The beginning of the end

Revolution is the ecstasy of history. Angelo Quattrocchi, poet, anarchist and correspondent for the Italian newspaper Avanti, was posted to Paris during the events of May 1968. He witnessed the student revolt at Nanterre, which spread to the Sorbonne and then to nine million factory workers. Paris became an enormous battlefield of barricades, burning cars and CS gas. President de Gaulle's riot police publicly informed him that their loyalty could no longer be taken for granted. It was the closes the postwar west was to come to full-scale revolution. In staccato anecdotes, Quattrocchi describes events behind the slogans on the walls of the city: "To Forbid Is Forbidden", "Be Reasonable ... Demand the Impossible," and shows how ideas that had previously been the province only of radical philosophers suddenly became springs of actions for millions. Quattrocchi's account of this "ecstasy of history" is rhythmic, impassioned and unashamedly partisan. Tom Nairn, leftist writer and teacher, provides the ideal counterpoint, with an incisive analysis of the causes and consequences of the May events. Writing in the heat of a student occupation at Hornsey School of Art, Nairn dissects the structural contradictions that conditioned the eruption of `68 and mercilessly exposes the failure of the political organizations to rise to the challenge.