The Mai '68 Conference

On June 9, 2018, the Center for Critical Democracy Studies (CCDS) at The American University of Paris hosted a conference on the transatlantic legacy of the volatile period of civil unrest in May 1968 that begun with student protests and nationwide strikes throughout the entire country of France. The Mai ’68 Conference – hosted by Stephen Sawyer, Director of the CCDS, along with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Presidential Visiting Professor in the Religion Department at Yale University – marked 50 years after this period of landmark social and political action that changed the face of French politics. Panelists who took part in the Mai ’68 Conference included historians, philosophers and cultural scholars from nine different universities in France, Belgium and the United States.

On the 50th anniversary of the events of May 1968, scholars took the opportunity to note the recent resurgence of academic and popular interest in the uprisings that took place in France. This interest, they argue, follows a long-established pattern of historical commemoration. The common aim of participants in this conference was to investigate the deeper democratic significance not only of “the events of May,” but also of the very fascination with these events over the decades, both in France and beyond.

As the intellectual historian Wim Weymans suggested in his reading of the work of Claude Lefort, May ’68 helped expand notions of what counts as a “healthy” form of contestation in a democratic society. In contrast, other panelists highlighted some of the dangers of taking the narrative of the 1968 protesters – the original soixante-huitards – and their intellectual heirs at face value. Kalinka Alvarez-Courtois, for example, warned of the “sugar-coated” account of some former activists who have sought to institutionalize generational revolt as part of France’s political culture, while Grey Anderson saw in the celebration of the events of May ’68 the obscuring of the violent aspects of the birth of the Fifth Republic ten years prior.

The conference was organized in partnership with Tocqueville 21, a space for reflection on contemporary democracy sponsored by the CCDS and The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville. The evening prior to the conference, Tocqueville 21 organized an informal discussion of May ’68 between conference participants, members of the public, and the renowned philosopher Frédéric Worms. Tocqueville 21’s blog has published work by several of the conference panelists and will also make a selection of the papers presented available in the coming weeks.

For more information concerning the Mai ’68 Conference, Tocqueville 21 blog is archiving full abstracts of the papers presented.