Why do we so rarely think about what preserves the social order? Perhaps the cost of such reflection is too high, perhaps it is better to not think about it, rather than have to face one's own powerlessness. And yet, if we all simultaneously stopped doing what we are doing – and followed the utopian instructions of l’An 01 in the epigraph above – this order would be brutally thrown into question, and each of us would realise how much we contribute to maintaining it. The social world does not lend itself to the kind of experiments that are popular among physicists, which momentarily suspend a particular force in order to analyse its nature and effects. But there are rare historical moments that come close to this, during which the established order trembles, ordinary time and social laws are temporarily suspended, and everything that is ordinarily self-evident is thrown into question. These situations constitute veritable experiments, spyholes into the wings of the social world, which reveal the arbitrary and habitually hidden nature of its foundations. During such events, the present and the future are no longer the simple continuation of the past: everything becomes – temporarily – possible. This is particularly true for those participants who share the feeling that they are making history, that they are historical actors and no longer simply bystanders. In these moments, the dialectic between biography and history – do we shape history or are we shaped by it? – takes an unusual turn; it becomes disjointed, as the event destabilises the course of individual and collective destinies.

Is that what an “event” is? A “de-fatalizing” conjuncture that shakes the established order and modifies the course of existence, to the point where one or several cohorts are transformed into “political generations?” This is one of the questions that motivated my work on the events that took place in France during May and June of 1968, and on the biographical consequences for those who participated in them.