1966 or the Birth of Our Present: Antoine Compagnon

When theory, consumption, and systems replaced people

To begin, I will compile some questions that arise from Compagnon's analyses from 1966 for our time today, 60 years later:

Are our universities today nothing more than "Potemkin universities"? Compagnon quotes contemporary critics who, in 1966, lamented that “wrong students” were being educated at “wrong universities” by “wrong professors” for “wrong exams.” When we complain today about the devaluation of degrees and the purely technocratic administration of knowledge, we must ask ourselves: Have we ever developed the system of mass education beyond the stage of a mere facade, or are we simply managing the academic decline that began in 1966?

Was the liberation of the individual in reality only his total subjugation to the "system"? In 1966, Foucault proclaimed the "death of man," replacing lived meaning with the cold logic of the system. In an era where algorithms and data structures govern our lives, the radical question arises: Didn't the structuralism of 1966 liberate us, or rather provide the ideological blueprint for a world in which the individual is merely a meaningless variable in an anonymous network?

Is our entire culture now just one giant "gadget"? Compagnon describes 1966 as the year in which culture, through paperbacks and mass media, became a disposable commodity, comparable to a disposable lighter. Must we now admit that our cultural consumption—from streaming to social media hype—is merely the ultimate expression of this "throwaway culture," in which the symbol is more important than the content, and owning a prestigious object replaces genuine reading?

Have we sacrificed the memory of the Shoah to spectacle? The Treblinka affair of 1966 demonstrated that the silence surrounding genocide could only be broken through a massive scandal and the provocation of the victims. Does this present us with a dilemma today: Is a serious engagement with historical trauma in a media-driven society even possible without the mechanism of scandalization and commercial exploitation, as Steiner demonstrated in 1966?

Was the "youth rebellion" in reality just the birth of the perfect consumer? Compagnon argues that in 1966, youth became a class less through political ideals than through their purchasing power and specific consumer desires (miniskirts, transistors, posters). Must we, in retrospect, conclude that the entire myth of revolt was merely a clever marketing strategy that paved the way for a society in which resistance itself is now just another commodity on the shelf of the lifestyle industry?

Antoine Compagnon unfolds in his panorama of a year, 1966, miraculous year (Gallimard, 2026) his interpretation of a miracle year. Inspired by Victor Hugo's description of the year 1817 in Les MisérablesCompagnon seeks to uncover the essence of a century beneath the "foam of the day." To this end, he scours the press, literature, radio, television, and fashion to make the form of an era tangible. He chose 1966 because this year is often overshadowed by the symbolically powerful year of 1968. Compagnon argues, however, that 1966 represents a crucial turning point where long-term trends in politics, culture, and society intersected. It is the year in which France definitively entered the consumer society and experienced a "second French Revolution," initiating profound ruptures in demographics and social customs. The author uses a temporal distance of approximately sixty years to maintain a critical perspective while simultaneously exploring the depths of this period.

The book understands 1966 less as a calendar year and more as a cultural season that began as early as autumn 1965. It was a time of institutional normalization under De Gaulle, but also of intellectual unrest. While André Malraux, with his "Cultural Centers," erected modern cathedrals against the meaninglessness of the machine world, and the birth control pill and new marriage laws ushered in the legal liberation of women, an intellectual revolt was already simmering beneath the apparent stability of Gaullism, a revolt that, in the Strasbourg Situationist scandal, precisely foreshadowed the upheavals of May 1968. Compagnon, however, wants to show that 1966 possesses an independent significance that cannot simply be dismissed as a mere prelude to 1968. The project is a blend of meticulous archival research and the personal exploration of an author who experienced this period firsthand as a young man.

The year 1966 also proves to be the precise peak of economic prosperity, marking France's definitive entry into the consumer society and the emergence of youth as an independent economic force through phenomena such as the collecting frenzy for promotional keychains and the miniskirt. In this year, the massive population explosion reaches the universities, giving rise to a new class of "new intellectuals," while simultaneously, "theory" rises to become the new dominant currency and thinkers like Michel Foucault, with their thesis of the "death of man," relegate Sartre's humanist legacy to the archives of the 19th century. It is the birth of modern semiotics and a radical textuality that reorganizes literary life under the leadership of figures like Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers, while the mass distribution of paperbacks definitively canonizes Marcel Proust as the greatest writer of the modern era. At the same time, a profound change is taking place in the collective consciousness, as the Shoah, through the controversies surrounding Jean-François Steiner and Hannah Arendt, enters French memory culture for the first time as a unique crime.

Part 1: The new intellectuals

The study begins with the massive explosion in student numbers during the 1960s, which gave rise to a new social class. These “new intellectuals” included not only academics but also a growing number of white-collar workers and technocrats shaped by higher education. This group formed the core audience for the emerging paperback series and sophisticated news magazines such as… The Express.

Methodically, Compagnon links statistical data on education with literary analyses, such as those of Georges Perec's novel The thingsHe demonstrates how the devaluation of academic titles and the feminization of the teaching profession altered the status of the intellectual. The university was in a state of permanent crisis as it attempted to transfer elitist structures to mass education.

The text also illuminates the suffering of this generation, whom Compagnon calls the "sick of the university." He uses reports from student psychological counseling centers to illustrate the alienation and aimlessness of this new class. Literary figures such as Adam Pollo in Le Clézio's The protocol They serve as prototypes for these insecure young people.

The main finding of this section is the demonstration that the cultural boom of 1966 would have been impossible without this new mass audience. One of Compagnon's theses is that the students of the 1960s were defined less by rebellion than by a specific form of psychological alienation and social declassification. Furthermore, it becomes clear that the educational reforms under Christian Fouchet unintentionally paved the way for the unrest of 1968 by destroying traditional humanistic foundations without creating new professional prospects.

Part 2: Youth Culture

This section focuses on the visible signs of youth culture, such as long hair, miniskirts, and the curious mania for collecting promotional keychains. Compagnon interprets these phenomena as expressions of euphoric optimism during a time of economic prosperity. For the first time, young people were perceived as an independent economic force with specific purchasing power.

The method employed here consists of a cultural studies analysis of everyday objects and mass media. The author examines the paperback (livre de poche) as a consumer good that sparked a heated debate about the democratization of culture. He contrasts the elitist rejection of this "paperback culture" by critics like Hubert Damisch with the pragmatic defense by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Furthermore, Compagnon analyzes the political instrumentalization of youth. He describes the efforts of Minister François Missoffe to develop a national youth policy, which ultimately failed due to a lack of understanding of the real problems facing the younger generation. The failure of this technocratic planning becomes tangible in the confrontation between Missoffe and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

This section makes it clear that the youth of the 1960s primarily formed a class through consumption, not politics. A surprising thesis is the significance of the disposable "Cricket" lighter as a symbol of the transition to a throwaway society, which Sartre used as a metaphor for the new culture. The key takeaway lies in the realization that the so-called "youth revolt" had its roots in a profound commercialization of everyday life.

Part 3: Rome and Moscow – Mauriac and Aragon

Compagnon portrays the two "literary popes," François Mauriac and Louis Aragon, as the dominant figures of 1966. While Mauriac represented Catholic Gaullism, Aragon embodied the intellectual power of the Communist Party. Both used their enormous media presence to influence literary and political events.

The author employs a biographical and literary-historical approach to demonstrate the parallels between these two careers. He describes Mauriac's eightieth birthday as a national event and his support for De Gaulle during the presidential election campaign. Simultaneously, he portrays Aragon's efforts to reconcile the legacy of Surrealism with Marxism and to win back the youth for Communism.

Compagnon pays particular attention to the private crises behind the public facade. He analyzes a harrowing letter from Elsa Triolet to Aragon from the spring of 1966, which exposes the lie of their mythologized love affair. This rupture is reflected in the structure of Aragon's novel. Blanche or Forgetting again, which was interrupted during this time.

This section reveals the extent to which literary life was still dominated by authoritarian father figures who simultaneously upheld political ideologies. A provocative thesis posits that Aragon adopted the language of the avant-garde and structuralism only to mask the dogmatic rigidity of the Communist Party. Compagnon exposes a profound chasm between the public persona of these "great authors" and their inner despair in the face of aging and political disillusionment.

Part 4: Proust 66

This section examines the renaissance of Marcel Proust in 1966. Compagnon demonstrates how Proust was definitively canonized as the "greatest writer of the 20th century" at that moment. This process coincided with the disappearance of the last living witnesses and the transition to purely academic analysis.

The method employed here is one of reception history and media criticism. The author analyzes the impact of a major television documentary about Proust, in which his housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, became the real sensation, changing the elitist view of the author. Paperback editions and exhibitions made Proust accessible to a mass audience.

At the same time, Compagnon describes the rise of Proust scholarship at the university, which moved away from biographical anecdotes and adopted structuralist methods. George Painter's biography sparked a fierce controversy, as it claimed that the work could only be understood through life—a thesis that was provocatively reversed by new critics such as Barthes.

One insight gained from this section is that Proust was reinvented in 1966 at the intersection of high culture and mass consumption. One argument presented is that Céleste Albaret "democratized" Proust by making him accessible through the "servants' staircase," thus breaking the author's sophisticated aura. Furthermore, it is shown that the avant-garde's turn to Proust signaled the end of existentialism.

Part 5: A minor modernist heretic – Barthes versus Picard

This section deals with the famous dispute between the "Nouvelle Critique" and the traditional academic criticism of the Sorbonne. Triggered by Roland Barthes' work on Racine, a debate erupted over the legitimate interpretation of classical texts. Raymond Picard sharply attacked Barthes in a pamphlet, accusing him of "imposture" and ideological blindness.

Compagnon uses a sociological analysis based on Pierre Bourdieu to unmask the dispute as a pure power struggle within the intellectual field. It was less about the truth about Racine than about the dominance of new disciplines like semiotics over the classical humanities. Barthes sought an alliance with the press and the students against the "mandarin" of the Sorbonne.

Barthes' methodical defense in Criticism and truth Barthes is described as a turning point in modern text theory. He demanded the right to a subjective, systemic reading and rejected the idea of ​​objective philological truth. He established the notion that the critic himself becomes a writer.

The essential yield of this perspective is the reconstruction of a conflict that would shape the pedagogical methods of French schools and universities for decades. The central thesis is that, despite their animosity, Barthes and Picard were accomplices in defending the literary canon. Bourdieu's observation that Barthes merely exploited the archaic state of the university to establish a new, technocratic routine is particularly interesting.

Part 6: Theory, Literature, Politics

Compagnon analyzes here the rise of "theory" to the new leading discipline. He describes how thinking transitioned from existence to concept and from meaning to system. 1966 was the year in which structuralism conquered the media, although its proponents often rejected this label.

Methodically, the author examines the introduction of Russian Formalism into France through Tzvetan Todorov's anthology Theory of LiteratureHe demonstrates how these texts were instrumentalized to create a new genealogy for structuralism. The connection between linguistics and literature became the core of this new intellectual self-understanding.

Another focus is on the political dimension of this theoretical development. Within the Communist Party, formalism was used as a weapon against rigid socialist realism. Aragon and Pierre Daix promoted these currents in order to culturally modernize the party without completely abandoning Marxism.

This section illustrates how "theory" became the de facto religion of intellectuals in 1966. A key thesis is the exposure of the "whitewashed" history of structuralism, which Roman Jakobson presented as a universal mediator, thereby concealing fractures within the Russian school. The conclusion lies in the realization that scientific rigor often served as a cover for internal party power struggles.

Part 7: Children of the 1960s – Bresson, Morin, Godard

In this section, Compagnon compares the film work of Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard with the sociological work of Edgar Morin. All three approached the youth of 1966 in different ways, ranging from metaphysics to field research. Bresson's For example, Balthazar and Godard Masculine – Feminine They are read as complementary studies on modern alienation.

The method combines film analysis with the examination of sociological practices such as the interview. Morin conducted a field study in Plozévet, Brittany, to document the violent intrusion of modernity into a traditional community. He identified women and young people as the real drivers of this change.

Godard, in turn, used "cinema-vérité" to portray the "Marx and Coca-Cola" generation. His film is interpreted as a sociological essay that highlights the gap between politically engaged boys and consumer-oriented girls. He directly "collagated" the reality of 1966 into his fictional narrative.

One outcome of this section is the demonstration of a deep kinship between the "anti-modern" Bresson and the "modern" Godard in their rejection of commercial cinema. One thesis is that in the 1960s, the school ceased to be the primary engine of modernization and was instead overtaken by consumer culture. Furthermore, it becomes clear how profoundly the interview, as a new literary and academic form, shaped the year.

Part 8: The Turn to Textuality

This section highlights the break between the magazine As is and the "Nouveau Roman". Philippe Sollers turned away from Alain Robbe-Grillet and proclaimed a radical textuality that understood writing as an "experience of limits". With this, the avant-garde completed the transition from psychological realism to purely linguistic investigation.

Compagnon methodically analyzes Sollers' programmatic texts and Barthes' theoretical reorientation. He shows how figures like Sade, Artaud, and Bataille were elevated to the status of new guiding lights. Literature was no longer meant to represent the world, but rather to reflect its own creation.

In contrast to this theoretical coldness, Marguerite Duras's work is presented as a form of novel that, despite all its experimentation, retained an emotional depth. Her work The vice consul It marked a high point in her career and was even praised as prophetic by Jacques Lacan. Duras became the true icon of 1966.

The value of this section lies in the reconstruction of a radicalization of the avant-garde, which increasingly distanced itself from its readership. A central thesis is the end of the "Nouveau Roman" as a reformist project of the bourgeoisie and its replacement by an aggressive "theory of the text." The observation that Duras's success was based on her treatment of colonial history in a way that resonated with the modern audience of 1966 is particularly interesting.

Part 9: Malraux's Year of Terror

Compagnon describes 1966 as a crisis year for André Malraux, the Minister of Cultural Affairs. Malraux was politically embroiled in censorship disputes surrounding Rivette's film. The nun and Genet's piece The walls He came under pressure. At the same time, he was in a deep personal depression and secretly working on his Antimemoirs.

The method consists of juxtaposing Malraux's brilliant public speeches with his private turmoil. The author analyzes Malraux's vision of the "Maisons de la Culture" (Houses of Culture) as modern cathedrals intended to restore meaning to life in the machine-driven world. Malraux rejected any form of pedagogical instruction and believed in the immediate "aesthetic shock."

Furthermore, the book addresses the falling out with Pierre Boulez that led to the composer's emigration from France. Malraux was mocked as a "Minister of Culture" (with a "K") who, while possessing grand visions, failed at practical reforms and in the fight against censorship. His retreat into writing his memoirs is interpreted as an escape from the unresolved issues of the present.

This section reveals the paradox of a minister who extols artistic freedom while his government suppresses it. A surprising thesis is the comparison between culture and highway construction, with which Malraux attempted to justify his budget to parliament. The takeaway lies in the realization that Malraux's true legacy of 1966 was not his politics, but rather the reinvention of the literary form of the "anti-memoir."

Part 10: The Death of Man – Foucault versus Sartre

This section is dedicated to the overwhelming success of Michel Foucault's The order of thingsThe book became a symbol of the end of existentialism and the rise of structuralism. Foucault's thesis of the "death of man" shook the humanistic foundations of both Christian and Marxist philosophy.

Methodically, Compagnon traces the media's portrayal of Foucault and confronts it with Sartre's bitter critique. Sartre saw structuralism as the "last barricade of the bourgeoisie" against Marxism and accused Foucault of replacing history with a static system. Foucault, on the other hand, considered Sartre a 19th-century thinker incapable of grasping modern epistemology.

The author also illuminates the technocratic dimension of Foucault's thought. Critics like Henri Lefebvre saw structuralism as the appropriate ideology for the new class of planners and experts under De Gaulle. Foucault himself was closely associated with government agencies during this period and participated in university reforms.

This section presents a radical shift in French thought. A central thesis is that Foucault's success stemmed from his fulfillment of a need for scientific rigor, which replaced Sartre's "moralizing." Crucially, Foucault categorized Marxism as a mere marginal phenomenon of the 19th century, one that had lost its relevance in the modern world.

Part 11: Althusser – Lacan

Compagnon examines the unusual alliance between the Marxist Louis Althusser and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Both worked on a radical renewal of their disciplines through a "return to the sources" and the rejection of all humanism. This connection shaped an entire generation of elite students at the École normale supérieure.

The method employed here is rooted in the history of ideas and organizational sociology. The author describes the struggles within the communist student organization UEC, in which Althusserian rigor was pitted against "revisionist" tendencies. The publication of Lacan Writings and Althusser's For Marx In the same year, they cemented their intellectual dominance.

An important aspect is the role of "theory" as a political instrument. While the Communist Party leadership attempted to establish a Christian-Marxist humanism, Althusser insisted on Marx's "theoretical antihumanity." Lacan, in turn, used linguistics to liberate Freudianism from its biological misunderstandings.

This section shows how the connection between Marx and Freud led to a new intellectual orthodoxy. A surprising thesis is that Althusser accepted Lacan as a "father figure" while simultaneously attempting to discipline the student movement to the party line. A valuable insight lies in the analysis of the "Cahiers pour l'analyse" as the germinal cell of a mode of thought that was already seeking to move beyond structuralism.

Part 12: The Treblinka Affair

This section discusses the controversy surrounding Jean-François Steiner's book. Treblinka The work addressed this topic. It sparked a heated debate about the alleged passivity of the Jews during the extermination. Steiner was accused of mocking the victims and perpetuating antisemitic stereotypes of "Jewish cowardice."

The method combines literary criticism with contemporary history and moral philosophy. Compagnon relates the book to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, whose French translation appeared at the same time and raised similar accusations of collaboration by Jewish councils. He demonstrates how these debates sharpened the awareness of the unique nature of the Shoah in France.

Despite the justified historical criticism of Steiner's fictionalized dialogues and inaccurate figures, Compagnon acknowledges the book's catalytic effect. It broke the silence surrounding the extermination camps and forced the public to confront the reality of industrial-scale killing. Prominent intellectuals like Pierre Vidal-Naquet experienced a personal and professional turning point as a result of this work.

One insight from this section is that 1966 was the year in which the Shoah entered the French collective memory. A central thesis states that Steiner's "scandalous" questioning was necessary to break the heroic narrative of the Resistance and to make the specific situation of the Jewish victims visible. Relevant here is the observation that Steiner was instrumentalized by the extreme right while simultaneously attempting to establish a new Jewish self-awareness.

Part 13: Before May

The concluding section summarizes the year as a "stocktaking," leading directly into the unrest of 1968. Events such as De Gaulle's speech in Phnom Penh against the Vietnam War and the rise of Yves Saint Laurent's ready-to-wear mark the global and societal upheaval. The old elites celebrate themselves one last time, while the youth are already forging their own paths.

Compagnon presents a chronological collage of the last months of the year. The author describes the scandal surrounding the Situationists in Strasbourg as a perfect premonition of May 1968. Their pamphlet On the misery in the student milieu He attacked all the idols of the year and demanded a life without "dead times" and enjoyment without "shackles".

Compagnon concludes the book with a personal reflection on his own return to France in August 1965. He interweaves his "ego story" with the book's major themes and confesses that 1966 was the year he discovered a new world. The year emerges as a moment of total availability and transition.

This conclusion reinforces the initial thesis that 1966 was a unique "miracle year" whose richness cannot be reduced to 1968. Compagnon argues that the real revolution had already taken place in the minds and consumer behavior of 1966, and that 1968 was merely the political eruption. This section makes it clear that the apparent stability under De Gaulle was already riddled with deep cracks.

Conclusion

Compagnon integrates international contexts primarily as reflections or catalysts for French developments, with the USA frequently serving as a benchmark for modern consumer and media cultures, while Germany remains present mainly through its reckoning with the Nazi past. The author documents the creeping "Americanization" of the French public sphere, for example, through the novelty of televised election campaigns or the transformation of news magazines along US lines. Culturally, the "children of Marx and Coca-Cola" represent the tension between political ideals and global pop culture, manifested both in the symbolic significance of Route 66 and in the triumphant success of French theoretical exports at Johns Hopkins University. Germany appears, on the one hand, through Hans Magnus Enzensberger's intellectual critique of paperback culture. On the other hand, the German frame of reference remains indispensable for the changing perception of the Shoah, whether through the legal reckoning in the Düsseldorf Trials or the provocative reception of Hannah Arendt's theses on the "banality of evil." Compagnon does not use these international references as isolated digressions; rather, they serve as indispensable coordinates to locate the radicalism of 1966 within a networked Western world.

The established figures of the French intellectual world, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, François Mauriac, and Louis Aragon, reacted to their looming displacement by the rising structuralists with a mixture of bitter resistance, creative retreat, and desperate attempts at rejuvenation. Sartre suddenly found himself branded a "has-been" and passionately defended history and human practice against the new primacy of the system, which he denounced as the "last barricade of the bourgeoisie" against Marxism. Meanwhile, Malraux, faced with personal crises and public attacks, fell into a deep depression and immersed himself in work on his Antimemoirs Aragon, fleeing, attempts to escape through a demonstrative “Jeunism” and an alliance with the avant-garde of As is to keep pace with the new era. Mauriac, on the other hand, although he allows himself to be celebrated as a national monument, sees himself as a kind of "mammoth" or "aurochs" who no longer truly understands the youth and their new customs.

Compagnon interprets the dethronement of this generation as a radical epistemological break, in which 19th-century humanism is replaced by "theory" and a cold system. The concerns of the older intellectuals, which revolve around concepts such as meaning, freedom, and lived destiny, suddenly appear provincial and scientifically inadequate in the eyes of the new generation. Michel Foucault, with his thesis of the "death of man," relegates Sartre and his contemporaries directly to the museum of intellectual history, since they are incapable of grasping modern structures beyond consciousness.

Compagnon views the emergence of this group of new intellectuals with marked skepticism, as he sees it as inextricably linked to a crisis-ridden "massification" of education. He describes this stratum as often "disoriented" and uses the term "the sick of the university" to characterize a generation trapped in a system of "Potemkin universities." He sees the consequences of this development as the emergence of an academic illusory world. The rise of structuralist theory served this new elite as a kind of "technocratic religion," displacing traditional humanistic education and replacing it with a new, often sterile academic routine that managed rather than liberated thought.

Compagnon assesses the long-term effects of this era as a fateful turning point, as the 1966 reforms—particularly the abolition of the general education first year of university studies—initiated a lasting fragmentation of higher education. This generation of "children of Marx and Coca-Cola" forged a consequential link between intellectual aspiration and mass consumption, thereby reducing culture to a mere commodity, an available "gadget." Instead of achieving genuine social openness, the new intellectual practice merely cemented new hierarchies and paved the way for a consumerist arbitrariness that continues to weaken the legacy of the classical humanities to this day.

Despite these critical diagnoses, Compagnon does not advocate reversing these processes, as he understands 1966 as an inevitable threshold between two eras. He emphasizes the "asynchronicity of contemporaries" and demonstrates that 1966 was a moment in which long-term trends (demographics, economics, social customs) irreversibly intersected. The book does not end with a call for restoration, but rather with the question of what we owe this year today. Compagnon makes it clear that the "second revolution" he describes is far from over and that our digital, consumer-driven present has emerged directly from the pivotal decisions of 1966.

Compagnon looks back on 1966 with the sharpness of a historian and the melancholy of a contemporary witness. He exposes the illusions and psychological alienation of the youth of that time, as well as the arrogance of the new theoretical elites. But instead of calling for a change of course, he urges the reader to better understand the shape of our own era by studying its origins in this “wonderful” yet terrible year of transition.

It would be inappropriate to retrospectively measure Compagnon's analysis against standards that only emerged in the decades after 1966. Feminism, postcolonial theory, and homosexual emancipation movements only gained their social and theoretical traction during the 1970s and 1980s. This temporal asymmetry, however, is not neutral but rather requires explanation: it points to the limitations of the intellectual horizon at the time and to those topics that were not yet considered central to public debate in 1966. In this context, the strong focus of the chosen year on a male-dominated elite is striking, through whose lens 1966 appears almost exclusively as a stage for canonized intellectuals. Figures like Mauriac, Aragon, Malraux, and Sartre act as central interpretive authorities, while other voices are structurally excluded. While Compagnon acknowledges the importance of 1966 for legal and sexual changes in women's lives – for example, in the context of the financial independence of married women or the social debate surrounding the birth control pill – women are predominantly discussed as social indicators of change, not yet as independent producers of theory and critique.

Antoine Compagnons 1966, miraculous year As demonstrated, this is more than a mere chronicle; it is the reconstruction of an epistemological rupture. The year marks the moment when 19th-century humanism and 20th-century existentialist responsibility were superseded by the cold elegance of the system, the sign, and the market. It is the year in which youth was born as an economic class and "theory" rose to become the new cultural currency. De Gaulle may have still reigned unchallenged, but the foundations of his moral order had already been eroded: by the pill, the paperback, and structuralism. This work shows that 1966 is the true turning point of French modernity. Here, the course was set for the identity politics, the culture of memory, and the media staging of intellectuality that we know today.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.