Some ill-informed folks are comparing the current riots in France with the 1968 uprising led by Red Danny. Absolutely wrong!
I was then an admirer of Red Danny. He was called Red because of the colour of his hair and not the hue of his ideology.
I read almost all his pamphlets and his book “Le Gauchisme, remède à la maladie sénile du communisme”, which can be translated as “Senile communism: the Left remedy”. Co-authored with his brother Gabriel Cohn-Bendit immediately after the May ’68 events, it offers an insider’s critique of both mainstream capitalism and bureaucratic Soviet communism, arguing for decentralised worker self-management and libertarian socialism. The title parodies Lenin’s famous 1920 essay “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
He was an intelligent, charismatic leader. No one is even close to him in calibre, erudition or vision in the current unrest.
The 1968 student uprising in France, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit (“Danny the Red”), culminated in a dramatic political and social crisis known as May ’68. As you can guess from his name, Danny was Jewish. Daniel Cohn-Bendit was born to a German-Polish Ashkenazi Jewish family. During the May 1968 events, when the French government expelled Cohn-Bendit to Germany, French student protesters famously marched in solidarity, shouting the slogan “Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands” (“We are all German Jews”).
The movement transformed from local university protests into a nationwide crisis involving a general strike by 10 million workers, which was a third of the French workforce.
In June 1968, de Gaulle’s conservative party won a decisive majority in Parliament, as the conservative majority turned out heavily, frightened by the prospect of revolution. If history repeats itself, whatever the idoitic dreamers might say, Marine Le Pen will emerge as a stronger force in the elections, and Macron will go.
What happened to Danny? Did he become a Maoist or an apologist of Islamic Jihad? No. Cohn-Bendit shifted away from radical anarchism toward pro-European integration. In 2010, he co-founded the Spinelli Group, an initiative aimed at promoting a federalist model for the European Union.
Cohn-Bendit was elected to the European Parliament in 1994. Over the course of 20 years, he represented both German (Alliance 90/The Greens) and French Green parties (Les Verts/Europe Écologie) in rotation.
From 2004 to 2014, he served as co-president of the Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament.
What are the main differences between the May 1968 uprising and the October 2026 riots and vandalism?
First, protesters in current demonstrations draw heavily from working-class suburban youth and radical Islamic Jihadi immigrants from Muslim countries, whereas 1968 was predominantly led by middle-class, university-educated French youth.
Second, in May 1968, 10 million workers joined students in a massive general strike, nearly shutting down the entire economy. The current movement sees Palestine activists and arsonists hijacking the protest. There is not a sign of a widespread nationwide general strike that defined 1968.
Third, unlike the movement in May 1968, which had prominent individual figures like Daniel Cohn-Bendit (“Danny the Red”) who acted as the public face and spokesperson of the revolt, the current student movement in France is decentralised and lacks a single, figure-of-note leader.