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Until recently, one of the received ideas about May 68 in France was that the student actions and the workers' strikes never went beyond a kind of "abortive encounter". The particularity of France's experience in 1968 was that for a brief moment students and workers joined forces in simultaneous mobilization. Such mobilizations had existed in other countries, but always separately, and this led the seeming convergence that occurred in France to be interpreted immediately as a kind of "mis-understanding". Given the mutual distrust existing between the gauchiste groups, on the one hand, and the Communist Party and the CGT union on the other, it seemed self-evident that a genuine convergence between workers and students was ultimately impossible; their two struggles were viewed as in essence distinct since the former were allegedly seeking to "have more" and the latter to "live differently."¹ This simple idea has characterized all the interpretative battles still raging around the meaning of May 68. What they share is a kind of social essentialism which holds the working class to be incapable of thinking beyond material necessity or taking on board themes like individual emancipation, and the students or members of intellectual professions to be preoccupied only with cultural liberalism and the egotistic pursuit of self-liberation.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230319561_3

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