After 1945, France année zéro and Le roman des années 50, Alain Moreau and Patrick Cabouat present their new film, Les années 60: Les mythologies, the next documentary in the France 2 collection that aims to decrypt France in the last half of the 20th century.
France’s rural idylls and peaceful provincial living that hallmarked the beginning of the Sixties would not survive the decade. The Sixties saw France undergo a metamorphosis of epic proportions: the consequences of history had come to fruition and the France of yester year would be condemned to the memory. Millions of children of the baby-boom generation filled nurseries, classrooms and lecture theatres whilst their parents developed a taste for the good life, buying cars in abundance, jamming the newly built motorways. On a global scale France seemed to be represented by two single people: De Gaulle and Brigitte Bardot. President De Gaulle, the hook-nosed military General, had scrapped the 4th Republic without a moment’s hesitation. At the same time he hauled France from the quagmire of the Algerian War and in doing so put an end to the imperial colonial era. However, within a few months the ‘Don’t think, just spend’ generation grasped the bit between their teeth and awoke from their passivism. Paris’ Latin Quarter was set alight. Friends became comrades. Politics made people dream, but not always of the same ideals. In between the Libertarian fantasies of the youth generation and De Gaulle’s dreams of grandeur, an ideological collision was inevitable. Eternally wounded by the unfathomable divide between the modern French youth and their image the President as an old man stuck in his ways, De Gaulle stepped down from power. In less than ten years France had lived through passion and blood, brilliance and flamboyance, forgettable and momentous events. It was a mythological era that will forever be etched in French memory as the Belle Epoque.