Protests in Paris, May 1968 – photographs then and now. By Alicia Canter and Guy Lane
As Paris exploded in
mass protests, words scrawled on the walls of the Sorbonne summed up the
revolutionary zeal: “Run free, comrade, we’ve left the old world behind!” Fifty
years on, May 1968 remains a watershed moment. Photographer Alicia Canter
revisits the key locations.
The black and white
images of students lobbing cobblestones over barricades in the Latin Quarter of
Paris in May 1968 are still clung to as defining a significant moment in
modern French history. The May 1968 protests
are remembered for students in Nanterre, outside Paris, railing against rules
preventing men and women students visiting each other’s living quarters. But
the row about the right to be treated as adults was soon subsumed into much
bigger concerns and disillusionment with the leadership of an ageing General de
Gaulle in an oppressively hierarchical society.
More than 9 million
workers staged wildcat strikes in May 1968, closing factories, occupying
workspaces and paralysing France with the largest strike movement in Europe since the
second world war. Hierarchy was chipped away but it was a slow, incremental
type of revolution – De Gaulle won elections in June 1968, only sidling out of
politics the following year... see photos:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/02/protests-in-paris-may-1968-photographs-then-and-nowMore Than 200 Demonstrators Arrested During May Day Rallies In Paris
