What did 1968 ever do for us?

It is forty years since 'May 1968', a series of student protests in France. Rebellion was not confined to the cobbled streets of Paris's Latin Quarter that year; revolutionary waves also rippled across the streets of Prague, Belgium, Poland, Pakistan, the Philippines, Mexico, Kenya and Brazil. In the UK, women demanded equal pay and in the United States, students protested the Vietnam War and beauty contests. The spirit of '68, or the undermining of authoritarianism, is celebrated, exaggerated and exploited four decades on.

Achievements

There is disagreement over what les evenements in Paris and beyond achieved over the short and long-term:

• Peter Lennon believes the protests were about more than hippie youngsters railing against the 'heavy' establishment who had shuttered their cinematheques; he thinks the students effectively brought down a head of state. This is open to conjecture; the protests reached such a point that de Gaulle created separate military operations headquarters to deal with the unrest, dissolved the National Assembly and called for new parliamentary elections a month later. After a face-saving interval, the most influential leader in modern French history retired a year later.  
• Geoffrey Wheatcroft is doubtful that the global rebellion led to a lasting shift in political values, and warns against grizzled soixante-huitards hijacking the 1968 zeitgeist.  He writes that the "brief orgasmic thrill of 1968 was followed by years of post-coital depression" and that the intervening 40 years has seen the right win politically and the left win culturally. There is some truth here: the right has inhabited the Elysée palace for 26 of the last 40 years; the Conservative Party has dominated political life in the UK for almost half of  the last four decades, and in the United States, Republicans have been in the White House for 28 of the 40 years.
• Chris Harman, the Editor of International Socialism agrees that many of 1968's political and cultural gains were rolled back. "That was what the coups in Chile and Argentina were about. That was what Thatcherism and Reaganism were about. That is what the transformation of women's liberation into sexual commodification is about." 
• The new climate of cultural liberalism certainly gave the business world new opportunities to exploit. "The structure of capitalist society was beginning to shift in a manner barely evident at the time. How could we have known that empowerment would be the adman's dream ticket or that the market would zoom in so thoroughly on personal identity," writes Sheila Rowbotham.

Legacy of hope

Although many are sceptical of 1968's impact today, most agree that rebellion -- in Paris and further afield -- contested the space between personal life and politics. The French students discombobulated the old authoritarian society of which they had had enough, and workers advanced a broader, more political and more radical agenda. Both wanted to change a society where housewives needed the permission of their husbands to open a bank account and workplaces were draconian establishments reminiscent of Victorian England.

Christopher Hitchens, one of the most articulate soixante-huitards, agrees that the desire to undermine authority and the hope for change, if not real change, is 1968's true legacy: "the antitotalitarian ethos embraced by the best soixante-huitards remains an option…and I believe that it will have further opportunities to declare itself long after the pseudo-revolutionary silliness has been forgotten."

A disgruntled Belgian contributor to The Guardian's Comment is Free forum would agree. "1968 was also more than just a bunch of students, it was about inequality between the Walloon and the Flemish population. We are still in the same mess though," he writes.