Presa della parola : A review and discussion of oral history and the Italian 1968

Research on 1968 and oral history

The importance of oral sources for historical research on 1968 has been highlighted more than once, not just by oral historians but also by ‘traditional’ historians not accustomed to employ such sources in their research. In November 1988, at a conference organised in Turin on the 20th anniversary of ‘the students’ year’ (Rossanda, 1968), an interesting debate about the approaches to research on Sessantotto took place. ⁴ Pointing out the already noticeable delay of Italian historiography on this subject matter, historians Nicola Tranfaglia and Francesco Barbagallo claimed that it was necessary to gather oral testimonies from the protagonists and analyse them together with the written evidence that had been produced by the movements (documents, reports, leaflets and so on). Furthermore, Giovanni De Luna – a historian who had been a sessantottino (i.e. somebody who participated in Sessantotto) himself – drew attention to the paradox that 1968, despite orality having played a crucial role in it, had left a predominantly written memory. However, this memory alone, De Luna pointed out, was insufficient for an accurate historical reconstruction of that period:

At that time, there was deep wariness of the written word, which was identified with power, mystification, and falsehood; in any case, one wrote a lot, but there is no doubt that the truest things of 1968 were linked to oral communication. This makes it extremely difficult to reconstruct 1968 only through written documents. (Passato e Presente, 1989: 20) ⁵

In addition, there are reasons inherent to the very principles and aims of oral history that make this research methodology particularly suited to investigate 1968. If one considers that oral history is ‘an art dealing with the individual in social and historical context’ that aims at exploring ‘the dramatic distance and the indissoluble bond between “history” and personal experience’, with a view to acknowledging the latter’s relevance within the historical account (Portelli, 1997: VIII), it is apparent that few research topics suit this agenda better than 1968. ⁶ In fact, apart from the wars of the last century – which are, by no coincidence, the object of various admirable oral history works ⁷ – it is not easy to think of other historical events and processes that were characterised more than 1968 by direct and active participation of great numbers of ordinary people in ‘history with a capital H’, and by the breaking of traditional boundaries between the private and the public sphere. ⁸ Thus, oral history can find in 1968 a privileged terrain for the investigation into the dialectics between history and stories, or in other words, for the analysis of the complex intermingling of great historical events and processes, on the one hand, and ordinary individuals’ experience and memories, on the other hand. Moreover, the specific attention to subjectivity that is characteristic of oral history makes this methodology an extremely valuable tool for studying movements that were based on the idea of achieving social and political change ‘starting from oneself’, that is, from the activists’ identity, feelings, personal needs, aspirations and conditions of life.

The ‘classics’

In the light of what has been said, it is not surprising that the first significant oral history works dealing with the Sessantotto were produced by scholars such as Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli, who, despite not participating in first person in the uprising of ‘the students’ year’ for fortuitous circumstances, ⁹ shared its spirit and ideals (along with forms of political and cultural activism in previous and subsequent years), and considered themselves in all respects sessantottini.

Luisa Passerini is the author of a quite atypical work that was published in Italian in 1988 (Passerini, 2008) and, after being translated into English in 1996 under the title Autobiography of a Generation (Passerini, 2004), gained considerable attention internationally. The book has an original structure resulting from the combination of heterogeneous materials: the unevenly numbered chapters consist of a selective adaptation of a diary kept by the author during the years 1983–1987, in which the account of contemporary events, personal recollections, descriptions of dreams and reflections on a cycle of psychoanalytical sessions are intertwined; the evenly numbered chapters, on the other hand, contain a thematic analysis of some crucial aspects of memory of 1968, based on the interviews with activists of the Italian student movement that Passerini was conducting in those years for the collective book entitled 1968. A Student Generation in Revolt (Fraser et al., 1988). ¹⁰ To sum up, Passerini’s book breaks away from usual formats and crosses the boundaries between literary genres: strictly speaking, it is neither a historical essay, a diary, a book of memoirs, nor a psychoanalytical notebook; in fact, it is a combination of them all, a text that mixes genres and styles presenting an individual and at the same time a collective autobiography of the 1968 generation.

A couple of years after Passerini’s book came out, Portelli (1990) wrote an article that was translated into English in the mid-1990s with the title ‘I’m Going to Say It Now: Interviewing the Movement’ (Portelli, 1997: 183–98). In this article, Portelli reflects on the methodology of oral history and its relationship with 1968, and analyses some interviews with former activists who had participated in one of the watershed events and foundation myths of the Italian Sessantotto: the so-called battle of Valle Giulia, that is, the clashes between the police and students that occurred on 1 March 1968, when students tried to enter the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Rome La Sapienza that had been evacuated the day before, and for the first time opposed a violent reaction to police charges.

In both works, research on 1968 is also meant as a form of autobiography. As revealed by its title, this is a key dimension in Passerini’s book, which opens with this eloquent diary entry:

January. I conducted my first interviews with the protagonists of ’68. The interviews plunge me into my own past: as I listen, the film of what I was doing at the time unreels. Memory redoubled in this way is hard to bear; it seems to me that until now no one has wanted to take on this burden, sometimes not even those who tell their stories. The mirror I see my image reflected in is opaque. My interviews with the elderly about their memories of Fascism had absorbed and moved me, but they weren’t so weighty, so unresolved, so enigmatic. (Passerini, 2004: 1).

For the author, listening to and analysing former activists’ life stories constitute an essential complement to her autobiographical exploration and self-reflection. ¹¹ In the above quotation, the comparison she draws with the interviews she had conducted for her previous research on memories of Fascism (Passerini, 1987) is significant. Although with a different emphasis, Portelli too points out the huge difference between interviewing Italian steelworkers or Kentucky coal miners (see Portelli, 1985, 2011), on the one hand, and movement activists, on the other. This difference stems from a series of factors: the shorter generational distance (Portelli was born in 1942, so many sessantottini are the same age or slightly younger than him), which implies that he can remember the events that are narrated, even if he did not take part in them; the sharing of previous and subsequent experiences; the greater socio-cultural homogeneity (the dialogue occurs between educated and literate people, who share the same types of discourse and often the same cultural references). Finally, there is the aforementioned close connection of oral history – Italian oral history, at least – with Sessantotto:

Whenever oral historians tackle 1968 they are involved in something akin to autobiography – maybe not personally, but scientifically, inasmuch as we are dealing with the roots of our scientific identity and method. Even though I was not present at the ‘battle’ of Valle Giulia, I am doing autobiography when I interview people about it, because it was one of the events which molded the very tools I am using, my very approach to reality (Portelli, 1997: 190).

Thus, the autobiographical dimension of Passerini’s and Portelli’s works is multifaceted. It is linked to the authors’ sense of belonging to the 1968 generation and their involvement (though indirect) in the events of ‘the students’ year’. It has to do with the connection between oral history as a research methodology and the values and practices of 1968. With regard to this, it is worth highlighting that bringing to the foreground the authors’ own subjectivity is a way of acknowledging its key importance in historical research and the writing of history, in sheer contrast to the old-style positivistic paradigm that saw the historian as a detached, impersonal and ‘objective’ observer.

Crucial, in both works, is the analysis of that veritable cornerstone of oral history: memory, understood as an activity that gives meaning to the past, (re)constructing it as a narrative in the present. ¹² In this respect, Passerini highlights that, rather than presenting a historical account of 1968, she is interested in exploring the protagonists’ memories in order to study their subjectivity:

Memory narrates in the vivid tones of actual experience. But what interests me is neither the liveliness of the accounts nor their faithfulness to reality, both of which would make these stories a secondary source for a good social history of Italy after 1945. Rather, what attracts me is memory’s insistence on creating a history of itself, which is much less and perhaps somewhat more than a social history (Passerini, 2004: 23).

Thus, with her focus on memory, Passerini aims at writing a cultural, rather than a social, history of the 1968 generation. Memory is the real subject also for Portelli, who points at the differences and divergences in the narratives of the battle of Valle Giulia, concerning not just the state of mind in which narrators tell they lived through that day, but also the dynamics of the events. For instance, there is no agreement on the police’s appearance and attitude: according to some, they were warlike and menacing, according to others relaxed if not ungainly and funny; similarly, it is not clear whether the demonstration, before the clashes with the police, was tense or festive, or whether the police fired teargas canisters at head level or not. So, Portelli highlights how memory and the narrative construction of the event are influenced by the narrators’ subjectivity, and in particular, by their previous and subsequent personal stories. Examining the narrative forms they use, he underscores that several recount the events of 1968 in ironic tones, and that one of the specific styles of these narratives is the mock-heroic style. A good example of this is provided by an activist who explains how, while running away from the police who were charging the demonstrators, he tore his trousers on a piece of wire and was left with the gaudy red underpants he was wearing that day sticking out of them (Portelli, 1997: 196). The use of irony, Portelli argues, reveals the distance between the narrated self of the past and the narrating self of the present, who is reconstructing some significant steps of his or her autobiography by looking at himself or herself ‘from outside’, as if at another person.

To sum up, Passerini’s and Portelli’s works hinge on the analysis of memory, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity. ¹³ Focusing on the ways in which narrators reconstruct past events and experiences in life stories and on the meanings they attach to them, bringing to the foreground not just the narrators’ but also the researchers’ subjectivity, and exploring the complex relationships between the actors involved in an oral history interview, these works reflect the significant innovations in the field of oral history – from a rather positivistic factual approach to more sophisticated forms of analysis that incorporated theoretical and methodological insights from disciplines such as anthropology, psychology and literary criticism – that precisely these authors had strongly contributed to introduce in the previous decade or so (Passerini, 1979; Portelli, 1981).

Particularly interesting, in this regard, is the position of Passerini, who in Autobiography of a Generation is questioning the assumptions and the role of traditional oral history as it was employed, for instance, in one of the other ‘classic’ works on 1968 that were published in the same period, and for which she wrote the parts on Italy. This is the aforementioned 1968. A Student Generation in Revolt (Fraser et al., 1988), a transnational history of 1960s movements in five Western countries – the United States, the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland), France, West Germany and Italy – written by various authors under the direction of Ronald Fraser. The book is based on a wide set of interviews with former activists (more than 230 interviews were made, out of which 175 were actually used) and looks at 1968 through the lenses of the experience of the individuals who took part in it: what personal, cultural and political paths led them to activism and commitment; what they did and how they lived the period of revolt; how they interpreted the movements’ expectation for radical change and how they emerged from the ‘1968 years’. Interviews are used for a rich and polyphonic reconstruction of the events and the activists’ experiences, but Passerini (2004) dubs this an ‘“objective” book’ (p. 165) in that it follows an essentially factual approach that does not include any specific analysis on the forms of memory, nor on issues of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity.

In addition, no other primary sources were used along with the interviews, aside from some leaflets and printed documents. Moreover, the interviewees’ profile, and the authors’ political and cultural orientation, which is basically in line with the movements’ spirit, converge towards an account that appears markedly ‘internal’ to the movements’ set of values and ideals. These aspects made this work, although undoubtedly valuable for its transnational approach, susceptible to methodological remarks relating to the necessity of weaving together oral history interviews with other primary sources and of applying to narrators’ testimonies the source criticism procedures that constitute the basic methodological toolbox of historical research. A couple of years after the book was published, for instance, Italian historian Gian Giacomo Migone (1991) polemically highlighted that the activists’ autobiographical testimonies constituted ‘the markedly narrow and distorting basis of general reconstructions’, and that the authors lost sight of the crucial distinction between sources and interpretations, running the risk of falling into what he called ‘a reminiscence trap’ (p. 7). ¹⁴ Although Migone’s severe criticism might appear excessive to some, it is important, on a more general level, in that it reminds us of some potential pitfalls of oral history. In particular, the peculiarities of oral sources require that researchers be always alert to the risk of falling under ‘the eyewitness’s spell’, so to speak, and seeing personal testimonies as a sort of ‘truest story’ whose verity rests upon lived experience, thus overlooking the role of subjectivity and memory – as well as external factors, as we will see later in this article – in shaping personal recollections of the past.

Other 1968s

In the 2000s, a series of new studies on 1968 have seen the light, which show substantial differences from the ‘classic’ works of the late 1980s and early 1990s that have been discussed so far. First, many of these studies are the product of scholars who cannot be classed as oral historians but are simply historians with no further qualification. This is linked to a considerable change in Italian academic historians’ attitudes towards oral history: whereas two or three decades ago many were still sceptical about oral sources, considering them at best a sort of second-rate documentation, subsequently their use became much more widely accepted as an increasing number of ‘traditional’ historians came to acknowledge their usefulness for historical research. ¹⁵ Second, for reasons that will be discussed further ahead, the specific autobiographical dimension that was crucial in Passerini’s and Portelli’s works does not characterise these more recent studies. Finally, another noticeable difference, as well as the most significant element these studies have in common, consists in the aim of shedding light on the ‘other 1968s’, based on the recognition that 1968 was an eminently plural and multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be reduced to any of its single components. This can entail shifting the focus from activist leaders to the rank and file, moving away from the largest cities and main universities towards the smaller centres, or looking not at the student movement itself but rather at the social, political and institutional actors with which it interacted.

Some studies intend to paint a wider and richer picture of the Italian Sessantotto by focusing on its margins, rather than on its centre. Margins can be understood in geographical terms, as in Sofia Serenelli-Messenger’s research on Macerata, a small provincial town in the Marche region that represented a very different setting from the major urban centres considered by Portelli and Passerini (respectively, Rome and Turin). Serenelli-Messenger examines the peculiarity of this local experience, concentrating on the local branch of the Manifesto group and its relationship with that veritable mainstay of social life and culture in the region: the family. ¹⁶ The use of oral sources allows her to explore what appears to be a conspicuous discrepancy between ideological discourse, on the one hand, and memory of everyday life and social practices, on the other. Whereas documents and articles written by national leaders of the Manifesto group expressed a critical view of the family, seen as a hierarchical and oppressive structure based on unequal relationships, which tended to foster inner solidarity among its members matched by selfishness towards the outside, by contrast, in the recollections of former Macerata activists, the local Manifesto group is frequently described in positive terms precisely as a family based on collaboration, cohesion and shared sense of belonging (Serenelli-Messenger, 2010).

In another sense, margins can also refer to the role people played in Sessantotto. This is the perspective adopted by a collective book by the Circolo Gianni Bosio (2006), a research group and oral history archive based in Rome and chaired by Alessandro Portelli. The book consists of a collection of 42 interviews with those who in its subtitle are called ‘common people’, that is, those who were not involved with the 1968 movements, and especially, those who participated but ‘used to sit at the back of the room during mass meetings and to march in the last lines in protest rallies’, yet ‘without whom there would have been no 1968’ (Circolo Gianni Bosio, 2006: 5). In the authors’ intentions, this approach, focusing not on leaders who subsequently became public figures but on rank and file activists who remained unknown, is meant to respect the democratic ethos of 1968, which – as highlighted in Portelli’s introduction – ‘can be considered a huge collective capture of speech’ (p. 5). Thus, the book points to the essential fact that the presa della parola could take a variety of forms, and for many sessantottini it happened not so much in the iconic settings of 1968, such as mass meetings and rallies, as in everyday life, in their daily activities, and in their relationships with family, friends, teachers, colleagues and so on.

Working from a different perspective, Orsina and Quagliariello (2005) focus not on 1968 movements per se but on their relationships with ‘the others’, looking at how these movements interacted with, and affected, the political establishment, in particular, the political parties’ youth organisations, and the students’ associations and representative bodies that, in their majority, were swept away by the student revolt and ceased to exist. This too is a collection of interviews but the approach of the authors – two ‘traditional’ historians previously not accustomed to use oral history in their research – is quite different from that of the Circolo Gianni Bosio. Not only do they appear to be definitely less in tune with the ideas and practices of 1968; much more relevant is the fact that this work seems closer to an ‘American-style’, elite-oriented oral history than to the social history approach that has always been predominant in the Italian context. ¹⁷ In fact, the interviewees are for the most part leaders (both of the student movement and the pre-existing organisations and associations) and the interviews, which appear to have been extensively edited and tidied up for publication, have a quite rigid common structure that is centred on the eminently political aspects of 1968 rather than on the subjective experience of those who participated or witnessed it. In addition, attention is directed primarily to the informative content of the interviews rather than to those aspects – memory, narrative construction of life stories, inter-subjectivity and so on – that distinguish oral sources from most other kinds of evidence used by historians.

Finally, Stuart Hilwig’s and Francesca Socrate’s works focus on the Sessantotto ‘of the others’, considering the ways in which the individuals, social groups and institutional actors that were hit by the student revolt reacted to it. In particular, American historian Hilwig (2009, 2010) looks at activists’ parents, university professors, the police, industrial workers, the press and politicians – that is, the people, he argues, whom the students called ‘the establishment’ – in order to reconstruct how they saw the movement, what they thought about it, how they related to it and how they recall it. ¹⁸ His research, which is based on oral history interviews and written sources (newspaper articles, police documents, parliamentary papers and so on), offers interesting insights into how media representations of the student movement – in particular, those disseminated by the conservative press – influenced the vision of it that many members of ‘the establishment’ had and have today. Policemen’s and workers’ memories of 1968, for instance, feature recurrent discursive elements that show considerable analogy with the images and rhetorical constructions through which the press described the student movement, starting from their representation as rich and spoiled figli di papà (daddy’s kids) playing revolution, or as violent hotheads prone to vandalism, but also – with the passing of time, as the echo of the season of the movements was fading away – as dreamers moved by a sincere romantic-style idealism.

Un altro Sessantotto (literally, ‘Another 1968’), edited by Francesca Socrate (2008), concentrates on the memories of 1968 held by the lecturers and professors who at that time taught at Rome La Sapienza, the largest university in the country and one of the epicentres of the Italian Sessantotto. The purpose of this collection of interviews is to widen and enrich the memory of 1968 with the reminiscences of a socio-professional group that was one of the main targets of student protest but, at the same time, was quite close to students in terms of education, working environment and often also generational belonging (most of the interviewees were relatively young in 1968). The basic question around which this work revolves is whether lecturers and professors shared or not a collective memory of 1968. In the introduction, the editor argues that the diversity of experiences, attitudes and opinions on 1968 seems to rule out this hypothesis and indicate, in contrast, the existence of several divided memories based on generational belonging, disciplinary specialisations and political–cultural affiliations. Nevertheless, Socrate points out that there are some elements that appear to be largely shared by lecturers and professors. One is their criticism of the movement because of the students’ weak cultural competence, and their tendency to exhibit contempt for academic knowledge and its traditional forms of transmission. Another is the fact that, in their narratives, the 1966 joint protest of students and teaching staff in response to the death of architecture student Paolo Rossi, who fell from the external balustrade of a university building after being assaulted by a group of neo-fascists, stands as a positive model of democratic protest precisely in opposition to the tumultuous and disruptive revolt of 1968. ¹⁹

Memories of 1968

Aside from a few recurrent elements, the picture resulting from the recollections of the protagonists and witnesses of the ‘season of the movements’ that feature in the works examined in the previous sections is that of an eminently plural and divided memory. ²⁰ From this point of view, the analysis of individual memory of the Italian Sessantotto conducted through oral history shows considerable analogies with the findings of recent studies on public and cultural memories of 1968, which have made clear that, in the various national settings, these memories differ widely and are highly contested, since competing discourses, narratives, representations and interpretations were constructed around the events and processes of those years, making 1968 an emblematic site of ‘memory contests’ or ‘memory battles’ (Waters, 2010; on Italy, see Foot, 2010).

With regard to oral history, the plurality of memories of 1968, together with the relationship between personal recollections and dominant cultural images of the past, are among the foci of some interesting ongoing studies whose first findings have been published in the last couple of years. Significantly, these studies concentrate on the ways in which former activists’ memories are structured and differentiated along lines of generation and gender: in so doing, they adopt two analytical categories that were key to the social movements under scrutiny, which challenged hierarchical relationships between people of different generations both within and outside the family, and – as in the case of feminism – put radically into question traditional gender roles.

Socrate (2011) draws on interviews with around 40 sessantottini and examines their vocabulary through text-analysis software that surveys the terms they employ, classifies them by grammatical category, counts their occurrences and lists them by frequency. This kind of data processing allows to carry out a quantitative and at the same time qualitative analysis of autobiographical narratives, exploring, through the interviewees’ lexical choices and narrative modes, their attitudes towards the past they are recounting. In her article, Socrate looks at the relationship between the narrating and the narrated self, focusing on the differences between two generations of sessantottini, that is, those who were born in the years 1938–1945 and 1946–1951, respectively. A noticeable difference concerns the use of verb tenses and persons: whereas for the older generation, third-person singular or impersonal forms prevail, as well as tenses that indicate detachment such as historic present (equivalent to the past simple), for the younger generation, first-person singular is predominant and verbs that link more tightly past and present recur, such as imperfect and present perfect. Nouns too are employed in different ways: for instance, the older generation makes use of proper nouns mainly for the press, political parties and groups, student leaders or places where historical events occurred, while the younger generation uses them to refer to friends, acquaintances, their place of origin or travel destinations. On the whole, such linguistic clues suggest that while the former have a more detached and objective relationship with past reality and their own past self, which they describe mainly through political and public references, the latter, on the contrary, show a more subjective look, the centrality of private aspects and emotions, and a stronger continuity between the narrating and narrated self.

Rebecca Clifford (2012) focuses on the expression of emotions in autobiographical narratives, pointing to the fact that men and women in her sample of interviewees tend to tell considerably different stories and show diverse memories of 1968. In order to account for such diversity (which obviously stems in some measure from the different experiences they lived through in that period), the author introduces the metaphor of a ‘third person in the room’ to indicate that the interviewees’ narratives are influenced not just by the presence of the interviewer but also by a set of dominant cultural images of 1968, and in particular, by an idealised model of the activist. A key feature of this model, Clifford argues, is a marked masculine dimension: the brave sessantottino who resolutely rebels against his parents, who is not afraid of violence but is ready to embrace only those forms that are deemed acceptable, who refuses an excessive emotive involvement in sexual relationships and so on. Therefore, it is not surprising that men’s stories are more easily shaped by these idealised narratives and are characterised by a tone that switches from serious to light or ironic and by positive feelings such as joy or pride, while women often recount experiences that are at odds with these narratives and express painful feelings such as anger, sadness, sense of guilt or disappointment. Thus, Clifford’s work (which echoes some key themes of Penny Summerfield’s study on British men and women on the home front during the Second World War) crucially reminds us that personal recollections do not exist in an autonomous and separate sphere from that of cultural and collective memories but do relate and interact with them in various and often complex forms. ²¹

As pointed out by Anna Bravo (2008), another distinctive feature of the memory of former sessantottini is that of being weak and ‘punctiform’, that is to say, ‘marked by gaps, frayings, uncertain chronologies’ (p. 3). According to her, this weakness is ‘an effect of the flow of emotions (only for some of psychedelic nature) that wrapped experience, of a way of living that was flattened on an eternal present, of the feeling that time was together pressing and infinite’. In addition, among former activists, it is not infrequent to see memory gaps as a sort of ‘guarantee mark’ for having participated in 1968, an attitude that is often matched by the idea that those who ‘weren’t there’ cannot fully understand the spirit of 1968. However, in this way, a sort of ‘proprietary vision of history’ emerges, which assigns, in exclusive ownership, to those who lived through a certain past the possibility of a genuine understanding of it.

This kind of approach is reflected by the fact that a considerable part of the vast literature on 1968 – not just memoirs but also historical accounts – has been written by former sessantottini, often focusing on the places, events and processes of which they had direct experience: a tendency that has induced some scholars to speak of a ‘possessive memory’ and a ‘self-referential history’ (Foot, 2010). As seen above, initially oral history constituted no exception to this trend, the first significant studies having been conducted by scholars who had a strong personal relationship with 1968 and saw research on it (also) as a form of autobiographical exploration. However, things have changed considerably in more recent times, as revealed by the fact that the majority of works that have been published in the last decade or so are the product of researchers who are simply too young to be directly involved in 1968, and on the whole, cast a more detached eye on the events and memories of that period.

In addition, even the authors of these recent works who took part in 1968, such as Francesca Socrate, who was an activist in the student movement in Rome, show a very different attitude from that of the ‘pioneers’. In fact, in the works by Socrate that have been described earlier, there is no trace of an autobiographical approach comparable to that, say, of Luisa Passerini. Hence, the question arises whether this is ascribable only to the different subjectivities and research interests of these two scholars, or whether more general factors should also be taken into account to explain this difference. Presumably, the passage of time and the different historical contexts play an important role here. On the one hand, the hypothesis can be made that, as the years went by and passions cooled down, the need to confront one’s personal past in public form might have become less urgent. This may have been reinforced by the political and cultural atmosphere of the 1990s and 2000s, when the triumph of neoliberalism and post-ideological politics, together with a conception of time centred on the present, which induced many to see the current organisation of society as the ultimate fulfilment of historical destiny, made most of the ideas, values and hopes of an eminently future- and change-oriented phenomenon such as 1968 sound drastically out of date. This could have favoured the passing of 1968 itself from the realm of memory, where the past is still alive, so to say, to that of history, where, in contrast, it is accepted as being irretrievably gone and can thus be subjected to a more detached analysis. On the other hand, the enduring strength of individual memories of Sessantotto and the importance of the latter as an element of identity for many former activists – two aspects that were particularly evident on the occasion of the 30th and 40th anniversaries of ‘the students’ year’ – could account for the adoption of the memories of sessantottini as a topic of study, with a view to historicising not just 1968 but also its memory.

In any case, what is certain is that the memory of 1968 cannot be detached from the complementary tendency to forgetting, which generates silences and obscurity on the most contradictory and difficult-to-elaborate aspects of that experience. ²² One of them certainly is political violence, which is the topic of sociologist and political scientist Isabelle Sommier’s (1998) comparative study on the Italian and French far left groups of the 1970s. Using both coeval and retrospective sources (leaflets, posters, documents and so on; and written memoirs and oral history interviews, respectively), Sommier traces the evolution of activists’ discourses on violence from the ‘1968 years’ to the 1990s. Whereas in the former phase, violence was generally legitimated and praised as a necessary tool for revolution, with the passage of time, most activists developed a critique, if not an abjuration, of violence. While many of them were experiencing a painful and disorienting end of activism with the return to private life, and others were going on with their political engagement turning to a full acceptance of the democratic system, violence was progressively delegitimised and became a taboo. How difficult it might be to come to terms with this issue in a changed historical context is revealed by the fact that various former activists opposed resistance to Sommier’s research: some developed verbal strategies, conscious or not, to euphemise or deny the role of violence in the ‘1968 years’, while others refused to be interviewed, arguing that they ‘were fed up with these old stories’, they ‘were disgusted’ or that ‘so much has been said’ that ‘there is nothing left to say’ (Sommier, 1998: 27–30). These silences and this tendency to minimise, Sommier concludes, are to be interpreted as symptoms of collective amnesia, repression or – referring to a psychoanalytical process described by Jacques Lacan – foreclosure.

Conclusions

This article has given an account of how oral history has been used in historical research on the Italian Sessantotto from the 1980s to the present, and it has discussed the main thematic and methodological issues raised by a number of selected studies. On the basis of what has been said above, a few final remarks can be made. First, the close relationship and the important analogies between 1968 and oral history have been highlighted. In different but related ways, both can be seen as a collective presa della parola, and – by virtue of its characteristics – 1968 constitutes a particularly suitable subject matter for oral history research. In addition, not only did several oral historians of the generation that is now in its 60s or early 70s participate in Sessantotto (or at least share its ideals and purposes), but above all, in more general terms, the democratic and participatory ethos of the ‘season of the movements’, as well as the idea of ‘starting from oneself’, had a crucial influence on the development of Italian oral history, fostering attention to ‘ordinary’ people’s lived experiences and memories, and to the spheres of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity.

Second, if in the mid-1990s Alessandro Portelli (1997) lamented the paucity of oral history works on the Italian 1968 (p. 183), it must be acknowledged that today the picture is noticeably different. In fact, we now have quite a rich and diverse corpus of scholarly literature, which is also continuing to grow with works in progress showing innovative methodology and promising results. The examination of this body of research has shown that scholars have adopted different approaches and have used oral sources in a variety of ways and with various aims, ranging from factual reconstruction of the past to more sophisticated analysis centred on memory, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity.

As we have seen, a significant evolution took place over time. Whereas in the 1980s, when in Italy oral history was still looked upon with scepticism by many ‘traditional’ historians, a few oral historians conducted some ground-breaking studies, the most interesting of which based on original approaches and a marked autobiographical dimension, subsequently things changed considerably. The works published in the last decade or so reflect a situation in which oral history has become generally accepted as a legitimate tool of the trade within most academic circles: oral sources are now employed by a wider range of figures, including researchers who could not be classed as oral historians in a strict sense, and the ways in which they are used appear to mirror this process of ‘normalisation’ together with an even wider differentiation in terms of approaches, methodological references and interests. From this last point of view, the focus of research has shifted from the mainstream Sessantotto, that is, the student movement, the main cities and universities, the most important events and the activist leaders, to the ‘other 1968s’, that is, less central localities, rank and file activists, and the individuals, social groups and institutions that were most directly hit by the protest. Furthermore, in line with more general developments in the humanities and the social sciences, consisting in the emergence and consolidation of memory as a major topic of research, new issues have come into focus, such as the complex relationships between personal recollections, on the one hand, and public and cultural memories, on the other.

On the whole, the substantial contribution oral history can make to a better understanding of 1968 has emerged from this survey. It is a research methodology particularly well suited to bringing out the plurality and diversity of the lived experiences of the various actors who were involved in such a multifarious phenomenon as 1968. It allows to stretch the history of Sessantotto well beyond the chronological boundaries of the ‘season of the movements’ through the adoption of long-term perspectives that place 1968 within the wider framework of activists’ life trajectories and explore the ways in which they have been mutually influenced. It permits us to look not only at the events, processes and experiences of the ‘years of unrest’ but also at how they have been subsequently reassessed and reinterpreted by protagonists and witnesses, and how they are reconstructed and recounted in memory narratives in the present. Finally, the multiple, rich, divergent and even contradictory personal memories that emerge through oral history may usefully complement and balance the sometimes more coherent but often also one-dimensional or oversimplified cultural images of 1968 that are diffused by the media, the culture industry, and the social and political actors who contribute to the formation of public discourse.