Enjeux de l’espace socio-historique dans Derrière la vitre, de Robert Merle

With Derrière la vitre, published in 1970, Robert Merle devotes a novel that is also a historical document to the preamble to May 68 that the events on 22 March 1968 in Nanterre represent. As specialists in the period such as Lefebvre and David Harvey have pointed out, the particularities of the physical and social space of the faculty and its surroundings were among the direct triggers of the student uprising, and Merle’s novel takes account of this by constructing with it a response, which is at the same time an interpretation, to some of the social problems of the time. In this way, the aim of this work is to examine the socio-spatial web of the novel in the light of the themes and social problems of the period, and more spe-cifically the problems of the university environment in general and Nanterre in particular.