Last week, French interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy launched his presidential bid with a speech attacking the values of May 1968, and the student uprising which swept across the world and particularly struck Paris, almost bringing down the government of General Charles De Gaulle.

It’s strange, that a presidential hopeful should launch his campaign with a speech about events that occurred almost 40 years ago. But the events of 1968 are still with us, they still continue to exert a peculiar attraction on the western mind. The reason, probably, is that the revolution failed, so we could never become disillusioned with the tyrannies or compromises of its leaders, unlike the revolutions of Lenin, Mao or, more recently, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko.

It was also a peculiar kind of revolution. It wasn’t Marxist-Leninist – far from it. The enemies of the revolutionaries were bureaucracy, industrialism, wage slavery, consumerism, the boredom of modern life, anything that tried to fix or ossify the human spirit. The Soviet Union seemed just as guilty of these sins as the western capitalist states. Both were life-negating hierarchic systems ruled by old men. The revolution was a revolution of youth.

If there was an ideology of 68, it was Situationism. This was a philosophy put forward in the 1950s by a group of Parisian student drop-outs, idlers and malcontents, who lived together, drank together, slept together, and avoided work at all costs. Their most prominent member was Guy Debord, whose main work, The Society of Spectacle (1967), was a direct influence for the 68 uprising.

Debord updated the idea of alienation, first given to western civilization by Plato, and used as a justification for violent revolution ever since. The theory of alienation, in a nutshell, is this – man in modern civilization is a stranger to himself, cut off from his own emotions and vital instincts. He lives not for himself or for God, but for the good opinion of others. He lives in others’ opinions, as Rousseau put it. He follows life-denying civilized conventions of politeness and bourgeois respectability, not because he believes in them but because everyone else seems to, and he wants the acceptance of everyone else. He is not a real person. He is a mask, a simulacrum, a fake.

Debord developed this idea of alienation by introducing the notion of the ‘Spectacle’. The Spectacle was all the things in society which made us live this phony, inauthentic life behind masks. It was particularly the media – TV, radio, advertising, everything which urged us to consume, to improve our images, to try and look better in others’ eyes. Movie stars were the ultimate spectacle. We sat and gawped at them in cinemas, living vicariously through their adventures, while our own lives were dull, unhappy and boring. Boredom was the terrible cost of the society of spectacle, because we were cut off from our real selves, living lives of illusion.

What to do in this false world? The Situationists undertook personal revolts by opting out of work. They scrounged, took odd-jobs, stole if necessary, supported each other. Work – the soul-killing 9-5 office or factory job – was the enemy of the human spirit. They took ‘derives’– spontaneous perambulations around Paris, without aim, designed to unlock the secret unconscious life of the city (in this, as in many things, they were heavily influenced by the Parisian Surrealist group of the 1920s and 30s).

They practiced a revolutionary method known as ‘detournement’, where the propaganda of the Spectacle would be turned against it, by doctoring or defacing Spectacular art-work such as magazines, advertisements or comics (in this, again, they were following the Surrealists, who would try to disorientate and liberate the human spirit by cut-up montages from newspapers and magazines).

Above all, they drank, partied, made love, sat around talking endless philosophy. Like other small counter-cultural groups, such as the Surrealists or the Beats, the friendships between the members were very strong. Life should be a party. It was only the life-hating stooges of capitalism and communism who had made us believe anything different. Like the Surrealists said, life should be desire unbound, loosed from the strait-jacket of civilized conventions.

The Situationist revolution, then, would be a revolution of desire. To hell with work, with the boring office job. The city would be transformed into a giant spontaneous street party. “Revolutionary moments”, wrote Raoul Vaneigem, another leading Situationist, “are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society”. They are Dionysian festivals, when we give voice to our whole nature, in all its ugliness, passion, sexuality, violence and desire. We leave the phoniness and lies of adulthood and return to a beautiful honesty – for the moment of revolt is “childhood rediscovered”.

Sure, there would be violence too. Violence was a necessary part of the destruction of the Spectacle. The bourgeoisie may fear the murders, arson, lynchings and rapes that often accompany revolution. But they were cowards. “In the barbarity of riots, the arson, the popular savagery, the excesses that terrify bourgeois historians, we find exactly the right vaccine against the cold atrocity of the forces of order and hierarchical oppression”, Vaneigem wrote. The defenders of that order should expect no mercy from the Situationists – they are not humans, but mere objects, things, and “will die the death of things”.

In 1966, a group of Situationist-inspired students managed to win the election for the student union at the University of Strassbourg. They used their funds to print the works of Debord and other Situationists, and distribute them throughout France’s student population. Two years later, as student uprisings swept across the world, it was Situationist slogans that appeared on posters and graffiti in the Paris streets, as students closed down campuses and raised barricades against the police. ‘We have made Paris dance’, they wrote. ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.’‘Power to the Imagination’. ‘Revolution will be total, or it will not be.’‘I love you – oh, say it with paving stones!’

For a few days, it really seemed like Debord’s dream had come true. Students joyfully wandered the streets, feeling a sense of connection with strangers. Humanity, creativity and solidarity seemed liberated. It reminded one of the early days of the French revolution, when people danced in the streets and old men swore they felt regenerated.

But then, the spirit drifted away and De Gaulle and his troops re-imposed the bourgeois order. Ordinary people didn’t want a permanent carnival. They needed predictability and order, as much as they needed the occasional carnival-esque release. They had families to support.

Still, perhaps because of its failure, people still dream of the spirit of 1968. Debord’s theory of the Spectacle was an obvious influence on post-modernist thinkers like Jean Baudrillard, with his theory of the Simulacrum. The Situationists are also a major influence on the anti-globalization movement, the anarchist elements in which, such as the UK group Reclaim the Streets, embrace the Situationist idea of revolution as street carnival. Other anti-globalization groups, such as the Canadian organization Adbusters, use the Situationist method of detournement, re-named ‘culture jamming’, to parody advertising in an attempt to wake us up from our consumerist trances.

But it is in the artistic sphere that Situationism seems to have been most influential. It was a clear influence on the British punk music scene, and on bands like the Sex Pistols and Gang of Four, and on later British bands like Blur. It helped inspire Brett Easton Ellis’ novel, Glamorama, the terrorist hero of which is first met while reading Debord. It is also a big influence on Chuck Palahniuk’s zeitgeist novel, Fight Club, which was turned into a very popular film. It has inspired other recent films, such as Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, or Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators.

Is Sarkozy right, that this continued influence of Situationism on our culture is toxic? He is certainly right that there is something spoilt in the 1968 demand for pleasure at all costs. He said last week: “The truth is that the students of May ‘68 were the spoiled children of 30 years of prosperity. You are the children of crisis. They lived a life without constraints. Today you are picking up the bill.” They were the children of the post-war boom, an era of cheap oil, and that era no longer exists, so neither we, nor our planet, can afford for us to seek purely our own pleasure before all else. That culture of ‘everything is permitted’ is not really a radical rejection of consumerism – it is itself the heart of consumerism. I can’t think of a mentality that could less prepare us for the coming ecological crises we face.

Situationism is also a dangerously naïve idea. It believes we are all beautiful, creative beings, if we could just leave our rigidly organized schedules and step into the street carnival. But not everything in the human heart is beautiful. Invariably, such mass outpourings of spontaneous emotion, if they go on long enough, turn into the most awful violence. One need only point to the French Terror, or the pogroms of 1930s Germany, or the viciousness of Mao’s cultural revolution. The festival of brotherhood soon turns into a festival of blood.

But the hippy students of the 1960s had no historical consciousness, no memory of the fascism they were edging towards, of the evil that humans were capable of. They lived “in societies sundered from their past…they had no way of understanding what their elders had experienced”, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm has written.

The idea of alienation itself is, arguably, the most dangerous idea in western history. It is a stick of dynamite ever lurking under civilization. We all feel slightly miserable in civilization, slightly out of touch with our own emotions and desires. That, as Freud wrote, is the price of civilization.

There are methods to overcome that feeling of alienation, but they are religious, or psychological, or artistic. The dangerous, and naïve, illusion, is to believe we can overcome this dissatisfaction with violent revolution. The human heart does not change that easily.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

September 5, 2006