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- Fifty years ago today the streets of Paris staged a battle between 6,000 student demonstrators and 1,500 gendarmes – within days it had snowballed into civil dispute that saw 10 million French workers go on general strike and brought the economy to a virtual halt.
www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/may-1968-paris-student-riots-demonstrations-sorbonne-nanterre-de-gaulle-a8335866.htmlThe Paris riots of May 1968: How the frustrations of youth ...
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May 5, 2018 · In a drastic action, the authorities shut down the University of Nanterre on 2 May. The students who had decamped to the Sorbonne were bound to think that this was a hostile act, an outbreak of...
A counter-demonstration organised by the Gaullist party on 29 May in central Paris gave De Gaulle the confidence to dissolve the National Assembly and call parliamentary elections for 23 June 1968. Violence evaporated almost as quickly as it arose.
- Overview
- Background
- Confrontation and revolt
events of May 1968, student revolt that began in a suburb of Paris and was soon joined by a general strike eventually involving some 10 million workers. During much of May 1968, Paris was engulfed in the worst rioting since the Popular Front era of the 1930s, and the rest of France was at a standstill. So serious was the revolt that in late May the...
In the decade preceding May 1968, the French student population had nearly trebled, from about 175,000 to more than 500,000. It was an era of international “youth culture,” yet French society remained autocratic, hierarchical, and tradition-bound, especially in the eyes of French youth. As the May revolt erupted, de Gaulle was on the verge of celeb...
In retrospect, the event that precipitated the May revolt seems fairly innocuous. In 1967, students at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris had staged protests against restrictions on dormitory visits that prevented male and female students from sleeping with each other. In January 1968, at a ceremony dedicating a new swimming pool at the campus, the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit verbally attacked François Missoffe, France’s Minister of Youth and Sports, complaining that Missoffe had failed to address the students’ sexual frustrations. Missoffe then suggested that Cohn-Bendit cool his ardour by jumping into the pool, whereupon Cohn-Bendit replied that Missoffe’s remark was just what one would expect from a fascist regime. The exchange earned Cohn-Bendit a reputation as an antiauthoritarian provocateur, and he soon acquired an almost cultlike following among French youth.
In March an attack on the American Express office in central Paris resulted in the arrest of several students. At a protest at the Nanterre campus a few days later in support of the students, more students were arrested, including Cohn-Bendit himself, who, it was rumoured, was threatened with deportation (he was eventually expelled in late May). The March 22 Movement, which lobbied for the arrested students’ release, emerged in response.
In early May, fearing an escalation of the protests, the dean of Nanterre shut down the campus—in retrospect, a fateful decision. Since the students were barred from protesting at Nanterre, they decided to take their grievances to the Sorbonne, in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter. On May 3 the rector of the Sorbonne formally requested that the police clear the university’s courtyard, where some 300 students had assembled. The mass arrests that followed—undertaken with help from the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Securité), the national riot police—sparked violent resistance from bystanders, who began pelting the police with cobblestones removed from the streets and erecting barricades. The police responded with tear gas, clubbings, and more arrests. The rector of the Sorbonne closed the university, which further incited the students. The student leaders then proposed a major march and rally for May 10 to demand the reopening of the Sorbonne, the release of students who were still being held by the police, and an end to the intimidating police presence in the Latin Quarter.
The Night of the Barricades—May 10–11, 1968—remains a fabled date in postwar French history. By then the number of student protesters in the city had reached nearly 40,000. After police blocked the marchers’ path toward the Right Bank and the national broadcasting authority ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française), the students again began removing cobblestones and erecting barricades for protection—a scene that remains one of the May movement’s enduring images. At about 2:00 in the morning of May 11, the police attacked, firing tear gas and beating students and bystanders with truncheons. The bloody confrontation continued until dawn. By the time the dust had cleared, nearly 500 students had been arrested and hundreds of others had been hospitalized, including more than 250 police officers. The Latin Quarter lay in ruins, and public sympathy for the students, already considerable, increased.
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- Richard Wolin
Sep 8, 2006 · The government backed down. On April 22nd, the general assembly of the Cinémathèque convened and voted to reinstate Langlois. The Cinémathèque was snatched back from the jaws of the state. On May 2nd, with some fanfare, Langlois reopened the Left Bank screening room, on the Rue d’Ulm.
May 5, 2018 · 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...
Events of May 1968 - Aftermath, Influence, Legacy: French society underwent measured and incremental change in the aftermath of the May revolt, initiating a transformation of everyday life. The sixty-eighters sought to unmask forms of ideological coercion and social control.
May 4, 2018 · The violence came to a head in the wee hours of May 10, the fateful “ Night of the Barricades,” when riot police attacked demonstrators in Paris’s Latin Quarter, resulting in almost 500 arrests...
