Annus mirabilis

On New Year’s Eve 1967, Charles De Gaulle, the 78-year-old president of France...

On New Year’s Eve 1967, Charles De Gaulle, the 78-year-old president of France, broadcast his annual message to the nation. ‘I greet the year 1968 with serenity,’ he announced, brimming with self-satisfaction. ‘It is impossible to see how France today could be paralysed by crisis as she has been in the past.’ Little did he know. Six months later, De Gaulle was fighting for his political life and the French capital was paralysed after weeks of student riots followed by a sudden general strike. France’s journey from ‘serenity’ to near revolution in the first few weeks of May is the defining event of ‘1968’, a year in which mass protest erupted across the globe, from Paris to Prague, Mexico City to Madrid, Chicago to London…

That youthful idealism, unplanned and ill-defined, carried for a while by a momentum that took everyone by surprise, ran aground almost as quickly as it had flared up. For all the revolutionary ferment of May ‘68, the year ended with De Gaulle still in power, Nixon elected to the White House, and the Vietnam war escalating beyond all predictions as the Americans rained bombs on Laos.

‘In history it is always imprecise to attribute fundamental shifts to one moment,’ writes Kurlansky. ‘But 1968 was the epicentre of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our post-modern media-driven world… It was the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the dawn of a new geopolitical order.’ It was also the beginning of modern protest, and of the many struggles that have followed — from feminism to ecological awareness…

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The spirit of ‘68 endures, perhaps mythical, perhaps as a lingering sense of the possibilities that mass activism once had. ‘If ‘68 does not matter, as the Right claim,’ says Tom Hayden, one of the Chicago activists, ‘then why does it remain so symbolic? People ask me why did it happen when it happened. My emphasis would be on consciousness. It was entirely possible that the American people would have accepted the Vietnam war with all its casualties and all its taxes, just as they supported the Korean war. So, you have to conclude that it was a shift in consciousness that helped bring about its end. That’s what happened when people marched for Civil Rights and against the war, that’s what happened in 1968 when people united in activism: the consciousness of America shifted.’ Perhaps that, in itself, is legacy enough.

Excerpted from Sean O’Hagan’s ‘Everyone to the barricades’, in The Observer, January 20