Forty years ago to the month that the French invented chic revolution.
Wiki says:
May 1968 is the name given to a series of student protests and a
general strike that caused the eventual collapse of the
De Gaulle government in
France. The vast majority of the protesters espoused
left-wing causes, but the established
leftist political institutions and
labor unions distanced themselves from the movement. Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake up the "old society" and traditional
morality, focusing especially on the
education system and
employment.
It began as a series of
student strikes that broke out at a number of
universities and
lycées in
Paris, following confrontations with university administrators and the police. The
de Gaulle administration's attempts to quash those strikes by further police action only inflamed the situation further, leading to street battles with the police in the
Latin Quarter, followed by a general strike by students and strikes throughout France by ten million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the French workforce. The protests reached such a point that de Gaulle created a military operations headquarters to deal with the unrest, dissolved the
National Assembly and called for new parliamentary elections for
23 June 1968.
The government was close to collapse at that point (De Gaulle had even taken temporary refuge at an air force base in Germany), but the revolutionary situation evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, after a series of deceptions carried out by the
Confédération Générale du Travail, the leftist union federation, and the
Parti Communiste Français (PCF), the French
Communist Party. When the elections were finally held in June, the Gaullist party emerged even stronger than before.
May '68 was a political failure for the protesters, but it had an enormous social impact. In France, it is considered to be the watershed moment that saw the replacement of conservative morality (religion, patriotism, respect for authority) with the liberal morality (equality, sexual liberation, human rights) that dominates French society today. Although this replacement did not take place solely in this one month, the term
mai 68 is used to refer to the shift in values, especially when referring to its most idealistic aspects.
It is difficult to identify precisely the politics of the students who sparked the events of May 1968, much less of the hundreds of thousands who participated in them. There was, however, a strong strain of
anarchism, particularly in the students at Nanterre. While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the
millenarian and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers (the anti-work graffiti shows the considerable influence of the
Situationist movement).
Happy Birthmonth Mai 68. Many happy returns