Abstract
The events of May-June 1968 in France broke out in the wake of an international wave of protest that occurred previously in many countries such as the United States, Germany and Italy (Duyvendak 1992, 137-138). The events of 1870, 1919 and 1936 provide also many examples of disruptive and short term insurgencies trying to bypass the institutionalized frame so as to claim demands for political change. Can we thus talk about "French exceptionalism" in terms of patterns and dynamics of social movements' political protests? Social movements, in the frame of political process theories, can be define as "strategically and/or thematically connected series of events, produced in interaction with adversaries and carried out by a coherent network of organizations and participants who use unconventional means of attaining political goals" (Duyvendak 1992, 30). In this theoretical frame, the political opportunity structure (POS) based on formal institutional structures, informal procedures and strategies, and the configuration of power, determines to a large extent mobilization patterns of "challengers" and "members" strategies such as repression or facilitation (Kriesi and Koopmans 1992, 172; Duyvendak 1992, 60-66). Why French social movements are often disruptive, revolutionary and short term collective action processes?
