Amid all this there was one radiant certainty: that he believed in civilization, and that civilization was still alive—precariously in England, perhaps, but magnificently in France, in its architecture, its wine, its national culture, in the villages and churches he had loved to visit on his Lambretta scooter ever since he first arrived in the Pyrenees. Even the president, Charles de Gaulle, had once granted a state funeral to the poet Valéry, and de Gaulle’s own memoirs, Scruton discovered, were both exquisitely written and illuminated by what the president called a certain idea of France.
In May 1968, then, as he visited Danielle in Paris, with his friends spending their days on the barricades, what Scruton saw shocked him. The atmosphere of that month was genuinely revolutionary. Ordinary life practically stopped, replaced by strikes, occupations, demonstrations, meetings, and spontaneous theater events. The entire city seemed to be involved in a mass political conference. The Paris police chief, Maurice Grimaud, called the events of May 1968 “the strangest . . . that Paris, and indeed France, had ever lived through.” As Arthur Marwick wrote in his history of the ’60s, the activists really believed that transformation was around the corner—that “the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, the values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society.”
When the bricks started hitting the windows and the cars went up in flames, Scruton felt, at one level, a “literary critical” distaste: The whole performance was shallow and vulgar. More viscerally, he experienced an anger, a desire to fight back on behalf of what was most precious to him. He had little political knowledge. What he had—from his battles with his father and his headmaster, from his experiences as a grammar-school boy at Cambridge—was a long training in rebellion and its ironies. You can rebel against the left by being more radical than they are; you can rebel against people and institutions that you also respect; you can rebel to provoke; you can rebel on behalf of tradition and the establishment; you can rebel simply by baffling and disconcerting the people who think they’re better than you. (“What do you mean, potatoes?”) Many people in the 1960s were caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the hour, or swept along on a current of their own emotions. Scruton’s rebellion was always likelier to be conscious, deliberate, and original.
And so we come to the celebrated moment, described many times and most vividly in Gentle Regrets, when looking down from the little flat on the Rue de Bérite, Scruton recoiled with all his mind and heart from the revolutionary spirit of 1968. Probing his friends’ politics in the following days, he became convinced that whatever he believed, it was the opposite of that. “I came back to Cambridge,” he once said, “determined to reanimate a political outlook for the modern world.”
Rejecting “les événements de Mai 68” was extremely wise: Michel Foucault and the Glamour of Evil.