also been an attempt to discipline the interesting future student hero (and even more future Euro MP) Daniel Cohn-Bendit, for heckling a Gaullist Minister for Youth, Francois Missoffe,  who had gone to Nanterre to open a new swimming pool. The clash was very funny, not least because the Minister gave as good as he got, and suggested mordantly that M. Cohn-Bendit (who complained about the sex segregation in the dormitories, referring to this issue as 'sexual problems’) would find a better outlet for his youthful urges by jumping into the nice new swimming pool which had been built for him.  ‘If you have sexual problems’, he said ‘I suggest you jump into the pool’. Cohn-Bendit, whose ancestry was German-Jewish, retorted that this was the sort of thing the Hitler Youth had said (or, in another account, the sort of thing a Nazi Minister for Youth would have said).  

In Sam Wilkin’s ‘History Repeating’, the exchange is recorded slightly differently from the account in Judt’s book. He says the Minister remarked ‘With a face like yours, no wonder you have these sexual problems. I suggest you jump into the pool’. Whichever account is accurate, rumours that Cohn-Bendit might be expelled, or even deported, as a result of his behaviour led first to a student sit-in and then to a violent confrontation with the police. We know the rest - at one stage most of France was on strike and it looked as though De Gaulle's Fifth Republic, only ten years old, would fall.

Though it is interesting to note that Francois Missoffe, a decent man who had been a prisoner of the Japanese throughout World War Two, later interceded personally to prevent the permanent deportation of Cohn-Bendit. As his obituary in the Guardian noted ‘Once the student revolt was underway, it seemed to French officials that they should send Cohn-Bendit back to his native Germany - which they did. But when he returned to France illegally, it was Missoffe who intervened on his behalf. There was to be no permanent expulsion of Cohn-Bendit.’

As Judt points out, though the seething of violence and window-smashing which began the May events was swiftly given a cloak of politics by organised Trotskyists, the thing was at bottom fired by ‘an essentially anarchist spirit whose immediate objective was the removal and humiliation of authority’.

But what authority was it that they so vaguely but fiercely wanted to overthrow and humiliate? Not all of it, to be sure. They needed some sort of generous state to look after them and carry on giving them other people's money. They didn’t want a world in which they would be sent home and made to do manual work on their parents’ peasant small-holdings, or trained to toil in car factories, pulling levers all day for a wage that would never buy them half of what they desired. They still very much wanted an advanced, rich urban civilisation that would pay them to be and do what they wanted, probably including fornication and drug abuse, in many cases.  

I think our goals at the time were completely unspecific, though vast,  and that was what made us, as a generation, so dangerous. It is the case that General de Gaulle actually fled the scene (I believe the latest scholarship is that this was a genuine panic on his part, not a tactical move to make the French people realise how much they would miss him). This is astonishing. De Gaulle’s personal and political courage had been demonstrated again and again, in the Great War and then when, wholly alone and without anything but force of personality, he managed to embody Free France and then overcome, at one time or another, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and the French Communist Party. On the day of Paris's liberation, he walked unmoved through the streets as snipers took aim at him.  Later he would return to power in what could only have been called a putsch, and remained untroubled by repeated and very violent attempts to murder him by former Army colleagues, at least one of which came within inches of success.

And yet this great man (who in my view had a Marxist-Leninist sense of history and politics without having the objectives of Marxism-Leninism) was scared by a few students chucking stones about on the streets of the Left Bank? He certainly wasn't troubled to begin with, remarking that youth was a thing that didn't last very long, and that young people pretty quickly became middle-aged and then old. No, I think he sensed that this was a far greater convulsion, and one for which his long training and experience had not prepared him. It was the modern world in arms, and he knew instinctively that it would sweep away his own world quite completely. Of course, he could beat it tactically. The pro-Gaullist demonstration which soon followed the Latin Quarter riots vastly outnumbered the student rabble, and the elections of that year overwhelmingly endorsed him. But it would be Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ‘Danny the Red’, who would win in the end. De Gaulle’s Roman Catholic, sovereign France in a ‘Europe of Nations’ is now one with Nineveh and Tyre, replaced by a coldly secular EU province, which doesn’t even have its own currency or borders. Its decline, though different from Britain’s and in some ways not as far advanced, has been steep since 1968. I tend to think that the Mitterrand presidency, much like the Harold Wilson era in Britain though several years later, provided the political context for a cultural revolution, and so brought about much that the 1968ers had desired.  

Where did this stuff come from?  I’m sure there was no plot. On the other hand, I am sure that plenty of people in political, legal, academic and cultural power were quietly keen to overthrow the wearisome restraints which an increasingly feeble Christianity still placed on their behaviour – especially sexual behaviour. Plainly, the invention and mass availability of the female contraceptive pill had a huge effect on this, as I explore in my 1999 book ‘The Abolition of Britain’. And interestingly, that pill was not a scientific accident but the result of research directed and financed by sexual radicals. So in that one instance there may actually have been a plan to reorder the world., which more or less achieved its objective. Certainly the contraceptive pill comes just after nuclear fission as the most momentous invention of our age. Most people now think there is no necessary connection between sex and procreation, which is why, when pregnancy still happens unexpectedly, they rush to the abortion clinic to restore what they now see as the natural balance.

Then there was music. There may have been nothing in the water, but there were plenty of pollutants in the air and the ether. When I think back to the era, I am amazed at how many years before 1968 the first strange thrill and hum of personal liberation from authority had made itself felt. Above all there was the music, not in any way political but intensely disturbing. Listen to the extraordinary 1963 Motown hit ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’, with its nonsense lyrics (originally pencilled in while they waited for some proper words, eventually left as they were) and the wall-of-sound drumbeat with which it begins. I can remember it being incessantly played, echoing across the bay as dusk fell upon respectable British beach resorts, and we all knew what it meant - though I don’t think anybody said so.  It meant sex, and letting go, and not being respectable.  But we were all so safe, we weren’t as troubled by it as perhaps we should have been.

One who *was* disturbed was the now deeply unfashionable novelist C.P. Snow, who in 1968 brought out what is perhaps his most powerful book, ‘The Sleep of Reason’.  It had been in gestation for some years. In fact we know that it was conceived in 1966 when Snow’s wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, also a novelist, was commissioned by the Sunday Telegraph to attend the harrowing trial of the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. She learned from this  experience, amongst many other things, that Brady was an enthusiastic reader of the works of the Marquis de Sade. And she wrote an interesting short book ‘On Iniquity’ in which she mused about whether liberalism had gone too far if this was what followed.

I am pretty sure this triggered her husband’s reflections, in a  novel which connects a row at a redbrick university, about a Vice-Chancellor who wants to discipline students caught fornicating ( al la Nanterre) in halls of residence, with a hideous crime against a child in the countryside nearby. The two women accused of this crime , and whose trial is brilliantly described in the book, are connected with a ‘group’ known to Snow’s hero and narrator, Lewis Eliot.

When he was young and very radical (Eliot, an autobiographical figure, eventually becomes a very left-wing member of the establishment), Eliot had been associated with this emancipated semi-secret society, who had broken the boundaries of the sexual morality of the 1920s. I think this sort of ‘progressivism’ among radical young people had begun before 1914, and redoubled in the inter-war years. It was pretty high-minded and took itself fairly seriously, and it was generally conducted in semi-secret, as those who too openly ignored the marriage-bond in those days might well damage their careers very seriously.

The sleep of reason in the title refers to Goya’s sombre etching ‘In the Sleep of Reason, Monsters are Born’. Eliot’s old friend George Passant, once brilliant and admired and the centre of the radical pre-war group, is now a washed-up, querulous failure living in something close to squalor. Now Eliot fears that the ideas he once likewise admired have also led to a nasty, dangerous and sordid outcome. Meanwhile his old friend, the Vice-Chancellor is destroyed by his attempt to maintain the old morals. His colleagues think he is too stiff-necked, and abandon him.

I would be glad if many modern 'progressives' would be as thoughtful. I ceaselessly think about this book and its antecedents, just as I ceaselessly try to find a more coherent explanation of the spasm of longing and unjustified fury that went through my part of the safe and prosperous middle class half a century ago.

I cannot deny that the liberation seemed attractive at the time. In that world of bad food, suppressed feeling, and often dull restraint, in which everything seemed universally grey and brown,  the fresh green spring of 1968 and the psychedelic orange of the counterculture glowed seductively.

The ceaseless hint, in the music, that there was something happening, somewhere close by, something marvellous which you might join in if only you could find it, was insistent and thrilling. 

And we were so safe. These who we blamed for repressing us had brought us up in a world so secure and insulated from sad and violent events, that it never occurred to us that our behaviour would have any worse consequences than a mild bruise, or a headache, or some brief tears, or the occasional broken window.

Yet when I add up the outcomes of that era, for my own generation and for my parents’ generation too, I find an extraordinary amount of real tragedy, madness, death, loss, abject failure, cruelty, destruction and deep, deep disappointment.  

We thought we were in a sunny garden, containing nothing more dangerous than a hedgehog,  and someone would soon call us in for tea and restore order. We turned out to be on the fringes of a jungle where great beasts fought and tore.