1968: Radical Year

After a couple of chapters setting the scene and sketching his approach, followed by a chapter on universities as incubators of protest, Vinen devotes four substantial chapters to 68 as it played out in the United States, France, West Germany, and Britain. He occasionally takes up events elsewhere—in Italy, for instance—but focuses on these four, emphasizing both commonalities and contrasts (the strong participation of workers in the French 68, for instance, as opposed to organized labor’s widespread disdain for protesters and activists in the United States).

These case studies are followed by three thematic chapters: “The Revolution Within the Revolution: Sexual Liberation and the Family,” “Workers,” and “Violence.” A chapter titled “Defeat and Accommodation?” considers the afterlife of 68 in the 1970s and 1980s, while in his conclusion Vinen assesses the would-be revolutionaries from today’s vantage.

Carlo Bavagnoli / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

Vinen combines two qualities not often found in the same historian. One is a willingness to doggedly absorb vast quantities of information and present his findings in a lucid if somewhat pedestrian form. The other is a sharp wit and a strong sense of irony, coupled with an openness to the unruly character of human experience. The result is a book that will be useful (even enjoyable) to a wide audience, from lay readers to Vinen’s fellow scholars, a chronicle that can be read with profit both by those who will be encountering events that took place well before they were born and by those (like me) who remember those days from their youth. It may be a timely book as well, though I hope it isn’t.

I know people (mostly via reading, sometimes between the lines, but also in person, including a couple of close friends) who loathe President Trump (as many of us do) but who hope he will be reelected in 2020. In their view, no incremental improvements to our flawed liberal democracy, held in the iron grip of capitalism, will even begin to lead us out of our dystopian mess. For these observers, the presidency of Barack Obama settled that question once and for all. They never use the word “revolution” (at least in my reading or hearing), but that seems to be the logical conclusion to their assessment. And more years of Trump, they judge, will make an overthrow of our malign “system” at least a bit more plausible.

I have one small gripe and one large complaint. Small but puzzling: Why doesn’t Vinen at least mention the three films—The Lovely Month of May, A Grin Without a Cat, and The Case of the Grinning Cat—in which Chris Marker muses on “the Long 68”? (Of course, I understand you have to leave a lot out in such a condensed account.) Large: For me, the greatest weakness of Vinen’s valuable book is his failure to give adequate attention to religion, a failure all the more maddening because—good historian that he is—he conscientiously includes, in passing, observations that might have prompted him to think more about this. (See his brief comments on pages 86-87 about the religious convictions shared by some members of the American left.) In fact he should have devoted a thematic chapter to religion and 68, which would have started with the rapid secularization of Western Europe in the sixties and contrasted this with the American experience. (On the first point see, for example, Hugh McLeod’s concluding essay, “Reflections and New Perspectives,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945-2000, edited by Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau.)

Of course this is a blind spot Vinen shares with many scholars of the sixties. While every general history of the sixties in the United States includes a mention of Students for a Democratic Society, very few of them take note of the Catholic charismatic renewal that began in 1967 at a retreat held by Duquesne University faculty and students, or the parallel explosion of Pentecostal influence on Protestants, not to mention the Lubavitchers and similar Orthodox Jewish movements. You can’t understand the sixties—68 very much included—unless you include in your view these movements combining intense piety with ecstatic experience. (See Geoffrey O’Brien’s brilliant memoir Dream Time for an unsettling variation on glossolalia, not “religious” but hardly “secular” either.)

This connection is particularly important for any study of political violence and terrorism. The religious or quasi-religious motivations that often play a part in such violence have been explored by novelists and filmmakers as well as scholars. Most of the 68 protesters Vinen describes were not violent, but some were. His consideration of “the Long 68” in Germany includes the Baader-Meinhof group, one of whose leaders, Gudrun Ensslin, was the daughter of a Protestant pastor. Stefan Aust, whose book Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. should be added to Vinen’s suggestions for further reading, quotes the pastor’s response after his daughter and Andreas Baader were arrested for arson in two department stores. While no one was injured in the fires—the group had not yet killed anyone, though that was soon to come—both Pastor Ensslin and his wife, while saying that of course they did not condone arson, spoke of their daughter’s action in exalted terms. “It has astonished me,” Pastor Ensslin said, “to find that Gudrun, who has always thought in a very rational, intelligent way, has experienced what is almost a condition of euphoric self-realization, a really holy self-realization such as we find mentioned in connection with saints.”

By coincidence (if there are any coincidences), I was reading an advance galley of Vinen’s book when I saw the news of Tom Wolfe’s death. It was in August 1968 that two of Wolfe’s books—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump House Gang—were published on the same day. Yes: two aggressively, offensively brilliant anatomies of the zeitgeist published on the same day. Two years later came Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (not irrelevant to 68, Short or Long).

So it happened that while I read the galley of 1968 and again when I read the finished book, Tom Wolfe seemed to be hovering nearby. No Ouija board was used, James Merrill-style, nor did I consort with any latter-day sisters of the Witch of Endor. Still I sensed a presence. Maybe it was that (in conjunction with the then-upcoming plans to mark the centenary of the end of World War I) that started me thinking about the centenary of 68.

Given the claims of the life-extension crowd, it’s possible I’ll be around for that anniversary, 120 years old. Will anyone care about 68 in 2068? I’m not sure. My memories of 1968 are still reasonably clear, with newsworthy events—the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; the Democratic convention in Chicago; and more—jumbled with personal memories: above all, marrying Wendy in Chico, California, in September and setting out later that day by car (Wendy at the wheel) for Santa Barbara, where I would begin classes at Westmont College in a couple of days. We were 20 years old.

A year and several months later, in February 1970, a Bank of America branch in Isla Vista, near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, was burned down by protesters. Wendy (who was pregnant with our first child, to be born that September) and I shook our heads at the news, but we weren’t at all overcome by a sense of dread. Should we have been? Or should we have decided that we too must join the revolution? Neither, maybe.