This paper aims to study the successive impacts of events held to be foundational, and in particular the dynamic of military coups, on the formation and the trajectory of political generations. The paper takes as a case study the 1968 generation in Turkey, which was socialized by the 1960 coup and which then suffered repression in the later military interventions of 1971 and 1980. The analysis is based on the results of fieldwork conducted in Turkey, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, and involving around sixty interviews and a questionnaire in Turkish administered to over 1,000 representatives of Turkish elite groups (political, economic, social, and intellectual), many of them from the 1968 generation.