Extract
Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible
In the final speech of his presidential campaign in May 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy declared 'it is a question of whether the heritage of May '68 should be perpetuated or if it should be liquidated once and for all'. The 'cynical' and 'immoral' left were held responsible for a crisis of 'morality, authority, work and national identity', including a failure of business ethics and the 'morality of capitalism'. Sarkozy said 'I want to turn the page on May '68', because 'The heirs of May '68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent'.1 The demonisation of the sixties has been a common theme in the New Right for the last thirty years, both in the United States of America and in the United Kingdom.2 Consequendy, Sarkozy's words were greeted with delight by contributors to Freerepublic.com, 'the premier online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web'.3 Just as Margaret Thatcher wanted to consign socialism to the 'dustbin of history',4 Sarkozy wants to excise the spirit of 1968 from the social imaginary. But as Kristin Ross says, the discourse about May '68 from June '68 onwards has already met Sarkozy's purpose: 'Discourse has been produced, but its primary effect has been to liquidate - to use an old 1968 word - erase, or render obscure the history of May'.5 The idea of 'May '68' already emerges as bivalent. Alain Touraine distinguished between the broad phenomenon of a social movement involving widespread cultural changes, and specific political expressions and organisations that erupt from this.6 Similarly, to talk of the spirit, heritage, or heirs of May '68 conjures a distinctive social and cultural orientation, which was international in reach and sometimes in orientation. The political events in France at the time (the history to which Ross refers) constitute a particular expression of this. In terms of general legacy, it is the broader cu...
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