ANALYSIS:The student revolutionaries of 1968 were anything but - they were seeking influence and direction from parents who had only vague liberal values marinaded in Doctor Spock
THE YEAR of the Young Rebelswas what the poet Stephen Spender called 1968. Student uprisings led to street protests and sit-ins from Prague to Rome, from Paris to New York. Forty years on, the grainy black-and-white photographs still haunt us. Did those young men in neat suits and women in pencil skirts really fling bombs at les flicsin the month of May? And where are they now?
One leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, is an MEP, and so are some of his former followers (not that they then believed in either leading or following). Oliver Cromwell once said that the only way to make a revolutionary safe was to give him a seat in parliament. But Danny the Red in 1968 didn't care much for sham exercises in electoralism every five years. Communism, like the bourgeoisie, was "obsolete", he claimed: and so he wrote a quickie book spelling out the "left-wing alternative".
Always self-ironic, he admitted cheerfully in his introduction that the volume, published by some of the foremost houses of Europe (including Penguin of London), would "grease the wheels of capitalism" even as it preached revolution.
But was it a revolution at all? L'imagination au pouvoirwas chalked on many a wall. French youth under Charles de Gaulle was suffering from terminal boredom. Children of affluence had the luxury, denied their war-time parents, of construing their condition; and they did not like the smug technocratic world which they saw. Television helped to create for the first time the sense of a global youth community, outraged by a war being fought with lethal weapons in the rice fields of Vietnam.
TV images of the torching of villages by the US army were so graphic as to turn even moderates against the war - and as a consequence such images would be censored in all future conflicts. Young American men in danger of conscription openly burned their draft-number cards. Professors gave some students higher grades than they might have deserved, hoping by a "moral" lie to reduce their chances of being drafted and killed.
In Czechoslovakia things were even more frightening - young people stood defiantly in market squares, as Soviet tanks rolled in to put an end to the Prague Spring led by the gentle gradualist, Alexander Dubcek. "The people were dissatisfied with the party leadership," he had explained. "We couldn't change the people, so we changed the leaders."
For all of the intensity, the protagonists of 1968 were often playful, even self-mocking. In Prague the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was crowned King of the May, in front of a student placard which read: "I would like to increase our population, but I have no apartment." In Paris jokers wrote on walls: "I am a Marxist of the Groucho faction." Insurrection took on the character of carnival. Only when mankind's work assumed the character of play, said the protesters, would people feel truly free.
Along with that lucid, self-critical element went an emotionalism that sometimes turned hysterical. The year 1968 was also the point at which the Beatles became terrified of their fans. "The world decided to go mad," recalled George Harrison, "and then proceeded to blame us". Young people who for years had sat quietly in schoolroom rows or office desks were suddenly learning how to emote en masse- at concerts, love-ins, arts festivals.
Suddenly, the Enlightenment seemed under threat by those who called themselves freedom-lovers. At Columbia University in New York, great liberal scholars were assaulted by ignorant, drug-fired protesters, who had scant interest in opening the sort of dialogue which the Parisian students had asked for.
"Up against the wall, motherf****er" was one of their politer slogans. Partaking in a march against the Vietnam war, Conor Cruise O'Brien was dismayed to notice the emergence of such uncivil elements among the demonstrators. "They had not the slightest suspicion," he wrote afterwards, "that in their own way of speaking to a policeman might lurk the germ of some future Vietnam."
And then it was all over, Dubcek was removed from power and reassigned to menial duties. The French students forged no lasting alliance with factory labourers - instead de Gaulle, who briefly fled his own country, returned with a call for everyone to go back to work. In the US, well before year's end, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were slain.
1968 was pivotal. Some of the best and worst practices of our culture derive from those experiences. Among the negatives are the "rage communities" which emote daily on radio and TV phone-ins; the drugs which have destroyed the lives of so many; and the reduction of sex to a matter of consumption and performance rather than tenderness and love.
In the West, those who failed to make a revolution in the world settled instead for making one in language. They retreated from the streets and factories to university arts' facilities. There they propounded extreme forms of post-structural theory in a specialist jargon, which no normally intelligent person could (or should) ever hope to understand. They turned for inspiration to a galaxy of Parisian maitres á penser, who glorified in proclaiming the end of liberal humanism. Some of these gurus had been openly hostile to students of '68, others indifferent, others supportive: but all were now treated as soixante-huitardsin the eyes of subsequent teachers, students and cultural historians.
This was a woeful misrepresentation of the spirit of Paris or Prague 1968 - though it played well enough on US campuses, where a modularised system of bitty courses left students longing for some generalising philosopher who could "tie it all together".
Those who were in Paris or Prague in '68 recall above all a directness of language, as people shed caution and talked openly deep into spring nights.
But that is not the spirit to be found in the writing of Michel Foucault or the deconstructors. The Enlightenment dream of "freedom" gave way in their work to a cult of suspicion, and approach which privileges doubt over meaning and asserts the eternal "undecidability" of all texts.
The irony is, of course, that while well-endowed radicals in western universities proclaimed the impossibility of meaningful language, an absurdist playwright in eastern Europe, still convinced that words can mean something, helped the Czech people to recover cultural and political freedom - to the sounds of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. For Vaclav Hável was, lest we forget, also a child of '68. And the day on which the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague is, in his view, the day on which the communist autocracy began to disintegrate.
That is a positive legacy, even if it took 21 years to render communism obsolete with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Positive also is the fact that the idea of a caring community survived for so long in social-democratic France. It developed the sort of medical care for citizens which other nations, however wealthy, can only envy.
But even France is turning its back on '68. Then the students carried slogans saying "it is forbidden to forbid". Two years ago, however, a new breed of enragésburned down the university bookshop on the Place de la Sorbonne - itself an act more likely to come from fascists or Klansmen than from lovers of intellectual freedom. Next day, I watched a large group of students assemble in a demo. Prevented by the enragésfrom entering their classrooms and libraries, they unfurled a banner which said simply: "It is forbidden to forbid students to study." And I felt like cheering.
Every rebellion contains the seeds of its own destruction. The superb education given to thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, Althusser and Sartre, has been made impossible for the next generation of students - by the very success of their idea (except in eastern Europe, where few ever subscribed to them).
Most of the suit-wearing bomb-throwers were not revolutionaries. They were members of the first generation raised in conditions of comfort after the second World War by parents who read Doctor Spock, the child psychologist. The parenting which he recommended was liberal, even permissive. It was so vague in defining values that the young felt obliged to put up their fists and say: "Up against the wall, mothers, fathers and teachers - and tell us what you really think."
At the core of 1968 was a search for authority rather than a subversion of it. Which is why so many of its shapers turned into just the kind of people they warned their parents against. Many - but not all.
The dream lives on in the sophisticated blend of cool analysis and warm communitarianism epitomised by Barack Obama. He seems like the spirit of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King reincarnated in a single man. Perhaps '08 will have a happier ending than '68, even after the heartless marketeers, pseudo-left theorists and rage communities have all done their worst.
Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College, Dublin