By June 1968 the collective euphoria had waned, the political crisis was over and the social barriers had been resurrected. But what had become of the activists? To what extent had the events of May-June destabilised those who participated, from the interested bystanders, to the revolutionaries who fought to ensure that nothing would ever be the same again? How did these participants attempt to bring about the promised utopia? Were their visions of the world and of themselves marked by the events? In the wake of the events, the ‘68ers interviewed here were faced with difficulties linked to their need to find a place in a society they had hoped to see crumble, their search for a social role not among those they had previously decried, and their desire to preserve their personal and political integrity without becoming permanently marginalised.

From the end of the 1970s in the United States, various studies attempted to respond to the question of what had become of the student protestors, as the social movements of the 60s were in sharp decline and these “former” activists were now mostly working and old enough to start families. These are primarily quantitative studies which converge on the persistence of political behaviour specific to the study population of former activists, compared to the non-activist population. They found “former activists to be more likely than nonactivists to define themselves as politically radical, espouse more leftist political attitudes […] and remain active in movement politics” (McAdam, 1988, p. 213). However, with just a few exceptions (McAdam 1988; Whalen and Flacks, 1989), these studies have difficulty proposing a sophisticated sociological interpretation of these biographical consequences. Remaining at a very general level, they are unable to attribute them to either the social characteristics of the former activists, nor to forms of participation in a political event. In other words, they fail to identify intragenerational differences.