Why 1966 ?

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After two years devoted to Proust ("Mémoire de la littérature", "Morales de Proust"), and two years to life writing (a first year general and broad, a second year exclusively on Montaigne), we completely changed subject and tackled contemporary times in a multidisciplinary and intercultural project.

For a long time, I'd had the idea of carrying out research over the course of a year, following it month by month. It would be like writing the novel of a year, reliving it at its own pace, in all its aspects, in all its details, reading all the books, going through all the press, seeing all the films, listening to the radio, watching television, immersing myself in daily life, songs, advertising, fashion and so on.

This unoriginal fantasy could be traced back to a memory from Les Misérables , where one chapter is entitled "1817" (t. I, book III, chapter I) and begins as follows: "1817 is the year that Louis XVIII, with a certain royal aplomb that was not lacking in pride, called the twenty-second of his reign. It was the year when M. Bruguière de Sorsum was famous. All the wigmakers' stores, hoping for powder and the return of the royal bird, were painted azure and decorated with flowers This is followed by a copious Abstract listing all the events, from the most significant to the most insignificant. All events are recalled and intermingled: news items, dramas, disasters, shipwrecks. Then come the rengaines, the scies, the obituaries.

Hugo was born in 1802, he was 15 in 1817; he revisits his youth, remembers anecdotes, but he has also investigated, compiled. And yet, 1817 is a year that doesn't count in history; it's a hollow year. "Here, in no particular order, is what emerges confusedly from the year 1817, forgotten today", he says.

Could the same be said of 1966? A forgotten year from which we'd like to extract a jumble of details to make its "physiognomy", pick out its incidents neglected by history, the scum of its days.

But why 1966? Was it better to try a flat, smooth, indifferent year, a plain year, or a prominent, steep, striking, mountainous year? A year drawn at random or a major year, turning point, threshold? This could be a false alternative, as there seems to be a great risk of turning a banal year into an exceptional one by deepening it. As Hugo said, "there are no small deeds in humanity". Conversely, we run the risk of discovering that a great year wasn't really great at all.

The choice could have been made on a purely arbitrary basis. So there are books about random years, years of chance. I know of at least two: one on 1926 by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Harvard UP, 1997): a kind of catalog, dictionary, encyclopedia of a year that was chosen in particular because no historian had given it any importance; the other on 1929, by Stefan Andriopoulos, 1929. Beiträge zur Archäologie der Medien (Suhrkamp, 2002), the year of Germany's first television broadcast.

And why should we admire that year? Why is it an annus mirabilis? The Latinism is actually an Anglicism. According to theOxford English Dictionary, the expression was first used in 1666. Yet this was a year of disaster, with the Great Fire of London, but also a year that could have been worse, given the magic of the number 666 in Revelation.

There is, however, a more serious model: the year 1913, a time of prodigious renewal in letters and the arts, on the eve of the Great War, a time of modern explosion, of Péguy's Eve, Cendrars' La Prose du Transsibérien ,Alcools and Apollinaire's Peintres cubistes , barrès's La Colline inspirée , Martin du Gard's Jean Barois , Alain-Fournier's Grand Meaulnes , Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, and even more confidential works such as Roussel's Locus solus, Larbooth's Journal d'A.O. Barnabooth by Larbaud, or "Le roman d'aventure", an article-program by Jacques Rivière in La NRF. There was also Braque and Picasso, Duchamp, Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes. But it all faded away in the war. 1913 was an accident.

Is 1966 of the same order? Between 1965, of which it is inseparable, and 1968, of which it is prophetic? Let's add that this refers to the cultural, academic and theatrical year, not the calendar year. For the purposes of this research, 1966 will begin on September^1, 1965. 1966 is not a visible year, but a seminal one in cultural, literary, cinematographic, theatrical, political, economic, demographic and social terms.

Let's start by recalling some of the highlights of 1966. On the political front, it was the year of the first election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage since 1848 (December 5 and 19, 1965), and of the unexpected defeat of General de Gaulle by François Mitterrand and Jean Lecanuet at the end of a first so-called American campaign. It was also a year full of incidents: ben Barka affair (kidnapped on October 29 in front of the Brasserie Lipp); announced NATO withdrawal; trial of writers Siniavski and Daniel in Moscow in early February; PCF central committee in Argenteuil in March and resolution on ideological and cultural problems, giving artists and intellectuals their freedom; US bombing of North Vietnam and protests in France; De Gaulle's trip to the USSR in June, Phnom Penh speech on September¹ condemning the US; start of the Cultural Revolution in China.

On the cultural front, it was the arrival of the baby boomers in universities, the year of the Fouchet plan for higher education, the construction of university campuses, and the major survey of France's youth launched by François Missoffe in the spring of 1966. It also saw the inauguration of the Maison de la Culture in Amiens, and the release of some memorable films( Godard'sPierrot le fou and Masculin féminin, Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, Lelouch's Un homme et une femme, Rivette's La Religieuse , Milos Forman's Les Amours d'une blonde, Fellini's Juliette des esprits and Polanski's Cul-de-sac ). We also remember the protests against Genet's Paravents , the Prix Renaudot for Perec's Les Choses , and the unexpected success of Foucault's Mots et les Choses.

1965-1966 was indeed a turning point. Sociologist Henri Mandras described 1965 as the start of the "Second French Revolution": simultaneously, the birth rate fell and the productivity of fixed capital began to decline. It was the start of the consumer society, the triumph of Gaullist modernism with the Fifth Plan, the adoption of the master plan for urban planning and development in Paris, the creation of new towns, the construction of the RER and the Montparnasse tower. We were just emerging from a twenty-five-year war (1938-1962), and growth was slowly taking hold. France was discovering that it was more prosperous than it had thought. It was the time of the transistor, the moped, the disposable lighter, the Peugeot 204 and the Renault 16.

Publishing was also undergoing profound transformations, particularly in the humanities, with a new public of teachers and students. In 1965-1966, there were 400,000 students in France, and 25,000 teachers in higher education. L'Express and Le Nouvel Observateur became American-style magazines, while La Quinzaine littéraire and Le Magazine littéraire were launched. The "à la page" magazines Critique and Tel Quel overtook Les Temps modernes. Numerous ambitious paperback collections appeared or developed ("Idées", "10/18", "Poésie/Gallimard"). The success of some of this season's famous titles would be incomprehensible if we ignored this demographic, economic, political, social and cultural context: Althusser's Pour Marx and Lire le Capital at Maspero; Benveniste's Problèmes de linguistique générale and Les Mots et les Choses in Pierre Nora's "Bibliothèque des sciences humaines" at Gallimard; Gérard Genette's Figures at Seuil, in the "Tel Quel" collection; Lacan's Écrits also at Seuil in the autumn. Not forgetting Barthes's Critique et vérité, the spring 1966 riposte to Nouvelle critique, nouvelle imposture, Raymond Picard's nasty pamphlet published in autumn 1965 by Pauvert, in the "Libertés" collection.

This lecture will therefore be not only literary, but also cultural in the broadest sense. We'll be looking at the year in all its diversity, from a variety of perspectives: demography, politics, urban planning, education, philosophy, sociology, film, television and song. To give a lecture on 1966 is to risk talking not only about high culture, but also about mass culture.

Excerpts from the InA archives.