Karl Mannheim's definition of generational units as being formed by their members’ shared exposure to the same events (Mannheim, 1972 [1928]) raises more questions than it answers. Is it really possible to say that the various participants in the events of May-June 1968 participated in the same event? What could a lower-class factory worker on strike have to exchange with a young student from a bourgeois background, motivated by breaking away from her family? Would they even have come into physical contact during the events? Archival films and photos show thousands of activists marching hand in hand down the streets of the Latin Quarter, sitting on benches in the universities or demonstrating in support of factory sit-ins. But was their convergence perhaps based on a misunderstanding? Did they really experience the deconstruction of social barriers, as some claim? Can the forms of destabilisation that resulted from their participation be limited to what occurred during the events themselves? More generally, does an analysis based on generation run the risk of obscuring the numerous ways in which the event was shaped by participants, and how they were shaped by it in turn?

In contrast to certain approaches that associate a foundational event with the formation of one – or two – political generation(s), this chapter aims to analyse the multiple socialising effects of May ‘68. In order to do this, we will focus here on what played out during the events. Yet an event does not exist “in an (interpretative) void” (Fassin and Bensa, 2002, p. 8); it partly resides in pre-existing interests and expectations. How can we then avoid the twin pitfalls of analysing participation in May ‘68 either on the basis of only the long term – trajectories prior to the event which neglect contextual variables – or on the short term of the event and its interactions – to the detriment of dispositions acquired in primary socialisation?

This study allows us to shed light on the articulation between primary political socialisation and event socialisation, to re-examine the question of the “generations of ‘68.”