THE YEAR THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING.(Special Report)(1968)(Cover story)

Byline: Christopher Dickey

In Europe and the United States, the generation of 1968 had an idealistic core expressed in culture, politics and a distinct way of looking at the world. Its legacy lives on.

In May 1968, students ripped up the cobblestones along the rue Gay-Lussac in Paris to build barricades and, in the process, exposed the sand foundation that lay under them. It was one episode in an orgy of confrontation with stolid authority that started out partly as protesting, partly as partying, and grew into a chaotic nationwide strike that shut down France. They were heady times. Fractious left-wing ideologues filled the air with strident declamations -- Marxist, Trotskyite, Maoist, anarchist, situationist and more. But the reigning sentiment was simple enough: strip away the edifices of established order. Get to a better -- and above all, a fairer -- future. Of the slogans shouted by the barricade builders on Left Bank streets that May, those best remembered almost 40 years on are "It is forbidden to forbid" and the weirdly frivolous but expressive, "Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!"

What happened in France that spring was inspired by, and inspired, a global season of rude awakenings that resounds still, even if it comes back to us now summed up in the singular date "1968." America's Vietnam War rumbled as a raging undercurrent, prompting the first protests of the French uprising. But in Czechoslovakia, the "Prague Spring" that began in March 1968 pushed aside the Iron Curtain -- until Moscow sent troops to crush the opposition. Ghettos burned and assassinations changed the political landscape of the United States. But at the end of the year, a triumph of American technology unexpectedly created environmental awareness: images of Earth taken from Apollo 8 showed just how vulnerable the Blue Planet looked in what astronaut Jim Lovell called the "vast loneliness" of space.

People who did not come of age then (which is to say the vast majority of the world's population today) may tire of hearing how epochal it all was. French conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, only 13 when the barricades went up in the Latin Quarter, ran his victorious presidential campaign this year against those "sixty-eighters" who still had an odor of irrational left-wing romanticism clinging to them. Yet Paul Berman, a New York University historian, and author of "Power and the Idealists," argues that in Europe today, and especially in Sarkozy's administration, the '68 generation is perhaps more influential than ever. He says there are two very different legacies: the cliched sloganeering associated with what he calls "antique" 19th-century ideologies, which mostly died of their own irrelevance, and the core sentiment that ruled the streets in Paris, a visceral hostility to ruthless authority, continued, says Berman, as a legacy of ...