“The Great Lesson of May '68 Is That Violence Pays”

From the après-mai 1968 through the end of the 1970s, successive groups of French radicals legitimized revolutionary violence and developed a militant protest culture that challenged the state's monopoly on violence. Most scholars have presented political violence in 1970s France as bound to the trajectories of organized Maoist and Trotskyist groups and as the product of revolutionary ideology that was overcome by experience. This article traces how a cohort of radicals continued to articulate discourses of self-defense, counterviolence, and violence as revolution of the self well into the 1970s. Activists did so because their experiences of conflict confirmed the salience of violent struggle. The article contributes to the historical study of violent phenomena by tracing an approach that integrates the analysis of understandings of violence and experiences of conflictual politics.