Moscow, Nauka Publishing House. 1975. 232 pp. The print run is 2100. Price 74 kopecks.

The rapid development of mass student movements in the West in the 1960s is one of the most remarkable phenomena that attracts the attention of historical science. Such great interest is due not only to the breadth of speeches and radical forms of struggle, but also to the very nature of the problems raised, the significance of which goes far beyond the scope of higher education. In recent years, many works have been published in our country that examine various aspects of student actions both in individual countries and in entire regions, provide a critical analysis of bourgeois, right - and left-opportunist concepts of the student movement, and highlight the activities of communist and workers ' parties in capitalist countries among this category of youth. At the same time, there is still a lack of comprehensive research based on concrete historical material, which makes it possible to look at the phenomenon of student protest as a continuously developing process, to reveal and trace the dynamics of this process, to reveal its deep dialectical relationship with the broader context of social development.

From this point of view, the book by A. L. Semenov, a researcher at the Institute of General History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Candidate of Historical Sciences, is of undoubted interest, in which this problem is developed on the example of France, a country where student performances took on the most intense and dramatic character, serving as the beginning of the famous events of May - June 1968.

A. L. Semenov set out to analyze first of all the deep social processes that drew the university into its orbit, led to radical quantitative and qualitative changes in the composition of the young emerging intelligentsia, and by the end of the 60s promoted it to the ranks of the active, socially oppositional and politically explosive forces of French society. The reviewed work is one of the first attempts in Soviet literature to specifically examine the various professional and party-political groupings of French students, their contradictory and sometimes chaotic ideological platforms, slogans, organizational principles, and methods of struggle, to identify the real contribution made by students to the development of the general democratic movement, and to determine the possibilities and ways of connecting their protest with the revolutionary struggle of of the class.

On the basis of extensive factual material, A. L. Semenov was able to convincingly show that the maturation of left-wing tendencies among young students of French higher education was not accidental. It was a natural product of the whole set of phenomena of the socio-economic, ideological, political, spiritual and moral life of bourgeois society in the 1950s and 60s, when with the development of the scientific and technological revolution, science and education are increasingly involved in the system of direct provision of both cultural and ideological and material conditions of the capitalist mode of production and production. social relations associated with it, and intellectual labor itself, which has acquired a mass character, is more and more subject to the formula"wage labor - capital". For the majority of modern and especially future knowledge holders, that is, ordinary representatives of the intelligentsia and its reserve represented by the growing student masses, this meant the devaluation of former social privileges,

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transformation into one of the categories of wage laborers who, along with the working class, are subjected to exploitation or are prepared for it within the framework of state-monopoly capitalism.

As a result, a knot of contradictions has emerged in the higher education system - between the old, traditional type of university that developed in the bourgeois - liberal era, and the need to create a new university that meets the modern needs of capitalism, between the interests of the bulk of future knowledge workers and the ruling class. The lack of security and hopelessness of the existence of university degree holders pushed a significant part of the student youth to oppose capitalism as a system, to a total rejection ("challenge") of bourgeois civilization.

The author avoids primitive "sociologizing", artificially attracting certain stages of the student movement to the evolution of the country's economy. The book reveals quite convincingly the complexity of the process of students ' subjective awareness of their new place in society-from mainly moral and ethical protest against the war in Algeria (1956-1962) with its brutal methods and reactionary goals, through attempts to rebuild the university structure on their own (1962-1965), to linking their problems with the World War II. problems of the class struggle on a national and international scale in the second half of the 60s.

Of course, this process did not proceed without serious costs, organizational disunity and ideological diversity, mixing the most diverse views, more or less painted in leftist tones. Subjecting the anarchist and other similar theories to a comprehensive critical analysis, A. L. Semenov rightly notes that it would be fundamentally wrong to reduce all the complex diversity of the student protest movement, especially manifested in the May days of 1968, to the phenomena of leftist extremism and adventurism (p.192). Behind the bizarre interweaving of often immature or simply utopian ideas, there are real problems, and one of the tasks of the monograph is to find out what objective needs of social development these ideas were trying to answer.

Defining the main problems of the student movement at each stage, the author reveals the failure of the attempts of the ruling class to push the student youth away from acute problems, limit the horizon of their thoughts and actions to narrow professional and corporate issues, and fully integrate them into the mainstream of bourgeois ideology and politics. Of particular interest in this regard is the analysis of left-wing student syndicalism, whose founders stated in the early 60s that the focus of a general student trade union organization (the National Union of Students of France - NSSF) should not be on the financial situation of students, but on organizing a mass struggle against the capitalist use of acquired knowledge, against the subordination of human intelligence to self-sufficient laws profit-making and the state power system serving it. The book traces the evolution of the views of cross-syndicalist leaders, the tortuous paths of their delusions and searches.

An important place is given by the author to the study of the relationship between students and the working class. The wide participation of students in the Resistance movement during the Second World War, and later in the struggle against the war in Algeria, laid down a good tradition of joint performances of democratically-minded students with working people, and contributed to the strengthening of a common desire for unity of action with the working class among them. However, as the monograph rightly emphasizes, students 'desire for joint actions was often accompanied by hegemonic tendencies, attempts to put themselves above the workers' and democratic movement, to adapt the workers ' movement to student actions, and to impose their own ideas about the goals, forms and methods of the revolutionary struggle (p.157). Avant-garde illusions were also fueled by the fact that left-leaning students did not always find the answer to their questions in the theoretical or practical activities of a particular group of the general democratic movement. Trying to solve them on their own, they often made serious mistakes that prevented the creation of a united front of struggle.

The paper provides a detailed picture of the relationship of students with politically motivated young people.-

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students ' organizations, trade unions, confessional and public organizations of the country at various stages of the student movement. The author thoroughly examines the positions of the FKP and the Union of Communist Students on education, analyzes the specifics of their activities at the university, and notes the achievements and difficulties in the struggle for the minds of the young intelligentsia.

In conclusion, A. L. Semenov points out that, despite the inherent weaknesses and vacillations of the left-wing student movement, it made a significant contribution to the expansion and deepening of the general democratic movement. It turned the university into an arena of mass struggle, and sharply raised the problems of the social role of education and science, culture and morality in modern bourgeois society. "Students," the author writes, " opposed all forms of suppression of the individual, demanded the democratization of all spheres of public life by providing him with the opportunity to participate in decision-making. The mass entry of French students into the arena of the country's political life in the second half of the 60s meant that we were not talking about individual actions of discontent, but about the historical initiative of a certain social stratum capable of conducting a selfless struggle" (p.221). We can fully agree with this conclusion.

The monograph is intended for both specialists and a wide range of readers interested in various aspects of the life of French students. In this regard, it should be noted as a negative point that the study is limited only to the left-wing student movement. It seems to us that this formulation of the problem leads to a violation of the true proportions of certain phenomena in the university environment, focuses attention on small, often secondary disputes in the leadership of the NSSF, often losing sight of the majority of young people who are not covered by it (not to mention extreme right-wing groups such as the Zapad movement or the Federation of Nationalist Students). The author's claim about the" identity " of university problems in all developed capitalist countries is hardly justified (p. 218). His work itself testifies to the pronounced specificity of France not only in the form, but also in the essence of these problems.

The relationship between the general and the particular in the workers 'and students' movements in France should also be more clearly revealed in this work. As you know, the French Communist Party has paid and continues to pay close attention to this issue. It resolutely opposes both intellectual snobbery, the leftist claims of some of the students to be the "detonator" of the revolutionary process, if not its "leader", and the" hurrierist " tendencies in the working environment that belittle the role of the intelligentsia (present and future) in the struggle against the capitalist system. From the communist point of view, the leading role of the working class in the general democratic movement not only does not contradict, but, on the contrary, presupposes the active participation of representatives of people of intellectual labor in it.

However, in general, the monograph is a valuable study. It helps to answer an extremely important question about the objective and subjective prerequisites and the very nature of the May-June 1968 socio-political crisis in France, at least at the level of the student movement, and the answer is concrete, clear, and solidly reasoned.

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