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REVIEW ARTICLE
FORTY YEARS ON: FRENCH WRITING
ON 1968 IN 2008

Les annes 68. Le temps de la contestation. Edited by Genevive DreyfusArmand, Robert Frank, Marie-Franoise Lvy and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel.
Paris: La Dcouverte, 2000, 2008. 525 pp. 14.50. ISBN 978 2 8084 0138 0.
Mai 68. Lvnment Janus. By Jean-Franois Sirinelli. Paris: Fayard. 2008. 331
pp. 20. ISBN 978 2 213 63238 4.
Choses vues. Une ducation politique autour de 68. By Daniel Lindenberg.
Paris: Bartillat. 2008. 237 pp. 20. ISBN 978 2 84100 432 4.
Le moment 68. Une histoire conteste. By Michelle Zancarini-Fournel. Paris:
Seuil. 2008. 309 pp. 22. ISBN 978 2 02 089891 1.
68. Une histoire collective, 19621981. Edited by Michelle Zancarini-Fournel
and Philippe Artires. Paris: La Dcouverte. 2008. 847 pp. 28. ISBN 978 2 7071
4996 1.
Mai-juin 68. Edited by Dominique Damamme, Boris Gobille, Frdrique
Matonti and Bernard Pudal. Paris: les Editions de lAtelier. 2008. 445 pp. 27.
ISBN 978 2 7082 3976 0.
Linsubordination ouvrire dans les annes 68. Essai dhistoire politique des
usines. By Xavier Vigna. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. 2007. 384
pp. 22. ISBN 978 2 7535 0446 2.
Histoire politique des immigrations (post)coloniales. France, 19202008. Edited by Ahmed Boubeker and Abdellali Hajjat. Paris: Editions Amsterdam. 2008.
317 pp. 19. ISBN 978 2 35480 023 9.
Forget 68. By Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Paris: Editions de lAube. 2008. 127 pp.
12.90. ISBN 978 2 7526 0451 4.
Mai 68. Un Mouvement politique. By Jean-Pierre Duteuil. La Buissire: Acratie.
2008. 237 pp. 23. ISBN 978 2 909899 31 2.
* Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford; e-mail: robert.gildea@
history.ox.ac.uk.

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ROBERT GILDEA*

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Mon mai 1968. By Alain Geismar. Paris: Perrin. 2008. 250 pp. 16.50. ISBN 978
2 262 02825 1.
De mmoire (1). Les jours du dbut: un automne 1970 Toulouse. By JannMarc Rouillan. Marseille: Agone. 2007. 203 pp. 14. ISBN 978 2 7489 0069 9.
Le jour o mon pre sest tu. By Virginie Linhart. Paris: Seuil. 2008. 175 pp. 16.
ISBN 978 2 02 091367 6.

1 A. Liniers [O. Rolin], Objections contre une prise darmes, in Terrorisme et dmocratie, ed.
F. Furet, A. Liniers and P. Raynaud (Paris, 1985), pp. 137224.

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Every ten years after the events of 1968 in France, there has been a spate of
publications about this pivotal moment in the twentieth century. In 1978, the
Maoist leader Robert Linhart published his experience of going to the people
as a car worker in LEtabli. 1988 saw the publication of Laurent Joffrins Mai 68.
Histoire des vnements and Gnration by Herv Hamon and Patrick Rotman,
a collective biography of the Paris-centred intellectual leadership of 1968,
especially the Maoists. In 1998, Jean-Pierre Le Goff attacked what he saw as the
hedonistic, amoral project of 1968 in Mai 68, lhritage impossible, an attack
that was resumed by Nicolas Sarkozy during the presidential election campaign
of 2007, when he vowed to liquidate 1968.
In 2008, the challenge has been not only to rescue 1968 from political
condescension but to widen the historical lens to situate it in a larger chronological
and geographical context. Fifteen books are reviewed here, written both by
historians and by former militants. They are analysed first in terms of their
chronological scope, with les annes 68 now becoming the standard time frame,
and their geographical scopehow far the provinces are included alongside
Paris, and international and transnational perspectives as well as purely French
ones. Second, we explore whether they consider 1968 as predominantly a
political revolt or alternatively a cultural revolt, a view that has become popular
since the publication of Arthur Marwicks The Sixties in 1998. The issue of
whether there was any connection between faith, a crisis of faith and revolt is
also discussed. The nature of 1968 as a generational revolt continues to be widely
discussed, but the question of whether the French 1968 and post-1968, compared
to the Italian and German models, involved any violence, still demands serious
reflection. The claim of the former head of the military wing of the Maoist Gauche
Proltarienne, that they did not indulge in violence because they were graduates
of the Ecole Normale Suprieure imbued with Kantian altruism, can no longer be
taken at face value.1 Lastly, we ask what sources are now being used to write the
history of 1968 and, in particular, what is the status of oral testimony. The
orthodox view among French academics, from Halbwachs to Nora and Rousso,
is that memory is partial and partisan, while history is universal and objective, so
that the first is of no use to the second. Simply to ignore the contribution of oral
testimony, which since Portelli is not about reliability but about making sense of
the past, is however to forfeit access to a rich and largely untapped resource.

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I

II

There have been a number of substantial single-authored studies of 1968 by

established historians. Mai 68. Lvnment Janus, by Jean-Franois Sirinelli,
leading historian of French intellectuals and cultural history, refocuses the lens

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The publications of historians are to some extent shaped by the rhythm of

anniversaries, but they also work to longer timetables. Much recent historical
research in France on 1968 was first aired in the seminar held under the direction
of Robert Frank at the Institut dHistoire du Temps Prsent between 1994 and
1998 on Les annes 1968: vnements, cultures politiques et modes de vie.
The collected papers were published in 2000 as Les annes 68. Le temps de la
contestation, and republished in 2008. This volume, with thirty contributions
grouped into five sections on the circulation of ideas and practices of
contestation, individuals and society, culture and politics, actors and social
movements, and political forces and the state, marks out the terrain in important
new ways. First, using the term Les annes 68, it places 1968 in a much longer
time frame, asking whether the period should not start in 1962 or 1965, and end
in 1974, 1978 or 1981. Second, it seeks to raise its sights above les pavs
parisiens and to include in lespace 68 Berkeley and Berlin, Rome and Prague.
In fact only four of the papers are not about FranceGenevive Dreyfus-Armand
and Jacques Portes on the international impact of the Vietnam war, Donatella
della Porta on the student movement in Italy, Karel Bartosek on Prague, and Lou
Taylor on fashion in Britain. How much space to devote to countries outside
France, and how to develop a comparative or transnational analysis, is a perennial
challenge for multi-authored works. The student movement and gauchisme in
France is given less weight than the labour movement and factory occupations,
with papers by Xavier Vigna on Renault-Flins, Nicolas Hatzfeld on the car
industry in general and three papers dedicated to the experience of autogestion,
notably in Lyon and Brest. The subject of cultural change is approached in three
different ways: as the circulation of images and critical ideas, with Robert Frank
on the images on Castro, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara, Michel Trebbitsch
on Marcuse and Situationism, and Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey on the New Left; as the
subversion of traditional art forms in the art schools, architecture and the
theatre; and as the use of more general concepts, as required by the new cultural
history, such as individualisation and affirmation of the self (Marie-Franoise
Lvy) and the question of a cultural revolution? (Pascal Ory). There is nothing
in the collection on the religious dimension of 1968: the revolt is imagined in
purely secular terms. Violence is dealt with only in the Italian context; for
France Serge Berstein expounds on the peaceful reordering of the French
political landscape 196869. The subjectivity of actors is not explored except
by Anne-Marie Sohn in her stimulating article on letters of female listeners to
RTL radio presenter Menie Grgoire in 196768. The view of actors, movements
and institutions is therefore one from above.

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on the twenty-eight days in Paris between 3 and 30 May 1968. He describes his
work as the analysis of an event and poses the fundamental question, was it
chance or necessity? He argues that the decision on 3 May to remove students
from the Sorbonne and load them into police vans to have their identities checked
was a mistake that provoked the first violent clash between students and police.
It took place, however, in a context of the emergence of a new youth culture that
started with the Salut les copains festival on the place de la Nation on 22 June
1963. The 1968 generation, for Sirinelli, is the baby-boom generation born after
1945 and brought up in a protected cultural bubble after the end of the Algerian
war and in the midst of the economic prosperity of the Trente Glorieuses. This
needs to be questioned since while the rank and file of 1968 were baby-boomers,
the leaders had generally been born during the Second World War and cut their
political teeth on opposition to the Algerian War.
Sirinelli privileges 1968 as a cultural moment rather than a political one. He
argues that moral codes were changing slower than the economy, but in 1966
the long-haired, guitar-playing singer Antoine broke through with his Mettez la
pilule en vente dans les Monoprix. He marginalizes gauchistes, saying that at
Nanterre they numbered 130140 out of 11,000 students, that the 22 March
movement at Nanterre was purely playful and that subversion was spontaneous
and generalized in lair du temps of juvenile mass culture which improvized
graffiti and happenings. Despite his claim to write objective history, distanced
from the black legends as well as the golden ones, Sirinelli is scornful of the
Marxism of the gauchistes, talking of the sabbat gauchiste and quoting Michel
Wieviorka that gauchisme was not, as Lenin claimed, an infantile disorder, but
a disorder of senility, signalling the death of communism. He argues that for
young people the image of Che was less as a revolutionary hero and more of a
Christ figure, or James Dean in fatigues. Gauchiste enthusiasm for wars of
liberation in Third World was disconnected from reality, a reality which
returned brutally with the fall of Saigon and flight of boat people. He quotes
Olivier Todd, How was I taken in by Hanoi? and contributes to the view current
among 1968-bashers that the Marxism of the rebels pointed inevitably towards
totalitarianism. One of Sirinellis main authorities is the memoirs of Paris prefect
of police Grimaud, and he is sensitive to the attempts of the government to
defuse the situation. Grimaud was keen to avoid the violence witnessed in Paris
on 6 February 1934, and Sirinelli argues that the barricades of 10 May 1968 were
an aberration, since the revolutionary violence of 17891871 had long since
given way to republican legality and democratic process. It is a pity that the
work of such a distinguished scholar should not move beyond the bounds of
May 1968 in Paris and affect such insensitivity to the 1968 project.
In Choses vues, Daniel Lindenberg, like Sirinelli, concentrates on Paris and
indeed on the Paris of the activists of his generation (he was born in 1940), but
he is far more sympathetic to the 1968 project. He lovingly revisits the sites of
May 68, the Boule dOr Caf, place Saint-Michel, Maspros bookshop La Joie
de lire, Simone de Beauvoirs flat, rue Schoelcher, the Champo cinema and the
Cinmathque. He evokes the excitement of the fermentation and mingling of

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political and cultural ideas in the 1960s: Marx but also Rousseaus utopianism
and Rimbauds surrealism, revolutionary ideas from the mouths of dissident
Catholics such as Jean Cardonnel and the impact of anti-psychiatry which
sought to release repressed subjectivity centred on the clinic of La Borde where
Flix Guatarri was active. He demonstrates that several cohorts took part in the
1968 generation, not only the baby-boomers and his own, born during the war.
The revolutionaries of the Popular Front and the Resistance relived their youth
by our sides, Charles Tillon and Daniel Gurin included. The ideas of 1968
were rarely new, he claims: they were summoned up from the Paris Commune
and the Revolutions of 1848 and 1789. The movement of factory occupations,
he reminds us, started at Sud-Aviation at Nantes, where the inspiration was the
anarchist Alexandre Hbert, born in 1921, the last link in a chain that went
back to sans-culottisme. This point is well taken: 68ers saw themselves in
generational revolt against gerontocratic politicians and the moralizing
bourgeoisie, but idolized Resistance heroes such as DAstier de la Vigerie or
Maurice Clavel.
In Le Moment 68. Une histoire conteste, Michelle Zancarini-Fournel reaffirms
the conclusion of Les Annes 68 that the horizon of expectation of 1968 as
the utopia of revolutionary hope and a radiant future continued until the
economic crisis of 197374 and the electoral victory of the Left in 1981. She
agrees that work on 1968 has been too Paris- and France-centred, that 1968 was
fundamentally international and that the influences and transfers between
national spaces should be studied. On the other hand, she argues that other
countries such as Italy have written nation-centred studies of 1968, and that a
comparative approach points up contrasts between a vast counter-cultural
movement around music in Britain and the United States on the one hand, and
on the other France, Italy and Francoist Spain which saw a labour mobilisation
and political radicalism more developed than elsewhere. Zancarini-Fournel
engages closely with the question of generational revolt, taking issue with
Hamon and Rotman whose Gnration was only that of Parisian intellectuals,
and predominantly Maoists at that, and with Jean-Franois Sirinelli, whose babyboomers born after 1945 were not the only generation of 1968, since the cohort
born during the war and marked by the Algerian war, she says, also has to be
taken into account. In addition, far from being political virgins, she agrees with
Lindenberg that the activists of 1968 mobilized a set of references to revolution
and struggle that went from the Algerian war to the Resistance, and from the
Paris Commune to 1789. Zancarini-Fournel tackles the question of violence,
contrasting the non-violent model of the Civil Rights movement in the United
States with that of the helmeted and embattled Japanese student organizations,
or Zenkakuren. She explores the shift to terrorism in Italy and Germany but is
unable to explain it as a function of the relationship between students and the
labour movement, for whereas the German student movement had no labour
support and bred a terrorist wing, in Italy terrorism developed even with a close
studentworker alliance. The question of violence in the French 1968 or
post-1968, however, is not tackled, and seems to remain a taboo subject.

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III

Younger historians also made their impact in 2008, notably through the
publication of collective works. Two large collections stand out, one by historians
and the other by political scientists. That of the historians, 68. Une histoire
collective, 19621981 is co-edited by Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, a student at
Nanterre in 1968, and Philippe Artires, an authority on the cultural history of
the nineteenth century, who was born that year. It is a vast undertaking, with
111 articles written by sixty-one authors, including eighteen by Artires and
seven by Zancarini-Fournel. Adopting the longue dure, it is divided into four
time periods, 196268, 1968, 196874 and 197481. Each section begins with a
4060 page narrative of the years in question by Zancarini-Fournel, followed by
the analysis of an iconic film, from Godards La Chinoise (1967) to Chris Markers
Le Fond de lair est rouge (1977). The rest of each period is divided into sections
on Objects, such as the mini-skirt, police matraque, flower power or Little Red
Book; Elsewhere and Places, which widen the geographical and spatial focus;
Actors; and Traverses, serving to deepen our understanding of a particular
problem or event. Alone of all the books reviewed here, it is illustrated, publishing
92 previously unknown photographs from correspondents of LHumanit,
recently discovered in the Communist party archives.
The main contribution of this collection is to broaden the coverage of these
years beyond Paris and France. There is much on the French provinces, from
the Sud-Aviation strike outside Nantes and workers deaths at the Peugeot
factory at Sochaux to the non-violent struggles of the watchmakers of Lip,
Besanon and of sheep-farmers, gauchistes and conscientious objectors on the
Larzac plateau in the 1970s. Immigrants also emerge as activists through the
Sonacotra rent strike and Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes. Outside France
there is coverage of the Vietnam war, the American Civil Rights movement,
tiers-mondisme, the revolutionary magnet of post-independence Algeria, the
crushing of the student movement in Mexico and of the Allende regime in Chile,
terrorism in Italy and Germany and the carnation revolution in Portugal.
Changer le monde et changer la vie, the title of the 196874 period, indicates
that political and cultural changes are dealt with equally and thoughtfully.
Gauchisme is studied in various guises in a handful of chapters, as is the role of

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Zancarini-Fournel is to be praised for editing the indispensable Mmoires de 68.

Guide des sources dune histoire faire (1993), and here provides a useful
discussion of the historiography and available sources for 1968, from official to
organizational sources to sound and visual archives. She admits that the French
community of historians has been relatively reluctant to use oral sources and life
histories, drawing as it does a radical distinction between objective history
and subjective memory, but cites such memoirs as the Maoist Jean-Pierre Le
Dantecs Les Dangers du soleil (1978) and Vincent Porhels use of oral testimony
in his social micro-history, Ouvriers bretons. Conflits dusines et conflits
identitaires dans les annes 68 (2008).

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intellectuals, the explosion of words and writing. Culture is explored in a more

sophisticated way than in Les Annes 68, going beyond the study of critical
ideas and art forms. Themes include the material culture of daily objects, the
politicization of the body and feminist insurrection, the utopia of communal
existence and the subversive press. The religious dimension is taken seriously,
although there is only one article on left-wing Catholics. Violence is covered, as
in the tragedy of the march against the nuclear supergenerator at Malville (Isre)
in 1977, but the garrotting of Puig Antich in 1974 is treated as a Spanish matter,
although he was working alongside French activists who later formed Action
Directe. In this way the question of violence in 1968 is again dodged. Finally,
although a number of Portraits invite the use of oral history, this approach is
neglected. In part this is because the subjects of some of these portraits, such as
Pierre Overney and Michel Recanati, paid for their activism with their lives; but
other actors such as Jean-Pierre Duteuil might have been interviewed.
The collection by political scientists, Mai-juin 1968, edited among others by
Bernard Pudal and Boris Gobille, offers a similar longue dure, with sections on
194568, 1968 and 196875. It avoids being Paris-centred by a political/
sociological approach, explaining 1968 as a crisis of consent and ruptures of
allegiance. The first part explores the breakdown of social institutions ranging
from the traditional family, with the gradual emancipation of women, to the
school and university, coping with challenges to discipline and unmanageable
growth in numbers, the Catholic Church reacting to the emergence of left-wing
Catholicism, trade unions confronted by ill-disciplined young workers and the
Communist party under strain as Communist students embraced Trotskyism
and Maoism. This opened the way for what Boris Gobille calls a deterritorialization of subjectivity through a generalized creativity or vocation of heterodoxy.
This creativity and subversiveness was practised both in the political and cultural
spheres, with orthodox political gauchisme overtaken by a gauchisme culturel
in the form of sexual liberation and the recognition of sexual minorities, attempts
to de-school society, to de-clericalize the Church and to challenge the repression
of prisoners and mental patients. Subversion was practised not only by students
but also by workers and peasants who joined forces with students in the Nantes
area in 1968 and with students on the Larzac in the 1970s. Significantly, oral
history is used much more by political scientists and sociologists than by
historians, with Erik Neveu using it to trace the trajectories of a sample of
militants from Rennes and Catherine Achin and Delphine Naudier exploring the
subjective revolution of feminists in Auxerre in the 1970s.
One important monograph by one of Zancarini-Fournels pupils should also
be cited. Xavier Vignas LInsubordination ouvrire is a full-length study of the
strike movement, on which he has contributed shorter articles in Les annes
68. Une histoire collective and Mai-juin 1968. He adopts a long chronology
ending with the steelworkers strikes of Longwy and Denain in 1979, and has a
broad geographical spread from the Paris basin and the Nord to the decentralized
factories of the West of France set up by employers seeking a cheaper and more
docile workforce. He has little to say about the concept of generation, but notes

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that while the practice of factory occupation owed much to the strikes of 1936,
the productive strike in which workers continued to make and sell goods,
such as at Lip and Crizay (Deux-Svres) in 1973 was an innovation. New
departures also included greater involvement in strikes of female and immigrant
workers, together with the democratization of militant action in the factories
with the formation of strike, base or action committees which included nonunionized workers and put pressure on the established trade-union leadership.
Vigna argues that Trotkyist and Maoist militants managed to achieve an alliance
with radical elements of the workforce, the Maoists sending intellectuals to
work incognito in the factories and seeking to sharpen class struggle, although
most workers remained deeply suspicious of these young, hedonistic outsiders.
The violence preached by the Maoists led nowhere and Vigna concludes that
the Lip struggle was in some ways a slap and a lesson for the Gauche
Proltarienne, as the workers demonstrated that they could organize a powerful
and popular strike without gauchiste meddling. This is a serious study based on
archival sources. We have tried to give coherence to the fragments of workers
voices carried by our sources, explains Vigna, but the voices of Lip workers, for
example, are heard through the 1973 account of CFDT leader Charles Piaget
and the 1975 account of female workers, Lip au fminin, rather than through
any attempt at oral history.
Immigrant workers and intellectuals have long been absent from studies of
1968 but this is put to rights by a final collection predominantly by young
scholars, Histoire politique des immigrations (post)coloniales. It is edited by
Ahmed Boubeker, professor of sociology at the University of Metz, and Abdellali
Hajjat, a doctoral student at the EHESS, Paris. As a political history of immigration
in France since the First World War it rethinks victims as actors and explores the
encounters of onetime parias with French society. A quarter of the book covers
1968 and the years that followed. Xavier Vigna argues that immigrant workers
were rarely visible in 1968 because many were afraid of repression or expulsion,
while Laure Pitti demonstrates that they became active in the early 1970s through
industrial strikes and rent strikes in the prison-like hostels, run by Sonacotra, in
which they often lived. Abdellali Hajjat shows how the Palestine revolt in 1970
stimulated agitation for an Arab revolution among North African militants, and
forged links with the Gauche Proltarienne and the Christian Left in the Comits
Palestine. Michelle Zancarini-Fournel explores racism and anti-racism, returning
to the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes, while anthropologist Alain Morice
looks at the prehistory of the sans papiers movement. Immigrant movements
were based not only in the factory but in the community, owed nothing to trade
unions and political parties which ignored them, and developed new tactics
such as the hunger strike when threatened by expulsion, taking refuge in
churches like that of Saint-Bernard in the Goutte dOr quarter. These contributions
mark a significant change of focus and agenda, away from the white stonethrowers in the Latin Quarter, and deserve as much recognition as possible.
Imaginative use is also made of oral testimony with key players from the
immigrants Struggles, although these date from periods of activism after 1980.

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In addition to works of history and sociology, the fortieth anniversary of 1968

saw a rash of commentaries by former militants. Three of them come from
former members of the movement of 22 MarchDaniel Cohn-Bendit, JeanPierre Duteuil and Alain Geismarand they engage in a significant debate about
whether 1968 was essentially a political or a cultural movement, and about the
nature of violence. In Forget 68, Cohn-Bendit argues the familiar case now that
the revolt of 1968, and what followed, won culturally but lost politically. The
cover carries the picture of him smiling at a policeman outside the Sorbonne,
which, he argues, demonstrates that 1968 was not a revolution but a movement
which rhymes liberty with pleasure. Rather than trying to take political power,
an entirely backward-looking conception of some agitating minorities, those
who revolted in 1968 wanted power over their own lives. The majority of
workers did not want a revolution either, he says, but greater autonomy through
autogestion instead of alienation under capitalism. 68 was the end of the
revolutionary myth, the end of revolution, he says, and the beginning of
movements of liberation which continued in the 1970s and 80s, until today,
such as those for sexual equality and the rights of sexual minorities. Duteuil
takes the opposite view in his Mai 68. Un mouvement politique. He argues
that 1968 was indeed a revolutionary movement, which called into question
capitalism, hierarchy and authority, and believed that everything was to be
rebuilt. No-one, apart perhaps from the Gauche Proltarienne, was interested
in creating a revolutionary party, but new forms of revolutionary action were
improvized, notably the comits daction which sprang up in schools, universities
and workplaces. He lovingly chronicles the actions of workers from the
Rhodiaceta textile factory in Besanon, the Saint-Nazaire shipyards and the
peasant demonstrations in Redon, beginning in 1967, followed by the Comits
dAction Lycens and the studentworker comit daction on the Censier
campus in May 1968. He is fairly dismissive of Alain Geismar, secretary-general
of the SNESUP lecturers union, who joined the 22 March movement on 8 May,
amid a tearful psychodrama, confessing that he had negotiated the release of
French students, but not foreign ones. In his own account, Mon Mai 1968,
Geismar argues that he went to the 22 March movement for support against
self-proclaimed mediators who wanted to do such a deal since he could not
tolerate this discrimination twenty-three years after the capitulation of the
Reich and six years after the end of the Algerian war. Geismar was not convinced
that the game was up after 30 May 1968: since thousands of workers were
refusing to go back to work we were entering a genuinely revolutionary
situation. We did not think for a second that the movement would end and did
not question that sooner or later it would be stopped by force of arms. He cowrote a pamphlet called Vers la guerre civile, joined the Gauche Proltarienne
and spent eighteen months in prison in 197071 for incitement to violence and
reconstituting a banned political organization. He nevertheless defends the
view that French militants did not go down the violent route adopted by their

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Italian and German colleagues. Geismar and the Gauche Proletarienne decided
not to riposte after one of their members, Pierre Overney, was gunned down by
a vigilante outside the Renault factory at Billancourt in February 1972 and were
horrified by the Palestinian killing of Israeli hostages at the Munich Olympic
Games in September 1972. After the working class demonstrated during the Lip
strike of 1973 that it had no need of gauchiste leadership, the Gauche
Proletarienne dissolved itself and violence, says Geismar, ceased.
That French militants did not take the terrorist route is something of a
simplification. Most of course did not, but a minority did. They have been
dismissed as the monstruous children of 1968, who failed to understand its
utopian lessons. De Mmoire (1) by Jann-Marc Rouillan does something to
challenge this myth. Rouillan was a member of the comit daction of his Lyce
in Toulouse in 1968 and had his first encounter with police at the Isle of Wight
festival in the summer of 1970. Toulouse, was, however, the capital in exile of
the Spanish republican movement and many of his schoolfriends were the
children of veterans of the Spanish Civil War. For them the decisive event was
the Burgos trial of ETA militants in September 1970. To bring down the Francoist
regime, he and his friends formed an autonomous libertarian group, la
Commune, which attacked the Spanish Consulate in Toulouse, then a crossborder clandestine movement of French and Catalan militants, the Movimiento
Ibrico de Liberacin. We believed that revolutionary victory was at arms
length, he writes, tomorrow, or else the day after Already I was breathing
the oxygen of this liberation movement. The movement included Puig Antich,
who was captured by the Spanish police and executed. Rouillan went on to
form Frances notorious group dedicated to armed struggle, Action Directe,
and has been in prison since 1987, but here gives a persuasive account of why
angry young people might resort to violence for understandable political reasons
in the early 1970s. The second volume of this memoir is due to be published
this year.
One of the great tragedies of the Maoist movement was that its charismatic
leader, Robert Linhart, had a nervous breakdown during the events of May 1968
and never inspired again as a leader. His work in the factories as an tabli was
in a sense to regain his credibility as a militant, learning from the working class
which was destined to carry through the revolution. His daughter, Virginie,
having written Volontaires pour lusine. Vies d tablis in 1994, has now published
Le jour o mon pre sest tu. She recounts the day in 1981 when her father
attempted suicide and then his slow recovery from a coma; she was fifteen at
that time. Her book is a search for the children of the leaders of 1968, Maoists,
Trotskyists or feminists, whose parents were impossible modelsintellectuals
and revolutionaries who sacrificed everything to the revolution, including their
children. For example, Mao Pninou has gone into mainstream politics, but
bears a ridiculous first name and claims that the rage of his feminist mother and
friends against abusive men, demanding their emasculation, largely explains his
turn to homosexuality. This is a powerful and passionate account which
demonstrates that the leaders of 1968 did not all secure themselves plum jobs

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FORTY YEARS ON: FRENCH WRITING ON 1968 IN 2008

in the government and media, and in many cases left a legacy of disillusionment
and dysfunction, not least to their offspring. It is also a demonstration of the
power of oral history, though in the hands of a journalist, rather than a
historian.
V

Interview with Yvon Chotard, Nantes, 1 April 2008.

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What conclusions can be reached about the state of studies on 1968 in France
forty years on? Chronologically, 1968 is now firmly established in a sweep that
extends from 1965 to 1975 or from 1962 to 1981. Geographically, the lens has
moved away to incorporate much more of what was going on in the French
provinces, although works like than of Sirinelli and Lindenberg remain
unashamedly Paris-centred. The international dimension of 1968 is now clearly
recognized, although the tendency of edited volumes is to include a selection of
articles on 1968 outside France, with some attempt at comparative analysis, but
without tackling the transnational dimensions of 1968. Much remains to be said
about the transfer and reception of radical ideas and practices along activist
pathways in Europe and globally, about revolutionary tourism, about the
International of students studying abroad, about political exiles and passeurs
between one zone of radicalism and another.
There is now a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between
political and cultural activism, although the tendency to downgrade political
activism, even to lift Marxist discourse from its context in the 1960s and 70s and
to denounce its totalitarian message is to be regretted. More work is required
on the religious dimension of 1968. Contributions on the attempts of left-wing
Christians to reconcile Marxism and faith and their involvement in 1968 are few
and far between, and the origin of radical militancy in some kind of crisis of
Catholic, Protestant and Jewish faith also invites further investigation. A
surprising proportion of militants attended seminaries or belonged to the
various youth branches of Catholic Action. Yvon Chotard, leader of the student
movement in Nantes, said that my dream was to become a saint, in order to
make my mother happy.2 The question of violence, particularly in the post1968 period, also requires revisiting. French historians, political scientists and
most former militants maintain the orthodoxy that French radicals or
revolutionaries did not do violence, and yet the Maoist La Cause du peuple,
for example, is full of calls to hang bosses by their balls, and revolutionaries
such as Jann-Marc Rouillan need less to be dismissed as terrorists than to be
understood in terms of why what they call guerilla action was an option in the
political and international context of the early 1970s. The question of nonviolence as a deliberate strategy, as in the struggles of Lip and the Larzac, also
invites study.
Lastly, there is the regret that oral history is still not regarded as a serious tool
of French historical scholarship. Oral history of the generation of 1968 has been

ROBERT GILDEA

119

attempted by local historians such as Vincent Porhel, or by sociologists, political

scientists and journalists, but the corporation of historians continues to draw a
formal line between history and memory. At a time when activists of the
1968 generation are entering or are in retirement, this appears to be a foolish
prejudice. On the other hand, it leaves the field open to non-French historians
who are a good deal more positive about the collection and handling of oral
testimony.
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