The protests of 1968 challenged the ideological structures of the Cold War, and were the inevitable conclusion of changes which originated during the Second World War – a growing generational gap exacerbated by increased affluence, a surge in university attendance paired with a growing identity crisis, and a drive for change among the young, all conveyed by a blossoming international media network. 1968 challenged the permanence of traditional social structures and cultural hierarchies and left a complex legacy. The integration of protest into daily life gave rise to a fear of social atomisation and prefigured the terrorist movements of the next decade, but the year also marked a shift towards the democratisation and liberalisation of many countries. This was coupled, on the one hand, with a greater emphasis on individual freedoms and personal identity (which would play a key role in the fall of communism in 1989), and, on the other, with the emergence of identitarian politics and minority rights, particularly in Western Europe and North America. In order to grasp the diversity and ideological heterogeneity of the protest movements which arose during the decade and culminated in 1968, the essay will focus on a number of iconic examples in different countries, examining the reasons that led to the protests, the revolution they sought, and the changes they engendered.
Italy
Of all the movements that culminated in 1968, those in Italy were fundamental in the evolution of protest strategies and aesthetics. Italy prior to 1968 and Italy post-1968 are, in many ways, two different countries. The Italian poet and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini believed the country had experienced a sweeping rivoluzione antropologica [anthropological revolution], and there is some veracity to his claims. Italian protest was unique in that the events of 1968 carried over into a new concerted social movement, the extra-parliamentary opposition Lotta Continua.
Between 1958 and 1963 Italian society underwent an accelerated transition from a primarily agrarian to a highly industrialised nation. In the process of the vast south to north migration that ensued, a substantial proletariat was created and traditional family and gender values gave way before the spread of an increasingly secular culture of consumption. Much as in America, there was a growing divide between a young generation brought up with this new affluence and their parents, who had experienced a succession of trials throughout World War II and in the difficult years of the postwar period.
Until 1968 Italian students were primarily represented by the Unione Nazionale Universitaria Rappresentativa Italiana [National Union of University Representatives] (UNURI). Working through a local network of student parliaments, UNURI’s system of political delegates ensured that local student assemblies inevitably became conduits for the agendas of party politics. The cumulative loss of legitimacy achieved by UNURI had its logical dénouement in 1968, when students sought to create a new organisation with a new democratic structure, in which cohesion was provided not via UNURI but via the ethos and aesthetic of the student movement. The attempt to craft a new democratic coordinating framework shaped the events of 1968 in Italy, but achieving a consensus by integrating local plenums into the year’s national conferences proved an impossible task.
By late February 1968, tens of thousands of students had joined protests against the paternalistic structure of the university system. The vast majority of university facilities were either occupied, or under siege, as students found a common enemy in the authoritarianism of the state, an enmity epitomised at Valle Giulia on 1 March. “The Battle of Valle Giulia” has become iconic in Italian memories of Sessantotto (1968). A dramatic clash between young left-wing Italians and the police in the picturesque surroundings of the Piazza di Spagna, outside the University of Rome’s architecture faculty, Valle Giulia became not only a definitive moment for student protest, but marked a growing realisation of the complex dynamics of class, politics and ideology which undergirded all similar movements during the year. As Pasolini remarked to the students whom he perceived as petit bourgeois dissidents, purveyors of a radicalism empty of content: “When yesterday at Valle Giulia you fought/ with policemen, I sympathized with the policemen! Because policemen are children of the poor” (Rohdie, 1995, 193).
Valle Giulia marked a turning point, as it was the first occasion on which students directly attacked the police. Violence thus became a clear option for protestors and henceforth previously nonviolent protest took on the character of running street battles. This practical and opportunistic change in tactics catalysed a concurrent change in the movement’s political influence. For a short span, the student movement became one of the most significant bodies outside of the Italian parliament and, consequently, the forms and locations of its protest shifted. Students abandoned their university strongholds in favour of open plazas and main streets which could attract a wider media audience and took their confrontational style to the large Northern industrial facilities. Conversely, by Autumn 1968 the majority of universities had resumed normal operations.
Framing their changing perspectives through iconic documents such as the Trento students’ “Manifesto for a Negative University” and “Tesi della Sapienza” [The Thesis of Wisdom] students attempted to redefine their identity and place in relation to the wider society. Much as black power advocates prescribed a revolution of the mind, Italian students found that their tactics has changed their perceptions of their place in the conflict. While passive resistance was formative in the early days of 1968, as the year progressed, students increasingly focused on their connection with the workers’ struggle and their own relationship to an overall tradition social structure, in the latter mirroring the concerns of similar protests in the USA. As a result, 1968 saw a change in both the movement’s goals and its self-image. A justification of the efficacy of violence against both people and property, Valle Giulia led the Italian students to adopt a strategy of “limited rule breaking” similar to that being practiced by the New Left in West Germany, with the ultimate goal of moving the university beyond the campus in order to intervene in workers’ conflicts.
West Germany
1968 in West Germany was set in motion initially by the 2nd of June 1967 visit to Berlin of Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran. During a demonstration against the visit by Berlin’s Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund [Socialist German Student League] (SDS), a group of Iranian secret service agents masquerading as pro-Shah demonstrators attacked the students. A retaliatory demonstration of thousands in front of the Berlin opera house the same evening led to the shooting of a young student, Benno Ohnesorg, by a police officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras. The incident marked the transformation of the West German New Left into a nationwide student revolt and propelled SDS to the forefront of the movement.
Ohnesorg’s shooting confirmed the protestors’ perception of West German society as authoritarian and in a state of crisis. The tensions between the old and new generations of dissenters emerged at the SDS congress in Hanover on 9 June as the sociologist Jürgen Habermas lambasted student leader Rudi Dutschke’s direct action strategies as “left-wing fascism” (Kundnani, 2009, 45).
As the year progressed, demonstrations radiated from Berlin out across the country. The SDS convention on 4-8 September launched a campaign against Springer media, which had given highly critical coverage of the protests. The campaign sought to unmask the agenda of the Springer press, while producing an alternative, independent media apparatus that could foster public criticism. Extrapolating this intent to an institutional context, the SDS established Berlin’s first Kritische Universität [Critical University] on 1 November.
1968 proper opened with the Vietnam Congress of 17-18 February at the Technical University in Berlin, during which, fired by the confidence of having achieved the resignation of West Berlin’s police president and Mayor in the previous year, over 12,000 Leftist activists marched through the streets carrying banners emblazoned with Trotsky, Guevara and Rosa Luxemburg.
The counterdemonstration of 60,000 people which erupted three days later illustrated the inability of the protestors to connect with the majority of Berlin’s citizenry. On 11 April, Dutschke, by then the effective leader of the left-wing Außerparlamentarische Opposition [Extra-Parliamentary Opposition] (APO) was shot in the head by the young painter Josef Bachman, himself goaded by sustained anti-student rhetoric in the Axel Springer-owned Bild paper, leading to a student-led assault on the Springer Press in Berlin the same day. Dutschke’s injuries would prove fatal eleven years later.
In the weeks that followed, protest exploded across the country. On 14 April, 45,000 demonstrators in over twenty cities attempted to interrupt the delivery of Springer papers, and across Easter 400 protestors were injured, with two fatalities. Although heartened by events in France during May, the movement was sorely tested during the following weeks. Marshalling a plethora of teach-ins, strikes and occupations of university buildings, capped by a 60,000 person march in Bonn, the protestors were nonetheless unable to prevent the passage of emergency legislation on 30 May.
Defeated and demoralised, SDS splintered in numerous, ever more radical, directions. On 4 November, approximately 1000 protestors attacked the police, while Frankfurt University’s sociology department was occupied on 9 December. The protestors created a “Spartacus-Seminar” to replace regular lectures, but were unceremoniously evicted nine days later. While the students saw a retreat into authoritarian control, the academics sensed a profound danger to the independence of the university.
Violence was a tool for both repression and dissension. Early April saw the first rumblings of the Rote Armee Fraktion [Red Army Faction] in Frankfurt as Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, along with Thorward Proll and Horst Soehnlein firebombed two department stores in the city, inspired by the counter-culture rhetoric of the anarchist collective Kommune I. The techniques of West German activists were inspired by American examples but evolved as they fused with the protesters’ specific goals. A continuing debate about the merit of direct action, coupled with the examples of the Civil Rights and Free Speech movements in the United States, was fundamental in shaping the anti-authoritarian rhetoric of SDS, and caused an equally fundamental redefinition of its approach to protest.
The protests of 1968 in West Germany represented a liberalisation of the Federal Republic on the individual level, but were enmeshed in a more comprehensive process of reform and democratisation which had started in earlier. Part of a social shift that embraced all of West German society, it was the young students which provided the German movement with both its catalyst and its zenith. In the process, they confronted traditional expectations, opened new avenues of identity formation and cultural expression, and integrated the changing public sphere with a rising secular and consumer culture. The socialist revolution they desired never materialised, but the struggle loosened the Cold War’s ideological stranglehold and facilitated West Germany’s re-emergence as a key player on the European and international stage.
France
In contrast to Italy, protest in France did not commence until international developments had reached their zenith. However, the French movement accelerated with a ferocity and verve which quickly eclipsed many earlier surges of activism in both potency and controversy. The series of student and worker strikes which rocked France throughout May almost toppled the government, as thousands of students refused the cynical injunction on protest posters to “Sois jeune et tais toi” or “Be young and shut up” (Gumpert, 1997, 51).
Originating with Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s small cadre in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, the French protests rapidly evolved into a general strike that paralysed the entire country, engendering a political confrontation which threatened the foundations of the Gaullist system. Unlike in Italy, the protests were not primarily a response to economic or political crisis. Rather, the student movement in France was both spontaneous and self-sustaining, as well as highly ideological in nature.
The milieu of 1968 France saw a general crisis in the university system which directly impacted the lives of students. Two groups dominated the early 1968 movement, the Enrages (taking their name from the 1789 group founded by Jacques Roux) and the “Movement of March 22” (MOM 22). Both were opposed to what they saw as traditional bureaucratic, organisational, dogmatic and authoritarian structures. The University was not merely a site for protest, but intended as the starting point for a comprehensive transformation of society. While the Enrages sought the abolition of the university system, the members of MOM 22 instead envisaged the creation of a “critical university”.
Drawn from a diverse background of anarchists, Marxists and Trotskyists, MOM 22 was an action-orientated movement, which culminated in its occupation of the University of Nanterre on 22 March, 1968. Its predilection for action arose from its rejection of traditional Leninist organisational and operational strategies and the growing emphasis on the efficacy of a proactive minority which was also gaining ground in the United States. The Nanterre rebellions rapidly spilled over into the Sorbonne, eliciting a massive police response which provoked a substantial portion of the previously inactive student majority into joining the protestors. After the 22nd, protest accelerated in a dialectic struggle between student protests and governmental repression. The following days were marked by bloody clashes throughout the Sorbonne and the Latin Quarter, with the protests increasingly incorporating young labourers and high school students.
Between 3-10 May a substantial amount of the working class demonstrated solidarity with the student protestors, with an estimated 7.5-9 million workers spontaneously taking to the streets. Importantly, the worker’s mobilisation followed the same strategy of improvisational, point and counter-point action as the student movement, and they were united by perceived common values created by a single critical event – the Night of the Barricades, which served to synchronise the two disparate groups’ perceptions and criticisms of the power structure. Between May 10-11, student protestors occupied a section of the Latin Quarter, establishing barricades, demanding the release of individuals arrested previously and calling for the reopening of the Sorbonne. The group’s demands were neither unprecedented, nor unattainable. Crucially, however, the aesthetic of the barricades alluded to both the Paris Commune of 1871 and the French liberation after the Second World War. Dangerous not as much in terms of its physical presence, but more in its symbolism, the barricade became an essential icon in the politicisation of the protest by the media.
The subsequent news coverage created a receptive audience which helped protest spread from Paris to the provinces. With Prime Minister Pompidou in Afghanistan, the government’s response was confused and uncoordinated – accordingly the students were cast as revolutionaries, their demands portrayed as riot. Police and security forces arrived on the morning of 11 May to remove both the barricades and the protestors, which led to a wave of public protest.
The Night of the Barricades was neither shaped by preceding social-structural factors, nor planned to a great degree by those involved. Rather, it was a challenge of contingency, a combination of uncoordinated authoritarian response met by practical improvisation. By disturbing the rhythms of everyday life, the Night served to synchronise the perceptions of different social groups by providing a public event which acted as a unified point of reference and which was judged by shared standards. In the process, it led the French labour unions into solidarity with the student movement, culminating in a 24 hour General Strike.
Interpreting the precise points of change brought about by this series of protests and actions poses a difficult task for scholars. Historiographically, May 1968 in France has been subject to numerous and diverse interpretations, from which two chief narratives tend to emerge. The modernist perspective, embraced by Régis Debray, saw 1968 as giving rise to a new bourgeois society, which opened the country to both American politics and American consumerism (Debray, 1979). Conversely, Gilles Lipovetsky argued that 1968 represented the flourishing of narcissistic individuality and saw it as pivotal in the rise of postmodernism (Lipovetsky, 1983). In this respect, 1968 in France encapsulates most of the meanings attached by historians of postwar Europe to the protests of the year – an outward manifestation of a diverse range of political and cultural influences resulting in an overall challenge to authoritarian government and traditional social structures, coupled with a resurgence of individualism and a growing acceptance of difference (ethnic, gendered, sexual etc.). Crucially, these protests came from a radical New Left perspective, an element that distinguishes the 1968 movements in Western Europe from those in Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain.
Czechoslovakia – behind the Iron Curtain
On the other side of Europe, under Soviet-controlled communist governments, the 1968 movement had an altogether different political character than in the West. While the single most significant event is linked to the Czech “Prague Spring” and the Soviet-led Warsaw pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that followed in retaliation, the movement was felt across Central and Eastern Europe and led to a period of relative ‘reform’ of the hard-core Stalinist style of government that had predominated until then. As the first peaceful attempt at reform from above, Alexander Dubček’s “Prague Spring”, a period of liberalisation instituted on 5 January, marked a transformation of power relationships in the Eastern bloc countries.
Dubček’s experiment in liberalisation was dubbed the “Prague Spring” by media commentators after the music festival of the same name, with both events seemingly representing a flowering of a new liberal spirit. Dubček’s dream of creating “socialism with a human face” lasted for eight months, before hopes of a modern democracy were crushed under the tanks of the Warsaw Pact invasion of 21 August, the country’s second military occupation in three decades. The invasion was the largest military manoeuvre in post-war Europe, with half a million soldiers deployed to prevent “counter-revolution” in the country.
The original plan of an engineered putsch to be executed by the conservative party leadership, in concert with the central committee of the Komunistická strana Československa [Communist Party of Czechoslovakia] (KSČ), did not take into account the incredible level of civil and public resistance in the country. International opposition to the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968 ranks as one of the most successful, poignant and dramatic acts of protest in the twentieth century. Throughout the country the military occupation stalled as concerted national and public resistance frustrated the invaders. As the Polish leader Władysław Gomulka ruefully remarked: “We surprised them with our intervention and they surprised us with their resistance” (Pauer, 1995, 259). More importantly, tanks and boots could do little to control the media. The Soviet Union failed to legitimise its invasion on the international stage and its rhetoric was unable to cope with the images and symbols deployed by the protesters.
Diverse intellectuals, reporters and culture creators instigated an evolution of the traditional pressure group format to create unified protest organs with a significant presence. Epitomised by publications such as the rejuvenated Writer’s Association journal Literarni Listy, printed magazines provided a front of critique to perceived Communist reentrenchment. Similarly, the broadcast media underwent a startling revolution, championing Dubček’s daring reforms. This groundswell of public opinion was incarnated in the June 1968 publication of “Two Thousand Words”. Penned by the Czech writer and journalist Ludvík Vaculík just prior to the Fourteenth Congress and designed to support the development of a political party distinct from the Soviet model, the incendiary tract was disseminated on 27 June with signatures from sixty of the most noted thinkers of the generation, as well as those of the ordinary public. The statement garnered thousands of signatures as the movement progressed and resulted in a continuous correspondence which kept the Prague Spring in the public eye. With its appeal for morality, independence and unity against the threat of restoration, “Two Thousand Words” echoed both the emerging rhetoric of direct confrontation and dissent and earlier works from the “Samizdat” tradition.
Yet “Two Thousand Words”, though strongly reformist, was not revolutionary — it pledged allegiance to a government “[that] will do what we give it a mandate to do” (Navrátil, 1998, 181). Such rhetoric had its dangers. Deprived of any genuine democratic representation for the entirety of the Prague Spring, wishful thinking and reality became conflated. In April 1968, trust for the KSČremained high, with between 42 and 53 percent of voters keeping faith in the party, and over 89 percent favouring the continued pursuit of socialist development. By the end of August, the last glow of the Spring had faded and the citizens of Czechoslovakia faced a harsh winter, marred by the neo-Stalinist “normalisation” polices of Gustáv Husák.
The repercussions of the Prague Spring were felt beyond the country. In East Germany, the Warsaw Pact invasion occasioned profound cognitive dissonance as the state’s false claims to democracy and humanism were laid bare. The invasion of Prague seemed to repudiate the possibility of reform in the Eastern bloc as a whole. The repression of the Spring unleashed long-repressed tensions in the GDR, with almost two thousand acts of protest. The resulting clashes were not a reaffirmation of Dubček’s socialism with a human face, but a singular moment of expression of anger at Soviet domination from the younger East German generation.
The United States
The war in Vietnam infused much of the 1968 protest in the United States. A series of demonstrations at Howard University during 19–23 March epitomised the new style of dissent, in which, inspired by the more militant elements of the African-American freedom struggle and civil rights movement, protestors realised that diminutive cells of well-organised protestors could effectively immobilise monolithic institutions. The nature of the Howard students’ demands also exemplified the tone of the 1968 protest. The protestors sought the removal of military-industrial influence from the University environment, mandated a move toward a more racially equitable curriculum, and offered a continuing critique of the Vietnam conflict on moral and ethical grounds, embodied in the draft and the sense of guilt it engendered.
America seemed to be the frontline of a new and deadly war. April was a bloody month – Martin Luther King was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel (4 April), his death sparking prolonged riots across urban America and marking the concurrent demise of his Poor People’s Campaign for better urban living conditions. Two days later in Oakland, members of the increasingly active and militant Black Panther party clashed with the local police, resulting in the death of sixteen year old Bobby Hutton, who was gunned down as he left his suburban hiding place, topless and unarmed.
While on 11 April President Johnson enshrined the 1968 Civil Rights Act in law, guaranteeing equal provision in housing, race remained a close companion to anti-war protest. Student activists at Columbia University immobilised the campus from 23-30 April in protest at the University’s links with the Institute for Defense Analysis and the establishment of a gymnasium with segregated access on campus at the expense of housing in Harlem. However, Columbia represented the hard edge of student protest – its tendency towards performance and demagoguery at the expense of content. As Mark Rudd, later of the Weather Underground, remarked, some protestors merely wanted chaos, “The gym issue…[was]…bull” (DeGroot, 2008, 344). The response of the establishment was equally hard-edged and callous. The 30 April deployment of 1000 armed officers led to the end of the strike and a legacy of brutality for the Columbia administration.
Two weeks later on 17 May, the Selective Service offices in Catonsville, MR, were invaded by nine Catholic activists who immolated dozens of selective service records using napalm in a symbolic critique of the Vietnam draft. With one third of the group comprised of priests of various confessions, the “Catonsville Nine”, as they became known, epitomised the diversity of impulses catalysing anti-war protest.
With the assassination of Robert Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan on 5 June, America seemed dangerous ground for those seeking change. The establishment was recalibrating its responses to protest and dissent. As France detonated its first hydrogen bomb on 24 August, anti-war protestors clashed with police outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The war and race were soon joined by another long-simmering font of discontent. In September, approximately 150 members of New York Radical Women, a collective of young, new left women formed in 1967 by Shulamith Firestone and Pam Allen, staged the first major demonstration of the Women’s Liberation Movement, targeting the Miss America Pageant for demeaning and dehumanising women. Mopping the boardwalk and distributing “Revlon Masks” to an amused crowd, the Miss America protest epitomised the increasing integration of dissent into American life.
However, it was the appearance of Tommy Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the 1968 Mexico Olympics which defined the interaction of 1968 protest with the international public. Smith and Carlos protested under the guidance of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) formed in 1968 by sociology instructor Harry Edwards. Under Edwards, OPHR compiled extensive demands ranging from the removal of International Olympic Committee chairman Avery Brundage, to broader goals encompassing the censure of South Africa and Rhodesia’s teams, the return of Muhammad Ali’s titles, stripped as a result of his refusal to serve in Vietnam, and the inclusion of two African-American coaches on the Olympic team alongside the appointment of two black representatives to the U.S. Olympic Committee.
Edwards’s campaign in 1968 was qualitatively different from previous protests. Rather than international pressure from without, the 1968 protest was an internal revolution, a confrontation of a nation by its own athletes. In a year steeped in international and domestic violence, the Olympics became a focal point for an internationally displayed critique of American society.
In public memory, and much historical scholarship, the Olympic protest survives as a single iconic image. In 1968, Edwards saw two of his students, Smith and Carlos, triumph in the 200 meters competition. Rose-tinted myth holds that, prior to the podium ceremony, both athletes donned a specific and symbolic choice of apparel and struck a studied pose wherein their raised hands represented Black Power and Unity, their black scarf and socks the pride of black America and its poverty. The truth is slightly more prosaic. Smith and Carlos improvised as they only had one pair of gloves, sent by Carlos’s wife from California. However, the response to the podium protest was instantaneous and opinionated. Suspended from the Olympic team, their medals revoked and summarily dismissed, Carlos and Smith faced the court of public opinion on their return, but got the attention they desired.
Nonetheless the dramatic performances on the American and international stage, whether from civil rights activists, student protestors, or feminist campaigners were to achieve little success in the year of their orchestration. Although President Johnson announced the immediate cessation of all bombardment of North Vietnam on 31 October, the inauguration of the Republican Richard Nixon was to presage not only a protracted American involvement in the conflict, but the deferment, if not the death, of many of the dreams of 1968.
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Citation: Torrubia, Rafael. "1968". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 February 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=9312, accessed 02 May 2025.]
