After a quick tour of the last quarter of 1966 - De Gaulle's speech in Phnom Penh, bookshops, films - we recognized the dead ends and shortcomings of this lecture: mass culture, television, Europe (the crisis of the empty chair), urban planning, new towns, science and technology. But, without being either historian or sociologist, images and sound were taken into account. More should have been said about women and feminism, for example, the new marriage law giving women independence in banking and employment on January1, 1966.
One last case was mentioned, which occupied the whole year. It was linked to the publication of Jean-François Steiner's book Treblinka, which was a huge success, but also provoked controversy. Steiner was looking for a "history of Jewish resistance" to contrast with the supposed passivity of the victims, who were complicit in their fate (an idea similar to that of Hannah Arendt on the betrayal of the Jewish elite in Eichmann in Jerusalem, translated into French in autumn 1966). Criticism came mainly from the fact that it was a fictionalized account rather than a history book.
But this book, despite the violent attacks it suffered, marked the awakening of the memory of the Shoah in France, the beginning of the insistence on the special fate of the Jews, the distinction between concentration camp and extermination camp (identified by Gaullist and Communist histories of the war). To date his conversion, Pierre Vidal-Naquet will always refer to this book as execrable, but as a turning point in French consciousness.
In this lecture, the men and women of 1966 were treated as if they were Nambikwaras or Arapechs, without judgment, as if we hadn't been there. But we still have to think about the observer's place (otherwise, it's the "king's place", as Foucault said of Les Ménines). The duty of involvement is also part of the researcher's ethic. So why 1966? The year wasn't chosen at random. It really was a watershed year in modern France.
But we also had personal motivations: we wanted to verify a few facts. 1966 was the year I discovered France after my secondary education in the United States. That was the moment when the question of French identity arose for me, so I wanted to verify the collective dimension of my own history. As soon as I left for the provinces, I didn't share many of the preoccupations of Parisian intellectuals, but I did follow the events of the year, the presidential election and the Ben Barka affair, with some attention. I evoked some of my 1966 passions, such as Gainsbourg and Pierrot le fou. I later got to know some of the protagonists I've mentioned: François Châtelet, my teacher and then a friend, François Wahl, my first editor, and of course Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Louis Althusser, Pierre Nora, Christian Fouchet and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. But there were some developments I hadn't foreseen, on Aragon and Malraux, on Blanche ou l'oubli and the Antimémoires, written that year. With 1966, it was, so to speak, my story that I told you.
