NANTERRE, France: Forty years ago, students in neckties and bobby sox threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that France's sclerotic postwar system change. Today, students worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits are marching through the streets demanding that nothing change at all.

May 1968 was a watershed in French life, a holy moment of liberation for many, when youth coalesced, the workers listened and the semi-royal French government of President Charles de Gaulle took fright.

But for others, like the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, only 13 years old at the time, May '68 represents anarchy and moral relativism, a destruction of social and patriotic values that, he has said in harsh terms, "must be liquidated."

The fierce debate about what happened 40 years ago is very French. There is even a fight about labels - the right calls May '68 "the events," while the left calls it "the movement."

While a youth revolt became general in the West - from anti-Vietnam protests in the United States to the Rolling Stones in swinging London and finally the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany - France was where the protests of the baby-boom generation came closest to a real political revolution, with 10 million workers on strike and not just a revulsion against stifling social rules of class, education and sexual behavior.