Plus ça change: forty years after battle of Sorbonne, Paris students go on the march

An unpopular right-wing president is in power. Students are marching on the streets. National demonstrations threaten later this month. Forty years to the day after the beginning of the student and worker revolt of May 1968, France seems to be heading for an acute bout of déjà vu. Look again, however, and you see that the revolt of May 2008, unlike the events of May 1968, is a rebellion in favour of the status quo, not against it.

In May 1968, the students rose against the stuffy social climate of Charles de Gaulle's France, against authority and against their parents' generation. Forty years later, the main demand of the lycèe students who have been marching in the streets for the past three weeks is that they should have more teachers, or at least that there should be no teaching job cuts, and no change in the school curriculum.

The confused demands of 1968 were libertarian as much as socialist, cultural as much as political. Celebrated slogans included: "Cours camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi." (Run comrade, the old world is behind you.)

Forty years on, the demonstrations by unions and students, planned for 15 and 22 May, will not seek a youthful or utopian new world. They will oppose Nicolas Sarkozy's plans to cut public sector jobs and to force people to work at least one more year before claiming a full pension.

The Education Minister, Xavier Darcos, argues that more than 8,000 jobs can be cut by natural wastage in colleges and lycèes (middle schools and sixth forms) because fewer students are coming through the system. Students and teaching unions are insisting on the same level of staffing.

The events of May 1968 actually began in March and ended in June. The pivotal day was, however, 40 years ago today. A demonstration of about 400 students gathered in the courtyard of the venerable Sorbonne university, in the centre of the Paris Left Bank. They were protesting against the punishment of a handful of students in the new Nanterre University on the western fringe of Paris. The Nanterre students, led by a red-haired French-born German, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, had staged a series of mild guerrilla actions to claim, among other things, the right for girls and boys to sleep together in campus dormitories.

A far-right group, Occident, pumped the left-wing students with self-righteous adrenalin by threatening to attack the Sorbonne demonstration. The riot police scattered the right-wingers and then began to remove the "lefties" from the Sorbonne. The demonstrators were promised that they could leave freely. The police reneged on the deal and about 400 of them were brutally arrested.

Larger demonstrations gathered. The first cobble stones were thrown at the police. The Paris police, supported by a few busloads of the notorious CRS riot police, responded with indiscriminate baton charges and volleys of tear gas, assaulting students, journalists, passers-by, tourists, cinema-goers and elderly couples who were sitting at café terraces watching the action.

A week later a large crowd of students tried to "liberate" the Sorbonne, producing running battles throughout the Left Bank. After a month of demonstrations and riots across France – and a wildcat general strike of workers which threatened to bring down the government – the authorities conceded a 10 per cent pay increase across the board, a 35 per cent increase in the minimum wage, a shorter working week and mandatory employer consultations with workers.

Four decades later, President Sarkozy is considerably more unpopular than President de Gaulle was in May 1968. France's youngest executive president was elected last year partly on a promise to obliterate the legacy of 1968, which he blamed for everything from rising crime to poor school results.

The revolt will therefore be given no official birthday celebration but has been marked by a flurry of books, including one jointly authored by Cohn-Bendit. The former student revolutionary, now a German MEP and leader of the Greens in Strasbourg, has called his book Forget 1968. He defends the spiritual and cultural legacy of the revolt but argues that no sensible comparison can be made between the world of the late 1960s and the early 21st century.