Full Swing into the Revolution: The Uprisings of 1968

Full Swing into the Revolution: The Uprisings of 1968

The year of 1968 proved an eventful one throughout the world; it witnessed the culmination of antagonism and dissatisfaction of oppressed people everywhere, and their subsequent retaliation against that oppression. A common element of rebellion in cities around the world was its incitement against authority: "the target of rebellion was power – power over people and power over nations, power exercised on the international plane by great imperial states, by governments within nations, or by people in positions of dominance over the powerless under them." (Daniels, 5) In Paris students rose to rebel against school authority, and were later joined by a working class exploited by new government regulation of trade union leadership. In Peking, youth retaliated against China’s bureaucratic government. In San Francisco a hippie counterculture expressed defiance in myriad ways, exhibiting their disagreement to the power authority expressed over them. In Chicago, youth protested the country’s role in the Vietnam War. And in Memphis and Washington D.C., the fight for equality was one waged by African Americans, tired and enraged by their inferior status in American society. The unifying factor in each rebellion, begun for their individual causes and grievances, was the plea for equality against some dominating power (structure). Robert V. Daniels, in Year of the Heroic Guerrilla, called the events of 1968 revolutionary. His definition: "Revolution’s essence is a turnabout, whether temporary or permanent, in the basic values that hold a society or a significant segment of society together and legitimize its character." (9) Evaluating this definition, one must analyze to what extent each of the aforementioned rebellions resulted in some type of turnabout in the societies within which they existed.

Rebellion of a largely student and working class population in Paris caused great changes in the values and sentiments of French society, evidenced by the wave of horror and shock the public experienced upon news of the riots. Daniels alleges that changes through these societies were temporary, and characterized by the "quick collapse of all these movements of defiance, seemingly so deeply rooted in the character of modern or modernizing society. This year of revolutionary spectaculars actually represented not the upsurge of discontent but rather the peak and downturn of the process." (241) Furthermore, Daniels specifically speaks of the events in Paris, where: "the violent acts of the radical minority only prompted reaction and repression by the conservative majority.