MAY 1968
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(Redirected from May 68)
:''For other events in May 1968, see 1968.''
'May 1968' (in this context usually spelled 'May '68') is the name given to a series of protests and a general strike that caused the eventual collapse of the De Gaulle government in France. The vast majority of the protesters espoused left-wing causes, but the established leftist political institutions and labor unions distanced themselves from the movement. Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake up the "old society" in many social aspects and traditional morality, focusing especially on the education system and employment.
It began as a series of student strikes that broke out at a number of universities and high schools in Paris, following confrontations with university administrators and the police. The de Gaulle administration's attempts to quash those strikes by further police action only inflamed the situation further, leading to street battles with the police in the Latin Quarter, followed by a general strike by students and strikes throughout France by ten million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the French workforce. The protests reached the point that de Gaulle created a military operations headquarters to deal with the unrest, dissolved the National Assembly and called for new parliamentary elections for 23 June 1968.
The government was close to collapse at that point (De Gaulle had even taken temporary refuge at an airforce base in Germany), but the revolutionary situation evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, after a series of deceptions carried out by the Confédération Générale du Travail, the leftist union federation, and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), the French Communist Party. When the elections were finally held in June, the Gaullist party emerged even stronger than before.
On 22 March leftist groups, including 150 students, invaded an administration building at Nanterre University and held a meeting in the university council room, in the name of the Enragés, who were allied with the Situationist International. René Riesel immediately demanded the expulsion of two observers from the administration and of several Stalinists who were present. After a spokesmen for the anarchists, a regular collaborator of Cohn-Bendit's, had asserted that "the Stalinists who are here this evening are no longer Stalinists," the Enragés immediately left the meeting in protest against this cowardly illusion. The Enragés left and the 22 March Movement carried on confusedly without, and against the Enragés who had had begun the agitations in the first place. Cohn Bendit later became a leader and spokesman and stepped into the limelight.
The Sorbonne administration called the police, who surrounded the university. They initially agreed to let students go in groups of 25, first women and then men. When the men began to emerge however, they were arrested. When other students gathered to stop the police vans from taking away the arrested students, the riot police responded by launching tear gas into the crowd. Rather than dispersing the students, the tear gas only brought more students to the scene, where they blocked the exit of the vans. The police finally prevailed, but only after arresting hundreds of students.
Following months of conflicts between students and authorities at the University of Paris at Nanterre, the administration shut down that university on 2 May 1968. Students at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris met on 3 May to protest against the closure and the threatened expulsion of several students at Nanterre. On Monday, 6 May, the national student union, the UNEF - still the largest student union in France today - and the union of university teachers called a march to protest against the police invasion of the Sorbonne. More than 20,000 students, teachers and supporters marched towards the Sorbonne, still sealed off by the police, who charged, wielding their batons, as soon as the marchers approached. While the crowd dispersed, some began to create barricades out of whatever was at hand, while others threw paving stones, forcing the police to retreat for a time. The police then responded with tear gas and charged the crowd again. Hundreds more students were arrested.
High school students started to go out on strike in support of the students at the Sorbonne and Nanterre on 6 May. The next day they joined the students, teachers and increasing numbers of young workers who gathered at the Arc de Triomphe to demand that: (1) all criminal charges against arrested students be dropped, (2) the police leave the university, and (3) the authorities reopen Nanterre and the Sorbonne. Negotiations broke down after students returned to their campuses, after a false report that the government had agreed to reopen them, only to discover the police still occupying the schools.
On Friday 10 May, another huge crowd congregated on the Rive Gauche. When the riot police again blocked them from crossing the river, the crowd again threw up barricades, which the police then attacked at 2:15 in the morning after negotiations once again floundered. The confrontation, which produced hundreds of arrests and injuries, lasted until dawn of the following day. The events were broadcast on radio as they occurred and the aftermath was shown on television the following day. Allegations were made that the police had participated, through ''agents provocateurs'', in the riots, by burning cars and throwing molotov cocktails [1].
The government's heavy-handed reaction brought on a wave of sympathy for the strikers. The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) reluctantly supported the students, whom it regarded as adventurists and anarchists, and the major left union federations, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the Force Ouvrière (CGT-FO) called a one day general strike and demonstration for Monday, 13 May.
Over a million people marched through Paris on that day; the police stayed largely out of sight. Prime Minister Georges Pompidou personally announced the release of the prisoners and the reopening of the Sorbonne. The surge of strikes did not, however, recede.
When the Sorbonne reopened, students occupied it and declared it an autonomous "people's university". Approximately 401 popular "action committees" were set up in Paris and elsewhere in the weeks that followed to take up grievances against the government.
In the following days workers began occupying factories, starting with a sit-down strike at the Sud Aviation plant near the city of Nantes on 14 May, then another strike at a Renault parts plant near Rouen, which spread to the Renault manufacturing complexes at Flins in the Seine Valley and the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. By 16 May workers had occupied roughly fifty factories and by 17 May 200,000 were on strike. That figure snowballed to two million workers on strike the following day and then ten million, or roughly two-thirds of the French workforce, on strike the following week.
These strikes were not led by the union movement; on the contrary, the CGT tried to contain this spontaneous outbreak of militancy by channeling it into a struggle for higher wages and other economic demands. Workers put forward a broader, more political and more radical agenda, demanding the ousting of the government and President de Gaulle and attempting, in some cases, to run their factories. When the trade union leadership negotiated a 35% increase in the minimum wage, a 7% wage increase for other workers, and half normal pay for the time on strike with the major employers' associations, the workers occupying their factories refused to return to work and jeered their union leaders, even though this deal was better than what they could have obtained only a month earlier.
On May 25 and May 26, the Grenelle agreements are signed at the Ministry of Social Affairs. They provide for an increase of the minimum wages by 25% and of the average salaries by 10%. These offers were rejected and the strike went on.
On May 27, the meeting of the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (''national Union of the students of France''), most outstanding of the events of May 68, proceeded and gathered 30,000 to 50,000 people in the Stade Sebastien Charlety.
On 30 May several hundred thousand protesters (300,000 to 400,000, many more than the 50,000 the police were expecting) led by the CGT marched through Paris, chanting, ''"Adieu, de Gaulle!"'' (Meaning: "Goodbye, De Gaulle.")
While the government appeared to be close to collapse, de Gaulle remained firm. Instead, after ensuring that he had sufficient loyal military units mobilized to back him if push came to shove, he went on the radio the following day (the national television service was on strike) to announce the dissolution of the National Assembly, with elections to follow on 23 June. He ordered workers to return to work, threatening to institute a state of emergency if they did not.
From that point the revolutionary feeling of the students and workers faded away. Workers gradually returned to work or were ousted from their plants by the police. The national student union called off street demonstrations. The government banned a number of leftist organizations. The police retook the Sorbonne on 16 June. De Gaulle triumphed in the legislative elections held in June and the crisis came to an end.
Main articles: Slogans of May 68
It is difficult to precisely identify the politics of the students who sparked the events of May 1968, much less of the hundreds of thousands who participated in them. There was, however, a strong strain of anarchism, particularly in the students at Nanterre. While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the millenarian and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers (the anti-work graffiti shows the considerable influence of the Situationist movement)
France was far from the only country to witness student protests in 1968. The events were preceded by the announcement, in the United States, that United States President Lyndon B. Johnson would choose to withdraw from the 1968 presidential campaign in March due to rising domestic opposition. This was soon followed by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (on April 4), and a student-led occupation and closure of Columbia University on April 23.
In Mexico, on the night of 2 October 1968, a student demonstration ended in a storm of bullets in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, Mexico City.
The United States and German student movements were relatively isolated from the working class, but in Italy and in Argentina students and workers joined in efforts to create a radically different society.
In Belgium, students from the University in Leuven protested against the dominance of the French language in the Flemish university, which resulted in a separate Francophone university.
In Eastern Europe, students also drew inspiration from the protests in the West. In Poland and Yugoslavia students protested against restrictions on free speech by Communist regimes. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring offered a broadening of political rights until it was crushed by the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies.
Many of the student groups involved with May 1968 were also inspired by a strain of political thought called ''tiers-mondisme'' (third worldism). Students idealized and followed socialist movements in countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, or China, and revered figures such as, Castro, Che or Mao. Their struggles in their own countries were tied to their support of these third world socialist movements.
★ The Mai '68s, an indie-pop-punk band from Leicester, United Kingdom, took its name from the May 1968 events.
★ Robert Merle's book, ''Derrière la vitre'' is a novel set in the May 1968 events.
★ Vangelis released an LP, dubbed a poème symphonique, entitled ''Fais Que Ton Rêve Soit Plus Lang Que La Nuit'' and was a musique concrète/folk recording collage reflecting the May 1968 strikes. Vangelis was in Paris at the time recording with Aphrodite's Child. The LP was limited in release to France and Greece and only on vinyl.
★ Jean-Luc Godard's and Jean-Pierre Gorin's 1972 film ''Tout va bien'' is a film starring Yves Montand as a former French New Wave film director, and then radical Jane Fonda as a news reporter. The film goes into what an intellectual's place is during the post May 1968 world. Available through The Criterion Collection.
★ René Viénet's 1973 film ''Can Dialectics Break Bricks?'' dealt with the concepts surrounding May 1968, parodying the events within the narrative.
★ Guy Debord's 1973 film ''The Society of the Spectacle'' dealt with the motivations around the events of May 1968. The film also contains large amounts of archival footage of the events.
★ Chris Marker's 1977 film ''A Grin Without a Cat'' IMDb is a 3-hour-long film documentary portraying the history behind the social unrests of the sixties. Made with archival images, it deals with May 1968 in depth.
★ ''Milou en Mai'' (''Milou in May'', also released under the English title ''May Fools''), is a later film (1990) by Louis Malle. It portrays the impact of revolutionary fervour on a French village.
★ Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film ''The Dreamers'' was based on three young film-loving students and their experiences in May 1968, although it features the events mainly as a backdrop and not predominantly within the primary plot.
★ Roman Coppola's 2001 film ''CQ'' depicts the Paris filmmaking world of the late 1960s and makes repeated reference to the events of May 1968.
★ The Rolling Stones' song "Street Fighting Man" was heavily influenced by the student riots.
★ The Beatles' song "Revolution 1" was based upon the May 1968 uprising. Another song, "Revolution 9" was based on this uprising, and was intended to show the violence of a revolution in progress.
★ Philippe Garrel's 2005 film ''Les Amants Réguliers'' IMDb ("the regular lovers") is a 3-hour-long rejoinder to ''The Dreamers'' that portrays the May 1968 events through the eyes of a group of young artists who grow increasingly absorbed in a world of drugs and free love upon what they see as the failure of the May 1968 events.
★ The Stone Roses song "Bye Bye Badman" on their eponymous debut album was said by lead singer Ian Brown to be about the riots. The lemon the band commonly use as a logo represents the lemons used by protestors to sooth their eyes from the effects of tear gas.
★ The video for Röyksopp's single Only This Moment depicts events from the May 1968 riots.
★ 'The Merry Month of May' is author James Jones's 1971 novel concerning the events of the 1968 student revolutions in Paris. It is centered around a rich American family, the Gallaghers, living as expatriates in Paris.
1. "Ils voulaient un patron, pas une coopérative ouvrière", ''Le Monde'', interview with Michel Rocard, 20 March 2007
★ Movement of 22 March which initiated May 1968
★ Anarchism in France
★ Autonomism (and Italian ''operaismo'')
★ Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne
★ Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité
★ Feminism in France
★ Situationist International
★ Socialisme ou Barbarie
★ Cornelius Castoriadis
★ Lip factory, a self-managed factory starting in 1973, considered as "the social conflict of the 1970s"
★ University of Paris strike of 1229
★ French civil unrest of 2005
★ 2006 labor protests in France
★ The 1973 democracy movement in Thailand
★ Prague Spring
★ Maurice Brinton: Paris May 1968
★ Posters from May 1968 (French)
★ More Posters from May 1968
★ Picture gallery
★ May 1968, Essex students revolt
★ May Events Archive of Documents
★ Cohn-Bendit, Daniel - ''Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative''
★ Cornelius Castoriadis avec Claude Lefort et Edgar Morin - ''Mai 1968: la brèche''
★ Dark Star Collective - ''Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 68''
★ Feenberg, Andrew and Freedman, Jim - ''When Poetry Ruled the Streets''
★ Gregoire, Roger and Perlman, Fredy - ''Worker-Student Action Committees: France May '68''
★ Jones, James - ''The Merry Month of May'' (novel).
★ Adair, Gilbert - The Holy Innocents (novel).
★ Ross, Kristin - ''May '68 and its Afterlives''
★ Quattrochi, Angelo and Nairn, Tom. ''The Beginning of the End''.
★ Singer, Daniel - ''Prelude To Revolution: France In May 1968''
★ Touraine, Alain - ''The May Movement: Revolt and Reform''
★ Vienet, Rene - ''Enrages And The Situationists In the Occupation Movement, France May '68''
★ Debord, Guy - ''The Society of the Spectacle''
★ Raoul Vaneigem - ''The Revolution of Everyday Life''
★ Knabb, Ken - ''The Situationist Anthology''
★ Plant, Sadie - ''The Most Radical Gesture: Situationist International in a Postmodern Age''
★ Tony Cliff - France – the struggle goes on
★ Mark Kurlansky - ''1968: The Year That Rocked The World''
★ Ferlinghetti, Lawrence- ''Love in the Days of Rage''
:''For other events in May 1968, see 1968.''
A May 1968 poster: "Be young and shut up", with stereotypical silhouette of General de Gaulle.
'May 1968' (in this context usually spelled 'May '68') is the name given to a series of protests and a general strike that caused the eventual collapse of the De Gaulle government in France. The vast majority of the protesters espoused left-wing causes, but the established leftist political institutions and labor unions distanced themselves from the movement. Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake up the "old society" in many social aspects and traditional morality, focusing especially on the education system and employment.
It began as a series of student strikes that broke out at a number of universities and high schools in Paris, following confrontations with university administrators and the police. The de Gaulle administration's attempts to quash those strikes by further police action only inflamed the situation further, leading to street battles with the police in the Latin Quarter, followed by a general strike by students and strikes throughout France by ten million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the French workforce. The protests reached the point that de Gaulle created a military operations headquarters to deal with the unrest, dissolved the National Assembly and called for new parliamentary elections for 23 June 1968.
The government was close to collapse at that point (De Gaulle had even taken temporary refuge at an airforce base in Germany), but the revolutionary situation evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, after a series of deceptions carried out by the Confédération Générale du Travail, the leftist union federation, and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), the French Communist Party. When the elections were finally held in June, the Gaullist party emerged even stronger than before.
| Contents |
| The events of May |
| The events of June |
| Slogans and graffiti |
| 1968 in an international context |
| In pop-culture |
| References |
| See also |
| External links |
| Further reading |
The events of May
On 22 March leftist groups, including 150 students, invaded an administration building at Nanterre University and held a meeting in the university council room, in the name of the Enragés, who were allied with the Situationist International. René Riesel immediately demanded the expulsion of two observers from the administration and of several Stalinists who were present. After a spokesmen for the anarchists, a regular collaborator of Cohn-Bendit's, had asserted that "the Stalinists who are here this evening are no longer Stalinists," the Enragés immediately left the meeting in protest against this cowardly illusion. The Enragés left and the 22 March Movement carried on confusedly without, and against the Enragés who had had begun the agitations in the first place. Cohn Bendit later became a leader and spokesman and stepped into the limelight.
The Sorbonne administration called the police, who surrounded the university. They initially agreed to let students go in groups of 25, first women and then men. When the men began to emerge however, they were arrested. When other students gathered to stop the police vans from taking away the arrested students, the riot police responded by launching tear gas into the crowd. Rather than dispersing the students, the tear gas only brought more students to the scene, where they blocked the exit of the vans. The police finally prevailed, but only after arresting hundreds of students.
Following months of conflicts between students and authorities at the University of Paris at Nanterre, the administration shut down that university on 2 May 1968. Students at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris met on 3 May to protest against the closure and the threatened expulsion of several students at Nanterre. On Monday, 6 May, the national student union, the UNEF - still the largest student union in France today - and the union of university teachers called a march to protest against the police invasion of the Sorbonne. More than 20,000 students, teachers and supporters marched towards the Sorbonne, still sealed off by the police, who charged, wielding their batons, as soon as the marchers approached. While the crowd dispersed, some began to create barricades out of whatever was at hand, while others threw paving stones, forcing the police to retreat for a time. The police then responded with tear gas and charged the crowd again. Hundreds more students were arrested.
High school students started to go out on strike in support of the students at the Sorbonne and Nanterre on 6 May. The next day they joined the students, teachers and increasing numbers of young workers who gathered at the Arc de Triomphe to demand that: (1) all criminal charges against arrested students be dropped, (2) the police leave the university, and (3) the authorities reopen Nanterre and the Sorbonne. Negotiations broke down after students returned to their campuses, after a false report that the government had agreed to reopen them, only to discover the police still occupying the schools.
On Friday 10 May, another huge crowd congregated on the Rive Gauche. When the riot police again blocked them from crossing the river, the crowd again threw up barricades, which the police then attacked at 2:15 in the morning after negotiations once again floundered. The confrontation, which produced hundreds of arrests and injuries, lasted until dawn of the following day. The events were broadcast on radio as they occurred and the aftermath was shown on television the following day. Allegations were made that the police had participated, through ''agents provocateurs'', in the riots, by burning cars and throwing molotov cocktails [1].
The government's heavy-handed reaction brought on a wave of sympathy for the strikers. The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) reluctantly supported the students, whom it regarded as adventurists and anarchists, and the major left union federations, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the Force Ouvrière (CGT-FO) called a one day general strike and demonstration for Monday, 13 May.
Over a million people marched through Paris on that day; the police stayed largely out of sight. Prime Minister Georges Pompidou personally announced the release of the prisoners and the reopening of the Sorbonne. The surge of strikes did not, however, recede.
When the Sorbonne reopened, students occupied it and declared it an autonomous "people's university". Approximately 401 popular "action committees" were set up in Paris and elsewhere in the weeks that followed to take up grievances against the government.
In the following days workers began occupying factories, starting with a sit-down strike at the Sud Aviation plant near the city of Nantes on 14 May, then another strike at a Renault parts plant near Rouen, which spread to the Renault manufacturing complexes at Flins in the Seine Valley and the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. By 16 May workers had occupied roughly fifty factories and by 17 May 200,000 were on strike. That figure snowballed to two million workers on strike the following day and then ten million, or roughly two-thirds of the French workforce, on strike the following week.
These strikes were not led by the union movement; on the contrary, the CGT tried to contain this spontaneous outbreak of militancy by channeling it into a struggle for higher wages and other economic demands. Workers put forward a broader, more political and more radical agenda, demanding the ousting of the government and President de Gaulle and attempting, in some cases, to run their factories. When the trade union leadership negotiated a 35% increase in the minimum wage, a 7% wage increase for other workers, and half normal pay for the time on strike with the major employers' associations, the workers occupying their factories refused to return to work and jeered their union leaders, even though this deal was better than what they could have obtained only a month earlier.
On May 25 and May 26, the Grenelle agreements are signed at the Ministry of Social Affairs. They provide for an increase of the minimum wages by 25% and of the average salaries by 10%. These offers were rejected and the strike went on.
On May 27, the meeting of the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (''national Union of the students of France''), most outstanding of the events of May 68, proceeded and gathered 30,000 to 50,000 people in the Stade Sebastien Charlety.
On 30 May several hundred thousand protesters (300,000 to 400,000, many more than the 50,000 the police were expecting) led by the CGT marched through Paris, chanting, ''"Adieu, de Gaulle!"'' (Meaning: "Goodbye, De Gaulle.")
While the government appeared to be close to collapse, de Gaulle remained firm. Instead, after ensuring that he had sufficient loyal military units mobilized to back him if push came to shove, he went on the radio the following day (the national television service was on strike) to announce the dissolution of the National Assembly, with elections to follow on 23 June. He ordered workers to return to work, threatening to institute a state of emergency if they did not.
The events of June
From that point the revolutionary feeling of the students and workers faded away. Workers gradually returned to work or were ousted from their plants by the police. The national student union called off street demonstrations. The government banned a number of leftist organizations. The police retook the Sorbonne on 16 June. De Gaulle triumphed in the legislative elections held in June and the crisis came to an end.
Slogans and graffiti
Main articles: Slogans of May 68
It is difficult to precisely identify the politics of the students who sparked the events of May 1968, much less of the hundreds of thousands who participated in them. There was, however, a strong strain of anarchism, particularly in the students at Nanterre. While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the millenarian and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers (the anti-work graffiti shows the considerable influence of the Situationist movement)
1968 in an international context
France was far from the only country to witness student protests in 1968. The events were preceded by the announcement, in the United States, that United States President Lyndon B. Johnson would choose to withdraw from the 1968 presidential campaign in March due to rising domestic opposition. This was soon followed by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (on April 4), and a student-led occupation and closure of Columbia University on April 23.
In Mexico, on the night of 2 October 1968, a student demonstration ended in a storm of bullets in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, Mexico City.
The United States and German student movements were relatively isolated from the working class, but in Italy and in Argentina students and workers joined in efforts to create a radically different society.
In Belgium, students from the University in Leuven protested against the dominance of the French language in the Flemish university, which resulted in a separate Francophone university.
In Eastern Europe, students also drew inspiration from the protests in the West. In Poland and Yugoslavia students protested against restrictions on free speech by Communist regimes. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring offered a broadening of political rights until it was crushed by the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies.
Many of the student groups involved with May 1968 were also inspired by a strain of political thought called ''tiers-mondisme'' (third worldism). Students idealized and followed socialist movements in countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, or China, and revered figures such as, Castro, Che or Mao. Their struggles in their own countries were tied to their support of these third world socialist movements.
In pop-culture
★ The Mai '68s, an indie-pop-punk band from Leicester, United Kingdom, took its name from the May 1968 events.
★ Robert Merle's book, ''Derrière la vitre'' is a novel set in the May 1968 events.
★ Vangelis released an LP, dubbed a poème symphonique, entitled ''Fais Que Ton Rêve Soit Plus Lang Que La Nuit'' and was a musique concrète/folk recording collage reflecting the May 1968 strikes. Vangelis was in Paris at the time recording with Aphrodite's Child. The LP was limited in release to France and Greece and only on vinyl.
★ Jean-Luc Godard's and Jean-Pierre Gorin's 1972 film ''Tout va bien'' is a film starring Yves Montand as a former French New Wave film director, and then radical Jane Fonda as a news reporter. The film goes into what an intellectual's place is during the post May 1968 world. Available through The Criterion Collection.
★ René Viénet's 1973 film ''Can Dialectics Break Bricks?'' dealt with the concepts surrounding May 1968, parodying the events within the narrative.
★ Guy Debord's 1973 film ''The Society of the Spectacle'' dealt with the motivations around the events of May 1968. The film also contains large amounts of archival footage of the events.
★ Chris Marker's 1977 film ''A Grin Without a Cat'' IMDb is a 3-hour-long film documentary portraying the history behind the social unrests of the sixties. Made with archival images, it deals with May 1968 in depth.
★ ''Milou en Mai'' (''Milou in May'', also released under the English title ''May Fools''), is a later film (1990) by Louis Malle. It portrays the impact of revolutionary fervour on a French village.
★ Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film ''The Dreamers'' was based on three young film-loving students and their experiences in May 1968, although it features the events mainly as a backdrop and not predominantly within the primary plot.
★ Roman Coppola's 2001 film ''CQ'' depicts the Paris filmmaking world of the late 1960s and makes repeated reference to the events of May 1968.
★ The Rolling Stones' song "Street Fighting Man" was heavily influenced by the student riots.
★ The Beatles' song "Revolution 1" was based upon the May 1968 uprising. Another song, "Revolution 9" was based on this uprising, and was intended to show the violence of a revolution in progress.
★ Philippe Garrel's 2005 film ''Les Amants Réguliers'' IMDb ("the regular lovers") is a 3-hour-long rejoinder to ''The Dreamers'' that portrays the May 1968 events through the eyes of a group of young artists who grow increasingly absorbed in a world of drugs and free love upon what they see as the failure of the May 1968 events.
★ The Stone Roses song "Bye Bye Badman" on their eponymous debut album was said by lead singer Ian Brown to be about the riots. The lemon the band commonly use as a logo represents the lemons used by protestors to sooth their eyes from the effects of tear gas.
★ The video for Röyksopp's single Only This Moment depicts events from the May 1968 riots.
★ 'The Merry Month of May' is author James Jones's 1971 novel concerning the events of the 1968 student revolutions in Paris. It is centered around a rich American family, the Gallaghers, living as expatriates in Paris.
References
1. "Ils voulaient un patron, pas une coopérative ouvrière", ''Le Monde'', interview with Michel Rocard, 20 March 2007
See also
★ Movement of 22 March which initiated May 1968
★ Anarchism in France
★ Autonomism (and Italian ''operaismo'')
★ Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne
★ Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité
★ Feminism in France
★ Situationist International
★ Socialisme ou Barbarie
★ Cornelius Castoriadis
★ Lip factory, a self-managed factory starting in 1973, considered as "the social conflict of the 1970s"
★ University of Paris strike of 1229
★ French civil unrest of 2005
★ 2006 labor protests in France
★ The 1973 democracy movement in Thailand
★ Prague Spring
External links
★ Maurice Brinton: Paris May 1968
★ Posters from May 1968 (French)
★ More Posters from May 1968
★ Picture gallery
★ May 1968, Essex students revolt
★ May Events Archive of Documents
Further reading
★ Cohn-Bendit, Daniel - ''Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative''
★ Cornelius Castoriadis avec Claude Lefort et Edgar Morin - ''Mai 1968: la brèche''
★ Dark Star Collective - ''Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 68''
★ Feenberg, Andrew and Freedman, Jim - ''When Poetry Ruled the Streets''
★ Gregoire, Roger and Perlman, Fredy - ''Worker-Student Action Committees: France May '68''
★ Jones, James - ''The Merry Month of May'' (novel).
★ Adair, Gilbert - The Holy Innocents (novel).
★ Ross, Kristin - ''May '68 and its Afterlives''
★ Quattrochi, Angelo and Nairn, Tom. ''The Beginning of the End''.
★ Singer, Daniel - ''Prelude To Revolution: France In May 1968''
★ Touraine, Alain - ''The May Movement: Revolt and Reform''
★ Vienet, Rene - ''Enrages And The Situationists In the Occupation Movement, France May '68''
★ Debord, Guy - ''The Society of the Spectacle''
★ Raoul Vaneigem - ''The Revolution of Everyday Life''
★ Knabb, Ken - ''The Situationist Anthology''
★ Plant, Sadie - ''The Most Radical Gesture: Situationist International in a Postmodern Age''
★ Tony Cliff - France – the struggle goes on
★ Mark Kurlansky - ''1968: The Year That Rocked The World''
★ Ferlinghetti, Lawrence- ''Love in the Days of Rage''
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