The Beginning of the End France, May 1968

Revolution is the ecstasy of history. Angelo Quattrocchi, poet, anarchist and correspondent for the Italian newspaper Avanti, was posted to Paris during the events of May 1968. He witnessed the student revolt at Nanterre, which spread to the Sorbonne and then to nine million factory workers. Paris became an enormous battlefield of barricades, burning cars and CS gas. President de Gaulle's riot police publicly informed him that their loyalty could no longer be taken for granted. It was the closes the postwar west was to come to full-scale revolution. In staccato anecdotes, Quattrocchi describes events behind the slogans on the walls of the city: "To Forbid Is Forbidden", "Be Reasonable ... Demand the Impossible," and shows how ideas that had previously been the province only of radical philosophers suddenly became springs of actions for millions. Quattrocchi's account of this "ecstasy of history" is rhythmic, impassioned and unashamedly partisan. Tom Nairn, leftist writer and teacher, provides the ideal counterpoint, with an incisive analysis of the causes and consequences of the May events. Writing in the heat of a student occupation at Hornsey School of Art, Nairn dissects the structural contradictions that conditioned the eruption of '68 and mercilessly exposes the failure of the political organizations to rise to the challenge.

Anarchist and poet, Angelo Quattrocchi (1945–2009) reported from London, Paris and the US for Italian newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s and subsequently worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC, Channel 4, and Italian television. His books include The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968, What Happened, Why It Happened with Tom Nairn.

Tom Nairn‘s many books include The Break-up of Britain, Faces of Nationalism, After Britain, and The Enchanted Glass. He writes for, among others, New Left Review and the London Review of Books.

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics—including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome—as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.