The Repressed Visual Legacies of May ’68

The students’ and workers’ uprising in France during May and June 1968 have frequently been remembered through images: black and white photographs of demonstrations, occupations and barricades, posters collectively produced by the Atelier Populaire, graffiti, and cartoons. The visual representations of May ’68 have often prevailed over the narrative ones, to such an extent that Keith Reader has famously argued that ‘May lives on as an image’ due to its ambiguous and inconclusive nature. The intense debates that continue five decades after the events not only indicate their enduring vague nature, but also contribute to a restricted, dominant representation, an ‘official history’ of the events under discussion. Dominant cultural and political narratives since the 1970s have denounced the emancipatory potential and revolutionary aspirations of the movement, often reducing it to a ‘harmless’ youth revolt that heralded a triumph of individualism and the emergence of neoliberalism. In France, the ‘nouveaux philosophes’ who emerged in the mid-1970s put forward some of the best-rehearsed arguments: both Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut asserted that the events of ’68 pre-empted the rise of late capitalism’s contemporary individualism, and Gilles Lipovetsky claimed that ‘the ’68 spirit’ contributed decisively in precipitating narcissistic individualism’s actualization as the dominant form of contemporary subjectivity. Other commentators have gone even further, arguing that nothing of real significance actually happened. Raymond Aron spoke of ‘the event that turned out to have been a non-event’ and of students play-acting revolution. In a similar vein, Pierre Nora categorically asserted that ‘not only was there no revolution, but nothing tangible or palpable occurred at all.’ During his pre-electoral campaigning in 2007, presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy attacked the ‘cynical’ and ‘immoral’ Left for its alleged systematic support for ‘thugs’ and ‘troublemakers’, who attack police, and called for the ‘liquidation’ of May ’68’s legacy.