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Be realistic, demand the impossible - May 68 in photos

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Fifty years ago this month, student protests in Paris morphed into huge demonstrations across the country, in scenes recorded in iconic images by Gilles Caron, Bruno Barbey, and Claude Dityvon

Half a century on, the events of May ‘68 still burn in the memories of its provocateurs. Morphing from a frenzy of student protests into a nation-wide revolt, embroiling seven million people at its height, France was dragged out of its post-war complacency that summer and into seven weeks of turbulent action and police brutality.

The fire of the rebellion was first sparked on Valentine’s Day, when students of Nanterre University in the Western suburbs of Paris, held a residents’ strike to promote the right to move freely between male and female dorms. The university hesitated over making any change, so on 22 March, 600 frustrated students gathered to occupy an administration building in protest against the old institution’s ageing values.

By 02 May, after months of boycotted exams, vandalism, and campus protests, the administration shut down the university. It was a move that reeked of hostility to hundreds of students all across the city, and on 03 May they rallied in the courtyards of Sorbonne University central Paris, hurling whatever they could find at police – who waded in with batons and handcuffs. By the end of the first night of rioting, the police had locked up over 600 students.

At the centre of this revolt was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a young man famously photographed by Gilles Caron (1939 – 1970). Caron’s iconic images of May ’68 – and of other major conflicts of the 60s – are on show at Photo London this weekend, including this portrait of Cohn-Bendit.
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The rebel stands, with a small but confident grin, opposite the looming figure of a CRS officer [French riot police] in a portrait that Olivier Castaing, curator of the show, describes as an image of confrontation between youths and authority.

The image made it to the front pages of the national press the morning after the first night of the barricades but, while they were originally made for the press, Castaing says that Caron’s photographs now find themselves in the artistic field too, giving “importance to photojournalistic images and their aesthetic qualities”.

According to Castaing, Caron was a short man of around 5’4”, and in 1968 he was only 28 years old. Naturally he fit in with the protestors, and he also sympathised with them. Tragically, by 1970 he had disappeared on the road between Cambodia and Vietnam, but in five years he had made his mark in the history of photography, says Castaing – producing iconic images of five of the major conflicts of the 60s, including the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, and of course, May ‘68.

Portraits of students flinging cobblestones became a symbolic element in Caron’s photography, but the violence quickly escalated. Parked cars were flipped over to create barricades against the police, who responded by firing swarms of tear gas. Over just a week, what had been a student demonstration had grown to encompass 20,000 people, including teachers, artists, filmmakers and civilians, who flowed out onto the streets of the Latin Quarter demanding that Nanterre University be reopened, and that the charges on the detained students be dropped.

“I’ve never seen such violence in a western capital as I saw in Paris that month,” Magnum photographer Bruno Barbey has said – another image-maker whose coverage of May ’68 has become iconic. Shots of the police’s heavy-handed response sparked sympathy for the protestors, he told The Guardian in an article published on 21 August, but it also meant that the photographers became targets.

Journalists were chased down the street for their cameras, says Barbey, and – after images of people throwing stones were used as evidence for arrest – the protestors began to view the cameras with suspicion, making it increasingly difficult to document what was happening.
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Boulevard St Michel

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Gay Lussac Street, Paris, France

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Barricade built out of movie posters, Rue de Lyon, near the Bastille, Paris, France

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On the Barricades on Boulevard St Germain

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Medic, Boulevard St Germain

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