Stifle the uprisings
At the end of the 1960s, the services of Raymond Marcellin, Minister of the Interior from 1968 to 1973, kept a close eye on what was written about the crisis of May-June 1968.
An extraordinary break with the established order, May 1968 and what followed was immediately the object of efforts to suffocate the events.
Historians were prosecuted for libelling the police when they published, in La Sorbonne par elle-même (October 1968) a tract about the death of a Maoist militant, Gilles Tautin, who drowned near the Renault-Flins factory while fleeing the police.
Other books, about the ‘murder of Gilles Tautin’ were threatened, including Mai 1968, une répétition générale (Maspero) and Livre noir des journées de mai published by student unions (Seuil).