Bibliographic record
Abstract
The events of May 1968 have entered the French national mythology in the form of a simplified and exemplary narrative: May is generally believed to have been a student-led uprising, whose transformative legacy was socio-cultural rather than political. Popular perceptions of May also contain strong elements of mythical fantasy as defined by the mythologist Geoffrey Kirk: all the rules governing normal actions, normal reasoning and normal relationships were suspended or distorted during May; consequently, as if by magic, anything suddenly became possible. Vast amounts have been written about May and about its mythological accompaniment. Studies have also been carried out into how May influenced French comic strips, notably by Aeschimann and Nicoby, as well as by Rolland. However, hardly anything has yet been said about the way the uprising itself is evoked in comic strips, despite their being a key aspect of French popular culture. This article fills a gap by studying comic strip representations of May. I draw on previous critical writings about May and about French comics, as well as on a range of strips, most of which have hitherto received little or no critical attention. The coming pages consider a historical reconstruction, a sociological study, a light-hearted comedy, a tale of the supernatural, and a CD booklet, as well as two graphic novels, two counter-factual dystopias, and various parodies. My purpose is to examine how these comics contribute to and/or contest the mythology that has grown up around May. We shall see that several artists construct myths about May, as well as exploiting the multiple possibilities mythical fantasy offers; other artists are more critical of May’s attendant mythology. However, all of the comic strips indicate that May has come to be remembered via a collective deformation of reality, which no longer corresponds to historical fact.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".