There’s a whiff of revolution again at the Sorbonne in Paris, 50 years on from the May 1968 student protests that mushroomed into a nationwide movement and brought France to its knees, reports Reuters.
In scenes reminiscent of the 1968 revolt, students blocked entrances to the university’s Latin Quarter campus, shouted slogans over megaphones and stockpiled petrol bombs.
The new generation of protesters want to halt President Emmanuel Macron’s wide-ranging economic reforms and some hope there will be a convergence of struggles similar to the 1968 movement that almost toppled Charles de Gaulle’s government.
“We think about May ’68 a lot inside,” said Marianne Kli, 19, an art history student protesting at the Sorbonne’s campus in eastern Paris. “History has shown that governments can cave in – even those as powerful as Macron’s.”
It may not be so easy this time around. The 1968 protests were part of an international movement, but today many people are sufficiently worried about long-term employment prospects to think twice about taking to the streets.
What started in 1968 as a revolt by male students defying rules banning them from sleeping with female counterparts in dormitories was a backlash against a conservative and paternalistic social order no longer in tune with the times.
The student revolts then spread to factories across France, with strikes by 7 million workers looking for higher pay paralysing a highly industrialised economy that was booming.
Now, France has an unemployment rate of almost 9 percent that has remained stubbornly high a decade after the global financial crisis, providing a less favourable backdrop for strikes by those who don’t have iron-clad public sector jobs.
“The demands of 1968 were made in a context where you didn’t have this fear of the future you can see today, this pessimism about jobs,” said Henri Rey, a political analyst at the Sciences Po university who took part in the May 1968 events.
“It was part of a worldwide movement, with this idea that the world was going towards more social justice, on a backdrop of great optimism,” he said.
In his first ten months in office, Macron has watered down France’s strict labour laws, defying unions who failed to stop what they saw as the biggest attack yet on a cherished social model protective of workers’ rights.
The 40-year-old is now dealing with rolling strikes by rail workers over a shake-up of state-run SNCF, student protests over higher education reform, a pay dispute at Air France and anger among pensioners over higher social security levies.
Yet after two weeks of railway strikes that unions want to carry on for three months, public opinion has turned in favour of Macron’s transport plan, which includes ending job-for-life guarantees and other perks.
According to a poll by Elabe published on April 11th, 58 percent of those surveyed backed Macron’s reform.