The message that endures

Thirty years after les evenements of May 1968, coming as they did after demonstrations in Warsaw, the Prague Spring, the Berkley riots, towards the end of the decade of flower power, free love, and dropping out, it is stunning to consider how a tidal wave of youthful ideology shook the world political order and seemed to bring France to the brink of collapse - and then stopped.

When Didier says the student revolutionaries of the streets of Paris in 1968 - les soixante huitards - are dead, he is expressing bitterness that the joyful expectations amid the fumes of tear gas resulted, as he sees it, in nothing.

''Nothing has changed. If anything, things are worse. Everyone talks about communication technology, but nobody communicates. They don't have any ideas to communicate. They've invested all their creativity in the means of communication without trying to inspire any ideas worth communicating. Schools are the worst. It all started with students protesting about the education system, but nothing has changed: the same diplomas and exams. All the teachers talk about is their pension and early retirement.''

Didier was on the barricades lobbing paving stones. He got chased for his life by three terrifying goons in CRS uniform along the rue Dauphine, managed to scramble up the stairs of a little hotel, and burst into a room occupied by two young Argentinians who let him hide under a bed. As far as he is concerned today, this part of it was entirely incidental and unimportant.

''The great thing then was that everyone was really alive and exchanging ideas. Everyone was talking to everyone else. Nowadays nobody has anything to say. They're all dead, the soixante huitards.''

Haven't any of the ideas, the feelings, from those days, remained with the people who were involved?

''Feelings?'' Didier snorts, ''who has feelings these days? Priests?''

Renee Roudier feels that the extent to which some people subsequently abandoned the beliefs they had chanted so passionately on the boulevards - ''It is forbidden to forbid''; ''Be realistic, demand the impossible'' - and the extent to which others feel betrayed, depends on what they did with their lives afterwards. She moved on to become a social worker in the Creuse, a rural part of la France profonde once famous for tapestries the world no longer wants.

The Creuse has the same kind of social problems of isolation, poverty, and depopulation that you find in the Highlands and Islands. Renee has spent her working life speaking on behalf of the disadvantaged to administrators and institutions not inclined to be sympathetic.

When she first arrived in the Creuse in the early 1970s she was labelled soixante huitard which inspired a mixture of awe and indignation among the authorities she had to work with, an architect who was purple with rage because she dared to suggest some modifications to his plans for a local leisure centre.

''I don't think I could have done this had it not been for the strength and the sense that I, as an individual, had the right to comment on the system and that, by the power of my ideas, could change things. I got that sense of my power as an individual in Paris in May 1968. When I finished my studies and moved out of Paris, the sense of power I had acquired became a responsibility which I used in my career.''

The deeply disillusioned Didier is a former art teacher turned professional photographer. As a graduate of the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts he indulges the sense of superiority those from les grandes ecoles hide behind: Renee didn't really understand how it was in 1968, didn't en-

tirely grasp the significance.

Denise Cherlonneix, also a graduate of l'Ecole des Beaux Arts, has happy memories of 1968, although life has delivered her a real measure of pain in the form of the recent death of her husband after a lingering illness from lung cancer. In spite of it all, Denise is irrepressibly upbeat and she recalls les evenements with relish.

''We took over a nursery school in the Marais. It was an old dingy place built at the turn of the century, the windows so high and grimy there was hardly any nat-ural light in the building. We just shoved the teachers out! They were a miserable lot of ancient women keeping the kids under tight control. Yes, they made a fuss, but we just kicked them all out. The police never turned up. I suppose they had too much to do!

''We had all the kids painting huge murals on the walls. They had a great time. So did we.''

Lecturing now in the Ecole Nationale des Metiers de Batiment, Denise enjoys a relaxed approach to her students and her work which would seem to suggest that she made the new liberalism an integral part of her life, but it's hard to escape the notion that Denise was always like this and would have been so, evenements or no evenements.

Evidently individual personality was the greater influence. Driven careerists have felt obliged to thrust their participation on the streets of Paris well behind them as no more than a bit of youthful skylarking.

Bernard X, successful Eurocrat based in Luxembourg, doesn't want to discuss the matter at all; saying it is entirely irrelevant and inappropriate. Clearly he is one of the Didier's ''dead ones''.

Equally successful, though not at all dismissive of their roles in May 1968, are the student leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Alain Geismar. The former, known at the time as Danny the Red, is now Green and a German MEP. He has retained his famous, self-mocking humour and refers to himself today as a ''radical narcissist''. The latter is a member of the Cabinet of the French Minister of Education. This is proof that, though the May revolution did not immediately deliver in political terms, it established lasting liberal tendencies in tens of thousands of young people, some of whom, in time, infiltrated the bastions of power they despised 30 years ago.

This is seen in more modest terms, too. Renee mentions pockets of soixante huitards who turned their backs on Paris and came to settle in the tranquillity of the Creuse. Initially regarded with suspicion, they have, over the years, taken over the mairies, formed associations, and developed enterprises which are now crucial to life in the departement.

''It is in keeping with the spirit of 1968,'' Renee points out. ''They have confidence in their own ideas and they make the mairies responsive to local needs rather than merely tiny cogs in the great machine of state bureaucracy.''

The strength of the mes-

sage which the participants assimilated lay in its appeal for respect for the individual and the message has endured to some extent because individuals kept the faith. But individualism has been the great flaw in the philosophy, too, in that it spawned the poisonous economic liberalism of the 1980s.

Didier's career has followed this social pattern: from student revolutionary through cultural liberal to self-employed freelance photo-grapher. These days he's more interested in deals than ideals.

Renee Roudier kept the faith: ''It's politicised me for life. By some absurd chance some girlfriends and I found ourselves mixed up in the Gaullist demonstration that took place at the end of the month. The sight of all those thousands and thousands of bourgeois, their faces twisted with hatred and fear, made me vow that I would never become one of them.''