May 68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution (review)

This collection of twenty-six essays ranges widely over the variegated legacies of May 1968, whose description in the title is a doubly tendentious one. May 68, while undoubtedly revolutionary, was not in historical fact a revolution, and who is to say that it was France’s last (as opposed to most recent) such upheaval? The book brings together the proceedings of a conference held in Paris to commemorate the fortieth anniversary — something worthy of attention for two reasons. First, the dispersed and heterogeneous quality often characteristic of such compilations here works in favour of May 68, or at least of une certaine idée de mai 68 as protean and rhizomatic, although Kristin Ross’s May ’68 and its Afterlives (University of Chicago Press, 2002), frequently referenced here, writes against the political dilution often implicit in such culturally based readings. Second, it reminds us that the fortieth anniversary was accompanied by a burgeoning of colloquia and publications more likely to be associated with a ‘golden’ anniversary, doubtless because many key players may no longer be with us by the time 2018 comes around. The book is divided into three sections — broadly speaking sociohistorical (‘Rethinking the Events’), regional–national (‘Decentring the Events’), and artistic–superstructural (‘Performing the Events’). Frequently underrated aspects that come to the fore include peasant militancy, delineated by Jean-Philippe Martin, and the movement’s reaching out to immigrants, perceived by Daniel Gordon as figuring ‘an anti-nationalist project that radically questioned the existence of a distinction between “French” and “foreigner”’ (p. 106). Small wonder that Nicolas Sarkozy wished to put an end to the heritage of May 68. Michael Sibalis’s chapter on gay liberation acts as a salutary corrective to the ‘hetfest’, as which May 68 has habitually been viewed, while the chapters by Kate Bredeson and Emmanuelle Loyer do much to bring into focus the importance of theatre, via, respectively, the occupation of the Odéon and activity in Villeurbanne and Avignon. The treatment of cinema is also worthy of note for its absence of the Godardolatry that might have been expected. Nathalie Rachlin addresses Hervé Le Roux’s Reprise —a 1997 interrogation of 1968 footage — as premonitory of the ‘new wave of social cinema’ (p. 340) of the past decade, while Roland-François Lack draws on star studies to interrogate the possible political implications of Bernadette Lafont’s carnality. The collection concludes with a translation of extracts from Virginie Linhart’s moving autobiographical memoir Le Jour où mon père s’est tu, a fitting cadenza in that it reminds us how immense and often contradictory the impact of the events was on the (literal and symbolic) children of their participants. Probably not a book to be read — or designed to be read — cover to cover, but an indispensable compendium for students and teachers of French politics, history, and culture.