Film and Colonialism in the Sixties by Jon Cowans

Author:Jon Cowans [Cowans, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Africa, South, Europe, Great Britain, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), 19th Century, 20th Century, Performing Arts, Reference
ISBN: 9780429665028
Google: Jah8DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-07T01:33:40+00:00

France

Things seemed calm in France well into 1968. The political turmoil of the transition to the Fifth Republic in 1958 and the traumas of the Algerian War, including OAS bombings and assassination attempts, finally abated by the mid-1960s. After a controversial 1962 referendum in which President de Gaulle secured popular election of presidents, the strong performance of the left’s candidate, François Mitterrand, in the 1965 elections indicated a healthy democracy. Despite the left’s charge that de Gaulle had subverted republican traditions, most of the French considered the Fifth Republic a major improvement on the unstable parliamentary regime it had replaced and did not see de Gaulle as a dictator. Strikes and protests continued (as ever in France), including marches against America’s war in Vietnam, but amid peace and prosperity, things seemed calm.65 As Le Monde’s Pierre Viansson-Ponté famously wrote in March 1968, France was bored.66

On 22 March, when a handful of students staged a protest at the suburban Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, no one foresaw it becoming a national uprising that nearly toppled the Fifth Republic. After officials blocked gatherings at Nanterre, students moved their protests to the Sorbonne, and anger at police overreaction boosted the movement.67 The protestors had sharply varying agendas and outlooks. With France having recently expanded its university population, conditions in places such as Nanterre were poor, and a glut of graduates in fields such as sociology worried students about employment prospects. As part of the sexual revolution, male and female students sought the right to meet in each other’s dormitories, while various leftist groups envisioned a revolution against capitalism and the Fifth Republic. When unrest spread to labor unions, the number of strikers approached 10 million, raising the prospect of a collapse of the existing order.

Initial polls showed considerable support for the protesters, but by late May, with no clear picture of who or what might replace de Gaulle and capitalism, sympathy began eroding.68 On 30 May, when the President spoke on radio, urging a counter-demonstration, roughly half a million gathered in Paris; de Gaulle also announced new legislative elections, which revolutionaries viewed warily.69 In the June elections, the Gaullists increased their majority in the National Assembly, so before the Americans turned to Richard Nixon in November 1968 and the British to the Conservatives 1970, French voters reacted to countercultural agitation by electing the right. The time for post-mortems had begun.70

Debate was already plentiful in May, with seemingly endless speeches in and around the Sorbonne. Among the outpouring of excited words were graffiti such as “It is forbidden to forbid,” and “Forget all you have learned. Begin by dreaming.”71 Writing soon afterward, Raymond Aron saw the whole episode as a carnivalesque inversion of social hierarchies, and others have since echoed his view of the violence as symbolic and ritualistic.72 Remarkably, weeks of street fighting left only four dead.73

While utopian visions from 1968 now look terribly unrealistic, many things briefly seemed possible. Given the explosion of anarchic, creative energies, the episode ended prosaically:

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