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.

Publishers Weekly

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)