Building Castles in China

This chapter examines the intellectual influences on the small cohort of Caledonian and Kanak students who attended universities in France and experienced the May 1968 student–worker uprising. It first discusses the arrival of a number of New Caledonian students in France in the early 1960s, including Jean-Paul Caillard, Nidoish Naisseline, and Max Chivot, and how they actively imagined revolutionary utopias in China, Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, and perhaps even the Caillou. It then considers how the Algerian conflict inspired francophone intellectuals to reflect on colonial settler psychology, and especially Third World decolonization and liberation. It also explores how Third World nationalism interacted with a radical West that had millenarian dreams of victory over “the establishment,” with particular emphasis on New Caledonian anticolonial activitists' views about socialist revolution. Finally, the chapter takes a look at the May 1968 student–worker protests in France, led by the so-called enragés (angry youth).