Some causes championed in the Paris revolt are now seen as very troubling

Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the current French health and education ministers Bernard Kouchner and Jack Lang were among the signatories of petitions in the 1970s calling for paedophilia to be decriminalised, it emerged yesterday.

A number of extraordinary documents have surfaced - in the wake of accusations of possible child sex abuse against the former student revolutionary Danny Cohn-Bendit that are forcing France's intellectuals to confront the values of the May 1968 revolution and its aftermath, a period that witnessed probably the biggest change in sexual behaviour in recorded history.

The petitions were issued after a 1977 trial that saw three men jailed for non-violent sex offences against children aged 12 and 13. "Three years in prison for caresses and kisses: enough is enough," one petition, signed by Mr Kouchner and Mr Lang, said.

"French law recognises in 12- and 13-year-olds a capacity for discernment that it can judge and punish," said a second petition signed by Sartre and De Beauvoir, along with fellow intellectuals Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida; a leading child psychologist, Françoise Dolto; and writers Philippe Sollers, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Louis Aragon. "But it rejects such a capacity when the child's emotional and sexual life is concerned. It should acknowledge the right of children and adolescents to have relations with whomever they choose."

Such tracts and manifestos were not just acceptable but fashionable at the time. "A lot of good came out of 68, but we have to face it now, the era was naive," Roland Castro, an architect who was a prominent figure in the uprising, said yesterday. "We said everything and its opposite, hastily, without reflection. And in trying to break out of all the old barriers, we ended up pulling them down altogether."

Now an MEP for the French Green party, Mr Cohn-Bendit has been severely embarrassed by the resurfacing of an article he published in 1975 about the "erotic" nature of his contacts with children at an alternative kindergarten in Frankfurt, where he lived and worked after being kicked out of France for his part in May 68.

"Certain children opened the flies of my trousers and started to tickle me," he wrote. "I reacted differently each time, according to the circumstances ... But when they insisted on it, I then caressed them."

Mr Cohn-Bendit has insisted that the passages "bear no relationship to reality", that he has never been a paedophile, and that the article - taken from a book, Le Grand Bazar - was "a product of its time, of our anti-authoritarianism; pure provocation, designed to shock the bourgeoisie".

At the time, the book and Mr Cohn-Bendit's TV appearances to discuss it, got critical acclaim.

Some 20 children then in his care, now in their 30s, and their parents have written an open letter in his support, and Frankfurt prosecutors said yesterday there was "quite clearly" no case to answer.

But some at the time went further. Writer Tony Duvert praised "the great adventure of paedophilia" and raged at "the fascism of mothers". Philosopher René Scherrer urged "the removal of all sexual taboos - nothing should be outlawed".

Across the Rhine, the reassessment of May 68 is all about politics and violence. Mr Cohn-Bendit's close friend and fellow 70s radical Joschka Fischer, now Germany's foreign minister, is under fire over footage showing him striking a policeman. He also faces a judicial investigation into allegations that he lied about contacts with suspected terrorists in the 70s.

In France, the debate is more about sex. "Cohn-Bendit should resign, and he should do it now," declared Philippe de Villiers, a senior conservative. "For how many paedophiles have his appalling statements served as justification, or even encouragement?"

One signatory of the 1977 petition, Philippe Sollers, admitted yesterday that "there were so many manifestos, we signed them almost automatically". What shocked him now, he said, was that "the whole problem of violence against children was simply not a social problem at the time", but is now.

Libération, the left-leaning French newspaper that emerged from the barricades of 68, devoted four pages to the issue yesterday. It pointed out that in the 70s, French leftists held "a very serious debate about whether parents should leave their bedroom door open when they were having sex".

May 68 did not invent paedophilia, said Libération's editor Serge July. "The existing moral order was the enemy," he said. "The cultural revolution that followed May 68 was a social triumph in many, many ways. But its discourse on the sexuality of children has served to legitimise practices that are, at times, criminal."