May 68: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:08, 14 April 2005

Revision as of 10:49, 14 April 2005

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In '''May 1968''' a general [[insurrection]] broke out across [[France]]. It quickly began to reach near-revolutionary proportions before being suppressed by the Government and the [[French Communist Party]]. Some philosophers and historians have argued that the rebellion was the single most important revolutionary event of the [[Twentieth Century]] because of the fact that it wasn't participated in by a lone demographic, such as workers or racial minorities, but was rather a purely popular uprising, superseding ethnic, cultural, age and class boundaries.

It began as a series of student [[Strikestudent action|strike]]s that broke out at a number of [[university|universities]] and [[high school]]s in [[Paris]], following confrontations with university administrators and the police. The [[Charles de Gaulle|de Gaulle]] administration's attempts to quash those strikes by further police action only inflamed the situation further, leading to street battles with the police in the [[Latin Quarter]], followed by a general strike by students and strikes throughout France by ten million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the French workforce. The protests reached the point that De Gaulle created a military operations headquarters to deal with the unrest, dissolved the [[French National Assembly|National Assembly]] and called for new parliamentary elections for [[June 23]], [[1968]].

The government was close to collapse at that point, but the revolutionary situation evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, urged on by the [[Confédération Générale du Travail]], the leftist union federation, and the [[Parti Communiste Français]], the [[France|French]] [[Communist]] Party. When the elections were finally held in June, the Gaullist party emerged even stronger than before.