Macron faces national debate over anniversary of May 1968 protests

The black and white images of students lobbing cobblestones over barricades in the Latin Quarter of Paris in May 1968 are still clung to as defining a significant moment in modern French history.

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But as the country prepares for a raft of exhibitions, books and events to mark the 50-year anniversary of the student and worker revolt, historians are intent on debunking the myths. They want to tell the full story of a nationwide movement that included immigrant workers, women factory staff, doctors, dancers and taxi drivers – who rose up to contest authority in all its forms.

If the underlying theme of May 1968 was speaking out and speaking up — giving voice to the voiceless — certain comparisons to today’s #MeToo movement to speak out against sexual harassment and abuse are being tentatively made. There is astonishment and fury in France against an open-letter signed by the actress Catherine Deneuve and other figures of the older 1968 generation criticising the #MeToo movement. This seems to imply people should think twice about speaking out about harassment, and has raised questions about whether they are out of touch with society’s new battle lines.

The May 1968 protests are remembered for Nanterre students outside Paris railing against rules preventing men and women students visiting each other’s living quarters. But the row about the right to be treated as adults was soon subsumed into much bigger concerns and disillusionment with the leadership of an ageing General de Gaulle in an oppressively hierarchical society.

Over 9 million workers staged wildcat strikes in May 1968, closing factories, occupying workspaces and paralysing France with the largest strike movement in Europe since the second world war. Hierarchy was chipped away but it was a slow, incremental type of revolution — de Gaulle won elections in June 1968, only sidling out of politics the following year.

The lofty power structure of the Fifth Republic he created is now stronger than ever in the shape of the centrist Emmanuel Macron. As for the sexual revolution and changes to a macho society, including abortion rights, it would take several more years to start happening in the 1970s.

The hesitation within Macron’s entourage to say whether or not he will hold an official presidential commemoration of May 1968 reflects the ongoing row over its legacy. The key aspect was the historic worker strikes that changed labour relations and pay conditions. But it’s unclear whether Macron – who walks a delicate line between supporters on the right and left, and who pushed through labour law changes by executive order – wants to celebrate the power of strike action.

Macron, 40, is the first French president born after 1968 and there were rumours he would rather deliver a speech on how utopian thought has been lost in modern politics. Nothing has yet been decided but the right is already complaining. After all, the last right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy promised to “liquidate the heritage of May ‘68,” lamenting how it had challenged France’s moral order.

Historian Philippe Artières has studied newly released government documents from May 1968 for a commemorative exhibition at the National Archives in Paris. He said it was striking to see how people’s ideas for society had been talked about — and listened to — despite the repression of the time. He said: “1968 was a moment when people who had never spoken of their work conditions, life conditions, the way that they were alienated, spoke up and were given a voice. Women, workers, immigrant voices were given a say. This is precisely interesting at this current moment in France, when the whole question of speaking out is central through #MeToo and [its French equivalent] #BalanceTonPorc [Rat out your pig].”

He said: “Today, when we talk about the society changes of May 1968, we’re actually talking about the years that followed. There wasn’t sexual liberation in 1968 France, that is false; it was an extremely macho society, where the girls were expected to make the sandwiches while the boys demonstrated. The advances on women’s rights came later in the 1970s.”

Historian Danielle Tartakowsky said the commemoration year would highlight that May 1968 was not just students but also a workers’ strike, that it was not just Paris, but the whole country, and not just France but global backdrop of movements from Prague to the US.

“We’re slightly prisoners of a myth built around the barricades of the Latin Quarter,” she said. “It’s a far more complex series of events.”