In this chapter, we aim to bring back the context, and identify the salient features marking the beginning of the cycle: on the one hand, the generational character of the revolt and its incubation and development within the university, itself characterized by internal inequalities that would quickly become politicized; and on the other hand, the activism of the extreme left, in an international context favouring ideas of rupture and the rebellion of the weak. Beyond the common features which raise the question of social movement diffusion (a question which is still largely unanswered today), this chapter also highlights a number of distinctions between different situations and contexts. One of these is the variable capacity of groups to cross the initial boundaries of protest action, but there are also strictly ideological factors at play and which are common to the three European countries under consideration.

The International Context

As we have already underscored, the international context undoubtedly nurtured a warrior mind-set, and solidarity with ‘peoples in struggle’ prepared the ground for the emergence of belligerent demonstrations and new types of action, sometimes inspired by urban guerrilla warfare. In France, there were bomb attacks by the Trotskyist-leaning National Vietnam Committee (CVN) against US interests (Bank of America, Trans World Airlines, etc.), and the American Express headquarters was vandalized in March 1968, leading to the creation of the Movement of 22 March. In Europe, as in the United States, anti-Vietnam War demonstrators marched to the chant of ‘Two, three, many Vietnams’, Che Guevara's message to the 1967 Havana Tricontinental, and raised ‘El Che’s’ emblematic figure as a flag. In short, everything indicated, as stated by the far-left newspaper Lotta continua in July 1970, that ‘the general trend [was] revolution’.

The oldest ‘sixty-eighters’, i.e. those who had become politicized or had been activists prior to the student rebellions, often say their first commitment to have been in solidarity with Algerian freedom fighters and with Cuban (or more broadly, Latin American) revolutionaries, and of course, against the Vietnam War.