A small man in a large room. The room is very ornate; the man is very animated. There are many others in the room. They are listening, he is talking. It is the natural political order of things.

The small man is Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France. He is in his presidential palace and those listening are his MPs, who form a majority in the French parliament. Sarkozy is explaining why his popularity has plummeted further and faster than any French president of the Fifth French Republic in his first year in office.

Many are guilty of causing this drop. Happily for his MPs, Sarkozy is not one of them. Past presidents, alive and dead, shoulder much of the blame, according to him. His predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was very guilty, announcing he would reform France and then giving up after six months. Previous presidents, François Mitterand and even Sarkozy's hero, Charles de Gaulle, were guilty of creating and reinforcing an imperious institution that was resistant to change. The opposition Socialists were guilty because they were "useless". The French media were guilty because they had become a rabid opposition, replacing politicians. So fierce, so pristine, so right was Sarkozy that even some of his own followers were taken aback. "It was a political strategy seminar of incredible arrogance," one of his MPs said, anonymously of course. The small president is vindictive.

Most guilty of all, in the eyes of the president, were the French people themselves, and in particular one generation of the French. These people are what they call in France the soixante-huitards the generation of '68.

Summer of … love?

1968 was a year of political earthquakes around the world. The Tet offensive in Vietnam, when Vietnamese guerrillas and troops invaded Saigon and were eventually repelled by American troops, nevertheless convinced a large segment of the American public that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. Martin Luther King and then Robert Kennedy were assassinated. In communist Czechoslovakia a young new regime tried to create "socialism with a human face." The experiment was crushed by Soviet tanks. There were student riots from California to Berlin.

And in France there were what the French call les événements — the Events. The Events amounted to nothing less than a cataclysm that froze the country, terrified the government, and almost turned the president out of office. That president was de Gaulle who, in the national mythology, was twice the saviour of his country. This was big.

It started small, with a workers' strike and then a students' sit-in in Paris. The student protest metastasized in May into a national revolt against the educational system and the whole conservative structure of power. For a month France stopped. The conservatives in power, the Gaullists, were confused and furious. De Gaulle disappeared, consulted his generals, returned and called for a counterattack. Hundreds of thousands marched to his call. The revolt fizzled. The Events were over.

One who wanted to march with the Gaullists but was not allowed to was an angry 13-year-old schoolboy. His mother wouldn't let him. His name was Nicolas Sarkozy.

Fast forward 40 years

Forty years on Sarkozy has not lost his rage about that period. In his campaign for the presidency, he raised the Events, only to denounce their legacy. "The heirs of May '68 imposed the idea that everything has the same value, that there is no difference between good and evil, between the true and the false, between beauty and ugliness. It imposed intellectual and moral relativism on France." That legacy had to be "liquidated."

The irony of that denunciation was not lost on May '68 leaders. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-German student firebrand of 40 years ago, is still in the arena as a European MP, and co-chair of the Greens. In that month of May, he was reputed to have come up with one of the most famous slogans of the Events — "sous les pavés, la plage ", under the paving stones, the beach.

Today Cohn-Bendit still enjoys playing with words, this time at Sarkozy's expense. He points to another famous May '68 slogan, "vivre sans contrainte et jouir sans entrave " — live without limits and enjoy without restraint. ("Enjoy" here had a distinctly sexual whiff.)

"Don't be fooled by a frustrated '68er like Sarkozy," Cohn-Bendit says. "He chose a slogan, jouir sans entraves (enjoy without restraint) and he wants to impose on us his daily enjoyments."

That was a scarcely veiled reference to Sarkozy's three marriages and very public love life.

On a more sober note, the philosopher and May '68 graduate André Glucksmann pointed out, "he was only 13 then, and doesn't know how much he owes to the mental or moral revolution of 1968. Without '68, a divorced man, a man of his background, would never have got to the presidential palace." It's a reference to Sarkozy's Jewish grandfather.

Anniversary sellout

Sarkozy's deep sentiment is one result, positive or otherwise depending on your political point of view, of May 1968.

Despite more than 100 books about the Events and hours of debates on radio and television on the 40th anniversary, finding other lasting effects of the Events is surprisingly elusive.

It was self-proclaimed revolt against not only old conservatism but also new capitalism, the system that functioned on "repressive tolerance," a term coined by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse to describe a place where "the real world is replaced by a selection of images, projected above it."

The young people of May '68 drew their own counter-images, both pictorial and verbal. "Be realistic, demand the impossible" was another of their slogans. Ironically, 40 years later the society of the spectacle has simply swallowed them up, too.

A big sportswear company has an ad that echoes the idea of demanding the impossible. Live without limits is the theme of many car ads. One of Paris's fanciest food stores, Fauchon, is selling May '68 tea "with a whiff of revolution." The Events have become a commodity.

Score another victory for repressive tolerance.