READERS who were of age in May 1968 to take interest in the Paris students’ revolt have certainly not forgotten the fiery figure of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, generally referred to by international media as “Danny the Red” — for his flaming red hair of course, but more so for his revolutionary ideas.

Although by that time television had not taken the same importance in people’s lives as it does today, newspapers and magazines carried pictures of the young man with a mocking smile on his face making fun of a tall, helmeted policeman or yelling angrily into the microphone in his hand.

The ‘revolution’, if it may be so called, proved to be a dismal failure though it made President Charles de Gaulle, who was close to his 80th year, think about his own role in history. He qualified the riots that were assuming country-wide proportions as “doggy bedlam” and dissolved the national assembly. Elections were held and the Gaullists were back in power a month later with bigger majority.

Gen de Gaulle handed over power to Georges Pompidou, saying “I am the past, you are the future,” and retired definitively to his country house in Colombey les Deux Eglises.

Next week it’ll be 46 years since the ‘revolution that never was’ began and ended within two months. Psychologists called it ‘an adolescent rebellion against mom and dad.’ The main slogan of the movement, “Be realistic, demand the impossible!” justified to some extent this explanation.

Other analysts defined its motivations as ideas influenced by different leftist groups such as Marxists, Trotskyites, Maoists, anarchists or surrealists. Some had joined the movement simply for their anti-industrial, anti-institutional or even anti-rational convictions.

The Parisian students’ riots were probably no more than a childish attempt to re-enact the taking over of the Bastille fort during the French revolution. The majority of the leaders grew up, turned into college professors, writers or simply office workers and heads of families — everyone that is, except Danny the Red.

Born in France in 1945 to German parents who later returned to their homeland after the war, Danny went to schools, colleges and universities in both the countries and has remained all his life as much a Frenchman as a German, speaking and writing in both the languages perfectly and eloquently.

He had come to limelight a little before the famous Paris students’ uprising for his role as a firebrand public speaker on behalf of various anarchist and Marxist groups that he had joined, then impatiently left, in quick succession.

Growing years never really slowed down Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s march as a man with a cause and his erratic behaviour has remained unchanged. But today he appears concentrated on the idea of Europe as a single country following his adhesion to the French and German Green parties and especially after his election to the European Parliament in 1994. Since then he has been re-elected three more times on five year terms.

Not surprisingly, these 20 years have been as stormy as ever for Cohn-Bendit. In 2011 he was the main cause for bringing down Hungary’s rather controversial EU presidency by calling the country’s President Victor Orban a dictator. “The European Union is not a doormat where you come to wipe your feet!” he told Orban.

His clash in September 2012 with the Earl of Dartmouth is also well remembered by those who were present that day. When the British representative said angrily, “Mr Cohn-Bendit, why can’t you understand that federalism is not a solution for Europe’s problems!” Danny the Red retorted, in English, “Mr Earl, why can’t you understand the world is changing and the earls and the counts are not any more part of it!”

Today at age 69, as his flaming red hair is turning white, Cohn-Bendit says he no longer wishes to stay in the European Parliament and will not be a candidate for a fresh mandate on May 25 this year. In his characteristic fiery manner he made a farewell speech at the parliament on April 16, insisting “nation-states exist no longer” and that in the next three decades “the only way to compete with the growing expansion of China and India will be through a federal Europe and not as individual European countries”.

To a journalist’s question as to why he is dropping the curtain at a time when his popularity was at its peak, Danny the Red responded: “Being a member of the European Parliament is a tiring job. I am getting old and I hate just sitting here and watching the time go by. I think I’ll devote the rest of my life to writing books or making films, or maybe to watching football.”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

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