While the Vietnam War raged, the counterculture became increasingly radical. In western European and North American cities, students and sympathetic followers organized massive antiwar demonstrations and then extended their protests to support colonial independence movements, demand an end to the nuclear arms race, and call for world peace and liberation from social conventions of all kinds.

Political activism erupted in 1968 in a series of protests and riots that circled the globe. One of the most famous and perhaps far-reaching of these revolts occurred in France in May 1968. The “May Events” began when a group of students, dismayed by conservative university policies and inspired by New Left ideals, occupied buildings at the University of Paris. Violent clashes with police followed. When police tried to clear the area around the university on the night of May 10, a pitched street battle took place.

The “May Events” might have been a typically short-lived student protest, but the demonstrations triggered a national revolt. By May 18, some 10 million workers were out on strike, and protesters occupied factories across France. For a brief moment, it seemed as if counterculture dreams of a revolution from below would come to pass. The French Fifth Republic was on the verge of collapse, and a shaken President de Gaulle surrounded Paris with troops.

In the end, however, the goals of the radical students did not correspond to the bread-and-butter demands of the striking workers. When the government promised workplace reforms, including immediate pay raises, the strikers returned to work. President de Gaulle dissolved the French parliament and called for new elections. His conservative party won almost 75 percent of the seats, showing that the majority of the French people supported neither general strikes nor student-led revolutions.

Counterculture protests generated a great deal of excitement and trained a generation of activists. In the end, however, the protests of the sixties generation resulted only in short-term, limited political change. Lifestyle rebellions involving sex, drugs, and rock music expanded the boundaries of acceptable personal behavior, but they hardly overturned the existing system.