Just why post-war European politicians and planners should have made so very many mistakes remains unclear, even if we allow that in the wake of two world wars and an extended economic depression there was a craving for anything fresh, new and unlinked to the past. It is not as though contemporaries were unaware of the ugliness of their new environment: the occupants of the giant housing complexes, tower blocks and new towns never liked them, and they said so clearly enough to anyone who cared to enquire. Architects and sociologists may not have understood that their projects would, within one generation, breed social outcasts and violent gangs, but that prospect was clear enough to the residents. Even European cinema—which only a few years before had paid loving, nostalgic attention to old cities and city life—now focused instead on the cold, hard impersonality of the modern metropolis. Directors like Godard or Antonioni took an almost sensuous pleasure in filming the tawdry new urban and industrial environment in films like
Alphaville
(1965) or
The Red Desert
(1964).
A particular victim of post-war architectural iconoclasm was the railway station, the lapidary incarnation of Victorian achievement and often a significant architectural monument in its own right. Railway stations suffered in the United States, too (the destruction of New York’s Pennsylvania Station in 1966 is still remembered by many as the defining moment of official hooliganism); but American city planners at least had the excuse that, squeezed between the car and the airplane, the prospects for rail travel appeared grim. But in the overcrowded circumstances of a small continent, the future of train travel was never seriously in question. The stations that were torn down in Europe were replaced by insipid, unappealing buildings performing the identical function. The destruction of Euston Station in London, or Paris’s Gare Montparnasse, or the elegant Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin had no practical purpose and was aesthetically indefensible.
The sheer scale of urban destruction, the pan-European urge to have done with the past and leap in one generation from ruins to ultra-modernity, was to prove its own nemesis (thankfully aided by the recession of the 1970s, which trimmed public and private budgets alike and brought the orgy of renewal to a halt). As early as 1958, even before the paroxysm of city renovation had peaked, a group of preservationists in Britain founded the Victorian Society. This was a typically British volunteer organization, devoted to identifying and saving the country’s threatened architectural heritage; but similarly inspired networks emerged all across Western Europe in the following decade, pressing residents, academics and politicians to act in concert to avert further loss. Where they were too late to save a particular district or building, they at least managed to preserve whatever was left—as in the case of the façade and inner cloister of the Palazzo delle Stelline on Milan’s Corso Magenta: all that remains of a seventeenth-century city orphanage, the rest of which was torn down in the early 1970s.
In the physical history of the European city, the 1950s and 1960s were truly terrible decades. The damage that was done to the material fabric of urban life in those years is the dark, still half-unacknowledged underside of the ‘thirty glorious years’ of economic development—analogous in its way to the price paid for the industrial urbanization of the previous century. Although certain amends would be made in later decades—notably in France, where planned modernization and heavy investment in roads and transport networks brought a distinct improvement in the quality of life to some of the grimmer outer suburbs—the damage could never be wholly undone. Major cities—Frankfurt, Brussels, London above all—discovered too late that they had sold their urban birthright for a mess of brutalist pottage.
It is one of the ironies of the 1960s that the ruthlessly ‘renewed’ and rebuilt cityscapes of the age were deeply resented above all by the
young
people who lived there. Their houses, streets, cafés, factories, offices, schools and universities might be modern and relentlessly ‘new’. But except for the most privileged among them, the result was an environment experienced as ugly, soulless, stifling, inhuman, and—in a term that was acquiring currency—‘alienating’. It is altogether appropriate that when the well-fed, well-housed, well-educated children of Europe’s benevolent service states grew up and revolted against ‘the system’, the first intimations of the coming explosion would be felt in the pre-fabricated cement dormitories of a soulless university ‘extension campus’, heedlessly parked among the tower blocks and traffic jams of an overspill Parisian suburb.
XII
The Spectre of Revolution
‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963,
Between the end of the Chatterley
ban and the Beatles’ first LP’.
Philip Larkin
‘The Revolution—we loved it so much’.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit
‘The rebellion of the repentant bourgeoisie against the complacent and
oppressive proletariat is one of the queerer phenomena of our time’.
Sir Isaiah Berlin
‘Now all the journalists of the world are licking your arses . . . but not me,
my dears. You have the faces of spoilt brats, and I hate you, like I hate your
fathers . . . When yesterday at Valle Giulia you beat up the police, I
sympathized with the police because they are the sons of the poor’.
Pier Paolo Pasolini (June 1968)
‘We are not with Dubček. We are with Mao’.
(Italian student slogan, 1968)
Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own times—and their own selves—was one of the special features of the age. A significant part of the Sixties was spent, in the words of The Who, ‘talking about My Generation’. As we shall see, this was not a wholly unreasonable preoccupation; but it led, predictably, to some distortions of perspective. The 1960s were indeed a decade of extraordinary consequence for modern Europe, but not everything that seemed important at the time has left its mark upon History. The self-congratulatory, iconoclastic impulse—in clothing or ideas—dated very fast; conversely, it would be some years before the truly revolutionary shift in politics and public affairs that began in the late 1960s could take full effect. And the political geography of the Sixties can be misleading—the most important developments were not always in the best-known places.
By the middle of the 1960s, the social impact of the post-war demographic explosion was being felt everywhere. Europe, as it seemed, was full of young people—in France, by 1968, the student-age cohort, of persons aged 16 to 24, was eight million strong, constituting 16.1 percent of the national total. In earlier times such a population explosion would have placed huge strains upon a country’s food supply; and even if people could be fed, their job prospects would have been grim. But in a time of economic growth and prosperity, the chief problem facing European states was not how to feed, clothe, house and eventually employ the growing number of young people, but how to educate them.
Until the 1950s, most children in Europe left school after completing their primary education, usually between the ages of 12 and 14. In many places compulsory primary education itself, introduced at the end of the nineteenth century, was only weakly enforced—the children of peasants in Spain, Italy, Ireland and pre-Communist eastern Europe typically dropped out of school during the spring, summer and early fall. Secondary education was still a privilege confined to the middle and upper classes. In post-war Italy, less than 5 percent of the population had completed secondary school.
In anticipation of future numbers, and as part of the broader cycle of social reforms, governments in post-war Europe introduced a series of major educational changes. In the UK the school-leaving age was raised to 15 in 1947 (and later to 16 in 1972). In Italy, where in practice most children in the early-post war years still left school at 11, it was raised to 14 in 1962. The number of children in full-time schooling in Italy doubled in the course of the decade 1959-1969. In France, which boasted a mere 32,000
bacheliers
(high-school graduates) in 1950, the numbers would increase more than five-fold over the next twenty years: by 1970,
bacheliers
represented 20 percent of their age cohort.
These educational changes carried disruptive implications. Hitherto, the cultural fault-line in most European societies had fallen between those—the overwhelming majority—who had left school after learning to read, write, do basic arithmetic and recite the outlines of national history; and a privileged minority who had remained in school until 17 or 18, been awarded the highly-valued secondary-school leaving certificate, and gone on to professional training or employment. The grammar schools,
lycées
and
Gymnasiums
of Europe had been the preserve of a ruling élite. Heirs to a classical curriculum once closed to the children of the rural and urban poor, they were now opened to an ever-expanding pool of young people from every social milieu. As more and more children entered and passed through the secondary school systems, a breach opened up between their world and the one their parents had known.
This new and wholly unprecedented generation gap constituted a
de facto
social revolution in its own right—albeit one whose implications were still confined to the realm of the family. But as tens of thousands of children poured into hastily constructed secondary schools, placing great strain upon the physical and financial fabric of an education system designed for a very different age, planners were already becoming concerned at the implications of these changes for what had until then been the preserve of an even tinier élite: the universities.
If most Europeans before 1960 never saw the inside of a secondary school, fewer still could even have dreamed of attending university. There had been some expansion of traditional universities in the course of the nineteenth century, and an increase in the number of other establishments of tertiary education, mostly for technical training. But higher education in Europe in the 1950s was still closed to all but a privileged few, whose families could forgo the earnings of their children to keep them in school until 18, and who could afford the fees charged by secondary schools and universities alike. There were, of course, scholarships, open to children of the poor and middling sort. But except in the admirably meritocratic and egalitarian institutions of the French Third and Fourth Republics, these scholarships rarely covered the formal costs of additional schooling; nowhere did they compensate for lost income.
Despite the best intentions of an earlier generation of reformers, Oxford, Cambridge, the
École Normale Supérieure
, the Universities of Bologna or Heidelberg and the rest of Europe’s ancient establishments of learning remained off-limits to almost everyone. In 1949 there were 15,000 university students in Sweden, in Belgium 20,000. There were just 50,000 university students in all of Spain, less than double that number in the United Kingdom (in a population of 49 million). The French student population that year barely exceeded 130,000. But with Europe now on the cusp of mass secondary education there would soon be irresistible pressure to expand higher education too. A lot would have to change.
In the first place, Europe was going to need many more universities. In many places there was no ‘system’ of tertiary education as such. Most countries had inherited a randomly configured network of individual institutions: an infrastructure of small, ancient, nominally independent establishments designed to admit at most a few hundred entrants each year and frequently situated in provincial towns with little or no public infrastructure. They had no space for expansion and their lecture halls, laboratories, libraries and residential buildings (if any) were quite incapable of accommodating thousands more young people.
The typical European university town—Padua, Montpellier, Bonn, Leuven, Fribourg, Cambridge, Uppsala—was small and often some distance from major urban centers (and deliberately chosen many centuries before for just this reason): the University of Paris was an exception, albeit an important one. Most European universities lacked campuses in the American sense (here it was the British universities, Oxford and Cambridge above all, that were the obvious exception) and were physically integrated into their urban surroundings: their students lived in the town and depended upon its residents for lodging and services. Above all, and despite being hundreds of years old in many cases, the universities of Europe had almost no material resources of their own. They were utterly dependent on city or state for funding.
If higher education in Europe was to respond in time to the ominous demographic bulge pushing up through the primary and secondary schools, the initiative would thus have to come from the center. In Britain and to a lesser extent in Scandinavia, the problem was addressed by building new universities on ‘greenfield’ sites outside provincial cities and county towns: Colchester or Lancaster in England, Aarhus in Denmark. By the time the first post-secondary cohort began to arrive, these new universities, however architecturally soulless, were at least in place to meet the increased demand for places—and create job openings for an expanding pool of post-graduate students seeking teaching posts.
Rather than open these new universities to a mass constituency, British educational planners chose to integrate them into the older, elite system. British universities thus preserved their right to select or refuse students at the point of admission: only candidates who performed above a certain level in national high school-leaving exams could hope to gain entry to university and each university was free to offer places to whomsoever it wished—and to admit only as many students as it could handle. Students in the UK remained something of a privileged minority (no more than 6 percent of their age group in 1968) and the long-term implications were unquestionably socially regressive. But for the fortunate few, the system worked very smoothly—and insulated them from almost all the problems faced by their peers elsewhere in Europe.