AP Syllabus focus:
'Women’s, civil rights, and gay and lesbian movements gained prominence as intellectuals and youth challenged bourgeois materialism.'
In the late 1960s, protest in Europe shifted from older class-based politics toward struggles over culture, identity, and personal freedom, with 1968 becoming the symbolic high point of this change.
What Made These Movements “New”?
Postwar Europe had become more prosperous, urban, and educated. Expanding universities created large student populations, while mass media spread shared images of protest across borders. Many younger Europeans felt that traditional political parties, churches, schools, and families were too hierarchical and too closely tied to conformity. As a result, activism increasingly focused on daily life, social values, and personal autonomy rather than only wages or parliamentary reform.
These protests are often grouped as new social movements because they centered on rights, identity, and culture as much as on economic class.
New social movements: Protest movements that focused on issues such as gender equality, civil rights, sexuality, identity, and quality of life, rather than only on traditional party politics or class conflict.
These movements often emphasized direct action, demonstrations, consciousness-raising, and cultural critique. They did not always seek immediate control of the state; instead, they aimed to transform relationships between men and women, majorities and minorities, and individuals and institutions.
A major target was bourgeois materialism, which many students and intellectuals associated with consumerism, social conformity, and narrow middle-class respectability.
Bourgeois materialism: A value system associated with middle-class society that prioritizes property, consumption, career success, and social order over deeper social equality, personal freedom, or cultural change.
Thinkers linked to the New Left argued that even a wealthy society could remain oppressive if it encouraged obedience, sexism, racism, and passive acceptance of authority.
The Revolts of 1968
Students, Universities, and Authority
Universities became major centers of unrest because they symbolized both opportunity and control. Students protested overcrowding, rigid curricula, disciplinary rules, and the lack of democratic participation in academic life. Their complaints quickly widened into criticism of bureaucracy, capitalism, and the social expectations imposed by older generations.
Student protest also had a powerful moral and cultural dimension. Many young people believed that affluent European societies had become comfortable but spiritually empty. They rejected a world organized around exams, careers, consumption, and deference to authority. In this sense, the revolt of 1968 was not only political; it was also a rebellion against values.
France and the Wider European Wave
The best-known case was May 1968 in France.
Photographed in Paris in July 1968, this image shows walls covered with protest posters left in the wake of the May events. It illustrates how the revolts of 1968 operated not only through marches and strikes but also through a highly visible “battle of ideas” in public space, where slogans and graphics challenged authority and bourgeois norms. Source
Student demonstrations in Paris escalated into campus occupations, street fighting, and a vast general strike involving millions of workers. Although the government survived, the events revealed how rapidly discontent with authority could spread from universities to factories and offices.
Similar protests appeared elsewhere in Western Europe, especially in places where younger generations felt blocked by conservative institutions. Common themes included:
anti-authoritarianism
demands for participatory democracy
criticism of consumer society
rejection of rigid social and sexual norms
The revolts of 1968 therefore became a symbol of wider dissatisfaction with bourgeois values and established power structures.
Major New Social Movements
Women’s Movements
Women’s movements gained force in the late 1960s and 1970s. Activists argued that formal legal equality had not eliminated discrimination in employment, education, pay, or political life. They also challenged the assumption that women should be defined mainly by marriage, motherhood, and domestic service.
Key themes included:
criticism of patriarchy, or male-dominated social structures
demands for equal opportunity
insistence that private life was also political
resistance to stereotypes about femininity and family roles
A major achievement of feminism was to broaden politics beyond parliaments and parties. Issues inside the home, workplace, and school became subjects of public debate.
Civil Rights Movements
Civil rights movements in Europe addressed racism, exclusion, and unequal treatment. As European societies became more diverse, activists pressed for equal access to housing, education, employment, and public respect. They also challenged discriminatory policing and racial stereotypes.
These movements expanded the meaning of democracy. Rights were no longer understood only as voting or formal citizenship; they increasingly included social dignity, equal treatment, and recognition in everyday life. Civil rights activism pushed European societies to confront injustices that economic growth alone had not solved.
Gay and Lesbian Movements
Gay and lesbian movements also became more visible after 1968.
Activists rejected older views that treated homosexuality as a crime, a sickness, or a shameful secret. Instead, they emphasized public visibility, dignity, and the right to define one’s own identity.
Important features included:
challenging legal and social discrimination
opposing the assumption that only heterosexual family life was normal
creating activist groups, publications, and public demonstrations
linking sexual freedom to broader struggles against conformity
These movements marked a major cultural shift. Questions of sexuality, once treated as private or taboo, became central to debates about freedom and equality.
Political and Cultural Effects
The revolts of 1968 rarely produced immediate revolution, but they permanently changed European public culture. They weakened automatic respect for authority in universities, workplaces, and family life. They also redirected activism away from purely class-based struggles and toward issues of identity, rights, and lifestyle.
New social movements influenced language, education, media, and law. They expanded the idea of citizenship to include gender equality, anti-racism, and sexual freedom. Intellectuals and youth did not simply reject material comfort; they argued that a society organized only around consumption and order could neglect human dignity, creativity, and participation. For AP European History, 1968 matters because it marks a turning point in which politics increasingly included culture and personal life, while reform movements gained momentum outside traditional party structures.
FAQ
They turned protest into a visible public culture. Short slogans could be painted quickly on walls, carried in marches, and remembered easily after a demonstration ended.
Posters and graffiti also helped movements spread across borders. Newspapers and television reused these images, so the style of protest became almost as influential as particular demands.
Many intellectuals saw students as a force capable of challenging stale political systems and inherited social habits. Universities also gave them a natural meeting place for debate, publishing, and organising.
Some were attracted by the idea that culture itself could become political. That meant literature, philosophy, film, and education were no longer separate from struggles over power.
Trade unions often supported better wages and working conditions, but they did not always trust student radicals. Union leaders could see student protest as disorganised, theatrical, or politically unpredictable.
They were also wary of losing control. If unofficial occupations and spontaneous strikes replaced formal negotiation, union authority within the labour movement might weaken.
Lesbian activists often argued that sexuality could not be separated from women’s broader inequality. As a result, some worked closely with feminist groups rather than primarily within mixed gay organisations.
They also criticised the way male voices could dominate public leadership, media attention, and activist priorities. This gave lesbian politics a distinct emphasis on both gender and sexuality.
For supporters, 1968 represents liberation: freer speech, less deference, and greater openness about gender and sexuality.
For critics, it symbolises the breakdown of discipline, authority, and shared moral standards. Because it touched family life, education, and culture as well as politics, its legacy has remained emotionally charged for decades.
Practice Questions
Identify one reason why youth and intellectuals in 1968 challenged bourgeois materialism. (2 marks)
1 mark for identifying a valid reason, such as opposition to consumerism, conformity, rigid hierarchy, or lack of democratic participation.
1 mark for briefly explaining how that criticism encouraged protest or support for new social movements.
Explain how two of the following gained prominence in Europe after the revolts of 1968:
women’s movements
civil rights movements
gay and lesbian movements
(5 marks)
1 mark for a clear thesis or line of argument linking 1968-era protest to the rise of new social movements.
2 marks for one fully explained movement, including specific goals, methods, or significance.
2 marks for a second fully explained movement, including specific goals, methods, or significance.
