May 1968: `the last great collective dream'

They had everything, but they wanted more. Thirty years ago, France's post-war, baby-boom generation brought the country to the brink of civil war with a month of riots and street demonstrations. Ironically, France was enjoying the most prosperous decades of its history.

Perhaps, as Pierre VianssonPonte of Le Monde wrote in a famous article of the time, France was bored. Or perhaps it underwent a deeper "crisis of civilisation", as the writer Andre Malraux said.

To much of the world, it looked like revolution. The confrontation began on May 3rd, after police detained demonstrators at the Sorbonne. With a cry of "free our comrades", a young man hurled a paving stone that cracked a police officer's skull open.

For three hours, the Latin Quarter was engulfed in tear gas. Demonstrators smashed shop windows and built barricades with cafe tables and wrought iron grills. Hordes of policemen swept up and down the Boulevard St Michel, beating everyone in sight with night sticks.

In ever worse riots, that continued until the end of the month, dozens of cars and the Paris Bourse were set on fire. Nearly 1,000 people were seriously wounded; a police commissioner and two students died in the violence. President de Gaulle briefly fled to Germany while he contemplated resigning. The CIA concluded France was headed for civil war.

But despite Gen De Gaulle's allegations of a Communist plot, the KGB reined in the French Communist party. Ten million workers went on strike in sympathy with the students, but their return to work would ultimately doom the movement.

With a large dose of nostalgia and some soul-searching, scores of exhibitions, books, newspapers and magazine articles are commemorating the great fright France gave itself in May 1968. The student revolutionaries fancied themselves as Maoists, Trotskyists, followers of Che Guevara and Castro.

If a common theme ran through their pronouncements, it was the rejection of authority and paternalism - as personified by Gen de Gaulle, then 75 and in his 10th year in power. Some of the slogans were endearing - "The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love."

Others frightened the bourgeoisie. "Comrades, mankind will not be happy until the last capitalist has been strung up by the guts of the last bureaucrat," the graffiti in the Sorbonne said.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit was the 23year-old, freckle-faced, chubby sociology student at Nanterre University who led the revolt. At the time, Cohn-Bendit claimed he wanted nothing short of "the overthrow of the regime". Today a German member of the European Parliament, he admits that he and his comrades were often silly and maintains that the explosion took place for one simple reason: the soixante-huitards ("sixtyeighters") "thought that those who had lived through the (second World) War had a vision of the world, of society and morality that was completely blocked".

It was Cohn-Bendit, the son of Jewish Germans who had emigrated to France to escape the Nazis in 1933 and later returned there, who gave the first hint of the irreverent challenge to come. On January 8th, 1968, the French minister of sports - who had just published a "white paper on youth" - inaugurated a swimming pool at the Nanterre campus. Students were demanding the right to have sex in their dormitory rooms, and the issue was discussed in cabinet meetings.

Cohn-Bendit approached the minister at the poolside and casually asked him for a light. "I read your white paper," Cohn-Bendit said in an exchange that would go down in history. "Six hundred pages of nonsense. You didn't even mention the sexual problems of young people."

"If you have that kind of problem," the minister responded, "you would do better to dive in the pool three times."

"That is exactly the type of response one expects from a fascist regime," Cohn-Bendit snapped back. The government demanded a written apology, which he provided, but they had not seen the last of "Dany the Red".

Politically, the events of May 1968 were a failure for the left. The right dramatically increased its strength in new elections after de Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly at the height of the crisis.

But culturally, the old soixante-huitards claim, they were the victors. The family and bourgeois morality would never again have the same hold over the French individual. Today, that brief spark of revolution has long given way to economic necessity. "May 1968 was the last great collective dream," the French philosopher, Gilles Lipovetsky, says. "All that remains of it is the call to live in the present, here and now."