Mai-68... et après ? Une nouvelle donne politique. La France de 1962 à 1984

Abstract

The French « moment 68 », is placed within a world-wide context which began in the early 1960s and was marked by multiple, strongly political, socio-cultural movements in which youth assumed a prominent position. Yet, at the same time, it also represented a specific event incommensurate with what other western countries experienced, with the exception of Italy. Indeed, May and June of 1968 were stage to a massive general strike (7 million strikers) along with the occupation of companies. This largely forgotten, atypical social movement had contradictory consequences. It led to an all-encompassing period of social struggle (women’s and migrants’ strikes, a second feminist wave, the development of environmentalism and antimilitarism), while communists and socialists struck up a political alliance as had occurred in 1936. However, the ruling classes, aware of the emerging threat to capitalism and to the organisation of civil society, strove to find countermeasures that safeguarded social order at the expense of a number of concessions implemented with V. Giscard d’Éstaing’s 1974 victorious presidential elections.

Keywords

• right-left division
• counterculture
• general strike
• youth
• social movements