DANY COHN-BENDIT, AGITATOR FOR 40 YEARS

Protagonists:

•  Daniel COHN-BENDIT

In 1997, Dany Cohn-Bendit said, “I genuinely feel as though I am part of the German society, but I believe that I am also part of the imagination of French society”. His lifelines have spanned the decades: European by birth, Daniel Cohn-Bendit is a libertarian wary of all powers and the way they are exercised. Always favouring the individual over the collective, passionate about debate, in constant search for practicality and compromise, and ever reformist even in his most radical period, he has given a voice to European civil society.

May 68 made him the icon of a cultural uprising, of a major event in French history of the last half-century; sent back to Germany, he will become one of the emblematic figures of the alternative society, of the German underground, then of the Grünen, and in the end all the chapters of his story will merge into a European destiny. In Brussels, Dany Cohn-Bendit has become one of the main figures of European civil society.