The memory industry was in overdrive in Paris this summer as France marked the fiftieth anniversary of “Mai 68,” that defining month when major Parisian arteries turned into seas of flag-waving young people and occupied high schools and universities. After violent clashes between students and security forces on May 10 left 367 wounded, and huge swaths of Paris’s Left Bank resembling a war zone, industrial workers joined the protests. Ten million workers were soon on strike, many occupying their factories and workplaces. What began as a challenge to a sclerotic education system had morphed into a crisis that shook president Charles de Gaulle’s government and brought France to the edge of revolution. May 1968 has been remembered in France, historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel wrote in 2008, as the most important event since the end of the Second World War.
Despite the reams of words...
Susan Whitney is an associate professor of history at Carleton University. She is teaching courses on twentieth-century France, modern Paris, and comparative youth history this year. Whitney is the author of Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Duke University Press).
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