"1968 was the last huge explosion of students and workers, which nearly brought the state down," declared far-left political leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon as he vocally endorsed the massive wave of high school and university riots paralyzing France in late 2026.
As hundreds of thousands of students set up blockades, clash with riot police, and burn high school gates over education cuts, Mélenchon and his allies have explicitly weaponized the legacy of May '68, arguing that today's street violence is a legitimate rerun of a glorious past—a necessary and effective force that will ultimately break the executive branch and compel the government to surrender.
To the modern French left, the message to the youth is clear: the barricade is the only language the state understands, and because the riots of 1968 successfully transformed France, the riots of 2026 will do the same.
The popular myth of May 1968 frames the student riots as a triumphant uprising that shattered a rigid society and catalysed a cultural revolution. The historical reality, however, is far more sobering. For all the fiery rhetoric, barricades, and economic paralysis, the French students won remarkably little—a reality openly admitted by their own leaders over the subsequent decades. What they mistook for a revolutionary dawn was merely a series of minor bureaucratic pacifications.
The profound cultural and social liberalizations they rioted for had already occurred across the English Channel in the United Kingdom, entirely without the need for violent civil unrest. This divergence reveals a fundamental truth about the two nations: their opposing mechanisms of governance, a historical pattern hardcoded into both cultures since 1968 and stretching back to 1789.
In the wake of the riots, the French state did not collapse; it adapted to neutralize the threat. The resulting Edgar Faure Act of November 1968 was not a revolutionary dismantling of patriarchal society, but a shrewd bureaucratic reorganization. While it broke up rigid, centralized university structures and gave students voting seats on newly created administrative councils, ultimate power over budgets, curricula, and degrees remained firmly in the hands of the state.
Years later, prominent student leaders like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Marxist-Leninist hardliners acknowledged that their grand political revolution had failed. They recognized that French capitalism had simply co-opted their rebellion, offering superficial administrative adjustments and consumer liberties in place of structural change. The core reason the French youth felt compelled to tear up the cobblestones of Paris was that the French state left them no alternative.
The political system of the Fifth Republic was an inflexible, top-down bottleneck that suppressed social evolution. Conversely, the United Kingdom had already achieved a sweeping cultural revolution by the late 1960s—legalizing abortion, decriminalizing homosexuality, abolishing theatre censorship, and lowering the voting age—through standard, peaceful parliamentary legislation. This is the legacy of our revolution. We cut a king’s head off but eventually realised that a republic, especially Cromwell’s repressive theocratic military dictatorship was a disaster. John Lilburne et al ended up by learning a lesson that Cohn-Bendit didn’t (how much had he read about the Interregnum one wonders?), constitutional monarchy turns out to be the best instrument for guaranteeing that a military elite will not take power. Or, as the distinguished French statesman Chateaubriand put it, “Constitutional monarchy has always seemed to me the gentlest and surest path to complete liberty.”
In the UK, the political system operates with flexibility and pragmatism; it serves as a safety valve, bending to accommodate shifting societal values so that citizens do not need to riot to force a change of mind.
In France, the government is structurally rigid. Historically, the state resists evolution until it is faced with an existential crisis, meaning that the only way to compel it to change course is either to completely replace it at the ballot box or to apply severe, violent pressure on the streets.
This behavioural pattern is not unique to 1968; it has defined the political histories of both nations since the watershed year of 1789. This reliance on street violence to break political gridlock is the defining feature of modern French history, which has seen no fewer than five republics, two empires, two constitutional monarchies, and a collaborationist regime since 1789. When the French state refuses to bend, it is routinely broken.
Following the catastrophic violence of the 1789 Revolution, the state was violently remade by Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (1799), which eventually established the First Empire. When the restored Bourbon monarchy attempted to clamp down on liberties, it took the armed street battles of the July Revolution of 1830 to depose them. Just eighteen years later, when the subsequent July Monarchy became similarly rigid, it was entirely dismantled by the Revolution of 1848, giving birth to the Second Republic—which itself was promptly assassinated from within by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s bloody coup d'état of 1851. When that Second Empire collapsed in 1870, the transition to the Third Republic was immediately baptized in blood by the brutal civil war of the Paris Commune of 1871, where tens of thousands were slaughtered on the barricades.
The only time the French didn’t rise up to bring down their government was when Pétain formed a highly popular fascist regime, which started hunting down French Jews and sending them off to be murdered by the Germans.
Even the birth of the current Fifth Republic in 1958 was not a product of peaceful legislative evolution, but rather the result of an imminent military coup d'état led by disgruntled army officers in Algiers, which successfully forced the collapsing Fourth Republic to hand total executive power to Charles de Gaulle.
From 1789 to May 1968, and directly into the street clashes of late 2026, the French state has never evolved through gradual consensus; it has only ever moved when a knife is held to its throat.
Lacking a flexible institutional safety valve, French political history is a jagged timeline of rigidity followed by explosive collapse—oscillating through republics, empires, restorations, and coups. Because the state refuses to bend, it must routinely be broken.
Ultimately, this is the true, enduring legacy of the French Revolution. By anchoring its political culture on the trauma and triumph of 1789, France institutionalized a toxic dynamic: the government rules from a position of absolute rigidity, but operates under a permanent, latent terror of its own population. May 1968 was simply a modern reenactment of this historical cycle. The state barricaded itself against change, the population rioted to break the gridlock, and the government quickly surrendered minor bureaucratic baubles to pacify the crowds and preserve its survival. It is a cycle of governance that the French political class has never managed to escape.
PS the painting ('The Storming of the Tuileries on 10 August 1792' by Jacques Bertaux) shows my ancestor, Dominique la Gan, a leading sans-culotte (detail)