Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week an extremely dangerous accident from 1961, code name Broken Arrow. We meet the man in charge of

making safer nuclear bomb after it crashed to the ground in the US.

It's hard to say how close it was it to detonating, in my personal opinion, damn close.

Plus the British Dambusters raid on the German industrial heartland in the Second World War

remembered 75 years on.

Maria Montessori and her revolution in thinking about educating young children

and look back in anger, a revolution in British theatre when it burst onto the London stage in the 1950s.

I want to be there on you when your face is rubbed in the mud.

There's nothing else I'm hopeful anymore.

There's nothing else I want anymore.

That's coming up later.

But we begin in Paris 50 years ago. In May 1968 France was brought

to a near standstill by widespread student protests and the largest general strike

since the 1930s. 68 was a year of turmoil across much of Europe and the United States.

There seemed to be a lot to protest about.

There was an upswell of rebellion against the post-war elites of government and commerce. There were civil and political

rights to fight for and the Vietnam War to campaign against. But it was in the French capital

that this general unrest proved most potent. Lisa Louis has been speaking to one of the French

policemen who faced the Paris riots that year.

The French demonstrations of 1968 started in Paris in early May.

They had been prompted by a standoff between students and the administration at Nantesterre University just to the north of the capital.

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