General strike day1/15/2024 ![]() ![]() The following day the students responded by organizing a meeting in the Sorbonne courtyard in central Paris. From 1967 the university was the source of a growing series of conflicts over such issues as sexual freedoms and victimizations of certain students in the exams.Ĭonfronted by a wave of protest demonstrations that had been fueled by the 22 March Movement-a united front with anarchist leadership that began at Nanterre on 22 March 1968 following a demonstration against the arrest of a student suspected of involvement in terrorism-the university dean decided on 2 May to suspend all classes. Built in 1964 on an army training ground surrounded by shanty towns, it housed no less than 11,000 students. The May events began at the University of Nanterre. Considerably transformed by the early beginnings of mass access to secondary and higher education, swollen by the demographic boom, influenced by changing values and the development of a mass consumption society, they started to levy totally unexpected demands. For the first time in history, students moved to the front rank of the social struggle. ![]() The level of the protests pressured the government for the first time in 15 years to grant a legal permit to the traditional 1 May march.ĭespite being strongly mobilized on the eve of the "May events," the working class, however, only played a secondary role in triggering them. ![]() The year 1968 continued the ambient agitation of the times and opened with a wave of disputes involving engineering workers. Several important strikes occurred, in particular a huge miners' strike in 1963. Throughout the 1960s this situation heightened social tensions. An exceptional level of growth culminated from the increase in working hours, an intensification of work, and the widespread existence of low pay. astronaut (the Soviets were ahead by two decades, with Valentina Tereshkova) when she goes into space aboard the shuttle Challenger.Ī sudden and uncontrollable explosion, the May movement had its origins in the processes of accelerated economic and social modernization that affected the industrialized world in the aftermath of World War II. 1983: Sally Ride becomes the first female U.S.Senate approves a measure presented by President Carter the year before, to turn the Panama Canal over to Panama by 2000. 1973: Signing of peace accords in Paris in January ends the Vietnam War.1968: After Czechoslovakia adopts a more democratic, popular regime, Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces invade to crush the uprising.1968: Violence erupts at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated on 4 April, and Robert Kennedy on 5 June. 1968: Communist victories in the Tet offensive mark the turning point in the Vietnam War and influence a growing lack of confidence in the war, not only among America's youth, but within the establishment as well.Supreme Court rules that no municipal, county, or state government may require recitation of the Lord's Prayer or of Bible verses in public schools. 1958: China's Mao Zedong proclaims the Great Leap Forward, a program of enforced rapid industrialization that will end a year later, a miserable failure.1953: Korean War, a conflict with no clear victors, ends with an armistice establishing an uneasy peace between South Korea and North Korea.1948: Israel becomes a nation and is immediately attacked by a coalition of Arab countries.The French May 1968 has been the subject of many interpretations and is still analyzed more as a societal phenomenon than as a classic labor conflict. Whether the revolution was unattainable, betrayed, or failed is often debated. At the end of nearly two months of often violent demonstrations, these events led to an overwhelming victory by the Right in parliamentary elections. Their singularity lies in the conjunction of two major crises on behalf of students and workers that did not merge. Bruno Groppo remarked, "For any French person, 1968 immediately evokes the May events: so close a linguistic association of the year and the month that one automatically and instinctively says 'May 1968'." As a result this movement occupies so important a place in the French collective memory that it has ended up by obscuring the other events of this critical year.įamiliarity does not always imply clarity, and it is difficult with hindsight to retrace the coherence of the events. In addition to these figures, 1968 also had the social, cultural and political impact of an earthquake. Involving at their height between 7 and 10 million strikers and 150 million working days lost, the May-June strikes were the largest ever recorded. In France these protests took on an exceptional character. Significant protests by students and workers on an international scale marked 1968. ![]()
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