How Europe Got From May ’68 to Emmanuel Macron

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/europe-may-68-emmanuel-macron.html

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Fifty years ago, France seemed briefly to teeter on the edge of revolution. Student riots in Paris expanded into wider protest and a strike by almost 10 million workers (no one was sure of the exact number because the statistical services themselves broke down) paralyzed the country. This was the most spectacular example of a general upheaval, initially rooted in student discontent, that also shook Italy, West Germany, Britain and the United States.

It is often said that 1968 was a failed revolution in political terms but a successful one so far as cultural change was concerned. There is an element of truth in this. Protesters did not destroy capitalism, or even bring down Charles de Gaulle’s regime in France. There is, though, a broader sense in which ’68 itself eventually went with a realignment of politics so significant that it redefined notions of the right and the left.

This realignment was rooted in the fact that 1968 had two faces. On one side, it entailed a social challenge to the existing order — one that usually drew on Marxist thought, though not on that of the orthodox Communist parties. The working class was central to this challenge and, especially in France and Italy, workers and students often supported each other. Some students, inspired by Maoist ideas about the need for intellectuals to leave the ivory tower, took jobs in factories. On the other side, there was a cultural version of 1968. It emphasized a sharp break with formality and authority in everyday life and a transformation of personal, especially sexual, relations rather than the overthrow of a social order.

The two versions of 1968 were not mutually exclusive, but there were tensions between them. These were seen in France when the Communist leader Georges Marchais denounced the student “pseudo-revolutionaries who claim to give the working class lessons” and when, a few years later, construction workers in New York attacked an antiwar demonstration by students. In Britain, too, there was an ominous sign of potential division in April 1968 when dockworkers marched in support of Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration “rivers of blood” speech.

At first, the demonstrations around Mr. Powell’s speech looked like an isolated episode. In Britain and continental Europe, workers and the student left continued to act in alliance through the 1970s — particularly as students supported strikes such as that of British miners in 1972. But in the longer term, there was a change.

As those who had been students in ’68 entered mainstream politics, they formed new parties, the Greens in Germany and the Socialist Party in France, or transformed old ones, like Britain’s Labour Party. The ’68 generation turned issues that would once have been seen as questions of culture or personal behavior into matters of public policy: Gay rights and women’s liberation were discussed in parliaments rather than in consciousness-raising groups. This cultural revolution was more than just a matter of listening to the Doors and smoking joints; it brought real change to the lives of women and sexual and racial minorities. But in doing so, it helped redraw political lines. At its simplest level, this is seen in the fact that most European left-wing parties, once built on the votes of male industrial workers, now draw on drastically different coalitions.

What largely disappeared from the ’68 left was its anticapitalism. This change has been most striking in France, and perhaps no one epitomizes it like President Emmanuel Macron. Though born in 1977, Mr. Macron has flirted with the cultural version of 1968, exemplified by his relaxed attitude on sexual morality and his rhetorical support for a “diverse and varied” national culture. He is said to have briefly considered sponsoring a formal commemoration of the 50th anniversary this year. However, Mr. Macron has also adopted social and economic policies that are bound to bring him into conflict with the trade unions. Ironically, he has done so with the support of some former student leaders from 1968, most notably Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was the face of the Paris protests 50 years ago and went on to become a member of the European Parliament from the Green Party. (He was known as Danny the Red when his hair and his politics looked different.)

The changing nature of the ’68 generation is reflected in its enthusiasm for the European Union. Fifty years ago — the same year the European Customs Union was established —the left often dismissed European institutions as instruments of capitalism. But as capitalism itself is questioned less, the European Union has come to be seen increasingly as a means to defend liberal values. The former leftists, at ease with internationalism, have often embraced Europe: Joschka Fischer, a stone-throwing activist in West Germany, became a foreign minister who pushed for greater European integration.

Like the left, the right now seems increasingly prone to define itself in cultural terms. The U.K. Independence Party, the National Front in France and Alternative for Germany have drawn a partly working-class electorate by emphasizing a politics of popular nationalism that they contrast with the smooth internationalism of the elites. There are curious ways in which the entry of the left-wing ’68 generation into the establishment provoked a kind of ’68 of the right. Those who organized the demonstrations against the legalization of gay marriage in France boasted of the comparison. The language of this new right — its dislike for “technocracy” and the “establishment” — often echoes that of the left in 1968.

There is, of course, a twist to all this. The populist right largely draws its support from baby boomers, born after World War II. Where does this leave the young people of today and, especially, that section of them, larger than ever before, who are students or who belong to that lumpen intelligentsia of those who have a higher education but not the kind of job that might once have matched that education?

Some of them support left-wing movements — Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Blairite section of the Labour Party, Podemos in Spain and the insurgent France Unbowed — that seek to once again unite the student left and workers. Students across Europe are fascinated by the events of 1968. Perhaps, though, this tendency to look back is itself a sign of how things have changed: The defining quality of 1968 was its optimism. The young had grown up during two decades of rapid economic growth and, curiously, that reinforced their confidence that capitalism would be easily overthrown. Things are bleaker today. One of the things that the student left and the populist right have in common is a belief that the past was better than the future is likely to be.