It was the year the optimism of the 'Swinging Sixties' transformed to fury as idealistic youth rose up against futile wars and oppressive governments — but 40 years on the jury is still out on whether the 1968 rebels changed the world.

Revolts spread around the globe from the 'flower power' campuses of California to left wing universities in Paris and anti-communist groups in the Prague Spring.

"Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command," sang Bob Dylan in his 1964 hit "The Times They Are A-Changin'" — and it proved prophetic.

At the end of "The Year of the Barricades" the world was a different place.

The causes of the youth revolt varied from country to country — a fact that adds to the uncertainty of its legacy — but everywhere it saw a new generation reject the social order created by those who survived World War II.

In the early 1960s

It began in the early 1960s as American students marched in support of the civil rights movement, carried along by free love and the protest songs of their unplugged folk heroes.

But it was the Vietnam War that claimed their innocence.

In January 1968, the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive. The brutality of the fighting turned public opinion against US President Lyndon Johnson as television brought the indelible image of a prisoner shot in the head at point-blank range in Saigon into American living rooms.

The anti-war movement shaking Berkeley, San Francisco and Chicago, reached Japan with its US air bases and the capitals of Europe.

In London, mounted police on 17 March charged at a crowd of more than 20 000 protestors who had broken through the fence of the US embassy. In Italy, Rome State University was closed for a fortnight.

An assassination attempt on 'Red' Rudi Dutschke on 11 April set off riots in West Germany in a wave of fury at the Springer press group that was accused of demonising the leader of the German student revolt.

In the same month, French authorities shut down Nanterre university in the Paris suburbs, only to the see strife shift to the capital's Latin Quarter where students dug up cobblestones as ammunition.

On the night of 10 May, police fought running battles with rioters in the heart of Paris and arrested hundreds.

'There has never been a year like 1968'

Trade unions exploited the anarchy created by the country's youth and within a week two-thirds of the workforce were on strike. A shaken President Charles de Gaulle threatened to declare a state of emergency.

If Vietnam was the common spark that ignited events in the West, simultaneous student uprisings behind the Iron Curtain saw young intellectuals take on communist rule barehanded.

In Poland, it began in late 1967 when the regime banned a sell-out production of an anti-Soviet play by Adam Mieckewicz.

Protests in Warsaw spilled over to universities in other cities.

Police brought in workers from the paramilitary "factory defence units" to help them enforce order. Students pleaded in vain with the worker police to come over to their side. Lecturers did and lost their jobs.

In April, the student leaders were jailed.

In the same month, the Prague Spring began next door in Czechoslovakia as reformist leader Alexander Dubcek eased restrictions on freedom of the press and movement and spoke of "socialism with a human face".

In August, tanks from the Soviet Union and most of its Warsaw Pact allies rolled into Prague which would have to wait another 20 years for an end to Soviet oppression.

In Mexico, students and peasants who hero-worshipped Che Guevara turned on the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party in the run-up to the 1968 Olympic Games.

In an echo of events...

In an echo of events in Prague, the state deployed tanks against 10 000 people gathered in Mexico City on October 2 in one of the last gasps of the global student movement. Between 200 and 300 protestors were massacred.

Students in Japan held out until January when police stormed Tokyo University.

When the dust settled, De Gaulle had been re-elected and Richard Nixon had succeeded Johnson. The Vietnam War dragged on until 1975, though it created more dissent than the current US-led conflict in Iraq.

But if authority was restored, it could never again assume to go unchallenged and later generations owe this much at least to the last one that truly believed it could change the world.

In lecture halls, the tone changed. Women's rights were entrenched. Black Power asserted itself at the Mexico Olympics as US medal winning sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos gave a raised fist salute.

Four decades after Martin Luther King was killed in April 1968, Barack Obama can hope to become the first black US president.

"There has never been a year like 1968, and it is unlikely there will ever be again," Mark Kurlansky wrote in "1968: The Year That Rocked The World".

"At a time when nations and cultures were still very different, there occurred a spontaneous combustion of rebellious spirits around the world."

AFP