1180 Ch. 29 • Democracy and the Collapse of Communism

An outnumbered policeman during the massive protests in Paris in May 1968.

political process, as a way of expressing French “national ambition,” which
he believed was slipping away. “‘The French think of nothing but increasing
their standard of living,” he once complained. “Steak and French fries are
fine. A family car is useful. But all that does not add up to national ambi­
tion.” In 1969, the president announced another referendum, this one on
local administrative reform. This seemed an unlikely issue for de Gaulle,
who believed in an efficiently centralized state and cared little about
regional liberties (he once asked rhetorically how one could govern a country
with several hundred different kinds of cheese). De Gaulle lost what turned
into a plebiscite on his government and retired from political life.
The contentious year 1968 also brought student demonstrations and riots
to Italy and West Germany, where Berlin was the center of the student
movement. The University of Rome had been built to accommodate 5,000
students but that year enrolled 60,000 students. Thousands of university
graduates were frustrated because they could not find jobs. But Italian stu­
dents found no support from workers, and the movement quickly collapsed.

Shifts in Western European Politics after 1968

During the 1970s, European domestic politics underwent a shift from the

right to centrist governments. This change was apparent not only in the Ger­

man Federal Republic and Britain (where Labour was in power from 1974 to

1979) but also in France. In Italy, the strikes of 1968 and 1969 generated