France is still coming to grips with the role of feminism in May 1968

By M.M. | PARIS

BRANDISHING a Viet Cong flag, she stands with her torso above the crowd filling the Luxembourg Gardens. Her eyes lifted, her expression serious and confrontational, she looks like she is about to charge into the fray. Jean-Pierre Rey’s photograph of the “Marianne of ’68” was instantly recognised for its likeness to Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting of bare-breasted Liberty.

In “Icons of May ’68”, an exhibition at the National Library of France, viewers are asked to look at the photograph as something other than an allegory. The woman in the photograph was a tourist from Britain, Caroline de Bendern, with no experience of the conditions of workers and students and their ideological battle. But Ms de Bendern knew how to look good in front of the camera. A fashion model, she consciously chose the solemnity of her pose with what she described as “a professional reflex”. Men too would take on iconic status in the memory of 1968, notably with the face of Daniel Cohn-Bendit laughing at a policeman. But he never represented Liberty. Instead, he fought for it, known as the activist who sparked chaos at Paris Nanterre University when he occupied the female students’ dorms, insisting that there be greater sociability between the sexes.

While retrospectives marking the 40th anniversary tended to gloss over the fact, this time around the paradox of women’s role in 1968 is finally being unpicked. Prominent in pictures, their miniskirts a symbol of the overthrown patriarchy, their bodies became the fantasy of both sexual and political freedom in the male imagination. The takeover of the Odéon Theatre 50 years ago, on May 15th, was supposed to promote dialogue between students and workers. Mr Cohn-Bendit declared the doors of bourgeois culture thrown open to the people. But activity soon moved to the basement, the go-to destination for casual sexual encounters. Liberating it was, perhaps, for those brought up observing strict Catholic mores. But it fed the stereotype of women supporting activism via their romantic partners.

Indeed, when women did participate, they cooked and set up makeshift nurseries in the occupied buildings. They chanted on the streets, but only as the chorus echoing the male leader. They were present at the barricades, but only so they could pass cobblestones to the masked and armed men up front. Some learned to type for the occasion, copying tracts—one of the small responsibilities with which they were trusted. When an all-female workforce went on strike, a man was brought in to negotiate with the boss. “Everything was questioned, the rapports between students and workers, boss and worker, rich and poor,” remembers Jacqueline Feldman, who would later become a radical feminist in part because of the machismo she experienced in the protests. “Everything except the power dynamics between men and women. We were always the ‘little hands.’”

Anne Wiazemsky’s celebrity made her more than just a face in the crowd. Jean-Luc Godard’s second wife, she starred in his Maoist-inspired harbinger of what was to come, “La Chinoise” (1967), and would go on to record her experience of 1968 in her memoir “A Year Later”. Michel Hazanavicius, an Oscar-winning director, adapts her writings in a new biopic, “Redoubtable”, now in cinemas in Britain and America. Following the couple before, during and after the events, the film reveals the gap between their political aspirations and personal lives. Mr Hazanavicius’s Godard is supremely unsympathetic, criticising the patriarchy and invoking a wife’s duties in the same breath. In the throes of the protests he repeatedly breaks his signature dark glasses, the emblems of his ego’s blind spots. As he fumbles to regain his footing, the audience is supposed to laugh.

In making Mr Godard and his sexism the endless butt of jokes, the film replicates the oppression it critiques by neglecting its female character. Even as it brings Ms Wiazensky’s memoirs to life, the film loses her point of view. The only thing Stacey Martin in the lead role seems capable of asserting is her gamine sexuality, the camera luxuriating on her naked body in black-and-white homage to the way Mr Godard filmed his starlets. Ms Wiazensky was 19 (to his 37) when they married, but she did not just follow him around clutching at his elbow as “Redoubtable” implies. An active supporter of the actors’ strike that took place along with the demonstrations, she had been the one to introduce her husband to left-wing circles at Nanterre, where she studied philosophy and called the student leaders close friends.

Most commemorations look back on the events with greater patience, showing the disjunction between 1968 in theory and in practice while preserving the hope of its promises. In “Images in the Struggle: Visual Culture of the Far Left in France (1968-1974)” at the Palace of Fine Arts in Paris (pictured), the first room is covered floor-to-ceiling with the colourful slogans that plastered the walls of Paris 50 years ago. “It is forbidden to forbid,” one of them claims, even though the absence of women in the posters suggests sexual difference was still taboo. By extending the timeline a few years to illuminate the afterlives of the protests, the exhibition shows how participants used what they learned for radical ends, including the early iconography of the Women’s Liberation Movement, begun in 1970. If May 1968 itself was not for women, it was when they learned to speak and struggle publicly, to put their different perspectives forward while working within the French model of universal rights.

Bibia Pavard, a professor of history at the Sorbonne who recently published a new book “Mai 68”, says that perspectives on 1968 are changing quickly. She believes the feminist full reckoning “has not finished, and has only been magnified in the wake of the #MeToo movement that has contributed to this specific moment”. In “Femmes et Filles: Mai 68” (“Women and Girls: May ‘68”), a collection of essays published last month, many of the contributors discuss the events as introducing la maison des possibles, a domain of possibility rather than a completed struggle. In a sign that that struggle is still not over, several evoke #MeToo as continuing what was begun in 1968, in contrast to other French women (notably Catherine Deneuve) who signed a letter in January defending the “freedom to bother” women. Feminists both young and old are still building on the work of their forerunners as they try to forge a future in which women might at last be free.