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Europe

May 1968: A Month of Revolution

Pushed France Into the Modern World
By ALISSA J. RUBINMAY 5, 2018

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Photo
A student hurling rocks at the police in Paris during the May 1968 student uprising. The
protests transformed France. Credit Gamma-Keystone, via Getty Images

Just six weeks after France’s leading newspaper, Le Monde, pronounced that the
country was “bored,” too bored to join the youth protests underway in Germany and in
the United States, students in Paris occupied the Sorbonne, one of the most illustrious
universities in Europe.

The day was May 3, 1968, and the events that ensued over the following month — mass
protests, street battles and nationwide strikes — transformed France. It was not a
political revolution in the way that earlier French revolutions had been, but a cultural
and social one that in a stunningly short time changed French society.

“In the history of France it was a remarkable movement because it was truly a mass
movement that concerned Paris but also the provinces, that concerned intellectuals but
also manual workers,” said Bruno Queysanne, who, at the time was an assistant
instructor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, one of the country’s most prestigious art
and architecture schools.

“Each person that engaged, engaged himself all the way,” he said. “That was how
France could stop running, without there being a feeling of injustice or sabotage. The
whole world was in agreement that they should pause and reflect on the conditions of
existence.”

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Photo
Jacques Sauvageot, center right, one of the protest leaders, and other students marching
in Paris. Universities across the country shut down during the protests. Credit Bruno
Barbey/Magnum Photos
Photo
Police forces in the Latin Quarter in Paris during the “night of barricades” on May 10 to
11. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Photo
Riot police in front of the Le Rex cinema on the Grands Boulevards in Paris. The 1968
Cannes Film Festival was cancelled about halfway through its run because of the
protests and strikes. Credit Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos

Today it is hard to imagine a Western country completely engulfed by a social

upheaval, but that is what happened in May 1968 in France. It is hard to find any
Frenchman or woman born before 1960 who does not have a vivid and personal
recollection of that month.

“Everything was enlarged by 1968; it determined all my life,” said Maguy Alvarez, a
teacher of English to elementary school students, as she walked through an exhibition of
posters and artworks from the period.

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“In religion, in sexual things, what it meant to be a woman — that it did not mean only
to serve a man or to submit to men. These are questions you think about your whole
life,” she said.

Both the women’s liberation movement and the gay rights movement in France grew
out of the 1968 upheaval and the intellectual ferment of the time.

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Photo
Students at Nanterre University in the suburbs of Paris in 1968. Credit Gilles
Caron/Fondation Gilles Caron
Photo
Students gathered for a general assembly in the amphitheater at Sorbonne University on
May 15. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Photo
Posters at a French university celebrating communist leaders. Credit Bruno
Barbey/Magnum Photos

While some people saw the mass strikes and protests as a shattering and painful event
that upended social norms — the authority of the father of the family and of the leader
of the country — for most, it pushed France into the modern world.

“The 19th century was a very long century,” said Philippe Artières, a historian and
researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research and one of the curators of the
show on the posters of 1968.

“We’re hardly out of it, and you have to keep in mind that in ’68 we were just 50 years
after the revolution of ’17 and a century after the Paris commune,” he said, referring to
the Russian Revolution and the 1871 uprising by mostly poor and working class
residents of Paris (although the leadership was middle class) that was brutally put down,
leaving as many as 10,000 dead.

President Emmanuel Macron, who was born in 1977, is the first post-1968 French
leader not to have personal memories of the upheaval — the exhilaration, the sense of
possibility, and the potential power of the street.

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Photo
Students passing cobble stones to build barricades in Paris on May 10. Credit Bruno
Barbey/Magnum Photos

Universities across the country shut down as students, often joined by their professors,
occupied the classrooms and courtyards. In Paris and other major French cities,
workers, students, intellectuals and anyone else who was interested thronged into the
street for mass rallies.

Blunting the sense of exhilaration were the daily confrontations with the police. As
early as May 3, police charged into the Sorbonne and ousted the students; in the ensuing
melee, some 600 were arrested, according to Agence France-Presse.

The students returned and quickly set up barricades to stop the police from entering the
areas where they were massing. The two factions faced off night and day: The police
wearing helmets and armed with riot shields, tear gas, truncheons and water cannons;
and the university students, sometimes still wearing the ties and jackets mandated at the
time by the university administration. The students dug up paving stones from the Paris
streets to heave at the police.

The night of May 6 was particularly violent, with 600 people wounded and 422
detained, but it was overnight between May 10 and May 11, known as the “night of
barricades” that people still talk about.

The protesters ripped up the paving stones from two streets in Latin Quarter, where the
Sorbonne is, set fire to cars and confronted the police. By the time the bloody fighting
ended, hundreds of students had been arrested and hundreds more hospitalized, as were
a number of police officers.

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Photo
A student chased by a police officer with on May 6 in Paris. Credit Gilles
Caron/Fondation Gilles Caron
Photo
Students in the Latin Quarter being led to a police station on May 11. Hundreds of
students were arrested during the protests that night, and hundreds more hospitalized, as
were a number of police officers. Credit Associated Press
Photo
The evacuation of an injured student under the eyes of the riot police during the night of
May 10-11. Credit Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos

“During the night there were very violent protests, cars burned, things broken, but
during the day, there was an air of vacation, of summer, a relaxed feeling,” said Mr.
Queysanne, who later became a professor of the philosophy of architecture at the
University of Grenoble and then at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in
Los Angeles.

“But then the next day, people came and discussed what they had seen; some were for,
some were against. This was incredible, there was freedom of speech, words were
liberated.”

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Photo
The aftermath of a night of riots in Paris. Credit Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos

Amazingly, somehow the violence did not taint the euphoria of the protesters.

“The feeling we had in those days, which has shaped my entire life really, was: We’re
making history. An exalted feeling — suddenly we had become agents in world
history,” said Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the most prominent of the student leaders at the
time, in an essay in the May 10 issue of The New York Review of Books.

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Photo
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, right, addressing students at the Sorbonne on
May 20, 1968. Credit Associated Press
Photo
French student leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit, left, and Pierre Delteil, with glasses,
speaking to the media in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris after a night of violent
clashes on May 7. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Photo
Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated their support for President Charles De
Gaulle on May 31, 1968. Many sang “La Marseillaise” on the tomb of the Unknown
Soldier. Credit Gamma-Keystone, via Getty Images

Simultaneously with the student protests, France’s factory workers walked off the job
and in many places camped out on the factory floor, refusing to work and demanding a
new order.

The shipyards in Nantes stopped loading and unloading freighters, and work in much of
the car manufacturing and aeronautics industries also ceased. The unions did not call the
strikes but when workers and students embraced them, they acquiesced.

By the third week in May, between 10 and 11 million people were on strike. There was
no gas for cars because the refineries came to a halt; the trains did not run, nor did the
Paris Metro.

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Photo
A May Day demonstration in Paris against the bombings in North Vietnam by United
States forces. Credit Gilles Caron/Fondation Gilles Caron
Photo
Strikers at the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt on May 27. Credit Bruno
Barbey/Magnum Photos
Photo
A student on a barricade in front of the School of Medicine; it was the last barricade to
be breached by the police, on May 12. Credit Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos

In France, the enemy of change was the government, then headed by President Charles
de Gaulle, who tried to repress the strikes and the sit-ins, but on May 29, he appeared to
be overwhelmed.

In an unprecedented move, he left the country without saying either that he was leaving
or where he was going. It was a startling turn of events and for a day or two the students
and workers thought they had won.

But Mr. de Gaulle returned, dissolved the National Assembly and called an election for
the end of June. Already, on May 27, the government and the unions had made a deal to
get the striking workers back on the job, offering them generous pay increases and
benefits.

But the established hierarchy and formality that permeated relationships between
teachers and students, parents and children, bosses and workers, and ultimately even
politicians and citizens, had been upended.

“At the level of daily life, and the relationships of people with institutions, there were
big changes,” said Mr. Queysanne, the professor of the philosophy of architecture.

When students returned to classes, they could now ask questions in class and dispute
ideas — a revolution in the French educational system. Bosses had to treat their workers
better.

But that heady atmosphere of social foment, excitement and a sense of deep
camaraderie that cut across class and education, that touched factory workers, students,
intellectuals and farmers alike had passed.

There would be other moments of social protests, but none that were quite the same as
those that occurred in the Paris spring of 1968.

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Photo
A Paris street in June, with the aftermath of the protests still clearly visible. Credit
Gilles Caron/Fondation Gilles Caron

Produced by Gaia Tripoli