Les Belles Images, Beauvoir's novel about 1965-1966, describes the New Year's Eve party on December 31, 1965, and recounts a salon conversation: "Did you see the retrospective on TV yesterday? - Yes," says Laurence, "it seems we've had a strange year: I hadn't realized. - They're all like that and you never realize it The conversation turns to the times and the future: "I wonder what people will think in twenty years' time about the film on 'France in Twenty Years'." This was a program based on a prospective report by the Commissariat Général au Plan: six 60-minute episodes on the Première Chaîne addressing the problems of urbanization, the rural world and leisure.
Later in the same Réveillon dinner, we find a mention of the magazine Planète: "[...] this age is so flatly positivist that people need the marvellous to compensate. People build electronic machines and read Planète ". In another sign of the times, Planète exploited the success of Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier's bestseller Le Matin des magiciens. Introduction au réalisme fantastique (1960), which combined esotericism and science fiction. This magazine illustrates the clash between a youth culture and a legitimate one, but also a general optimism, traceable in the mix of scientism and the marvellous.
The society of 1966 appears young and optimistic. A "youth culture" appeared on radio, television and in magazines, identified with songs such as Salut les copains and Âge tendre et tête de bois. Transistors, mopeds, paperbacks and disposable lighters are his favorite objects. Many recent works, particularly those by Edgar Morin, study the demographic weight of young people in the wake of the baby boom, adolescents from 1960 onwards, students from 1964 onwards. Adolescence in the 1960s was a time of abundance, after the restrictive childhoods of the 1950s: 72.5% of households were equipped with a refrigerator in 1968, compared with 7.5% in 1954; in 1966, half of all households were equipped with a television set.
Young people are neither a category nor a stratum, but a readership or an audience. They are, in fact, economic agents. Young people now have purchasing power, pocket money (the transistor and the moped come to mind in Au hasard Balthazar); young people are a market, for beauty products, records, the press and advertising. But this class is not homogeneous; Edgar Morin points out many nuances between the black jacket and the beatnik, even if he perceives common traits: a panoply (" blue jeans, polo shirts, leather jackets and blousons, and currently the fashion is for printed tee-shirts, embroidered shirts"); "decadent" property goods: electrophone, preferably electric guitar, transistor radio, collection of forty-five rpm records, photos" (cultural goods); language ("terrible","sensass" ); ceremonies (surprise-parties, music-hall); and finally, idols.
