May 68

In May and June 1968, a revolt that began among Paris university students grew into the largest general strike in French history and briefly seemed to threaten the government of President Charles de Gaulle. Street battles, factory occupations and mass marches paralysed the country for weeks. The crisis ended with an election that de Gaulle's party won by a landslide, but its slogans, ideas and memory have shaped French politics and culture ever since.

France had grown richer and more urban during the post-war boom, but many young people felt stifled. Universities were overcrowded and rigidly run, and students influenced by Marxist, anarchist and anti-imperialist ideas saw themselves as part of a wider struggle against capitalism and authority, in the climate of the Cold War. Many workers, meanwhile, resented low wages and harsh conditions. De Gaulle's Fifth Republic looked to his critics like a figure of the past. On 22 March, some 150 students and activists occupied an administration building at the Nanterre campus outside Paris, launching what became the Movement of 22 March.

After weeks of conflict the authorities closed Nanterre on 2 May. The next day students gathered at the Sorbonne in central Paris to protest, and police moved in. On 6 May a crowd of over 20,000, including teachers as well as students, converged on the sealed-off Sorbonne; police charged with batons and tear gas, protesters threw paving stones and built barricades, and hundreds were arrested. On the night of 10 May, riot police attacked barricades in the Latin Quarter in fighting that lasted until dawn and was broadcast live on radio. The heavy-handed response won the students widespread sympathy.

The main union federations called a one-day general strike for 13 May, and well over a million people marched in Paris. Prime Minister Georges Pompidou released the prisoners and reopened the Sorbonne, which students promptly occupied as a "people's university". But the strikes did not stop. Workers occupied factories across the country, and the stoppage spread to transport, public services and offices. Estimates of its size vary; some put it at around ten million workers, roughly two-thirds of the workforce. In late May the government, employers and unions negotiated the Grenelle agreements, raising the minimum wage by 35 per cent and other wages by 10 per cent, but many strikers rejected them.

On 28 May the opposition leader François Mitterrand declared that the state no longer existed and offered to form a government. The next day de Gaulle cancelled his cabinet meeting and vanished for several hours. He had flown secretly to Baden-Baden in West Germany to see General Jacques Massu, commander of French forces there, who persuaded him to carry on. On 30 May hundreds of thousands of union marchers demanded his departure, and that afternoon, under pressure from Pompidou, de Gaulle made a broadcast refusing to resign, dissolving the National Assembly and calling elections for 23 June. Hours later a vast Gaullist crowd, perhaps 800,000 strong, filled the Champs-Élysées.

The movement then lost momentum. Workers drifted back to their jobs or were removed by police, several far-left groups were banned and on 16 June the police cleared the Sorbonne. In the June elections the Gaullists won 353 of 486 seats, the largest victory in French parliamentary history, while the Communists and Socialists were crushed. Yet surveys suggested that many voters found de Gaulle too old and too authoritarian. He left office the following year after losing a referendum in April 1969.

May 68 left no revolution, but it became a lasting reference point in French life, seen by some as a moment of liberation and by others as a slide into disorder. Participants became known as soixante-huitards, the "68-ers", and slogans such as "Under the paving stones, the beach!" and "It is forbidden to forbid" entered popular memory. The events are widely credited with feeding new social movements, including feminism and environmentalism.

Our 1960 map shows France as it was in the early years of the Fifth Republic, and the 1985 map shows the country in the later Cold War.