The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 / Edition 1

by Angelo Quattrocchi, Tom Nairn

Overview

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781859842904
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	05/17/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Anarchist and poet, Angelo Quattrocchi (1945–2009) reported from London, Paris and the US for Italian newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s and subsequently worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC, Channel 4, and Italian television. His books include The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968, What Happened, Why It Happened with Tom Nairn.

Tom Nairn‘s many books include The Break-up of Britain, Faces of Nationalism, After Britain, and The Enchanted Glass. He writes for, among others, New Left Review and the London Review of Books.

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics—including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome—as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

An unconsciously situationist text.”—Guy Debord

From the Publisher

Italian TV scriptwriter Quattrocchi and Edinburgh, Scotland-based teacher and political writer Nairn have written two entirely different essays for the 30th anniversary of the French student riots, and combined to make this very short book about a very challenging subject. Nairn's flat prose about the political motivations is not original but at least is readable, although marred by clichd chapter headings like "The Last Comedy of Capitalism" and "A New Subjectivity." But this book errs badly in printing Quattrocchi's "contemporary fable" titled "What Happened," which reads like a combination of a hokey "atmospheric" radio script and John Berger after too many Camparis. Quattrocchi offers a myopic view of the events of the student revolution, with so many arcane references and French terms that only a reader thoroughly familiar with the 1968 revolution will have any idea of what he is getting at, and even then, what he adds in the way of perspectives and comments are not exactly illuminating. Parts sound like a bad translation of Genet: "The mass copulation with fear has left behind its sportcars hooting obscenities. Young puppets tenderly nursed by midwife flics." Readers truly interested in ideas about political revolution will want to read theorists like Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Raymond Aron, among others, as an antidote to this curious, unhelpful production. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly