Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (80 page)

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 ‘New 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

Overlapping with both sets of fashions were the gypsy-like drapes of the hippies. In contrast to the ‘Carnaby Street’ and ‘Street-fighting Man’ looks, which were indigenously European in origin, the hippie look—obscurely ‘utopian’ in its non-western, ‘counter-cultural’, asexual ethic of conspicuous under-consumption—was an American import. Its commercial utility was obvious, and many of the outlets that had sprung up to service the demand for skin-tight, sharply cut fashions in the mid-sixties were soon working hard to adapt their stock accordingly. They even tried, briefly, to market the ‘Mao look’. A shapeless jacket with a sharply tailored collar, paired with the ubiquitous ‘proletarian’ cap, the Mao look neatly combined aspects of all three styles, particularly when ‘accessorized’ by the Chinese dictator’s
Little Red Book
of revolutionary insights. But despite Godard’s 1967 film
La Chinoise
, in which a group of French students dutifully study Mao and try to follow his example, the ‘Mao look’ remained a minority taste—even among ‘Maoists’.

Counter-cultural politics and their symbols took on a harder edge after 1967, by association with romanticized accounts of ‘Third World’ guerrilla insurgents. But even so, they never fully caught on in Europe. We should not be misled by Che Guevara’s remarkable after-life as the martyred, Christ-like poster-boy for disaffected Western adolescents: the European Sixties were always Eurocentric. Even the ‘hippy revolution’ never quite crossed the Atlantic. At most it washed up on the shores of Great Britain and Holland, leaving behind some sedimentary evidence in the form of a more developed drug culture than elsewhere—and one spectacularly original long-playing record.

The frivolous side of the Sixties—fashion, pop culture, sex—should not be dismissed as mere froth and show. It was a new generation’s way of breaking with the age of the grandpas—the gerontocracy (Adenauer, De Gaulle, Macmillan—and Khrushchev) still running the continent’s affairs. To be sure, the attention-catching,
poseur
aspects of the Sixties—the narcissistic self-indulgence that will forever be associated with the era—ring false when taken all at once. But in their day, and to their constituency, they seemed new and fresh. Even the cold, harsh sheen of contemporary art, or the cynical films of the later Sixties, appeared refreshing and authentic after the cozy bourgeois artifice of the recent past. The solipsistic conceit of the age—that the young would change the world by ‘doing their own thing’, ‘letting it all hang out’ and ‘making love, not war’—was always an illusion, and it has not worn well. But it was not the only illusion of the time, and by no means the most foolish.