May ’68: A Great Lyrical Community
Fifty years later, we look back at the student-led protests that shook Paris in May 1968 and have occupied the French political imagination ever since.
May 1968, Paris. Photo: Bruno Barbey.
The events of May 1968 in France emerged seemingly out of nowhere, yet they brought the country to a halt. High schools and universities in all corners of the country were occupied by students, and millions of workers went on strike. Although some have maintained that the uprising was actually an outgrowth of the strike movements that had swept the country in the previous year, May ’68 was not the result of worker discontent: they only joined the fray ten days after the students set it off. The movement emerged from the students. Its premonitory signs appeared at the new University of Nanterre in late 1967 and early 1968 with protests over the right for boys to visit girls’ dorms and vice versa and in defense of the students who were threatened with expulsion for their participation in an anti–Vietnam War demonstration. What would become known as the May events began when students gathered at the Sorbonne in Paris and threw stones at police occupying the courtyard.
Why, in the midst of the , the thirty glorious years of
