France, May 1968

Students demonstrate, workers occupy factories, a great uprising ...

My '68: “My opinions snapped into focus”

In 1968 I was a student at Cambridge university. I had leftish opinions as a result of books I’d read and experiences between leaving school and going to university — but really they didn’t amount to more than a vague blur. The French events of 1968 suddenly snapped issues into focus. To this day I can remember reading a big article in the Observer at the end of May by Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville which explained how the French Communist Party was acting as a conservative force within the strike movement. Even before that, I didn’t like the Communist Party or consider the regimes in...

My '68: From observer to participant

Like many teenagers in 1968, my political education was as an observer for many years of a number of major struggles throughout the world. The civil rights movement in the US; the events in China, which were mystifying as portrayed by the media and explained meaningfully by no-one, and the horrors of the US war in Vietnam. The first half of 1968 started out again as another of watching, but this time the intensity of the experience was ratcheted up by the Prague spring of “Socialism with a Human Face”, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and most excitingly the May-June events in France. A friend and...

May '68: An activist remembers

“At the time I was a student in Bordeaux, active in the French students’ union UNEF. Politically I was hesitating between the PCI [the ‘Lambertist’ group] and Lutte Ouvriere, or, as it was then, Voix Ouvriere. I had friends in the PCI, and my brother was in VO. After May-June I made my choice for VO. There had been a rise of working-class struggle in 1967-8, but no-one expected what happened in May. We first realised that something very big was happening with the big Paris demonstration of 13 May. That was the entry of the working class into what had previously been a student struggle. The...

May '68: The revolt of the youth

The newspaper Le Monde of 15 March 1968 published an article by the journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté asserting that “what defines our public life at the present time is boredom”. The revolt of the youth, erupting spontaneously, came to break that boredom, pulling the working class into the general strike. How to explain this explosion, when it was fashionable to talk of the “embourgeoisement” of the working class? When tens of thousands of young people suddenly expose the reality of the regime by courageously confronting its state machine, and when millions of workers jump into a strike...

May '68: A diary of struggle

3 May 1968: the rector of the Sorbonne (in Paris) demands the intervention of the police to clear the courtyard where left-wing activists are holding a meeting. The police round up everyone. Students in the surrounding area react and demonstrate. The police charge and make more than 600 arrests. All further demonstrations are banned, but the student union UNEF calls a campus strike for 6 May. The Communist Party declares that “these false revolutionaries are behaving objectively as allies of the Gaullist regime”. 6 May: demonstrations bring out 20,000 people. UNEF raises three demands...

May '68: Preparing Capitalism's downfall

In March 1968 students at Nanterre near Paris started a campaign to visit each others’ rooms in halls of residence after 11pm. Their campaign drew in students from all over France, who added their own grievances, their own demands. Then the students’ struggle became the catalyst for a movement which would lead to a general strike involving 8 million French workers. The workers’ demands were at first minimal — for wage concessions and greater social security. However, as a mass strike wave developed and continued throughout May, many long-germinating working class aspirations came to the fore...

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