Paris
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Jack Lang
Former Minister
of Culture and Education and now a Socialist deputy in the
National Assembly
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Posted Sunday, August 10, 2003; 16.11BST
May 1968 was a grand movement of liberation in the American sense, but also a movement of simple respiration. The French state then [under President Charles de Gaulle] was a symbol of oppression. It seemed to have a lid on everything, with state-run television and radio putting
out permanent propaganda.
Suddenly, it became apparent that the state wasn't all-powerful after all, and for many of us everything seemed to even smell different. What we didn’t sense was the real worry the revolt provoked in traditional France. It was a good thing the left didn’t win [national elections] until later.
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Suddenly, it became apparent that the state wasn't all-powerful
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The communists feared a movement they couldn't control, and the democratic left was in rebellion against bourgeois institutions — so we weren't ready to run those institutions. Everyone was into the 'cult of spontaneity,' which was, of course, a very bourgeois thing anyway.
But even if there was no immediate political result of May 1968, the fruits came later. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing [elected President in 1974] was a conservative, but the spirit of 1968 was there when he legalized abortion and lowered the voting age to 18.
Eventually, the Socialist Party
became the home for a whole
faction of soixante-huitards (1968 rebels) like me. That had to happen so François Mitterrand could reform his party and, 13 years later, bring it to victory.
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THE LEFT BANK
