The Long ’68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies. By Richard Vinen. Allen Lane; 411 pages; £20.
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“IF YOU can remember the Sixties, you weren’t really there.” The old saw is attributed to everyone from The Who’s Pete Townshend to Timothy Leary (the decade’s most famous advocate of LSD). The reality, as Richard Vinen proves in a meticulously researched book, is that plenty of people do remember the Sixties—but not all the same way.
For the French, “68” is May 1968, when alarmists feared that cobblestone-throwing students might overthrow the Fifth Republic. Fifty years later, soixante-huitard (“sixty-eighter”) remains shorthand for a certain type of baby-boomer in modern France, with nuances ranging from sexual liberation to illusory dreams of social equality. But Mr Vinen, a historian at King’s College London, notes that France’s May 1968 was actually part of a political and social ferment that affected most of the West for much of the 1960s and into the 1970s—the period he calls “the Long ’68”.
What linked the demonstrations that rocked (and mocked) the establishment from Berkeley to London, Paris to Berlin? Mr Vinen proposes several answers. One was a generation’s anger at the Vietnam war (the Vietcong’s Tet offensive, which showed that an American victory was nowhere near, began in January 1968). Another was a reaction to the aftermath of colonialism. In France memories of the Algerian war, which had ended in 1962, were still raw and divisive. In Britain Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech against immigration in April 1968 infuriated students even as it delighted dockers.
A third was the cascade effect of different groups’ fights for their rights. One activist from Queen’s University Belfast argued that events in Northern Ireland were linked to “the black struggle in the US, the workers’ fight in France, the resistance of the Vietnamese, the uprising against Stalinism in Czechoslovakia”. Television linked these struggles. As Mr Vinen wryly notes: “Filming in Berlin or Berkeley could offer the same arresting images of violence without entailing the risk of real war. Television could flatten the contours of violence so that war, riot and boisterous demonstrations could appear the same.”
But none of these answers is entirely satisfying. Young rebels and striking workers struggled to work together smoothly. Although some starry-eyed students, especially in France, joined the assembly line to spread the revolution, most workers—like Britain’s striking miners—were in their guts conservative rather than radical.
Baby-boomers reliving their youth will be impressed by Mr Vinen’s research. It includes plenty of detail on well-known characters from America’s Black Panthers to Germany’s Red Army Fraction (the Baader-Meinhof Gang) and Italy’s Red Brigades. But it also features the occasional surprising gem—for example, that in the 1950s a young Henry Kissinger tried to persuade Albert Camus to write for him.
Capitalism is still with us, and so is the class system. So Mr Vinen’s verdict on the 1960s is a recognition of “a change in personal behaviour that is hard to measure and hard to dismiss”. Meanwhile, some of the period’s militants have gone from notoriety to respectability, including Dany Cohn-Bendit, a Franco-German former member of the European Parliament, and Joschka Fischer, a German former foreign minister. Tariq Ali edited the Black Dwarf and then the Red Mole (Marxist papers which—perhaps oddly, given their influence with British radicals of the era—are not discussed in much detail). But Mr Ali is now a venerable member of Britain’s literary establishment, a fitting destination for a former president of the Oxford Union.
The pity of this otherwise admirable book is that it misses that spirit. The forensic scrutiny of the scholar cannot quite capture the era’s heady conviction that all was possible. In retrospect, the dreams of the 68ers—remember John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” or Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco”—seem hopelessly naive. But for baby-boomers they were real enough at the time. For all his academic expertise, Mr Vinen is a little too young to have smelled the flowers in their hair.