It was a fast-forward cultural, political and sexual revolution that still fuels passionate debate, with a flood of books, films and nostalgic magazine specials to mark the 40th anniversary next month.

   Four decades on, France is still torn over the legacy of May 1968.
   That month saw students set up barricades to demand a say in a stifling
post-war society, soon joined by downtrodden factory workers and their artist
brothers-in-arms. Together, they ground the country to a halt, nearly bringing
down the government.
   It was a fast-forward cultural, political and sexual revolution that still
fuels passionate debate, with a flood of books, films and nostalgic magazine
specials to mark the 40th anniversary next month.
   "Nineteen-sixty-eight crystalised all of society's problems over the space
of a few weeks," said French historian Michel Winock.
   France was not alone. Student protests swept the world that year, from US campuses to communist-ruled Prague, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Mexico and Japan, fanned by a wind of revolt over the Vietnam War and fed by a generation's
hunger for change.
   But in France, 10 million workers joined students in rising up against the
powers-that-be, turning factories to debating chambers and whole chunks of society upside down for a few surreal weeks.
   May 1968 became an instant myth and a national watershed.
   Millions remember the month as one that dragged conservative French society
blinking into the era of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll -- changing the rules on
everything from education to women's rights, labour relations, media
censorship and the arts.
   "The same changes happened all over the Western world -- but in other
places they did it without the barricades," said Winock.
   For Winock, the riots against the stuffy conservatism of president Charles
de Gaulle's France was part of a hard-wired tradition stretching back to the
1789 Revolution -- still on display in the 1,000-odd street protests held in
France each year.
   "We are a country that has spent the past 200 years in a permanent state of
confrontation. We have a cult of revolution," he said.
   Since 1945, France had seen a period of unbroken growth but also deep
social change, as half of its rural population poured into towns and cities,
and their children enrolled at the country's free universities.
   Lecture halls were bursting at the seams, as the student population
rocketed from 200,000 in 1950 to 850,000 by 1970.
   But 1968 France was still a "rigid, locked-up society," from the classroom
to the factory floor, according to Winock.
   Women were banned from working in trousers and needed their husband's
say-so to open a bank account, the "pill" had barely been legalised, education
was dull and authoritarian, censorship the rule in state-controlled media and
paid holidays rare.
   In early 1968, a simmering student protest against the Vietnam War at
Nanterre near Paris -- which kicked off over demands for boys to be let into
girls' dormitories -- led the government to shut down the campus on May 2.
   Protestors promptly occupied La Sorbonne, the hallowed university in Paris'
Latin Quarter, building barricades and ripping cobblestones from city streets
to combat riot police.
  
   'France is torn between revulsion and fascination'
 
   They were led by a German student Daniel Cohn-Bendit -- whose Jewish
parents had fled to France to escape Nazism in 1933 and who earned the moniker
"Danny the Red" for his politics and ginger locks -- until he was expelled
from the country.
   By mid-May protests had spread to workplaces across France, where anger was
already rumbling over wages and harsh labour practices. They escalated into a
general strike by 10 million workers that sparked fuel and bread shortages.
   Fired up by all-night debates and anarchist, anti-system slogans -- "Be realistic, demand the impossible," "Never work" -- France seemed be in the throes of a new revolution, prompting De Gaulle at one point to confer with his generals at a base in Germany.
   By the end of the month, cracks were starting to show in the student-worker solidarity after the government struck a deal with workers and an exasperated public turned against the student violence.
   On May 30 a massive counter-demonstration filled the Champs Elysees to cries of "Down with anarchy". By mid-June the movement had collapsed, with De Gaulle's supporters easily winning general elections later that month.
   But the veteran leader became an indirect casualty the following year when
France voted "no" to a referendum on reform. Sensing he had been disavowed, De
Gaulle resigned.
   "Change did not happen overnight... with a before and after May '68,"
argued historian Philippe Artieres.
   But French society and attitudes changed fundamentally over the following
decade, he says, whether in the workplace, in schools or people's homes.
   Forty years on, however, the country is still unsure what to make of its
May '68 legacy.
   "French society is torn between fascination and revulsion," said the
sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff.
   For a majority of French -- three quarters according to one survey -- the
legacy of the spring revolt is broadly positive.
   But some left-wing critics argue that May 1968 let loose the individualism
and unfettered capitalism of the 1980s.
   And a chunk of the French right remains deeply hostile to the spirit of '68.
   During last year's presidential race, now head of state Nicolas Sarkozy
launched a vitriolic attack blaming the moral decadence of May 1968 for
everything from crime to failing schools and the excesses of global capitalism.
   Cohn-Bendit, now a German deputy, points out that for a twice-divorced man
to hold France's highest office shows itself how much May '68 changed French
society.
   But the one-time student leader, who has written a book called "Forget 68",
says the world has changed -- and it is time for France, whether pro- or
anti-68, to move on.
   "Forty years ago, we were not afraid of unemployment, there was no AIDS,
global warming or unfettered globalisation. We were not afraid of the future,"
he said.
   "Talking endlessly about May '68 is a way of avoiding today's problems."

Emma Charlton

AFP