May 68: How and Why France Dreamed Up Another Revolution

[00:00:22] Hello, this is Garlic and Pearls with Muriel Zagha, who is unquestionably French, and me, Suzanne Raine, who is just very, very British, I'm afraid to say. Don't be afraid. Yeah, you're right. I'm never afraid. Especially not of that. No.

[00:00:42] Anyway, here we are. And today it's Muriel's turn to explain to me something which helps me understand why the French are so French. Today is a case in point, Suzanne, because we are in the month of May. And naturally enough, because I'm unquestionably French, this puts me in a somewhat countercultural and utopian and even perhaps quasi-revolutionary mood. Oh God, no. And why is that? Why is that?

[00:01:13] Because, no, don't be frightened. It's only because of some dramatic events that took place at this time of year, some decades ago. And that left a profound mark on France, on the French, on French culture, whether you lived through them or not. And I was only a year old. So I can't say that I really experienced them. But I'm talking, of course, about les événements de mai 68, which is the events of May 68.

[00:01:43] That was a period when there were huge demonstrations in France. You're going to say, why is that special? Because, of course, there are always demonstrations in France. But, you know, specifically student demonstrations in Paris and in other university towns, but also widespread general strike at the same time, where people in a lot of different sectors, down tools, occupied factories, and so on.

[00:02:05] And really, the country came to complete standstill. And all the time that this was going on, people were talking, talking about the possibility of social and economic change. They were questioning the status quo, Suzanne. And it was a real shakeup. So, to put you in the right sort of mood, I have a little present for you today, which is a t-shirt. I'm handing it over to you now. So you can wear it on the holiday. You can wear it to exercise, perhaps, or to sleep in.

[00:02:35] I don't exercise. No. I was joking. So it's quite cool, I think. I love it. I love it because it's black, which is a good colour for a t-shirt, especially if you support health. Heavy metal bands. Or pirate metal, which you know that I do. Yeah, we're very big on pirate metal on this podcast. We are. And on it then, in red, it says, I even can't pronounce this. You don't have it.

[00:03:03] Shall I say it for you? It says, la beauté est dans la rue. Do you know what that means? Well, I assume that's beauty. Yes. Yes. So the beauty is in the street. Yes. And then it has, in between that, it's got la, that's really hard to pronounce at the top, and then Edon LaRue at the bottom. And then in between that, there is what I thought originally was, I'm sorry, I thought it was a ballet dancer. But now I'm looking more closely.

[00:03:30] It's a figure in red, in what looks like tights and a short skirt. I don't know what they're wearing. And they're throwing a brick. Yeah. And then at their feet is a spider's web, which I imagine is not a spider's web. That's maybe barbed wire or something, is it? I don't know what that is. No, this is a good reading of the image. So actually, it's a girl. It's a female figure. Yep.

[00:03:56] She's wearing, yeah, I'd say trousers, actually, and maybe a mack that's sort of flying behind her because she's sort of taking aim, you know. And she's throwing, that's a very English reading. You said a brick. It's not a brick. It's a paving stone. Oh. It's a Parisian paving stone, a pavé. And I think what you see at her feet is kind of stylized rendering of pavement. But you know, those little... Cobblestones, almost.

[00:04:24] Cobblestones, that's what they are. Those little cobblestones are very typical of some Parisian streets. So this is an image that's now been put on T-shirts. Now you have it. But it was originally designed as a poster during the period of May 68, where people were making posters, tracts, pamphlets, you know, coining slogans and so on. And this is one of the ones that remains in the sort of collective memory.

[00:04:51] It captures, you know, youth, beauty, the revolution, the street, throwing a cobblestone at the man or at the right police or something. It captures the spirit of those days. One of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this today is because we had May 68, May 68. And I don't think that Britain really had it in the same way.

[00:05:18] I mean, there were, I think, you know, this sort of unrest was happening in America, in Germany, in Italy, not just in France. But I think in Britain, it happened on a smaller scale. I think a couple of maybe art schools specifically, art schools, there were protests there. And no, it's not to say that there wasn't social unrest. You know, the late 60s were troubled everywhere. But we didn't, we got it more than you. And so I'm trying to work out why. Because that is, of course, the way we look at things on this podcast.

[00:05:48] Does May 68 mean anything to you, Suzanne? Does it conjure up any images for you or any? Yes, so more than most things, I suppose. I have heard of it. I have had it. I mean, I've watched TV programs about it. I understand the general sort of sense of what was going on and that it started in universities. I think I might be wrong about that.

[00:06:14] I would note, though, that when you speak about revolution, you say it in a different way to the way I would say it. And that's because in France, it has, it kind of has deep rooted meaning in a sort of positive way. Whereas I think for us, you know, whenever we have revolutions. Is it because when you've had your revolution, but you've had more time to reflect? Well, we had the glorious revolution as well. Yes, that's true, actually.

[00:06:44] Yeah. Which wasn't really that much. I don't know where to start. It was a quiet, velvet revolution. Your revolutions are violent and bloody and you still somehow celebrate them. I know. And I think there's something... That's the great paradox of France. And I can't explain it all today. But let's focus on this particular moment of unrest. What was it all about, essentially? You know, what were people rebelling against or protesting against this time?

[00:07:11] Because as you pointed out, we're a nation famous for taking to the streets. So it wasn't the first time that this happened. So people were very broadly protesting things like the Vietnam War that was happening in a lot of other countries. But more generally, they were protesting against the old ways and the old order, against the strictures of the respectable bourgeoisie, authoritarianism, paternalism, the patriarchy, mum and dad,

[00:07:38] against all figures of authority, against hierarchy, against capitalism, everything. And against General de Gaulle, who was at the time in power. He was the president. He'd been president of the Fifth Republic, which he had sort of brought about really in 1958 for 10 years. So he'd been in power for 10 years. By then, he's 77 years old. Now we have gerondocracies all over the world. But in those days, it really felt like your grandfather was in charge of the country.

[00:08:08] And one of the slogans of May 68 was, which means 10 years is enough. We've had enough. So it's perhaps worth considering, since we are comparing and contrasting on this podcast, who was in power in Britain at the time? It was Harold Wilson and the Labour Party. De Gaulle, on the one hand, of course, glorious figure of the French resistance, the war and all that, but also a staunch... Possible cagoule wearer.

[00:08:36] Possible cagoule wearer when he was younger. A staunch conservative figure, eventually, you know, and a general. He's getting on a bit. His prime minister, who's called Georges Pompidou and who will then become president, is sort of working out how to take over the Élysée Palace. So there's a sense of end of reign a little bit. And de Gaulle is perceived as, and probably was, pretty authoritarian figure. So you had a close grip on the TV network, for example.

[00:09:05] You know, the equivalent of the BBC, which was called the ORTF at the time, was essentially a mouthpiece for the presidency. People didn't like that. In Britain, you have Harold Wilson. Harold Wilson was not a Marxist firebrand, but he was the man who put forward the Beatles for their MBE in 1965, which I think created quite a lot of controversy at the time. So he was a bit more with it, I think, Harold Wilson, wasn't he? In his besuited way, than de Gaulle.

[00:09:35] De Gaulle would not have approved of the Beatles and said that they were important figures in national culture. So very broadly, when we look at May 68, it's not that everything is rosy in Britain. Wilson has only been in power for four years, not 10 years. So there are tensions with the unions, all of that. There's economic anxiety. The pound has been devalued the year before, you know, in 67. There's just been, in April 68, Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech,

[00:10:04] and then the fallout from that. So it's not as though everything is hunky-dory. But on the other hand, the Beatles have their MBE, which is brilliant. And there's been a significant increase, I think, in progressive social legislation, improving access to education, and all the good things, and the growth of pop culture, of course. So Britain is swinging, and France is not. And I'm also thinking, because you're right, because the thing about Harold Wilson,

[00:10:33] that maybe gave him an element of being on the front foot, is that his government did a lot of liberalising. So he abolished capital punishment. He abolished the theatre censorship. He partially decriminalised male homosexuality. He relaxed the divorce laws. He outlawed racial discriminisation, liberalised birth control and abortion laws. So all of those sorts of things get him plus points, I imagine, with revolutionaries. Exactly so.

[00:11:03] Whereas France is really behind with all these things, and we're still very, very buttoned up. So, you know, for example, the pill, the contraceptive pill becomes available in 1967 in France, but it's very heavily regulated. And the general mindset, just this is just a detail. Oh, it's not a detail. It's very important. It's just one aspect of the mindset at the time, is that the general take on the contraceptive pill at the time is, it's a good thing for women who are married, and already mothers, and have had several children,

[00:11:33] and think that they've finished their family, and then we can give them the pill. It's not everybody have the pill. So that's not really at the forefront of what people in charge, the grown-ups, are thinking. It's a good thing for mistresses of presidents. Yes. That is a very shrewd observation. I'm not going to tell you the whole story of May 68. It's far too complicated, because I think as I said to you when we were discussing this podcast,

[00:12:02] there are far too many leftist splinter groups and different kinds of unions, and we don't need to go into all that. But I will give you a bit of context, and I will give you a quick timeline of what happens, and then we can talk about the impact, the legacy, what it will mean, how French was it? Very French. So firstly, what sounds perhaps like a paradox, which is that in France, when the protests begin, the economic situation is very good. We're still in what's known as les trente glorieuses,

[00:12:31] the 30 glorious years, you know, where the post-war years, where there was expansion, there's very healthy growth, people's quality of life is improving, consumerism is gaining ground, as it is in Britain. You know, people are buying more cars, they're buying televisions, they're getting sanitation in their homes, all of that. Actually, that's perhaps not as surprising as it sounds, because I think historically, protests tend to happen when the situation is stable enough to give you a bit of breathing space. Exactly. It never happens at the dip.

[00:13:00] It happens when people are then recovered, and then they get angry about something else. So people are very recovered. In fact, they've never had it so good in a way, and therefore they get angry. They get angry. So there are two aspects to this. One is that I said the economic situation is good. It's good for some people, but as ever, and we mentioned this when we talked about the gilets jaunes movement, there is also the beginning of globalization. France is in the common market, Britain isn't.

[00:13:28] So, of course, it's all lovely to be trading together, but it begins to exacerbate certain inequalities. Not everyone benefits. Some sectors are being de-industrialized. It begins, you know, and there have been strikes in the 1960s, particularly the coal mines are in dreadful trouble. You know, so all of this is happening, as well as, hey, it's wonderful, and France is going places, and so on. So people want better pay. They feel excluded from all this ambient prosperity.

[00:13:58] There are also still a lot of people living in what's known as Bidonville. So Bidon is spelled B-I-D-O-N, and it means a jerry can, a tin can, because the Bidonville are like slums, shanty towns, really, that are built out of tin, and iron and cardboard. There are people living in terrible slums, in a way that's been eradicated in France, but it was still in the late 60s a thing, in complete insalubrious, shoddily put together housing,

[00:14:27] which sort of sprouts in urban wasteland with, I mean, just terrible living conditions. And there is significantly one such slum, Bidonville, in Nanterre. And Nanterre is a town to the west of Paris, where there is also a university, founded in 1963, so it's brand new, it's very modern, and it was founded in order to take the overflow from the Sorbonne, because more people are going to university, you know, it's the beginning of that,

[00:14:55] more democratic education. More democratic education, although I should say again, to paint a picture for you, that at the time, 92% of students in France come from a middle class background. So actually, it's very homogeneous. You know, we are very much entre nous, the same kind of people. The students at Nanterre can see the Bidonville from their high-rise new campus. And Nanterre University is,

[00:15:22] it will be one of the hotspots of student unrest. This is, in fact, where it all begins a little bit before May 68. Meanwhile, so I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty of the leftist, we call them groupuscule, like tiny little groups, but just generally, the left in France, a lot of people on the left, especially the young, are a bit disillusioned with the Communist Party and with Soviet Union. It all seems very, all these very old, again, old men, mummified men.

[00:15:52] And so they're looking to Cuba, the Che, they're looking to China for inspiration. They've seen images of the Chinese Red Guards. Thrilling, you know, young people, schoolchildren and students attacking, physically attacking the reactionaries. Everyone thinks that's brilliant, very inspiring. So a lot of little groups are set up to the French Maoists, French sort of Marxist-Leninists, but who are independent from the Soviet Union and from the Communist Party, all of that kind of thing.

[00:16:22] It's all about youth, the young, the young, the young. I'm just saying it like that because I'm jealous, of course, because I'm no longer young, but the young emerge in the 60s, in Britain, in France, almost as a separate social class, don't they? Yeah. With their own fashion, their own press, their own music, their own political goals. And among the goals, of course, because they are young, is sexual liberation. We mentioned the contraceptive pill. Actually, the trigger of the unrest

[00:16:51] in Nantes University, people are talking about Vietnam, they're talking about other things, but what really triggers the protest on the campus is that it's a campus where students live live and there are boarding houses for boys and boarding houses for girls. And at the time, the boys are not allowed in the girls' dormitories to socialize with them. And this is enforced very strictly. You know, we're still in a very 1950s mindset. And so that is the beginning of the unrest,

[00:17:21] is that the young want access to each other. And then there's also a sort of down with imperialism subtext. Where it all sort of ignites, and I will give you a timeline and you'll see how it happens, and it makes May 68 or May 68 specifically a French phenomenon, I think, is that you have student protests and you have social unrest forming a perfect storm. So if it's just

[00:17:50] the students on their own, you know, it's going to remain a little storm in a teacup, really. If it's just social unrest, well, there's social unrest all the time. So it doesn't perhaps get into the papers in the same way than if you get imagery and iconic photos which come from the student side of things. So very, very quickly because it's a long story, but the protests begin at Notaire University in March, so really a couple of months before May. And they're to do

[00:18:19] with the co-ed socializing issue, but also generally criticizing the crushing authority of the man, which the students feel very forcefully in Notaire. And interestingly, there's no leader, there's never really a leader, a political leader of May 68, partly because of the fragmentation into all these little groups. But there is one guy who becomes known as one of the faces and he's called Daniel Cohn-Bendit. He was known as Danny Le Rouge, Danny the Red,

[00:18:48] because he was a red, but also because he was a bit ginger. He emerges as one of the leaders. I'm just showing you a photo of him there where he's standing up, he's raising his fist. There's riot police around him. Sort of choleric aspect. Choleric aspect. He's not going to take things lying down. And this is partly what amplifies the movement is that he's going to be photographed, this guy and other guys like him, can be photographed, filmed. People are going

[00:19:17] to see them on TV because even though de Gaulle was, you know, an authoritarian figure, people still get to see images of what's going on. They're carefully edited, but, you know, they see that there are these young people who are answering back, who instead of saying when Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Danny the Rouge, Danny the Red, is challenged by the dean of Nolte-Hare University, he doesn't say, oh, I'm very sorry, sir, it won't happen again. He goes, well, yes, well, you know, we have some demands. And he just stands his ground.

[00:19:47] And people are astonished by this lack of deference. It's quite new. So the dean is not pleased. So eventually, the dean shuts down the university. Nolte-Hare is closed. The action moves to Paris. And the Sorbonne ignites. And that's where there are barricades. It becomes more like a sort of embryonic revolution. There are riots. There are clashes with riot police. This all happens in the Latin Quarter, around the Sorbonne, all over the Luxembourg Gardens.

[00:20:17] Lots of cobblestones are thrown. This is where you can put on your T-shirt, I think, Suzanne, so you can join in with the spirit. Hundreds of protesters are arrested. There are burnt cars. There's devastation in the streets. It's quite alarming, but it's also quite exciting and fun. So there's one person who doesn't like it at all. Can you guess who that might be? But General de Gaulle. He doesn't like it. No, well, he, no. I mean, he wouldn't. He's not amused. In a very Victorian way, actually,

[00:20:47] he's not amused at all. He's appalled by it. And he says, famously, la réforme, oui, la chienlit, non. So that means reform. Yes. Okay. La chienlit. So this is an old medieval word, which literally means crapping the bed. I'm sorry to be so coarse, but it also means chaos. Chaos. Yeah. And so he's saying no enough, you know, this is just getting out of hand. And he's in favor

[00:21:16] of quite brutal repression. But his prime minister, Pompidou, who's a little bit younger, thinks it's wiser to contain things by all means, but allow the movement to run out of steam because at the time, they think just a few ridiculous students would be fine. It does spread. There are marches in Sympathy elsewhere in France, other university towns in Strasbourg, in Marseille, in Brest, in Dijon, you know. And initially, I think people look at this and they go, oh, it's the young,

[00:21:45] they're expressing themselves. There are people who are outraged. So within families, when you talk to people who lived through this and who were maybe at school or at university at the time, they will either say, and this is the, almost like a Brexit-like divide, they will either say, my father was beside himself, he said, we should send in the troops, we should arrest everybody, or they say, oh, my father and my mom, they thought, well, actually, maybe things have been a little bit

[00:22:14] too claustrophobic for the young. After the end of the May 68 uprising, in some families, parents will tighten the screws. And in other families, there's a kind of awakening and a kind of softening. One person said to me, well, afterwards, my father, who'd been quite a disciplinarian, he began to listen to us a little bit more. And we didn't have to go to mass every Sunday. We were allowed to decide if we wanted to go or not. Things like that. So there's,

[00:22:42] it depends really where the line falls, whether people feel sympathy and a certain kind of sentimental, you know, dreaminess about it, or whether they think, well, this is just chaos, we have to immediately close this down. It also makes me reflect a lot, as I already have done a bit about revolutions and how, if you're, if you're in charge in whatever way, if you're president, prime minister, or if you're running a company, or indeed,

[00:23:12] I have my own experience in a small way of a revolution at my school, which I know, I mean, this is a separate thing, but we had an uprising. I was hoping that you would talk about that actually. Well, there must always be change and reform. As they famously said in the novel by Lampedusa, The Leopard, for everything to stay the same, it's necessary for everything to change. And if you are the person in charge, you have to work out

[00:23:40] when to give and how much to give so that you're just always one step ahead of the people who are getting impatient and potentially destructive. So, so the wrong amount of repression can lead then to a violent resistance So it seems like what Harold Wilson managed to do is lift the lid on some of those demands a little bit ahead of what, and I can imagine, I mean,

[00:24:09] you know famously we have a view of de Gaulle which isn't as flattering as maybe a French person's view of de Gaulle, but I can imagine how his intransigence on critical points isn't great leadership at that sort of moment because actually what you do need to do is accept that a change is necessary, that there is a new generation coming and you're going to have to give on some of the issues. And that I think is always a leadership thing

[00:24:38] is can you modernize at the pace that is required of you that doesn't go too far or too fast because then that annoys people as well, but doesn't go too slowly and means that people get impatient and revolt. So the problem is, of course, when you're taken by surprise and of course surprise and you know, this is one of your areas of interest, how to anticipate the unexpected. De Gaulle, the government did not see this student uprising coming at all.

[00:25:09] They had no idea it was coming and so they were completely unprepared and they were even less prepared when the compound element kicked in which was that in mid-May the unions, so things had been brewing, you know, but the unions perhaps sensing an opportunity for again amplifying their message, call for a general strike. There are huge demonstrations, marches, many factories are occupied including Renault, you know, some aviation factories, I mean really big stuff

[00:25:38] and then instead of stopping when the unions have decreed that it should stop, it carries on. So that's what's known as a wildcat strike, I think, where une grève sauvage is called in French. So it continues which is quite unusual so everybody's taken by surprise really. By the latter half of May 68 up to 10 million workers are on strike. It's a lot of people and this brings France to a standstill but then gradually they regain control,

[00:26:08] this is still the timeline that they regain control at the end of May in June De Gaulle announces he's not going to resign, he dissolves the Assemblée nationale, he calls for elections, the Gaullists are returned in the election because by then public opinion has turned and it's turned partly because people have seen the degree to which police repression of the marches was actually quite muscular, quite violent, although it's all relative, you know, given what we see happening today.

[00:26:36] There were deaths, again, when you compare it to other places where repression is unbelievably murderous, you know, in the tens of thousands, it seems little but at the time up to seven people were killed and in two cases killed by policemen who shot them with real bullets and that I think really shocked people, frightened them, they wanted order to be restored, everyone was outraged by it, you know, makes you nostalgic for a time where a single death

[00:27:06] would paralyze the nation, people would be shocked, nowadays sadly we're not quite in that place anymore but it's still the case then. Then there are negotiations with the unions, various demands are met, the government agrees to an increase in salaries to also better representation in the workplace, better working conditions, all the demands that the workers were making. Soon after that, de Gaulle does resign in 1969 because you may remember from our episode about the psychics, the presidents

[00:27:35] and the psychics, that... Great episode, by the way. This is de Gaulle trying not to be a reactionary. He's trying, as you say, to anticipate what needs to be done to give a little bit. So he's thinking what would be really cool and people will love me for it is to reform the Senate, you know, reform some quite technical things about how senators are recruited. We'll hold a referendum about that and I will really lean into it

[00:28:05] and say, unless people say yes, I will resign. The psychic he had spoken to who was also a retired military guy, do you remember the guy who drank schnapps and had said to him, don't do it, mon général, don't have the referendum. But de Gaulle went ahead with it. Pompidou was also, his prime minister was also saying no, no, no, making sort of chopping gestures. But again, there are other examples of this where people really want to have a referendum and they have a referendum and then the result is not the one they were expecting.

[00:28:35] So people voted against and de Gaulle had to resign. Almost a year after May 68 and in April 1969, at the end of April, he resigned. Why was there not a revolution then? I think it's partly because it's two ideas. May 68 is two things happening at the same time but not really as one. On the one hand, you have working people

[00:29:04] who have objectives that I think we would say are rooted in reality. You know, they want more money, they want better working conditions, they want all those things and their living conditions are genuinely hard. And then on the other hand, you have students and artists, the theatre, you know, all these people, ideologues, who become caught up in a sort of collective utopian fever dream which part of me, I can remember being that age and I can remember

[00:29:32] being hugely idealistic, having absolutely, because you don't know anything about anything. That's what's so wonderful about the young. I don't think it's changed very much from what I see around me. And so, for someone to say to you at university, you know, we could change everything, we could remake a better world, we don't have to, you never have to go to work, you know, say no, say no to the man, say no to capitalism. One of the slogans of May 68 was never go to work, ne travaille jamais, don't give in to the system, just don't,

[00:30:02] it's a trap, right? So it's all like that. So we're really saying no to the system that is oppressing us. So to give you an idea of the student mindset at the time, there was a guy called Robert Merle who was a novelist, but he was also, he also lectured in English at Nantair University. And he was quite good friends with his students. And at the time of the protests, he was there and he recorded a lot of the conversations that people had when, you know,

[00:30:31] there was an open debate, people with megaphones shouting at each other, trying to enforce direct democracy within the university, all these kinds of workshops and things. He was there. And then he wrote a novel about it, which is called Derrière la vitre, Behind the Window, where he gives an account of the sort of febrile atmosphere at the time and the things people did. So the students at Nantair at one point when things really began to kick off, Nantair is high-rise, low-rise, modern buildings. All the administration

[00:31:00] is housed in a tower, in a high-rise tower. They occupied that. And there was a lot of talk about how this tower was the symbol of phallic oppression, patriarchy, de Gaulle's power, and that it also resembled a watchtower in a concentration camp. Just to say, everybody's being

[00:31:27] a little bit silly. But people get caught up in this kind of rhetoric and we would say, how could they be so stupid and say such silly things? But you know that when you're young and if you have, this is the generation that did not grow up in the war. They don't remember the war and they don't want to think about the war. They want to think about a bright new world where they're going to get to do whatever they want. And their parents

[00:31:57] who have lived through the war are perhaps more indulgent with them than their parents have been with themselves. Maybe. And also you have a natural tension from the parents who have really been through it, who are saying, actually guys, just, I was thinking the opposite, like don't be so spoiled. This is, you have no idea how good your life is. And there's nothing more annoying than someone telling you that you have no idea how lucky you've got it. So that's, you can see how the dynamic would work. And then of course they will escalate

[00:32:26] and escalate. You know, again, if you try to put yourself back in that mindset, it's a tremendous luck. You go on marches all the time. You don't have to write dissertations and things. You go on strike. So the students go on strike. Ooh, scary. So it's really like a big party. It's festive. You, I don't know, you have barbecues and things. You picnic in the faculty. You're talking about dismantling capitalism and bringing the system down. Actually, although there are clashes

[00:32:56] and yes, some people die, even though people worried, some people were very frightened that there was going to be some kind of actual breakdown of society, civil war, you know, there is nothing like that. There's no coup d'etat being planned. Nothing like that. It's really a climate of experimentation, people shouting, people chanting, plenty of flaneurs out and about and their polo necks. All the things are coming together. Plenty of people shouting, never go to work, shouting,

[00:33:27] election, piège à con, which means elections are a trap for idiots. So don't vote either. You know, just don't engage with the system, but it's really all words. So at times, the students and the workers are marching together, but the workers don't take the students seriously. There's these young bourgeois whippersnappers and the students are so idealistic and some of them try to do this, that they think they're going to go into factories and they're going to help the workers

[00:33:57] be better revolutionaries. They're going to tutor them and tell them how to bring about the revolution. So you can imagine how well that goes down. So it's really not a dialogue that is very productive. So, and also, again, with the gilets jaunes, you know, the gilets jaunes in a way is a sort of replaying of a version of May 68, not all of it, but it's the lack of unified structure, no leaders and a lack of objectives because Jean-Paul Sartre,

[00:34:27] our friend, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who by now is also quite old in May 68. I mean, he's a very senior figure of the left in France. He has a meeting with Danny the Red, with the young firebrand from Nanterre and he, Sartre, says to him, what are your objectives, you know, from a Marxist-Leninist point of view, you know, what you were hoping to achieve and Danny the Red says, who's 25 or something, says, we don't talk about objectives, man, you know. You're so square, yeah.

[00:34:57] It's a very uptight way of looking at things because when you start talking about objectives, you're closing your mind and people need to be free to think and talk just as things come to them. So Sartre goes, oh, okay, well, good luck. Good luck with that. So, there are these parallel lines. The workers make some progress with negotiations. They get some of the things they wanted. The students,

[00:35:26] I'm going to open a little sidebar and then we'll get on to the legacy for the students. But my sidebar, which actually relates to you and something you mentioned earlier, is Britain in 68. So while all this is going on in Paris and in France, meanwhile in Britain, as I said, minor actual unrest in reality, but there is a film because there's always a film. There is an amazing film, which is Lindsay Anderson's If. Yes.

[00:35:57] You know this. Have you seen If? I have seen If. I think for a lot of people of a certain age, it's a film they can identify with. Yeah. So you can see perhaps where I'm leading. I'm just going to talk about If for a minute and then I have a question for you about your own experience. So If, it stars Malcolm McDowell, who's the guy who's done in Clockwork Orange and Malcolm McDowell is at a public school. So it's, I think, the lower six, it's kind of uprising in the ranks of the lower six, isn't it?

[00:36:27] They're at this public school. There's caning. There's a really stifling sort of authoritarian system. It's also very paramilitary. They're in the cadets. It's all terribly fascistic. So there is rebellion. There are various acts of rebellion, but it ends on Founders Day with Malcolm McDowell, who is a cadet, so he has access to guns, climbing onto the roof of the school and beginning to shoot at the assembled crowd. So it's pretty, you know, compared actually to what happened

[00:36:57] in May 68 in France, it's more radical and more hardcore than what the French were doing. And it's interesting to me also because it's such a British context of the public school. You know, we, as being the embodiment of oppression and the system, we don't have public schools in France. We can rebel against that. But you, of course, in your own... I don't know how much I should say about this. In your own capacity? No, probably not.

[00:37:26] But when you were at school, there was a bit of conflict. I experienced, I mean, nobody died. But... No, good, good. Nobody shot anybody. But we did have a revolution in my school, which was an old-fashioned school which did quite a lot of locking people in cellars and things like that. And there was a proper revolution, which we did. And I reckon... I mean, it was... For me, it was a formative experience

[00:37:56] and all the stages of the build-up of resistance, the anger, the way that authority tries to address grievance. I mean, the problem, I think, in the experience that I had was that they addressed grievance through further punishment. So they confiscated all our socks, you know, and it was winter, you know, that sort of thing. And then you think, okay, so now I'm more angry because I've got cold, wet feet

[00:38:25] and therefore I feel like something must be done, you know. And so... And I drew long, important life lessons from that, some of which are easier to implement than others because you can't actually overcome your own nature in a lot of these things. But seeing essentially how sooner or later with a revolution it has to come to a parlay situation or some kind of catastrophic denouement. Yeah. And that's the same

[00:38:54] wherever we are and you could argue, I'm thinking about various countries in the world now where this is... I mean, everywhere. But clearly, we have our own experiences in the UK of dealing with structures that constrain and how to behave or manipulate your way through structures that constrain. That's it exactly. Getting back to the case in hand,

[00:39:23] which is May 68, so the French events, afterwards, the dust settles. again, as I said before, the reaction afterwards goes one way or the other depending on, I suppose, on your ideological stance or your sensibility. Either you are thrilled that it's over, that things have gone back to normal, gradually you become aware that there is a legacy, things actually have changed,

[00:39:53] are changing, and if you are of a certain die, then you'll think it's the beginning of the end and looking back you will think, May 68, and I know people in my own family of both sides really, but the people who disapprove of May 68 will say it was the beginning of the end, it was the end of traditional values, morality was lost, we lost the values of restraint, discipline, self-denial, hard work, and so on, and from then on all people wanted to pursue

[00:40:23] was pleasure-seeking individualism and usually it crystallizes around education, people will say well education started really going downhill after May 68 because it's true that May 68 had a great impact in education, on education rather, because it was a student protest but a lot of teachers joined in and then some of the students themselves became teachers and they implemented some of the things that they wanted to change, so authority were less of that,

[00:40:52] child-centered learning, more of that, hostility to selection and elitism, you know, all this kind of thing. We talked about Howard Wilson and his brilliant sort of super cool reforms that he implemented at the right time, a little ahead perhaps of public opinion. In France, those reforms will happen after May 68 and arguably as a result of more or less directly, so abortion is decriminalized in 1974,

[00:41:21] up until that time people used to travel to Switzerland or to Britain. The age of majority is revised down from 21 to 18, also in 74. In 1981, so much later than in Britain, Mitterrand, who is a socialist president, abolishes capital punishment. Finally. Obviously, you were really going to cling to that. Of course. Bastion of identity. You were, the guillotine, you know. I mean, a lot of people

[00:41:51] probably are quite nostalgic. I don't think they are. I think actually I'd be surprised. Well, I don't know. Sorry, this is a tangent. I'm not going to go down that road. But I don't know what the percentage is. I think it's probably about the same as Britain. Actually, there are quite a lot of people in favor of a return to capital punishment. Would they be in favor of a return to the guillotine? I don't know. It's quite raw, isn't it? Interesting thing. We'll have to talk about it another time. I'm going to press on. So, this is, if you are, yeah, if you are, let's say, a more traditional person,

[00:42:21] then you are horrified by May 68 and by the legacy of May 68. If, on the other hand, you are a 68ard, so someone who either was there and joined in at the time, it's called faire May 68, you know, to do May 68. So, people will say, did you do May 68 or, you know, part of the event? Or, if you like the idea of it, then for you, it will remain a sort of paradise lost of utopian hope. You loved it

[00:42:51] if you were there. You loved it. You loved it if you weren't there. You wish it could come again. You know, you think of it as a wonderful, magical time where things could have changed for the better. And it's achieved a kind of mythological status that's kind of drifted like a balloon away from its anchorage in what actually happened because of images. because of people's memories, which are often a little bit embellished, but also because of some images

[00:43:20] that have been reproduced. And it's a way of remembering things through images that were in the press rather than through what actually happened. So, I'll just give you one example, which is a photograph that was taken at the time. This is a black and white photograph. Yeah, it's a fabulous photograph. So, it's a crowd and there is a person standing sort of half a body high above the crowd. So, she's sitting on the shoulders of her companion. Yeah. And holding her, is it a woman?

[00:43:50] I can't really tell. It is a woman. Holding her left arm aloft and from that streams a banner and I can only see the white bits of it because I think the top is black or red or another colour. But in the background I think there's a building that Prasmeister has been built by Baron Ostman. Yes, once you've seen his work you can never unsee it, can you? So, this is a photograph that was taken by a guy called Jean-Pierre Ray. I like to credit photographers when possible

[00:44:19] and he took that at a demo. This girl, this blonde girl who is actually quite beautiful. It's no accident that the photo lasted because a lot of photographs of girls sitting on the shoulders of boys waving flags were taken at the time. That's the sort of image, you know, that's the way people behaved. So, there are a lot of these photos floating around. This is the one that people remember partly because the woman is particularly attractive and also

[00:44:48] because Life magazine in America and Paris Match both reproduced it and made a lot of it. And in the case of Life magazine they did a thing where they Oh, yeah. They made a rapprochement Suzanne, they made a rapprochement between this photograph so she's waving a Vietnam flag by the way. Oh, is that what I can't see because it's black and white? Yes, well it is and they super imposed it on,

[00:45:19] do you know what that painting is? It's by Delacroix It's called Liberty Leading the People and it shows a figure which, you know, we associate with France and with the Republic but actually this is Is that Marianne? It's Marianne but it's she's Liberty really in this painting it's just that a lot of other meanings have been super imposed on the painting and it's one of the most famous

[00:45:48] French paintings there are so they've stuck the photo of this young woman literally they've mixed it up with the painting so that it looks like one thing like a continuous thing and this process is called Mariannisation it's where you turn someone into Marianne into a figure of Marianne the girl in the photo her name was Caroline the Benden and she was an aristocratic British model who happened to be in Paris at the time

[00:46:17] and of course a lot of people got caught either they happened to be studying or nannying or maybe being an au pair being a model or whatever and they were in Paris at the time and they would have got caught up in this thing and so she had been talked into going to a marsh with a friend and she was getting very tired so this friend very chivalrously put her on his shoulders and she was holding the flag that presumably he'd brought to the demo which happened to be the flag of Vietnam and then this photographer was in the crowd

[00:46:47] shooting people this is her account Caroline's own account of it is the photographer noticed her because she was particularly presentable she noticed him noticing her she was a model and so in that moment she found herself straightening up altering her expression a little bit tilting her head holding the flag perhaps a little bit more decoratively and that's what he snapped and then that photo has been reproduced so many times much to her dismay

[00:47:17] there are many such cases you know in the history of photography where somebody is photographed just as a snapshot and then the photo becomes incredibly famous and the person in the photograph feels hijacked by it and that's what happened to poor Caroline but at the same time you could say she became immortalized as sort of mythical image of what May 68 was like the spirit of the barricades youth beauty utopia when in fact looking back

[00:47:47] it wasn't really a continuous with the actual revolutions that it taps into because of the painting but does it matter now she's 81 and that shows how long ago it was now that that generation is now in their 80s older than de Gaulle was at the time

[00:48:17] even yeah which is which is extraordinary so what do you think Suzanne shall we go and erect a barricade perhaps and try and start something a movement a kind of garlic and pearls May garlic and pearls 26 well I don't know what we want more garlic and more pearls more garlic and more pearls I think that's enough of a revendication I can get behind that

[00:48:46] do you think the reason why things didn't really happen on this side of the channel in the same way is that because we are just naturally more bullshit more contrary we love taking to the streets whereas the British even the young even the arty young are not I don't think you can say that you're more bolshie than us I think good good I want you to resist I am resisting this is a big question I don't think I'm expert enough in what happened on this

[00:49:16] side I mean there's a lot there's a long history of rioting in Britain yeah we love a riot you do you love it more than we do I tell you what what my theory about all of this is and it does relate to Germany actually even more is that if you have a society as we do in Britain which is permanently letting off steam through microaggressions which we do on a daily basis

[00:49:46] it's actually healthier than one that is trying to keep on top of it so I would if I was Germany recently people are more polite people are less inclined to have a violent fight in the street in Germany for example than here but what that means is that the problems which every society has build to a greater sort of pressure before somebody steps forward to do something about it

[00:50:16] and I would reflect that actually sometimes in the UK what appears like a very high ambient level of civil violence sorry I'm not laughing at civil violence it's a serious matter we're sort of quite used to that and actually that's what makes it quite difficult to live here because there's always some kind of aggro and I feel that in myself you know I was in Germany recently where I

[00:50:45] saw something happening and I thought nobody's intervening it's going to have to be me it's going to have the British who stands up and says we can't put up with this sort of behaviour but I think we're constantly doing this is just I'm making this up but I think we are constantly in the UK there's always somebody saying actually no don't do that we're all a society you've got to stop whatever it is we're fighting with each other and that is constantly chipping off the edges and if you don't

[00:51:15] which sounds like what de Gaulle did if you don't let the chipping off of the edges happen then you get a bigger problem yeah I think that's probably quite an astute there's a difference in sensibility and it is a lot of it is to do with the safeguards that are in society in culture and in yourself on that note dear listeners let's start a movement more garlic more pearls more garlic and pearls I think that's a

[00:52:03] could could we be a move move move exactly that's what we are enjoy your t-shirt and I will see you Suzanne next time for something completely different au revoir Muriel bye Suzanne you