Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [143]
And indeed, nothing shocked me more at the time than the meeting to which I and several other visiting Marxists from the UNESCO jamboree were invited by, was it the Institut Maurice Thorez or some other academic adjunct to the French Communist Party?, at which points of Marxist interpretation were to be discussed, while the students marched. Nobody appeared to take cognizance of what was happening outside. I caused a few moments of awkwardness by pointing this out. Did we have nothing to say, I asked, about what was happening on the very streets through which we had passed on our way to the meeting? Could we not at least declare our general support? Alas, thirty-four years later I cannot for the life of me remember whether those of us who felt as I did managed to shame the gathering into making such a declaration. It seems unlikely.
The Magnum 1968 collection includes another picture that encapsulates at least part of my feelings at the time. (It is also, I need hardly add, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, that genius at catching the historic moment.) An elderly member of the middle class stands, with arms folded behind his back, looking reflectively at a poster-covered Parisian wall and a rough wooden door – presumably to some yard or building site. The top layer of posters has been half-stripped from the wall, leaving breeze-blocks and older movie posters half-visible. On the door there is an accumulation of political posters – a Communist Party poster on top of some text about student power, a half-torn sheet calling for struggle for a democratic society opening the way to socialism, and on top of it all a large graffito written with the basic armament of the 1968 revolutionary, the spray-paint can. It reads ‘Jouissez sans entraves’, which the editors have translated bashfully as ‘Let it all hang out’. (It really means: ‘Let nothing stop orgasms’.) We cannot tell what Cartier-Bresson’s elderly citizen made of the walls of Paris, which were the chief victims and public witnesses of the student revolt. My own reaction was sceptical. As every historian knows, revolutions can be recognized by the vast floods of words they generate: spoken words, but in literate societies words written in enormous quantities by men and women who do not usually express themselves in writing. By this criterion May 1968 was something like a student revolution – but its words record an odd kind of revolution, as anyone could see who watched the walls of Paris at the time.
The truth is that the characteristic posters and graffiti of 1968 were not really political in the traditional sense of the word, except for the recurring denunciations of the Communist Party, presumably by the militants of the various left-wing groups and factions, almost invariably descended from some Leninist schism. And yet, how rare were the references to the great names of that ideology – Marx, Lenin, Mao, even Che Guevara – on the walls of Paris!3 They would later appear on badges and T-shirts, as icons symbolizing the overthrow of systems. The student rebels reminded theorists of a long-forgotten Bakuninist anarchism, but if anything they were closest to the ‘situationists’, who had anticipated a ‘revolution of everyday life’ through the transformation of personal relations. That (and their