Paris, 1968. The fair City of Light, bursting with life, an unrivalled setting for some of Christendom’s greatest jewels, known as the centre of culture, elegance and refinement, “the glory of France and one of the most remarkable ornaments in the world,” according to Montaigne, was once again radiating its charm after the ravages of the Second World War.
Although decadent, a mere shadow of its former self, it still seemed to be the secular “lady” of Europe. In fact, we must recognize with Victor Hugo that, before having its people, Europe had its city, and that city was always Paris. The course of an entire civilization rested in its hands…
In 1968, however, its influence did not make its appearance in formal dress at an elegant soirée, nor did it gain notice for an intellectual or technological innovation. Paris – and with it the world – took a step towards the savage, the aggressive, the uncultured.
In the heart of this reliquary of civilization, contrasting with the regal grandeur of Notre-Dame Cathedral and Sainte-Chapelle, eclipsing the attractions of the Champs-Élysées and the galleries of the Palais Royal, disdaining the luxury and beauty of opera houses, exquisite cafés, squares and historic monuments, and denying centuries of tradition, a strange student revolution was about to break out, which in a few weeks would take on unprecedented dimensions…
The world stage for the events of May 1968 had been carefully prepared by the perpetrators of the Revolution. Unprecedented economic prosperity, followed by the decline of the systems of government established at the end of the war, and the emergence of counter-cultural movements such as hippieism and rock and roll, which allied immoral tendencies propagated by thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse and Guy Debord, left world society in a tangle of contradictions. At times this society condemned the atrocities – of only one contender, of course – in the Vietnam War, and at other times fought fiercely for the “right” to abortion, to cite just one example…
Nothing could be more “logical”, then, in the panorama of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, than the colossal explosion that took place at the academic centre of France.
The dawn of the revolution
Generalized protests by students at the Faculty of Nanterre – at the time linked to the Sorbonne University – took place from January 1968. In March, some rioters stormed the building in defiance, and by April there were more than 1,500 demonstrators.
Later, the Sorbonne itself took the reins of the movement, and from May 3 onwards there were a series of marches and violent clashes between the rioting students and the forces of public order. The demonstrators – who already numbered ten thousand, including professors and people from outside the academic world – were evicted from the campus, but they set up barricades in the Latin Quarter and clashed with the police until the Champs-Élysées. Finally, on May 13, they took over the Sorbonne after a shameful capitulation by the authorities.
Before long, their protests echoed throughout the country’s labour sector, winning over nine million workers to the revolt and resulting in the biggest general strike in French history.
“Paris was stunned,” admitted The Guardian of London, at the time. “Buses with their tires slashed and windows broken were slewn across the street. Cars upended with windows smashed marked the spots where the hard core of the students put up fierce resistance to the police who, with nerves shattered after a full day of rioting, clubbed the clubbed the demonstrators”…1
The students said they were dissatisfied with the size and impersonal nature of the universities, they criticized the teaching system, the discipline and the rules they had to follow. But that was not all: they denied any social order – whether capitalist or communist – labelled a decent life a “loss of freedom”, preached the “right” to free love, the exaltation of moral perversion and the use of narcotics as a means of achieve the sublimation of the intellect…
Establishing chaos
The demonstrators, in a climate of total promiscuity and debauchery unheard of at the time, barricaded themselves in the Sorbonne. The venue was transformed, according to a pamphlet of the time, “into a revolutionary volcano in full eruption whose lava was to spread far and wide, searing the social structure of modern France. The physical occupation of the Sorbonne was followed by an intellectual explosion of unprecedented violence. Everything, literally everything, was suddenly and simultaneously up for discussion, for question, for challenge. There were no taboos.”2
In the midst of the ideological turmoil, everyone found a reason to protest and express their universal dissatisfaction through destruction. The panorama in the city became savage. “Policemen and journalists with long years of experience of Paris riots almost disbelieved the evidence of their eyes as they viewed the scene of destruction.”3
The “trademark” of this revolution was chaos, which it left behind in all its clashes. And this chaos was established above all in ideas: no one knew for sure why they were there; the students’ demands were notoriously empty and the movement, although radical in its aims and methods, lacked clear doctrines.
Nevertheless, while a few credulous individuals believed they were fighting to modernize the faculties, others knew they were pioneers of a revolution, whose rudimentary expression by means of graffiti on walls became a trend: “Under the influence of the revolutionary students, thousands began to query the whole principle of hierarchy.”4
A new tune for the “Marseillaise”
Clever and incisive slogans – the hallmark of French genius, in this case unfortunately in the service of evil – popped up in the streets of Paris, arguing, criticizing, questioning… “The boss needs you, you don’t need him,” “Everyone is free to be free,” “Humanity will only be happy when the last bureaucrat is hung with the entrails of the last capitalist,” “Down with consumer society,” “Culture is the inversion of life,” “Action institutes consciousness,” “I take my desires for reality,” “Beneath the paving stones, the beach,” “Power to the Imagination”…
It is hard to gauge the true reach of this propaganda, whose most famous phrases travelled around the world like wildfire: “It is forbidden to forbid,” “Be realistic, demand the impossible,” “Any view of things that is not strange is false,” “First, disobey: then write on the walls,” “Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him,” “Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes. It is our ultimate weapon!”
Analysing the amoral foundation of these words in June of the very year of 1968, Dr. Plinio foresaw the change that the Revolution meant to achieve with them: “We are moving from a civilization that had reason as its foundation and that even attacked the Faith in the name of reason, from a morality that sought theoretical reasoning to justify itself, but that was still a rational morality, to the pure glorification of the bestial instinct and the presentation of sexual perversion as a fruit of morality.”5
And he continued: “There is an element germinating in them that has as its goal complete equality and complete freedom, but which does not present itself as a doctrinal conviction. […] It is a universal impulse that shakes youth as a whole. […] A new historical era is emerging, in which man renounces reason and discipline, and looks to instinct for the future order of things. […] There can be no greater denial of the truth, nor a more profound revolution than this.”6
would spread throughout the world
Scenes of the disturbances of May 1968, in Paris
The true name of the Sorbonne revolt: Fourth Revolution
Let us return to Paris. The revolt seemed to have taken hold of a stunned France, but in the end, common sense won out. It was seemingly put down and order was restored by De Gaulle, with massive support from the French people… But was it really all over?
Far from it. In the inexorable march of the Revolution, in which each new phase is born as a “matricidal culmination”7 that swallows up and surpasses the previous one, “the failure of the extremists is, therefore, only apparent.”8 History textbooks may consider the Sorbonne revolt to have ended with the elections of July 1968. However, from his privileged prophetic vantage point, Dr. Plinio revealed the direction that events would take: the demonstrations in Paris were only the very first chords of the Fourth Revolution.
As he affirmed, “The Revolution intends, as its final term, to establish a state of things wherein complete liberty coexists with complete equality.”9 This is “an anarchic order of things, as-yet mysterious, which presupposes an equally mysterious transformation of man, and which is the great unknown of the modern world.”10
In fact, if the three Revolutions rose up against inequality in the spiritual, political, social and economic fields, the Fourth Revolution would directly attack inequality within man himself, by inverting the order of the powers of the human soul and subjecting intelligence and will to the most primal instincts.
What a difference from previous revolutions, as Dr. Plinio emphasized: “As is well known, neither Marx nor the generality of his most notorious followers, both ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’, saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as the final phase of the revolutionary process. […] This would be the undoing of the proletariat dictatorship as a result of a new crisis, under the force of which the hypertrophic state will be victim of its own hypertrophy. And it will disappear, giving rise to a scientistic and cooperationist state of things in which – as the communists say – man will have attained a heretofore unimaginable degree of liberty, equality, and fraternity.”11
Where will this lead? To tribalism, to a society without government and without a trace of inequality, so as to completely erase man’s likeness to God, a goal towards which the Revolution has already predisposed humanity: “The revolutionary process in souls, thus described, produced in the more recent generations, and especially in adolescents of our days who hypnotize themselves with rock and roll, a state of spirit characterized by the spontaneity of the primary reactions, without the control of the intelligence or the effective participation of the will, and by the predominance of the fantasy of feelings over the methodical analysis of reality. This, in large measure, is fruit of a pedagogy that virtually eliminates the role of logic and the true formation of the will.”12
The devil unfurls his standard…
For Dr. Plinio, the ultimate aim of the Fourth Revolution, after establishing anarchy in society and within man, is to present the “religion of totemism” as the spearhead of this total egalitarianism, in which man, already irrational and “divinized” in his instincts, finds in narcotics and debauchery the perfect expression of his progress, under the direction of a shaman tasked with maintaining, on a mystical level, the collective psychic life of the tribe…13
These explanations afford a better comprehension of certain sayings from the Sorbonne, really just dictums that accompanied a premeditated agenda: “Not thinking together. But pushing together,” “Don’t argue with the bosses. Eliminate them,” “The sacred, behold the enemy,” “How can one think freely in the shadow of a chapel?”, “Neither God, nor master,” “Violate your Alma Mater”…
Stressing the seriousness of the situation, Dr. Plinio said: “Humanity is thus faced with the temptation to abandon every idea of order and morality, and to proclaim the opposite of order and morality; in other words, it is faced with the greatest temptation in history. There has never been a more radical temptation, because it is not made for one man, but for the whole human race.”14
A turning point in history
Further explaining the characteristics of this new humanity, Dr. Plinio added in his masterpiece: “In reality, the path leading to this tribal state of things must pass through the extinction of the old standards of individual reflection, volition, and sensibility, which are gradually replaced by increasingly collective modes of thought, deliberation, and sensibility. It is, therefore, chiefly in this field that the transformation is to take place.”15
Thus, from a tribalist perspective, the overthrow of clothing traditions that symbolize modesty and respect, the increasing disregard for ornament and beauty in clothing in favour of the new ideals of comfort and practicality, obviously tend towards the establishment of nudism, which is ultimately the expression of anarchism in clothing.
As a result, the disappearance of forms of courtesy, reasoned conversation and even cultured language – as has become widespread with the use of smartphones – can only end in absolute, amorphous and ignorant triviality in relationships: in other words, the nudism of the spirit, a legacy of the spontaneity of the Sorbonne. Symptomatic in this sense is a prognosis published in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo and amply commented upon by Dr. Plinio: if until May 1968 men greeted each other with their right hand, from that date onwards they would do so with their left…16
From this, in turn, comes the general debasement of morality – a legacy of the free love preached at the Sorbonne – which manifests itself in the vulgarization of public life and the extinction of the respectability of institutions that embody the principle of authority, in all spheres.
Furthermore, to measure the enormous change that has taken place in mentalities, the reader may observe, for example, that it is not uncommon today to find high-profile personalities wearing T-shirts and shorts, boasting of crude immorality or even advocating the cause of hippieism and the Revolution, without causing the least surprise… Could there be a better expression of the moral collapse of our era?
The Fifth Revolution which has always existed…
But the present situation, in the gradual twilight of reason in which we live, will degenerate into other revolutions, predicted Dr. Plinio. So, what will the Revolution’s new moves be? What will be left of humanity when it is brought to the final stages of irrationality, immorality and anarchy?
To what depths will it fall in the end, if God’s intervention does not prevent another leap by the Revolution towards the future post-cybernetic society, whose first steps Dr. Plinio only glimpsed in his lifetime, but prophesied in detail? Will it finally be the parody of the “diabolical creation”, in which Satan becomes the “god” who maintains the world? After all, this is the dream he has cherished ever since the moment of the “Non serviam”…
Do not the innovations of cybernetics, increasingly dehumanizing in their speed and their resources, impenetrable by the ordinary intellect, head towards this outcome? And in the midst of humanity’s misery, do they not point to a pseudo-heaven in search of a solution that will certainly not come from God, but from mysterious parapsychological phenomena, hyper-developed robots or the terrifying and inexplicable progress of so-called “artificial intelligence”? Time will tell. We must therefore conclude that the Fifth Revolution – which has always existed – lies dormant in the depths of the abyss and is waiting, like Leviathan, for the opportune moment to emerge…
Concert of the “The Rolling Stones” in São Paulo in 2016
Faced with such a panorama, it is not surprising that Dr. Plinio asked himself: “to what degree may a Catholic perceive the deceptive gleam, the canticle – at once sinister and attractive, soothing and deliriant, atheistic and sorceristically believing – with which, from the bottom of the abysses where he eternally lies, the Prince of Darkness attracts those who have denied Jesus Christ and His Church?”17
Today, just as sixty-five years ago, it is certain that Dr. Plinio would end these lines with the same prophetic confidence with which he ended them in the past: a mixture of unshakeable faith in the fulfilment of the promises of Fatima and categorical affirmation of adherence to the Holy Church. We too, echoing his cry of fidelity, in the midst of the waves of revolutionary chaos, will not doubt Our Lord’s infallible promise: come what may, the gates of hell will not prevail! ◊
Notes
1 CARROLL, Joseph. Paris students in savage battles – 1968. In: www.theguardian.com.
2 BRINTON, Maurice. Paris: May 1968. Solidarity Pamphlet 30. Bromley: Solidarity, 1968, p.15.
3 CARROLL, op. cit.
4 BRINTON, op. cit., p.39.
5 CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio. Conference. São Paulo, 15/6/1968.
6 Idem, ibidem.
7 RCR, P.III, c.3.
8 Idem, P.I, c.6, 4, C.
9 Idem, c.7, 3, B, c.
10 CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio. Conference. São Paulo, 11/12/1968.
11 RCR, P.III, c.3, 1.
12 Idem, P.I, c.7, 3, B, d.
13 Cf. Idem, P.III., c.3, 2.
14 CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio. Conference. São Paulo, 15/6/1968.
15 RCR, P.III, c.3, 2.
16 Cf. MESQUITA FILHO, Júlio de. A crise na França – II. Rebelião juvenil abala estruturas [The Crisis in France – II. Youth rebellion is shaking structures]. In: O Estado de São Paulo. São Paulo. Year LXXXIX. N.28.572 (June 4, 1968); p.2.
17 RCR, P.III, c.3, 2, A.
