Guardian Europe columnists Rokhaya Diallo and Alexander Hurst are taking questions from readers about the riots and protests in France. Join the discussion in the comments here.
Eamon McCrisken notes: Comparisons are being made with May 1968 but I think the following should be borne in mind from those times:
‘De Gaulle and Pompidou warned the country was threatened with a Communist coup. De Gaulle announced a snap election, calling upon the French to choose between legitimate government and revolutionary anarchy. The May Events in France were curiously peaceful by the standards of revolutionary turbulence elsewhere, or in France’s own past. The French ‘psychodrama’ (Aron) of 1968 entered popular mythology almost immediately as an object of nostalgia, it was above all a victimless revolution. (Tony Judt, Postwar)
Rokhaya: This comparison reminds me how familiar the political framing sounds: a social movement with concrete grievances is presented as a threat to the nation, and the public is asked to choose between the government and chaos. That framing allows those in power to elude questions about their own policies and responsibility for the escalation, as it is the case for the current protest.
May 1968 was not really “victimless”: people died during the May–June events, including striking workers at a Peugeot factory in Sochaux. Relative restraint compared with other historical upheavals should not erase those deaths.
Alexander: Part of me loves to talk about national mythologies and how they can also become our national pathologies, and part of me hates it because I know I’ll inevitably end up reducing and simplifying things because I haven’t, unlike Tony Judt, written a chef d’oeuvre like Postwar on it.
But to go there anyway, if the US mythology has a large dose of “someday I can get rich, too” in it, I think the French mythology has a dose of “someday, I too can overthrow a despotic government”. I obviously wasn’t around in May 1968, and I didn’t grow up in France, but it does often seem to me like every generation wants to have its own “Revolution” that then cements its place in the national narrative. The country obviously has a high propensity for large-scale street protests and confrontations that don’t really happen in the same way as the US or UK. Lately, I’ve been wishing the US would take some inspiration from the French. But is the confrontational nature of French politics a sign of it working, or a sign that it’s not really working? I’d lean towards the latter.
