The Long '68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies (ePub)

The year 1968 was marked by an extraordinary scale of protests throughout the Western world. In terms of scope, intensity and consequences, everything that happened then can be likened to a world revolution. Millions of French workers strike, the radicalization of university youth, protests against the Vietnam War, the struggle for minority rights and social justice - the echo of the "long 68" continues to resonate with modernity even fifty years later. Richard Vinen, historian and professor at King's College London, sees these events not as a single milestone, but as a whole historical period that lasted from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. This is the first attempt to consider from a transnational perspective the totality of the protest movements and uprisings unfolding in the prosperous industrial countries - the United States of America, France, Great Britain and West Germany. The author tries to find out why the developed democracies of the West suddenly found themselves on the verge of a nervous breakdown and how the protests affected various social groups - youth, women, workers, sexual minorities. A separate place is given to the combination of revolutionary violence and political conciliation, which was demonstrated in 1968 - a time of radical demands and unfulfilled hopes.