In the Spirit of ’68

The 1960s were a victorious decade for francophones in New Brunswick, who witnessed the election of the first Acadian premier and the opening of a new French-language university. But in 1968 students took to the streets of Moncton in protest, shouting “We want more French!” Joel Belliveau explores what provoked these students to spark a cultural revolution on par with those in English Canada and Quebec. Were they simply heirs to a long line of nationalists seeking more rights for francophones, as older histories suggest, or were they leftists whose calls for peace, lower tuition fees, and co-management of universities echoed ideas emanating from social movements in Quebec, English Canada, the United States, and France? Drawing on student papers and rare documentary footage, Belliveau argues that New Brunswick’s student movement emerged in the late 1950s as an expression of the province’s changing youth culture but then evolved as students drew inspiration from the ideas of the New Left, shifting their allegiance from liberalism to radical communitarianism. Moncton’s ’68 moment took the form of local demands for collective cultural and linguistic rights that ultimately fuelled the fires of the Acadian neonationalist movement of the 1970s.