What 1967 was, and what it was not
The most famous European student revolts, in Paris, Rome, Warsaw and Prague, belong mainly to 1968. The year 1967 was the preparation: a handful of sharp flashpoints, a number of local disputes over university rules and teaching, and a growing sense among young radicals that they were part of an international movement. Many capitals, including several covered elsewhere in this cluster, saw little that can be documented as a large student protest in 1967 itself.
It helps to hold two ideas together. First, European students were not copying one script. German students reacted to their own political arrangements, Italians to overcrowded and hierarchical universities, Belgians to a language dispute, and the French to rules about campus life. Second, a common backdrop linked them: the Vietnam War, the example of American campuses, Cold War politics, and a rapid expansion of university numbers that outran the old institutions.
Berlin, 2 June 1967
The best-known 1967 event is in West Berlin. On 2 June 1967 there were demonstrations against the visit of the Shah of Iran. Outside the Deutsche Oper, a plainclothes police officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, shot and killed a student, Benno Ohnesorg, who was 26. Kurras was acquitted in the 1960s; in 2009 it emerged that he had been an informant for the East German Stasi, which reopened old arguments about the case.
The killing turned a small radical scene into a much larger movement in West Germany. The Socialist German Student League (SDS) and figures such as Rudi Dutschke gained a wider audience, and hostility toward the Springer newspapers grew. The wider history of the West Berlin protests has its own article; the point here is that Berlin gave Europe its first dead student of the period and a date, 2 June, that later activists remembered.
Italy: occupations and the shadow of 1966
Italian universities had been tense for some time. In April 1966 a student at Rome, Paolo Rossi, died after clashes with right-wing students at La Sapienza; the exact circumstances were disputed, but his death sharpened feelings. In early 1967 students occupied university buildings in several cities, including Pisa and the architecture faculty in Rome, and produced documents criticising the university as an institution. Later in 1967, in November, Turin and Milan saw further occupations. The Italian student occupations are treated in a separate article. The decisive clash, at Valle Giulia in Rome on 1 March 1968, is a 1968 event.
Belgium and Leuven
In Belgium the trouble was linguistic. Flemish students and others demanded that the Dutch-speaking part of the Catholic University of Leuven be separated from the French-speaking side, and demonstrations ran through 1966, 1967 and 1968. The dispute is usually counted as part of the wider student ferment of the decade even though it began as a national and language question. It helped bring down the Belgian government in early 1968, which makes it unusual among these events: a student issue with immediate parliamentary consequences.
France before May
France is the country most people associate with student revolt, yet the spring of 1967 was not the French moment. At the new Nanterre campus, outside Paris, students protested over rules limiting visits to the residence halls, and there was a separate current of radical politics. In November 1966 some students in Strasbourg had distributed a provocative pamphlet attacking student life, written with Situationist influence. These were local episodes. The explosion came with the May 1968 strikes, which are a different story from anything in 1967.
Quiet cities and distant events
Elsewhere the record for 1967 is thinner. The Dutch scene was countercultural rather than a student uprising, and Scandinavian activity centred on the Vietnam War, with the Russell Tribunal meeting in Stockholm and later at Roskilde in Denmark. Austria’s universities were calm until 1968. In Greece, the Greek junta took power in April 1967, which gave European students a political cause but silenced Athens itself. In Eastern Europe, the Prague student protest of 31 October 1967, the Strahov protest, began as a complaint about conditions in a dormitory and was met with police force; it fed into the reformist pressures that led to the Prague Spring. A mass Polish student protest came in March 1968, not 1967.
The Vietnam War escalation was the thread that ran through much of this, giving otherwise separate groups a shared enemy and a shared vocabulary of protest.
Common threads
Several features recur across these otherwise separate stories. University rolls had grown fast, and many students met crowded lecture halls and teachers with near-absolute authority. Young people read the same books and journals, and followed the American campus movement and the Vietnam War through the press and television. And in several countries a single act of police force, or a single clumsy official decision, turned grumbling into action. The detailed local stories in this cluster show how different those triggers were, and how seldom the word “movement” fits 1967 without qualification.
The 1968 explosion
In 1968 events came in quick succession. Dutschke was shot and badly wounded in Berlin in April 1968. In Rome, Valle Giulia was followed by months of disturbance. In Warsaw, students rallied in March 1968 after the authorities closed a staging of a classic Polish play, and the government answered with arrests and an antisemitic campaign. In Prague, Alexander Dubcek became party leader in January 1968, and the reform period that followed ended with the Soviet-led invasion in August. In Paris, police action at the Sorbonne in early May was followed by barricades and a general strike.
Why the distinction matters
Treating 1967 as the year when European students rose up compresses two stages into one. The earlier stage was local, fragmentary and often about university rules, language, or a single act of police violence. The later stage was a chain of mutually aware events, with students watching one another on television and in the press. Keeping the dates straight shows how a series of small disputes could turn into something far larger, and it avoids crediting 1967 with events that only happened once the scene had already been set.