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France relives May '68 with a new dissatisfaction

By Elizabeth Bryant
May 12, 2008

A LEGACY: Police and students are shown battling in the streets of Paris in May 1968. Today, a new generation is demonstrating against plans to cut jobs. (Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

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PARIS — Rock music blares on a hot afternoon as students demonstrating against cuts in education reluctantly disperse in midtown under the watch of riot police in a scene reminiscent of a watershed May 40 years ago, when protests forced the Gaullist government to hold new elections and profoundly changed France's political landscape.

Today, an uneasy France revisits May 1968 with exhibitions, seminars, movies, articles and demonstrations amid widespread dissatisfaction with President Nicolas Sarkozy and his center-right government.

"Young people look very favorably at what happened in May '68," Jean-Baptiste Prevost, president of the National Union of Students of France, said about protests by high school students, including one last week against government plans to cut more than 11,000 teaching posts.

"At the same time, young people don't want to copy what took place. They want to write their own history," Mr. Prevost said.

The demonstrations, clashes and riots that rocked the country on May 6, 1968, and for the subsequent several weeks began with student takeovers of the Paris-area Sorbonne and Nanterre universities and quickly blossomed into a countrywide revolt that was rapidly joined by artists and disgruntled workers.

Workers staged strikes. Students held sit-ins calling for the government of war hero turned president Charles de Gaulle to resign. If the protesters hailed from different backgrounds, they shared a similar desire to shake up traditional French society and, for some, to express their opposition to the Vietnam War.

But the unrest dissolved almost as rapidly as it began. It was over by the time of the June legislative elections, which merely strengthened the Gaullist politicians' hand. Still, Mr. de Gaulle retired a year later.

Today, the debate is in the newspapers, on television and in forums organized across France about the legacy of that riotous month in 1968.

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