Mai 1968 : La fête des Dieux

• Main Author: Jean-Jacques Wunenburger
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Portugaise d'Etudes Françaises 2019-05-01
• Series: Carnets
• Subjects: celebration; Marxism; anarchism; imagination; freedom; revolution
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/carnets/9625

The effervescence of ideas and images of May 68 social movements - above all approached from a French point of view, and, by no means, monolithic - consists of two major mythic topics. Some of them come from different revolutionary Marxisms, including the proletariat in tension with students’ intellectual movement, and the other ones tap into anarchist and gnostic mainstreams that long for a libertarian society. We will study these mainstreams and their imageries through Gilbert Durand’s metaphorical model, which liken the different phases of a collective imagery to the steps of a river morphology. It appears that these imageries, most of them antithetic, date back to the XIX and XXth centuries, which explains the lack of any genuine posterity, and leave room to other contemporary imageries.