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"What we are witnessing," says a French Jesuit philosopher, Father Georges Morel, "is the decadence of a culture that was too rich and too critical." Father Morel finds, for example, that "the ideal of a total view of life is finished" among French intellectuals. "All experience can be interpreted from a thousand points, each equally valid," he says. "In literature, this is expressed in a greater interest in the material, the linguistic texture, than in the thought content." Literary Critic Maurice Nadeau finds, furthermore, that many young novelists are simply "popularizing or dramatizing the linguistic and sociological findings" of such popular scholars as University of Paris Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Parisian designers have yielded the frontiers of fashion to London and New York. Many painters in France not only produce strictly for a New York market but also borrow in style from American trends. Among composers too, the avant-garde has moved elsewhere; French musical life has been mediocre for years.
No one factor could explain France's eruption. The workers certainly did not go to the barricades because of censorship, the young did not rebel because of bad art or poor music. But all these things taken together caused the new mood in France, a crisis of attitudes. Ultimately what happened was the result of simply having too much De Gaulle. "Without me, this country wouldn't be anything," he once said. "Without me, it would all have collapsed. For years, I've carried France on my shoulders." No nation with any pretense to vitality can indefinitely be carried on the shoulders of one man. Either its sinews must atrophy or its restlessness erupt in the desire to walk on its own. The French are on their feet now, but swaying dangerously, reckless with the rediscovery of their latent powers.