"Tout va bien" is set in 1972, i.e. four years after the "events" of 1968. President De Gaulle and his successor president Pompidou had rolled back the would-be revolution and the political right wing held France in its grip. And yet "everything's fine" (tout va bien). Relations between people have changed. A factory is occupied, a woman striker phones her husband and tells him to mind the children, a Communist Party militant sells party literature in a supermarket and is ignored by young people (his party dominated the left before 1968).
—Albert Rozenboom