From May to October: Reassessing the 1968 Generation

The article reports on the resurgence of far left in France. There is a parallel between the reemergence of the memory of the Algerian war during the 1990s and the reemergence of the memory of another taboo subject, 68-era Trotskyism, in the early 2000s. Just as immigration controversies in France and civil war in Algeria brought back to the surface uncomfortable memories of decolonisation, so the renewal of the French far left in the present has brought its past into sharper relief. Arguably, this has undermined the credibility of the view that 1968 was simply a soft lifestyle revolt, for harder-edged ghosts are back to haunt us.