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Good Morning Motlies
Around 6 weeks ago or so, I, like many here, was chuckling over the embarrassing failure of the Teaparty's American Spring protest, where instead of 10's of millions of protestors turning up, it was few hundred. In the words of one organiser
“We were getting over two inches of rain in hour in parts of Virginia this morning,” Mr. Milton said. “Now it’s a nice sunny day. But this is a very poor turnout. It ain’t no millions. And it ain’t looking like there’s going to be millions. Hundreds is more like it.”
From Washington Times
However. this reminded me of another Spring Protest - Mai 68 in France, which gave rise to the collective noun "les soixantehuitards" or sixtyeighters.
Spring in 1968 was politically charged world wide, Since January, the Czechoslovak people and government had been negotiating a softening of the Stalinist regime, and the opening of the economy to some free market forces, which came to be known as the Prague Spring. This would eventually lead to an invasion by Soviet forces in August. In the USA, opposition to the war in Vietnam was growing, with protests and student strikes, and Spring 68 saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King (4/4/68) and Bobby Kennedy (6/6/68). London saw 10,000 people protesting outside the US embassy against the Vietnam War.
But of all the countries that saw civil strife that year, it was perhaps France that went closest to outright revolution.
What started out as a pissing contest between students and university authorities, bloomed into a nationwide civil disturbance, with parts of Paris occupied and defended by rioters, a nationwide wild cat strike in which over 10 million people (30% of the national workforce) participated, and the President -De Gaulle - fleeing to Germany, and only returning after obtaining a guarantee that the military would stick with him.
After a month of protests, with marches featuring upwards of half a million protestors (are you reading this teabaggers), an uneasy peace was obtained when De Gaulle dissolved the Government , and called for new elections. Paradoxically, the left was so split between Socialists and Communists, that the right took a huge majority. De Gaulle who had not resigned, held on for another year, and was forced to resign after a referendum.
The people who participated in those protests became known as "soixantehuitards", and are a kind of aristocracy in the French left. One of the most famous leaders of the student movement at the time was Daniel Cohn Bendit, who is the current co_President of the Greens in the European Parliament.
Shown without comment.