1968 – The Year of Revolution1968 joins a number of other revolutionary years. We will go to the source of the revolution in Paris (where else?!). NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT WRITE IN THIS BOOKLET – I use it from year to year.

If you aren’t in class, follow the route of the May 1968 protests in Paris at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2008/apr/01/1968

Assignment #1 –Headlines:From The Guardian

Parisian students in savage battles May 7 1968, Guardian: Paris was stunned tonight after a day and a night of riots by at least 10,000 students on a scale unequalled in post-war years

Parisian students in new clash May 8 1968, Guardian: Seven policemen were injured tonight in a clash with student demonstrators outside the 'Figaro' newspaper on the Champs-Elysees

Were students incited - or provoked? May 8 1968, Guardian: A still slightly dazed city is looking back almost incredulously at a night of violence

Police halt march on Sorbonne May 9 1968, Guardian: Rebellious students marched through the streets of Paris again tonight after being told by their union president: "We are going back to reconquer the Latin Quarter"

De Gaulle's hint of concessions May 9 1968, Guardian: At this morning's Council of Ministers, General de Gaulle insisted that, before all else, public order must be maintained

A lull in Paris violence May 10 1968, Guardian: Armistice but hardly peace has today been achieved in the revolt which has ranged the students of Paris against the authorities

French government yields to student power in Paris May 13 1968, Guardian: Tomorrow, the Sorbonne will be open

Leader: The Sorbonne students' protest May 13 1968, Guardian: The street violence which has been raging in Paris is unlike anything seen in Western Europe since the end of the war

A brutal round up by riot police May 13 1968, Guardian: When the French university students, held their demonstrations on Friday evening, they felt the Minister of Education had let them down by going back on his undertaking to open Naterre and the Sorbonne from Thursday afternoon if calm was restored

Shots fired at end of Paris march

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May 14 1968, Guardian: Police opened fire tonight when students attacked a police van towards the and of the march across the capital, organised by students and workers, to mark the 24-hour general strike

De Gaulle gives full powers to the Premier May 15 1968, Guardian: General De Gaulle took so grave a view of the student disturbances that he considered cancelling his visit to Romania

A cultural revolution - and a carnival May 15 1968, Guardian: The free university is here, if only temporarily. Since last night, the Sorbonne has been given over to a round-the-clock "teach-in", which shows no sign of flagging

French revolt on news control May 16 1968, Guardian: The federation of the various unions, of which journalists employed by the State-controlled French radio and television services are members, is to set up a permanent committee, to watch over the objectivity of information

Pompidou's plea: "Reject anarchy" May 16 1968, Guardian: The French Government tonight ordered the partial mobilisation of the National Gendarmie which serves as riot police cities

Paris Odeon stage given over to student dramatics May 17 1968, Guardian: The Odeon has become 'a meeting place for workers, and assembly for revolutionary creativity, a place of continuous discussion'

Students in march on Paris works May 18 1968, Guardian: Several thousand students marched this evening for the second time in 24 hours from the Sorbonne to the Renault works, in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt

Leader: Liberation for French TV? May 18 1968, Guardian: More factories occupied by their workers, more students marching, more police mobilised, more tension between demonstrators and the authorities: that is the news from France

Communist move to take over French "explosion" May 18 1968, Guardian: Since last night it has been evident that a power beyond the students was moving in on an upheaval born in the university

De Gaulle talks of "reform" as strike disruption spreads May 20 1968, Guardian: 'Reform yes, but no shambles.' This was General de Gaulle's first and somewhat crypted recorded utterance on the crisis now gripping France

Six millions now on strike May 21 1968. Guardian: About six million workers were on strike today, 250 large factories were being occupied by the strikers, and red flags flew over many of the buildings

Gaullism of the old kind has already died May 21 1968, Guardian: 'Le chienlit - c'est lui!' proclaimed the posters in the Latin Quarter today

Two governments in trouble May 21 1968, Guardian: One lasting significance of current happenings in France is that the Government did not know they were going to happen

The high cards De Gaulle can still play May 21 1968, Guardian: The Constitution lays down unequivocally that a Prime Minister defeated on a censure vote must resign

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French devaluation threat May 21 1968, Guardian: The crisis in France is almost bound to have adverse effects on the long-term, as well as the immediate, prospects for the French economy

De Gaulle to offer a 'new deal' May 22 1968, Guardian: Details are not forthcoming. It is known only that the measures are conceived on a grand scale and that their announcement is likely to be made with liturgical solemnity

Censure move fails to topple de Gaulle's Cabinet May 23 1968, Guardian: The French National Assembly has received a fresh lease of its less than dynamic existence by surviving a censure motion

Cohn-Bendit barred by France May 23 1968, Guardian: The French Government has barred one of the leaders of the student protest movement from re-entering France

Police in Paris may not obey orders May 23 1968, Guardian: Disorder returned to the streets of Paris last night. If it persists there is no guarantee that the police can be relied upon to contain it

Students plan to storm frontier May 23 1968, Guardian: West German and French students will attempt tomorrow to force the French immigration authorities at Saarbrücken to accept the entry of Daniel Cohn-Bendit

A workers' guard on Citroen plant May 24 1968, Guardian: They're not sure yet whether they've got the directors down and under. 'It's a poker game,' says a member of the workers' committee, "going to whoever can last out the longer"

Insurrection in Paris May 25 1968, Guardian: Thousands of students turned the Latin quarter into a besieged camp in the early hours of this morning, building dozens of barricades along the Boulevard St Michel and in the other streets around the Sorbonne

Cool reception for de Gaulle's offer May 25 1968, Guardian: President de Gaulle announced in a television broadcast tonight that he would stake his leadership on a referendum next month

Another plea for a mandate May 25 1968, Guardian: The following is the full text of General de Gaulle's television speech to the French nation last night

The President's offer

May 25 1968, Guardian: The message at the end of de Gaulle's speech was simple and challenging, but it was also unconvincing. Vote for me (he said, in effect) and I will lead you in a new direction

Ten per cent rise for Frenchmen May 27 1968, Guardian: French workers are expected to get a 10 per cent wage rise as a result of weekend talks between unions, industralists, and the Government which continued last night

Resentment grows after the speech May 27 1968, Guardian: Discounting the expected statement from the official spokesman of the regime, reactions to General de Gaulle's broadcast are almost uniformly unfavourable

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Strikes go on in spite of French wage deal May 28 1968, Guardian: There was no sign last night that the huge concessions made by the Government was bringing to an end the wave of workers' strikes throughout France or the students' revolt

Paris quiet after 'arms' warning May 28 1968, Guardian: The Ministry of the Interior today claimed to have information that 'a certain number of extremists' intended to use arms either during or after the demonstrations called for today by the National Union of French Students

De Gaulle promises TV 'dialogue' May 28 1968, Guardian: General will explain in a radio and television 'dialogue' the 'reasons for and the content of the referendum in the situation in which the country finds itself'

French wage offers threaten the franc May 28 1968, Guardian: France could be forced to devalue the franc within a year to 18 months as a result of the nationwide wage settlement accepted this morning by the Government

Mitterrand challenges De Gaulle May 29 1968, Guardian: M. François Mitterrand will be a candidate for the Presidency of France, assuming - as he does - that the country's answer in General de Gaulle's referendum proves to be 'No'

La violence Parisienne May 29 1968, Guardian: These past few weeks we have witnessed the truth of what the poets have been telling us since the beginning of time: there is no adult world

Gen de Gaulle in retreat May 30 1968, Guardian: The pressure to oust the Gaullist Government increased during the day and night after General de Gaulle's sudden decision to retreat to his country home

De Gaulle ready to use Army? May 31 1968, Guardian: Units of the Second Infantry Division have been moved to Melun and Creteil near Paris, according to 'L'Aurore'

General tells why he stays May 31 1968, Guardian: General de Gaulle will not retire. After 24 hours of medication he has resolved to remain at his post as the legal guardian of the Republic

Gaullists show their strength May 31 1968, Guardian: So there are two Frances. One that marches from the Bastille to the Republique shouting 'De Gaulle resign,' and the other that marches up the Champs-Elysées shouting 'De Gaulle is not alone'

The university goes critical May 31 1968, Guardian: The spontaneous movement at present at work in the Sorbonne runs all through the French university system and affects the whole educational structure

Violence or non-violence? May 31 1968, Guardian: Shorn of its rhetoric President de Gaulle's message to the French is that if they behave themselves they can have a general election within four or five weeks

See assignment #1 in Assignment packet.

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Assignment 2 – Read the following article and respond to the questions posed on the Assignment sheet.

Everyone to the barricadesOne brick thrown in Paris... and its crash was heard around the world. In Berlin, Prague, Chicago, Rome, Mexico City and even London, protesters took to the streets. Here Sean O'Hagan connects the worldwide uprisings of that explosive year and examines their legacy

By Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, Saturday 19 January 2008

On New Year's Eve 1967, Charles De Gaulle, the 78-year-old president of France, broadcast his annual message to the nation. 'I greet the year 1968 with serenity,' he announced, brimming with self-satisfaction. 'It is impossible to see how France today could be paralysed by crisis as she has been in the past.' Little did he know. Six months later, De Gaulle was fighting for his political life and the French capital was paralysed after weeks of student riots followed by a sudden general strike. France's journey from 'serenity' to near revolution in the first few weeks of May is the defining event of '1968', a year in which mass protest erupted across the globe, from Paris to Prague, Mexico City to Madrid, Chicago to London.

'There has never been a year like 1968, and it is unlikely there will ever be again', writes Mark Kurlansky in his illuminating book, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. 'At a time when nations and cultures were still very different there occurred a spontaneous combustion of rebellious spirits around the world.'

These rebellions were not planned in advance, nor did the rebels share an ideology or goal. The one cause many had in common was opposition to America's war in Vietnam but they were driven above all by a youthful desire to rebel against all that was outmoded, rigid and authoritarian. At times, they gained a momentum that took even the protagonists by surprise. Such was the case in Paris, which is still regarded as the most mythic near-revolutionary moment of that tumultuous year, but also in Mexico City, Berlin and Rome.

In these cases, what began as a relatively small and contained protest against a university administration - a protest by the young and impatient against the old and unbending - burgeoned into a mass movement against the government. In other countries - like Spain, where the Fascist General Franco was still in power, and Brazil, where a military dictatorship was in place - the protests were directed from the start against the state. In Warsaw and Prague, the freedom movements rose up briefly against the monolithic communist ideology of the USSR. And in America, capitalism was the ultimate enemy, and Vietnam the prime catalyst.

'There was not one '68, as popular myth would have it,' says the historian Dominic Sandbrook, author of White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties. 'The riots in Chicago were different to the

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protests in Mexico, which in turn differed from the events in Paris in May. In each case the causes were different.'

And yet the protesters in each country had much in common, including an often instinctive espousal of radical leftist politics, a shared sense of idealism that often bordered on naivety and had its roots in the previous year's hippy Summer of Love, and a distrust of all forms of established authority including parents, police, college administrations and government. Above all they shared what Sandbrook calls 'the common spirit of youthful rebellion'. 'Youth was a new thing in the Fifties, and by the Sixties you had young people who, for the first time, were self-consciously generational,' he says. 'In America, Britain and Europe the growth of education and affluence meant that young people were suddenly defining themselves as separate from, and indeed, against the beliefs and values of their parents.'

With a historian's level head, Sandbrook refutes the common notion that this generation gap was widespread, stressing that most young people did not attend university and it was 'only well-educated kids that tended to get involved in protests'. Nevertheless, the Sixties were the decade when the student population in America, Europe and Britain expanded dramatically, and by 1968, when the words youth and protest became synonymous, the difference in attitudes between the educated and increasingly emancipated young and their parents became a political as well as a cultural rift.

From 1963 the culture and economy of youth burgeoned, says Jon Savage, pop-culture historian and author of the recent book Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture: 'Pop music is always incredibly prescient and you can hear an increasing ambition and invention in the pop music made in those years, a sense of limitless possibility, but also of immense frustration and edginess. And then, in 1968, it all exploded into something totally unforeseen. In the five years from the emergence of the Beatles in 1963 to the upheaval of 1968 the economic enfranchisement of a generation turned into mass political action, if not fantasy.'

Paris was the place where political action and utopian fantasy came together in the most spectacular fashion. The 'Enragés' (angry ones), as the Paris protesters came to be known, were emblematic of the spirit of that year. They initially comprised a small bunch of student activists, 25 at most, at Nanterre University. Protests began in January against the lack of facilities on their bleak suburban campus. On 26 January the authorities summoned the French riot police to quell a relatively small demonstration - and dozens of angry and suddenly politicised students joined the rebels. On 22 March, in sympathy with four students arrested during an anti-Vietnam War rally in the centre of Paris, 500 demonstrators stormed the Nanterre faculty building. Suddenly, the Enragés had a name: the March 22nd Movement.

They also had a leader, though he shunned the title. His name was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a young German soon to be rechristened Danny the Red by the media, a reference to his ginger hair as much as his politics. Cohn-Bendit's ready grin, easy humour and non-dogmatic radicalism made him the antithesis of the dour theoretical Marxist. 'I slowly stepped in,' he said later, 'because I was saying something at the right moment and in the right place.'

In April, after another occupation at Nanterre, the Ministry of Education shut down the university and ordered Cohn-Bendit to appear before a disciplinary board on 6 May at the Sorbonne. Thus the protests shifted to the centre of Paris where media crews from all over the globe were assembling to cover the imminent Vietnam peace talks. The students were now becoming an embarrassment to De Gaulle. He sent police into the Sorbonne to arrest supposed ringleaders. In the end, 600 students were arrested and,

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in a desperate attempt to defuse the situation, the administrators ordered the closure of the Sorbonne. While the left argued over the meaning of the unrest, Cohn-Bendit, like many of his generation, simply went with the flow. 'Everyone asked me, "How will it end?" he later admitted. 'And I would say, "I don't know".'

It ended in near-revolution. The government banned all demonstrations on 6 May, when Cohn-Bendit was due to be disciplined. Nevertheless 1,000 students accompanied their ever-smiling leader to the Sorbonne, where they passed through ranks of the CRS, French riot police armed with shields and clubs. The cameras followed in their wake.

In Rue Saint-Jacques the tension broke and police charged the chanting students, swinging batons and leaving several students unconscious on the cobbled street. To the amazement of the CRS the students regrouped and fought back, overturning cars, building barricades and digging up cobblestones to use as ammunition. The battle between police and the demonstrators continued for several hours as the streets around the Sorbonne filled with smoke and tear gas.

'I was completely surprised by 1968,' recalls Francois Cerutti, an old-school Marxist and radical bookstore owner quoted in Kurlansky's book. 'I had an idea of the revolutionary process and it was nothing like this. I saw students building barricades, but these were people who knew nothing of revolution. They were not even political. There was no organisation, no planning.'

As news of the uprising spread, young people from all over Paris arrived to support the students. Petrol bombs and Molotov cocktails lit up the streets as night fell. Over 600 protesters were injured on that single day and about half as many police. The rioting continued for another week. Images of the clashes with police were broadcast across the world.

Something else happened on the streets of Paris in those few weeks, though, something no one had foreseen. People from different backgrounds came out in support of the students. Groups of animated Parisians gathered around the barricades and at impromptu meeting places to talk, argue, organise and agitate. Posters appeared across the Left Bank and beyond. The two main Parisian art schools had combined to form the Atelier Populaire, producing hundreds of silk-screened images in what Kurlanksy describes as 'one of the most impressive outpourings of political graphic art ever accomplished'.

Across Paris a poster featuring de Gaulle's face appeared alongside the words: 'Be young and shut up'. On the walls graffiti proclaimed a new poetry of protest. 'Be realistic, demand the impossible' ran one slogan. 'Under the cobblestones, the beach' ran another. A third summed up both the euphoria of the demonstrators and the bafflement of the establishment: 'The revolution is unbelievable because it's real.'

Kurlansky quotes a veteran of the Paris uprising, Radith Geismar, who remembers not the violence of the barricades but the sense of community they brought. 'The real sense of '68 was a tremendous sense of liberation, of freedom,' she says, 'of people talking on the street, in the universities, in theatres. It was much more than throwing stones. A whole system of order and authority and tradition was swept aside. Much of the freedom of today began in '68.'

In just a few weeks, Cohn-Bendit, who was soon to receive a deportation order from the French government for his role in the ferment, had gone from local student activist to an international

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figurehead for revolution. 'There I was,' he said, 'the leader of a little university, and in three weeks I was famous all over the world as Danny the Red.'

The catalyst for his fame was television. In 1968 two technological innovations transformed the nightly news reports: the use of videotape, which was cheap and reusable, instead of film, and the same-day broadcast, which meant that often unedited images of rebellion were disseminated across continents almost as they happened. Student protesters in Berkeley and Columbia cheered their TV sets as footage from the Paris barricades made the American news in May, while French students took heart from images of the huge anti-war demonstrations now occurring across Europe and America.

'We met through television,' Cohn-Bendit later said of his counterparts in other countries. 'We were the first television generation.' Indeed, the radicals had a much better grasp of the galvanising power of television than the politicians they were trying to overthrow. 'A modern revolutionary group headed for the television, not for the factory,' quipped the late Abbie Hoffman, one of the great political pranksters of 1968who helped provoke a bloody battle between anti-war protesters and the Chicago police force at the Chicago Democratic convention. As the police attacked them, the protesters chanted: 'The whole world is watching!' And, for the first time, it was.

It often seemed like the whole world was watching the Vietnam war. The year dawned with an escalation of the conflict that had already claimed nearly 16,000 young American lives in the previous three years. On 30 January the Tet Offensive began with a suicide attack by Viet Cong guerrillas on the US embassy in Saigon. Images of the frantic battle were broadcast almost instantly to a nation who were not used to seeing their soldiers looking frightened and confused in a conflict that, as many Americans were reluctantly realising, they could not win.

Vietnam became the first war beamed into the living rooms of America, and the images were as raw and visceral as today's are diluted and controlled. 'In the Sixties, television turned up the intensity of what was going on in the world,' says Sandbrook. 'We had all seen war footage but this was the first time we had seen it almost as it happened. People had a sense of the sheer disproportionate force involved. The carpet bombing, the Napalm, the scale of the American operation shocked viewers and then angered them. Vietnam was the first TV war, and, as a direct result of that, it spawned the first global anti-war movement.'

The anti-war movement began on the campuses of America. It took as its example the Sixties Civil Rights campaign led by Martin Luther King, and many of its leading activists came of age protesting against segregation in the south. 'The first thing you learned in the Civil Rights movement was that fear was the enemy, and overcoming fear was the very purpose of the struggle,' says Tom Hayden, one of the most prominent anti-war campaigners. 'That carried over into the protests against the Vietnam war. And the draft had a way of focusing the mind of a young person. It was not just that you were fighting for an abstract cause, you were fighting for something all too real, something that thousands of your fellow citizens were dying senselessly for.'

As the body count in Vietnam escalated, the anti-war movement grew in strength and authority. Though originally dismissed by the Right as a bunch of long-hairs, peaceniks and cowards, it had been steadily growing in numbers and in the breadth of its constituency since its inception in 1965. In that year Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organised a peace march in Washington that drew 20,000 people. In 1967 over 70 anti-war protests were held on student campuses in October and November

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alone. By the spring of 1968, some 30 colleges a month were protesting with sit-ins, occupations and marches, and the anti-war movement had moved to the streets, and from America all around the world.

In Germany a strong anti-Vietnam war movement had grown on campuses in 1967. April 1968 brought highly organised rioting in Berlin following the attempted assassination of left-wing figurehead Rudi Dutschke by a right-wing loner. Students and activists directed their ire at the right-wing Springer Press organisation, laying siege to the main building in Berlin on 11 April, and fighting with police on the streets outside.

Elsewhere in Europe the protests were spreading fast. In Warsaw the government closed down eight university departments, and imprisoned nearly 1,000 students after protests against state censorship. In Italy the University of Rome was shut down for two weeks after violent demonstrations against police brutality. In Spain students marched against the Fascist regime of General Franco, who closed down Madrid University for a month. In Brazil three protesters were killed during marches against the military junta. In France on 14 February, just as the Nanterre protests began to gather momentum, thousands marched against the war in Paris. A few days later, 10,000 German protesters gathered in West Berlin.

Even 'sleepy London town', as Mick Jagger later called the capital in his ambivalent song 'Street Fighting Man', had its violent protest as an antiwar demonstration culminated in rioting outside the American Embassy on 17 March. There, during the famous 'Battle of Grosvenor Square', protesters threw ball-bearings under the hooves of police horses, and youths overturned cars and smashed windows in the surrounding streets. 'It was the first time any of us had seen anything like that,' remembered Russell Hunter, then drummer with a London rock group called the Deviants. 'The first time the non-violent thing went right out the window... police horses charging, people dragged through hedges and beaten up.'

In the global scheme of things, though, the Grosvenor Square riot was a storm in a very English teacup. 'It looks quite a big deal in a British context,' says Sandbrook, 'but it was small scale compared to Prague or Mexico City or even Paris. It did not leave a scar on the British psyche. We simply did not have the issues here. There was no Civil Rights tradition, and we had no troops in Vietnam thanks to Harold Wilson holding out against that even while vociferously supporting America.'

While Britain simmered America raged. On 4 April Martin Luther King was killed by a sniper's bullet in Memphis. His murder shocked an already traumatised America and provoked two nights of rioting in several major cities. The National Guard were mobilised, and Chicago's infamous Mayor Daley issued a 'shoot to kill' order as fires raged. Twelve black people were killed during riots in Washington DC. Stokely Carmichael, founder of the Black Panthers, a black power militia which preached violent revolution, grabbed headlines when he said: 'Now they've taken Dr King off, it's time to end this non-violence bullshit.'

Two days later, Bobby Hutton, a 17- year-old member of the Black Panthers, was killed in a shoot-out with police in Oakland, California. And still the demonstrations continued. Students at Columbia University in Harlem, New York, took over the campus and shut down the university. On 30 April, 200 policemen stormed the site and beat both those who resisted and those who did not. Over 700 students were arrested, 150 were admitted to hospital for their injuries and, later, 120 charges of brutality were brought against the police. One year on from the so-called Summer of Love, America was gearing up for a summer of violence and fear.

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It began on 5 June with another assassination, that of Senator Robert Kennedy, the Democratic heir apparent to the presidency, and the younger brother of the late President John F Kennedy. A traumatised nation headed towards the imminent Republican and Democratic conventions with an increasing sense of dread. In Miami in mid-August, Richard Nixon became the Republican candidate before the media circus moved on to Chicago for the Democratic Convention. Leading antiwar activists, including Tom Hayden, had planned a demonstration that would 'close down the city' of Chicago during the convention. Mayor Daley refused the organisers a permit to demonstrate, and only a few thousand demonstrators descended on the city. Enter the Yippies.

Led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, they were perhaps the smallest yet most effective bunch of political pranksters to emerge in 1968. The Yippies, or Youth International Party, were left-wing activists who had emerged from the America's hippy underground with a vision of revolution that, as one commentator said, was 'more Groucho Marx than Karl Marx'. Yet the Yippies attracted television cameras wherever they went. They turned up in Chicago in late August intent on staging a Festival of Life to protest at the Democratic Convention, which they called A Festival of Death. They also nominated a Yippie candidate for the presidency: a pig named Mr Pigasus. As the cameras rolled, the police arrived on cue, arresting Hoffman, Rubin, the folk singer Phil Ochs and Mr Pigasus, whom Hoffman later claimed had been interrogated and charged with disorderly conduct.

A rumour spread that the Yippies had planned to put LSD in the city's water supply. Another circulated that they were planning to kidnap Democratic delegates and hold them to ransom. Daley responded by increasing the huge police presence on the street, and ordering army and national guard back-up.

That week, Soviet troops rumbled into Czechoslovakia, abruptly ending the brief Prague spring of reforms. Hoffman held a press conference to propose that Chicago now be referred to as Czechago. On Sunday night, as the first day of the convention drew to a close, protesters waving Yippie and Viet Cong flags faced off against police in Lincoln Park. Then, in the full glare of TV cameras, the trouble started. The battle of Chicago lasted for five days, and such was the police brutality towards the protesters, bystanders and the media, that the Convention was halted. On Wednesday night, outside the Hilton hotel, police and national guardsmen were recorded on camera pursuing and beating not just demonstrators but anyone who happened to be in their way, including old people, women and children. 'Demonstrators, reporters, McCarthy workers, doctors, all began to stream into the Hilton lobby, blood streaming from head and face wounds,' wrote Norman Mailer, whose book, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, became the definitive account of that turbulent week. The world awoke the day after to images of unprecedented police violence on the television news. 'Chicago was, along with Tet, one of the seminal events in the coming of the age of television,' writes Kurlansky. The protesters' impromptu chant - 'The whole world is watching!' - came to pass in an instant.

The battle of Chicago became one of the fault lines on which America defined itself in 1968. Later an unrepentant Abbie Hoffman declared: 'Because of our actions in Chicago, Richard Nixon will be elected President.' Not for the first time, the clown prince of American activism was proved right. The following year, he, alongside Rubin, Tom Hayden and five others, including Black Panther Bobby Seale, was charged with conspiracy to cause violence in Chicago. (Ironically, one of Hollywood's most conservative directors, Steven Spielberg, is currently preparing a film about the conspiracy trial.) In the wake of the Chicago violence, the government under Nixon began clamping down on the anti-war movement.

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By then, the spirit of 1968 had dimmed in France, too. On 13 May, to the astonishment of both students and government, the French trade unions had called for a general strike for more pay and better working hours and conditions. France ground to a halt to the horror of the beleaguered De Gaulle. It looked for a moment like France was about to undergo another revolution... but the unlikely alliance of students and workers was an illusion.

'The workers and the students were never together,' Cohn-Bendit admitted years later. 'The workers wanted a radical reform of the factories. Students wanted a radical change in life.'

That youthful idealism, unplanned and ill-defined, carried for a while by a momentum that took everyone by surprise, ran aground almost as quickly as it had flared up. For all the revolutionary ferment of May '68, the year ended with De Gaulle still in power, Nixon elected to the White House, and the Vietnam war escalating beyond all predictions as the Americans rained bombs on Laos.

In Prague, the arrival of Russian tanks in August was perhaps the saddest image of the youth revolution of 1968. Or does that belong to the Mexico student movement, hundreds of whom were slaughtered by the Olympic Battalion in Tlatelolco Square in October? When, two weeks later at the Olympic games in Mexico, American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the Black Power salute, it seemed like a gesture of defiance against all the odds. The youth revolution of 1968 was over.

In its place came darker forms of violence and terror: the Baader-Meinhof cells in West Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the rebirth of the IRA in Northern Ireland. All had their roots in the turbulent events of 1968. By the Eighties, both America and Britain had elected ultraconservative leaders whose belief in the market above all else seemed to make a mockery of the utopian idealism of 1968. 'We are reaping what was sown in the Sixties,' Margaret Thatcher thundered in 1982. 'Fashionable theories and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which old values of discipline and restraint were denigrated.'

Yet 40 years on from 1968 the meaning and the legacy of that volatile year is still being contested. Many on the Right still view it as the epitome of all that was irresponsible, idiotic and dangerous about the Sixties, while many on the terminally fractured Left still mourn 1968 as the last great moment of revolutionary possibility. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but there is no doubting that something unique and potentially revolutionary happened around the world, something that continues to shape the present in ways that those involved in the protests could not have not foreseen, and that the majority of today's globally-connected younger generation are probably utterly unaware of.

'In history it is always imprecise to attribute fundamental shifts to one moment,' writes Kurlansky. 'But 1968 was the epicentre of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our post-modern media-driven world... It was the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the dawn of a new geopolitical order.'

It was also the beginning of modern protest, and of the many struggles that have followed - from feminism to ecological awareness. Cohn-Bendit, the face of May 1968, is now a Green Party leader in the European parliament. Out of the activism of 1968 came the Women's Liberation movement, which hit the headlines in September 1968 when 100 demonstrators gathered outside the Miss America pageant in Atlantic city and, borrowing from the Yippie handbook, crowned a sheep, and threw bras, make-up and beauty products into a 'freedom trash can'.

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Feminism entered a new phase. '1968 deepened the politics of the Sixties,' says Professor Lynne Segal of Birkbeck College. 'Women had been involved in all the struggles, Vietnam, anti-colonialism, Civil Rights. Everyone's liberation was suddenly on the table in 1968. By 1969 women had found a way to articulate it that resounds to this day. Women's Liberation became inevitable because of the radical politics of the Sixties but specifically because of the huge surge towards self-empowerment that happened in 1968.'

Dominic Sandbrook agrees: 'The Women's Liberation movement turned out to be the most influential of all the late-Sixties movements. It has had an abiding influence that no other cause from that time has had.'

And yet, the spirit of '68 endures, perhaps mythical, perhaps as a lingering sense of the possibilities that mass activism once had. 'If '68 does not matter, as the Right claim,' says Tom Hayden, one of the Chicago activists, 'then why does it remain so symbolic? People ask me why did it happen when it happened. My emphasis would be on consciousness. It was entirely possible that the American people would have accepted the Vietnam war with all its casualties and all its taxes, just as they supported the Korean war. So, you have to conclude that it was a shift in consciousness that helped bring about its end. That's what happened when people marched for Civil Rights and against the war, that's what happened in 1968 when people united in activism: the consciousness of America shifted.' Perhaps that, in itself, is legacy enough.

Assignment #3 – 1968 Style. See assignment packet.

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Assignment #4 -- Photographer Philippe Vermès's best shot

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Interview by Jon Henley , The Guardian, Wednesday 27 April 2011

This shot was taken at the Atelier Populaire – the popular workshop – which occupied the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, in May 1968. The Atelier Populaire was where we made the posters for the uprisings that swept Paris that month: a whole lot of striking students, staff, artists from outside. It was a very special place; completely collaborative. There was a general assembly every evening at 7pm, and everyone there would vote on the various proposals for posters presented. Anything that got a unanimous vote was screen-printed the next day.

I'd come to Paris from the Beaux-Arts de Caen in Normandy, studying abstract and narrative painting. But I'd started taking pictures with a Kodak folding camera years before: of my family, who were farmers, and of old buildings. There were several of us photographers at the Atelier Populaire, but it was a hectic sort of place, and from time to time things would go missing. Eventually someone took my camera – an Exakta – and that was that, for then. But I was kept busy; I was one of the few to have a car, a red Deux Chevaux, so I used to drive the posters round to the factories for the striking workers.

This poster was iconic. As soon as it was printed, it was the one everybody wanted, all the strike committees in the factories and schools. It's a very powerful image, the six workers against the light, one with his fist raised, another holding a wrench. It's saying: we are the power now; not the unions, not the politicians, not the police. We, the workers.

I like the composition of the photograph, the light and shade; the posters spread out on the ground and the others hung up to dry, curled like cornets of chips. And the fact there are no faces. We tried not to photograph faces at the Atelier Populaire, because afterwards the police could identify them, and that was not good.

At “Print.Mag.com” website: Rock Versus Paper http://www.printmag.com/Article/Rock-Versus-PaperAn interview (by William Bostwick) with Philippe Vermès, the Occupy artist of Paris '68

"Spirits are high for a protracted struggle," from June 1968; and "Beauty is in the street."

"May '68—beginning of a

prolonged struggle."

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In May 1968, Philippe Vermès joined the student uprising in Paris that paralyzed France and nearly brought down the government. He was a painter. Other students threw cobblestones, organized strikes, and burned cars. Vermès made posters. With a few co-revolutionaries, Vermès took over the École des Beaux-Arts’ printing workshop, set up a silk-screening rig, and, on rolls of newsprint donated by striking newspapers, produced thousands of iconic posters: witchlike de Gaulles, menacing cops, defiant workers. Forty-three years later, Vermès and Johan Kugelberg, a New York–based curator and editor, gathered the remarkable output of that pop-up press, the Atelier Populaire, into a book called Beauty Is in the Street (Four Corners Books). The current generation of protesters, from Wall Street to Tahrir Square, might have borrowed from the spirit of ’68, but the aesthetic clarity and cohesion of the earlier movement still seem unique. Print talked with Vermès about the artist’s role in revolution and why, though la lutte continue, posters may have been left behind.

You were a painter, right? How did you get pulled into the student movement in ’68? Yeah, I was a painter. I left Normandy, where I’m from, and came to Paris and the [École Nationale Supérieure des] Beaux-Arts to avoid the draft and the war in Algeria. I worked at the Beaux-Arts for two years, and then I came back with some friends to help with the movement. I was part of a group of painters, the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, where we had exhibits against Vietnam, against Algeria. My role was as an artist; I was happy to do that. But it didn’t happen in one day.

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How did you end up occupying the lithography studio at the Beaux-Arts? What was the vibe like there? How did it operate? I met some other protesting students at the Sorbonne, and we were trying to decide—what are we doing? I said, Let’s come to the Beaux-Arts; we can do posters with the lithography equipment there, we can make engravings. And so we did. But it took too much time. We couldn’t produce enough. A friend told me about silk-screening, which was a new idea. And that way we could make 2,000 posters in one night, sometimes more. You could find them everywhere in France, even in Marseilles. They went out quick, quick, quick. I’d go around Paris in my little Citroën to the newspapers on strike to get paper. We’d have a roll down in the garden and pull it up through the window to print on. It was like being in a factory, working 24 hours a day. We lived there, we slept there. A certain group was trained [in printing] like me. We’d help the others out—people would come in from all over France. We’d screen them to make sure no police came in disguise. There were no pictures allowed, except the ones I took.Did you talk about aesthetics at the beginning or try to come up with a coherent aesthetic strategy? No, not at the beginning. When we were occupying the Beaux-Arts, we’d have a meeting every night at 7 p.m. to decide on a slogan. We said, We have to not be Trotskyites, Situationists, anarchists. We have to get the right slogan that hits people the strongest. We’d vote—20 against, 30 for, or whatever. Then we’d work on it together, change this, change that. And the next day the poster would come back to get approval, and we’d vote again. There was no time for aesthetics. Everything was voted on, collectively. One time, we made a flag, blue, white, and red. And the red overlapped the other colors, and—No, no, no, we said. Because maybe it’s a Communist red. Everyone had to put their ideologies behind them. Are there certain criteria that you think make a poster, or a slogan, more or less successful? Simplicity. It must be easy to understand. I have one in front of me, with a pill bottle that says, “The Press: Don’t Swallow It.” It’s not good for your health. Look at our posters and you’ll know what’s good. Or the poster with “La Lutte Continue,” with the fist. There’s humor. Lots of humor.

Read more at PrintMag.com: Rock Versus Paper

Assignment #5 This tale of two revolutions and two anniversaries may yet have a twistThe very different events of 1968 and 1989 left a reformed, stronger, more socially liberal capitalism - but now it's in trouble

o By Timothy Garton Ash , The Guardian, Wednesday 7 May 2008

During the Velvet revolution of 1989 I spied an improvised poster in a Prague shop window. It showed "68" spun through 180 degrees to make "89", with arrows indicating the rotation. Nineteen sixty-eight and 1989: a tale of two revolutions. Or at least, two waves of what many called revolution at the time. A 40th anniversary this year, a 20th next. Which of the two will be most memorialised? And which actually changed more?

Nineteen sixty-eight will be hard to beat in the commemoration stakes. Already, more ink has flowed recalling that year than did blood from the guillotines of Paris after 1789. Reportedly more than 100 books have been published in France alone about the revolutionary theatre of May 68. Germany has had its own beer-fest of the intellectuals; Warsaw and Prague have revisited the bitter-sweet ambiguities of their respective springs; even Britain has managed a retrospective issue of Prospect magazine.

The causes of this publicistic orgy are not hard to find. The 68ers are a uniquely well-defined generation all across Europe - probably the best defined since what one might call the 39ers, those shaped for life by their youthful experience of the second world war. Having been students in 1968, they now - at or around the age of 60 - occupy the commanding heights of cultural production in most European countries. Think they're going to pass up a chance to talk about their youth? You must be joking. Not important, moi?

There is no comparable class of 89. The protagonists in that year of wonders were more diverse: seasoned dissidents, apparatchiks, church leaders, middle-aged working men and women standing patiently on the streets, finally insisting that enough was enough. Students played a role in a few places and, 20 years on, some of them are now prominent in their countries' public lives. But the leaders of 89 were generally older, and many of them were, in fact, 68ers. Even the Soviet "heroes of retreat" around Mikhail Gorbachev were shaped by memories of 1968.

It's a general rule that the events we recall most intensely are those we experienced when young. The dawn you glimpsed when you were 20 may turn out to have been a false dawn; the one you witness at 50 may change the world for ever. But memory, that artful shyster, will always privilege the first. Moreover, while 1968 happened in both the western and the eastern halves of Europe, in Paris and in Prague, 1989 only really happened in the eastern half.

Politically, 89 changed far more. The Warsaw and Prague springs of 1968 ended in defeat; the Paris, Rome and Berlin springs ended in partial restorations, or only incremental change. Probably the largest street demo in Paris, on May 30 1968, was a manifestation of the political right, which the French electorate then returned to power for another decade. In West Germany, some of the spirit of 1968

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flowed more successfully into Willy Brandt's reformist social democracy. Everywhere in the west, capitalism survived, reformed itself, and prospered. The events of 1989, by contrast, ended communism in Europe, the Soviet empire, the division of Germany, and an ideological and geopolitical struggle - the cold war - that had shaped world politics for half a century. It was, in its geopolitical results, as big as 1945 or 1914. By comparison, 68 was a molehill.

Revisited today, much of the Marxist, Trotskyite, Maoist or anarcho-liberationist rhetoric of 68 does look ridiculous, childish and morally irresponsible. It was, to quote George Orwell, a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot. Evoking the beginning of a "cultural-revolutionary transitional period" - Chairman Mao's brutal cultural revolution thus being held up as a model for emulation in Europe - and describing the Vietcong as "revolutionary forces of liberation" against US imperialism, Rudi Dutschke told the Vietnam congress in West Berlin that these liberating truths had been discovered through "the specific relationship of production of the student producers". The production of bullshit, that is. At the London School of Economics they chanted: "What do we want? Everything. When do we want it? Now." Narcissus with a red flag.

Those who in 1968 were so harsh on the way some of their parents' generation (the 39ers) had been fellow-travellers with the terrors of fascism and Stalinism might wish, on this anniversary, to make a small reckoning of conscience about their own lighthearted fellow-travelling with terror in faraway countries of which they knew little. But many leading representatives of the 68 generation went on to learn from these mistakes and frivolities. They engaged over subsequent decades in a more serious politics of liberal, social democratic or green "new evolutionism" (to borrow a phrase from the Polish 68er Adam Michnik), including the ending of a slew of European authoritarian regimes, from Portugal to Poland, and the promotion of human rights and democracy in far-away countries of which they learned to know more.

A balance sheet that describes 68 only as frivolous, evanescent and non-consequential, by contrast with a serious and consequential 89, is thus too simplistic. An essential point is made by that archetypical 68er Daniel Cohn-Bendit: "We have won culturally and socially while, fortunately, losing politically." Nineteen eighty-nine produced, with an astonishing lack of violence, a transformation of structures of domestic and international politics and economics. Culturally and socially, it has more the character of a restoration, or at least the reproduction or imitation, of existing western consumer societies. Nineteen sixty-eight produced no comparable transformation of political and economic structures, but it did catalyse a profound cultural and social change, in eastern as well as western Europe ("1968" here really stands for a larger phenomenon, "the 60s", with the spread of the pill being more important than any demos or barricades).

No change of this scale is ever only for the better, and we see some negative effects today; but on balance, this was a step forward for human emancipation. In most of our societies, most of the time, the life chances of women, of people from many sorts of minority and from social classes previously held back by stuffy hierarchies, are much greater today than they were before 1968. Even critics of 68 such as Nicolas Sarkozy are beneficiaries of this change. (Could the divorced son of migrants have become president in the pre-1968 conservative idyll of his imagining?)

Sharply contrasting though the two movements were, it is the combined effect of the utopian 68 and the anti-utopian 89 which has produced, across most of Europe and much of the world, a socially and culturally liberal, politically social democratic, globalised version of reformed capitalism. Yet in this

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anniversary year of 68, we are seeing trouble in the engine-room of that reformed capitalism. What if the trouble gets worse next year, just in time for the anniversary of 89? Now, that could be a revolution.

· This article was amended on Friday May 9 2008. In the comment piece above, an editing error resulted in the line: "In West Germany, some of the spirit of May 30 flowed more successfully into Willy Brandt's reformist social democracy". That should have read "some of the spirit of 1968". This has been corrected.

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