Daniel Cohn-Bendit (born 1946) only occupied center stage in French politics for a few weeks in 1968. Still, more than anyone else, Cohn-Bendit came to personify the new left that swept Western Europe and North America in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In early 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bendit was a little known leader of a tiny student movement at the brand new Nanterre campus of the University of Paris. He was only 22, having been born in France of German Jewish parents in 1946. Because he held dual citizenship he had chosen to pursue his studies in sociology at the newly opened campus in one of the grimier industrial suburbs of Paris.

That campus represented everything that was troubling the overcrowded French university system. It had been built without planning for the social lives of the students. The educational system suffered from the same problems as the rest of the huge university centered...