1968

1968 is less a single episode than the formative historical atmosphere against which Casaubon measures his choices: a time of revolutionary fervor, uneasy compromise, and private uncertainty. He enters adulthood feeling out of step with his generation, takes part in demonstrations without surrendering his skepticism, and finds a comfortable perch between radical politics and traditional scholarship. In retrospect, the same years become a test of whether he had the courage to act when history seemed to offer its decisive moment.

Generational Dislocation and Incredulity

Casaubon recalls entering university a year or two after 1968 with the sense that his birth date was wrong. Jacopo Belbo later persuaded him that each generation feels similarly misplaced, as if everyone must revise their horoscope day by day to live properly in the world. The thought gives the period a personal scale: history is not simply a sequence of public events but a pressure on how a person understands his own timing and possibilities.

His skepticism had an earlier, domestic beginning. At ten, Casaubon asked his parents to subscribe to a magazine adapting literary classics into comics. When he defended it by repeating the advertisement’s educational promise, his father answered that every magazine’s purpose was to sell copies. Casaubon remembers that exchange as the day he began to be incredulous. The later political climate did not create his suspicion so much as give it new objects: revolutionary slogans, group loyalties, and claims to truth.

Revolution and the University’s Compromise

Casaubon describes himself as a nonbeliever among believers, guilty because he thought the believers might be right. He tried belief as one might take an aspirin, hoping it could do no harm and might make him better. In the midst of the Revolution—or what he calls its most stupendous imitation—he sought an honorable faith in participation. He joined rallies and marches, chanting with the crowd, and felt moral excitement when police charges sent demonstrators escaping through narrow downtown streets. He did not throw paving stones or ball bearings, partly from fear of reciprocal violence, but returned home with the feeling of having performed a duty.

Political conviction remained, for him, partly a matter of language and positioning. At meetings, he felt untouched by disputes among factions and amused himself by finding phrases that could be exchanged to move from one group to another. At demonstrations he sometimes followed a banner because a girl had caught his interest, and he suspected that activism could be bound up with sexual desire. His own motive, he says, was curiosity. These observations complicate any simple portrait of him as either a committed militant or a detached observer: he participated, but also watched how belief and belonging were made.

The University of Milan gave this divided stance an institutional form. Elsewhere in Italy, students occupied classrooms and demanded proletarian sciences; at Milan, apart from a few incidents, a territorial compromise held. The Revolution occupied the grounds, auditorium, and main halls, while traditional Culture retreated to inner corridors and upper floors. Casaubon could debate proletarian matters downstairs in the morning and pursue aristocratic knowledge upstairs in the afternoon, inhabiting both worlds without feeling a contradiction.

He believed an egalitarian society was coming, yet thought its trains would still need to run well. The militants around him, he observed, were not learning to shovel coal, operate switches, or draw up timetables; someone would have to do that work. He likens his position to a remorseful Stalin preparing to study while the poor Bolsheviks went ahead, waiting to see who would draft the Five-Year Plan. The comparison exposes both his practical self-justification and his awareness that he was standing aside from the struggle while preserving a place in the future order.

Pilade’s Bar and Political Coexistence

Pilade’s Bar, an old establishment near one of Milan’s canals, becomes a small-scale image of the period’s negotiated coexistence. With its zinc counter and billiard table, it served tram drivers and artisans in the morning. During 1968 and the years that followed, it drew Movement activists alongside a reporter for the bosses’ newspaper, who might arrive after putting the paper to bed while trucks carried its supposedly Establishment lies to the newsstands. In the bar, the reporter could also feel like an exploited worker chained to an ideological assembly line, and the students forgave him.

Late at night the customers included a young publisher, an architect, a crime reporter hoping to move to the arts pages, Brera Academy painters, writers, and students such as Casaubon. The drinks changed with the clientele: white wine remained for the tram drivers and aristocratic customers, while intellectuals received appropriately labeled sparkling wines and revolutionaries Johnnie Walker. Casaubon suggests that the political history of those years could be written through the progression from Red Label to twelve-year-old Ballantine and then single malt. The bar does not erase social differences; it lets opposed identities meet within the same commercial and conversational space.

Memory, Courage, and the Missed Moment

Years later, Casaubon revisits the period while hiding in the darkness of a museum and thinking about Belbo’s repeated attempts to run away. He asks whether his own flight came from a police charge or from history, and whether that distinction matters. He wonders if he attended a march out of moral choice or to test himself against another supposed Opportunity. Because he was born in the wrong decade, he imagines that he missed the great moments through age rather than cowardice; yet he recognizes that he could have taken risks even without believing the conflict was his.

That retrospective reasoning does not resolve into self-exoneration. Casaubon questions the impulse to choose a wrong opportunity merely to prove that one would have chosen rightly had the true opportunity appeared. A contrived test, he concludes, is not the real thing. Wisdom can create cowardice when a person waits for a moment whose importance will only be recognizable afterward. His final unease is sharper than the claim that he was simply born too late: he feels like a coward because, at some point, he was one.

The novel also places the period beside Belbo’s memories of wartime partisan life. Belbo later remembers that world as one of clarity: bullets and corpses were unmistakable, and the opposing sides appeared marked in red and black. Casaubon contrasts that remembered certainty with the ambiguity of the present, in which even a disappearance can become slippery evidence. The comparison helps explain how the emotional memory of a plainly divided past can become an attractive counterweight to the confusing interpretations that follow.

From Historical Site to Imagined Plan

Casaubon’s later visit to Tomar shows how the habits of historical interpretation formed around these earlier experiences can become dangerous. At the Castle of the Knights of Christ, he connects the real location to the Provins message and concludes that Tomar was the first meeting place in a centuries-long Templar Plan. He leaves Portugal with the conviction that the Templars meant a castle literally and that the message must be studied anew. Yet he also reminds himself that the task is not to discover the Templars’ secret but to construct it.

The movement from revolutionary participation to retrospective self-questioning and then to conspiratorial interpretation is not a simple conversion. It reveals a persistent need to make uncertain history legible—to decide whether one acted, failed to act, or arrived at the wrong time. In the novel, 1968 supplies the lived political setting for that need, while the later Plan magnifies it into a system in which every place and coincidence can be made to testify.