Antibes, France
I have been spending a week in France, the country where I lived and worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun in the late 1960s and as a CBS News correspondent in the late 1990s. This has been a trip down memory lane.

Of all my experiences as an American in Paris, the most unforgettable was May 1968. Right now, the French are commemorating the 40th anniversary of what they still call the “Days of May” - the great national upheaval that threatened to change everything in the French republic and in the end changed almost nothing.

It was a wonderful time to be young and living in Paris. It was even better to be a reporter. I was fascinated by the spectacle of university students burning cars and building barricades in the Left Bank, of students throwing paving stones and riot police responding with tear gas and batons as they tried to break up the demonstrations that spread through most of France's schools and universities and onto the streets. It was pure political theater, and indeed that is what it turned out to be. Only a few hundred people were injured in the melees and as far as I knew only one or two might have died. The French riot police may have looked fierce in action but they were well trained in crowd control. I shuddered to think what would have happened if there had been a similar national upheaval throughout the United States and the National Guard had been called in.

The “events”, as most of the French called them, began as a minor protest in a university outside Paris against rules forbidding men and women from being in the same dormitory bedrooms. The leader of the protest was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was known as “Danny the Red” because of the color of both his hair and his politics. He quickly became the bane of the French government and the hero of French students. Nowadays he is a Green Party politician.

French workers were also swept up in what quickly became a national orgy of protest against the stodgy French establishment and the conservative government of General Charles de Gaulle. A general strike shut down just about everything. I had to wait in line for hours and push my car to a service station in the (often vain) effort to find gasoline. Public transport was paralyzed, and even the undertakers were on strike. The dead had to wait to get buried.

The students thought they were running a cultural revolution. Chairman Mao was their icon, and they engaged in endless debates in the universities. At one of these meetings in the Sorbonne, they were proclaiming that “the only creative act is destruction.” As a dutiful reporter, I asked one of the student leaders, “OK, if that's the way you want it, what are you proposing to replace our bourgeois society?” He smiled and explained to the obviously dim-witted foreign correspondent, “We have a student committee working on that.” The young revolutionaries seemed more interested in making slogans (and love) than realistic plans.

In fact, the students and the workers were living in different worlds. The workers eventually realized that. Their trade unions were appalled at the chaos and disorder the students created. The biggest union, the communist-led CGT, was afraid of being overtaken by the left and eventually made a deal with the government for better pay. One of the things that particularly alienated the workers was the fact that students were burning other people's automobiles. An automobile in those days was something that you worked for years to acquire. It was almost sacred, and those unruly students were burning them as if they were worthless.

The French government, which knew something about the French character, finally put an end to the Days of May with a simple move. On the eve of the big spring Whitsunday holiday, police broke up the strike in the refineries and gasoline distribution system. The restless French, who hadn't been able to go anywhere for weeks except on foot or on bicycles, filled up their precious cars with gas and drove off to the countryside or the seaside for a jolly three-day weekend, and it was all over.

It was as simple as that, and if veteran 68'ers tell you today how the Days of May changed their country, they are delusional, or dreaming. France is still a basically a (small “c”) conservative country. The Communist Party was one of the most conservative elements and really wanted to change nothing except workers' pay and benefits. General de Gaulle, to his credit, reacted to the national upheaval by proposing a referendum on government reforms and resigned after losing it. He was succeeded by a long line of conservative and socialist governments that changed very little in the way France runs.

As a result, the government has been piling up deficits for years, but the French still enjoy one of the most comfortable lifestyles in the world. The quotation, “Après moi, le deluge” (“After me, the flood”) is popularly attributed to King Louis XV, who left France deeply in debt more than two centuries ago. That still seems to be the prevailing attitude among the French, who are also fond of saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”