Even without retrieving that bundle of yellowing French newspapers from the top shelf in a closet, it is easy to remember the night of May 10, 1968, in Paris. It is far less easy, 40 years later, to discern what it was all about. Adolescent hormones, the death of communism, the death of capitalism or, as André Malraux suggested at the time, the death of God?

Malraux, the writer and politician and the French culture minister at the time, may have been alone in invoking God's death as an explanation, but no one doubted that May 10 provoked an entire society to a rare assessment - call it an examination of conscience, if you will - of its fundamental values.

A week earlier, the police had been called in to occupy the Sorbonne, and Paris began to witness daily student marches, usually culminating in skirmishes between students throwing stones and the police firing tear gas.

By May 10, the number of student demonstrators was estimated at 20,000. At every street leading to the Sorbonne, they found their way blocked by vans and ranks of riot police. This time, the students did not disperse. As darkness fell, they began prying up cobblestones, ransacking building sites and turning over parked cars to construct their own barricades facing the police ones.