Human beings cannot be absolutely evil, according to Christian theology, because they are made in the image of God; though fallen, they always retain an awareness of good and evil. Recent reports in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo (February 26) reveal that some of the high priests of French existentialism and postmodernity are making the effort to prove Christian theology wrong. “Revolution” was cute and romantic in 1968, but we did not notice at the time that sex with children was as well. This has come out in the course of accusations against one-time revolutionary student Daniel Cohn-Bendit. A prominent leader of the 1968 student revolts, which eventually led to the resignation of President Charles DeGaulle, Cohn-Bendit has joined the haute bourgeoisie as a member of the European Parliament representing the Greens of France. Now Cohn-Bendit is in hot water as a result of an essay he published in 1975, regarding the “erotic” nature of his behavior with children in a so called “alternative,” “anti-authoritarian” kindergarten in Frankfurt, where he lived after being expelled for participating in the revolts.

“There were boys [or children; the Spanish plural ninos used in El Mundo can be generic, but if he used the French garcons in the original, it meant boys] who opened the fly of my trousers and began to give me caresses,” Cohn-Bendit wrote in a 1975 article. “I reacted differently on each occasion, according to the circumstances, but when they insisted, I caressed them as well.”

In 1977, when three men were sentenced to prison terms for nonviolent sexual contact with 12- and 13-year-old children, four prominent French “intellectuals”—the late Jean-Paul Sartre and his mistress, Simone de Beauvoir, and two current government ministers, Bernard Kouchner (minister of health, also director of the NATO occupation forces in Kosovo) and Jack Lang (minister of culture)—signed letters calling for the decriminalization of pedophilia. “Three years in prison for some caresses and kisses: enough of this!” said a manifesto signed by MM. Kouchner and Lang. Sartre and Beauvoir, joined by leading postmodernists, Michel Foucault (who subsequently died of AIDS), Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida and celebrated writers Philippe Sollers, Alain Robbe-Crillet, and Louis Aragon, all signed an open letter reading: “The law should recognize the right of children and adolescents to maintain sexual relations with whomever they choose.”

As a result of the attention being given to his 1975 article, Cohn-Bendit has been denounced by many. Philippe de Villiers, an eminent French conservative, has called for his immediate resignation: “How many paedophiles can have used these shocking manifestos to justify, or worse, to stimulate their own actions?” Serge July, editor of the leftist newspaper Liberation, defended the advocates of child sex on the grounds that, in 1968 and the following years, it was the existing moral order that was the enemy. While he spoke of a “social triumph,” even July acknowledged in a rather backhanded way that such articles and manifestos could “legitimatize practices which, in certain eras, were criminal.” Cohn-Bendit, meanwhile, has claimed that the article in question was pure fiction and that he has never been a pedophile. It all depends, of course, on the meaning of “has been.” (A grammarian might well note that if he still is one, it is incorrect to say he “has been.”)

M. Cohn-Bendit is not a famed intellectual, as the late MM. Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes were. These four men trashed the ideas of objective truth and moral standards; now we see the result. It is impossible to break one commandment out of the Decalogue without smashing the stone tablets to bits. In 1968, it was chic to be a revolutionary. Most of us who observed the scene at the time did not realize that it would eventually be chic to be a pedophile. I am reminded of the Psalmist’s observation, “The wicked strut about, when vileness is exalted on ever)’side” (Psalm 12:8).