When I was 19 I took an amazing university course on French philosophy in the 1960s. We watched Godard and Truffault in class, studied Hegel as received through Kojeve, Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Louis Althusser. Even then, as a progressive, I was the one guy in my class who instinctually hated May ‘68. I hated the selfishness of the movement, the fact that the wealthiest generation in human history up to that point wished to burn down the society of their mothers and fathers and grandparents for no reason other than the fact that they were bored and felt “alienated” by mass consumerism. French boomers ended up being probably one of the luckiest and wealthiest generations in history and had they had their way in the streets back in May ‘68 they would have burned it all down in favour of a Maoist-Pol Pot style mentally ill communist dictatorship. It’s so funny, everybody in my class got starry eyed and wistful talking about May ‘68, basically wishing that we could have a version of May ‘68 for our generation. They felt left out and jealous. Yet I looked at the students and socialists bringing France to a total standstill for fundamentally no real reason at all and I just instinctually hated it to my guts because I saw the possibility of civil war. I was the only one in class to speak in favour of De Gaulle. I asked how the “Revolution” would have helped the French working class and nobody could answer me.