Review Essay

A Revival of Labor and Social Protest Research in France: Recent Scholarship on May 1968

Keith Mann^a1

^a1 Cardinal Stritch University, Milwaukee

Phillipe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, 68: Une Histoire Collective, 1962–1981. Paris: La Découverte, 2008, 847 pp.

Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, Le Moment 68. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2008, 313 pp.

Xavier Vigna, L'insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68: Essai d'histoire politique des usines. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007.

May 1968 in France was one of those events that became instantly a distinct historical moment. Nearly contemporaneously with the events themselves, “May '68” became an object of conscious—and contentious—reflection, research, and analysis. By October 1968, the Bibliothèque nationale had already listed 124 books on the May–June events. The leading scholarly labor and social history journal in France, le mouvement social, immediately prepared a special issue on May 1968. Successive anniversaries have been marked with waves of scholarly and popular articles, books, films, interviews, colloquia, and other commemorative events and gatherings. The graphic depictions of May '68—photographic and other—have become enduring iconographic images that reappear with each anniversary.

Keith Mann is associate professor of sociology at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee Wisconsin. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French social and labor history. He is the author of Forging Political Identity: Silk and Metal Workers in Lyon, France 1900–1939 (2010). In addition to contributions to International Labor and Working-Class History, his work has appeared in the International Review of Social History, Labor History, and Le mouvement social.