Right: first, it's not Nanterre (a hotbed of student radicalism in 1968), it's Nantes.
Nantes is a picturesque provincial town on the Loire. In May 1968, the people of Nantes heard Daniel Cohn-Bendit (and probably Bob Dylan, and Tariq Ali, and everyone else) talking about "Revolution" and, in their adorable, provincial way, thought they really meant Revolution - and so they actually had one.
For all of six days, they had a fully-functioning Hornby Double-Oh workers' state or <ompr> autonomous collective </ompr>. Then General de Gaulle wagged his finger at them and they stopped.
Nowhere else in France actually did this, despite all the talk about it.
Now, you're probably thinking I'm a nostalgic Socialist, and you've already started muttering about Hugo Chavez and North Korea - but no!
Nonononono. No.
That's not the idea at all.
I am *not* proposing that anyone re-enact *now* what people in Nantes were doing *then*.
No, the idea is that some people now might wish to re-enact *in Nantes* what people in 1968 were doing *everywhere else*.
Let me explain.
Nantes has a history. Not just in the sense that, say, Clacton has a history, but a history in the sense that a client of the Caring Professions may have a history.
At the time of the original French Revolution in 1789, Nantes joined with the Vendee region in being militantly royalist. Many of its people had to be killed to make them, you know, see Reason, and get with the new bourgeois republicanism.
In 1935, when the rest of France was in the throes of its first really socialist government (the "Popular Front"), Nantes turned out 50 000 strong to protest against socialism, in favour of bourgeois republicanism.
Then, in 1968, when the rest of France (and the Western World) was deciding that socialism was too much like hard work, and turning instead to sex, drugs and limited anarchy (not enough to threaten one's future career, obviously), Nantes finally got around to socialism.
The point is, Nantes is a time machine. It always arrives at the revolution exactly one cycle behind everyone else.
So, for anyone who is nostalgic for the 1960s and would love to have one last chance to experience them, Nantes is clearly the place to go to do this - and now (when there's a quite different and contrary revolution going on everywhere else) is the time.
No, I won't be going myself - I'm just saying.-- pertinax, Jun 07 2017 clearly very pretty https://www.google....gC&biw=1366&bih=673Also, I see they've acquired an elephant, but not yet worked out how to get it into the room. [pertinax, Jun 07 2017] //momentarily stops muttering about Ugo Chavez//...what?-- theircompetitor, Jun 07 2017 Or Hugo. That works too.
If tl;dr, skip to the line that says "time machine".-- pertinax, Jun 07 2017 This sounds excellent. Can I step in and go back to, say, 2012 when a few things made geopolitical sense?
Those rings clearly have something to do with their time machine.-- RayfordSteele, Jun 07 2017 Yes. I think they reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.-- pertinax, Jun 08 2017 Won't you need a repressive protein that blocks the operating cells ?-- 8th of 7, Jun 08 2017 We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate as an alkylating agent - a potent mutagen. It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.-- normzone, Jun 08 2017 //Ethyl methane sulfonate// etc.
Are we all getting old and repeating ourselves ... elves ... elves?-- pertinax, Jun 09 2017 ... or maybe trapped in a time loop ?-- 8th of 7, Jun 09 2017 It's astounding; time is fleeting.-- hippo, Jun 09 2017 Last week, I came across a listing in The Guardian (hard copy) of arts festivals across Europe this summer, and Nantes headed the list, as being most highly recommended.
To the extent that the readership of the paper grauniad is a good proxy for "people most likely to be nostalgic for 1968", and an arts festival is their most likely medium for expressing their nostalgia, that makes this idea baked within one month of being posted.
That might be a record. :-)-- pertinax, Jul 16 2017 [pertinax] It's always been in the room. Are you trying to get it in the box ?-- wjt, Jul 16 2017 No; there's no room in there, what with the cat.-- pertinax, Jul 18 2017 There's more than one box-- pocmloc, Jul 19 2017 random, halfbakery