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May '68 and Its Afterlives
During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications.
Kristin Ross shows how the current official memory of May '68 came to serve a political agenda antithetical to the movement's aspirations. She examines the roles played by sociologists, repentant ex-student leaders, and the mainstream media in giving what was a political event a predominantly cultural and ethical meaning. Recovering the political language of May '68 through the tracts, pamphlets, and documentary film footage of the era, Ross reveals how the original movement, concerned above all with the question of equality, gained a new and counterfeit history, one that erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers from the picture, and eliminated all traces of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, and the influences of Algeria and Vietnam. May '68 and Its Afterlives is especially timely given the rise of a new mass political movement opposing global capitalism, from labor strikes and anti-McDonald's protests in France to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.
Kristin Ross shows how the current official memory of May '68 came to serve a political agenda antithetical to the movement's aspirations. She examines the roles played by sociologists, repentant ex-student leaders, and the mainstream media in giving what was a political event a predominantly cultural and ethical meaning. Recovering the political language of May '68 through the tracts, pamphlets, and documentary film footage of the era, Ross reveals how the original movement, concerned above all with the question of equality, gained a new and counterfeit history, one that erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers from the picture, and eliminated all traces of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, and the influences of Algeria and Vietnam. May '68 and Its Afterlives is especially timely given the rise of a new mass political movement opposing global capitalism, from labor strikes and anti-McDonald's protests in France to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.
247 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 2002
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About the author
Kristin Ross
26 books37 followersKristin Ross is a professor of comparative literature at New York University. She is the author of numerous books, including Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture and May '68 and its Afterlives.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 16, 2015
This is quite a good book, interesting and sophisticated, though at times somewhat dense and jargony (hence the lost star) -- definitely written from a 'radical' perspective.
Ross is attempting to study not so much the nature of May '68 (as such), as its roots (in the Algerian War) and, more importantly, its recuperation (Afterlives) by the Neoliberals (from 1975-1988 - the 20th Anniversary -- and beyond).
According to Ross, the Neoliberals (and its collaborators -- all ex-gauchists -- like July, Cohn-Bendit, etc.) have successfully re-interpreted 1968 not as a Marxist-oriented revolutionary (but anti-Stalinist) movement à bas (Rosa Luxemburg), but as a modernizing 'cultural revolution' unleashing (through the mechanism of the 'Generation of '68 and its media stars) the individualism that allowed France, a backwards nation at the end of WWII, to modernize in a Neoliberal, globalist (and 'progressive') direction). She opposes this interpretation (which is ethical rather than political), being firmly situated in a radical critique of it.
She is very smart, though, and the book is interesting and well worth reading.
You can download it here: http://angg.twu.net/tmp/ross__may_68_...
Ross is attempting to study not so much the nature of May '68 (as such), as its roots (in the Algerian War) and, more importantly, its recuperation (Afterlives) by the Neoliberals (from 1975-1988 - the 20th Anniversary -- and beyond).
According to Ross, the Neoliberals (and its collaborators -- all ex-gauchists -- like July, Cohn-Bendit, etc.) have successfully re-interpreted 1968 not as a Marxist-oriented revolutionary (but anti-Stalinist) movement à bas (Rosa Luxemburg), but as a modernizing 'cultural revolution' unleashing (through the mechanism of the 'Generation of '68 and its media stars) the individualism that allowed France, a backwards nation at the end of WWII, to modernize in a Neoliberal, globalist (and 'progressive') direction). She opposes this interpretation (which is ethical rather than political), being firmly situated in a radical critique of it.
She is very smart, though, and the book is interesting and well worth reading.
You can download it here: http://angg.twu.net/tmp/ross__may_68_...
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July 28, 2022This quickly became one of the best political/historical investigatory works I have ever read, and I suspect one of the best books I will ever read on the subject of May ’68 events. Kristin Ross doesn’t merely attempt to answer the question of “What happened?” in May ’68, but also why the events of May have been obscured and convoluted, devided between the extreme poles of “Nothing happened” and “Everything happened at the same time”. Between these two poles, adopted by politicians and historians, lies an immense sea of narratives and points of view that is almost systematically ignored, both in and outside of academia. Ross retrieves vital testimonies by workers, students, activists, philosophers and writers in order to restore the deliberately obscured dimension of May events: The radical political aspirations. Efforts to depoliticize May seems to be the major feature of most revisionist narratives surrounding it.
Gradually, by drawing from the accounts of various figures involved in the events, Ross makes the case for May events as revolutionary, as an active and splendid attempt in reaching equality, beyond time, space and social confinements. Furthermore, an intriguing aspect of her investigation is to ignite the trail of political events that lead to mass upheaval and dissent in May, in opposition to the dominant narratives that have tried (and succeeded, to a large degree) to isolate May as a single instance of cultural and philosophical outburst among students. Among the political events are the Algerian and Vietnam war, how they were perceived both by students and workers, and the phenomenal meeting that happened between these two key figures in universities, factories and the streets (‘a solidarity that was not sympathy’). As put by Dominique Lecourt,
Long after the fracas of 1958 and the sound of boots that had accompanied the return to power of General de Gaulle, the imminence of a fascist ‘coup’ kept us on alert. And the OAS bombs, in those blue nights, like the almost daily combats on the rue Saint-Jacques, mobilised the most pacifists among us.
Ross drags the revisionist spotlight from the courtyard of Sorbonne to the factories, the streets, the bookstores and more importantly, other cities besides Paris. Considering prevailing narrative of ‘individualist, hedonistic and rebellious youths making a hippie fuss’, the efforts by Ross to marshal plenty of evidence to the contrary is extremely valuable. She quotes Raymond Aron, who said youths rebel ‘like rats or other animals, when forced to live at an excessive density in a confined space’ and remarks sarcastically that this dehumanizing vocabulary had been ‘underused since the time of the Paris Commune’. Aron, despite posing as an anti-Gaullist, had nonetheless supported de Gaulle’s call to arms at the end of May and marched in solidarity with scores of colonials, neo-fascists, parachutists, and similar guardians of order.
Another interesting aspect of the book is how Ross aspires to enrich her political investigation with cultural aspects. A particularly fascinating instant of this is her writing on the verb matraquer, which had its pre-history in Algeria, entered French general usage, was used increasingly in each decade following 1968, becoming a point of connection, an axis of solidarity between the May insurrectionists. In the third chapter, Ross investigates the assimilation of the soul of May events in the hands of many philosophers and thinkers who sought to steal the ball and reshape the narratives, mostly along the lines of “nothing happened”, and doing so by seeking the media limelight. She cites Deleuze (himself active in ’68 events) writing in 1977:
the theme that was already present in the first books: the hatred of ‘68. It was about who could best spit on ‘68. It is in function of that hatred that they constructed their subject of enunciation: ‘We, as those who made ‘68 (??), we can tell you that it was stupid, and we won’t do it again.
At the end of the chapter, Ross succinctly posits:
There’s much more to say about this book. Every single page was captivating in its own way. The prose is at times a little complicated, but generally it’s not a difficult book to get through. The book flows from an introduction that seeks to clarify that “something” happened in May, to the following chapter aiming to marry the struggle of students and workers and the crisis of representation, and finally the revisionist narratives that sprang up in the following events, but these themes bleed into each other, making the entire book much more cohesive and persuasive.
During May nothing happened politically; its effects were purely cultural—so went the consensus evaluation, the story learned, authorized, imposed, celebrated publicly, and commemorated, in print and in the television shows…
Gradually, by drawing from the accounts of various figures involved in the events, Ross makes the case for May events as revolutionary, as an active and splendid attempt in reaching equality, beyond time, space and social confinements. Furthermore, an intriguing aspect of her investigation is to ignite the trail of political events that lead to mass upheaval and dissent in May, in opposition to the dominant narratives that have tried (and succeeded, to a large degree) to isolate May as a single instance of cultural and philosophical outburst among students. Among the political events are the Algerian and Vietnam war, how they were perceived both by students and workers, and the phenomenal meeting that happened between these two key figures in universities, factories and the streets (‘a solidarity that was not sympathy’). As put by Dominique Lecourt,
Long after the fracas of 1958 and the sound of boots that had accompanied the return to power of General de Gaulle, the imminence of a fascist ‘coup’ kept us on alert. And the OAS bombs, in those blue nights, like the almost daily combats on the rue Saint-Jacques, mobilised the most pacifists among us.
Ross drags the revisionist spotlight from the courtyard of Sorbonne to the factories, the streets, the bookstores and more importantly, other cities besides Paris. Considering prevailing narrative of ‘individualist, hedonistic and rebellious youths making a hippie fuss’, the efforts by Ross to marshal plenty of evidence to the contrary is extremely valuable. She quotes Raymond Aron, who said youths rebel ‘like rats or other animals, when forced to live at an excessive density in a confined space’ and remarks sarcastically that this dehumanizing vocabulary had been ‘underused since the time of the Paris Commune’. Aron, despite posing as an anti-Gaullist, had nonetheless supported de Gaulle’s call to arms at the end of May and marched in solidarity with scores of colonials, neo-fascists, parachutists, and similar guardians of order.
Another interesting aspect of the book is how Ross aspires to enrich her political investigation with cultural aspects. A particularly fascinating instant of this is her writing on the verb matraquer, which had its pre-history in Algeria, entered French general usage, was used increasingly in each decade following 1968, becoming a point of connection, an axis of solidarity between the May insurrectionists. In the third chapter, Ross investigates the assimilation of the soul of May events in the hands of many philosophers and thinkers who sought to steal the ball and reshape the narratives, mostly along the lines of “nothing happened”, and doing so by seeking the media limelight. She cites Deleuze (himself active in ’68 events) writing in 1977:
the theme that was already present in the first books: the hatred of ‘68. It was about who could best spit on ‘68. It is in function of that hatred that they constructed their subject of enunciation: ‘We, as those who made ‘68 (??), we can tell you that it was stupid, and we won’t do it again.
At the end of the chapter, Ross succinctly posits:
The attitude of critique or its very possibility – the soul of ‘68 – has at this moment been lost. The enthusiastic conversion by some ex-gauchistes to the values of the market has been successfully disguised as a ‘cultural’ or ‘spiritual’ revolution, and May, it seems, can be renarrated now as the founding moment of this trajectory.
There’s much more to say about this book. Every single page was captivating in its own way. The prose is at times a little complicated, but generally it’s not a difficult book to get through. The book flows from an introduction that seeks to clarify that “something” happened in May, to the following chapter aiming to marry the struggle of students and workers and the crisis of representation, and finally the revisionist narratives that sprang up in the following events, but these themes bleed into each other, making the entire book much more cohesive and persuasive.
May 3, 2010
About damned time someone rescued "May '68" from Daniel Cohn-Bendit, et al. Ross opens up "May" beyond May and the Latin Quarter, and discusses the implications afterlives that have both limited the event temporally and spatially have for contemporary debates.
I found Ross's discussion of how the third-worldism of the 1960s has given way to a discourse on "human rights" that denies agency and voice to those in the third world particularly compelling and important.
I found Ross's discussion of how the third-worldism of the 1960s has given way to a discourse on "human rights" that denies agency and voice to those in the third world particularly compelling and important.
March 31, 2023
Great look at how May 1968 started and lasted long after the fall of barricades. Also great critical approach to the development of New Philosophers movement and anti-third worldism.
May 6, 2017
Ross argued that, in French historical discourse, the French state, allied with the few spokesmen of the insurrection, worked to defang the largest general strike in the “overdeveloped” world after World War II, and the largest in French history, three times the size of any of the largest strikes in the Popular Front era in 1936. The 6 week May-June 1968 general strike, which was started as university occupations against capitalism, consumerism, American imperialism, and the traditionalist Gaullist regime, quickly spread to factories where workers occupied their place of work. At its height, the French economy ground to a total hault, with nothing at all getting done, and nearly 11 million people involved. The Communist backed unions helped end the strike, as it had its workers report back and the students eventually dissipated into summer recess. During “May ‘68”, artists became part of the street actions, and all hierarchies melted away. Ross argued that the revolution was a sort of Luxembergist building of socialism from below, also a sort of anarchism. Ross also argues in 4 chapters that in the years afterwards, repentant ex-Maoists helped distance themselves from the revolution and work to defang its memory, calling it a cultural or spiritual revolution rather than political one, since no one seized power nor did it change anything in the day to day. Ross argues strongly that this argument takes away agency from the millions of participants who participated in the weeks of breakdown of traditional social institutions. Simply put, it was in the interest of those in power to forget May ’68, and indeed, footage of violence of those days did not appear on French television for nearly twenty years. The years of the Algerian War had slowly built agitation amongst youth, which spread out to workers.
Key Themes and Concepts:
-Ross uses “biological” (or personalized) and “sociological” approaches to looking at public memory of May ’68. She argues strongly that sociological views have taken the militancy of those days out.
-Anti-authoritarians and anti-establishment spokespeople of the rising became neoliberals and therefore sought to distance themselves from revolutionary spirit of May ’68.
-France imported countercultural music from England and the United States, but instead binged on philosophy as a form of rebellion.
-The spirit of May ’68 was against specialization, rigid hierarchy, and sought to blur all lines, of which Maoist notions of “going to the people” were heavily influential in the years afterwards.
-TV, mail, and all other forms of communication were shut down, reading skyrocketed. Art was everywhere, totally grassroots and organic.
Key Themes and Concepts:
-Ross uses “biological” (or personalized) and “sociological” approaches to looking at public memory of May ’68. She argues strongly that sociological views have taken the militancy of those days out.
-Anti-authoritarians and anti-establishment spokespeople of the rising became neoliberals and therefore sought to distance themselves from revolutionary spirit of May ’68.
-France imported countercultural music from England and the United States, but instead binged on philosophy as a form of rebellion.
-The spirit of May ’68 was against specialization, rigid hierarchy, and sought to blur all lines, of which Maoist notions of “going to the people” were heavily influential in the years afterwards.
-TV, mail, and all other forms of communication were shut down, reading skyrocketed. Art was everywhere, totally grassroots and organic.
December 18, 2019
Useful as a window into how the French, particularly academic sociologists and former activists, set about containing the meanings of the May '68 uprising by limiting it to a "generational" conflict with an emphasis on cultural issues. In the process, the workers and Algerians, both of whom played central roles in the long history leading to '68, more or less vanish from the story. That's important to know, but once she establishes that, Ross has a tendency to fall back on academic jargon and a privileging of insular Marxist elements of the situation. If you're okay with very dense theoretical writing, probably a four star book.
October 30, 2020
1968 was a turbulent year on college campuses, not just in America and England, but all around the world as well. In Paris, during the month of May, students took to the streets to demonstrate, write graffiti all over the walls, and hand out pamphlets outlining the need for a radical transformation of society. The wildfire spread into the factories and workers called for a general strike that extended outsider of Paris to outlying cities and even caught on with some farmers in rural areas of France. Kristin Ross, in May ‘68 and Its Afterlives, examines the buildup to the uprising and how the narrative about the event has supposedly been hijacked by right-wing ideologues ever since.
This book is very much a work of academic Critical Theory. Ross writes in a roundabout way and never approaches her subject matter in a direct manner. In her case, that is not a good thing. The actual meaning of this book is buried under layers of intellectual acrobatics and postmodernist jargon that come across more as filler than as substantial argumentation. She includes the usual claptrap about performativity, subaltern voices, the deconstruction of signs, framing, and the Other with a capital O. She writes about the semiotics of police clubs used to beat demonstrators, analyses the difference between the words “we” and “I”, and discusses lot of stuff about French television and how the NGO Medecins Sans Frontiers does not actually help anybody in conflict zones because they reinforce the power structures of capitalism. I can just imagine some Iraqi boy who has just had his arms and legs blown off by a bomb saying to a MSF doctor, “Please don’t treat my wounds because I don’t want to be unwittingly supporting your oppressive system. Go away and come back when you have become sufficiently Marxist.” And of course all of this is seasoned with postmodernist name dropping; we get a healthy dose of seasoning in the form of quotes and paraphrases from Foucault, Bordiou, Althusser, Fanon, and Heidegger. Round up the usual suspects and call in Alan Sokal to straighten out this mess.
When all the academic fluff is cleared out, there are some definite themes to this whirlwind of confusion. Two main roots of May 1968 are identified. One is the activism that grew in response to the Algerian War. Another is the return of the conservative Charles de Gaulle and his quasi-fascistic militarization of the French police force. In the latter case, Ross demonstrates why the police responded to the demonstrations in the way they did. However, she does not draw a strong link between those two causes and the uprising itself. That does not necessarily mean the links were not there, it just means that she does not make a strong connection when she should have. This is a flaw in her argument.
Such a flaw could have been avoided if she had actually addressed the events of May 1968 more directly. She gives some graphic descriptions of police brutality but little else in terms of what actually occurred. She glosses over the beginning, middle, and end of that month’s happenings. In fact saying too much about May ‘68 might actually weaken her interpretation. She fails to mention that the uprising began when students protested the visitation rules of their dorms. The students wanted males and females to be allowed more time and freedom for inter-gender mixing. To be blunt, they were a bunch of horny teenagers who wanted to make it easier to have sex while living on campus. The student demonstrations moved off campus and into the streets and the uprising took on a life of its own; it is possible a lot of the people joining in had no idea how all this started. There are a lot of people who will march along with any crowd that comes their way. Ross suppresses this information from her narrative, probably because it is not PC enough for what she wants to portray. A political movement started by heterosexuals for heterosexual purposes does not exactly mesh with Critical Theory, regardless of the direction the demonstrations went in later on.
Kristin Ross’s central interpretation of May ‘68 is that it was an assertion of communist values. She mentions the presence of Stalinist, leninist, and Trotskyist elements in the crowds but she sees this overall as a Maoist uprising. This is because after the students took to the streets, the factory workers’ general strike began. The demonstrators went to the factories to lend their support to the laborers and an alliance was formed. This stage of the movement was Maoist in nature because the intellectuals and ideologues joined forces with the proletariat. According to Marx and Engels, the communist revolution would come about when the factory workers and farmers awoke to their role as historical actors and seized control over their political destiny. But Ross does not address the possibility that the communists were piggybacking on the demonstration and trying to steer it in their own direction. She does, however, admit that the general strike was not born out of ideology; the workers went on strike simply because they wanted a pay raise and more vacation time.
In 1978 and 1988, television shows were aired commemorating May 1968. According to Ross, these narratives were driven by conservative, pro-capitalist public intellectuals. Their interpretation of the event was that it was all about people expressing their personal freedom. There was no mention of communism or any other ideology, for that matter. The majority of this book is about how wrong those right-wing intellectuals are. This book is more of an attack on their agenda than any thing else. Ross uses May ‘68 as a stick to beat the conservatives with rather than saying anything informative about the original event. The conservative capitalists deserve every beating they get but the problem here is that Ross does the same thing she accuses them of doing; by interpreting May ‘68 through the narrow lens of Maoist communism she is cherry picking and ignoring the entire spectrum of other possible interpretations. There were so many participants in that month of demonstrations that it is a truism to say that it meant many different things to many different people. Individual expression can be one amongst a wide range of variable interpretations and excluding that because it is not her favored interpretation is a deliberate distortion.
Ross wants to seize control over the narrative surrounding May 1968. She wants to dominate it for the sake of furthering her own political agenda. While she does an adequate job of throwing dirt in the faces of capitalist intellectuals, her own defense of May ‘68 as a Moist political movement is underdeveloped. One deficiency is that she fails to demonstrate a strong connection between the left-wing alliance between the proletariat and the intellectuals that had any impact in the months to come. She does mention some journalists who started a commune with disgruntled farmers and squatters. This passage about an obscure political experiment was the most fascinating part of the book. But she never comes to terms with why the alliance between the laborers and intellectuals fizzled out by the summer of 1968. Another problem she has in defending her ideas is that the left has not offered a counter-narrative to the conservative one being put forth for so many years. It seems a little shallow to accuse the right-wing of conducting a monologue about the event when the people on the left did not seize the opportunity to debate the issue with them. You have to wonder why the leftist point of view was never wholeheartedly expressed. If someone speaks to you and you refuse to answer, that is your fault, not theirs. It actually sounds like the leftists simply moved on to other, more significant, things.
The reasoning in May '68 and Its Afterlives isn't good and the writing is just plain bad. I am in agreement with Noam Chomsky’s dismissal of postmodern intellectualism. If you have something to say then just say it. You don’t benefit in any way from confusing your audience. If you were to remove all the academic nonsense from this book, you would be left with about 40 pages of substantive material. The rest is just filler and fluff meant to impress rooms full of insular college students who can’t see Critical Theory clearly for what it is: a pseudo-intellectual chess game that is completely inconsequential outside the universities. If leftists really want to save the world from capitalism, they should abandon this type of writing and start speaking to ordinary people in a language they can understand. And if you really want to learn about France’s May 1968 movement, ignore this book. The Wikipedia page is far more comprehensive and informative.
This book is very much a work of academic Critical Theory. Ross writes in a roundabout way and never approaches her subject matter in a direct manner. In her case, that is not a good thing. The actual meaning of this book is buried under layers of intellectual acrobatics and postmodernist jargon that come across more as filler than as substantial argumentation. She includes the usual claptrap about performativity, subaltern voices, the deconstruction of signs, framing, and the Other with a capital O. She writes about the semiotics of police clubs used to beat demonstrators, analyses the difference between the words “we” and “I”, and discusses lot of stuff about French television and how the NGO Medecins Sans Frontiers does not actually help anybody in conflict zones because they reinforce the power structures of capitalism. I can just imagine some Iraqi boy who has just had his arms and legs blown off by a bomb saying to a MSF doctor, “Please don’t treat my wounds because I don’t want to be unwittingly supporting your oppressive system. Go away and come back when you have become sufficiently Marxist.” And of course all of this is seasoned with postmodernist name dropping; we get a healthy dose of seasoning in the form of quotes and paraphrases from Foucault, Bordiou, Althusser, Fanon, and Heidegger. Round up the usual suspects and call in Alan Sokal to straighten out this mess.
When all the academic fluff is cleared out, there are some definite themes to this whirlwind of confusion. Two main roots of May 1968 are identified. One is the activism that grew in response to the Algerian War. Another is the return of the conservative Charles de Gaulle and his quasi-fascistic militarization of the French police force. In the latter case, Ross demonstrates why the police responded to the demonstrations in the way they did. However, she does not draw a strong link between those two causes and the uprising itself. That does not necessarily mean the links were not there, it just means that she does not make a strong connection when she should have. This is a flaw in her argument.
Such a flaw could have been avoided if she had actually addressed the events of May 1968 more directly. She gives some graphic descriptions of police brutality but little else in terms of what actually occurred. She glosses over the beginning, middle, and end of that month’s happenings. In fact saying too much about May ‘68 might actually weaken her interpretation. She fails to mention that the uprising began when students protested the visitation rules of their dorms. The students wanted males and females to be allowed more time and freedom for inter-gender mixing. To be blunt, they were a bunch of horny teenagers who wanted to make it easier to have sex while living on campus. The student demonstrations moved off campus and into the streets and the uprising took on a life of its own; it is possible a lot of the people joining in had no idea how all this started. There are a lot of people who will march along with any crowd that comes their way. Ross suppresses this information from her narrative, probably because it is not PC enough for what she wants to portray. A political movement started by heterosexuals for heterosexual purposes does not exactly mesh with Critical Theory, regardless of the direction the demonstrations went in later on.
Kristin Ross’s central interpretation of May ‘68 is that it was an assertion of communist values. She mentions the presence of Stalinist, leninist, and Trotskyist elements in the crowds but she sees this overall as a Maoist uprising. This is because after the students took to the streets, the factory workers’ general strike began. The demonstrators went to the factories to lend their support to the laborers and an alliance was formed. This stage of the movement was Maoist in nature because the intellectuals and ideologues joined forces with the proletariat. According to Marx and Engels, the communist revolution would come about when the factory workers and farmers awoke to their role as historical actors and seized control over their political destiny. But Ross does not address the possibility that the communists were piggybacking on the demonstration and trying to steer it in their own direction. She does, however, admit that the general strike was not born out of ideology; the workers went on strike simply because they wanted a pay raise and more vacation time.
In 1978 and 1988, television shows were aired commemorating May 1968. According to Ross, these narratives were driven by conservative, pro-capitalist public intellectuals. Their interpretation of the event was that it was all about people expressing their personal freedom. There was no mention of communism or any other ideology, for that matter. The majority of this book is about how wrong those right-wing intellectuals are. This book is more of an attack on their agenda than any thing else. Ross uses May ‘68 as a stick to beat the conservatives with rather than saying anything informative about the original event. The conservative capitalists deserve every beating they get but the problem here is that Ross does the same thing she accuses them of doing; by interpreting May ‘68 through the narrow lens of Maoist communism she is cherry picking and ignoring the entire spectrum of other possible interpretations. There were so many participants in that month of demonstrations that it is a truism to say that it meant many different things to many different people. Individual expression can be one amongst a wide range of variable interpretations and excluding that because it is not her favored interpretation is a deliberate distortion.
Ross wants to seize control over the narrative surrounding May 1968. She wants to dominate it for the sake of furthering her own political agenda. While she does an adequate job of throwing dirt in the faces of capitalist intellectuals, her own defense of May ‘68 as a Moist political movement is underdeveloped. One deficiency is that she fails to demonstrate a strong connection between the left-wing alliance between the proletariat and the intellectuals that had any impact in the months to come. She does mention some journalists who started a commune with disgruntled farmers and squatters. This passage about an obscure political experiment was the most fascinating part of the book. But she never comes to terms with why the alliance between the laborers and intellectuals fizzled out by the summer of 1968. Another problem she has in defending her ideas is that the left has not offered a counter-narrative to the conservative one being put forth for so many years. It seems a little shallow to accuse the right-wing of conducting a monologue about the event when the people on the left did not seize the opportunity to debate the issue with them. You have to wonder why the leftist point of view was never wholeheartedly expressed. If someone speaks to you and you refuse to answer, that is your fault, not theirs. It actually sounds like the leftists simply moved on to other, more significant, things.
The reasoning in May '68 and Its Afterlives isn't good and the writing is just plain bad. I am in agreement with Noam Chomsky’s dismissal of postmodern intellectualism. If you have something to say then just say it. You don’t benefit in any way from confusing your audience. If you were to remove all the academic nonsense from this book, you would be left with about 40 pages of substantive material. The rest is just filler and fluff meant to impress rooms full of insular college students who can’t see Critical Theory clearly for what it is: a pseudo-intellectual chess game that is completely inconsequential outside the universities. If leftists really want to save the world from capitalism, they should abandon this type of writing and start speaking to ordinary people in a language they can understand. And if you really want to learn about France’s May 1968 movement, ignore this book. The Wikipedia page is far more comprehensive and informative.
July 3, 2018
Other reviews here have covered Ross' arguments well, so I'll just share a couple of my favourite quotes from the book.
1. “May ’68 had very little to do with the social group- students or “youth” who were its instigators. It had much more to do with the flight from social determinations, with displacements that took people outside of their location in society.” (2-3)
2. “Discourse has been produced, but its primary effect has been to liquidate… or render obscure, the history of May.” (3)
3. “I am less interested in the revisionist terms of the “official story”- whether it be the great rebellion by angry youth against the restrictions of their fathers or its corollary, the emergence of a new social category called “youth”. I am more concerned with how that particular story came to prevail, how the two contradictory methods or tendencies, the experiential and the structural, converged to formulate categories- “generation”, for example- whose effects were ultimately depoliticizing.” (6)
4. “The principal idea of May was a union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle. Another way of saying this is that the political subjectivity which emerged in May was a relational one, built around a polemics of equality.”
“The experience of equality, as it was lived by many in the course of the movement- neither as a goal nor a future agenda but as something occurring in the present and verified as such- constitutes an enormous challenge for subsequent representation.” (11)
5. “In May, everything happened politically- provided, of course, that we understand ‘politics’ as bearing little or no relation to… electoral politics.” (15)
1. “May ’68 had very little to do with the social group- students or “youth” who were its instigators. It had much more to do with the flight from social determinations, with displacements that took people outside of their location in society.” (2-3)
2. “Discourse has been produced, but its primary effect has been to liquidate… or render obscure, the history of May.” (3)
3. “I am less interested in the revisionist terms of the “official story”- whether it be the great rebellion by angry youth against the restrictions of their fathers or its corollary, the emergence of a new social category called “youth”. I am more concerned with how that particular story came to prevail, how the two contradictory methods or tendencies, the experiential and the structural, converged to formulate categories- “generation”, for example- whose effects were ultimately depoliticizing.” (6)
4. “The principal idea of May was a union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle. Another way of saying this is that the political subjectivity which emerged in May was a relational one, built around a polemics of equality.”
“The experience of equality, as it was lived by many in the course of the movement- neither as a goal nor a future agenda but as something occurring in the present and verified as such- constitutes an enormous challenge for subsequent representation.” (11)
5. “In May, everything happened politically- provided, of course, that we understand ‘politics’ as bearing little or no relation to… electoral politics.” (15)
January 1, 2017
A lucid and convincing challenge to those who attempted to reduce the significance of the events of May '68 in France by compartmentalising and categorizing those who took part. Ross passionately argues against the misrepresentation of the protesters, their background and intentions and advocates for the real significance of those amazing times.
June 1, 2021
As a confirmed soixante-huitard disliker I found this the most convincing case for May I've yet come across, particularly on the lack of any correspondence between the way the event is remembered and what actually happened in May '68 in France, particularly in the 'work' of the New Philosophers axis of the '70s onwards.
January 19, 2021
análisis muy riguroso. muy ameno de leer
January 20, 2015
Three passages from May ’68 and Its Afterlives:
For May ’68 itself was not an artistic moment. It was an event that transpired amid very few images; French television, after all, was on strike. Drawings, political cartoons – by Siné, Willem, Cabu, and others – proliferated; photographs were taken. Only the most “immediate” of artistic techniques, it seems, could keep up with the speed of events. But to say this is already to point out how much politics was exerting a magnetic pull on culture, yanking it out of its specific and specialized realm. For what does it mean that art should suddenly see its purpose as that of keeping apace with events, with achieving a complete contemporaneity with the present and with what is happening around it?
The incommensurability or asymmetry that seems to govern the relation between culture and politics holds true for the ’68 period in France. In fact, that incommensurability is what the event is about: the failure of cultural solutions to provide an answer, the invention and deployment of political forms in direct contestation with existing cultural forms, the exigency of political practices over cultural ones. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the experience of the Beaux-Arts students who occupied their school in mid-May 1968, proclaimed it the revolutionary Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts, and began producing, at breakneck speed, the posters supporting the strike that covered the walls of Paris during those months. The “message” of the majority of posters, stark and direct, was the certification, and at times the imperative, that whatever it was that was happening – the interruption, the strike, the “moving train” – that it simply continue: “Continuons le combat.” “La grève continue.” “Contre offensive: la grève continue.” “Chauffeurs de taxi: la lute continue.” “Maine Montparnasse: la lute continue.” Nothing, that is, in the message aspires to a level of “representing” what was occurring; the goal, rather, is to be at one with – at the same time with, contemporary with – whatever was occurring. Speed, a speedy technique, was of the essence; students learned this soon enough when they abandoned lithography early on because, at ten to fifteen printings an hour, it was far too slow to respond to the needs of a mass movement. Serigraphy, which was light and easy to use, yielded up to 250 printings an hour. Speed and flexible mediums facilitated the absolute interpenetration of art and event achieved by the posters, but speed is not the most important factor in rendering art capable of living the temporality of an event. Writing thirty years later, one of the militants active in the Atelier populaire, Gérard Fromanger, recalls the genesis of the posters in a brief memoir. His title, “Art Is What Makes Life More Interesting Than Art,” goes far in giving a sense of the dizzying opening created when the social refuses to stay “out there,” distinct from art, or when art achieves presentation, rather than representation:
May ’68 was that. Artists no longer in their studios, they no longer work, they can’t work any more because the real is more powerful than their inventions. Naturally, they become militants, me among them. We create the Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts and we make posters. We’re there night and day making posters. The whole country is on strike and we’ve never worked harder in our lives. We’re finally necessary.
Fromanger describes in greater detail the stages in the dismantling of art and artists during May: how, as the mass demonstrations got under way in mid-May, art students first “got down off their horses to gather the flowers,” as the Maoists would say, how they left art behind as they ran from demo to demo. “We artists had been in the movement for ten days, we run into each other at the demos. We had separated from everything we had before. We don’t sleep in the studios… we live in the streets, in the occupied spaces… We no longer paint, we don’t think about it anymore.” The next phase describes a retreat to familiar spaces: “We painters say to ourselves that we have to do something at Beaux-Arts, that we can’t let the buildings be empty, closed up.” An old lithograph machine is located; the first poster, USINE-UNIVERSITE-UNION, is produced immediately. The thought at that point is for someone to run the thirty copies down to a gallery on the rue Dragon to sell them to help the movement. But it is at this point that “the real,” in the shape of the movement, literally intervenes, short-circuiting the steps that art must take to be art in bourgeois culture and hijacking it, so to speak, off that path, bringing it into the now. There is no time, it seems, for the art object to remain a commodity, even one that had been redirected in the service of the movement. On the way to the gallery, the copies are snatched out of the arms of the student carrying them and plastered immediately on the first available wall. The poster becomes a poster.
“Bourgeois culture,” reads the statement that accompanied the founding of the Atelier populaire, “separates and isolates artists from other workers by according them a privileged status. Privilege encloses the artist in an invisible prison. We have decided to transform what we are in society.”
+
On October 17, 1961, the first mass demonstration of the 1960s occurred, organized by the FLN to protest a recent curfew set by the prefect of police that prohibited Algerians in the Paris region from being on the street after 8:30 PM. Informed in advance of the demonstration, the police, along with the CRS and the mobile gendarmerie, are armed with bidules, a longer version of the matraque with greater leverage and range, capable of breaking a skull open in a single swing when adroitly applied. The police have also been virtually exonerated in advance of any “police excesses” that might occur; in the preceding weeks Papon has visited the various commissariats, imparting these messages: “Settle your affairs with the Algerian yourselves. Whatever happens, you’re covered,” and “For one blow, give then back ten.” And, to overcome the scruples of certain more hesitant members of his forces, he adds: “You don’t need to complicate things. Even if the Algerians are not armed, you should think of them always as armed.”
The Algerians – between thirty and forty-thousand men, women and children – are, in fact, unarmed, and the demonstration is peaceful. Many of the Algerians are wearing their best “Sunday” clothes, in the interest of impressing the French and the international communities with their peaceful motives. Nevertheless, police open fire almost immediately. Confrontations occur simultaneously throughout the city wherever the Algerians are concentrated. Police “combat groups” charge the crowd in the main thoroughfares and boulevards, while other police ranks stand behind in the side streets, blocking escape routes and splitting the crowd into small pockets of two or three individuals, each of whom is then surrounded by police, and men and women are methodically clubbed. Along the Seine, police lift unconscious and already dead or dying Algerians and toss them into the river. A document published soon after the massacre by a group of progressive police describes what went on in one part of the city:
At one end of the Neuilly Bridge, police troops, and on the other, CRS riot police, slowly moved toward one another. All the Algerians caught in this immense trap were struck down and systematically thrown into the Seine. At least a hundred of them underwent this treatment. The bodies of the victims floated to the surface daily and bore traces of blows and strangulation.
Some of the arrested men and women are taken to the courtyard of the prefecture of police where, as Pierre Vidal-Baquet reports, “If I believe the testimony of one policeman, gathered immediately after the event by Paul Thibaud and that I’ve often had occasion to evoke since then, Papon had several dozen Algerians beaten [matraqué] to death in front of his eyes in the courtyard of the police prefecture.” Some six thousand others are taken to several sports stadiums reserved by police for that purpose. In all of these places, people die while in custody – of wounds they had already received or of new blows administered by police “welcoming committees” arranged in a kind of gauntlet outside the entrance to the sports arenas.
On the night of October 17, the police publish a communiqué stating that the Algerians had fired on police, who were then forced to return fire. The official death count, originally two, was revised the next morning by Papon’s office to three. The almost total news blackout that surrounded the event makes it very hard to determine the exact number of Algerians – for no police were injured – who actually died. Most knowledgeable estimates put the number at around two hundred.
+
But the real question, I believe, lies elsewhere, outside the parameters of revolution, failed or not. Why did something happen rather than nothing? And what was the nature of the event that occurred? The attention given to the problematics of power has effaced another set problems at issue in May, and 1960s culture more generally, which we might begin to group under the heading of a no less political question – the question of equality. I mean equality not in any objective sense of status, income, function, or the supposedly “equal” dynamics of contracts or reforms, nor as an explicit demand or a program, but rather as something that emerges in the course of the struggle and is verified subjectively, declared and experienced in the here and now as what is, and not what should be. Such an experience lies to the side of “seizing state power;” outside of that story. The narrative of a desired or failed seizure of power, in other words, is a narrative determined by the logic of the state, the story the state tells to itself. For the state, people in the streets are people always already failing to seize state power. In 1968, “seizing state power” was not only part of the state’s narrative, it expressed the state’s informing desire to complete itself – that is, to totally assimilate the everyday to its own necessities. Limiting May ’68 to that story, to the desire or the failure to seize centralized power, has circumscribed the very definition of “the political,” crushing or effacing in the process a political dimension to the events that may in fact have constituted the true threat to the forces of order, the reason for their panic. That dimension lay in a subjectivation enabled by the synchronizing of two very different temporalities: the world of the worker and the world of the student. It lay in the central idea of May ’68: the union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle. It lay in the verification of equality not as any objective of action, but as something that is part and parcel of action, something that emerges in the struggle and is lived and declared as such. In the course of the struggle, practices were developed that demonstrated such a synchronization, that acted to constitute a common – though far from consensual – space and time. And those practices verified the irrelevance of the division of labour – what for Durkheim was nothing more and nothing less that that which holds a society together and guarantees the continuity of its reproduction. As such, these practices form as direct an intervention into the logic and workings of capital as any seizure of state – perhaps more so.
.
For May ’68 itself was not an artistic moment. It was an event that transpired amid very few images; French television, after all, was on strike. Drawings, political cartoons – by Siné, Willem, Cabu, and others – proliferated; photographs were taken. Only the most “immediate” of artistic techniques, it seems, could keep up with the speed of events. But to say this is already to point out how much politics was exerting a magnetic pull on culture, yanking it out of its specific and specialized realm. For what does it mean that art should suddenly see its purpose as that of keeping apace with events, with achieving a complete contemporaneity with the present and with what is happening around it?
The incommensurability or asymmetry that seems to govern the relation between culture and politics holds true for the ’68 period in France. In fact, that incommensurability is what the event is about: the failure of cultural solutions to provide an answer, the invention and deployment of political forms in direct contestation with existing cultural forms, the exigency of political practices over cultural ones. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the experience of the Beaux-Arts students who occupied their school in mid-May 1968, proclaimed it the revolutionary Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts, and began producing, at breakneck speed, the posters supporting the strike that covered the walls of Paris during those months. The “message” of the majority of posters, stark and direct, was the certification, and at times the imperative, that whatever it was that was happening – the interruption, the strike, the “moving train” – that it simply continue: “Continuons le combat.” “La grève continue.” “Contre offensive: la grève continue.” “Chauffeurs de taxi: la lute continue.” “Maine Montparnasse: la lute continue.” Nothing, that is, in the message aspires to a level of “representing” what was occurring; the goal, rather, is to be at one with – at the same time with, contemporary with – whatever was occurring. Speed, a speedy technique, was of the essence; students learned this soon enough when they abandoned lithography early on because, at ten to fifteen printings an hour, it was far too slow to respond to the needs of a mass movement. Serigraphy, which was light and easy to use, yielded up to 250 printings an hour. Speed and flexible mediums facilitated the absolute interpenetration of art and event achieved by the posters, but speed is not the most important factor in rendering art capable of living the temporality of an event. Writing thirty years later, one of the militants active in the Atelier populaire, Gérard Fromanger, recalls the genesis of the posters in a brief memoir. His title, “Art Is What Makes Life More Interesting Than Art,” goes far in giving a sense of the dizzying opening created when the social refuses to stay “out there,” distinct from art, or when art achieves presentation, rather than representation:
May ’68 was that. Artists no longer in their studios, they no longer work, they can’t work any more because the real is more powerful than their inventions. Naturally, they become militants, me among them. We create the Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts and we make posters. We’re there night and day making posters. The whole country is on strike and we’ve never worked harder in our lives. We’re finally necessary.
Fromanger describes in greater detail the stages in the dismantling of art and artists during May: how, as the mass demonstrations got under way in mid-May, art students first “got down off their horses to gather the flowers,” as the Maoists would say, how they left art behind as they ran from demo to demo. “We artists had been in the movement for ten days, we run into each other at the demos. We had separated from everything we had before. We don’t sleep in the studios… we live in the streets, in the occupied spaces… We no longer paint, we don’t think about it anymore.” The next phase describes a retreat to familiar spaces: “We painters say to ourselves that we have to do something at Beaux-Arts, that we can’t let the buildings be empty, closed up.” An old lithograph machine is located; the first poster, USINE-UNIVERSITE-UNION, is produced immediately. The thought at that point is for someone to run the thirty copies down to a gallery on the rue Dragon to sell them to help the movement. But it is at this point that “the real,” in the shape of the movement, literally intervenes, short-circuiting the steps that art must take to be art in bourgeois culture and hijacking it, so to speak, off that path, bringing it into the now. There is no time, it seems, for the art object to remain a commodity, even one that had been redirected in the service of the movement. On the way to the gallery, the copies are snatched out of the arms of the student carrying them and plastered immediately on the first available wall. The poster becomes a poster.
“Bourgeois culture,” reads the statement that accompanied the founding of the Atelier populaire, “separates and isolates artists from other workers by according them a privileged status. Privilege encloses the artist in an invisible prison. We have decided to transform what we are in society.”
+
On October 17, 1961, the first mass demonstration of the 1960s occurred, organized by the FLN to protest a recent curfew set by the prefect of police that prohibited Algerians in the Paris region from being on the street after 8:30 PM. Informed in advance of the demonstration, the police, along with the CRS and the mobile gendarmerie, are armed with bidules, a longer version of the matraque with greater leverage and range, capable of breaking a skull open in a single swing when adroitly applied. The police have also been virtually exonerated in advance of any “police excesses” that might occur; in the preceding weeks Papon has visited the various commissariats, imparting these messages: “Settle your affairs with the Algerian yourselves. Whatever happens, you’re covered,” and “For one blow, give then back ten.” And, to overcome the scruples of certain more hesitant members of his forces, he adds: “You don’t need to complicate things. Even if the Algerians are not armed, you should think of them always as armed.”
The Algerians – between thirty and forty-thousand men, women and children – are, in fact, unarmed, and the demonstration is peaceful. Many of the Algerians are wearing their best “Sunday” clothes, in the interest of impressing the French and the international communities with their peaceful motives. Nevertheless, police open fire almost immediately. Confrontations occur simultaneously throughout the city wherever the Algerians are concentrated. Police “combat groups” charge the crowd in the main thoroughfares and boulevards, while other police ranks stand behind in the side streets, blocking escape routes and splitting the crowd into small pockets of two or three individuals, each of whom is then surrounded by police, and men and women are methodically clubbed. Along the Seine, police lift unconscious and already dead or dying Algerians and toss them into the river. A document published soon after the massacre by a group of progressive police describes what went on in one part of the city:
At one end of the Neuilly Bridge, police troops, and on the other, CRS riot police, slowly moved toward one another. All the Algerians caught in this immense trap were struck down and systematically thrown into the Seine. At least a hundred of them underwent this treatment. The bodies of the victims floated to the surface daily and bore traces of blows and strangulation.
Some of the arrested men and women are taken to the courtyard of the prefecture of police where, as Pierre Vidal-Baquet reports, “If I believe the testimony of one policeman, gathered immediately after the event by Paul Thibaud and that I’ve often had occasion to evoke since then, Papon had several dozen Algerians beaten [matraqué] to death in front of his eyes in the courtyard of the police prefecture.” Some six thousand others are taken to several sports stadiums reserved by police for that purpose. In all of these places, people die while in custody – of wounds they had already received or of new blows administered by police “welcoming committees” arranged in a kind of gauntlet outside the entrance to the sports arenas.
On the night of October 17, the police publish a communiqué stating that the Algerians had fired on police, who were then forced to return fire. The official death count, originally two, was revised the next morning by Papon’s office to three. The almost total news blackout that surrounded the event makes it very hard to determine the exact number of Algerians – for no police were injured – who actually died. Most knowledgeable estimates put the number at around two hundred.
+
But the real question, I believe, lies elsewhere, outside the parameters of revolution, failed or not. Why did something happen rather than nothing? And what was the nature of the event that occurred? The attention given to the problematics of power has effaced another set problems at issue in May, and 1960s culture more generally, which we might begin to group under the heading of a no less political question – the question of equality. I mean equality not in any objective sense of status, income, function, or the supposedly “equal” dynamics of contracts or reforms, nor as an explicit demand or a program, but rather as something that emerges in the course of the struggle and is verified subjectively, declared and experienced in the here and now as what is, and not what should be. Such an experience lies to the side of “seizing state power;” outside of that story. The narrative of a desired or failed seizure of power, in other words, is a narrative determined by the logic of the state, the story the state tells to itself. For the state, people in the streets are people always already failing to seize state power. In 1968, “seizing state power” was not only part of the state’s narrative, it expressed the state’s informing desire to complete itself – that is, to totally assimilate the everyday to its own necessities. Limiting May ’68 to that story, to the desire or the failure to seize centralized power, has circumscribed the very definition of “the political,” crushing or effacing in the process a political dimension to the events that may in fact have constituted the true threat to the forces of order, the reason for their panic. That dimension lay in a subjectivation enabled by the synchronizing of two very different temporalities: the world of the worker and the world of the student. It lay in the central idea of May ’68: the union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle. It lay in the verification of equality not as any objective of action, but as something that is part and parcel of action, something that emerges in the struggle and is lived and declared as such. In the course of the struggle, practices were developed that demonstrated such a synchronization, that acted to constitute a common – though far from consensual – space and time. And those practices verified the irrelevance of the division of labour – what for Durkheim was nothing more and nothing less that that which holds a society together and guarantees the continuity of its reproduction. As such, these practices form as direct an intervention into the logic and workings of capital as any seizure of state – perhaps more so.
.
November 19, 2019
As others have noted, Ross's main aim of this book is to reclaim, in some part, the radical spirit of May 68, rather than the revisionist version peddled by many French New Philosophers. This book does not attempt to analyse the event to give any definitive explanations - Ross says so herself in the opening pages. This book doesn't give so much an account of the events of May 68 (indeed it doesn't even cover the initial student sit in or wildcat strikes) but rather it gives in great detail, some much needed context to both the political and societal conditions of post WWII France that had an influence in precipitating this event - including the Algerian War, the many variants of leftist thought (Maoist in particular), recurring political actors and strategies by which the left had sought to organize around.
Ross does go into detail the effect that May 68 had on reshaping communal and societal relationships in that period, detailing how various leftist magazines and publishers were born from the aftermath of 68 and the long term (if any) effects such new discourses have had.
As someone who had an awareness of the events of May 68 and who does view it as radical rupture in intellectual discourse, the main argument of the book was pretty much already preaching to the converted. However, as someone researching the events of May 68, the examples provided by Ross were fascinating and does much to give the reader a fuller picture of the decades before and after 68 in an engaging and relatively easy to read manner.
Also, if anyone has other books on May 68 to recommend, please message me.
Ross does go into detail the effect that May 68 had on reshaping communal and societal relationships in that period, detailing how various leftist magazines and publishers were born from the aftermath of 68 and the long term (if any) effects such new discourses have had.
As someone who had an awareness of the events of May 68 and who does view it as radical rupture in intellectual discourse, the main argument of the book was pretty much already preaching to the converted. However, as someone researching the events of May 68, the examples provided by Ross were fascinating and does much to give the reader a fuller picture of the decades before and after 68 in an engaging and relatively easy to read manner.
Also, if anyone has other books on May 68 to recommend, please message me.
September 28, 2022
Easily one of the most important history books I have ever read, both in terms of form and substance. Ross crafts a wonderfully nuanced, essayistic "anti-history" of one of the most inspiring events in recent historical memory, yet one as she highlights with a legacy deliberately smeared, re-written, and blotted out that makes trying to find out what "actually" happened a heck of a lot harder. And the great thing too is that Ross does not profess to possess the answers herself, but rather in probing all these grey areas and dispelling all the most prevalent myths/legends of May, a fascinating picture of May gets synthesized out of all these bits and pieces. Her investigation of historical memory, collective consciousness, and how future testimony from participants (such as the ex-gauchistes-turned-New Philosophers crowd) does not necessarily guarantee and accurate picture of the past, but can actually become a totally individualistic and crass vehicle by which these newly "reformed" impose their current biases on their past revolutionary activities, is genuinely impressive and incarnates an approach of critical historiography that I found to be very unique and level-headed.
In sum, this was definitely probably one of the hardest books I ever had to read (in spite of its pretty modest length), mostly by virtue of the heavily academic nature of the text, however I found it super rewarding and a profoundly strong companion piece to Ross's previous book, Fast Cars Clean Bodies.
In sum, this was definitely probably one of the hardest books I ever had to read (in spite of its pretty modest length), mostly by virtue of the heavily academic nature of the text, however I found it super rewarding and a profoundly strong companion piece to Ross's previous book, Fast Cars Clean Bodies.
November 25, 2025
For people with cameras that have lots of sex but in a French and angry way
August 8, 2008
I thought this book was fascinating, as Ross tends to be, and only revert to four stars on account of its academic tone, which I don't mind but which might annoy someone else. It is not always easy going, and I will admit that there were some pages that left me scratching my head wondering what in the hell she was talking about. Ross can hit you with some big words and ideas at times.
I'm not sure that I'm fully up to the task of communicating what the author does in these pages, but, on a basic level, she argues that the events of May represented far more than a benign student revolt. The fact that May ended without a political victory for the left hardly signals that “nothing happened in May,” as sociologists and popular memory like to insist. May, to Ross, was a dramatic example of the alternative possibilities that are implicit in all history, of millions of people looking and stepping beyond their familiar social environments and identifying with a broad range of “Others” in a manner that sociological frameworks and categories cannot explain.
I recommend reading FAST CARS, CLEAN BODIES for a lighter presentation of Ross's ideas, and if you like it, pick this up. Even then, it’s important to let Ross lead you where she wants you to go. Sometimes the chapters make little sense on their own, and it’s not until three chapters later that you see why so much time was devoted to an earlier topic. My experience has always been that Ross is always piecing together some kind of puzzle for you, and as long as you stick with her and trust her, she drops you off in a coherent place.
Some social scholars obviously wouldn't agree with Ross (Tony Judt in POSTWAR declares that May was "a victimless revolution, which in the end meant that it was no sort of revolution at all," which I suspect was a direct shot at Ross, given that both walk the halls at NYU), but I'm inclined to side with her in large part, as are other big names on France, such as Rod Kedward, who insists that May "affected areas of life untouched by any other civil disturbances of the century, and its social and cultural ideals did not disappear with the success of the counter-events of June" (Kedward also notes that over 1,000 were injured during the course of events, which countermands Judt's assertion that May and June were 'victimless'). But Ross isn't into counting. She's after something deeper than numbers, and usually she finds it.
I'm not sure that I'm fully up to the task of communicating what the author does in these pages, but, on a basic level, she argues that the events of May represented far more than a benign student revolt. The fact that May ended without a political victory for the left hardly signals that “nothing happened in May,” as sociologists and popular memory like to insist. May, to Ross, was a dramatic example of the alternative possibilities that are implicit in all history, of millions of people looking and stepping beyond their familiar social environments and identifying with a broad range of “Others” in a manner that sociological frameworks and categories cannot explain.
I recommend reading FAST CARS, CLEAN BODIES for a lighter presentation of Ross's ideas, and if you like it, pick this up. Even then, it’s important to let Ross lead you where she wants you to go. Sometimes the chapters make little sense on their own, and it’s not until three chapters later that you see why so much time was devoted to an earlier topic. My experience has always been that Ross is always piecing together some kind of puzzle for you, and as long as you stick with her and trust her, she drops you off in a coherent place.
Some social scholars obviously wouldn't agree with Ross (Tony Judt in POSTWAR declares that May was "a victimless revolution, which in the end meant that it was no sort of revolution at all," which I suspect was a direct shot at Ross, given that both walk the halls at NYU), but I'm inclined to side with her in large part, as are other big names on France, such as Rod Kedward, who insists that May "affected areas of life untouched by any other civil disturbances of the century, and its social and cultural ideals did not disappear with the success of the counter-events of June" (Kedward also notes that over 1,000 were injured during the course of events, which countermands Judt's assertion that May and June were 'victimless'). But Ross isn't into counting. She's after something deeper than numbers, and usually she finds it.
May 17, 2016
Cohn-Bendit and his sell-out cohorts finally get their ass kicked here. May '68 gets a correct academic analysis in a book that every library should own and everyone that cares about ourstory should read. All is good with the world at least concerning the events of '68 Paris General Strike and its reverberations. Kristin Ross is an intellectual force worth experiencing . Anyone interested in the topic and times should hunt for a copy . Who wouldn't want to read a reliable analysis regarding Revolution in The Sixties! "Viva La Rev!"
September 23, 2013
Both a rescuing of the radicalism of May from its neoliberal interlocutors and a brilliant account of what the project of making May safe for consumption and celebration within the frame of the post-68 French state entails, Ross's book is also a terrific account of what was truly revolutionary about the student and worker revolts and their tactics. Really impressive work of cultural history, and wonderfully written.
November 28, 2015
-the divisions in society melt, the students support the workers and viceversa: solidarity
do not fear the end of a project it is the beginning of something more viable
how do people empower themselves by labeling others victims?
may 68 as the ticket to that academic career you always wanted, telvision specials and feature length films: the may 68 industry
do not fear the end of a project it is the beginning of something more viable
how do people empower themselves by labeling others victims?
may 68 as the ticket to that academic career you always wanted, telvision specials and feature length films: the may 68 industry
August 16, 2010
Ross is fairly biased, but this is a good narrative of the Paris uprising/riots/protests of 1968. Lots of good detail, maybe too much, and certainly her favorite sources are the most obscure, and so maybe not the most representative. Still, it's an interesting perspective on a crazy time.
June 26, 2010
Dense for those who ain't down with post-structuralist analyses of political movements.
Want to read
August 19, 2018Didn't finish
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews