1968

The fact that political rebellion should so often have erupted at a time when a large cohort of the population was around the age of twenty, and that it so often coincided with educational expansion and the growth of a ‘youth culture’, is significant.

The radicalism of the late 1960s often emerged out of reformism earlier in the decade and it sometimes blended back into more conventional kinds of politics – or labour organization – later in the 1970s.

his lover, like many intelligent Czechs, simply assumed that every word emanating from the regime was the exact opposite of the truth and, therefore, that American intervention in Vietnam must be a good thing

In Britain too, rejection of ‘Englishness’ was often seen as a badge of radical respectability – though some left-wingers recognized that the most enthusiastic exponents of English values (and bitter opponents of 68) were Jewish intellectuals from Eastern Europe

An account of Germany that stopped in 1968 would show a student movement that had broken up, one that stopped in the autumn of 1977 would present terrorism as a major legacy of 68, one that stopped ten or twenty years later would concentrate on the origins of the Green Party and a new kind of democratic politics.

Timing matters because interpretations of 68 depend partly on where one stops the clock.

How then is 68 to be defined? It had several components: generational rebellion of the young against the old, political rebellion against militarism, capitalism and the political power of the United States and cultural rebellion that revolved around rock music and lifestyle.

Students in 68 are portrayed in words, frequently their own words, but workers are often remembered in pictures. The strikes and factory occupations that caught the public imagination in France frequently did so because a film crew happened to be present.

The leading figures in 68 often had a highly developed sense of themselves as historical actors and as people who would one day be the object of historical research. The Italian guerrilla group Prima Linea dissolved itself in 1983 partly to allow its own members to provide ‘a full reconstruction of the history of the organization, its origins, development, aims and activities, to avoid leaving it to others to tell the story of Prima Linea’.

An American guide for those who wanted to found communes advised: ‘it would probably be a good idea to refrain from giving yourself a name . . . you will be harder to talk about without a handle’.