General Strike
France 1968
Synopsis
Significant protests by students and workers on an international scale marked 1968. In France these protests took on an exceptional character. 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 addition to these figures, 1968 also had the social, cultural and political impact of an earthquake. 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.
Familiarity does not always imply clarity, and it is difficult with hindsight to retrace the coherence of the events. Their singularity lies in the conjunction of two major crises on behalf of students and workers that did not merge. At the end of nearly two months of often violent demonstrations, these events led to an overwhelming victory by the Right in parliamentary elections. Whether the revolution was unattainable, betrayed, or failed is often debated.
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