Factory disputes in the French provinces in the "1968 years"

Brittany as a case study

Vincent Porhel

pp. 188-201

in: Julian Jackson, Anna-Louise Milne, James Williams (eds), May 68, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

The regions have long been the object of a certain ambivalence within French historiography. On the one hand, they represent an object of choice for young research students "exiled" in the provinces as a result of the French education system's traditional hierarchies, but, on the other, they are often "reduced" to merely local history, with Paris always perceived as the stage for national history.¹ This dichotomy is especially striking when we turn to contemporary history. Thus exploring the diversity of "the 1968 years' from a regional point of view inevitably means challenging the bias "official" history gives to our collective representations.² This "official" history tends to approach "68 as a relatively short-lived set of social and political events, which lasted through the month of May and unfolded according to a three-stage escalation: the student crisis, the social crisis, the political crisis. The three scenes for this three-act drama are largely Parisian: the Latin Quarter, the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, then the Ministry of Labour on the rue de Grenelle. This version of the events, which was produced as they themselves played out, is still widely accepted today.³ By locating May 68 elsewhere, the aim here is also to question its chronology, to explore how it was perceived by those directly implicated in it and then marginalized from its afterlives, and to re-examine the forms of protest that arose out of it, thus also re-examining the initial representations that were constructed from it.⁴