Activists from ’68 revolutions interviewed for database
15 July 2011
Hundreds of interviews with former activists from the 1968 revolutions which shook Europe have been analysed and put online by an international research team led by historians at Oxford University.
Nearly 500 activists from more than 100 activist networks in 14 European countries have been recorded discussing how they became involved in activism, their experiences in 1968 and what they now think about their activist past.
The interviews have been put into an online database called ‘Around 1968’: Activism, Networks, Trajectories’, which has now been launched at Oxford University, thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.
Professor Robert Gildea of Oxford University’s Faculty of History, who led the project and interviewed over 60 French activists, said: ‘Around 1968 investigates former activists’ reflections on the revolution 40 years on, looking into their motivations; how their views have changed with age; their backgrounds, networks and interactions with others; and how political and cultural revolutions overlapped in 1968.
‘Now is the perfect time to conduct these interviews – former activists are able to reflect back and make sense of their experiences 40 years on while the recent wave of protests has brought notions of revolt and revolution to the forefront of people’s minds – today’s is the first generation of radical students since the 1970s.
He added: ‘There are many similarities in the experiences and backgrounds of the 1968 activists with those today and in many ways the protests against cuts in Trafalgar Square and elsewhere evoke the ‘spirit of ‘68’, but there are also a lot of differences. People are struggling with common issues of revolution, gender relations, violence and non-violence and how to be revolutionary without being stigmatized as a terrorist, although the 1968 revolutions were more diffuse in their aims and involved countries under both capitalism and communism.
Professor Gildea and his international colleagues have come across some interesting findings during their interviews. He said: ‘One thing our project has found is that the revolution was not simply concentrated in France, West Germany and Italy but was in fact a truly European revolution – we’ve even found protests against US military bases in Iceland.
‘Our interviews also revealed that, interestingly, some Eastern European countries have invented a ‘1968 narrative’ as their ticket to being part of the European Community.’
The database provides some interesting individual stories, including a member of the terrorist group Action Directe who was interviewed in Marseilles despite a condition of his day release from prison being not to talk about his experiences.
Another activist, Dominique Grange, was inspired to join the revolution in 1968 after hearing a Spanish singer on the radio calling for people to go to the factories and sing for the workers. After 1968, she joined a Maoist organisation and, now in her seventies, still sings revolutionary songs with extraordinary energy.
André Senik, who as a Jewish child had spent the war hiding from the Germans, argues that ‘being revolutionary for Jews was thus a paradoxical and rather aggressive way of becoming part of society instead of having to hide ... it was a way of settling our accounts with parents who told us not to raise our voices, not to say that we were Jewish, to take care that people didn’t think ill of us because we were Jewish.’
‘As historians, we are here to try to make sense of the routes people went down, not to judge their actions,’ Professor Gildea explained. ‘What is interesting are the paths people took after the dust settled on ’68. Some renounced their radicalism and are embarrassed about it today while others have modified their radicalism into support for other causes such as inequality and racism.’
For more information, contact Matt Pickles at the University of Oxford Press Office on 01865 270046 or matt.pickles@admin.ox.ac.uk . Professor Robert Gildea is available for interview, contactable on 01865 2 78348 or Robert.gildea@history.ox.ac.uk