1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies - Hardcover

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Richard Vinen is a professor of history at King’s College London. He is the author of academic works, most recently National Service, 1945-1963, which won the 2015 Wolfson History Prize, as well as A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, The Unfree French, and Thatcher's Britain.

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1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the Western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary—around ten million French workers went on strike and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained but had profound, longer-term implications: terrorist groups, feminist collectives, and gay rights activists can all trace important roots to 1968. Bill Clinton and even Tony Blair are, in many ways, products of that year.

1968 is a striking and original attempt, half a century later, to show how these events, from anti-war marches in the United States to revolts against Soviet oppression in Eastern Europe—which in some respects still seem so current—stemmed from histories and societies that are in practice now extraordinarily remote from our own time. Richard Vinen pursues the story into the 1970s to show both the ever more violent forms of radicalization that arose from 1968 and the brutal reactions from those in power that brought the era to an end.