French accounts during the historical moment initially emphasised the global experience of student unrest. Such interpretations understood mobilisation in Mexico, Poland, and Nigeria as having a shared horizon of expectation, turning worldwide anti-authoritarian student unrest into an interpretive frame. With the unfolding of events in France, the French narrative subsequently shifted from a globally experienced present to a nationally framed évènement of the past. This shift from lived experience/present to memory turned the student mobilisation as ‘les évènements de mai-juin 68’ into a succession of French historical events.
The commemoration of French events as a paradigmatic case side-lined mobilisation in other European, Asian, African, and Latin American countries. However, this nationalisation gave way for a pacified Franco-centred narrative which could be juxtaposed to the European memory scale whilst neglecting its internal contradictions stemming from the diverse European and global peripheries.
