The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968
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The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968[1] is a book by Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn.
Blurb:
In May 1968, France stood on the verge of full-blooded revolution. Here a rhythmic, vivid evocation from eyewitness Angelo Quattrocchi is complemented by Tom Nairn’s cool and elegant appraisal to tell the astonishing story of those heady days. Paris is a seething battlefield of barricades, burning cars and CS gas. De Gaulle’s riot police publicly inform him that their loyalty can no longer be taken for granted. Meanwhile students and millions of young striking workers on the streets raise ideas that had previously been the sole province of radical philosophers: “To forbid is forbidden”; “Be reasonable ... Demand the impossible”; “Freedom is the consciousness of our desires.” (less)
- Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May '68 -- the Situationist International's official statement on the 1968 revolution -- begins with the following quotation from Hegel's Reason in History.
- Concerning original history. . . . The content of these histories is necessarily limited; their essential material is that which is living in the experience of the historian himself and in the current interests of men; that which is living and contemporary in their milieu. The author describes that in which he has participated, or at least that which he has lived; relatively short periods, figures of individual men [sic] and their deeds. . . . It is not sufficient to have been the contemporary of the events described, or to be well-informed about them. The author must belong to the class and social milieu of the actors he is describing; their opinions, way of thought and culture must be the same as his own. In order to really know phenomena and see them in their real context, one must be placed at the summit -- not seeing them from below, through the keyhole of morality or any other wisdom [emphasis added].
--The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968[2]
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