As strikes rage in France today, the legacy of May '68 looms large
Gérard Alezard never threw a stone, vandalized property, or endured the blows of a police baton like many soixante-huitards (sixty-eighters) – those who participated in France’s May 1968 protests. But he remembers those who did.
They were mostly students who had led a protest on May 10 in Paris’s Latin Quarter that ended in a violent confrontation with police. On that notorious evening – “the Night of the Barricades” – thousands of police officers descended on the Left Bank of the Seine River to break up the some 20,000 students who had erected a dozen barricades in protest.
By the next morning, the area resembled a war zone – cars smashed, fires burning, and sidewalks uprooted. More than 400 students were brutally arrested; beaten with batons, sprayed with tear gas, and
Bringing France to a standstill#MeToo, 1968Fifty years later
