Here’s a really interesting assessment of the difference between Paris’ and Prague’s 1968 upheavals, by French historian Jacques Rupnik.

The first half of 1968 was a remarkable season of youth rebellion around the world, from Mexico to the US, to Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But it was in France and Czechoslovakia that protesters came closest to overthrowing a government.

In France, the Paris movement was a leftist one, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, opposed to various cultural and political (the two are inseparable in the minds of the Paris movement) developments post-WWII, most importantly the material culture, or the culture of commercialism.

The Czech movement was more political in nature and was focused on restoring various liberties (such as the press) that the Soviets had been suppressing.

Jacques Rupnik suggests that we have remembered the events falsely: the only quality they had in common was their simultaneity. More importantly, both movements were out to achieve what the other was trying to shake off: the Czechs trying to rid themselves of the very Marxism the French wanted; the French rejecting the democracy (“an illusion”) the Czechs wanted.

The Prague Spring was brutally put down by communist troops and tanks, while the Paris Spring simply ran out of gas. But the Soviet occupation of Prague, Rupnik argues, had a significant long-term impact on the French Left: it disburdened them of their delusions about the workers’ paradise USSR.

By making human rights, civil society, and European culture central to its activity, [Czech] dissent had an impact that was by no means negligible on the anti-totalitarian Left in France in a new political and intellectual context post-1968.

[…] The post-68 "new philosophers", when they asked themselves questions about the origins of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, of the Gulags and of "barbarism with a human face" (Bernard-Henri Lévy), traced the intellectual and political ancestry of Soviet Russian Bolshevism back to the German "master thinkers" (A. Glucksmann) and further back to the Enlightenment, discovering along the way some of the concerns of Czech dissenters including Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel.

The Czechs were trying to turn (quoting a protester from the time) “From Asia and toward Europe;” to French ears “Europe” carried more than a whiff of imperialism. Thus is was significant for both movements that the Czech return to Europe after 1989 was marked by adsorption into the European Union (by which Rupnik means the common market).