ABSTRACT
Nineteen sixty-eight has gone down in history as the year of the global student revolution. 1 It has attained iconic significance in the narrative of student activism, and has dwarfed in significance another landmark of student activism that took place some 120 years earlier—the student protests that heralded the 1848 revolution which began in France and then swept across much of Europe. What invested the 1968 protests with a special aura was perhaps the fact that the French students, who were at the center of the movement, managed eventually to bring down the towering figure (both literally and figuratively) of President de Gaulle. Nineteen sixty-eight reverberated across the world, its echoes being heard from Berkeley to Mexico City, from Paris to Dakar. 2
