On the morning of 11 March 1969, a group of French students stormed the public gallery of the Maison de l’Europe in Strasbourg. They shouted slogans, sported banners and scattered pamphlets to an aghast audience of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), who were just about to debate plans for organizing European elections. The students, who were members of a European federalist youth organization, were hardly satisfied with these plans. They demanded the convention of a European constituent assembly that would draft a federalist constitution for Europe (Dulphy & Manigand 2020). The mass social upheaval that had erupted throughout Europe in May 1968 thus seemingly trickled through to the otherwise so impenetrable institutions of the European Community (EC).

After a brief suspension, the debate resumed to ceremonious disapproval at the students’ crude and unwarranted disruption. Most MEPs, however, clearly welcomed the protest. They saw it as an encouragement for their pursuit of a more democratic European Community, to which some of them had now been committed for the best part of two decades (HEP, 11 March 1969: 1–4). The protest allowed them to claim that Europeans expected to be more directly involved in European integration, even if the student protest was hardly representative of public opinion or of the concerns of young people (Patel 2020: 127–9; Andry 2022: 60–74). Regardless, to most MEPs, it was the people that spoke in Strasbourg that day.

Never before had the voices of European citizens resonated so directly in the Maison de l’Europe. From 1952 onward, MEPs had grown accustomed to operating at great remove from their constituents, both in a physical and a mental sense. Their insular position, as delegates from the national parliaments, was largely by design. After all, the European Community was first and foremost a project of technocratic market integration, aimed at achieving greater political and economic interdependence between the six member states. In this constellation, MEPs were well aware that they occupied an awkward position. As the Italian socialist Alessandro Bermani remarked in response to the student protest, he and his colleagues were little more than “pseudo-representatives” in the absence of European elections (HEP, 12 March 1969: 50).