Paris, May 1968. Barricades rose in the Latin Quarter, tear gas filled the French boulevards, and students occupied the Sorbonne. What started as a campus protest quickly turned into a national uprising that shook France to its core.
Already during the early spring of ’68, a new mood had begun to take hold. Rents were rising, post-colonial immigration was stirring public debate, some customs seemed increasingly outdated, and the postwar economic boom was slowing down. A sense of a nouvelle époque arrived with social unrest and a growing number of protests (Dorman, 2017).
By mid-May, student demonstrations and blockades had taken over the city. The popular indignation fueled a spirit of revolt against the structures of capitalist society—calling for an independent university and rejecting anything and anyone with even a trace of the establishment. The movement also led to a disregard for prominent French intellectuals and consolidated intellectual currents. This student revolt sought not to appropriate power, but to break away from it (Atack, 1999).
Jean-Paul Sartre, one of said intellectuals, famously asserted that man, through his existence, precedes any essence, endowing him with a great freedom to self-define. In other words, there is no nature or program that confines the individual to a single definition of what it means to be human (1946/2007). Since no idea of human nature is completely fixed, one can choose one’s life and break with the conventions and ingrained attitudes that surround them. This freedom is unavoidable, and even refusing to choose is itself a choice.
Sartre contended that turning a blind eye to this reality amounted to having bad faith: the act of deceiving oneself by denying one’s own freedom and responsibility, pretending to be bound by predetermined roles, circumstances, habits, social norms, or other automatisms (1943/2003).
This idea of freedom is understood as a key instrument in revolution: the capacity to recognize one’s own freedom, to emancipate oneself from imposed molds, and to consider the full scope of one’s possibilities. At the same time, Sartre emphasized that, while the weight of the social and historical environment condition our choices, they also hold the potential to be reshaped through collective action, thereby opening new horizons for human freedom.
The sociologist Michel Wieviorka describes May ’68 as a gigantic celebration of youth: spontaneous and collective, combining “play and the sacred.” The atmosphere was one of novelty, participation, and a certain joy among the youth (2019). Yet, students did not constitute a class or a permanent, well-defined group.
Sartre as a Political Figure: Approval and Respect
During the days of the Sorbonne occupation, on May 20, Sartre was admitted into a packed amphitheater to speak to an agitated and indignant crowd. Interrupted several times and under close scrutiny, he sought camaraderie with the students, but without abandoning his own ideas. In the opening minutes of his talk, he pointed out that only “five to seven percent” of those before him were children of workers, while the rest were petit-bourgeois—sons and daughters of the middle and upper classes.
Sartre told the students plainly: if they wished to win their battle, they had to join the struggle of the oppressed, dissociate themselves from their parents to stand alongside those exploited by them.
He had already set the stage for this argument in 1966 with Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels. In it, he assured that many philosophers—particularly those from privileged backgrounds—made the mistake of believing they could study society with a neutral, universal method. But society, he insisted, is always tied to the perspective of an individual who is conditioned by the prejudices of the dominant ideology, which means even supposedly “objective” investigations are already influenced by those hidden biases. As Sartre wrote:
“[The intellectual must] recognize himself as a selected petit-bourgeois, [and] must combat his own class which, under the influence of the dominant class, necessarily reproduces in him a bourgeois ideology. (…) The intellectual is therefore a technician of the universal who discovers that, in his own domain, universality does not exist ready-made; it is perpetually to be created” (1966, p. 403).
We are always caught in a situation—in this case, the bourgeois world for the students. One must become aware of this in order to transcend one’s own class and question the social order that keeps them from realizing their freedom. The universal, for Sartre, is the search for the freedom of all: that each person could acknowledge their condition and build their own essence free from the prejudices of bourgeois ideology.
So, standing before the students of the Sorbonne, Sartre sought solidarity with his audience by telling them that as children of the bourgeoisie they were also victims of the system. Alongside the exploited, they too were alienated from their freedom. Their task would be to recognize their own condition of freedom and break from rigid molds. Sartre saw in the divorce of youth from the bourgeois class, and their search for equality with workers, a chance at liberation. To free themselves together from bad faith and to self-define through the power of imagination. This was the universal that remained “perpetually to be created.”
Teaching Freedom, Demanding Responsibility
Sartre’s way of addressing the students resembled the very ethos of pedagogy. He did not hand down ready-made doctrines but confronted students with their own dogmatisms and the weight of their choices. Like good teaching, his intervention sought to provoke students to take control of their context by examining their societal pressures, traditions and other forces that shape decisions.
In this way, his “lessons” at the Sorbonne mirrored the best of education: engaging learners as free agents capable of shaping their own future. By giving students tools for critical analysis to escape the anxiety of freedom, Sartre made it possible to call forth a sense of responsibility from them rather than offering comfortable answers.
Sartre’s philosophy incited students, in a manner antithetical to intellectual paternalism, to trust themselves as agents and to recognize their own freedom; to use imagination as a means of questioning the social and historical fabric shaping our choices and actions. With the conviction that: anyone, anywhere can let their imagination take power and revolt against the dogmatisms of the dominant class.
References
Clamote Carreto, C. F. (2019). Mai 68 ou l’imagination paradoxale. Carnets, 2(16). https://doi.org/10.4000/carnets.9959
Dorman, A. (2017). The emergence, forgetting and re-writing of May ’68 (Master’s thesis, University of South Carolina). Scholar Commons. https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4066
Sartre, J.P . (1966). Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels. Situations VIII. Autour de 1968, Gallimard, 1972, p. 403 et 404
Sartre, J.-P. (2003). Being and nothingness (H. E. Barnes, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Routledge. (Original work published 1943)
Sartre, J.-P. (2007). Existentialism is a humanism (C. Macomber, Trans.). Yale University Press. (Original work published 1946)
Luis Maurin Hakala
Luis Maurin Hakala is a graduate in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the Alianza 4 Universidades program (Pompeu Fabra University, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Autonomous University of Madrid, and Carlos III University of Madrid). His recent research explores social policy under free trade, digital rights, and European Union integration.
