The King's German Legion (1): 1803-12 Book

This quickly became one of the best political/historical investigatory works I have ever read, and I suspect one of the best books I will ever read on the subject of May '68 events. Kristin Ross doesn't merely attempt to answer the question of "What happened?" in May '68, but also why the events of May have been obscured and convoluted, devided between the extreme poles of "Nothing happened" and "Everything happened at the same time". Between these two poles, adopted by politicians and historians, lies an immense sea of narratives and points of view that is almost systematically ignored, both in and outside of academia. Ross retrieves vital testimonies by workers, students, activists, philosophers and writers in order to restore the deliberately obscured dimension of May events: The radical political aspirations. Efforts to depoliticize May seems to be the major feature of most revisionist narratives surrounding it.

During May nothing happened politically; its effects were purely cultural'so went the consensus evaluation, the story learned, authorized, imposed, celebrated publicly, and commemorated, in print and in the television shows…

Gradually, by drawing from the accounts of various figures involved in the events, Ross makes the case for May events as revolutionary, as an active and splendid attempt in reaching equality, beyond time, space and social confinements. Furthermore, an intriguing aspect of her investigation is to ignite the trail of political events that lead to mass upheaval and dissent in May, in opposition to the dominant narratives that have tried (and succeeded, to a large degree) to isolate May as a single instance of cultural and philosophical outburst among students. Among the political events are the Algerian and Vietnam war, how they were perceived both by students and workers, and the phenomenal meeting that happened between these two key figures in universities, factories and the streets ('a solidarity that was not sympathy'). As put by Dominique Lecourt,

Long after the fracas of 1958 and the sound of boots that had accompanied the return to power of General de Gaulle, the imminence of a fascist 'coup' kept us on alert. And the OAS bombs, in those blue nights, like the almost daily combats on the rue Saint-Jacques, mobilised the most pacifists among us.

Ross drags the revisionist spotlight from the courtyard of Sorbonne to the factories, the streets, the bookstores and more importantly, other cities besides Paris. Considering prevailing narrative of 'individualist, hedonistic and rebellious youths making a hippie fuss', the efforts by Ross to marshal plenty of evidence to the contrary is extremely valuable. She quotes Raymond Aron, who said youths rebel 'like rats or other animals, when forced to live at an excessive density in a confined space' and remarks sarcastically that this dehumanizing vocabulary had been 'underused since the time of the Paris Commune'. Aron, despite posing as an anti-Gaullist, had nonetheless supported de Gaulle's call to arms at the end of May and marched in solidarity with scores of colonials, neo-fascists, parachutists, and similar guardians of order. 


Another interesting aspect of the book is how Ross aspires to enrich her political investigation with cultural aspects. A particularly fascinating instant of this is her writing on the verb matraquer, which had its pre-history in Algeria, entered French general usage, was used increasingly in each decade following 1968, becoming a point of connection, an axis of solidarity between the May insurrectionists. 

In the third chapter, Ross investigates the assimilation of the soul of May events in the hands of many philosophers and thinkers who sought to steal the ball and reshape the narratives, mostly along the lines of "nothing happened", and doing so by seeking the media limelight. She cites Deleuze (himself active in '68 events) writing in 1977:

the theme that was already present in the first books: the hatred of '68. It was about who could best spit on '68. It is in function of that hatred that they constructed their subject of enunciation: 'We, as those who made '68 (??), we can tell you that it was stupid, and we won't do it again.

At the end of the chapter, Ross succinctly posits:

The attitude of critique or its very possibility - the soul of '68 - has at this moment been lost. The enthusiastic conversion by some ex-gauchistes to the values of the market has been successfully disguised as a 'cultural' or 'spiritual' revolution, and May, it seems, can be renarrated now as the founding moment of this trajectory.

There's much more to say about this book. Every single page was captivating in its own way. The prose is at times a little complicated, but generally it's not a difficult book to get through. The book flows from an introduction that seeks to clarify that "something" happened in May, to the following chapter aiming to marry the struggle of students and workers and the crisis of representation, and finally the revisionist narratives that sprang up in the following events, but these themes bleed into each other, making the entire book much more cohesive and persuasive.