The Mai '68 Protests...from an American College Student's Perspective

Growing up stateside, our collective memory of the 60s is a turbulent one, involving the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s Assassination, the Space Race, and Civil Rights movement. While logically we focus on our own nation’s experience during this extraordinary decade, we tend to overlook the universality of this cultural upheaval across the globe.

Only a month after the riots across the U.S. in response to Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, France played host to an entire month of (at times violent) social turmoil.

I recently watched a documentary that followed French society through this month of May 1968, an iconic moment in modern French memory. As a current student interested in social activism, the power and influence of university students in the conception of this veritable social movement made an immediate impression on me. While tension certainly existed under the surface of French society at the time, young students at the Sorbonne set off a series of protests (turning into riots) in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The heavy-handed repression of the police against the students ended up galvanizing a much larger (and more powerful) sector of France, the labor unions, which ended up going on strike for nearly the entire month of May. Throw the character of President Charles de Gaulle into this potent mix, and I begin to wonder why Hollywood has yet to produce a blockbuster film on the subject.

In the past few weeks, my War and Cultural Memory course has examined contemporary France’s collective memory of the Algerian War. This induces an interesting comparison between May 1968 and the émeuttes in the banlieues of Paris in 2005. In the sixties, the grévistes and étudiants certainly had a different complexion than the racaille of 2005, but could their grievances be similar? In ’68, a generation of baby-boomers felt their government, their established power system, had lost touch the generation that would succeed them. In one telling scene from the documentary, a student leader proclaims that students have the duty, as the future of the nation, to stake claim over their own future. Meanwhile, in the banlieues, North African immigrants and their descendants expressed a sense of frustration at their treatment by French society and the government at large. These minority groups expect to play a proportionate role in France’s future, but have felt marginalized and “foreign-ized” despite many of them being born inside l’Hexagone.

To apply this thinking even more broadly, the United States cannot ignore the gravity of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests that cropped up last year. In 1962, before any of these events, American researcher Everett Roger proposed the theory that, “For a social change to be ‘embedded,’ 5% of people must be behind it. The movement or idea becomes unstoppable when 20% of the populace is behind it.” When reacting to the manifestations of movements with the potential to reach this 20% mark, the “powers that be” must take care not to radicalize these, generally well-intentioned (or at least reasonable) protesters. We need look no further than Syria to find a dire warning to those that believe immediate and iron-willed repression of forms of public expression can permanently eliminate their threat to the established order.