Author: Sydney Kightlinger

“The role training, the instilled sense of inferiority and the contradiction between her own expectations and the claims of society produce in her the guilty feeling of never satisfying the demands placed upon her. She must choose between alternatives which in each instance mean a foregoing of vital needs” (308).

We touched on gender roles briefly during the French Revolution, and we are touching on them briefly now. During the French Revolution, women were relegated to raising strong, fair, enlightened citizens: sons who would fight and daughter who would sew (*eyeroll emoji here*). According to the text, these gender roles were standing strong in 1968 . How do you feel about this change demanding rhetoric? Moreover, how do you feel about the act of throwing tomatoes?

Does knowing that the tomatoes were on hand because of a pregnancy craving make the story better for you? It does for me.

Secondly, many occupations were accompanied by the ‘sequestering’ of bosses. Here the example of the Sud-Aviation workers was decisive. On 14 May, they demonstrated their resolve by sequestering their manager and five of his assistants for 15 days. And the treatment meted out to them was harsh: during the first two nights the Internationale was played continuously to prevent them sleeping (Varga 49).

As you all know, I tend to always side with the people protesting the establishment. However, I found the above section of text to challenge my opinions. There are many ways to read a situation, but I am not sure if this particular form of protest is ethical. I find something wrong by holding people hostage and denying them sleep (maybe, I am being sensitive to sleep deprivation as I, too, am exhausted). What are your thoughts on this tenet of protest?

Also, I found this oddly specific tiktok:

@justalittlepolitical3

♬ Misfits – bustersmam

The university has, in fact, become a sausage-machine which turns out people without any real culture, and incapable of thinking for themselves, but trained to fit into the economic system of a highly industrialized society (Cohn Bendit 27).

A modern university has two contradictory roles. To begin with, a university must churn out the trained personnel that is so essential for bureaucratic capitalism. (Cohn Bendit 41).

Throughout Cohn Bendit’s book, there is the sentiment that the university fails to prepare the working class students for a life of meaning, not chasing dollar. Obviously Cohn Bendit is toying with marxist thought, but what do you think about the justifications for university protest within the context of curriculum adaptations? I challenge you to think of both positions and try to argue the one you agree with least.

https://youtu.be/_rwWyIqpyYY

“Fuck hierarchy, authority, this society with its cold, rational elitist logic! […] Fuck this immutable society that refuses to consider the misery, poverty, inequality, and injustices that it creates, that divides people according to their origins and skills” (Fraser 218).

I found the above quote interesting in regards to The Grand Tour of Daniel Cohn- Bendit and the Europeanism of 1968 due to the strong connection between traveling and the youth’s resistance of authority Jobs makes. At first, I found myself hesitant to accept the notion that travel could make a student/young adult automatically question authority, but then I remember what I did the first time I left home on my own, learned some things, and then came back: I was a menace with a mission. I thought the section of this small article centered on the fact that Cohn-Bendit being barred from France because he elected German citizenship to be quite interesting because it really shows the issues with nationalism (and regionalism): you are not “allowed” to challenge to system without having the proper paper work (…). In so many ways, Cohn-Bendit was French: he was born and raised there, but his paperwork did not reflect that. My question to the class is this: how are we supposed to respect authority when major issues are cast aside and/or suppressed because authority finds a technicality to skate away on?

ALSO:

I found our reading’s focus on the Nanterre Movement to be very interesting because some of the students grievances seem very similar to ours. As a senior looking at graduate school, there is a constant “dollars and cents” thought plaguing my mind. I know that I want to go to professional school, and I am fairly confident that I could thrive in professional school. However, I probably will not be going to professional school next year because it is cost prohibitive. This is how it is for a lot of people I know.

I know it is a hot button issue in our political climate, but education should not be a financial burden. We should want an educated populous, so I am going to say it: we should taxpayer fund education. You can come for me in the comments, I am not going to budge. Education should be a right, not a privilege. (And, if you think college should be a temple of the elite, we cannot vibe.) Anyway, I digress. I found the quote, “It was interesting to see the UEC call for the efficient running of a bourgeois university in which certain ‘left’ or even ‘Marxist’ professors were afraid of a challenge to their status in that bourgeois university” (Bourges 131). I found this quote interesting because we have seen this pattern before: people who have nothing to gain that out weighs the gains of others being silent. I was wondering what you think the role of the “adult/establishment” is in social change? Can the protester and the establishment ever work together to change/dismantle/reform the “apparatus” or are people so fickle that rights must be taken from the establishment?

Today’s reading gives us a brief overview of the fundamentals of the 1968 Youth Protests. While we spent most of our time right after World War II and in the 1950s, I found myself really interested in the idea of protesting for the ability to protest. We are told on page 26 that, “For the most part, in the late 1950s the spirit of rebellion remained unfocused, diffused, and non-specific. Symptomatic for the state of affairs was the following exchange in the cult film The Wild Ones. When Marlon Brando, the leader of a biker gang, was asked: ‘What are you rebelling against?’, he answered: ‘What have you got?'”.

My questions are simple: What is interesting to you in this chapter? I know that I am madly in love with the title communist being assigned to Brando because they could not find a better way to summarize “‘radical’, ‘unorthodox’ , ‘anti-authoritarian’ , or ‘uncompromisingly oppositional'” (30). Other food for thought, you probably know someone who was in their teens or twenties in the 50s and 60s, what do you think those people where doing? We finally reached a part of history were we personally know people who lived threw it!

Also, here are The Beatles doing their thing. I was looking for a meme, but could not find one.

We were given the lyrics of “The National Song of Hungary, 1848” for class this week, and I would like to take a moment and briefly compare the lyrics of this national song to “La Marseillaise” which we listened to in the second week. Here is a stanza from each:

La Marseillaise:

To arms, citizens!
Form your battalions
Let’s march, let’s march
That their impure blood
Should water our fields.

The National Song of Hungary, 1848:

A miserable wretch is he
Who fears to die, my land, for thee!
His worthless life who thinks to be
Worth more than thou, sweet liberty!
Now by the Magyar’s God above
We truly swear,
We truly swear the tyrant’s yoke
No more to bear!

Now, this might be obvious but what are the similarities of these pieces? I definitely notice that there is a call to action in both (To arms, citizens! / We truly swear the tyrant’s yoke
No more to bear!). However, I think they are fundamentally very different. Do you agree? How do you think your interpretation is affect by revolutionary outcomes?

Here is another meme:

Chapter three had a lot of moving pieces as the author tries to layout all the dynamics of the 1848 revolutions. I know that I cannot keep all the moving parts organized, but I found the ending of this chapter fascinating. We are illuminated in Chapter 4 of what happens next, but I would like to take a moment and focus on the rhetorical questions begin asked:

Would the newly created regimes be liberal ones, that is constitutional monarchies with a limited, property franchise, or democratic – that is republics with universal manhood suffrage? Equally unresolved were key questions of political power. Who would command the National Guard, what weapons would it have, and who would be entitled to bear them?Where would the ultimate base of power lie, with government ministers responsible to an elected parliament, or with a royal or presidential camarilla? With an elected legislature or the radicalized masses of a capital city? (155-156)

Imagine you are a middle-class worker or peasant in Europe at the end of these revolutions. How would you feel about all of these unanswered questions? Now, how are we supposed to think about the emergence of a “free press” and public “political organizations”? These are super difficult cultural shifts for me to wrap my head around because I have always had these rights. What is everyone else thinking about all of these moving pieces?

Throughout the Dubois article, there is a lengthy discussion on the various ways the ruling elite thought about emancipating the slaves in the colonies. Some of these ideas included gradual emancipation based on age and “freeing” oneself by working for payment on their own time: “a process of gradual self-purchase, where the slaves, using money they made during their one [emphasis added by me] free day of the week, could buy additional days of freedom from their masters until they were entirely free (270). All of these discussions are predicated on the idea that a formerly enslaved human could not understand the significance of being an active member of society. To me, this arguments seem to be focused on maintaining white economic superiority within the French Empire and not at all to do with actual human right issues the revolution is attempting to address. In fact, I think Dubois feels this way with the incorporation of the Sieyes paragraph on page 259. What are your thoughts on the many painfully arrogant ways these French men though about emancipation within an empire?

Sydney Kightlinger

When I glanced at Hunt’s title “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” I thought this article would focus on the Madonna/Whore complex. This is a very tired, but reoccurring theme in Women’s Studies; however, I feel like Hunt’s conversation pushes past this to critic French Society. Obviously, the maker of the pornographic literature is using Madonna/Whore imagery/troops, but Hunt’s analysis focuses on the fear of the revolting society. I found her incorporation of Girard’s thought on “a crisis in a community that leads to a search for scapegoat” to be interesting when she pairs it with the need to “re-establish the ‘natural order'”(212-213).

In short: French society operates with intense and pervasive misogynistic, but how do you think the role of a “community in crisis” further forces the conversation of equality to be hush?