From the Archives to the Streets Listening to the Global 1960s in the Former French Empire BURLEIGH HENDRICKSON abstract In the spring of 1968, activists across the globe took to the streets and clashed with authorities to protest neo-imperialism, oppressive regimes, and the postcolonial order of things. While there is no shortage of archival material documenting this type of activism during France’s mai 68, this is often not the case for similar activism in places like Tunisia and Senegal. This article discusses the importance of personal archives and oral histories for analyzing lesser-known activism of the 1960s and 1970s in the former French empire. On the one hand, oral histories can help clarify archival material; on the other hand, they can fur- ther muddy politically charged narratives where past, present, and future collide. Through an analysis of interviews conducted with 1968 participants in France, Tunisia, and Senegal, I uncover the promises and perils of expanding conventional notions of the archive for the study of the “global 1960s.” keywords oral history, decolonization, global 1960s, archives, memory By attributing a natural quality to [a] particular unity . . . and adopting its official archive as the primary source of historical knowledge pertaining to it . . . the historian has adopted the view of the established state. —Gyanendra Pandey I began writing this article as I was undertaking the painstaking work of sifting through a morass of documents from my deceased grandfather’s estate. The large file cabinets, stacked boxes, and loose papers in his desk represented an archival collection unto itself—a personal archive of a man and his family, his faith and his business. I could not help but employ the very processes of win- nowing and culling I learned from my years of academic training. As historians we define and delimit our source bases and collect the fragments of our histori- cal objects. We form collages of stories, splicing snippets of documents from different boxes, from dossiers and manila envelopes, or, as in my case, from the French Historical Studies  Vol. 40, No. 2 (April 2017)  doi 10.1215/00161071-3761643 Copyright 2017 by Society for French Historical Studies 319 French Historical Studies Published by Duke University Press