Fifty Years After the Utopian Age Ended, a Man Who Lived Through France's "May Storm" Recalls the Summer of 1968

"Today there is almost no corner of the world free of the influence and the legacy of the 1960s."

In 1966, a Frenchman named Michel Bonnin was 17, and he wanted to go wandering in India.

India was, that year, where many young Europeans and Americans believed their souls belonged. Even the Beatles went there in January 1968 to look for a spiritual guide.

Like the strings of colored beads worn around the neck, the marijuana joints passed hand to hand around a circle, and the running away from home that could happen anywhere, anytime, India was simply taken for granted as part of life by many young Europeans and Americans around 1968 — history seems to have shown this period little favor, describing these young people's hopes for society with nothing more than the word "utopian," and leaving behind the label "hippie" to name them. India stood for a sense that the world could be one and that the world was on the brink; asking Buddhists and mystics for help became a consolation for the young of the capitalist world.

From New York, Paris, London, Berlin, and Prague to Tokyo and Mexico City, young people were voicing their discontent with the way things were. What they were against varied widely — totalitarianism, a rigid education system, war, consumerism, control. Sometimes there was no specific target at all; the point was simply to assert a voice of one's own. One famous slogan ran: "It is forbidden to forbid."

They were the baby boomers. Michel Bonnin's own summary, years later, was: "We were the world's first generation of youth."

In the one or two decades after World War II, birth rates surged everywhere; people born in that stretch came to be called the baby boom generation, though the exact years differ from place to place. Between 1965 and 1970, the average fertility rate was 5.0 children per woman. Nothing in history had matched that pace or that scale.

Take Michel Bonnin's France. According to the UN Population Division, France had about 41 million people in 1948; by 1968 the figure had risen to 49.91 million — a gain of more than 8 million in twenty years.

The growth in university students was even sharper. France had only 175,000 of them in 1958; by 1968 there were 530,000.

It was not just the population that exploded. Countries were also rebuilding their economies in earnest. From 1945 to 1975 France went through a wave of growth and formally became a consumer society, a stretch the French often call the "Thirty Glorious Years."

Governments everywhere struggled to keep up with a population growing this fast. France's higher-education system, packed to the rafters, faced problem after problem: there were not enough campuses, and the old teaching methods and institutions left students dissatisfied.

In 1966, students at Strasbourg published an essay titled On the Poverty of Student Life: "In France, apart from priests and policemen, students are the most despised. Universities were once respected, and students were once their pride and joy. But that era has passed them by; today's education system aims to mass-produce specialized technicians. The modern economic system simply demands, on a huge scale, students who are uncultured and incapable of thought."

Objectively, these young people had a material life their parents never had, and they were not happy. Liberal, leftist, and avant-garde currents were breaking out everywhere. Every educated student saw the world differently, but they agreed on one thing: society today is terrible, and we have to change it.

Michel Bonnin looked down on the washing machine his mother bought. There was nothing wrong with the machine. It was that, at the time, he thought working hard just to buy a washing machine was in itself "really meaningless."

What felt meaningful was going to India, living the sort of life Jack Kerouac wrote about in On the Road (even though Kerouac was more than a decade older than him), or at the very least not spending a whole life teaching school, the way his father had.

The American anthropologist Margaret Mead made the argument in her well-known book Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap: the age in which tradition held society's structure of knowledge together, with the old handing down experience to the young, was over. In the 1960s social change sped up, and knowledge, accounts of the world, and ways of living kept renewing themselves. Young people felt the change first; their elders stood still, disapproving of everything, and soon became their children's pupils.

Knowledge was changing hands. And where knowledge changes hands, power is bound to follow. The backdrop to the so-called utopian generation was an age that demanded the old guard step aside — though demanding is one thing, and this movement, with its scattered claims and no goals or solutions, was destined to leave history nothing but the echo of youth. "It is forbidden to forbid" — but forbid it in favor of what? Who would propose the replacement? Those questions became feathers drifting in the air. That, in the end, is why this generation's youth is called utopian.

At the start of 1968, countries around the world were trying to look optimistic about what lay ahead. The front page of The New York Times carried the line: "World Bids Farewell to a Turbulent Year as Snow Falls on New York City." The United Nations declared it International Year for Human Rights. And President Charles de Gaulle, ten years into governing France, told the public: "I wish that 1968 will be a peaceful year."

At the same time, the Cold War hung over everything, the guns of the Vietnam War never stopped, the Black civil rights movement in the United States was forcing its way through, leftist organizations were gathering strength, feminism was rising, and the sexual liberation movement was an arrow already drawn.

And then there were the restless young people we know so well. In France, the children of the bourgeoisie made a "May Storm," and, having unexpectedly won the backing of the working class, brought all of Paris to a halt (though the young would later feel "betrayed").

France's leftist forces were surfacing then — Maoists, Trotskyists, each with their own positions. The voices were nothing if not chaotic. Many people have likened the May Storm to China's Cultural Revolution, which was happening at the same time, but Michel Bonnin rejects the comparison; in his eyes the two were fundamentally different things.

Michel Bonnin, now 69, has long had a Chinese name, Pan Mingxiao. He is a professor at France's École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and a visiting professor at the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. When he talks about the May Storm he still loses himself in it. He does not regret taking part at all, even though he was let down afterward. His academic work, including his research on China's Down to the Countryside Movement for sent-down youth, is bound up with 1968.

In 2008, the well-known French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur ran a retrospective for the 40th anniversary of the May Storm under the headline "A Sham Revolution That Turned Everything Upside Down." That is how some people judge it — the movement that hoped to bring down de Gaulle's government did not succeed. Still, it marked society deeply, and it set the direction of reform for decades afterward.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the May Storm, and of the 1968 generation, the utopian generation. Jean-Claude Carrière, the screenwriter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, wrote in his book The Age of Utopia that the utopia people once cherished has become a beggar: "History bullies it, television news keeps it from lifting its head, and every part of human society goes on denying it. And yet it is a stubborn song, one that probably can never be beaten down or destroyed. It is an indispensable part of the substance of our lives."

Pan Mingxiao never made it to India. His father took away his passport. But he says the 1960s have never left him.

His own account may help you understand what a young person actually went through then.

We Were the World's First Generation of Youth — and We Were "Spoiled"

After World War II, France's economy kept doing well, and the whole world was moving toward modernization.

I say we were "the world's first generation of youth" because we were the first generation in which this many young people could go to school. That matters. There had been no concept of "youth" before; apart from a small elite, most people went to work after primary school.

By "youth" I mean a group of people with ideas. "Youth" also became a group of consumers then, and many companies made products specifically for them. And because young people had time, we could think about changing the world — back then we really believed we could, we had that kind of optimism. We felt we had to protect our own interests and change the traditions we could no longer stand.

My family was not rich. My father was a primary school teacher, my mother a typist. Because the economy was growing, even though their wages were low, my father bought a car when I was a teenager. It was a fairly beat-up car, but a car meant we could go on vacation, which was still a good thing; a few decades earlier it would have been impossible.

Maybe the change came too fast. Consumer society genuinely repelled me; it did not repel my parents. My mother, for one, was delighted to have a washing machine — before that they had to wash by hand. But I thought working yourself to the bone just to buy a washing machine was really meaningless.

Objectively we were the lucky ones, but we had no idea at the time; we thought it was normal. What was least normal was our spiritual life.

We were spoiled.

In my last year of high school, I told my parents one day, "I'm going wandering in India."

Before the university entrance exam I had no interest in studying and went off to do all sorts of other things — training as an actor, learning piano. In the end I arranged to go to India with a friend.

I had read a book called On the Road, and another about a poet who went wandering in India, smoked marijuana, and wrote poetry. I longed for that kind of life. I thought of myself as a rebellious young man. I did not want to be an ordinary person, and still less an ordinary consumer in a consumer society.

That kind of society was too vulgar, and our spiritual demands were very high. I was very interested in Indian religion and in Chinese Daoism, and that was a way of rebelling against mainstream society. I wrote poetry too — you could call me a literary youth.

Before that I had hitchhiked with a friend to Morocco and Turkey. There were many traditional things there, beautiful baskets and plates, but the locals did not want them; they wanted plastic things instead. I thought, what is so good about plastic?

While hitchhiking we slept on train station platforms. We did just about everything.

Partway through, the exam results came out and my friend had failed, so he had to rush back to Paris to prepare again. I gave him all the money I had for his train ticket, which left me two or three francs, so I had to hitchhike the whole way back. By the time I reached France I had gone two days without food and could only drink water on the street.

Hitchhiking as a way to travel was still fairly common and fashionable then. We learned later how dangerous it could be — some people who hitchhiked were beaten or raped.

The funny thing is that Germans were quite conservative. They thought hitchhiking was far too dangerous, but since you were already doing it, they felt obliged to help, so they insisted on taking you in their car, in case something happened to you. German cars were the easiest to flag down.

In the end I did not get to India, because my father put my passport away.

My friend went wandering by himself, which means he was not in France in 1968. When he came back from India, I felt we no longer spoke the same language. I had changed a great deal; he had not. So this historical event produced not only objective changes but subjective ones.

A Campus of Nothing but Concrete Buildings — No Atmosphere at All! Boring!

In March 1968, an article in Le Monde titled "The French Are Bored" described the society France was becoming: featureless, depersonalized employees absorbed in an endless string of meaningless bureaucratic chores. Social life had congealed into a futile, all-too-familiar routine, aptly summed up as "subway — work — sleep."

My father was a primary school teacher and he wanted me to be one too, but I had no intention of teaching. I did not want to be like my father.

While I was off hitchhiking, my father signed me up for the preparatory classes for the École Normale Supérieure, the most elite institution in French higher education. Of course he hoped I would get in — my grades were good, and he thought I had a chance.

The moment I started going to class I found it stifling. Honestly, I could not stand those classmates. They were little bureaucrats, so young and already with the mindset of old men. And there were so many courses to take, geography among them, which I hated. So I dropped out on my own and told my father I wanted an ordinary university instead.

I ended up at Nanterre, and I decided to study philosophy.

I had read Sartre at 13. I did not really understand him, but I thought it was fashionable. His influence on me was not political — I strongly disagreed with his sympathy for the Chinese Communist Party, that was unacceptable — but his account and understanding of freedom shaped me deeply.

Choosing Nanterre did not set off a family revolution. Ever since I had announced I was going wandering in India, my father had decided that as long as I was still willing to go to school he would be satisfied.

I picked Nanterre only because it was close to home. The campus had just been built, so there was nothing around it except a shantytown of North African immigrants. Jean-Luc Godard even shot a film there, La Chinoise, with a lot of footage of Nanterre, because he found the place such an unusual phenomenon. Our school really was strange: nothing there, just a few modern concrete blocks.

So many young people were going to university then that the government threw up a batch of new ones, some on land the army had used. Campuses like that had no atmosphere at all — concrete buildings and gray walls, nothing else.

The Sorbonne was different. It had centuries behind it, and the buildings were beautiful. Nanterre was like a few blocks that had suddenly appeared in the middle of a desert.

I sometimes think our extreme ideas may have had something to do with that environment.

The Prelude to the May Storm Began With "Sexual Freedom, Sexual Liberation"

Nanterre (that is, Paris X), where Pan Mingxiao studied, was pivotal to the May Storm. It had a nickname then, "Mad Nanterre," and several student organizations and leaders came out of it, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the student leader known as "Danny the Red."

Because the campus had been built purely to absorb overflowing enrollment, there had been no time to plan anything nearby, and students had nowhere at all to spend their free time. A lifeless campus plus a large mass of high-spirited young people bred all sorts of discontent. For students the dormitories became the only place to relax. A conservative rule was in force: only women aged 21 or over, or with a parent's permission, could enter the men's dormitories, and men could not enter the women's at all. That set off a demand from 11,000 Nanterre students for dormitory visiting rights.

From March 1967 on, male students were already demanding access to the women's dormitories. Some were punished for protesting, but the protests kept coming, and continued the following year.

Even now plenty of people laugh that our movement began with a demand to get into the women's dorms, but it is meaningful, because that was one of our important demands: sexual freedom, sexual liberation.

I remember the school built a new swimming pool, and the Minister for Youth, François Missoffe, came for the opening. One student — the man who would later be the famous Daniel Cohn-Bendit — walked up to the minister and said, "Mr. Minister, I've read your white paper on youth affairs, and there is not one word in it about sex."

The minister answered, "Jump in the pool and you won't think about that anymore." Cohn-Bendit shot back, "You could have been Hitler's minister of youth." I think that is when Cohn-Bendit began to show something of a leader.

I had friends who were living together while they were still students. The girl got pregnant and wanted an abortion, but abortion was illegal then, so they had to find a back-alley doctor and borrow money on top of it. That is when I thought this is intolerable — why was abortion not allowed? Traditional Catholicism had a huge influence on French society, and de Gaulle represented exactly that way of thinking, which made me feel all the more that we needed a free, open society.

On another front: before I turned 19 I was quite shy about relations between men and women, but then that whole sexual liberation movement succeeded, at least on me.

I was not confident at first, but when you are making a revolution, who has time to think it over — you throw yourself in entirely. That is when I started growing a beard, because there is no time to shave when you are busy with a revolution. Later I noticed girls seemed to like men with beards, so I have kept it ever since.

I think every revolution makes everyone more excited, and that certainly includes the sexual side. During a revolution people throw themselves into that too.

With a Beethoven Concerto Ringing Out, Students Occupied the Campus

After World War II the mass media grew, and we heard about events anywhere in the world quickly and could see the photographs and film almost at once. The biggest story then was the Vietnam War. Every day the television and the papers carried a great deal of coverage, and some truly horrifying photographs.

I thought: how can this society tolerate a war this cruel? We did not feel it as directly as Americans did, because we did not have to serve, but I still felt the Western world had a great many immoral problems.

France and the United States, as the mainstream of that world, would do anything in the name of anti-communism, and on top of that things were happening in Africa and South America that made us unhappy.

On March 21 a student from our school was arrested. He opposed the Vietnam War, went to the American Express building in central Paris, and smashed its display windows; the police picked him up.

Afterward some activists held a demonstration on campus and decided to protest by occupying the administration building.

The next day the administration building happened to be hosting a concert of a Beethoven concerto, and my girlfriend and I had bought tickets. With so many students in the room, Cohn-Bendit saw his chance. When the concert ended he suddenly rushed onto the stage and told the audience that we were occupying the administration building, that we opposed the university's failure to protect students, that we demanded the arrested student's release, that we opposed the Vietnam War, and that a new organization had been formed. (Note: the organization was named the March 22 Movement.)

Some in the audience were puzzled about what Cohn-Bendit was up to, but it did not bother me in the least. He made a deep impression on me, in fact. I thought this man was very good with words.

Amusingly, I ran into Cohn-Bendit at a conference in Brussels in 2008. We had coffee together and I reminded him of that day, and it turned out he still remembered that it had been a Beethoven piano concerto. I told him he had a fine memory.

Closing Nanterre Sets Off the "May Storm"

From the end of April, scattered protests broke out almost daily somewhere in France. Each one sharpened the conflict between students and the government, and each one also raised Cohn-Bendit's standing.

On May 2, the headquarters of the University of Paris summoned Cohn-Bendit and seven other students over the "March 22 incident." Nanterre students protested, blowing whistles and disrupting classes. Nanterre's administration recommended to the Minister of Education that the campus be closed. Nanterre students then went to the Sorbonne, in central Paris.

The next day the Sorbonne's rector, Jean Roche, sent a written request to Maurice Grimaud, the chief of the Paris police, asking that the Sorbonne's courtyard be "cleared."

When our school was closed, I first went home to do other things. This was not like today, with WeChat and the internet; information did not travel so freely. But later I learned that Nanterre students had gone to the Sorbonne, and, to my surprise, that the Sorbonne's rector had called the police.

Since the Middle Ages France has had a tradition that the police may not enter a university unless the rector asks them to. We believed students could solve students' problems themselves.

On May 6 the police drove the students out of the Sorbonne and into the streets, which made things worse, because it is easier to clash with police in the street. The police were fierce then, beating people with batons, and everyone was disgusted. Up to this point I was following it all in the newspapers. (Note: it was the first time in 700 years the Sorbonne had closed. About 600 students and 345 police officers were injured, and 422 people were arrested.)

There were student demonstrations every day, and the numbers kept growing. I remember the minister publicly sneered that they were a small pack of mad dogs. Then I saw in the media that nearly 50,000 people had taken to the streets shouting, "We are the mad dogs!" I liked them for it — I thought it showed real humor — and once I saw students getting hurt I began to identify with them.

That Night, I Threw a Stone at a Police Car

The Night of the Barricades on May 10 was arguably the most famous and most legendary protest of the whole May Storm. Cohn-Bendit wrote in his memoir Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative: "In these moments of collective ecstasy, when everything seems possible, nothing could be more natural, more simple, than the warm relations among all the demonstrators, and especially between the boys and the girls." That day 370 students were injured and 460 were arrested.

If you ask when I really began taking part in the movement, it was May 10. That day was a huge turning point, the moment a student movement became a movement for all of France.

Around six in the evening my girlfriend and I went near the Sorbonne, because Cohn-Bendit and the others had said they were going to surround it and occupy the area around the campus and the Latin Quarter.

We walked around the area, and honestly the atmosphere was good at first — a lot of people, almost like being at a sporting event. You would see people talking in the street, arguing about all kinds of things; I even ran into my philosophy professor strolling with his wife. Besides students, some young workers had come too.

But that easy, strolling mood soon changed. People began saying they wanted to pry up the paving stones and pile them into barricades. Quite a few were against it, myself included, because that would turn the thing violent, and we wanted to be civilized and peaceful.

Wasn't the whole point that we were against police violence, and all the more reason to stay peaceful? But those people did not care; they wanted to repeat the Paris Commune, the French Revolution. And you know, once one paving stone is pried up, it is easy for everyone else to pry up stones and pile them into barricades.

I remember Cohn-Bendit himself saying, on the spot, that we could do this, but not all in one place — only where it was needed.

Later the police tried to drive their cars into the barricades, and I was nearly hit by one. Even though I had not agreed with building barricades, I thought what the police were doing was wrong, and I threw myself in completely — like everyone else, I picked up a stone and threw it at a police car.

The mood on the ground is contagious. Everyone felt they had to defend that spot, and the moment the police charged at us I had to decide on the spot whether to leave or join the fight. In the end you have to pick a side.

Throwing stones was dangerous, of course — police cars are solid things — but it was a way of taking a stand. After a while, though, I noticed my throws were going too high and might accidentally hit our own people on the other side. That seemed genuinely dangerous, so I decided to stop.

Right after I stopped throwing stones, the police moved on the barricade area and threw tear gas at us; some people were clubbed. It was the first time I had seen tear gas, and I saw many people bleeding. The scene turned chaotic. I had never been in anything like it and had no idea what would happen. A lot of people there were crying.

My girlfriend and I felt it was too dangerous to stay — a policeman might appear in front of you and hit you with a baton. Our generation really had never seen anything like it. Part of us was frightened, and part could not believe our eyes. Thinking back, there may well have been people who died.

After two in the morning my girlfriend and I decided to pull back. Her home was in the Latin Quarter, not far away, so we took shelter at her place. But we were worried about what was happening, so we kept listening to the radio until morning.

The next morning, when Cohn-Bendit was interviewed on the radio, he urged students not to come and sacrifice themselves any further; the police were extremely brutal.

The state broadcaster was not allowed to report on the student movement, but we were not a communist country, so private stations did cover it. Generally speaking, if we wanted to know where a protest was, we could listen to the radio and go join in.

The media began reporting on that night, with photographs from the scene on every front page. Many people were shocked that this could happen in the heart of Paris, and the unions joined together in a strike in support of the students. Most people really did blame the police for being too harsh and overdoing it; it never needed to get that serious.

Millions Join the General Strike, Paris Grinds to a Halt

"Ten years is enough!" was the theme of the demonstration on May 13, whose marchers demanded that de Gaulle's government, in power for a decade, step down. Worker-student action committees were then formed to spread word of the revolt; within a few days about 2 million people had joined the strike, and by May 22 the number had risen to roughly 9 million.

May 13 was when the workers linked up for the general strike. The night before, on the 12th, I went home, and even my father's primary school said it would join. De Gaulle's government was too brutal. I think it built up — everyone already had grievances, and one incident set them off.

That day we took a train together to join the strike. The trains were supposed to be striking too, but they ran in order to carry the protesters.

The moment I got to the Paris station I saw an astonishing number of people. It broke every record at the time; there must have been a million there. There were so many that many streets became impassable. The atmosphere is hard to imagine — all those people chanting slogans and singing "The Internationale" together.

The best part was that word went around later that the Sorbonne had opened its doors, and activists invited workers and students inside to debate together. I went too. Even now I can hardly believe I took part in that debate. I had always been shy and disliked speaking in public; this must have been the first time I ever did.

That day Cohn-Bendit and the other student leaders led a group into a lecture hall at the Sorbonne that could hold several hundred people, and a crowd began arguing inside.

Many workers said they supported the students but felt the students did not understand workers, that the two sides' problems were different. (Note: workers at the time wanted radical reform of wages and factory conditions, while students wanted to reform life itself — their demands were not the same.)

So I picked up the microphone and told everyone not to be taken in: this was a government scheme, a tactic to split us, and workers and students should unite against the government.

Hundreds of people spoke that night and I was only one of them, but I was so excited, so eager to say those things, that I picked up the microphone on the spot.

"Goodbye de Gaulle! Farewell de Gaulle!"

Come to think of it, I must have sung "The Internationale" hundreds of times in that stretch.

The mood at the start of the May Storm was good all round; it only turned a bit chaotic later. In that period there were demonstrations all day, every day, and one protest I threw myself into left a deep impression.

On May 15 students were preparing to occupy a national theater. My girlfriend and I went along.

The funny thing is that before we went in, my girlfriend had a sudden idea. She saw the national flag hanging at the entrance and said she wanted to sit on my shoulders. She took the flag down, tore off the blue and the white, and hung the red back up on its own.

We had known about the Paris Commune and revolutionary history since we were children, and sometimes we simply wanted to do something. I remember that day being a lot of fun — someone playing the piano, some people arguing, others discussing problems.

That is what I want to convey: at night the whole movement was like a war, and by day it was like a holiday. France had ground to a halt, no cars, no gasoline, and still the mood on the streets was wonderful. One protest slogan read, "Under the paving stones, the beach," and the moment I saw it I was sure whoever wrote it had taken part in the movement, because if you pried up a paving stone you really did find a layer of sand underneath.

The movement had one great achievement: it completely changed relations between people. Everyone's speech was liberated. I said all sorts of things to my parents that I had never said before, and everyone in the street was a friend. I have never known that atmosphere again.

Buying things and getting food were both a problem then, but we did not care; we felt there were more important matters at hand, that we were writing history. I really do miss that feeling.

On May 24 I joined another protest, and that is when we heard on the radio that de Gaulle had decided to hold a referendum. Everyone there cheered, and we all shouted together: "Goodbye de Gaulle! Farewell de Gaulle!"

I thought: if he holds a referendum, he is bound to lose.

The Young People Who Could Not Change the World

In May, students and workers did briefly occupy the central place in society, but the "holiday mood" was unrealistic in the end, and the right was biding its time.

On May 30, de Gaulle's supporters organized a march from the Tuileries to the Place de l'Étoile, proof that the students had lost momentum. In the parliamentary election results on June 23, the so-called New Left the students backed did not win a single seat. The center-right parties gained 100. That was another painful blow.

The movement changed me. I had not been keen on political activity, but afterward I joined a Trotskyist organization (supporters of Trotsky). It had a newspaper called Rouge, and I sold their magazine and took part in their activities and demonstrations.

One feature of the Trotskyists was internationalism, which suited me, so I actually learned a lot in that period. But they had their dogmatism too, and factional fighting inside; the Trotskyists never held any real power, so it was all theorizing on paper.

Six months after joining, I concluded that I really was not made for political organizations — I prefer to doubt everything, which does not suit a politician — so I left.

After May many people were looking for a way forward, and the left around the world began to lose heart.

In August 1968 the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, simply because a Communist Party there wanted to make the country a bit freer. We thought the Soviet Union was terrifying. How could you call that socialism? It was a concentration camp.

We also came to see, gradually, that the Cultural Revolution was not romantic at all. At first we only knew slogans like "to rebel is justified" and "young Red Guards taking part in politics"; later we found out it was nothing of the sort.

The 1970s were a process of change. For my part, I began to see clearly that a revolution overnight could not solve every problem. It was pure fantasy.

Some of us became reformists, and some reversed their political leanings entirely — the Maoists especially. A few of them turned into hard-line rightists who believed capitalism was the only way forward. The Trotskyists mostly became supporters of democratic socialism.

Cohn-Bendit, of course, stayed active in politics. He later founded the Green Party in Germany, going from red to green — or, to be precise, he was both red and black (note: black here means anarchism).

That change was, honestly, very painful. I know some people killed themselves over it; they simply could not bear that atmosphere of despair. So for some the whole process was a tragedy, a tragedy of disillusionment.

There was one Maoist intellectual who gave everything up to go work in a factory, and found in the end that it was not what he had expected. He realized he had been wrong and refused to admit it. One day he stopped speaking, and he has not spoken since. His daughter later wrote a book about it, called The Day My Father Stopped Talking.

Most people, though, chose to face reality. I support democratic socialism, but I never took an active part in politics again; at most I vote.

In the 1970s, after six years in Hong Kong, I felt I had to go back to France, so I took the exam to teach Chinese in a French secondary school.

So the reality is that I became a teacher after all.

I Do Not Think Our Efforts Were Wasted

Some of my Chinese friends still joke that I was a Red Guard. I laugh along, and I know they mean it kindly, but I know these are two completely different things. I really was not one.

The biggest difference between the May Storm and the Cultural Revolution is that nobody told me to do it. The essential difference is spontaneity. In China someone told you to rebel. Mao Zedong stressed class struggle, but there was hardly any capitalism then, hardly any capitalists — whoever Mao decided was his enemy became "the bourgeoisie." Which means the students were being used.

Later, of course, both groups went through a somewhat similar change of mind. While the students were in the countryside (the Down to the Countryside Movement), they slowly began to reflect on what the Cultural Revolution had done. They came to understand they had been used, and that beating their teachers or anyone else had simply been wrong.

To this day I do not regret taking part in the May Storm. We were opposing police violence. We killed no one, we did not beat our teachers or anything like that. It was completely different.

Of course I also know that our fantasies then were very unrealistic, but that kind of romanticism was needed. You could perhaps say the movement itself failed, but you cannot say the movement defeated us.

After 1968 I believe France changed a great deal. I do not think our efforts were wasted.

We dreamed of a revolution and never got one, but we did get reform. Many agreements were rejected at the time and took effect in the end; those were all changes. France legalized abortion in 1975, for instance, and that is absolutely connected to 1968. The "May Storm" has been a lasting influence.

The next story from 1968 will concern the students who occupied Yasuda Auditorium at the University of Tokyo.

Cover image from Jean-Claude Seine / MEI68