“It’s horrible, horrible. It’s horrible! I don’t want to see that!” On the set of the show What an era! on France 2, March 2, 2024, Brigitte Fossey looks away from the scene of one of her films, The Valseuses, of which we rebroadcast an extract. We see her breastfeeding her infant in a deserted train when the two thugs, stars of the scenario, played by Gérard Dépardieu and Patrick Dewaere, harass her. “What I would like is for you to nurse my friend. He’s a big fan of milk and, what’s more, he was born to an unknown mother,” laughs the first, 24 years old at the time.
The famous film by Bertrand Blier, released in cinemas in 1974, was due to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary on Wednesday March 20. Nothing happened, not a word or a celebration for this feature film, that of a generation, that of May 68 and its aftermath, youth intoxicated with idealism and sexual freedom without any limits. “Pornography”, “obsessed film”… Although the critics may be gnashing their teeth, the public is rushing into cinemas in droves: 5.7 million admissions. In 1974, young people were still impatient and Bertrand Blier said, in an interview with Defector, having wanted to follow the fashion for provocative films “to give an extra turn of the screw, to shock even more”.
New standard
“Enjoy without hindrance”, so went the famous slogan, the era of sexual and sexist violence wrapped in the gift paper of libertinism. The Epicurean injunction of the time had no regard for the consent of women and children, but at the time of the #MeToo revolution, today’s left is taking a new look, much less enamored, at May 68 than his elders, socialists, communists, Maoists and others have glorified. A revolution certainly, but tinged with darkness. Exit conservative post-war society, and hello a “sexual freedom” from which female desire is excluded. It was forbidden to ban, so saying no, what an idea. Cinema goes there shamelessly, with history of O which depicts the sexual slavery of women. “May 68 was the emancipation of women and, at the same time, the liberation of male sexuality since, thanks to contraception and then abortion, tomorrow was no longer a worry for them. Women could not “appropriate pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but men, yes. A new cultural norm replaced the old one. If you were a left-wing woman, you had to accept it. That was what being revolutionary was all about,” explains the MP ecologist Sandrine Rousseau, who refuses to glorify the 1968 period, “a romanticized activist fantasy”.
Like a nod – in spite of itself – to a certain Nicolas Sarkozy… In 2007, in the middle of the presidential campaign during a meeting in Bercy, the UMP candidate rebelled against the myth. “In this election, it is a question of knowing whether the legacy of May 68 must be perpetuated or whether it must be liquidated once and for all,” he told his supporters, creating an outcry on the left. “Talking about the liquidation of May 68 is Bolshevism,” protested MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the faces of the era, also long criticized for having assumed this sexual freedom of the 1960s. without limits. In 1975, the young haired activist recounted in The Grand Bazaar his job as an educator in a so-called “alternative” kindergarten in Germany, in Frankfurt. “It happened to me several times that some kids opened my pants and started to tickle me. I reacted differently depending on the circumstances, but their desire posed a problem for me. I asked them: ‘Why don’t you play together, Why did you choose me and not the other kids?’ But if they insisted, I would pet them anyway,” he wrote. Seven years later, on the show Apostrophes on Antenne 2, he adds: “When a little girl of 5 and a half years old starts to undress you, it’s fantastic.” The ex-icon defended himself much later, affirming that what he had written had not “been done, it was a provocation”, and expressed his regrets to L’Express in 2001. Eight years later, in In the middle of the 2009 European campaign, François Bayrou will bring out the accusation: “I find it despicable to have pushed and justified acts against children that I cannot accept.”
Revolution ?
It still happens today that the totems of May 68 collapse. The latest is Gérard Miller, a Maoist activist at the time, who became a famous psychoanalyst, and was targeted by dozens of accusations of rape and sexual assault after investigations by the magazine She. Faced with the scale of the affair targeting a fellow traveler from La France insoumise, MP and long-time feminist activist Clémentine Autain says she feels “a feeling of betrayal”. If she abhors sexist and sexual violence (SGBV), so-called “left-wing” violence is dizzying to her. “It is all the more unbearable since the discourse we are making aims to combat this violence and domination. We say that women feel more confident with a man on the left, who calls himself a feminist and speaks the feminist language “It’s part of the abuse”, explains the elected representative of Seine-Saint-Denis who, for her part, does not cast opprobrium on May 68, the first stage of a movement to raise awareness among women, of the fight which follows for the right to abortion and the definition on the recognition of rape at the end of the 1970s.
Above all, a small breach from which the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) emerged, where society rediscovered The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, although published in 1949. Often, the critical view of the left of 2024 on the errors of the May 68 era is criticized for being that of a return to chastity, where it is not than a deconstruction of the national novel of the left. May 68, workers’ revolt, of which the strike at Lip (the watch factory in Besançon) would be the incarnation a few years later, transformed into a “sexual revolution”; but a revolution which never revolutionizes the relations of domination between men and women. We will have to wait for #MeToo, and since then, the sixties have been less peaceful, less cool and less relaxed.
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