Mai 68 par celles et ceux qui l'ont vécu
Résumé
This book was nominated for the Prix des Rendez-vous de l'Histoire de Blois, 2018.
May 68, fifty years on... The event still generates a great deal of discourse - trials ("It's 68'sfault!"), confiscations (leaders appropriating its meaning), shortcuts (reducing the movement to its student component alone) - but who knows how this extraordinary episode entered the lives of millions of ordinary people?
To bring this essential part of history out of oblivion, Éditions de l'Atelier and Mediapart launched an extensive call for testimonials from June to September 2017. More than three hundred anonymous participants in May-June 1968 responded, sending in texts and documents. A child from the red suburbs, an upper-class schoolgirl in a smock, an Algerian drama student, a fitter, a secondary school teacher, a PTT operator, a trainee film editor, a metal worker in a car factory, a conscript, a youth chaplain, a sound technician at ORTF, a director of the Maison de la Culture, a railway worker... Tied together, their stories form a veritable fresco: barricades in the Latin Quarter, factory occupations, rebellion at school against the ban on girls wearing trousers, the first demonstration, challenging an authoritarian boss, demands for higher wages, the first general assemblies, the first drinks at the café... The emancipatory impetus of what was experienced during those memorable weeks is embodied in a polyphonic way that is both intimate and political. These pages are a precious record, unprecedented on this scale, of what May 68 was all about. A moment in history whose emancipatory breath transformed lives. A past so strong that it still affects the present.
This book is the result of a selection of more than 300 testimonies, representing 2,000 pages of text, received during this collection, and features more than 150 testimonies.
Fruit de la sélection de plus de 300 textes reçus lors d'un vaste appel à témoignages lancé en partenariat avec Mediapart, ce livre a été coordonné par Christelle Dormoy-Rajramanan (CRESPPA - UMR 7217), Boris Gobille (Triangle UMR5206) et Erik Neveu (Arènes UMR 6051).
Postface d’Edwy Plenel
Postface d’Edwy Plenel