Marseille années 68

About this book

The story of May 68 was not written in Paris, and its authors are not only students. Throughout France, other territories, other activists have helped to make the decade following the May explosion a "golden age of struggles", sometimes acting as a catalyst at the national level. This is the case of Marseille and Bouches-du-Rhône, on which this book bears a singular look. By plundering recently declassified archives, notably those of the General Information, and by collecting numerous interviews of sixty Haitian musicians, he exhumed an unprecedented social and political history of the region. From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, he unveiled a city Phocean at the forefront of fighting such as the defense of immigrant workers and the recognition of feminist movements, lesbians and homosexuals. Far from the official vulgate centered on a few media figures, Marseille 68 years revives the actions of thousands of "ordinary" women and men who are committed to a more just world and have paid a heavy price for this commitment, both on the professional than personal plan. It rehabilitates an era and a generation often indicted and exploited for political ends.