In the spring of 1968, something happened that had not happened before and has not happened since: a set of political explosions occurred simultaneously in countries that had almost nothing in common — in their economies, their political systems, their social structures, their histories — but that nonetheless felt, to those participating in them and to those watching from outside, as if they were expressions of a single underlying rupture. Students in Paris built barricades in the Latin Quarter and triggered a general strike that briefly seemed capable of ending the Fifth Republic. Students in Prague celebrated a Communist Party reform programme that promised socialism with a human face, until Soviet tanks arrived to end the experiment. Students in Mexico City were shot by government security forces in the Tlatelolco massacre ten days before the Olympic Games opened in the same city. Students in Chicago were beaten by police outside the Democratic National Convention as delegates inside chose a presidential candidate on a platform that kept American troops in Vietnam. Students in Berlin marched against the war and were attacked. Students in Tokyo occupied their universities and fought riot police in battles that lasted months.
The simultaneity was not coincidental, but it was not organised. There was no international conspiracy, no coordinating committee, no shared document of demands that connected the Sorbonne to Tlatelolco to Prague. What connected them was a shared generational formation — the first cohort to grow up entirely in the postwar world, to benefit from its prosperity and its expanded educational systems, and to come of age with the expectation that the institutions they had inherited were either failing or actively wrong — and a specific historical moment in which several different legitimacy crises converged. Understanding 1968 requires understanding what was breaking down, and why it broke down in that year rather than another.
The Long Decade
The events of 1968 cannot be understood in isolation from the longer decade that preceded them. The “sixties” as a political and cultural phenomenon began not in 1960 but in 1955–56, with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Hungarian Revolution and the Suez Crisis and the first stirrings of anti-colonial movements across Africa and Asia, and it continued into the early 1970s, with the final years of Vietnam, Watergate, the oil crisis, and the fading of the utopian energies that 1968 had briefly concentrated. What made 1968 specifically the year of rupture was the convergence, within a single twelve-month period, of several crises that had been building for years and that reached their acute phase simultaneously.
The civil rights movement in the United States provides perhaps the clearest example of how the longer decade fed into the specific crisis of 1968. The legal victories of the mid-1960s — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — had been genuine achievements, won through a decade of organised nonviolent resistance against a political system that had denied basic citizenship to Black Americans for a century. But the legislation had not ended poverty, police violence, or the structural economic inequality that shaped Black life in the urban North as much as in the segregated South. The urban rebellions that erupted in Watts in 1965, in Newark and Detroit in 1967, and in cities across the country after King’s assassination in 1968 were expressions of a frustration that legal equality had not addressed and that the liberal political coalition was not prepared to address. King himself, in the final years of his life, had moved toward a politics of economic redistribution — the Poor People’s Campaign, the strike support in Memphis — that was far more threatening to the established order than the legal desegregation that his earlier career had achieved. His assassination removed the figure most capable of holding together the nonviolent tradition and the demand for structural economic change, and the movement that followed was both more radical and less politically coherent.
The Generation and Its Formation
The generation that revolted in 1968 had been shaped by the postwar settlement in ways that made revolt against that settlement nearly inevitable. They were the first beneficiaries of mass higher education: universities that had educated small elites were rapidly expanded in the 1950s and 1960s to accommodate the baby boom and the growing economies’ demand for educated workers. In France, university enrolment grew from two hundred thousand in 1950 to over five hundred thousand by 1968. In the United States, the GI Bill and then the expansion of state university systems had done similar work. In West Germany, Italy, Japan, and across the developed world, the same process had produced large student populations concentrated in institutions that had not been designed for them and that were still run on assumptions appropriate to a different era.
The political culture of this generation was shaped by two formative experiences that pulled in contradictory directions. The first was the explicit idealism of the postwar order: the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the anti-colonial movements that were producing independence across Africa and Asia, the civil rights movement in the United States — all of which suggested that the arc of history bent toward justice and that collective political action could change the world. The second was the evidence, accumulating through the 1950s and early 1960s, that the institutions claiming to represent that idealism were systematically failing it: the Suez Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala, the French use of torture in Algeria, and above all the escalating American war in Vietnam.
The nuclear dimension was also formative in ways that are easy to underestimate from a later vantage point. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had demonstrated, with unusual clarity, that the entire postwar world rested on a balance of terror that could tip into annihilation through miscalculation or accident. A generation raised under the shadow of mushroom clouds, drilled in school to take cover under desks, absorbing the logic of mutually assured destruction, had reasons of its own to distrust the rationality of the political order that had produced this situation. The connection between nuclear fear and political radicalism was not simply emotional; it reflected a genuine assessment that the existing order’s claim to stability was built on a foundation that could collapse at any moment.
Vietnam and the Collapse of American Credibility
The specific trigger that transformed a decade of growing political dissatisfaction into the explosive events of 1968 was the Tet Offensive, launched by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces on 30 January 1968 — the Vietnamese New Year — against more than one hundred cities and towns across South Vietnam. The offensive, in military terms, was eventually repelled with heavy communist losses. In political terms, it was a catastrophic American defeat. The Johnson administration had been telling the American public for years that the war was being won, that the enemy was weakening, that the end was in sight. The images of Viet Cong fighters inside the US Embassy compound in Saigon — broadcast on television into American living rooms on the same night — destroyed the credibility of that narrative beyond recovery.
Walter Cronkite, the CBS News anchor who was at that moment probably the most trusted figure in American public life, travelled to Vietnam to see for himself and broadcast on 27 February 1968 an editorial assessment — unusually direct for American television journalism of the period — that the war was a stalemate and that the only rational conclusion was negotiation. President Johnson reportedly said, on watching the broadcast: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” On 31 March, Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election. The political consequence of Tet was not only the destabilisation of the Johnson presidency; it was the fracturing of the Cold War consensus that had underwritten American foreign policy for twenty years, and with it the fracturing of the Democratic coalition that had governed American liberalism since Roosevelt.
The anti-war movement in the United States, which had been growing since 1965, became the largest in American history. It was also the most visible: the medium of television, which was reaching its peak saturation of American homes, carried images of protests, of police violence against protesters, of burning draft cards, of body bags arriving from Southeast Asia. The war produced not only opposition but a generalised crisis of authority — a sense, spread well beyond the student left, that the government was systematically lying, that the institutions designed to aggregate and express popular will were failing, that the conventional channels of political participation were not producing the outcomes they promised. This crisis of institutional legitimacy was the specific contribution of Vietnam to the broader political atmosphere of 1968.
Paris: The Revolution That Wasn’t
The events in France in May and June 1968 remain the most mythologised episode of the global revolt, partly because they came closest to producing a genuine political revolution in an advanced industrial democracy. What began in March 1968 with protests at the University of Nanterre — against institutional rules, against university overcrowding, against the Vietnam War — escalated through a sequence of administrative overreactions into a confrontation that, within six weeks, had involved ten million workers in a general strike and had produced a moment of genuine uncertainty about whether de Gaulle’s government would survive.
The Nanterre protests spread to the Sorbonne in Paris, where police moved to clear the campus on 3 May. The police action produced what administrative crackdowns on universities reliably produce: a much larger and angrier protest. On the night of 10–11 May — the Night of the Barricades — students constructed barricades in the Latin Quarter from whatever material was available, including the metal grilles around Parisian street trees, and fought running battles with the CRS riot police. The images — cobblestones, tear gas, overturned cars, burning barricades — were carried on radio and television across France and produced something that the student movement alone could not have produced: the sympathy of the French working class.
The CGT and CFDT trade union federations called a general strike for 13 May. Within days, the strike had spread spontaneously beyond what the unions had called for, with workers occupying factories, not merely walking off the job. By late May, ten million workers were on strike — the largest general strike in French history — and the occupied factories had taken on a quasi-insurrectionary character, with workers making decisions collectively about work processes and pay structures that management had previously controlled exclusively. The Gaullist government, which had not anticipated the scale or the character of the response, went through a period of evident disorientation.
De Gaulle’s response was politically astute even if it looked, initially, like panic. On 29 May, he secretly flew to Baden-Baden in West Germany, where he met with General Massu — the commander who had broken the Battle of Algiers — reportedly to assess whether military support would be available if the situation deteriorated further. He returned the following day and broadcast a radio address — deliberately choosing radio over television, to distinguish himself from the media world the students inhabited — in which he dissolved the National Assembly, called elections, and directly invoked the threat of Communist takeover if the left won. The Gaullists won the subsequent election by a landslide. The general strike ended. The barricades were cleared. The moment passed.
What had happened, and what it meant, was immediately disputed and has been disputed ever since. The structural Marxist interpretation — that May ’68 was a revolt without a revolutionary class capable of following through, a cultural explosion that the French Communist Party itself was too conservative to support — explained the failure in terms that were internally consistent but that missed something important about what the events had been. The conservative interpretation — that France had had a narrow escape from chaos, and that de Gaulle’s elections demonstrated that the French people were not, after all, revolutionaries — was correct as far as it went but explained nothing about why ten million workers had struck in the first place. The most durable analysis has focused on what May ’68 revealed about the nature of the modernised, consumer, technocratic France of the Fifth Republic: a society that had achieved material prosperity while systematically failing to address the forms of authority — in factories, universities, families, state institutions — that its own values of rationality and individual dignity implied should have been reformed.
Prague Spring and Its Ending
The Prague Spring of 1968 — the reform programme initiated by Alexander Dubček, who became First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in January 1968 — was a different kind of revolt from Paris, shaped by the specific constraints of a one-party state operating within the Soviet bloc. What Dubček and the reformers around him were attempting was not the abolition of communism but its democratisation: “socialism with a human face,” as the phrase went, which meant a free press, the rehabilitation of victims of the Stalinist purges of the 1950s, the end of political censorship, and a multi-party political system within the framework of socialist ownership of the means of production.
The programme had genuine popular support within Czechoslovakia, where the memory of the 1950s show trials — in which loyal Communists had been arrested, tortured into confessions of crimes they had not committed, and executed — remained raw. The Action Programme published in April 1968 was greeted with what Czech journalists, newly freed to write what they thought, described with scarcely concealed amazement: hope. The summer of 1968, before the Soviet invasion, was one of the most remarkable episodes of political creativity in postwar European history, as a society that had been told for twenty years what to think discovered it was permitted to think in public.
The Soviet response was determined by the logic of the Brezhnev Doctrine — the principle, never formally announced but consistently applied, that no state that had once been part of the socialist bloc could be permitted to leave it. On the night of 20–21 August 1968, Warsaw Pact forces entered Czechoslovakia in overwhelming numbers. Dubček was arrested and taken to Moscow. The reforms were reversed. “Normalisation” — the systematic restoration of orthodox Communist rule, the suppression of all public dissent, the rewriting of the historical record of the preceding months — followed and lasted until 1989. Jan Palach, a Czech student, burned himself to death in Wenceslas Square in January 1969 in protest, and became one of the most powerful symbolic acts of political resistance in the century.
The Soviet invasion had effects well beyond Czechoslovakia. For the Western European left, which had been conducting a long renegotiation of its relationship to Soviet communism since Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech on Stalin’s crimes, August 1968 was decisive: the tanks in Prague demonstrated that the Soviet model was not reformable from within, and that the argument for democratic socialism had to be made independently of anything happening east of the Iron Curtain. The Italian Communist Party’s condemnation of the invasion — unprecedented for a major Western Communist party — marked the beginning of Eurocommunism, the attempt to develop a distinctively Western democratic socialist politics that did not depend on Soviet validation. It was also the beginning of the end of the Soviet model’s intellectual credibility among the Western left.
Violence and Its Consequences: Chicago, Tlatelolco, and the Deaths of Hope
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on 4 April 1968 and of Robert Kennedy on 5 June 1968 — the two figures who most plausibly represented the possibility of transformative change within the American political system — removed from the scene the individuals around whom a coalition capable of ending the war and pursuing domestic reform might have assembled. King’s assassination triggered riots in over one hundred American cities, the most widespread civil unrest in the country since the Civil War. Kennedy’s assassination, on the night he won the California Democratic primary, ended the best hope within the Democratic Party for a candidate capable of both opposing the war and winning the presidency.
What followed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August was one of the most damaging spectacles in American political history. Inside the convention hall, party bosses loyal to Lyndon Johnson’s chosen successor Hubert Humphrey controlled the delegate process in ways that produced a platform and a candidate unacceptable to the anti-war movement. Outside, in Grant Park, protesters were beaten by Chicago police in actions that a subsequent government commission described as a “police riot.” The images — nightsticks, tear gas, blood, protesters chanting “the whole world is watching” — were carried live on television to the nation and to the world. Richard Nixon, who understood better than his opponents what the images meant to middle-class voters who were not themselves protesters, won the presidency in November on a programme of law and order and a secret plan to end the war that he did not have.
The Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City on 2 October 1968 — ten days before the Olympic Games opened, in the same city, to global media coverage — was suppressed by the Mexican government for decades. Student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas were surrounded by military forces and security agents, who opened fire. The death toll, which the government placed at thirty, was estimated by survivors and independent journalists at hundreds. The Mexican government maintained its official account for more than thirty years; the documentary record of what actually happened became available only after the democratic transition of the late 1990s. Tlatelolco was a reminder that in some countries, 1968 produced not the negotiated re-absorption of protest that occurred in France but direct state violence against civilians, with no subsequent accountability.
The Global South and the Limits of the Story
The conventional narrative of 1968 is essentially a story about Western Europe and the United States, with Czechoslovakia as the Eastern European counterpart. This framing misses the degree to which what happened in 1968 was genuinely global, and the degree to which the revolts outside the Western core were shaped by dynamics that were not simply reflections of Paris or Berkeley. In Latin America, the late 1960s saw the height of the armed guerrilla movements inspired by the Cuban Revolution — in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere — and the acceleration of the military repression that would, in the following decade, produce some of the most systematic state terror in the hemisphere’s history. In Africa, the late 1960s were the years of post-independence disillusionment, as the high expectations of the independence movements confronted the realities of neo-colonial economic dependence, military coups, and the entrenchment of single-party rule. In Asia, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which had begun in 1966 and would continue until Mao’s death in 1976, was a revolution of a very different kind from anything in Paris or Prague — a mobilisation of youth against established authority that was simultaneously more violent, more controlled from above, and more destructive of the very institutions it claimed to be renewing.
The Vietnam War itself, which was the proximate catalyst for much of the Western protest of 1968, was of course primarily a Vietnamese event — a consequence of French colonialism, American strategic miscalculation, and Vietnamese nationalism — in which American students’ opposition to their government’s policy was one element among many. The Vietnamese perspective on 1968 is organised around the Tet Offensive not as the media event that shook American public opinion but as a military and political turning point in a war of national liberation that had been going on, in various forms, since the 1940s. To understand 1968 properly is to hold in view both the Western story of generational revolt and institutional crisis and the non-Western story of anti-colonial struggle and the long reckoning with the consequences of European empire — even when these stories are in tension with each other.
What Changed and What Did Not
The revolts of 1968 did not produce the revolutions that some of their participants imagined were within reach. De Gaulle survived; the Soviet bloc tightened; Nixon won. But to measure 1968 by its immediate political outcomes is to miss what it actually changed. The cultural transformations it accelerated — in attitudes toward authority, gender, race, sexuality, and the organisation of everyday life — were real and lasting. The feminist, gay rights, and environmental movements that became major political forces in the 1970s drew directly on the organisational experience, the intellectual resources, and the cultural confidence that 1968 had generated. The critique of hierarchy and bureaucracy that animated the student revolts found its way into workplaces, families, and institutions over the following decades in ways that transformed the texture of daily life in ways that are now so thoroughly normalised as to be nearly invisible.
Politically, 1968 marked the beginning of the end of the postwar liberal consensus in both its American and its European forms. The fracturing of the Democratic coalition in the United States — specifically the alienation from the party of the white working class that Nixon and later Reagan would exploit — began in 1968, in the space between the protesters in Grant Park and the voters watching them at home. The crisis of communist legitimacy in Eastern Europe that would eventually produce 1989 began with the Prague Spring and the Brezhnev Doctrine’s response to it. The sense that the available political options were inadequate to the scale of the problems — which produced the radical politics of 1968 — also produced, over the following decade, the neoliberal politics of Reagan and Thatcher, which offered a very different answer to the same diagnosis of institutional failure.
The mythology of 1968, which has been produced and reproduced in memoirs, films, academic studies, and anniversary commemorations ever since, has not always served historical understanding well. The participants were not always as radical as they subsequently remembered being; the events were not always as coherent as retrospective narrative made them appear; the connection between cultural revolt and political change was real but more complicated than either the enthusiasts or the critics of the sixties claimed. What is undeniable is that 1968 registered something true about the world it occurred in: that the postwar settlement, for all its material achievements, had produced institutions and authority structures that were inadequate to the aspirations of the people living within them, and that those people, when given the opportunity, said so in ways that could not be ignored — even if the responses their saying so produced were not the responses they had hoped for.
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Image credit:Stiftung Haus der Geschitsche
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