Annabelle Quince: The 1960s and particularly 1968 was a time of social and political unrest and demonstration, and nowhere more so than in France. On May 13, 1968, students and workers joined together in Paris in one of the largest protests France had seen. They threatened the stability of the national government and arguably shifted the way we think about protests and political demonstrations forever.

Fifty years on we still remember what happened in France, yet that is just a small part of the story of 1968. On every continent, in almost every nation on earth, student unrest and protests became the norm. So why in 1968? And what were all these students protesting about?

Hello, I'm Annabelle Quince and this is Rear Vision on RN.

So why, if there were protests and demonstrations everywhere, do we focus on France? Gerd-Rainer Horn is Professor of 20th Century Political History and author of The Spirit of '68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956-1976.

Gerd-Rainer Horn: Paris and France is of course always in the centre of attention when people talk about 1968 because you have a major period of student unrest, but coupled with a 2- to 3-week-long general strike, blue-collar, white collar workers all across France were literally on strike, and France back then was the fifth biggest industrial power on the planet, so it made a big difference. So that's the reason why people focus on France. But you're absolutely right, that things happened in many, many other locations. Literally every single country in Western Europe was affected by a major bout of student unrest, and that was literally universal, from Scandinavia to Portugal to Italy to Great Britain.

What also happened in Southern Europe, what I like to call Mediterranean Europe, is that you had a major involvement of working-class social movements that combined with the student unrest, which gave the southern European dimension of 1968 a special flavour.

Eastern Europe under Communist regimes then also saw quite a number of flare-ups, the most famous one is the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, but there were also major upheavals spearheaded mostly by university students again in Poland and even more so in Yugoslavia. Even Eastern European societies were quite a bit affected by that spirit of '68. But then on top of this you had events in other continents of the world.

Journalist [archival]: In 1968 here was Paris, Chicago, Prague and finally Mexico City. Mexican students were on the march, challenging an authoritarian government that claimed to be democratic.

Zachary Scarlett: Protests both large and small were breaking out all over the world. Some of the larger ones were in places like Prague, in Czechoslovakia where students confronted the Soviet Union over reforms that the government had initially proposed to loosen up society and diminish censorship.

Annabelle Quince: Zachary Scarlett is Assistant Professor of History at Butler University and co-editor of The Third World in the Global 1960s.

Zachary Scarlett: In Mexico City there was in fact a very bloody confrontation between Mexican students and the government over issues of political freedoms, student rights, the Olympics which were held in Mexico City in October of 1968. In Tokyo there was a pretty significant protest over US military involvement, the presence of the US military on the Japanese islands, and in the United States, including most significantly in Chicago.

Crowd chanting [archival]: Peace now! Peace now!

Zachary Scarlett: In the summer of 1968 the Democrats held their national convention in Chicago. They were met there with quite significant protest marches in the streets of Chicago, students demanding an end to the Vietnam War, a greater and more robust platform that addressed civil rights. But the Mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, met them with police force, and there was essentially a police riot in Chicago. Students were beaten by the police. This went on for a few nights, and the city and the convention itself really devolved into chaos. So those are I think the major protests that broke out. But quite significant in many of these cities, they really in some cases challenged the government itself and posed a real threat to power.

Annabelle Quince: So why did so many students from around the globe take to the streets in 1968?

Gerd-Rainer Horn: In my view when I talk about les années '68, or The Long '60s is the term that is quite often used in the English language, for me it begins in 1956 and runs all the way to 1976, that along mobilisation cycle. 1956 saw in Eastern Europe, for instance, the Hungarian uprising and the Polish uprising against the Stalinist dictatorships. In Western Europe you had also the birth of the new left, very important, a new feature on the political horizon of not just a European but a North American society. The new left actually was born in virtually every single country, you can trace it back to 1956. For various sometimes local and national reasons but also having to do with events like the Suez crisis, the Algerian revolution and things along these lines.

So, the build-up, in my view, really starts in 1956 and then picks up speed in the early '60s when student movements develop in one country after the other. And here actually the big inspiration, if there's one big international inspiration for the development, the one social movement that taught students the politics of protest was the American Civil Rights movement which of course started also in the mid '50s, in some ways even earlier but it's in the mid '50s when it really picks up speed.

So, in the United States, which of course was one of the strongholds of 1968, in the United States it was the civil rights movement that was the very first massive social movement. University students only began to mobilise from, let's say, 1964, '65 onwards, and it's university students who had learned the tricks of the trade of the politics of protest in the civil rights movement who became the early leaders of the student movement at universities across the country in the United States. And from there of course it sort of swept across the Atlantic and Pacific to other places. So the build-up begins in '56, picks up speed in the early '60s, and then in very many countries the climax, so to speak, is in 1968 itself.

Journalist [archival]: In 1963, 78 Americans died in Vietnam and the civil rights casualty lists grew ever longer. On the same day that Medgar Evers was gunned down in front of his home in Jackson. Mississippi, June 11th, 1963, a drama of historic proportions was unfolding on the campus of the University of Alabama.

Zachary Scarlett: The civil rights movement was one of the catalysts of radical protests in the 1960s. Many of the radical students who would become very active in the late 1960s were directly inspired by the civil rights movement. Many of them in fact got their training in the civil rights movement. In 1964, for example, there was a major push in the United States to send students to Mississippi to help register black voters there. And so they became familiar with the rhythms of protest of this language that people like Dr Martin Luther King were using to articulate their critiques of American society. They linked up, they met each other. That might seem like something very trivial but it actually formed these connections that would become crucial political networks as the 1960s wore on.

Many people were simply flabbergasted by the fact that the United States, claiming to be this democratic, liberal society that was in diametric opposition to the tyranny of the Soviet Union still treated its citizens in this manner. This really laid bare the yawning gap between American aspirations in the form of creating equal egalitarian and open societies and American reality in which black people in this country still couldn't vote, couldn't go to school in some instances, faced a series of very difficult obstacles based on their race. That hypocrisy I think really outraged people not just in the United States but around the world.

The other aspect of the civil rights movement that connected people was the fact that many civil rights leaders themselves saw their movement as part and parcel of the larger struggle against racism in places like Africa specifically. Martin Luther King Jr attended the Independence Day of Ghana, one of the first independent African nations to shed off its colonial masters. It wasn't a coincidence. He believed that this was a part of the larger struggle for the freedom of black people, not just in United States but around the world.

Annabelle Quince: You're with Rear Vision on RN, I'm Annabelle Quince.

By the end of the 1960s, the post World War II generation was coming of age. What part, if any, did this play in these global protests?

Zachary Scarlett: Quite a significant part I think. The generation gap was one of the major precipitating forces of the 1960s, and we can specifically think about this in a couple of ways. The first is the fact that in the wake of World War II, particularly in Europe and the United States, despite the fact that the war was so devastating there was a general sense of optimism, of a feeling that these societies that had come out of World War II were going to create a much better life for the people coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. We saw this in, for example, the expansion of higher education which was a global phenomenon. For the first time ever, more and more students were able to attend college and university.

We also saw this in the emphasis on consumption and the idea that consumer products can make one's life easier, more comfortable. That idea which had been pushed on this generation that's took to the streets in the 1960s I think for many people proved to be hollow. This idea that they had grown up in this post World War II almost utopia of promise, of comfort, of an emphasis on consumption, as they reached their late teens and early 20s and beyond, they started to look around and say a lot of this is false promise. And I think specifically what motivated a lot of these students was a feeling of hypocrisy from their parents, that this just was not the world that they had hoped for and they therefore sought to change it. So I think certainly there is a connection between this generation that had grown up…mostly been born after World War II and came of age right around 1968.

Annabelle Quince: And was that as true in parts of the developing world as well?

Zachary Scarlett: Yes, great question, I think absolutely. In this instance though it was motivated not by emphasis on comfort, consumption, promise, but on the idea of what decolonisation would offer. Many nations in the wake of World War II were granted or gained their independence. In 1960, for example, more than a dozen African nations were founded in that year alone. So this was a period in which these long colonial struggles, some of which had lasted for 100 or 150 years, were finally finding success, and when nations were granted their independence. That came with a tremendous amount of euphoria, of a feeling that this was turning a corner, a new day had begun.

But just like in Europe and the United States, the children who had grown up in this very hopeful society, by the late 1960s were also beginning to realise that some of the promises of decolonisation were hollow and not been realised. In this instance I think in places like Asia and Africa specifically, the idea of the nation-state creating a more egalitarian society, a freer society, a more democratic society in many states proved simply to be false. And students were incredibly angry and disappointed that the promise of colonisation and the promise of a more open society was really being diminished by governments, some of which were turning increasingly towards authoritarianism.

Annabelle Quince: One of the first student protests to break in 1968 was in Dakar Senegal. Heike Becker is Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

Heike Becker: Students went on strike at the university in Dakar in late March 1968, and then throughout April they developed connections with organisations, associations, particularly also from workers that were outside the university. From there there were these kind of marches in the streets of the Dakar and they were asking for specifically more affordable staples, food, rice particularly, bring down the price of rice.

You had then a number of large demonstrations that carried on into late May when the government went into retreat. And then in early June they brought in the army and crushed very brutally the demonstrations that were happening at the time then by students.

Annabelle Quince: In lots of ways it did parallel what happened in France, and yet those unrests in Dakar actually began before the protests in France.

Heike Becker: Well, they were parallel in the sense that they happened at about the same time and that they were led by students. In Senegal the main reason was actually a kind of what we would call today austerity politics, issues of bread and butter. It started at the university with the students getting upset about their living situations. And then linking up with the trade unions and with the workers outside. So a lot of it was about the high price of food and these kind of politics. So in that sense if you would say parallel to what happened in France.

When we speak about global 1968 is that indeed it there was uprisings across the globe, but if you look into it you have quite different reasons behind what happened. Even within Europe you have different reasons what happened, for instance, in France and in Germany. What is perhaps interesting is that this was a period coming about 20-odd years after the end of World War II where it seems a generation across the globe picked up local and national political issues that were quite specific in many ways to their own countries but sort of rose up in connection.

But what perhaps made it the first global uprising was also I think in many countries it was the first wave of politics that was reported by the mass media, television particularly. In a way it was the first revolution that was televised. I think that's one of the interesting things, which also then helped people to understand what happened in other parts of the world. When you look at what happened in South Africa, in Cape Town at the time where there was no TV as yet in South Africa, TV was only introduced in 1976, but the students were, for instance, through the BBC and other broadcasting networks, very much aware of what was happening, for instance, in Europe, in Paris, in West Berlin, in London. So in some way they also got some inspiration from that. So perhaps I think the mass media played a role for making it a global event.

Zachary Scarlett: Television was one of the mediums that certainly connected the world and brought these images into people's living rooms. This was particularly true not just of the protests which students suddenly saw and more importantly recognised themselves in other students marching through the streets, but also in some of the very calamitous events that occurred in the 1960s, most specifically the impact of television on radical politics is probably clearly manifested in the war in Vietnam.

Especially students in the United States but in Europe and all over the world began to see images coming back from Vietnam, they were really quite horrified and shocked. This was the first war in which the events, the daily events of the war were reported on the news on a nightly basis. The other really fascinating and amazing thing about the Vietnam War was how uncensored many of these newscasts were. The American army has, since Vietnam, taken a very different approach towards journalists embedded with army units. In this instance though they allowed a lot of the imagery of the Vietnam War to be broadcast in the United States, and specifically what this did was it made people feel more connected to the war, it made people really live and confront the horrors of the war. This was not something that they could easily ignore, even though it was happening many thousands of miles away from the United States. And that was true not just in the United States but all over the world. This was a war that was not hidden, these atrocities, the difficulties, the sacrifices that American soldiers were making was something that people were being inundated with, confronting on almost a daily basis.

Gerard De Groot: I think what galvanised people in the 1960s about Vietnam was because it seemed so hypocritical.

Annabelle Quince: Gerard De Groot is Professor of 20th Century History from the University of St Andrews, and author of Student Protest: The Sixties and After.

Gerard De Groot: Before Vietnam, America was really the hero, she still was cashing in on her heroic status that she earned during the Second World War, and she was the sort of liberal democratic beacon for the world. And then when the United States went in so heavily into Vietnam, it seemed like a complete contradiction of American values. And so there was this crushing despondency, it's like your hero suddenly has feet of clay. There is this sense of alienation with the United States and what she represented, she seemed to become in a very short time a sort of new imperialist country.

Television was huge in terms of destroying America's reputation. You see so many iconic images, the image of the little girl being burned by napalm, the image of the Vietcong being executed in the street, the image of Kent State where the students are being shot down, these are all connected to Vietnam and they sort of feed in to the soundbite sort of generation which gets its news not just in a global sense but also in a rather reductive sense through images or through short statements.

Zachary Scarlett: We almost have to, when we think about 1968 and the '60s in general, adopt a type of double vision in which we simultaneously recognise the larger global connections of these protests but also acknowledge that they were very much rooted in local matters. So, for instance, in a place like Mexico City, students there were very connected to global cultural trends, to new ideas that were emanating from places like the United States. They were caught up in this sort of democratic free wave that had emerged. The fashion of protest was very much in vogue. And I think they were certainly taking influence and direction from protesters in the United States and around the world.

On the other hand, they were also responding to very local issues. They had specific concerns rooted in Mexican society, about the government, about the nature of the ruling political party and its relationship to Mexican society, about feelings of a gap that had opened up between the students' expectations and the reality of the world they were facing. So I think the answer is yes, there were certainly global connections. But much of the planning, much of the impetus for these protests remained quite local and addressed very local issues. You know, the inspiration came from the outside, but when students actually took to the streets they looked at their own communities, their own governments, their own nations to make their demands.

Annabelle Quince: What, if anything, remains of the legacy of 1968, and why, 50 years on, should we bother to remember it?

Gerard De Groot: History tends to get written by people who are sympathetic toward the left, and because of that they tend to overemphasise what the left has actually achieved. And I think I'm guilty of that myself. And as a result we find the right a little bit boring and we don't notice, for instance, that while the left in the 1960s was making a great deal of noise, the right was busy organising in a rather dull and understated and boring fashion.

The Young Americans for Freedom was a student group on campuses, it was a right-wing group. It had more members than did the Students for a Democratic Society, the left-wing group. But the Students for a Democratic Society gets the lion's share of attention in histories of the 1960s. And so what's happening is rather quietly the right is organising at the same time that the left is revolting and also alienating the sort of middle strata of society. The ordinary Americans or ordinary French, ordinary British are getting increasingly tired of all the noise and agitation and they are turning rightward.

And so I think part of this resurgence of the right in the 1960s is because they were very good at organising, but also it is because the left over the course of the decade began to be seen as rather despicable.

Zachary Scarlett: I think we still see the 1960s as important because of the fact that the legacies are still so deeply embedded in our societies, not just in the western world but everywhere around the globe. In a lot of ways I think that in the United States specifically we are still grappling with the outcomes of the 1960s, so much so that I would wager that if I stopped 100 people on the street who were alive in the 1960s and asked them their attitude towards this decade, I could still determine their political leanings in 2018.

It seems to be the point of departure for a lot of people, especially in the United States, for how they compose and view the world. And the specific legacies, not just in personal and individual politics but also in how protest movements are composed today I think are directly related to the 1960s, things like the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter are heavily influenced by the 1960s. I think much of our music and culture still stems from the influence of the 1960s. It may have changed in style and in its direction but much of the ideas of the 1960s still remain in culture.

And we haven't yet mentioned things like feminism, environmentalism which very much have their roots in the 1960s or come out of the spirit of the 1960s, the language of protest itself that was generated in the 1960s I still think remains central to how protest movements composed themselves, how they build their slogans, how they confront power. A lot of this is taken directly from the example of the 1960s. And so this question of when the 1960s ends and its legacy I think is most apparent in the fact that in a lot of ways the 1960s hasn't ended yet, we are still grappling with many of these most basic ideas.

Annabelle Quince: Zachary Scarlett, co-editor of The Third World in the Global 1960s. You also heard from: Gerard De Groot, author of Student Protest: The Sixties and After; Heike Becker, Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape; and Gerd-Rainer Horn, author of The Spirit of '68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956-1976.

The sound engineer is Russel Stapleton. I'm Annabelle Quince and you've been listening to Rear Vision on RN.