Last modification: 27/06/08
May ’68: France’s watershed moment
Forty years ago a revolutionary fervour gripped the streets of Paris as anti-establishment fury raged across the world. FRANCE 24 looks back on the legacy of that incendiary spring.
On March 22, 1968, a group of students occupied the administrative offices at the University of Nanterre, in the west of Paris, providing the spark for a conflagration that would develop from simple demands for student rights to revolution.
In the weeks and months to come, students, workers, artists and writers would take to the streets in demonstrations against state power that would challenge French President Charles de Gaulle’s government, paving the way for its eventual decline.
By May ’68, the March 22 Movement — as it came to be called — had spread to Paris, with the centres of discontent centered around the historic Sorbonne university in the heart of the French capital’s Latin Quarter.
By May 13, a general strike mobilised a million protesters on the streets of Paris and some of the movement’s leaders — such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit — became household names.
Forty years later, the legacy of May ’68 is still a controversial subject in France. “There is no one school of thought that came out of ’68,” philosopher Serge Audier tells FRANCE 24, “but rather an extraordinary nebulous movement linked to the emergence of third-worldism and to the rejection of the war in Vietnam.”
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