1968 and Europe

“1968 was a challenge and a defeat of logical reasoning, whereby events are interpreted according to a rational process”. This definition by Catholic historian and observer of French political life René Rémond, highlights the difficulty of understanding and interpreting the important event of our recent history, which broke apart political power and institutions, and on the long run also European societies. André Malraux, Culture Minister in de Gaulle’s government, identified it as “one of the deepest crisis that civil societies ever experienced”. Sprung from different sources, abroad, (the first occupied university was the Faculty of Sociology in Trent in November 1967) in the context of the Vietnam war, the crisis stemmed from another crisis affecting parliamentary democracy, and rapid social and economic changes. The ‘Italian Miracle’, the ‘German miracle’, the ‘Trente Glorieuses’, according to the definition by economist Jean Fourastié, expressed the shock provoked by the rapid industrialization of rural societies, by the irruption of modernity and prosperity (the American Way of Life). There was an outstanding increase in the planes of living with a yearly 5% increase, which all governments dream of. But West-European Countries were immobile. In other terms, as put by French sociologist Michel Crozier, they remained hierarchized and bureaucratic. He defined France as “a land of order”, centralized and rarely experiencing dialogue. There was movement and motionlessness at the same time. This hiatus triggered the earthquake. Indeed, European population had become much younger: those under 20 in 1968 represented approximately one third of the overall population, according to the different Countries. The first after-war baby-boom generation was becoming adult. However, it was hard for this youth to integrate into a developing and motionless society. The youth was on the point of entering higher education (in France, the number of university students passed from 200,000 in 1958 to 500,000 ten years later) but they didn’t wish to enter employment like their parents, despite their prosperity (in France there were just over 200,000 unemployed, a starkling figure today), and in fact the university and the employment environment were sclerotic when new disciplines such as psychology and sociologies gradually developed, offering unidentified job opportunities. This restlessness nourished the contestation based on a Marxist culture which opposed the so-called “bourgeoisie”. May 1968 was passed down in history as the peak of the wide-ranging protests prepared in the 1960s by the hippy movement which claimed sexual freedom and rejected all forms of authority. This is why all social spheres were affected by it: the economic world, politics, and also the Church which in those years and later on experienced and unprecedented crisis: the crisis in vocations along with seminarians’ dropping out. The ‘Cattolica’ University in Milan was the second university to be occupied by the students. Liberal philosopher Raymond Aron interpreted the crisis as the quest for a utopia, a psychodrama and a burlesque comedy. The most unpredictable aspect was that so many young people’s support of the criminal ideologies sprung from Marxism: Trozkism, Maoism, Castrism. These ideas took ground in a free world at a time when on the other side of the iron curtain, the youth dreamt of “bourgeoisie” freedom and in Prague they were opposing Communist power. Red flags in Rome, and Bonn; tanks of the Red Army in Prague: these images underline the historical absurdity of 1968 in the West.