Table Of ContentRégis Debray
A Modest Contribution to the Rites and
Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary
It has been Holy Unity week. The official ceremonies organized around the
tenth anniversary of May ’68 brought together everyone in this country with a
name, a status or a decoration and saturated every medium of communication.
From left to right, yesterday’s enemies and tomorrow’s friends, the best and the
worst—Libération to France-Soir, Séguy to Debré—were in agreement on the
absurdity of excluding the main hero from the proceedings. (If an ordinary
citizen may be permitted to add his voice to the general clamour: let Dany come
home soon.) This unanimity was a good sign. It could suggest that the level of
national idiocy is in decline, even a growth of liberalism. Everywhere else,
revolutionaries are showered with hatred and imbecility: they are sour assassins,
cold monsters, Gulag warrant officers, mass murderers. On the tenth anniver-
sary of Che’s death there was no homage, no round-table discussion or memorial
programme on Bolivian television. Nor anywhere else on a continent which
once trembled before him, not just for a month or two either. Robespierre was
not the toast of Paris in 1805; ten years after October, the name of Lenin still
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struck fear into the hearts of children in the European countryside. One
swallow doesn’t make a summer, but perhaps we should be thankful for
small mercies.
Its exceptional nature also merits examination. On the left, piety is
understandable. Recollection is always nice when you are no longer
capable of making things happen. Unable to live on their income, a
lot of people consume their capital of time-values: the very old are
nothing but memory. The right, for its part, appears young and lively.
Why this collusion in dwelling upon a ‘nightmare’? Doubtless the
right is always happy to repeat that the old antithesis of left and right
is outmoded. But it has plenty of other, more solid reasons for not
stinting its pleasure. Not least that it is precisely to the May cult that
it owes its youthful vigour.
May ’68 was the cradle of a new bourgeois society. It may not yet
realize this, but it is time someone told it so. With a bonus in the form
of a prediction. The Third Republic by conviction, and the Fourth
through inertia, made July 14th 1789their founding myth. The mature
Fifth Republic, and its successors, will be able to declare the entire
month of May a public holiday—with a little help from computer
technology and productivity growth. The bourgeois republic cele-
brated its birth, the storming of the Bastille; one day it will celebrate
its rebirth, the word-storm of 1968. This is not folklore or fetishism
but, for the entire modern West, the paradigm of a long-sought
legitimacy: its realized ideal, a future sublimated into legend.
Revolutions of the New World, or How to
Regenerate the Old
In 1968there were two Frances: an industrial and technological France,
and a social and institutional France. The first was in quick tempo,
dynamic, open to the outside: since the war, industrialization and the
concentration of capital had been advancing rapidly. Never has
humanity known such speedy growth of its productive forces as during
the period which changed the face of Europe after 1945; never in its
history has France experienced such an upheaval of its infrastructure
in such a short space of time. The second France, the France of senti-
ments and behaviour, was wedded to the leisurely pace at which values
and customs evolve. The cleavage between two layers of history during
the same period is a common occurrence: in this case, and precisely
because of the extraordinary rate of expansion and the brutal reorgani-
zation of productive labour, the cleavage became excessive, actually
intolerable. French society became ‘anti-economic’, and was beginning
to threaten the profitability of France s.a. When the time came to
harmonize the first with the second, the gap was so wide that the job
had to be attacked with crazy energy. A wind of madness was percep-
tible in this updating of the France de Papa; it was only the economic
bringing the social to its senses, the compulsory submission of the old
to the new. At Censier,1 it was decided to ‘abolish the economy’.
Obviously, since the hour had come for its enthronement in all the
control centres—political, cultural, administrative and ideological.
1Censier, an annexe of the Sorbonne where many debates took place during May.
46
As we know, there were three Mays: the student uprising (‘the revolt
of youth’); the upsurge of demands by the workers’ movement (general
strike); and the politicians’ May (crisis of the régime). Out of their
meeting, rather than their fusion, was born the Movement. But what
made this concordance decisive, or explosive, was a latent and sud-
denly-revealed discordance of which the ‘May crisis’ was at once the
symptom and the cure. Three became one because one was becoming
two.
This asynchrony produced a heart attack and called for the slow
resynchronization of the two countries, now well under way. The
phase displacement of two circuits required a change of voltage. One
country was plugged into 110 volts, the other into 220: connect them
up, short-circuit, blown fuse. Rewire the obsolete 110-volt circuit,
change the meter, install new trip-fuses. And switch on again. You too
must be modern. But don’t say modernization, say revolution. Any
businessman will tell you you can make twice as much by using one
word rather than another.
‘Chaos’? Not at all. The most reasonable of social movements; the sad
victory of productivist reason over romantic unreason; the gloomiest
demonstration of the Marxist theory of the finally determining role of
the economic (technology plus relations of production). Industrializa-
tion had to be given a morality not because the poets were clamouring
for a new one but because industrialization required it. The old France
paid off its arrears to the new; the social, political and cultural backlog
all at once. The cheque was a large one. The France of stone and rye,
of the apéritif and the institute, of oui papa, oui patron, oui cherie, was
ordered out of the way so that the France of software and super-
markets, of news and planning, of know-how and brain-storming
could show off its viability to the full, home at last. This spring cleaning
felt like a liberation and, ineffect,it was one.
The ghettos were opening at last! Starting with the workers’ world,
which instead of joining the student marches fell into step with the
rest of society. The old framework, in which yesterday’s privileges and
hierarchies (justice, medicine, university, church and so on) were cosily
preserved, was suffocating life. And the functioning of capital, whose
reproduction was causing cracks to appear in these antique conduits;
channels which had become too narrow and constricted. The first dam
to burst was the university, where the pressure was strongest. Quanti-
tative pressure, with the student population trebled from 200,000 to
600,000 between 1960 and 1968; and above all qualitative pressure,
with a style and intellectual framework of instruction and of courses
ill-adapted to the new labour market. To manage an increasingly vast
and unqualified labour force, capital needed a highly-qualified type of
cadre which the higher education networks were no longer producing.
Alarm signals were flashing on this side, unseen by the remote con-
trollers of the machine. The magazine Prospective, 1967 No. 14, wrote:
‘We are now confronted with the aberration of an education system
teaching values to which schoolchildren, students and end-users—that
is, employers—manifestly no longer subscribe’. This displacement was
everywhere, more or less marked, experienced by employees as intoler-
47
able and by employers as unprofitable. The growing feminization of
the labour force called for a reassessment of the status of women; the
failures of the central State called for a new articulation between
metropolis and regions; the overloading of the judicial machinery
called for a new relationship between offenders and litigants on the one
hand and the judicial apparatus on the other. In general, beyond a
given level of complexity, decisions are more effective when the level
at which decisions are taken is brought as close as possible to the level
at which they are applied. The macro can only function with the aid of
micros. Above a given level of industrial gigantism (conglomerate,
factory), productivity begins to decline, and small organizations become
more profitable. The search for maximum profit, as for the most fertile
technical innovations, passes by way of the splintering of production
units.
The demand for identity (the right to be different) which flowered in
May came before the functional demands of the system of exploitation.
What first appeared as constraints on individual existence turned out
to be constraints on turning the entire social field into commodities.
Capital aspired to circulate, youth wanted to communicate through the
barriers of the past. The imaginary anticipated the real and the law of
the heart coincided with thelaw of efficiency. That’s why, in 1978, ‘the
tablets of the law are groaning with all the fruits of May’. Fruits which
bear out the promise of the flower.
Only a blaze of subjectivity could impose the law of the marketable
object on those who rejected it. So the latter played ‘hide-and-seek’.
The arrangement was made with the agreement of the future victims,
whose consent could only be extracted in the form of disagreement.
Order by way of revolt. The sincerity of the actors of May was accom-
panied, and overtaken, by a cunning of which they knew nothing. The
pinnacle of personal generosity met the pinnacle of the system’s
anonymous cynicism. Just as Hegelian great men are what they are
because of the world spirit, the May revolutionaries were the entre-
preneurs of the spirit needed by the bourgeoisie. The fault was not
theirs, but that of a universe in which people do not choose to be born:
they accomplished the opposite of what they intended. History is at its
most cunning when dealing with the naïve.
Cultural Revolution
This inversion of a subversive reorganization is not to be attributed
solely to ideological delirium; in its way it reveals the existence of an
objective subterfuge. A small war was needed to put modern France
at peace with itself, and if this fell somewhat short of a shooting war, it
went rather beyond a war game. The fact is that it was necessary to
fight against the bourgeoisie then in power to persuade it to serve its
own interests. When men are not equal to their destiny, someone
always turns up to help them in spite of themselves: this was the role
of the May protesters. The bourgeoisie was politically and ideologically
well behind the logic of its own economic development. Politically,
with a Bonapartist régime ‘whose procedures considerably increased
the combustibility of social conflicts’ (Henri Weber). Ideologically,
48
with a set of values inherited from the past, the remnant of a by-gone
stage of development. To run a society from which it had itself expelled
the peasants (who constituted only 14 per cent of the working popula-
tion by 1968), it retained a peasant mentality. In many ways, people’s
acquisitiveness under De Gaulle had changed little since the days of
Marshal Pétain, the left-overs of a rural, old-Catholic world which De
Gaulle had buried physically but not yet psychologically. All the anal
gratifications of retention, boundary delimitation and the miser’s
stocking could not long stem the pressure of the new flux, but they
were still obstructing it too much. A Monsieur Homais2could hardly
preside over the elimination of the corner shop in a country filling
itself with ‘major outlets’.
The development of the capitalist mode of production and distribution
no longer needed everything that still survived here and there, in
people’s minds and in the social tissue, of Work-Family-Country.3
What use is a cult of work when the main source of surplus value is no
longer the quantity of work supplied but its technological quality, in
other words the grey matter employed? And when leisure itself be-
comes a commodity—an activity generating employment and profits?
When, and because, the productivity of labour increases in the
developed countries, ‘free time’ becomes productive in its turn.
What use is the patriarchal family, from the moment the main obstacle
to industrial growth resides in the old family firm with its outmoded
management and technology? The hereditary capitalism of the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries became a ball and chain for share-
holder capitalism; thanks partly to the effects of May, the concentration
of finance capital and industrial restructuring were able to progress,
resulting in large industrial groups consolidated after May (Saint-
Gobain, Pont-à-Mousson, GEC, Usinor, etc.). Soon Servan-Schreiber,
future Minister of Reforms, would be able to propose in a manifesto
of advanced capitalism, Ciel it Terre (1970), ‘the abolition of the heredi-
tary transmission of ownership of means of production’.
Fatherland? At a time when the Common Market is prescribing the
removal of the last customs barriers, when the multinationals are
becoming the decisive motor of world economic development, when
the reorganization of French capital is imposing increased dependence
on American and German financial groups (Westinghouse, Honeywell,
Boeing, etc.), the Fatherland... well, there’s July 14th for that, every
day has its own duties.
Capital’s development strategy required the cultural revolution of May.
Commodities have no sense of strategy; neither capital nor the revolu-
tion was conscious of its rôle. Both are ‘movements’: processes, as we
call things that work by themselves. Things with integral motors go
best. Spontaneously, the tide swamped useless barriers: the dead
weight of tradition, the envy of the displaced, the comfort of routine.
Look around you, in shop windows or at the television screen. The
2Monsieur Homais, the apothecary, a typical local worthy, in Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary.
3Travaille,Famille,Patrie:slogan of the Pétain régime.
49
slogans, the books, the personalities and the ideas of May are ‘going
very well’. Commodities as well, thanks. Better and better, faster and
faster. Merchandise is a moveable feast, swirling and ungraspable; May
was the feast of mobility. People did a lot of marching in May, and for
a lot of reasons. A malicious sociologist could attribute this urban
mobilization of the upwardly socially mobile to the delayed trans-
formation of a country still congealed in its traditional hierarchies: a
ritual compensation, an assertion of claims on the future. Revenues
climbing up the scale after a temporary freeze, charging up the street:
symbolic movement.
Is so much entropy to be regretted? All that fabulous energy wasted
in the streets, ‘liberated’ in the open air without concrete work or point
of application? Regret is in fashion, so let’s not succumb to it com-
pletely. Transformed by the various State mechanisms into reforms,
draft laws, statutes, settlements, amendments, Secretariats of State and
Ministries (for Reforms, the Condition of Women, the Quality of Life,
Manual Labour, the Environment, Youth, Desire, New Energies, New
Ideas, etc.), all the effort—despite inevitable wastage inherent in this
type of operation since the beginning of time—has been carefully
turned to profit by the very system against which it was mobilized. To
put the bourgeoisie on the road to the New World, the May militants
had to endure the thumping handed out by its ‘special detachments of
armed men’. It is not hard to understand why young ‘revolutionaries’
have subsequently lost some of their enthusiasm for sacrifice and the
cult of abnegation.
‘Run, comrade, the old world is behind you.’ There was a good deal
of running in May; it is the role of vanguards to precede the movement
and show the way. The distance which revealed itself at the time
between the cultural scouts and the main body of the social and political
column was the space separating an opaque and cumbersome central-
ized State from an agile, splintered civil society in the throes of self-
renewal; the distance separating the actual bourgeoisie from its
self-image.
The State closes the gap more every day. The continued growth of the
system, essential to its survival, has been, and continues to be, based
on the launching impulse of May. The new functions of capital have
found their adequate organs. The Patriarch’s retirement was signalled
in April 1969(backlash to May ’68) by the combined vote of the foreign
exchange speculators of the Bourse and the agents of change in the
Sorbonne; Pompidou the Latinist, born of schoolteacher parents at
Montboudif, made way for Giscard the economist, born in Coblenz,
the son of an international financier. Classical humanism passed the
torch to MIT systems analysis, the école normale graduates in the minis-
terial offices to brains-trusts of trained administrators; the old State
bourgeoisie to the new financial bourgeoisie. Subversion played a part
in the passage from the old to the new, but all it destroyed was the
relations linking management techniques to methods of domination
within liberal society. We have moved on from a shy technocracy
(hidden behind patriarchal charisma) to a triumphant technocracy; in
other words from flagrant authoritarianism (but only a façade) to shy
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authoritarianism (more diffuse and more real). The baton has been
passed on successfully. Well done, young mole!
Model and General Rehearsal
May ’68 was the first national general crisisneither stemming from nor
resulting in a conflict, in the sense of a change of political régime. Was
it, then, anodyne or insignificant? Far from it. But the crisis, though
considerable, reached no extremes and had no conflictual outcome.
This is the movement’s originality, the measure of its break with the
old world and with the habits of the political establishment. Conflict
means, in effect, polarization between friends and enemies, frontal
alignment and final decision. Nothing to do with labile, capillary,
plural May. The days of May replaced the sawtooth, up-climax-down
rhythm of crisis by the fluidity of a following breeze lifting, gently
shaking, whirling, irradiating, diffusing. That is why May, which had
no dénouement, is still working in our heads and on the street. Long
duration and long range made one.
Let us leave aside the fanciful speculation of Fathers Clavel and
Frossard4—Afflatus, Spirits, Graces—and note the unusual. For once,
instead of becoming more marked, the potentialities of conflict were
slowly reabsorbed without a general confrontation: no civil war, no
clash, no blood, it’s been said often enough. Also that in replacing
Galliffet with Grimaud,5 liberal civilization achieved a notable victory
over itself and its past barbarities. Nor was Louise Michel6 at the
rendezvous:’ bad instincts head south, to settle among the blacks and
the Arabs’. Less has been said about the paradox, apparently unique
in history, of a revolutionary movement followed not by counter-
revolution but by a very benign electoral reaction, returning the same
régime; and a government for which repression of the remnants of
the movement counted for less than political and administrative assimi-
lation of its impetus; in which Marcellin, in a word, was less
characteristic than Edgar Faure. ‘Power to the imagination’: without
striking a blow, the street slogan becomes the programme of the most
exposed Minister, revolt becomes an article of law. This is the unprece-
dented innovation of May ’68, signalled in advance by a slogan on a
Nanterre wall: ‘It’s not a revolution, sire. It’s a mutation.’
Revolution is a political term, mutation a term used in biology. Hypo-
thesis: May ’68 was the moment in the development of advanced
capitalist society when the automatisms of social biology began to
carry the day against the political logic of options and programmes. If
May was a crisis, it was more cybernetic than political, to such an extent
that in order to understand its dynamic as well as its results, the usual
categories of Leninism or materialism have to give way to those of
systems and information theory. ‘Dementia’, ‘delirium’, ‘irrationality’
4Maurice Clavel, a Catholic writer who helped inspire the ‘New Philosophy’;
André Frossard, commentator for Le Figaro.
5Gallifet and Grimaud: police chiefs in Paris at the time of the Commune and the May
events respectively.
6Louise Michel: leader of the petroleuses, the women’s vanguard during the Com-
mune.
51
signify nothing more than the emergence in the social field of a
rationality at that time unfamiliar to the public: that of servo-
mechanisms.
Those for whom May was an abomination, those for whom it was
Revelation, those who received grace and those who feared disgrace,
the indignant mandarins and the ageing first-communicants: were not
they all suffering from a lack of distance from the event, favouring
strong emotions but damaging to observation? Might not a simple
change of scale enable Raymond Aron and Maurice Clavel to calm
down a little in their evocations of the demoniac or divine spirit of the
cursed/blessed spring? Dare one suggest that they trade in their
spectacles for ‘the macroscope’ and (since they cannot manage Marx)
Michelet for Joël de Rosnay7 (whose book is very accessible)? In this
country there is always a High Priest on hand to stand in as pundit
(the Catholic and rural nineteenth century again). So we were beaten
over the head by, at the lowest estimate, a ‘crisis of civilization’; pretty
soon (inflation made this inevitable) it became ‘an instant of eternity’,
a ‘divine yawn’ or a ‘supernatual gap’, where an averagely well-
informed student would have been content to see ‘negative feedback’
or regulatory retroaction, as safety valves are called these days.
Let’s not sneer: the theory can get away with being fashionable, it is
very serious and far-ranging. Unlike ‘runaway’ or positive feedback
which would have overloaded the system to disintegration point, the
May crisis worked (independently of the wishes of its agents) as a self-
regulating factor, correcting the effect of internal disturbances in the
neocapitalist machine. During the confrontations, as in the final profit-
and-loss account, complementarity prevailed over antagonism, favour-
able retroaction over hostile reaction. At the beginning, of course,
there was some antagonism on the spot—the warning signal for the
corrections would not have been given without it—but of what might
be called a non-antagonistic type: a thermostat-crisis enabling the
machine specifically to readjust the complementarity of its constituent
parts (classes, institutions, practices). Thus, a crisis in the system may
have been confused with a crisis ofthe system, without anyone noticing
that the former is capable precisely of enabling the latter to be avoided.
In France, the classic land of revolutions, history as drama could only
and dramatically.
That ’68 should have served as a factor tending to stabilize fundamental
class relations—assuming in addition an internal reorganization—
would prove then that our modern bourgeois societies may have
reached the homeostatic maturity of complex systems, making them
more vulnerable to external hazards but also flexible enough to inte-
grate threats of rupture into the dynamic stability of the whole. What
matter that the development of contradictions produces endless upsets
and disparities, disorders in fact, if the machine has become adept at
making order out of disorder, an order superior to the disorders that
engender it and which it endlessly provokes? The organization inte-
grates its disorganized periods, not as phoney development costs, but
7Joël de Rosnay, contemporary populariser of cybernetics.
52
as its driving elements. What is incompatible is complementary, what
upsets stabilizes, what attacks strengthens. Not every social system, we
should remember, has the good luck to be in crisis: it costs the system
known as ‘actual socialism’ very dear not to be able to afford disorder.
In the developed capitalist system, crisis is a normal state, the sign of
good health, the mainspring of its advances. It is order which would
mean death.
This cybernetic model is of course doubly abstract. Firstly because of
its very nature as metaphor extrapolated too far from its area of
validity: a society is not an ‘intelligent’ machine. Next because, if
French society had been so modelled, it would not have needed May ’68.
It is precisely because there was no overload fuse in the institutional
system (exaggeratedly concentrated in the person of De Gaulle, the
régime having already eclipsed or eliminated intermediary bodies,
assemblies and notables) that the short-circuit was able to take place.
Thus, May ’68 could be the living proof of the utopian nature of
mechanical ruminations.
‘Comrades and friends! Let us not forget the class struggle! The State
Monopoly Capitalist system is condemned by history, doomed to an
inevitable withering away owing to the unresolvable contradiction
between the limitless development of the productive forces (scientific
and technical revolution) and private appropriation, and so on.
Battered by the redoubled blows of the workers, mobilized in growing
numbers by the catastrophic aggravation of the crisis . . .’ etc., etc. We
all know this golden oldie, waxed some time in the 20s and top of the
hit parade several times since. . . . Is it impossible to do without the
‘final crisis’? It has finally been admitted—a basic truth at last treated
as such owing to the efforts of Jacques Attali8 and some others—that
economic crises constitute the regulating and transforming moment of
the ‘dynamic of commodities’, ‘the place where order is re-established’.
And what if, in market societies not only determined but openly
dominated by the economic factor, the same plan of order through
noise also ruled social and political crises? More exactly: what if the
internal elimination of social struggles enabled political crises to be
eliminated too? And if that meant the and of politics? The ‘revolution-
ary’ kernel of the message of May: the revolution is no longer needed.
Henceforth, things will sort themselves out unaided, on the social level,
either pre- or post-politics (open to choice); that is, without direction,
planning or conscious will.
Which would explain the noise made by May, and its endlessly drawn
out echoes; for it is this ‘noise’ in person which continues to structure
the current reorganization of our ‘informational codes’. Which would
also explain that it took time to decode the message, since it was itself
coded back to front. For example, as the ‘first great crisis of State
Monopoly Capitalism’, or a ‘crisis of the third type’ according to
Ernest Mandel (the first type being linked to war, the second to major
economic crises). That can certainly be said. ‘Pre-revolutionary crisis’,
or post-revolutionary? Certainly not the last, in any case. There will be
8Jacques Attali, French Socialist economist.
53
other, more serious crises—the price of the stability of the system. The
combativity of the masses can only increase in the future? One can
only hope this is true. Integration in no way signifies the absence of
contradiction.
Poetry not Politics
A revolutionary situation is not one that carries the revolution in its
belly, but that which narrows all the options down to one: revolution
or counter-revolution, mounted on the extreme left or the extreme
right, all half-way compromises being plainly materially impossible.
The crisis becomes conflictual when it has accumulated enough intoler-
able uncertainties to be unable to tolerate even one more day of
indecision. What is striking about May is the indecision of each side,
the vacillation, the difficulty of extracting a conclusion. Which finally
imposed itself, in the form of dissolution of parliament and general
elections, by default, like undertow rather than response. The Movement,
for its part, experienced less a retreat or rout than an ebbing and
exhaustion. Which made the outcome an average between the two—the
‘new society’ of Chaban-Delmas—the resultant of the parallelogram of
forces in play. As if the marvellous spontaneity of the birth carried
within itself an abortion through inertia.
It is known today, and even a source of pride, as if resulting from a
surplus of grace, that there was no leadership, no plan, no intention,
still less a ‘conductor’ ordering the woodwinds about from Peking
or Havana. Cohn-Bendit: ‘People were not looking for a confrontation
on 11 May. The idea at the beginning was to have a big party in the
Sorbonne courtyard. The barricades went up by themselves.’ Grimaud:
‘There were no tactics on the leftist side, the street fighting was
improvised from day to day, which was lucky for the forces of order’.
The May movement was aggressive and clashed with enemies it had
not sought—the cosh, threats and tear gas—but did not lead to a
struggle between two hostile camps, two wills each seeking to dominate
the other. No enemies, no targets, no objectives: there were hard
clashes, perhaps all the harder for being not confrontations but
collisions. Franco had been hated, Laval and Ridgway had been hated,
but De Gaulle was not hated. As Clara Malraux said: ‘We couldn’t have
both joy and hate. And it was joy that mobilized us.’
Revolutions of love seldom result in love of revolutions, and social
self-regulation does not accept the outside control of politics. Let each
be responsible for himself, says the vulgate (‘vulgate’ is what one calls
the doctrine of others). Which means in this context: let each make his
own forces of order. Efflorescence by sprinkling. Happiness through
the diaspora. Dislocation as paragraph z in the manifesto.
Is not this the whole poetry of May, that the movement should be an
and in itself, like language for the poet or the game for the player?
Perhaps the best gambles have no stakes. The injured of May struggled
against a generic being who happened to be called De Gaulle. Between
a setting and a foil, less than an enemy but more than a reagent: what
was meant by State, System, Old World. One might almost say, it was
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