by Tony Judt
By the middle of the 1960s, the social impact of the post-war demographic explosion was being felt everywhere. Europe, as it seemed, was full of young people—in France, by 1968, the student-age cohort, of persons aged 16 to 24, was eight million strong, constituting 16.1 percent of the national total. In earlier times such a population explosion would have placed huge strains upon a country’s food supply; and even if people could be fed, their job prospects would have been grim. But in a time of economic growth and prosperity, the chief problem facing European states was not how to feed, clothe, house and eventually employ the growing number of young people, but how to educate them.
Until the 1950s, most children in Europe left school after completing their primary education, usually between the ages of 12 and 14. In many places compulsory primary education itself, introduced at the end of the nineteenth century, was only weakly enforced—the children of peasants in Spain, Italy, Ireland and pre-Communist eastern Europe typically dropped out of school during the spring, summer and early fall. Secondary education was still a privilege confined to the middle and upper classes. In post-war Italy, less than 5 percent of the population had completed secondary school.
In anticipation of future numbers, and as part of the broader cycle of social reforms, governments in post-war Europe introduced a series of major educational changes. In the UK the school-leaving age was raised to 15 in 1947 (and later to 16 in 1972). In Italy, where in practice most children in the early-post war years still left school at 11, it was raised to 14 in 1962. The number of children in full-time schooling in Italy doubled in the course of the decade 1959-1969. In France, which boasted a mere 32,000 bacheliers (high-school graduates) in 1950, the numbers would increase more than five-fold over the next twenty years: by 1970, bacheliers represented 20 percent of their age cohort.
These educational changes carried disruptive implications. Hitherto, the cultural fault-line in most European societies had fallen between those—the overwhelming majority—who had left school after learning to read, write, do basic arithmetic and recite the outlines of national history; and a privileged minority who had remained in school until 17 or 18, been awarded the highly-valued secondary-school leaving certificate, and gone on to professional training or employment. The grammar schools, lycées and Gymnasiums of Europe had been the preserve of a ruling élite. Heirs to a classical curriculum once closed to the children of the rural and urban poor, they were now opened to an ever-expanding pool of young people from every social milieu. As more and more children entered and passed through the secondary school systems, a breach opened up between their world and the one their parents had known.
This new and wholly unprecedented generation gap constituted a de facto social revolution in its own right—albeit one whose implications were still confined to the realm of the family. But as tens of thousands of children poured into hastily constructed secondary schools, placing great strain upon the physical and financial fabric of an education system designed for a very different age, planners were already becoming concerned at the implications of these changes for what had until then been the preserve of an even tinier élite: the universities.
If most Europeans before 1960 never saw the inside of a secondary school, fewer still could even have dreamed of attending university. There had been some expansion of traditional universities in the course of the nineteenth century, and an increase in the number of other establishments of tertiary education, mostly for technical training. But higher education in Europe in the 1950s was still closed to all but a privileged few, whose families could forgo the earnings of their children to keep them in school until 18, and who could afford the fees charged by secondary schools and universities alike. There were, of course, scholarships, open to children of the poor and middling sort. But except in the admirably meritocratic and egalitarian institutions of the French Third and Fourth Republics, these scholarships rarely covered the formal costs of additional schooling; nowhere did they compensate for lost income.
Despite the best intentions of an earlier generation of reformers, Oxford, Cambridge, the École Normale Supérieure, the Universities of Bologna or Heidelberg and the rest of Europe’s ancient establishments of learning remained off-limits to almost everyone. In 1949 there were 15,000 university students in Sweden, in Belgium 20,000. There were just 50,000 university students in all of Spain, less than double that number in the United Kingdom (in a population of 49 million). The French student population that year barely exceeded 130,000. But with Europe now on the cusp of mass secondary education there would soon be irresistible pressure to expand higher education too. A lot would have to change.
In the first place, Europe was going to need many more universities. In many places there was no ‘system’ of tertiary education as such. Most countries had inherited a randomly configured network of individual institutions: an infrastructure of small, ancient, nominally independent establishments designed to admit at most a few hundred entrants each year and frequently situated in provincial towns with little or no public infrastructure. They had no space for expansion and their lecture halls, laboratories, libraries and residential buildings (if any) were quite incapable of accommodating thousands more young people.
The typical European university town—Padua, Montpellier, Bonn, Leuven, Fribourg, Cambridge, Uppsala—was small and often some distance from major urban centers (and deliberately chosen many centuries before for just this reason): the University of Paris was an exception, albeit an important one. Most European universities lacked campuses in the American sense (here it was the British universities, Oxford and Cambridge above all, that were the obvious exception) and were physically integrated into their urban surroundings: their students lived in the town and depended upon its residents for lodging and services. Above all, and despite being hundreds of years old in many cases, the universities of Europe had almost no material resources of their own. They were utterly dependent on city or state for funding.
If higher education in Europe was to respond in time to the ominous demographic bulge pushing up through the primary and secondary schools, the initiative would thus have to come from the center. In Britain and to a lesser extent in Scandinavia, the problem was addressed by building new universities on ‘greenfield’ sites outside provincial cities and county towns: Colchester or Lancaster in England, Aarhus in Denmark. By the time the first post-secondary cohort began to arrive, these new universities, however architecturally soulless, were at least in place to meet the increased demand for places—and create job openings for an expanding pool of post-graduate students seeking teaching posts.
Rather than open these new universities to a mass constituency, British educational planners chose to integrate them into the older, elite system. British universities thus preserved their right to select or refuse students at the point of admission: only candidates who performed above a certain level in national high school-leaving exams could hope to gain entry to university and each university was free to offer places to whomsoever it wished—and to admit only as many students as it could handle. Students in the UK remained something of a privileged minority (no more than 6 percent of their age group in 1968) and the long-term implications were unquestionably socially regressive. But for the fortunate few, the system worked very smoothly—and insulated them from almost all the problems faced by their peers elsewhere in Europe.
For on the Continent, higher education moved in a very different direction. In the majority of Western European states there had never been any impediment to movement from secondary to higher education: if you took and passed the national school-leaving exams you were automatically entitled to attend university. Until the end of the 1950s this had posed no difficulties: the numbers involved were small and universities had no cause to fear being overwhelmed with students. In any case, academic study in most continental universities was by ancient convention more than a little detached and unstructured. Haughty and unapproachable professors offered formal lectures to halls
full of anonymous students who felt little pressure to complete their degrees by a deadline, and for whom being a student was as much a social rite of passage as a means to an education.152
Rather than construct new universities, most central planners in Europe simply decreed the expansion of existing ones. At the same time they imposed no additional impediments or system of pre-selection. On the contrary, and for the best of reasons, they frequently set about removing those that remained—in 1965 the Italian Ministry of Education abolished all university entrance examinations and fixed subject quotas. Higher education, once a privilege, would now be a right. The result was catastrophic. By 1968 the University of Bari, for example, which traditionally enrolled about 5,000 people, was trying to cope with a student body in excess of 30,000. The University of Naples in the same year had 50,000 students, the University of Rome 60,000. Those three universities alone were enrolling between them more than the total student population of Italy a mere eighteen years earlier; many of their students would never graduate.153
By the end of the 1960s, one young person in seven in Italy was attending university (compared to one in twenty ten years before). In Belgium the figure was one in six. In West Germany, where there had been 108,000 students in 1950, and where the traditional universities were already beginning to suffer from overcrowding, there were nearly 400,000 by the end of the Sixties. In France, by 1967, there were as many university students as there had been lycéens in 1956. All over Europe there were vastly more students than ever before—and the quality of their academic experience was deteriorating fast. Everything was crowded—the libraries, the dormitories, the lecture halls, the refectories—and in distinctly poor condition (even, indeed especially, if it was new). Post-war government spending on education, which had everywhere risen very steeply, had concentrated upon the provision of primary and secondary schools, equipment and teachers. This was surely the right choice, and in any case one dictated by electoral politics. But it carried a price.
At this juncture it is worth recalling that even by 1968 most young people in every European country were not students (a detail that tends to be overlooked in accounts of this period), especially if their parents were peasants, workers, unskilled or immigrants, whether from peripheral provinces or abroad. Of necessity, this non-student majority experienced the Sixties rather differently: particularly the later Sixties, when so much seemed to turn on events in and around universities. Their opinions, and especially their politics, should not be inferred from those of their student contemporaries. In other respects, however, young people shared what was already a distinctive—and common—culture.
Every generation sees the world as new. The Sixties generation saw the world as new and young. Most young people in history have entered a world full of older people, where it is their seniors who occupy positions of influence and example. For the generation of the mid-1960s, however, things were different. The cultural eco-system was evolving much faster than in the past. The gap separating a large, prosperous, pampered, self-confident and culturally autonomous generation from the unusually small, insecure, Depression-scarred and war-ravaged generation of its parents was greater than the conventional distance between age groups. At the very least, it seemed to many young people as though they had been born into a society reluctantly transforming itself—its values, its style, its rules—before their very eyes and at their behest. Popular music, cinema and television were full of young people and increasingly appealed to them as its audience and market. By 1965 there were radio and television programs, magazines, shops, products and whole industries that existed exclusively for the young and depended upon their patronage.
Although each national youth culture had its distinctive icons and institutions, its exclusively local reference points (the June 22nd 1963 Fête des Copains in Paris’s Place de la Nation was the founding event of Sixties youth culture in France, yet it passed virtually unnoticed elsewhere), many of the popular cultural forms of the age flowed with unprecedented ease across national boundaries. Mass culture was becoming international as a matter of definition. A trend (in music, or clothing) would begin in the English-speaking world, often in England itself, and would then move south and east: facilitated by an increasingly visual (and therefore cross-border) culture and only occasionally impeded by locally generated alternatives or, more often, by political intervention.154
The new fashions were perforce addressed to the more prosperous young: the children of Europe’s white middle-class, who could afford records, concerts, shoes, clothes, make-up and modish hair-styling. But the presentation of these wares cut ostentatiously athwart conventional lines. The most successful musicians of the time—the Beatles and their imitators—took the rhythms of American blues guitarists (most of them black) and paired them with material drawn directly from the language and experience of the British working class.155 This highly original combination then became the indigenous, trans-national culture of European youth.
The content of popular music mattered quite a lot, but its form counted for more. In the 1960s people paid particular attention to style. This, it might be thought, was hardly new. But it was perhaps a peculiarity of the age that style could substitute so directly for substance. The popular music of the 1960s was insubordinate in tone, in the manner of its performance—whereas its lyrics were frequently anodyne and anyway at best half-understood by foreign audiences. In Austria, to perform or listen to British or American pop music was to cock a snoot at one’s shocked parents, the generation of Hitler; the same applied, mutatis mutandis, just across the border in Hungary or Czechoslovakia. The music, so to speak, protested on your behalf.
If much of the mainstream musical culture of the Sixties seemed to be about sex—at least until it shifted, briefly, into drugs and politics—this, too, was largely a matter of style. More young people lived away from their parents, and at a younger age than hitherto. And contraceptives were becoming safer, easier and legal.156 Public displays of flesh and representations of unconstrained sexual abandon on film and in literature became more common, at least in north-west Europe. For all these reasons, the older generation was convinced that sexual restraints had completely collapsed—and it pleased their children to nourish the nightmare.
In fact, the ‘sexual revolution’ of the Sixties was almost certainly a mirage for the overwhelming majority of people, young and old alike. So far as we can know, the sexual interests and practices of most young Europeans did not change nearly as rapidly or as radically as contemporaries liked to claim. On the evidence of contemporary surveys, even the sex lives of students were not very different from those of earlier generations. The liberated sexual style of the Sixties was typically contrasted with the Fifties, depicted (somewhat unfairly) as an age of moral rectitude and constipated emotional restraint. But when compared with the 1920s, or the European fin-de-siècle, or the demi-monde of 1860s Paris, the ‘Swinging Sixties’ were quite tame.
In keeping with the emphasis upon style, the generation of the Sixties placed unusual insistence upon looking different. Clothing, hair, make-up and what were still called ‘fashion accessories’ became vital generational and political identification tags. London was the source of such trends: European taste in clothing, music, photography, modeling, advertising and even mass-market magazines all took their cues from there. In view of the already-established British reputation for drab design and shoddy construction this was an unlikely development, a youthful inversion of the traditional order of such things, and it proved short-lived. But the false dawn of ‘Swinging London’—as Time magazine dubbed it in April 1966—cast a distinctive light upon the age.
By 1967 there were over 2,000 shops in the British capital describing themselves as ‘boutiques’. Most of them were shameless imitations of the clothing stores that had sprung up along Carnaby Street, a long-time haunt of male homosexuals now recycled as the epicentre of ‘mod’ fashion for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. In Paris the clothing boutique ‘Ne
w Man’, the first French intimation of the sartorial revolution, opened in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie on April 13th 1965. Within a year it was followed by a trail of imitators, all of them dubbed with fashionably British-sounding names—‘Dean’, ‘Twenty’, ‘Cardiff ’, etc.
The Carnaby Street style—cloned all across Western Europe (though less markedly in Italy than elsewhere)—emphasized colorful, contoured outfits tending to the androgynous and deliberately mal-adapted to anyone over thirty. Tight red corduroy pants and fitted black shirts from ‘New Man’ became the staple uniform of Parisian street demonstrators for the next three years and were widely copied everywhere. Like everything else about the Sixties they were made by men, for men; but young women could wear them too and increasingly did so. Even the mainstream fashion houses of Paris were affected: from 1965, the city’s couturiers turned out more slacks than skirts.
They also cut back on their output of hats. It was symptomatic of the primacy of the juvenile market that hair replaced headgear as the ultimate self-expression, with traditional hats confined to formal occasions for the ‘elderly’.157 Hats did not by any means disappear, though. In a second stage of the sartorial transition, the cheerful, primary colors of ‘mod gear’ (inherited from the late-Fifties) were displaced by more ‘serious’ outer garments, reflecting a similar shift in music. Young people’s clothing was now cut and marketed with more than half an eye to the ‘proletarian’ and ‘radical’ sources of its inspiration: not only blue jeans and ‘work shirts’, but also boots, dark jackets and leather ‘Lenin’ caps (or felt-covered variants, echoing the ‘Kossuth caps’ of 19th-century Hungarian insurgents). This more self-consciously political fashion never really caught on in Britain, but by the end of the decade it was quasi-official uniform for German and Italian radicals and their student followers.158