Paris was burning, but not because of a foreign invasion. It was the kids. In May 1968, a bunch of fed-up students at Nanterre and the Sorbonne decided they’d had enough of the stuffy, paternalistic vibe of Charles de Gaulle’s France. It started small. A protest over dormitory rules, of all things. Then it exploded. Within weeks, the entire country ground to a halt. Ten million workers went on strike. The President literally fled the country for a moment because he thought a revolution was coming.
You’ve probably seen the posters. The iconic silkscreened silhouettes. "Under the paving stones, the beach!" It sounds poetic now, but back then, it was raw chaos.
The Spark at Nanterre
People often forget that the events of May 1968 didn't actually start in the center of Paris. They started in the suburbs. At the University of Nanterre, students were frustrated. It wasn't just about politics; it was about the fact that they felt like they were living in a museum. The administration was rigid. Men and women couldn't visit each other's dorms. It sounds silly today, but in 1968, that was the breaking point for a generation that had grown up with rock and roll and the looming shadow of the Vietnam War.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a student leader who everyone called "Dany the Red," became the face of the movement. He wasn't some polished politician. He was loud, he was provocative, and he drove the authorities absolutely crazy. When the police showed up to shut down the protests, they did exactly what the students wanted. They overreacted.
Violence broke out.
The "Night of the Barricades" on May 10 was a turning point. Students tore up the cobblestones—the pavés—and hurled them at the CRS (riot police). The police responded with tear gas and batons. By the next morning, the Latin Quarter looked like a war zone. Hundreds were injured. But more importantly, the public was watching. They saw the police beating kids, and suddenly, the students weren't just "troublemakers" anymore. They were symbols of a wider frustration.
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When the Workers Joined In
This is where the events of May 1968 get really weird and interesting. Usually, student protests stay on campus. But in France, the factory workers saw what was happening and decided they wanted a piece of the action. On May 13, a massive joint demonstration took place. Soon, workers were occupying factories. Renault plants shut down. The TV stations went dark. The trains stopped.
France was paralyzed.
It’s hard to wrap your head around the scale of it. Imagine ten million people—roughly two-thirds of the French workforce—just stopping. No one was in charge. The labor unions (like the CGT) were actually terrified because they couldn't control their own members. The students wanted to overthrow the state; the workers mostly wanted better pay and a 40-hour week. This tension between the "revolutionaries" and the "bread-and-butter" strikers is one of the most misunderstood parts of the whole ordeal.
De Gaulle was aging. He was a hero of World War II, a man of the 1940s trying to lead the 1960s. He didn't get it. On May 29, he disappeared. For six hours, the French government literally didn't know where their leader was. He had flown to Baden-Baden in West Germany to meet with General Massu, the commander of French forces there, to make sure the army would support him if he had to retake Paris by force.
He was ready for a civil war.
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The Cultural Aftershocks
The movement didn't end with a guillotine or a new constitution. It ended with a whimper and a massive landslide election victory for De Gaulle’s party in June. People were tired of the trash piling up in the streets and the lack of gasoline. They wanted order.
But if you think that means the students lost, you’re looking at the wrong scoreboard.
The events of May 1968 fundamentally cracked the foundation of traditional French society. Before '68, France was a place where "children were seen and not heard" and hierarchy was everything. After '68, that was dead. The reforms that followed changed everything from how universities were run to the legality of contraception. It was a cultural revolution that happened without a political one.
Historians like Kristin Ross have argued that the memory of '68 has been "sanitized" over the years. We remember the cool posters and the slogans, but we forget the intense police brutality and the genuine fear that the state might collapse. We also forget the colonial context—many of these students were deeply influenced by the Algerian War and anti-imperialist movements.
Why We Still Care
If you walk through the streets of Paris today, you can still see the ghosts of '68. Every time there is a major strike or a "Gilets Jaunes" protest, the media immediately draws comparisons. It set the blueprint for how the French public interacts with their government: if you don't like a law, you take to the streets until the government blinks.
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It’s a specific kind of democratic theater.
There are critics, of course. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy famously said in 2007 that the "heritage of May '68" needed to be liquidated. He blamed the movement for a decline in authority and moral standards. Whether you agree with him or not, the fact that a politician was still campaigning against a 40-year-old student protest tells you exactly how much weight those weeks in May still carry.
Basically, May 1968 was the moment France decided to stop being a 19th-century country and start being a modern one. It was messy, it was confusing, and it didn't actually lead to the socialist utopia the students dreamed about. But it made the old way of doing things impossible.
How to Understand the Legacy Today
To truly grasp what happened, you have to look beyond the history books and look at the shifts in social norms.
- Questioning Authority: The "C'est interdit d'interdire" (It is forbidden to forbid) mentality changed the workplace. Managers couldn't just dictate anymore; they had to negotiate.
- Education Reform: The massive, monolithic University of Paris was broken up into thirteen separate entities (Paris I, Paris IV, etc.) to prevent that kind of concentrated student power from boiling over again.
- Feminism and Rights: The movement paved the way for the MLF (Mouvement de libération des femmes) and the eventual legalization of abortion in 1975 under Simone Veil.
If you’re researching this today, avoid the mistake of thinking it was just a "hippie" thing. It wasn't San Francisco. It was much more intellectual, much more violent, and much more tied to the labor movement.
To dig deeper into the actual atmosphere of the time, look for the photography of Gilles Caron or the films of Jean-Luc Godard from that era. They capture the frantic, grainy reality better than any modern documentary can. Also, check out the archives of the Atelier Populaire, the student-run poster workshop. Those posters are the visual DNA of modern protest.
If you want to see the physical legacy, visit the Place de la Sorbonne. The cobblestones are mostly gone now, paved over with asphalt to make them harder to throw. That's a lesson the city took to heart. But the spirit of the "manif" (the demonstration) is very much alive. Every time a new generation of French citizens feels the government isn't listening, they go back to the toolkit created in May 1968. They occupy, they march, and they remind the people in power that the street still has a vote.