Street-fighting years
Recommends an impressive new account of a time when violence and unrest erupted across the globe
The Long ’68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies by Richard Vinen Allen Lane, 464 pages, £20
What did the late 1960s look like? Those who are old enough to remember them often look back nostalgically on an era of affluence, creativity, youthful idealism and sexual adventure.d However, as Richard Vinen reminds us, there was another version of the 1960s – one of protest, unrest and frequent violence.
Vinen defines ‘1968’ not as a single year, but as a phenomenon with roots in the early 1960s and consequences that lasted long afterwards. At the core of his book is a comparison between four nations that experienced radical protest during this era: the US, France, West Germany and Britain. Unfortunately, he doesn’t cover events outside the industrialised west, such as the Prague spring or the violent protests that took place in Mexico just before the Olympic Games. This is a shame, but not surprising. Vinen is an expert on western European history, particularly on Britain and France. Rather sensibly for someone who is tackling such a labyrinthine subject, he has stuck to what he knows best.
This said, his longest chapter is not about Europe at all, but about America, where the spirit of ’68 was first born. He traces the movement from the peaceful civil rights demonstrations early in the decade through to the more violent anti-Vietnam protests later on. The violence, he stresses, came from both sides. After Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, for example, riots broke out in 125 cities, causing around $100m in damage. Four months later, the tables were turned when police aggressively put down a peaceful demonstration outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago. According to one woman, “It was like the Bastille stormed us”.
In France, the protests were much less violent, but no less dramatic. Events here took place in a more intense timescale than anywhere else, exploding onto the streets of Paris at the beginning of May 1968, but fizzling out a month later. Much recent scholarship on France in 1968 tries to describe events in other parts of the country but, according to Vinen, Paris was always at the centre of events.
In West Germany, meanwhile, the protest movement took the form of a battle between the generations. Those who came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s were intensely aware of what their parents’ generation had done during the Second World War, and were unwilling to forgive them for the compromises they had made with Nazism. Students regularly called those in power “Nazis”, regardless of whether or not they had been members of the party – as of course many of them had been. According to a CIA report on “Restless Youth” in Germany, the
In West Germany, the protest movement took the form of a battle between the generations