IT’S summertime, and the living may be easy for some, but not if you’re a French 18-year-old in terminale (upper sixth).

If you are, you’re feverishly swotting away in the last few weeks, days, hours and even minutes before taking your do-or-die baccalauréat, or A-levels.

It’s a testing time for their teachers, too, and not just the ones in mother hen mode, cluck-clucking around their haggard protégés.

I’ve been up to my ears in English mock orals from eight until five with only a 90-minute break in the middle for the four-course lunch and a drop or three of the calming claret we professeurs get in the staff dining-room.

It’s most important for the examiner to be impartial, of course, but I was never the brightest student to have slipped the blue and silver tie of Hautlieu round his neck way back in the 1960s and I can’t help finding the stress of the candidates contagious.

Red blotches slowly appear on a girl’s neck, and I tug at my collar. All the moisture deserts one lad’s mouth to reappear as muck sweat on his brow, so I pour some more water in the Duralex toothglass and quietly fan myself with the assessment sheet.

I do try to radiate a little reassuring benevolence, but to them the examiner is the hanging judge reaching for the black cap, the Grand Inquisitor, so how on earth are they to relax and chatter away fluently in what the French persist in calling la langue de Shakespeare?

And perhaps I’m being too generous with my marks, anyway.
I’ve been functioning bilingually here for nearly 30 years now, so when a pupil says he’s leaving on a sheep, I know he means he’s living on a ship.

Or if he mumbles something about the Grossmiths’ diarrhoea, I ask him if he enjoyed their Diary of a Nobody.
Mind you, they’re all a lot better at English than I ever was at French at Hautlieu, where I only scraped through the O-level at the second go with a bottom-of-the-barrel grade 6. In 1968, that was, and I was completely wrongfooted at my own oral when I realised that the examiner expected me to say something, well, en français.

Nobody had ever really asked us resits to do that before, you see. The only time we ever strung whole sentences together was when we sang Frère Jacques.

.Actually, 1968 has been very much in the media this last couple of weeks.
We have just passed the 40th anniversary of the merry month of May in that year when the nation’s university students and other assorted youths took to the streets to build barricades and hurl cobblestones at the riot police.

As a challenge to the established order, it was a distinctly Gallic reworking of the spirit of Woodstock, but they were stirring days all the same and are fondly remembered by most 50- or 60-somethings, much as les anciens combattants like to recall their various wars.

There were 50 million French then, compared to 64 million today. A third were under 20 — it’s only a quarter now — and 1.8 million people were over 75, which is less than half 2008’s figure of 4 million.
Only 53% had a car (81% today), 13% had a phone (81% now . . . only 81%?), 10% of marriages ended in divorce (50% in 2008), and 7% of kids were, um, illégitimes (51%).

A total of 20% passed their bacca-lauréat (70%), 600,000 students were in higher education (2.3 million), and 580,000 people were on the dole (2 million).

But things had already begun to start moving a few years previously, if only very slowly.
In 1965, wives had finally obtained the right to open a bank account without their husband’s consent, contraception became legal in 1967, and both parents were recognised as jointly and equally responsible for their offspring in 1970.

That was also the year when Le Mouvement pour la Libération des Femmes came into existence, but the MLF were never quite as militant as their Anglo-Saxon sisters, preferring to stress the equal but different motif and seeing no real con-tradiction between feminism and fem-ininity.
Even today, nobody really seems to care that the French language has no equivalent of the maritally neutral Ms.

In 1974, the age for voting was cut from 21 to 18, and in 1975, a French-man’s belief that marital fidelity is having just the one wife and hardly any mistresses no longer exposed him to criminal proceedings if he was caught en flagrant delit, and divorce by mutual consent became possible. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1982, and a 1983 law ordered that men and women should be treated equally in the workplace.
But women are still paid about 30% less than men doing comparable jobs, always assuming that they can get them in the first place.

WE’VE also been celebrating the 60th birthday of the iconic 2CV, variously known here as a deux chevaux, or, more fondly, as a Deudeuche, or even as a Deuche.

The original design brief was to produce the cheapest possible car in which a farmer could take his pig to market in the week and his family to mass on Sunday, and one which could compete against the Fiat 500 and Volkswagen’s Beetle, which the French called la coccinelle, or ladybird.

And although the press at the Salon de Paris in 1948 were shocked by Citroën’s ugly new baby, the public loved it and more than five million were sold, despite a rusticity that required a certain fixed-grin stoicism right up to the closure of the last production line in 1990, in Portugal.

Top speed was initially around 50 kph/30 mph, and the first models only had one headlight, on the driver’s side, and only one wiper.

The windows were an early, brittle form of plastic, and there was no petrol gauge or starter motor: you rolled up your sleeves and cranked the handle.

But in 1950, 2CVs went soft and you now started the beast by yanking on a cable inside the car.
With the advent of motorways, the top speed was eventually doubled — but even then, wind speed and direction could save or cost Mme Masstairmann and myself five or ten minutes an hour as we bounced along some route nationale in our cherry-red Deudeuche, the first car we ever owned together. It may have been 600cc, but I’m pretty sure that 200 of them didn’t work.
Kenavo!