From May ’68 to May ’18

“We disrupted a conference about May 68 … telling speakers: ‘“You commemorate, we start again.”’

Valerie Costa-Kostritsky, a journalist based in London and Moscow, has written for the LRB Blog on the student protests that escalated this May during a commemoration of the protests of May 1968. Costa-Kostritsky outlines in detail the progression of the protests and their direct relation to the revolts that transpired fifty years prior:

“The students outside the theatre fifty years later had been protesting against a law that changes the conditions of access to university and introduces academic selection. They demanded to be let into the Odéon to take part in the discussion – to no avail. Inside, an audience mostly composed of smartly dressed white older people listened politely to the speakers. The theatre’s director called the police, who sprayed tear gas and arrested four students.

Patrice Maniglier, who teaches philosophy at Nanterre University (Paris X), was scheduled to speak at the event. ‘May 68 hasn’t passed,’ he told me. ‘It got stuck in time’s throat. We think our present is the result of May 68. It’s not the case. It’s a window that is looking at us critically, asking us why we failed to rise to its demands.’” Read the full piece here >

The French revolts of May 1968, the largest general strike in twentieth-century Europe, were among the most famous and colourful episodes of the twentieth century. Julian Bourg argues that during the subsequent decade the revolts led to a remarkable paradigm shift in French thought – the concern for revolution in the 1960s was transformed into a fascination with ethics.

MQUP recently published a second edition of Bourg’s From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. The book provides a compelling picture of how May 1968 helped make ethics a compass for navigating contemporary global concerns. In a new preface for the second edition published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the events, Bourg assesses the worldwide influence of the ethical turn, from human rights to the return of religion and the new populism.

Read more about the book here >