Divided France looks back on May 1968

Published on Saturday 3 May 2008 19:42

FORTY years ago, French students in neckties and bobby socks threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that the sclerotic postwar system must change. Today, French students, worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits, are marching through the streets, demanding that nothing change at all.

May 1968 was a watershed in French life, a holy moment of liberation for many, when youth coalesced, the workers listened and the semi-royal French government of Charles de Gaulle took fright.

But for others, including the current French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who was only 13 at the time, May 1968 represents anarchy and moral relativism, a destruction of social and patriotic values that, he has said in harsh terms, "must be liquidated".

The fierce debate about what happened 40 years ago is very French. There is even a fight about labels – the right calls it "the events", while the left calls it "the movement".

While a 1960s youth revolt became general in the West, France was where the protests of the baby-boom generation came closest to a real political revolution, with 10 million workers on strike, and not just a revulsion against stifling social rules of class, education and sexual behaviour.

The events (or movement) of 40 years ago began in March at Nanterre University, just outside Paris, where a young French-born German named Daniel Cohn-Bendit led demonstrations against parietal rules – governing when young men and women could be together in dormitory rooms – that got out of hand.

When the university was closed in early May, the anger soon spread to central Paris, to the Latin Quarter and the Sorbonne, where the student elite demonstrated against antiquated university rules, and then outward, to workers in the big factories.

Scenes of the barricades, the police charges and the tear gas are dear to the French, recaptured in every magazine and scores of books, including one by photographer Marc Riboud, now 84, called Under The Cobblestones, a reference to a famous slogan of the time from the leader-jester, Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament: "Under the cobblestones, the beach."

Cohn-Bendit, known then as 'Danny the Red' for the colour of both his politics and his hair, is also thought responsible for other famous slogans of the time: "It is forbidden to forbid" and "Live without limits and enjoy without restraint!" – the word for enjoy, jouir, also meaning sexual climax.

The injunction was especially potent in a straight-laced country where the birth control pill had been authorised for sale only the year before, noted Alain Geismar, another leader of the time. Geismar, a physicist who spent 18 months in jail – but later served as a councillor to government ministers – wrote his own book, My May 1968.

Philosopher Andr Glucksmann, who supports Sarkozy as the best chance to modernise "the gilded museum of France", is amused by his fierce campaign attack on the events of May 1968.

"Sarkozy is the first post-'68 president," he said. "To liquidate '68 is to liquidate himself."