Fifty years ago, France seemed briefly to teeter on the edge of revolution. Student riots in Paris expanded into wider protest and a strike by almost 10 million workers (no one was sure of the exact number because the statistical services themselves broke down) paralyzed the country. This was the most spectacular example of a general upheaval, initially rooted in student discontent, that also shook Italy, West Germany, Britain and the United States.

It is often said that 1968 was a failed revolution in political terms but a successful one so far as cultural change was concerned. There is an element of truth in this. Protesters did not destroy capitalism, or even bring down Charles de Gaulle’s regime in France. There is, though, a broader sense in which ’68 itself eventually went with a realignment of politics so significant that it redefined notions of the right and the left.

This realignment was rooted in the fact that 1968 had two faces. On one side, it entailed a social challenge to the existing order — one that usually drew on Marxist thought, though not on that of the orthodox Communist parties. The working class was central to this challenge and, especially in France and Italy, workers and students often supported each other. Some students, inspired by Maoist ideas about the need for intellectuals to leave the ivory tower, took jobs in factories. On the other side, there was a cultural version of 1968. It emphasized a sharp break with formality and authority in everyday life and a transformation of personal, especially sexual, relations rather than the overthrow of a social order.