![]() Yet Berman portrays Fischer as the man who "ushered the Germans into the actual modernized world by making them active participants in NATO, first in the Kosovo war, and now in Afghanistan." In France, Bernard Kouchner epitomizes the flamboyant style and the moral imperatives of 1968, as well as the rejection of its antique ideologies. ![]() Not only was he pilloried, but, by extension, 1968 was put on trial. The photographs came from the daughter of Germany's most notorious woman terrorist, whom Fischer had admired. When pictures of him hitting a cop during a 1973 protest appeared in 2001, they provoked outrage. One of the leading '68ers is Joschka Fischer, foreign minister of Germany from 1998 to 2005, representing the Green Party, but a street-fighting leftist radical in the early 1970s. In Europe, a handful of well-known student leaders would do the same, holding on to the idealism that marked 1968, but adapting to the demands of realpolitik, including "the use of Western power against extreme repression." In the United States the leaders of the civil-rights movement, if they survived, endured, matured and became influential inside and outside of government. Thousands of people were arrested and injured, but not a single person was killed in France's May uprising. The European protests and the government responses, moreover, while violent, were rarely deadly. Overt colonialism and violent, overwhelming fascism were living memories in Europe, and not, as in the United States, mere words in overheated left-wing rhetoric. In this, the European and American experiences were very different. He says there are two very different legacies: the clich?d 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 "anti-totalitarianism and human rights." 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. 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. 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. 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. Ghettos burned and assassinations changed the political landscape of the United States. But in Czechoslovakia, the "Prague Spring" that began in March 1968 pushed aside the Iron Curtain-until Moscow sent troops to crush the opposition. 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. 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!" Get to a better-and above all, a fairer-future. But the reigning sentiment was simple enough: strip away the edifices of established order. Fractious left-wing ideologues filled the air with strident declamations-Marxist, Trotskyite, Maoist, anarchist, situationist and more. 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. 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.
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