Posted on 11/04/2005 11:53:25 PM PST by Southack
It's good to remember History. Old tricks should be remembered, lest they be played on us again.
During most of the month of May in 1968, France had riots not unlike today. De Gaulle's government was even at its lowest point of popularity back then...strikingly similar to the 23% French approval rating today (in 2005) of Chirac.
A general insurrection broke out across France that month in 1968. It soon began to reach revolutionary proportions before being discouraged by the French Communist Party, and finally suppressed by the Government. This rebellion was an important revolutionary event of the Twentieth Century because it appeared to be a purely popular uprising, superseding ethnic, cultural, age and class boundaries.
It began with student strikes that broke out at a number of universities and high schools in Paris following confrontations with the police. The de Gaulle administration's attempts to quash those strikes by further police action appeared to inflame the situation further... leading to street battles (with the police) in the Latin Quarter. Ten million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the French workforce, then led a protest strike.
The protests caused De Gaulle to create a military operations headquarters to deal with the unrest, dissolve the National Assembly, and call new parliamentary elections for June 23, 1968.
The French government again appeared close to complete collapse at that point, but then something interesting happened; the revolution evaporated almost as quickly as it arose.
Upon urging by the Confédération Générale du Travail, the leftist union federation, and the Parti Communiste Français, the French Communist Party, workers simply went back to their jobs.
But the Left was not rewarded in the polls. When the elections were finally held in June, it was the Gaullist Party that emerged even stronger than before.
De Gaulle won the elections, not the Communists and assorted Leftists who were blamed for instigating the protests and who admittedly called for "their" protests to cease.
Which is to say, a French government with horrendous popularity (lack thereof, really), benefitted from the very riots against it.
I remember 1968. The entire planet passed through a cloud of something like red kryptonite.
Of course, if you add protesting in favor of Islam, all I can say is shoot to kill and bury them in pig skins.
Don't know if anyone has told you this, but Sarkozy, while Catholic, is of Hungarian, Greek, and Sephardic Jewish ancestry, not Polish.
From your lips to God's ears gaspar!
I hope it's so. I would like to see nothing more than a forces resignation of Chirac at this point.
I thought I had read he's Polish. I'll grant you, Sarkozy spells more Hungarian than Polish... Sarkoski? Jewish, eh?... That should be fun..:^D
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.