As an American, my mind quickly turned to Civil Rights, with images of young Black children running from spraying water hoses and biting dogs, but I quickly saw that these images did not take place in Alabama or Mississippi, but in the streets of Paris. In those photos, people ran from police wearing gas masks, while other images showed students sitting in crowded and messy lecture halls, having taken over the Sorbonne.

These were images from the May 1968 Riots in Paris, displayed to commemorate the 40 th anniversary of the Riots. It was the first time I’d ever heard of them, but after that trip, I wanted to know more.

When I returned to New York City I began to read up on those turbulent times in Paris. Students at Nanterre, a University just outside the city, had orchestrated protests based on a number of issues ranging from the school’s stodgy curriculum (and rules for decorum), overcrowding and issues with America’s war in Vietnam.

When these protests came to a head, when the police were called on the students and violence inevitably ensued, the protests expanded, first to the Sorbonne, then to the factory workers and shopkeepers of Paris.

Soon, the entire city was abuzz with revolutionary fervor. The Sorbonne was briefly closed and when it was opened the students occupied the building, garbage delivery stopped and the city ground to a standstill for several weeks before French President Charles De Gaulle, who’d left Paris when the protests began, returned from Germany.

While it was slow going, and many were disheartened by the concessions that were made by both sides to end the protests, De Gaulle was ousted from office the next year on the strength of what happened during the May Riots.

As I learned more about this time in history, I realized that protest is a part of the history of the modern world. I also learned that protests, especially barricades, are entrenched in French history.

While writing After the Barricades, I realized that French history, from the French Revolution in 1848 until now, has been about taking to the streets when the people are upset with their government. Barricades were built in the Revolution, and again throughout the years until the Paris Commune in 1871, barricades were built in the 1930s before World War II, and right on into the present day.

 In fact, Louis IV is said to have built the great French boulevards, like the Champs Elyees, not only to appease the shopkeepers who wanted a larger space to sell their wares, but to prevent the people from so readily building those pesky barricades that shut the city down and cut off its upper class from the finer things. Before the wide boulevards were built, when the streets were tight and narrow, it was much easier to simply toss a bunch of broken furniture, maybe a carriage or a car (depending on the century) and shut the city down.

The larger boulevards were harder to obstruct and yet, they did not stop the French from building barricades when injustice reared its head.

As I crafted After the Barricades, I knew I had to tell this story from the point of view of an American girl, since it seemed too hubristic to try to channel a French mindset I had not been raised with, and so the novel follows named Bethany, a student who travels to the Sorbonne for a year abroad to study Art History.

As the beauty of Paris draws her in, she begins to see through new friends like Claude, a French college student and vehement Communist and activist or Philippe, a beautifully effeminate gay kid studying Greek poetry, that the world is a much bigger and complicated place than she once believed.

Though Bethany was involved in the Freedom Rides in America and her brother is about to be shipped off to Vietnam (something she is conflicted about to say the least), she is unprepared for the violence of the protests.

Her worldview comes to a head when she meets and falls in love with an enigmatic artist named Stefan, an older man who grew up in Romania in the 1930s. He informs her of his own secrets and tragic past as a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp.

The theme of the novel is history and how unrest and political action have always been a part of it and so the novel is told in a frame, beginning with Bethany’s daughter, Anna, a reporter covering the Yellow Jacket protests in France many, many decades after the May Riots. When I began my novel, After the Barricades, I wanted to explore History, with a capital H.

I wanted to look at more than just the specific protests that occurred in May of 1968 in Paris, but to examine the larger issues at play and how those themes impacted not only History (with a capital H) but the present.

What I learned, as trite as it sounds, was just how much history repeats itself. Political unrest and history go hand-in-hand, they always have and it seems for now, they still will.

Since I discovered that art installation commemorating the 40 th anniversary of the May Riots, my son, now 14, has gotten in on the protest-action in his own community and political unrest has not shied away from the world.

When I returned to New York City from Paris, Occupy Wall Street was only a few years away and I remember wondering if the students who protested at Nanterre nearly forty years before were anything like this bunch.

Since Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the world has seen much unrest. A few years after my son was born, unrest in Egypt in 2012 lead to a coup. What I remember most from those protests was a student of mine, named Rames, who did not show up to my College Comp class for two weeks and when he finally returned, told me about how he’d flown to Egypt, his home country, to take part in the protests for freedom.

The protests throughout the world did not end there and throughout the early 2010s, unrest crept up, sometimes from the left, like Occupy Wall Street, and sometimes from the right, like France’s 2014 violent May Day marches protesting gay marriage.

When 2020 hit, we could already see the writing on the wall and as COVID crept into the lives of us all, so did unrest. Just as unrest followed the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, the early 2020s have been rife with strife, from anti-vax and anti-masking protests on the right, to marches for racial justice and LBGTQ+ rights on the left.

What truly surprises me, though maybe it shouldn’t, is just how much the history of the May Riots in ’68 has repeated. The Yellow Jacket protests have been active since 2018 and they’re still going strong. 

These new protests began when people took offense to new fuel taxes in France, but the demonstrations have since become about much more.

People have taken to the streets to protest wage stagnation (just like they did in 1968), income inequality (just like ‘68) and various seemingly insurmountable cultural impasses (just like ‘68).

We still live in a world that needs barricades every now and again. The United States has seen unrest from all sides of the aisle, most recently were the New Civil Rights protests that sprung up across the country after the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by police, as well as protests against the Dobb’s Decision that stripped women of their constitutional right to privacy.

The world has seen climate protests, as well as protests against unjust occupations and unjust policies. While not all protests are productive, people protest when they feel they have no choice.

Perhaps someday there will be no need to take to the streets, but until that day, After the Barricades strives to respect and protect the powers of the people, to stand up to the annals of unfairness at any time in history.