In Europe

thereby extend their adolescence even further.
    The ‘sexual revolution’ took some countries by storm: in 1965 almost half the Dutch population still felt that a woman should remain a virgin until her wedding day; by 1970 that had become only one in six. In the 1950s, fewer than one per cent of all British brides had lived with their future spouse before marriage; by 1980 that had become almost twenty-five per cent. In Belgium, France and the Netherlands in 1985, the number of divorces was approximately three times what it had been in 1970.
    Crucial to the storm of the 1960s was the fourth ingredient: the unique growth – and, above all, the mass character – of Western prosperity. In summer 1967, French sociologist Edgar Morin began work on a portraitof the little Breton village of Plodémet. In it, he described the two new means of communication that allowed young people to feel independent from the adult world: motorised transport in the form of the moped, or even a small second-hand car, and telecommunication in the form of their own transistor radio, which was never turned off.‘These days, therefore, the young people of Plodémet have the same facilities, the same passwords (
vachement
, fantastic,
terrible
, horrible), the same antenna, the same culture as the young people of the city. They feel the same wind of change.’
    At the same time, the young rebels also felt a great ambivalence towards the wave of prosperity. The real hippies were those who chose to drop out of society altogether. They attached great importance to the naturalness of clothing, food and lifestyle: unbleached cotton, bare feet, macro-biotic diets, meditation, rest. Cities were artificial, and therefore wrong. The ideal was a peaceful, communal existence in the countryside – where, by the way, most of these urban children lasted no more than six months. ‘In Holland as well, more and more right-thinking young people are getting out,’
Hitweek
wrote in 1969. ‘They're starting a new, radiant life that the world they come from doesn't understand at all.’
    There was also a fifth force, deeply hidden, which propelled this storm to great heights: fear. Much of the thinking of that day exudes an intense nineteenth-century optimism, the conviction that one could make one's own ‘radiant’ life. Yet it is also impossible to understand the 1960s without understanding the existential fear that held many Europeans in its grip. The whole generation of the 1960s had been raised under the permanent threat of a new war, many saw the atom bomb as an immediate threat, many young people wanted to ban war and oppression from the world at any cost.
    Early in October 1967, newspapers all over the world ran the famous melancholy portrait of rebel leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. He had been killed in the jungles of Bolivia, and that was the moment his myth came to life. His image was carried in demonstrations, it hung everywhere in cafés and students’ rooms, it symbolised a new solidarity with the Third World. With increasing frequency, publications like
Provo
,
Salut les Copains
,
ABC
,
Konkret
, the British
Oz
and the Italian
Mondo Beat
dealt with the burningquestions of the day: the relations between rich and poor, the ethical aspects of technology, the exploitation of the planet, the limits to growth.
    Just as the Spanish Civil War had set the tone in the 1930s, the American intervention in Vietnam was the touchstone for the 1960s. In early 1968, more than half a million American soldiers were involved in that dirty and unwinnable conflict, a war which could also be seen on TV every day. One demonstration after another rolled through the capitals of Western Europe and America. Tens of thousands of young American men refused the draft.
    Within the ‘islands of young people’, Marxism and Maoism often served as anti-ideologies, radical ways to distance oneself from the charged past of older generations. Both constituted attractive methods to press modern society into a mould that was easy to grasp, and also the ideal weapon to provoke and oppose the anti-communist establishment. ‘Real’ workers – as long as they fitted within that theoretical framework – were cherished by the young rebels. Parisian students embraced the Renault workers from Flins. My acquaintances in Amsterdam adopted working-class accents. Joschka Fischer, who would become Germany's foreign minister, went to work on the production line at Opel in 1970 in order