The sheer scale of urban destruction, the pan-European urge to have done with the past and leap in one generation from ruins to ultra-modernity, was to prove its own nemesis (thankfully aided by the recession of the 1970s, which trimmed public and private budgets alike and brought the orgy of renewal to a halt). As early as 1958, even before the paroxysm of city renovation had peaked, a group of preservationists in Britain founded the Victorian Society. This was a typically British volunteer organization, devoted to identifying and saving the country’s threatened architectural heritage; but similarly inspired networks emerged all across Western Europe in the following decade, pressing residents, academics and politicians to act in concert to avert further loss. Where they were too late to save a particular district or building, they at least managed to preserve whatever was left—as in the case of the facade and inner cloister of the Palazzo delle Stelline on Milan’s Corso Magenta: all that remains of a seventeenth-century city orphanage, the rest of which was torn down in the early 1970s.
In the physical history of the European city, the 1950s and 1960s were truly terrible decades. The damage that was done to the material fabric of urban life in those years is the dark, still half-unacknowledged underside of the ‘thirty glorious years’ of economic development—analogous in its way to the price paid for the industrial urbanization of the previous century. Although certain amends would be made in later decades—notably in France, where planned modernization and heavy investment in roads and transport networks brought a distinct improvement in the quality of life to some of the grimmer outer suburbs—the damage could never be wholly undone. Major cities—Frankfurt, Brussels, London above all—discovered too late that they had sold their urban birthright for a mess of brutalist pottage.
It is one of the ironies of the 1960s that the ruthlessly ‘renewed’ and rebuilt cityscapes of the age were deeply resented above all by the
XII. The Spectre of Revolution
‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963,
Between the end of the Chatterley
ban and the Beatles’ first LP’.
‘The Revolution—we loved it so much’.
‘The rebellion of the repentant bourgeoisie against the complacent and oppressive proletariat is one of the queerer phenomena of our time’.
‘Now all the journalists of the world are licking your arses… but not me, my dears. You have the faces of spoilt brats, and I hate you, like I hate your fathers… When yesterday at Valle Giulia you beat up the police, I sympathized with the police because they are the sons of the poor’.
‘We are not with Dubcek. We are with Mao’.
Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own times—and their own selves—was one of the special features of the age. A significant part of the Sixties was spent, in the words of The Who, ‘talking about My Generation’. As we shall see, this was not a wholly unreasonable preoccupation; but it led, predictably, to some distortions of perspective. The 1960s were indeed a decade of extraordinary consequence for modern Europe, but not everything that seemed important at the time has left its mark upon History. The self-congratulatory, iconoclastic impulse—in clothing or ideas—dated very fast; conversely, it would be some years before the truly revolutionary shift in politics and public affairs that began in the late 1960s could take full effect. And the political geography of the Sixties can be misleading—the most important developments were not always in the best-known places.
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
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,
This new and wholly unprecedented generation gap constituted a
