Volume 11, Number 3 · August 22, 1968
Two Cheers for the University
By Lawrence Stone
Anyone who was in Paris in May or early June of 1968 will have experienced the sense of revolutionary intoxication, compounded in equal parts of fear and quasi-mystical utopian exaltation, at the shattering of the bonds of orthodoxy, and heightened by a powerful dose of sexual excitement. Those amazing graffiti that spread across the walls of every University building in the Sorbonne and at Paris-Nanterre convey some idea of this apocalyptic atmosphere[1] : 'No God, no Master. I am God.' 'I declare a state of perpetual happiness.' 'The Imagination seizes power.' 'We are all German Jews.' 'The more I make love, the more I want to make the revolution. The more I make the revolution, the more I want to make love.' These are the authentic witnesses of the revolutionary spirit at its most frenetic, a spirit which must have been present in the streets of Paris in 1789, 1848, and 1870, and in Petrograd in 1919. Few of the published reports have given an adequate impression of the true character of the shock-waves that were—and are still—running through the French university system.
Feature, 1981 words
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