Paris, France
Mission Title: May '68 and the New Geography
Mission Date: --
SCRIPT
- May 2008 marks the 40th anniversary of the uprising, what has changed in the last 40 years. Have the paving stones been paved over? How many of the ideals have been realized? How many have been stifled.
- Listen to the stories but also ask provocative questions. What’s really changed? Can the uprising happen again? How do the May ’68 riots compare to the riots of 2005, when immigrants and the children of immigrants rioted all over France?
- Is there a space left for revolutionary discourse and actual change in France?
TRAVEL BAG
Is there a new geography of resistance?
From what started out as a relatively simple dorm dispute escalated into a 10 million worker strike in Paris during May 1968 . A tectonic shift of social, moral, and political values rattled the whole world during the Spring and Summer of 1968, with cities and students as the primary points of rupture. In Paris, the brief union of students and workers might appear to have little lasting effects (De Gaulle who went into hiding in Germany during the riots was roundly re-elected the following month). But to the French people May ’68 signals a shift in the cultural consciousness of the Republic from allegiance to god and country to the passionate defense of equal rights and liberated sexuality.
As well as a being a byword for this change, May '68 also involved coming up with a new geography of struggle: the barricade, the commune, the squat - semi-autonomous zones that allowed for both self-emancipation and collectivist social models. The walls of Paris were covered with graffiti, slogans but with a verbal wit, against work, against conformity, against boredom:
“Under the paving stones – the beach!”
“No replastering, the structure is rotten.”
“I’m a Groucho Marxist.“
“Boredom is counterrevolutionary.”
“Politics is in the streets.”
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