How Comrades recreated the “Vincennes experience”

Co-creator and director, Benjamin Charbit tells us about the “intellectual pot” of Vincennes and how his series for Arte sought to restore this totally forgotten effervescence. Encounter.

It’s a funny dive into the bustling world of Vincennes University which begins this evening on Arte (and is already available online on Arte.tv). By following a rebellious professor and his students in search of knowledge and personal liberation, the excellent series Comrades recounts a moment of excitement in Gaullian society. A free and inventive political fiction, peppered with striking archive images. Benjamin Charbit – co-creator and director with Dominique Baumard – tells us how he imagined this formal and intellectual ferment. Interview.

FIRST: How would you describe the utopia of the University of Vincennes, created in 1969?
BENJAMIN CHARBIT: It’s the Gaullists’ response to the great fear they had in the face of the student protests of May 68. It’s an experiment. They called it “elitism for all”! A truly popular university, open to all and especially to non-high school graduates, to single mothers, with a crèche for their children, to employees who work while remaining open in the evening… A self-managed place which has managed to attract great thinkers, who became professors at Vincennes: Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixou… It is truly the pot of protest against the Gaullism of the time…..