As Nana asked me to, I will try to explain what happened in Paris in the spring of 1968. That is hard. "Mai 68" is a very strange event in France, especially in Paris, echoing the civil rights movement in the United States, but it was very different in spirit and origin for the Paris case. Pupils and students of Paris universities went on "strike" and revolted against the burden of social convention and against the mental paralysis of the French establishment. History says it sparked off when spring came, and on March 22nd pupils were fed up with seeing their female classmates sleeping in another building and being forbidden to visit them. Lots of other versions exist and that is where Robert Merle comes in the picture : he wrote a whole book about that day to depict the whole set of circumstances around those premices. The national archives of French TV and radio (INA) only last year made public the documents about that event, giving a whole new material to open perspectives on these origins and check hypotheses. But no one cares any more. The truth is people wanted some oxygen in their lives and souls, suffering from widespread authoritarism and wanting to dream about brighter future... and present. But the demands of protesters were unclear, and went in all direction, because there was no real structured thought or ideology to help formulate the claims in a intelligible vocabulary. It was not really a communist or a maoist revolution, it was clearly not about raising wages. It was just that when you were not conforming to the working, grey, silent and docile horizon society fixed to your life, you were considered like a shit, that when you thought something, you couldn't really discuss it, that fathers were always right, bosses always winning. If you are on Earth, it is for working hard and dying quietly (each time I see a movie, a documentary or whatever about how people behaved during that period, I a frightened, really. Sometimes, today Japanese society make me think about that a lot). That was more or less what the youth of that time was fed up with and claim to abolish.
A childish, essential, imprecise and very clear case.
The whole heart of Paris was under siege by students holding meetings in their universities theatre to debate about how to fight against a predominant state of mind, pianos were installed and played in the square of Sorbonne, cars piled up in the adjacent streets, flowers were painted on the walls and Molotov cocktails thrown to squads of military police charging indistinctly students and other inhabitants of the neighbourhood. Posters were printed by idealistic printers with mottos about the beauty of life and the cruelty of rules, while tyranny and intellectual terrorism were experienced among the dreamers' meetings by the organized revolutionary groups, who saw an opportunity in that insurrection and wanted to channel the revolt into their long-studied plans of revolution.
Then, workers went on strike, trade unions first followed the movement and then kind of took control of it. They formulated demands in terms of the good old-fashion class struggle (for the revolutionaries) or of wage and work-condition improvement (for the reformists), in terms of death to the system for the anarchists, death to bourgeois culture for the maoists, and death to the super-ego for the psychoanalysts, etc. The whole thing went on several weeks, with a real state of insurrection in Paris, and movements a bit everywhere in France. Bourgeois feared for their properties and for "order and security". Nations of the world feared for a Red revolution in Paris, settling soviets on the wrong side of the iron curtain. Le Général de Gaulle, then in charge, secretly took refuge in some place still unknown with certainty by historians, and disappeared completely a few days. He came back, repressed the whole thing, lovers of the orders marched on the Champs Elysées to show they wanted tradition and order back and the old system unchanged : no one knew where it cam from or where it could go, so reaction came high in the public opinion. The Général dissolved the Assembly and organized general elections within 30 days to allow a formal expression of that reaction, that resulted in an almost unprecedented victory of Gaullists (as you can expect). But just a year later, he organized a referendum about a minor constitutional subject, only to tell France that voting for that was voting for him. He lost and he quit. The whole society had changed because colours and discussions had flourished everywhere, and not any more exclusively about the question of whether the Marxist revolution was the next step of humanity, or whether hormones were the only ground for a will to change the society.
You can tell I am very biased when telling you all those things, and my knowledge of it is very small, filtered by the things I wanted to read and hear about it. It is a real unidentified object in social history, and everyone understands it differently. Sarkozy declared during the presidential campaign that he wanted to get rid of the 68 heritage, because the praise of laziness and the contestation of authority were the deep reasons for the long-term levels of unemployment and the problems of deficit in the State's budget. (sic!)
So you see : the fight is not over...
Not to leave the last word to this idiotic guy, let me tell you this best condensed description of what happened in may 68: In 1789, our fathers took Bastille, today we recover our speech: En mai, on a pris la parole comme on a pris la Bastille en 1789
