Based on a survey of former May-68 activists who placed their children in two experimental schools, this article re-assays the determinants of involvement in the events of May 1968. Our analysis makes out four principal matrices of involvement:
family transmission of a disposition towards involvement, the politicization of religious commitments, the social mobility of first-generation intellectuals, and status-related incoherencies. The politicization of religious commitments is then explored in depth. A contextualized comparative analysis of six life trajectories points up the processes involved in the genesis of the disposition toward involvement and then in their reorientation, as well as the conjunction of micro-, mesoand macro-sociological factors that shifted the quest for salvation from the religious to the political sphere.