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By Root 1000 0

an increasingly repressive United States. Another of these 1968 laws made it a crime to cross state lines with the intent to commit violence. Federal prosecutors in Chicago were considering charging the leaders of the Chicago demonstrations with this untested law. But Johnson’s attorney general Ramsey Clark had no enthusiasm for such a conspiracy trial. This changed when Nixon took office and appointed New York bonds lawyer John Mitchell attorney general. Mitchell once said that Clark’s “problem” was that “he was philosophically concerned with the rights of the individual.” He wanted a Chicago conspiracy trial and on March 20, 1969, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, John Froines, and Lee Weiner—who came to be known as the “Chicago Eight”—were indicted. Hayden, Davis, Dellinger, Hoffman, and Rubin openly admitted organizing the Chicago demonstrations but denied causing the violence that even the government’s Walker Report blamed on the police. But they barely knew Black Panther leader Bobby Seale. During the trial, Judge Julius Hoffman ordered Seale bound and gagged for repeatedly calling Hoffman a fascist. None of them understood how SDS activists Froines and Weiner had gotten on the list and in fact the two were the only ones acquitted. The others had their convictions reversed on appeal. But John Mitchell himself later went to prison for perjury in the Watergate investigation.

The Italians for a brief moment in November were gripped by the story of Franca Viola, who married the man she loved, a former schoolmate. Two years earlier she had rejected the son of a wealthy family, Filippo Melodia, so he kidnapped her and raped her. After being raped, a woman had to marry her aggressor because she had been dishonored and no one else would have her. This approach had worked for Sicilian men for about a thousand years. But Franca, to the applause of much of Italy, went into court and said to Melodia, “I do not love you. I will not marry you.” This came as a blow to Melodia, not only because he had been rejected, but because under Sicilian law, if the woman doesn’t marry the rapist, he is then tried for rape, a crime for which Melodia was sentenced to eleven years in prison.

On December 3 strikes and protests by both workers and students paralyzed Italy after two striking workers were shot and killed in Sicily. An anarchist bomb destroyed a government food office in Genoa. The bombers left flyers that said, “Down with Authority!” By December 5 Rome was closed by a general strike. But by December 6 the workers had ended their strike for higher wages and left tens of thousand of protesting students on their own.

In France, too, the idea of merging the worker and student movements was still alive but still failing. On December 4, Jacques Sauvageot met with union leaders in the hopes of building the unified front that had failed in the spring. De Gaulle had been artificially propping up the franc for more than a year simply because he believed in “the strong franc,” and it was now seriously overvalued and declining rapidly in world currency markets. Instead of the normal fiscal maneuver of devaluing, he shocked Europe and the financial world by instituting a series of drastic measures to reduce social spending in order to try to uphold the declining currency. French workers were furious. On December 5 strikes began. But by December 12 the government had negotiated an end to the strikes and the students again found themselves alone when they shut down Nanterre to protest police attempts to interrogate students. The French government threatened to start expelling “student agitators” from the universities.

With each blow, it was predicted that de Gaulle would be tamed—when his prestige declined after the spring riots and strikes, when his foreign policy was shaken by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, when his economy was undone by the collapse of the franc. Yet at the end of the year, to the utter frustration of his European partners, he blocked British entry into the Common Market