Postwar Paris has remained no stranger to political battles in its streets. Violent demonstrations accompanied the Communist withdrawal from the coalition government in 1947. In the 1950s, the Left took to the streets again in protest against the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. And, in 1961, in one of the most shameful episodes in modern French history, some two hundred Algerians were killed by the police during a civil rights demonstration. 

This " secret massacre ", which remained covered by a veil of total official silence until the 1990s, took place during the Algerian war. It began with a peaceful demonstration against a curfew on North Africans imposed by de Gaulle's government in an attempt to inhibit FLN resistance activity in the French capital. Whether the police were acting on higher orders or merely on the authority of their own commanders is not clear, but, according to hundreds of eyewitness accounts, including some from horrified policemen, the police opened fire on the protesters, clubbing people and throwing them into the Seine to drown. For weeks afterwards the French media remained silent, in part through censorship, in part perhaps unable to comprehend that such events had happened in their owncapital. 

The state attempted censorship again during the events of May 1968 , though with rather less success. Throughout this extraordinary month, a radical, libertarian, Leftist movement spread from the Paris universities to factories across the country, producing a general strike by nine million workers. This general dissatisfaction with society, big business and institutionalized oppression sparked a growing Women's Movement and political interest in civil rights. 

Elections were called in June to return the Right to power. The occupied buildings emptied and the barricades in the Latin Quarter came down. For those who thought they were experiencing the Revolution, the defeat was catastrophic. But French institutions and French society did change, shaken and loosened by the events of May 1968. Most importantly, it opened up the debate of a new road to socialism, one in which no old models would give all the answers