France

IN MAY AND JUNE 1968, somewhere around ten million workers were on strike in France. They occupied their factories and marched in the streets, singing the “Internationale” and calling for an end to the ten years of Gaullist rule. Students, too, were on strike, occupying their schools and marching in the streets, singing the “Internationale” and calling for an end to the ten years of Gaullist rule. But popular memory is no less fallible than human memory, and so a poll published in early 2018 in the Nouveau Magazine Littéraire showed that 86% of those polled thought of the events of May ‘68 as a student movement. [Read More]

IN 1871 THE PARIS COMMUNE, a revolutionary body formed during the deep unrest following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, rose against the post-war provisional government of Adolphe Thiers and briefly held power in France. Two months after it took power, the Commune was brutally suppressed by the French army. In his film “La Commune,” released in 2002, director Peter Watkins orchestrated and documented a theatrical re-enactment of the Commune. At nearly six hours, the film explores the events of the Commune as well as its relevance for the present, and in so doing it is compelled to negotiate the myriad ways in which history bears on the present. [Read More]