Why and how did the trajectories of 68ers intersect, in spite of their great diversity, to create this event? Over the course of this book we have tried to demonstrate the diversity of the collective profiles subsumed by the vagueness of the term generation ‘68. The ‘68ers interviewed here experienced different frames of (political) socialisation, which can be linked to four different matrices of participation in May ‘68. The two first matrices emphasize the roles for the family transmission of dispositions for activism (political for some, religious for others) which become politicised through Third-Worldism in the 1960s. Structural transformations (of the school system and the condition of women) provide the backdrop for the other matrices, which bring together first-generation intellectuals on one hand, and on the other, young students who experienced an increasingly blatant gap between their personal aspirations and their objective conditions. On the eve of May ‘68, these young people did not share the same political, theoretical and intellectual referents – nor even the same political interests and demands. In other words, their trajectories converged at this moment because the events of May-June 68 were invested with disparate personal and political expectations. Yet this convergence was not pure circumstance, given that it did bring about the synchronisation of sectorial crises, which produced the dynamic of a political crisis (Dobry, 1986), and made May ‘68 a critical moment.

However, the diversity of ‘68ers cannot be reduced to the range of their prior socialisations. It is also due to the dynamic of the events, and to variables such as biographical availability, the place of engagement and the intensity of participation. The short term of the events cannot be reduced to the long term of trajectories (Gobille, 2008). This is why the typology of socialising effects of the events constructed in Chapter 2 took into account the forms of socialisation prior to May ‘68 and the forms of participation during the events. By combining the variables of accumulated activist resources on one hand, and the degree of exposure to the events on the other, we observe four different socialising effects.