Behind the Glass

Robert Merle's novel looks at a single day on the Nanterre campus of the Sorbonne, Paris' venerable institution. This day was just over a month before the revolutionary events associated with the May Movement (Touraine, 1971) of nineteen sixty-eight. Built in an industrial zone, occupied in previous centuries by vineyards and other fields, after the Second World War the grounds of Nanterre had been populated then abandoned, by various factories and warehouses, as the Parisian urban center pushed office complexes and suburban residential projects into the area. With the rapid expansion of France's university system, the Nanterre campus opened in nineteen sixty-four with nearly four thousand students. By nineteen sixty-eight, that number had swelled to fifteen thousand, and students expected to have twenty-five thousand classmates the following fall. On March twenty-second, a group of about one hundred and fifty students occupied part of the administration building of the Nanterre campus. These students took the date as the name of their movement, and we remember them for the central role that many of them played in the dramatic events which precipitated the events of May. As such, it is worth looking into how these students came together in the first place.