Human beings repeatedly discover that the way society is organized doesn’t exhaust the possibilities of how humans might live. They then try to reorganize authority, property, family, work, sex, religion, education, and community. Some experiments become durable institutions; others collapse; many fail in one dimension and succeed in another.
And there is a striking pattern: the same questions recur, but the feasible answers change enormously with technology, population, wealth, state capacity, ecology, and the inherited institutions of the society attempting the experiment.
So I’d resist telling this as a story of “progress toward the correct answer.” It’s more like a series of recurring experiments.
The recurring questions
Strip away the historical vocabulary and the questions are surprisingly stable:
Who gets to command whom?
Who owns what?
How much inequality can a society tolerate?
How much freedom can individuals have without destroying collective cooperation?
How much conformity does social order require?
Who controls one’s body, sexuality, marriage, and reproduction?
What is work for?
How should children be raised and educated?
How should strangers coexist?
How should collective decisions be made?
How much should be left to markets, families, communities, or the state?
What happens when individual desires conflict with collective needs?
What’s fascinating is that civilizations have produced radically different answers to these questions—and some of the answers that seem bizarre from one historical vantage point make considerable sense from another.
There are several major “arcs”
I’d roughly divide the history of these experiments into eight recurring solutions.
1. The sacred/traditional solution
The basic answer is:
We don’t redesign society. Society is an inheritance.
Religion, custom, family, caste, clan, monarchy, ritual and tradition tell people what their place is.
This solution has an enormous advantage: coordination.
You don’t have to negotiate everything.
You know:
who your parents are
who your spouse should be
what work you’re supposed to do
how you treat elders
what rituals you perform
who has authority
what happens when someone dies
It’s extraordinarily effective at generating continuity.
Its price is individual autonomy.
The person who asks, “Why should my father have authority over me?” is potentially asking not merely a personal question but threatening the structure that holds the community together.
This is why the 1960s question—
Why should I respect authority simply because it is authority?
—is actually an extremely ancient question.
Socrates asks versions of it.
Buddhism asks versions of it.
Daoism asks versions of it.
Mystical traditions repeatedly ask whether conventional social roles represent genuine reality.
Monasticism is another extraordinary response: if ordinary society makes it impossible to live according to the truth, leave society.
That’s an early version of the intentional community.
2. The egalitarian/community solution
Another recurring answer is:
Reduce hierarchy by making the community more equal.
You see versions of this in tribal societies, religious communes, monastic orders, peasant communities, utopian communities, cooperative movements, kibbutzim, anarchist experiments and socialist organizations.
The attraction is obvious.
If everyone shares resources and participates in decisions, perhaps you don’t need a permanent ruling class.
This can work surprisingly well at small scale.
But here’s one of the most important lessons of the historical record:
Equality is much easier to maintain inside a small community than inside a gigantic heterogeneous society.
A village can know everybody.
A monastery can expel someone.
A commune can establish shared norms.
A nation of 100 million people can’t rely on everyone personally knowing everyone else.
Scale changes everything.
And the moment you scale up, you start needing:
bureaucracy
accounting
courts
professional administrators
taxation
enforcement
information systems
And then the original anti-hierarchical project starts recreating hierarchy.
That’s one of the great recurring paradoxes of political history:
You need organization to abolish organization.
3. The liberal solution
The great liberal answer, emerging particularly strongly from the 17th–18th centuries, is almost the opposite:
Don’t try to make everyone good. Make power unable to do too much damage.
This is a profound shift.
Instead of asking:
“How do we create a virtuous society?”
liberalism increasingly asks:
“How do we construct institutions that remain tolerable even when people are selfish, ambitious, stupid, or corrupt?”
Hence:
individual rights
private property
freedom of speech
religious freedom
contract
representative government
rule of law
separation of powers
freedom of association
This has been spectacularly successful in some respects.
It gives people an enormous zone of personal autonomy.
And it produces a mechanism for coordinating millions of strangers without requiring them to share a religion or worldview.
But liberalism has a famous problem:
Formal freedom doesn’t necessarily produce substantive equality.
You can tell two people:
“You are both free to succeed.”
But if one owns the factory and the other owns nothing but his labor, their freedom is not equivalent in practice.
That is the question Marx and the socialist tradition seize upon.
4. The socialist answer
The socialist critique says:
You cannot understand freedom without understanding economic power.
The liberal says:
“You are legally free.”
The socialist responds:
“But what happens if you have no property and must sell your labor to someone who controls your livelihood?”
This moves the radical question from:
Who rules the state?
to:
Who rules the workplace?
That is the enormous historical significance of Marxism.
It identifies economic relationships as relationships of power.
And this is where your original quote about “Who owns the factory?” comes from.
The most successful version of this project wasn’t necessarily Soviet communism.
In many Western countries, the lasting socialist achievement was something more hybrid:
capitalism + democracy + unions + progressive taxation + social insurance + public education + healthcare + pensions + labor protections.
The Nordic countries are an especially important example—not because they implemented pure socialism, but precisely because they didn’t. Their model combined markets and private enterprise with powerful unions, redistribution and universal welfare institutions.
And even here, historical conditions mattered enormously. Research on Sweden, for example, suggests that declining inequality and rising social trust preceded the mature welfare state; the welfare state was therefore partly the result of favorable social conditions rather than simply the cause of them. Cambridge University Press+1
That’s a hugely important lesson:
Institutions don’t operate independently of the society they’re inserted into.
You can’t necessarily take “the Swedish model” and transplant it into a society with radically different levels of trust, inequality, state capacity, political conflict and historical experience.
5. The anarchist answer
Anarchism takes the anti-authoritarian question much further:
Maybe the problem isn’t who should rule us. Maybe the problem is that someone should rule us.
This is the closest intellectual ancestor of a lot of 1960s radicalism.
The anarchist experiment says:
decentralize power
abolish coercive hierarchy
let people organize themselves
replace command with voluntary association
replace centralized ownership with cooperative ownership
There have been real experiments.
The most famous large-scale one was probably anarchist Spain during the Civil War, particularly Catalonia and parts of Aragon, where workers collectivized factories and farms and attempted forms of decentralized management. These experiments were substantial, not merely utopian fantasies—but they operated under the extraordinary conditions of civil war and lost ground as centralized Republican authority reasserted itself. Dialnet
This reveals another recurring pattern:
Radical experiments often work best when the existing system is already breaking apart.
That’s both their opportunity and their curse.
A revolution can suddenly make previously impossible arrangements possible.
But the same instability that creates the opportunity can destroy the experiment.
6. The 1960s answer: change everyday life
And this is where your original question becomes especially interesting.
The 1960s radicals effectively said:
You’ve been looking at the wrong level.
The old revolutionary question was:
Who owns the factory?
The New Left asked:
Why does the factory dominate my life in the first place?
And then:
Why should the professor command me?
Why should the father command the family?
Why should the husband command the wife?
Why should the state regulate sexuality?
Why should children be subjected to authoritarian schooling?
Why should work occupy most of one’s waking life?
Why should consumption define happiness?
This was revolutionary because politics moved inside the private sphere.
Marriage became political.
Sex became political.
Childrearing became political.
Language became political.
Education became political.
Architecture became political.
Popular culture became political.
That is an enormous intellectual development.
And some of these experiments succeeded spectacularly.
Feminism is probably the clearest example
For centuries, a huge amount of human social organization rested on assumptions about gender.
The feminist movement effectively said:
Wait. Why should biological sex determine one’s economic, legal, sexual, educational and political possibilities?
And then it attacked the structure from multiple directions.
The results have been profound:
expanded access to education
employment opportunities
legal equality
contraception
changing marriage norms
reproductive autonomy in many countries
increased political participation
dramatically altered expectations around women’s lives
The second wave in particular explicitly expanded feminism beyond voting into sexuality, contraception, gender roles and broader legal equality. OUP Academic+1
But again, success wasn’t total.
The movement sometimes centered relatively privileged women while neglecting class, race, colonialism and family economics. And some achievements proved reversible: reproductive rights, for example, have subsequently become politically contested again in the United States. AP News
So even a hugely successful liberation movement doesn’t produce a final settlement.
It produces a new equilibrium—and new conflicts.
7. The communal/intentional-community experiment
Then there is the very literal attempt to answer:
Why don’t we simply live differently?
Hence:
communes
kibbutzim
cooperative housing
religious communities
intentional communities
eco-villages
co-ops
These are fascinating because they function as small-scale laboratories for social organization.
And their historical record is neither “they all failed” nor “they solved everything.”
One interesting finding from research on intentional communities is that decision-making structure may matter more for whether communities feel they are achieving their goals than simplistic explanations based on homogeneity or commitment alone. Taylor & Francis Online
In other words:
The problem isn’t necessarily human selfishness. It may be institutional design.
That’s an extremely important lesson.
8. The technological answer
And now we arrive at something the 1960s radicals could barely see.
Technology itself changes the answer space.
Consider what the internet does.
The old anarchist dream was:
“Can millions of people coordinate without a central authority?”
That was extraordinarily difficult in 1900.
Today, Wikipedia, open-source software, distributed scientific collaboration, online communities and peer-to-peer networks demonstrate that large numbers of strangers can sometimes coordinate without conventional hierarchy.
But technology also creates unprecedented surveillance and concentration of power.
So exactly the same technology can produce:
more decentralization
or
more centralized control.
The internet is simultaneously an anarchist technology and a surveillance technology.
That’s another recurring historical lesson:
Technology doesn’t determine the political outcome. It changes what outcomes are feasible.
So what has actually worked?
If we step back, I think the historical record gives us a surprisingly clear answer.
Not one system.
Hybrids.
The most durable successful societies tend to combine several seemingly contradictory principles:
They have markets
because decentralized price signals are extraordinarily good at coordinating complex production.
They have states
because markets don’t spontaneously provide all public goods or enforce contracts fairly.
They have democracy
because concentrated political power becomes dangerous.
They have civil liberties
because democratic majorities can themselves become oppressive.
They have redistribution
because extreme inequality eventually damages political equality and social cohesion.
They have civil society
because neither markets nor governments should mediate every human relationship.
They have families and communities
because humans need forms of belonging that aren’t reducible to either the state or the market.
And increasingly, they protect individual autonomy
because forcing people into a single conception of the good life produces its own kinds of oppression.
That combination is extremely different from both laissez-faire capitalism and centralized socialism.
But there’s a deeper pattern in the successes
Here’s the part I find most interesting.
The successful movements tend to stop trying to solve everything.
Take democracy.
The democratic insight wasn’t:
“We have discovered the perfect ruler.”
It was:
“We have created a mechanism for peacefully replacing imperfect rulers.”
That’s enormously different.
Liberalism doesn’t solve the problem of human selfishness.
It says:
Let’s constrain it.
Markets don’t eliminate greed.
They say:
Let’s sometimes make self-interest useful to others.
Democracy doesn’t make people wise.
It says:
Let’s make it possible to remove them when they’re not.
Welfare states don’t eliminate inequality.
They say:
Let’s prevent inequality from becoming catastrophic.
Free speech doesn’t make everyone truthful.
It says:
Let’s make it possible for falsehoods and abuses of power to be challenged.
That is a very different philosophy from utopian revolution.
And this explains many of the failures
The most catastrophic experiments often had one common characteristic:
They believed they had found the answer to the human problem.
The revolutionary becomes convinced:
“I know what the good society is.”
Then:
“Anyone resisting the good society is an enemy.”
Then:
“We must suppress the enemies.”
And eventually:
“We must suppress anyone who disagrees about how to suppress the enemies.”
That’s the recurring nightmare from revolutionary France through various 20th-century revolutionary regimes.
The attempt to eliminate domination can create new domination.
The attempt to eliminate hierarchy can create a hierarchy of revolutionaries.
The attempt to eliminate private power can create enormous state power.
The attempt to eliminate conformity can produce ideological conformity.
This is one reason the liberal institutional tradition ended up being more resilient than many utopian projects: it assumes disagreement is permanent.
But there’s a counterpoint
We shouldn’t conclude:
“Therefore, liberal capitalism won and everyone else was wrong.”
That would miss something enormous.
The radical movements changed the meaning of what liberal societies themselves consider legitimate.
Take the workplace.
In 1850, the idea that an employer should provide:
an eight-hour day
workplace safety
collective bargaining
pensions
unemployment insurance
minimum wages
would have seemed radically interventionist.
Much of what became ordinary social democracy was originally considered revolutionary.
Likewise feminism.
Likewise civil rights.
Likewise universal education.
Likewise environmental regulation.
Likewise decolonization.
The radical movements often lost the revolution but won the argument—at least partially.
May ‘68 is a wonderful example. The students didn’t overthrow capitalism. But the upheaval produced major wage and labor concessions, changes to university governance, and longer-term transformations in French social and cultural life. Larousse+1
So “success” needs to be defined carefully.
This gives us a useful taxonomy of success
I’d distinguish four kinds:
Kind of success Example What happened
System replacement - Some revolutions - Old regime actually disappears
Institutional reform - Labor movement - Radical demand becomes ordinary institution
Cultural transformation - Feminism / sexual liberation - What people consider normal changes
Experimental knowledge - Communes / anarchist experiments - Failure nevertheless teaches what doesn’t scale
The fourth category is underrated.
A commune that collapses after ten years isn’t necessarily a historical failure.
If it teaches us:
“This decision-making structure produces paralysis after 40 people”
that’s valuable knowledge.
Humanity is effectively conducting thousands of social experiments across centuries, although we rarely treat them as experiments.
And now your question about historical circumstances becomes crucial
You asked:
How much of success and failure was based on the time/situation in which the arc was being played out?
I’d say an enormous amount.
Consider democracy.
Athenian democracy worked under conditions of:
small population
face-to-face politics
slavery
exclusion of women
extraordinary civic participation
You can’t simply scale that institution to 300 million people.
The modern representative democracy is partly a technological solution to the scale problem.
Likewise, Scandinavian welfare states didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Their development interacted with relatively high levels of social trust, earlier egalitarian trends, organized labor and particular political institutions.
Likewise, revolutionary socialism emerged in a world of:
industrial exploitation
weak democratic institutions
imperialism
enormous inequality
relatively low living standards
Its appeal in 1917 Russia is therefore completely different from its appeal in prosperous Western Europe in 1968.
And the 1960s counterculture emerged in a world of:
mass higher education
television
automobiles
antibiotics
contraception
rising wealth
mass consumer culture
nuclear weapons
decolonization
global communications
The material conditions created new psychological possibilities.
A medieval peasant doesn’t ask:
“Why should I spend my life working for a corporation?”
because corporations don’t exist.
A 1960s student can ask it because mass industrial society has created a completely different structure of life.
Which brings us back to Godard
This is why I think your original observation about Weekend is actually a doorway into a much larger history.
Godard’s generation inherited several centuries of experiments:
religion → liberalism → socialism → anarchism → feminism → anti-colonialism
and then said:
You guys keep asking who owns the factory. We’re asking why human existence has to be organized around factories at all.
That’s the genuinely radical move.
But history has given us a fairly sobering answer since then.
We have discovered that:
Freedom without coordination doesn’t work.
Coordination without freedom doesn’t work.
Equality without productivity doesn’t work.
Productivity without redistribution eventually creates political problems.
Individual autonomy without community produces loneliness and fragmentation.
Community without individual autonomy produces conformity.
Markets without government produce certain kinds of power.
Government without markets produces different kinds of power.
Decentralization without organization produces paralysis.
Organization without decentralization produces bureaucracy.
And perhaps most importantly:
Every solution creates a new problem.
That may be the closest thing we have to a general answer after thousands of years.
So maybe the historical arc isn’t “toward the perfect society”
It’s something subtler:
Humans keep discovering previously invisible forms of domination.
First:
“The king shouldn’t have absolute power.”
Then:
“The majority shouldn’t have absolute power.”
Then:
“The employer shouldn’t have absolute power.”
Then:
“The husband shouldn’t have absolute power.”
Then:
“The parent shouldn’t have absolute power.”
Then:
“The professor shouldn’t have absolute power.”
Then:
“The state shouldn’t control sexuality.”
Then:
“The corporation shouldn’t control information.”
And today we are discovering still newer questions:
Who controls the algorithm?
Who controls the data?
Who controls the infrastructure?
Who controls attention?
Who gets to decide what an AI system does?
That’s why I wouldn’t regard the 1960s as a weird historical detour.
It was another stage in an extraordinarily old human argument:
How much of my life should be determined by structures I did not choose?
And the answer we’ve accumulated so far isn’t “none.”
That’s impossible.
Every human being is dependent on structures they didn’t choose—language, family, biology, ecology, institutions, other people.
The more mature answer may be:
We cannot live without structures. The political question is whether those structures are visible, contestable, revisable, and distributed enough that people retain meaningful agency within them.
That, I think, is where the various arcs—liberalism, socialism, anarchism, feminism, democracy, the counterculture—start converging.
And it also explains why the most successful historical reforms tend not to abolish an institution completely. They make it less absolute.
Kings become constitutional.
Employers become regulated.
Families become less patriarchal.
Religions become less coercive.
States become accountable.
Markets become bounded.
Work becomes less all-consuming.
That is a much less cinematic answer than revolution.
But historically, it may be the more important one.
If you want to push this further, there is a really fascinating next step: compare Athens → Buddhism → early Christianity/monasticism → the Enlightenment → Marx → anarchism → 1968 → feminism → today’s technology as different answers to the exact same underlying problem of individual freedom versus social order. That comparison gets surprisingly deep, because some of the ideas we think of as uniquely “modern” turn out to have very ancient precedents.
The question that generated the answer:
These questions seems to have been asked repeatedly in human societies around the world in different times and situations. What are the arcs that have been taken and what answers have we got so far? What were successful and what were not successful? And how much of the success and failure was based on the time / situation that the arc was being played out?
“The radical question became much bigger than economics
This is perhaps the biggest difference between 1960s radicalism and older socialism.
Older left politics often asked:
Who owns the factory?
The new radicals increasingly asked:
Why does my professor have authority over me?
Why does the state tell me how to live?
Why are men and women expected to behave in particular ways?
Why are sexual relationships regulated?
Why do we spend our lives working merely to consume?
Why is everyday life so boring and controlled?
Why should I respect an authority simply because it is an authority?
That is why the 1960s eventually connects political radicalism with sexual liberation, feminism, anti-authoritarianism, experimental art, drugs, communal living, and alternative education.
It wasn’t just:
“We want socialism.”
It was:
“We want to change what it means to live.””
The topic that generated those questions:
tell me about 1960s french radicalization
French radicalization in the 1960s wasn’t simply “everyone became communist.” It was a much broader revolt against authority, hierarchy, consumer society, colonialism, conventional morality, and the institutions of everyday life.
And it happened remarkably quickly.
The background: France was actually doing pretty well
The paradox is that France in the 1960s was experiencing substantial economic growth and rising living standards. More people owned cars, televisions, refrigerators, etc. University attendance exploded: the number of French university students went from roughly 170,000 in 1958 to more than 500,000 in 1968. Encyclopedia.com+1
So this wasn’t primarily a revolt caused by starvation or economic collapse.
It was partly a revolt against modern affluent society itself.
Young people were looking at this new prosperous France and saying:
Is this really what freedom looks like?
You have a house, a car, a television, a job, consumer goods—and you’re still trapped in an incredibly hierarchical society.
That’s exactly the territory Godard explores in Weekend.
1. The Algerian War radicalized an entire generation
This is probably the most important piece that can get lost if you think of 1968 as simply a student movement.
France fought a brutal colonial war in Algeria from 1954 to 1962. The conflict involved torture, terrorism, mass displacement, and an enormous political crisis inside France itself.
Young French people grew up watching their government defend colonialism while claiming to represent liberty and civilization.
When Algeria finally became independent in 1962, it left behind a generation profoundly suspicious of the French state and its official morality. Encyclopedia.com+1
And there’s a direct connection to French cinema.
Think about Jean-Luc Godard , François Truffaut , Chris Marker , Alain Resnais .
The French New Wave generation had grown up amid the collapse of the old colonial France. Films such as The Little Soldier (Le Petit Soldat, 1960) confronted the Algerian War directly.
So when Godard makes Weekend five years after Algerian independence, the violence of the French bourgeoisie isn’t occurring in a political vacuum.
2. Then there’s Vietnam
Vietnam became the next great radicalizing issue.
The United States was bombing Vietnam, and France had its own colonial history in Indochina. French students increasingly saw the Vietnam War as another instance of imperialism.
By early 1968, French student demonstrations against the Vietnam War were becoming increasingly intense. Encyclopedia.com+1
And this is where the French radical movement becomes interesting.
The old French Communist Party was enormously powerful, but many young radicals didn’t trust it.
They didn’t want merely:
“Vote for the Communist Party.”
They wanted something more revolutionary and less hierarchical.
3. The New Left was rebelling against the Communist Party too
This is crucial.
There was an older revolutionary left:
Communist Party → Soviet Union → Marxist-Leninist hierarchy → organized working class
But many young people in the 1960s thought this model was itself authoritarian.
They looked at Stalinism and said:
We’re trying to overthrow authoritarianism, and you’re giving us another authoritarian system?
So you get the New Left: anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Situationists, libertarians, anti-colonialists, and various other tendencies.
They disagreed violently among themselves.
But they shared an enormous suspicion of hierarchy and institutional authority.
The student movement at Nanterre, for example, was influenced by anarchism and Situationism rather than simply orthodox communism. Encyclopedia.com
And this is exactly why someone like Daniel Cohn-Bendit could become such an important figure. He wasn’t the traditional stern Marxist revolutionary. He was irreverent, funny, anti-authoritarian, and suspicious of political hierarchy.
4. The radical question became much bigger than economics
This is perhaps the biggest difference between 1960s radicalism and older socialism.
Older left politics often asked:
Who owns the factory?
The new radicals increasingly asked:
Why does my professor have authority over me?
Why does the state tell me how to live?
Why are men and women expected to behave in particular ways?
Why are sexual relationships regulated?
Why do we spend our lives working merely to consume?
Why is everyday life so boring and controlled?
Why should I respect an authority simply because it is an authority?
That is why the 1960s eventually connects political radicalism with sexual liberation, feminism, anti-authoritarianism, experimental art, drugs, communal living, and alternative education.
It wasn’t just:
“We want socialism.”
It was:
“We want to change what it means to live.”
And then: Nanterre
This is where the explosion starts.
Nanterre was a new university outside Paris, opened partly because the existing universities couldn’t accommodate the enormous postwar student population.
It was surrounded by poor housing and immigrant workers while students inside studied sociology, alienation, Marxism, etc. The contradiction was almost comically perfect. Encyclopedia.com
Students began protesting university rules, particularly restrictions governing dormitory life and sexual relationships.
Then, in March 1968, about 150 students occupied part of the university administration building.
This became the 22 March Movement.
And one of its prominent figures was Cohn-Bendit.
The administration shut Nanterre down.
The students moved toward the Sorbonne.
Then the police entered the Sorbonne.
And suddenly the university issue became a national crisis.
May 1968: the extraordinary part
On May 3, police entered the Sorbonne and arrested hundreds of students. The confrontation escalated rapidly. Encyclopedia.com+1
Students built barricades in the Latin Quarter.
Police attacked.
Students fought back.
The images spread across France.
And then something extraordinary happened:
the workers joined the revolt.
By mid-May, strikes spread through factories and workplaces across the country. Eventually millions of workers were on strike, with estimates reaching around 7–10 million. Encyclopedia.com
France was essentially paralyzed.
And suddenly this wasn’t a student protest anymore.
For a brief moment, the possibility of revolution seemed imaginable.
That’s the historical atmosphere sitting behind Weekend.
But here’s the fascinating contradiction
The students and workers weren’t necessarily fighting for the same thing.
The workers wanted better wages, working conditions, dignity, and greater power at work.
The students wanted something much more existential:
the transformation of society itself.
And the Communist Party and its trade-union apparatus were actually suspicious of the student radicals. They didn’t necessarily want an uncontrolled revolution led by anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and students. Encyclopedia.com+1
So the revolution that seemed possible in May ultimately didn’t happen.
De Gaulle regained control.
Elections were held.
And remarkably, the Gaullists won a huge parliamentary majority.
So 1968 was simultaneously:
an enormous failure politically
and
an enormous success culturally.
And this brings us straight back to Weekend
Now look again at Godard’s film.
The bourgeois couple are surrounded by:
cars
consumer goods
property
money
sex
violence
advertising
colonial violence
revolutionary rhetoric
Marxist rhetoric
Maoist rhetoric
mass media
And Godard refuses to give you a normal story.
Why?
Because normal storytelling itself belongs to the world he’s attacking.
The bourgeois world has become so irrational that the only appropriate cinematic language is irrational.
That’s why the famous traffic jam is so important.
Millions of individuals are pursuing their private interests—and the result is collective catastrophe.
That’s basically a miniature Marxist argument.
And then Godard goes further: the bourgeois couple eventually encounter revolutionaries and are literally consumed by them.
It’s grotesque, but the joke is essentially:
You wanted a society based on consumption? Fine. Eventually, you’ll become the thing being consumed.
One more thing makes 1968 especially fascinating
The French radicals weren’t simply saying:
“The government is bad.”
They were questioning the entire structure of everyday life.
There’s a famous slogan associated with May ‘68:
“Under the pavement, the beach.”
The idea is beautiful: beneath the rigid structures of ordinary bourgeois existence there is another possible life waiting to emerge.
And that’s very close to what Godard is doing.
His films keep trying to break through the surface of ordinary reality—to show that underneath the respectable French bourgeois world are sex, violence, class conflict, imperialism, alienation, desire, revolution.
So when you watch Weekend as a film made in 1967, one year before May ‘68, it starts to look almost prophetic.
Godard isn’t documenting the revolution yet.
He’s imagining what it would look like if the contradictions of bourgeois France finally exploded.
And that’s why the film ends where it does.
The world doesn’t get reformed.
It eats itself.
Movies that generated the topic:
there’s a chapter in godard’s weekend called the exterminating angel, at the same time bunuel made a film of the same name. Is this a coincidence?
Yes — it’s absolutely deliberate, not a coincidence. Godard is directly invoking Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel in Weekend .
In fact, the connection is rather richer than simply borrowing the title.
What Godard is doing
In Weekend, the intertitle “THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL” appears around the episode where Roland and Corinne encounter the bizarre Joseph Balsamo. Film scholars explicitly identify this as a reference to Buñuel’s 1962 film. Senses of Cinema+1
And look at what happens immediately afterward: sheep appear in the landscape. That’s particularly pointed because Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel famously ends with sheep entering a church, after the bourgeois dinner-party nightmare has played itself out. The sheep are therefore essentially Godard’s little cinematic wink to Buñuel. Senses of Cinema+1
But there’s a deeper thematic connection.
Buñuel’s film traps a group of wealthy bourgeois people in a mansion. They could apparently leave, but some inexplicable psychological/social force prevents them from doing so. As their civilized rituals collapse, they become increasingly primitive and violent. Turner Classic Movies+1
Godard takes something similar and turns it inside out:
Buñuel: bourgeois society is trapped inside its own rituals.
Godard: bourgeois society is trapped inside its own consumerist civilization, which is literally collapsing around it.
Buñuel: the drawing room becomes a prison.
Godard: the road becomes a prison — hence the gigantic traffic jam.
Buñuel: civilization gradually reveals the animal underneath.
Godard: civilization is already bloody, violent, absurd and animalistic.
So when Godard labels this episode The Exterminating Angel, he’s effectively saying: we’ve entered a Buñuelian world now.
And this wasn’t just Godard discovering Buñuel by accident. Buñuel was a major point of reference for Godard’s generation. Weekend is unusually close to Buñuel in its combination of bourgeois satire, surrealism, cruelty, absurdity, and sudden ruptures in ordinary reality. One critic even describes Godard’s explicit reference as part of his deliberate engagement with Buñuel’s surrealist cinema. ResearchGate
There’s also a wonderful irony
Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel is from 1962; Weekend is from 1967.
And only a few years later, Buñuel himself would make The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie — another film about bourgeois people whose supposedly civilized social rituals become an absurd nightmare.
So you can almost see a conversation:
Buñuel → Godard → Buñuel again
And Weekend is Godard saying, in effect, “Your bourgeois nightmare isn’t surreal enough for 1967. Let’s take it out onto the French roads and let civilization completely disintegrate.”
The fact that Godard actually puts Buñuel’s title on the screen makes the relationship unusually explicit. Senses of Cinema+1
If you’ve just watched Weekend, there’s an especially interesting rabbit hole here: the sheep, Joseph Balsamo, the traffic jam, and the final cannibalism can all be read as Godard progressively transforming Buñuel’s bourgeois nightmare into a political apocalypse.
Probably part of a series called: “How AI is exploding my comprehension of the human condition”.