Émile Durkheim emphasizes the crucial role of affect in experiences of what he calls “collective effervescence”: exceptional moments of increased social intensity, which can arise in periods of social upheaval and, under special circumstances, lead to revolutionary change. In these situations, everyday routines are disrupted and individuals are drawn into a shared “sensible” world—of images and emotions—through which they come to experience society and might generate possibilities for social transformation. Although Isabella Cosse does not explicitly engage Durkheim’s work, her latest and remarkably creative book, Rotos corazones—literally, broken hearts—can be read as a critical interrogation of the problem of effervescence, a term Cosse herself repeatedly invokes, as it was introduced by the French sociologist. By foregrounding passions, particularly love, in the study of the revolutionary praxis of armed leftist movements in Argentina between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, Cosse explores the romantic bonds of militants in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party-People’s Revolutionary Army (PRT-ERP) and Montoneros, the two organizations that hegemonized youth radicalization in the 1970s.
The book’s rhythm is dynamic and deliberately unstable, alternating between the most intimate love stories of leaders and rank-and-file militants and the unfolding of pivotal political events across the country. By tracing the threads connecting intimacy and politics, Cosse illuminates the many ways in which romantic bonds structured revolutionary praxis, disrupted it, and were ultimately instrumentalized against it. The forbidden romance between Mario Roberto Santucho and Clarisa Lea Place, for example, sent tremors through the ERP precisely as the organization was consolidating its power. Similarly, Norma Arrostito performed the intimate labor of measuring the body of her lover and fellow Montoneros founder, Fernando Abal Medina, to tailor the military uniform he wore during the kidnapping of General Aramburu—a moment when affection literally clothed the insurrection.
The book’s rhythm is dynamic and deliberately unstable, alternating between the most intimate love stories of leaders and rank-and-file militants and the unfolding of pivotal political events across the country.
The dynamism in the text does not come at the expense of careful chronological reconstruction. Cosse traces the crucial moments in the rise and fall of the revolutionary dream, including the student uprisings in Córdoba in 1969 and Tucumán in 1972 (chapter 2), the kidnapping and murder of Aramburu in 1970 and the Massacre of Trelew in 1972 (chapter 3), Cámpora’s electoral victory and Perón’s return from exile in 1973 (chapter 4), the creation of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA, “Triple A”) and the turn to clandestinity among armed leftist militants (chapter 5), and the systematization of persecution and violence after the 1976 military coup (chapter 6).
Although the story Cosse narrates is the well-known history of the revolutionary left’s political failure and tragic defeat—hence the “broken hearts”—she succeeds in avoiding a teleological interpretation of events. By skillfully moving between the big picture and fine grain analysis, Cosse unearths the shifting meanings that passions and affects held for militants and other social groups at each stage of the revolutionary process. Like a kaleidoscope held up to the past, the book reveals how compañerismo and infidelity, love triangles and affairs, forbidden romances and furtive encounters, as well as conflicts, reunions, and separations, acquired different significances as the 1970s accelerated. While affective bonds, in all their complexity, were fundamental for constituting a revolutionary sexual morality, they also became key strategies for survival in clandestinity and were ultimately instrumentalized by the military dictatorship’s apparatus of terror.
One of the book’s most ambitious—and analytically challenging—gestures is its attempt to reconstruct the necessarily elusive militant “sensibility.” To do so, the narrative moves beyond the sexual and affective relationships of leftist militants to examine how their conceptions of family, children, and political comradeship became entangled with specific gender and generational dynamics. During the 1970s, the revolutionary project operated as a centripetal force: fellow militants became family, children represented the promise of the new world, and these bonds defined, although in different ways for women and men, what it meant to be a young revolutionary. As Cosse argues in the book’s epilogue, the transition to democracy in the 1980s signaled the end of the revolutionary dream and worked as a centrifugal force, scattering and reassembling ideas of family, gender, youth, and politics into new emotional landscapes. The richness of Cosse’s object of study thus lies in its capacity to exceed its own analytical boundaries—namely, couple relationships—to capture a historically specific way of loving, feeling.
The narrative moves beyond the sexual and affective relationships of leftist militants to examine how their conceptions of family, children, and political comradeship became entangled with specific gender and generational dynamics.
Yet this analytical expansion creates a tension regarding the specificity of the militant experience. It forces us to ask: how much of the place children occupied in the revolutionary project was shaped by the political culture of the armed left, and to what degree was it underpinned by longer-standing traditions of the Argentine family? To what extent did disruptive affective and sexual bonds set the armed vanguard apart from the broader left or youth culture? This ambiguity, it bears emphasizing, does not undermine the analysis; rather, it productively unsettles established categories and opens new avenues for theorization. For scholars of the Cold War, the book invites renewed inquiry into how gender, sexuality, and subjectivity shaped transnational revolutionary movements in ways that might challenge entrenched narratives of radical politics.
Cosse draws on a rich array of archival sources, from recorded oral histories in public archives to private letters, photographs, popular song lyrics, and press coverage. Perhaps her engagement with these materials is the book’s most fascinating aspect. She reveals the centrality of small, sparkling details: the ambiguous smile of a young woman being detained during a student protest becomes a window into how revolutionary uprisings unsettled gender stereotypes, offering women a chance to find agency—and probably even joy—amidst the struggle. Similarly, the tone of a letter written by a militant while being pursued by the armed forces reveals a telling shift: in his final words to his daughters, the aspirations of the “new man”—the revolutionary epitome—give way to those of the “good man,” the tender father who loves their children thoroughly.
Written with a style that at times rivals the best fiction, the book offers a fresh understanding of one of the most studied periods of Argentine history, proving there is still much left to be discussed. While Durkheim’s study of collective effervescence remains unsystematic, Rotos Corazones offers a compelling account of how emotions, shared images, and passions coalesce into new ways of thinking and acting. It provides a way, at once simple and sophisticated, to think through the relationship between the elusive world of affects and the consolidation of more stable social frameworks in times of revolutionary change. The book opens up new avenues for students and scholars of Latin American social and political history, and offers an accessible and captivating read for anyone curious about Argentine history.
Julia Ballester is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research. She completed her Master’s degree in Sociology at the New School and, prior to coming to the U.S., earned her undergraduate degree in Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.