Volume 12, Number 10 · May 22, 1969
Birthday Party
By E.J. Hobsbawm
Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative
by Daniel Cohn-Bendit
McGraw-Hill, 256 pp., $5.95
The French Student Revolt: The Leaders Speak
by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, by Jean-Pierre Duteuil, by Alain Geismar, by Jacques Sauvageot. with an Interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit by Jean-Paul Sartre
Hill & Wang, 112 pp., $1.50 (paper)
The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval
by Henri Lefebvre
Monthly Review Press, 157 pp., $5.95
Red Flag/Black Flag: French Revolution 1968
by Patrick Seale, by Maureen McConville
Putnam's, 252 pp., $6.95
The Spirit of May
by J.J. Servan-Schreiber
McGraw-Hill, 116 pp., $4.95
Le Mouvement de Mai ou le Communisme Utopique
by Alain Touraine
Editions du Seuil, 290 pp., 21 francs
L'Elysée en Péril
by Philippe Alexandre
Fayard, 333 pp., 22 francs
Of all the many unexpected events during the past eighteen months, a remarkably bad period for prophets, the movement of May 1968 in France was easily the most surprising and, for left-wing intellectuals, probably the most exciting. It seemed to demonstrate what practically no radical over the age of twenty-five, including Mao Tse-tung and Fidel Castro, believed, namely that revolution in an advanced industrial country was possible in conditions of peace, prosperity, and apparent political stability. The revolution did not succeed and, as we shall see, there is much argument over whether it was ever more than faintly possible that it should succeed. Nevertheless, the proudest and most self-confident political regime of Europe was brought to within a half-inch of collapse. There was a day when almost certainly the majority of De Gaulle's cabinet, and quite possibly the general himself, expected defeat. This was achieved by a grass-roots popular movement, without the help of anyone within the power structure. And it was the students who initiated, inspired, and at crucial moments actually represented that movement.
Review, 4751 words
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