The World

The rebellion of youth was happening just as the reality of family had been proven: in 1962, two scientists, one British, one American, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. Nine years earlier, a balding boffin walked into his local Cambridge pub, the Eagle, and announced to the bemused boozers, ‘We’ve found the secret of life.’ The thirty-six-year-old Francis Crick, working with a young American, James Watson, just twenty-four, had discovered the double-helix of DNA – but not on their own. In fact they had been racing another researcher, Rosalind Franklin, a thirty-two-year-old Anglo-Jewish chemist, whose essential discovery of the key properties of DNA they had obtained without her knowledge, passed to them by a colleague at King’s College London. ‘When we saw the answer,’ Watson recalled, ‘we had to pinch ourselves. Could it really be this pretty? It was so pretty.’ Franklin died of cancer at just thirty-seven and therefore did not share the Nobel Prize won by Crick and Watson.

The discovery confirmed that DNA itself was the carrier of hereditary information, and further study showed that humans were virtually all the same; differences were tiny and everyone was a walking collection of family histories and a member of a deeper, broader family. It confirmed that race as a social category was neither based on scientific differences nor reflective of genetic ancestry. It was a social construct, but that did not it make any less powerful. Unravelling human DNA helped reveal the twists, migrations, settlings and clashes of the human story, as well as launching a biological revolution that changed the world, from the treatment of diseases and the investigation of crime to a new passion for family history.

In 1960, a birth-control pill, using hormones to inhibit ovulation, freed women from male control of sex for the first time: it could be enjoyed for its own sake. New household gadgets, washing machines, fridges, vacuum cleaners, made female servants obsolete, but also liberated women – encouraged by a movement of female empowerment, feminism – to pursue independent careers. They had fewer children, but now most of those survived to adulthood, leading to a new cult of childhood, particularly in the middle class, where the desire for women to work clashed with the virtues of attentive parenting. The feminist movement was the great success of the Sixties and early Seventies, the Great Liberal Reformation that delivered the right to abortion, curtailed capital punishment, legalized homosexuality and later gay rights.

Female sexual freedom shocked a gerontocracy of starchy male leaders. In 1965 Franco and Tito both reached seventy-three, de Gaulle seventy-five.^* ‘One must not reduce women to machines for making love,’ declared de Gaulle, denouncing the Pill that year. ‘A woman is made to have children … Sex will invade everything!’ So it did. Two years later, he legalized the Pill, but on 3 May 1968 radical students seized Sorbonne University in Paris and started to build barricades, calling for Marxist revolution and ‘adieu de Gaulle!’ Workers went on strike; students occupied their campuses. The president called this ‘

chienlit’ – or havoc, literally shit in the bed – and sent in his riot police: ‘When a child gets angry and oversteps the mark, the best way of calming him is to give him a smack.’ The violence only intensified les événements

. Madame de Gaulle wept at dinner, the president ranted, ‘The French have never recovered from defeat at Waterloo and Sedan,’ and warned, ‘I’m not Louis Philippe.’

Instead he contemplated a solution unique in the modern democracies: on 29 May, the president set off for home in Colombey but instead, taking an aide and his son, he commandeered the helicopter and flew to French NATO headquarters in Baden-Baden. ‘It’s all over,’ he told General Massu, testing the loyalty of the army for a military coup.

‘This is impossible,’ replied the general. ‘This is madness.’ De Gaulle was not the only potentate under siege. In Czechoslovakia, a reformer launched a Prague Spring against the Soviet imperium. In America, LBJ, broken, announced he would not run for a second term. Bobby Kennedy was expected to win. Yet in France, as elsewhere, the majority – hailed by the US presidential candidate Richard Nixon as ‘the silent majority’ – was willing to tolerate young radical excess only for a while. When de Gaulle flew back to the Élysée Palace to call new elections, opinion had turned against the students. But he was fatally damaged, and resigned soon afterwards.