Excerpt from Lefebvre's obituary

"The events of May 1968 in France and the upheavals throughout Europe and North America seemed to Lefebvre to vindicate all that he had been arguing. The Stalinists and structuralists seemed to him unable to understand, sympathize with, or even communicate with the insurgent students, whereas Lefebvre saw the students as the victims of social and intellectual alienation, and as the agents of his long term programme of social liberation leading to the creation of the Total Man. As a professor at Nanterre, where the student movement was sparked off, he had a grandstand view of the early days of the May events: Daniel Cohn-Bendit was one of his students. His study of the causes and origins of the events (translated in English as The Explosion) remains one of the most influential. Both the innovative political methods and slogans such as 'imagination has taken power' echoed Lefebvre's own concerns. They also echoed the imaginative anarchism of the situationists, grouped round Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, who had long appealed to Lefebvre. His work was one of their theoretical sources, though his relations with them were often turbulent. In many respects, the 1970s were the Golden Age of French Marxism. Lefebvre's many works reached a much wider audience during this period, and began to be translated into English as well as other languages (especially in Eastern Europe). He and those with whom he had worked during the late fifties and sixties (Morin, Chatelet, Axelos, Goldmann, Castoriadis, Fougeyrollas and others) became the senior figures of the non-communist Marxist revival. Reprints of Lefebvre's shorter accounts were snapped up, though his own energies were turned principally towards a series of innovative studies in urban sociology, in which he argued that the organisation of the urban time and space to fit the lived experience of its citizens and residents could become the focus for a renewal of direct democratic relationships in modern society." Source: "Henri Lefebvre, 1901-1991" in Radical Philosophy (Spring 1991).