The New Left and the Spirit of May '68

Abstract:To understand May '68 (in Paris, but not only), context is necessary. As it happens I was there, during, before and after. This life experience has been marked by the emergence of a "new left" in the US and in France and, to a lesser degree, similarly motivated movements in Germany and in Czechoslovakia. This article revisits my experience through a discussion of the concept of a "new left," which while intuitively evident is conceptually slippery: it does not refer to the immediate experience of a generation born into the emerging prosperity of the postwar West; and it assumes that a left will always and necessarily exist in modern societies. Here I describe my own experiences as a participant in that movement prior to the brèche that took place in May '68, and suggest some of the implications of the new possibilities that it opened.