Back to the barricades (again): What 1968 can teach students today
If you’ve assigned the opener and closer activities in our Atlantic Revolutions lessons (or any similar “what would make you protest?” prompt), you’ve probably heard student responses ranging from real firebrand stuff to apathy or helplessness. Today, students are watching protests unfold in real time on their phones, in their feeds, and sometimes in their own neighborhoods. As history teachers, we can provide tools and historical analogs that help young people grapple with a scary, unpredictable world— even when centuries-old revolutions feel a bit remote.
One way to help students make sense of unrest today is by covering a more recent example of unrest., Let’s examine the world revolution of 1968, when a generation of students drove a global year of protest.
Successful failure
In 1968, in nation after nation—in the capitalist west and the communist east, in West Africa, Latin America, and East Asia—youth joined together in protest, gestured vaguely at the world around them, and declared: “Enough of…this.”1
This was a global revolt of young against old: An antiwar, antiestablishment generation was rejecting the authority of a generation defined by war and trust in government. Across the globe, governments reacted with brutality. And nowhere in the world did the revolutionaries of 1968 achieve their goals of systemic change. Yet, this year of protest continues to shape our world.
The worldwide revolution of 1968 was history’s most successful failure.
OK, boomer
The protests of 1968 were a youth-led rebellion against institutions run by older, entrenched leaders. A post-1945 population boom meant that by 1968, there were more students than ever before, and universities expanded rapidly. More students meant more people living together, thinking together, organizing together. The postwar period also saw economic recovery and a boom in new technologies. Television transformed the landscape of protest. The Vietnam War was the first televised war, with graphic images and nightly reporting that shaped the public debate, eventually weakening public support for the war.
So, you send more kids to school than ever. You cram them into overcrowded university campuses that limit freedom of expression. You demand they read about rights and democracy while the world burns on the evening news. What could go wrong?
Voices of protest
By 1968, around the world, a lot of young people had a similar feeling: adults were lying. This generation, born after the Second World War and raised in an era of prosperity believed that their postwar governments—social democracies, communist republics, and populist movements of the global south—had failed to realize systemic change. Instead, the “Old Left” had taken the reins of state power, and rather than creating a classless society, had become the status quo and reinforced society’s old inequalities and injustices. The forgotten people of the world were left waiting, looking up, hoping that eventually, change would trickle down to them.
In each nation, the tenor of protests changed tune based on local conditions, but these movements learned from each other and shared grievances, goals, and tactics.
Universities in the late 1960s had become engines of revolution. In France, protesters at the Sorbonne and Nanterre decried university conditions and government repression. The parents of these students had fought in World War II and had fought against Algerian independence. Now, a couple of decades later, these students were holding up images of Che Guevara and voicing support for the Viet Cong fighting Americans in a former French colony.
The movement didn’t stay on campus. As police cracked down on protesters, workers joined the students in solidarity. Over 10 million took part in a general strike. For a moment, it looked like the state might crack.
All children rebel against their parents. But when you think of your parents as fascist war criminals, the tone of protest sounds different. In West Germany, Japan, and Italy, protests took on a decidedly more violent timbre. In West Germany, students took issue with former Nazis such as Chancellor Kiesinger running the government. These protesters were born after 1945. Their parents had voted for Hitler and had been indoctrinated by Nazi policies. In all three former Axis countries, protests quickly devolved into violent street fights with police.
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In Mexico, protesters faced off against President Ordaz, an authoritarian leader who was spending lavishly on the upcoming Olympic games. He wanted the world’s cameras pointed at Olympic stadiums, not student marches.
In several communist states of Eastern Europe, protesters also took to the streets. Events were most dramatic in Prague, where reformers, led by Alexander Dubček, took over the Communist Party. During the Prague Spring, Dubček offered “socialism with a human face,” loosening censorship and expanding debate. This can be a useful case for students to investigate because it complicates the “street protest” narrative of 1968. In the Prague Spring, the new generation weren’t political outsiders; they were young, new Party leaders who were trying to change the system from within.
Your students likely think of American politics today as chaotic. They’re not wrong, but a little bit of historical context might help them put things in perspective. In the United States of 1968, the world seemed to be falling apart.
In April of that year, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., sparked large uprisings in more than 100 cities. In June, Robert F. Kennedy was murdered just after winning the California Democratic primary. Grief, anger, and disillusionment echoed across the nation.
Universities like Berkeley, Columbia, and San Francisco State College emerged as epicenters of activism. Organizations like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) demanded the government end the war, expand civil rights, and democratize institutions.
Then came Chicago.
In late August, the Democratic Party gathered to nominate its presidential candidate. Just months earlier, President Johnson shocked the nation by announcing he would not run for a second term. Thousands of protesters traveled to Chicago: students, clergy, veterans, activists, and groups like SDS and the Yippies, who wanted to make the convention a global stage for the antiwar movement. They succeeded. The world was watching, but that did not stop a harsh government reaction. And it wasn’t just in Chicago. Globally, the protesters of 1968 often faced violent backlash by the police and military.
The machine rages back
In country after country, protesters demanded systemic, structural change. And in country after country, governments responded with extraordinary brutality. One lesson of 1968 is this: Repression often begins with permits denied, curfews enforced, lines of police in helmets, and the assertion that public space belongs to the state unless the state grants you permission to be there.
In France, President de Gaulle—a hero of World War II—sent tanks to the Paris suburbs. In Paris, police, riot squads, batons, tear gas, raids, and mass arrests marched to the drumbeat of official language about “order,” “stability,” and “security.” In West Germany, Japan, and Italy, police responded to student violence in kind. In each of these three cases, the state’s brutal response helped push a generation of organized political terrorism.
In Mexico, the government’s response escalated into gunfire, and culminated in the October 2 massacre at Tlatelolco, Mexico City. The killing of more than 300 protesters was followed by a campaign of arrests meant to break the movement before it could embarrass the regime at the Olympics.
In August, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. Despite widespread acts of nonviolent resistance, the reformers were cast down. The Soviets sent a message across the Eastern Bloc with the Brezhnev Doctrine: the USSR would intervene wherever it felt communist rule was threatened.
During the Democratic convention in Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley (a Democrat) treated protesters like invaders. Permits were denied, parks had strict curfews, and he flooded the streets with police and soldiers. Chants that “the whole world is watching” were met with police lines, tear gas, and mass arrests—all broadcast on national TV. Earlier that spring, after King’s assassination, Mayor Daley had given instructions to the police: “...shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand, because they're potential murderers, and...shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting.”
We’re still living in 1968
The protest movements of 1968 didn’t achieve their big demands: wars weren’t immediately ended, governments weren’t overthrown, economies weren’t remade, and repression wasn’t abolished. The barricades fell. Activists were arrested. In many places, the state got stronger. But 1968 did shatter blind trust in authority. It normalized protest as a legitimate feature of a democracy. This watershed year shifted politics on the left from an exclusive focus on class toward identity politics.
The “failures” of 1968 gave a voice to marginalized groups. For example, in these protest movements. women were generally not in leadership roles. They were expected to act as assistants to male leaders. In the wake of 1968, second-wave feminism, LGBTQ rights, environmentalism, antiracism, Black power, Indigenous rights, and other movements emerged. Today’s protest movements might use hashtags and livestreams instead of mimeograph machines, but the tactics draw from 1968: Disrupt normal life and force public attention.
The events of 1968 also offered lessons to governments, making later protests easier for authorities to absorb and ignore. In the US, the fallout of 1968 helped fuel “law and order” politics by triggering a countermovement, as conservatives aligned their messaging around opposition to cultural issues like abortion, gay rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment.
The transformations of 1968 still shape politics today—for better and worse. They didn’t overthrow the legitimacy of the state, but these students still changed the world.
If you’re looking for ways to tie 1968 into your world-history curriculum, you have a lot of options.
- Have students compare the patterns of 1968 to the world revolution of 1848. In both cases, a similar pattern appears: People revolt, broad coalitions fail, the status quo grows stronger, but new ideas spread.
- Ask students to claim-test the statement that “the protests of 1968 failed.”
- As a class, create an annotated world map or timeline of the global events of 1968.
- If you would like to use 1968 to talk about protests in our world today, you might ask students to draw general comparisons between now and then:
- What are the protesters trying to change?
- What tactics do protesters use to get attention?
- How does the state respond (concessions, policing, propaganda, arrests)?
- How does media shape what counts as “peaceful,” “violent,” or “reasonable”?
- Who gets called “rioters” or “domestic terrorists” versus “protesters” or “activists”?
1 The most famous protests of 1968 were those in the United States and France. But there were significant protests and riots in Japan, Pakistan, Finland, South Africa, Sweden, Jamaica, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Northern Ireland, Mexico, West Germany, Ecuador, Tunisia, Yugoslavia, Chile, and Ecuador—in democracies and autocracies, in governments both communist and capitalist. These movements were not confined to 1968, of course. This period lasted from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s; however, 1968 was the watershed year.
About the author: Bennett Sherry holds a PhD in history from the University of Pittsburgh and has undergraduate teaching experience in world history, human rights, and the Middle East. Bennett writes about refugees and international organizations in the twentieth century and is one of the historians working on the OER Project courses.
Header image: Composite image, inset image is the Anti-War March in Chicago prior to the 1968 Democratic National Convention. By David Wilson, CC BY 2.0.