Beauty is in the Street

Becky and I were visiting Paris recently and May 2018 was 50 years after the demonstrations and uprising in the streets of Paris.  On May 10 a million people marched in the streets of Paris. We had not realized we were there on that particular anniversary until we were there and I had seem some info about it in the American press. We really didn't seen anything about it in Paris itself.

It was fascinating walking through some of those same cobbled streets where the riots had taken place. There were no memorials anywhere and there were no events making the anniversary of the uprising. It was like if officially never happened and even the people of Paris seemed to want to forget about it. Very strange. Although the events of May 1968 have continued to influence French society and that period is considered a social, cultural, and moral turning point in the history of the country. It just didn't seem that way as we walked those streets 50 years later.

And we did  walk along the narrow streets with their smooth cobble stones. Some were loose and you could how people would have picked them up to throw at the police or the army. Parisians have had a long history of throwing their street stones at authorities. There were also many streets where you could see that the city had paved over the stones with asphalt since the 1968 riots in an attempt to take away the opportunity to throw the rocks.

I very much remember the riots in Paris as they happened in May of 1968. It was very mesmerizing and somewhat different from the race riots that were happening around America at the time or the protests against the Viet Nam War. These were students and workers marching for economic justice. I was just finishing up my junior year at North Catholic High School. 

The graphic here was taken from some street art at the time of the 1968 uprising and celebrated the beauty of the stones that was the streets of Paris.