May ’68: What Legacy?

Fifty years later, the time has come to take a measured look at the student-led protests that shook Paris in May 1968 and have occupied the French political imagination ever since. 

Student riots in Paris, May 1968.

Of the hundreds of books and essays published about the events of May 1968 in Paris, one of my favorite remains the philosopher Raymond Aron’s , written as the events unraveled in July 1968. In this book, whose title translates to , the events are described as a tragicomedy in which “a verbal delirium with no casualties” placed bourgeois students with a “utopian negation of reality” and workers with authentic and legitimate demands on France’s center stage. Raymond Aron was critical of the student protest; however, he was also critical of the centralized Gaullist government, which had failed to anticipate the aspirations of a whole society. A fellow graduate of Jean-Paul Sartre at Ecole normale supérieure in the late twenties, Raymond Aron joined