Dissident desideres. High-school students in the '68

Abstract

Multi-faceted, heterogeneous and sometimes antagonistic with each others: several conceptual places characterized students’ ideological panorama during the protests occurred in 1968. Through the analysis of a large amounts of scholastic pamphlets, this paper aims at highlighting how social, generational and cultural factors impacted on defining contrasting ideologies. In university students’ booklets and manifestos, scholastic and social flaws were framed into a Marxist vision of the society: democratization in school and society could have been possible, in their view, only disrupting a system where the élite forced middle and low-classes to live subjected to authoritarianism and alienation. Booklets written by students enrolled in technical schools usually focused on social and job marketing issues. On the other hands, issues debated changed dramatically among students enrolled in lyceums. As they usually came from affluent families, they felt the urgency to overturn cultural rather than economic constraints.