Abstract

2023), universally known as Rod Kedward, is best known for his groundbreaking studies of the French Resistance, discussed in diverse ways by several contributors to this roundtable. 1 Yet as Chris Warne emphasizes below, Rod's interests extended in time and space well beyond the Second World War.Indeed, to fully comprehend Rod, it is important to understand him as a soixante-huitard-close witness to many of the upheavals that marked the landscapes of les années '68, from the Larzac Plateau to the South Downs.Appointed a very young assistant lecturer at the nascent University of Sussex in 1962, and marrying Carol Wimbleton, one of the university's first students of French and later Senior Lecturer in Social Work, the Kedwards-like the equally important French historian Siân Reynolds, the first contributor to our roundtable, and her husband Peter France-played key roles in the making of perhaps the most innovative, leftwing, internationalist, European and high-profile of Britain's experimental 1960s universities.The Kedwards were active participants in Sussex's campus radicalism which, spilling over into the bohemian heart of Brighton, England's most self-consciously alternative city and Rod and Carol's home for six decades, was probably the closest, in both physical distance and spirit, that Britain got to Nanterre-whose Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines gave birth to the events of May '68. 2 Rod's cohort thus collectively exemplified how, contrary to clichés about baby boomers, the making of '68 also owed much to those a few years older, born during the war or even pre-war.Rod's understanding