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1968 and the Meaning of Democracy CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Digital Commons @ Assumption College Digital Commons @ Assumption University Political Science Department Faculty Works Political Science Department 2008 1968 and the Meaning of Democracy Daniel J. Mahoney Assumption College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.assumption.edu/political-science-faculty Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Mahoney, Daniel J. "1968 and the Meaning of Democracy." The Intercollegiate Review 43.2 (Fall 2008): 4-13. https://home.isi.org/1968-and-meaning-democracy. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Political Science Department at Digital Commons @ Assumption University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Political Science Department Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Assumption University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Daniel J. Mahoney 1968 and the Meaning of Democracy During a recent visit to France, I had an was May 1968. Some of this is the self-in- opportunity to witness the ongoing French dulgence of a generation that is no longer commemorations of the “May events” that so young. Some of it is compensation by a shook that country to the core forty years Left that now reluctantly admits that revo- ago. Parisian bookstores prominently dis- lution, even of a “mimetic” kind, is no lon- played a massive literature on those events, ger a serious option for France and Europe. while magazines were fi lled with nostal- But the “commemorative” character of the gic evocations of the three or four weeks French response to the fortieth anniver- that are said to have changed the world. sary of the May events risks obscuring the Le Monde, the house journal of the estab- farcical dimensions of that eruption; more lishment Left, went so far as to reproduce, seriously, it risks obscuring 1968’s truly each day, the front page of the newspaper revolutionary and ideological dimensions on the parallel day in May 1968. Those as well. Lost in the celebration of 1968 as old front pages perfectly captured both the birth pangs of an unproblematic “post- the obligatory leftism and the indulgence modern democracy” is a concrete feel for toward “Youth” that dominated that ven- the nature of the event itself. erable paper’s response to the implosion of the French social and political order. One article by Maurice Duverger was A Global Phenomenon representative of the atmosphere of 1968: We often forget that “1968” was a truly that famous political scientist cheerfully global phenomenon. Americans easily re- seconded the student movement’s call for call Berkeley and Columbia, and Europe- the abolition of exams, since examina- ans recall Paris and the Sorbonne. But that tions took professors away from precious momentous year also saw unrest in Dakar, scientifi c research and at the same time Mexico City, Tokyo, and elsewhere: the reinforced the alienation of the young. In the giddy, carnival-like atmosphere of the Daniel J. Mahoney is Professor of Politics at time, this passed for serious analysis. Assumption College in Worcester, MA. He is the Today, a majority of the French (or at author, most recently, of Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Mo- least of the French intellectual class)—and dernity (ISI Books) and editor (with Edward E. not all of them on the Left—look back Ericson, Jr.) of The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and nostalgically to the “turning point” that Essential Writings, 1947-2005 (ISI Books). 4 the intercollegiate review / Fall 2008 Daniel J. Mahoney / 1968 and the Meaning of Democracy rise of a revolutionary New Left through- structures” in the years immediately before out the Western world, and in a different 1968. Everywhere an ideology of liberation key the quasi-miraculous “Prague Spring” challenged the old bourgeois ethos of self- in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia. The command and self-control. “1968” was in latter gave undue hope to some on the Left some important respects an explosion in a that Leninist-Stalinist tyranny could be dramatic process already well under way transformed into “socialism with a human rather than the unanticipated announce- face.” ment of a new world. There were both general and particu- lar causes at work. “1968” surely had deep roots in cultural and social developments May 1968 that were in the process of transforming Despite these major social and cultur- the entire Western world. After the Second al transformations, nothing in France Vatican Council (1962-1965), for example, seemed particularly out of the ordinary on the Roman Catholic Church suffered the eve of May 1968.1 No one anticipated from self-infl icted wounds. That hoary that ongoing disputes about the organiza- institution transformed itself seemingly tion of the French university system would overnight from an authoritative bastion give rise to momentous social and politi- of traditional wisdom to a church in appar- ent freefall. Its “pro- gressivist” elements did not hesitate “to kneel before the world,” cel- ebrating socialism and revolution, secular hu- manitarianism, and every “democratic” de- velopment in society at large. In America, the moral promise of the civil rights movement, Paris, May 1968: violence at the carnival rooted in an appeal to American principles of liberty and equal- cal upheavals. Unrest at the University of ity bolstered by biblical religion, were co- Nanterre, fueled by the activism of anar- opted by the Black Power movement and chist revolutionaries led by Daniel Cohn- other manifestations of identity politics. Bendit, soon spread to the Sorbonne. In The Women’s Liberation movement and the days after May 3, that august institu- the recently manufactured birth control tion was more or less commandeered by pill (it was introduced in France in 1967) student radicals. Students clashed with conspired, for better or worse, to sever sex- police even as they—and sympathetic uality from a natural order and individual professors—“contested” the traditional liberty from its larger familial and social structures of state and society. Student contexts. In France, social institutions as protesters combined violence with a festive diverse as the Church and the Boy Scouts atmosphere celebrating their emancipation scrambled to adopt less hierarchical “power from traditional educational obligations the intercollegiate review / Fall 2008 5 Daniel J. Mahoney / 1968 and the Meaning of Democracy and social and cultural restraints. In the It took another couple of weeks (and three face of this rapidly deteriorating situation “nights of the barricades”) for order to (and of public opinion’s remarkable indul- be restored to the Sorbonne and the Left gence toward the student “revolutionar- Bank. In the elections at the end of June, ies”), the government of Prime Minister the Gaullists for the fi rst time won an ab- Pompidou began to lose nerve. solute majority in the National Assembly. The initial student phase of the May Things had come full circle. events was followed by a nation-wide gen- We have noted that revolutionaries of eral strike (of up to ten million workers) the Left (Trotskyites and Maoists of vari- that lasted two weeks and shut down the ous stripes) played a major role in radical- economic life of the country. This second, izing the student movement. These sub- “economic” phase of the crisis was followed terranean revolutionary “groupuscules” by a “political phase” that lasted from outmaneuvered the Communist Party and May 27 until May 30. For the fi rst time, it claimed to speak for the young as a whole. looked like the strong, self-respecting con- Some of these militants (André Glucks- stitutional order inaugurated by Charles mann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and the other de Gaulle in 1958 might collapse under the “new philosophers” of media fame come to combined assaults of a student revolution, mind) later broke with revolutionary ide- a general strike, and the machinations of ology and became vocal defenders of “the leftist political forces. A takeover by the rights of man.” These soixante-huitards Communist Party and other “popular” (’68ers) now tend to read their own in- forces became a real possibility for the fi rst tellectual and political trajectory into the time. It was only on May 30 that France nature of the event itself. They remain began to step back from the abyss. partisans of 1968 even in their new cen- After initial hesitations—and a lacklus- trist or even conservative incarnations. ter television address on May 24—Presi- But in truth there is an element of bad dent de Gaulle seized the initiative with a faith and wishful thinking informing the truly decisive radio address to the nation “libertarian” reading of 1968. The “liber- on May 30, 1968.2 He announced his de- tarianism” of 1968 directed nearly all its cision to dissolve the National Assembly anti-authoritarian ire at bourgeois society and to call for elections. He denounced and was remarkably indulgent toward the the “intimidation, intoxication, and tyr- totalitarianism of the Left. The “Marxist anny” exercised by various revolutionary consensus” so abundantly on display that groups as well as the danger posed by a year did not at the time refl ect the slightest “party which is a totalitarian enterprise.” clarity about the real nature of communist He lamented the fact that as a result of this totalitarianism. That was to come later, intimidation teachers were prevented from under the impact of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag teaching, students from studying, and Archipelago, a work that had a much more workers from working. And he reassured dramatic impact in France than anywhere the French people that “the Republic will else in the Western world. not abdicate.” Hundreds of thousands of citizens responded to de Gaulle’s radio ad- dress by descending on the Champs Ély- Aron’s Witness sées for a massive rally in support of the In retrospect, it is easy to forget the mas- Republic.
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