Your grandchildren will be the age you are today.
They will live in a world you wouldn't recognize. Artificial intelligence will have reshaped work, cities, human relationships — the very notion of what a normal day looks like. The gap between 2026 and 2086 will likely be the greatest leap humanity has ever made in a single generation.
Your grandparents already lived through something like this. They crossed one world — then another. And the world they knew has almost entirely disappeared.
Here is what it looked like.
It is 1966. Charles de Gaulle has been at the Élysée for eight years. France has just slammed the door on NATO's integrated military command — a unilateral decision made in March, to Washington's considerable fury. "La grandeur de la France," de Gaulle repeats in every speech. And strangely, in the France of 1966, nobody finds that absurd.
The country is coming out of twenty years of almost uninterrupted growth. The Trente Glorieuses — France's thirty glorious years — are in full swing. And out in the streets, in the cafés, in the kitchens, in the factories — something is happening that the numbers can't capture. A texture of life. An accepted slowness. A human density in the everyday that millions of people chase today without always knowing how to name what they're looking for.
Before the numbers and the history — let's start with life itself.
An ordinary day — Paris, a Tuesday in November 1966
His name is André. He is 38. He is a skilled worker at a printing house in the 11th arrondissement. He earns 1,050 francs a month. He lives on the fourth floor of a building on Rue de la Roquette with his wife Simone, a part-time nurse, and their two sons — nine and twelve years old. The older one wants to be a mechanic. The little one still says he'll be a cowboy — and nobody corrects him. Every morning before leaving, André folds his newspaper in four and slips a pack of Gauloises into his inside jacket pocket. He will do this for thirty years. Here is his day.
André is not exceptional. He is representative. Millions of French people live this day — with their own variations, their own difficulties, their own private details. But the rhythm is there. The human density is there. And the quiet, diffuse sense of having a place in something.
The table — the institution nothing has replaced
If 1966 France has one absolute cultural marker, it is the table. Not the baguette-cheese-wine of tourist postcards. The real table. The shared meal as a social, ritual, almost sacred act.
Lunch during the week lasts between 45 minutes and an hour for workers, often an hour and a half for office employees. On Sundays, the midday meal can stretch to two or three hours. Nobody finds it long. It's the week's rhythm — the deep breath after six days of tension.
At the table, no one talks about work. Everything else is on the table: the children, the neighbours, an imagined trip, something heard on the radio. The meal is a social decompression space that the modern world has entirely eliminated and never replaced.
Bread is cut by hand, directly on the table. Servings come from the tureen. You help yourself again without asking. Cheese comes before dessert — not after, as a foreigner would do. And the coffee is short and strong, taken standing up or while finishing a sentence. It closes the meal like a full stop.
In modest households, you eat what you have — often market vegetables, meat once or twice a week, eggs, bread, a great deal of bread. The cooking is simple because the ingredients are fresh and local, not for lack of imagination. A kilo of beef costs around 8 to 10 francs — expensive on a worker's salary. It lasts.
And this way of living wasn't just a matter of culture. It was also a matter of an economy that hadn't yet made ordinary daily life unaffordable.
Money — what the numbers don't say
A skilled worker earns around 900 to 1,200 francs a month in 1966. Converted mechanically into today's euros using inflation indices, that comes out to somewhere between 140 and 180 euros net. You read that and think: impossible to live on.
That's where the mistake creeps in. It's not the nominal figure that matters — it's what you can buy with it.
A worker earning 1,000 F/month spends roughly 25 to 30% of his salary on Parisian rent. Today, a minimum-wage worker in Paris typically spends 60 to 80% of their net income on rent. That single ratio says everything about what has been lost.
On property to buy, the difference is even more brutal. Between 1966 and today, French housing prices have been multiplied by somewhere between 50 and 100, depending on the area — while salaries have only been multiplied by 10 to 15. A middle manager could repay a Paris apartment over 10 to 15 years. The same profile today takes 25 to 30. In the suburbs.
1966 France is objectively poorer in GDP per capita. Fewer appliances, fewer cars, fewer holidays. And yet on the two dimensions that actually structure quality of life — housing and job security — the 1966 worker was in a structurally stronger position than his 2026 equivalent.
We gained in material comfort what we lost in fundamental stability. And stability, we only realise what it was worth on the day it disappears.
Credit: expensive, rare, and shameful
Borrowing to buy a television or book a holiday? In 1966, that is frowned upon. Deeply. Debt is a social shame in French popular culture of the era — it means you've mismanaged, lived beyond your means, lack discipline. And when you do borrow, consumer credit costs around 15 to 20% per year. A mortgage negotiates at around 7 to 9%.
The result: most people only buy what they already have. No money, no purchase. You wait. You save. This constraint builds a relationship with money that is fundamentally different from today's — where going into debt in three clicks is not only possible but actively encouraged by industries whose entire business model rests on keeping you in permanent debt.
Work — when unemployment was almost a foreign word
France's unemployment rate in 1966 is approximately 1.8%. Long-term unemployment barely exists. Someone who loses their job finds another within weeks. This single fact changes everything — the psychology of work, the relationship to management, the way you imagine the future. No low-grade permanent anxiety about professional security.
Happiness — or rather, the legibility of the world
What 1966 France offers most of its people is not happiness in any naive sense. It's not the absence of hardship, tension, or injustice — those exist, real and well-documented.
It's something else. It's the legibility of the world.
You know where you live. You know with whom. You know at what pace. And you know, more or less, what tomorrow looks like. This stability doesn't make you happy on its own — but its absence makes you anxious, almost without exception. What wellbeing researchers today call "existential insecurity" is precisely what the France of 1966 had not yet invented.
André doesn't ask himself whether he'll still have a job in six months. He doesn't wonder whether he'll be able to pay next year's rent. He doesn't calculate whether his pension will be enough. These questions don't yet exist in his daily life. And that absence — that simple, banal, extraordinary absence of structural anxiety — may be the most precious thing the France of 1966 possessed without knowing it.
Three cities — Paris, Marseille, Nice in 1966
Les Halles still exist. The belly of Paris — two hectares of iron and glass pavilions built under Napoleon III, where produce trucks arrive at 3am, where market gardeners sell directly to the public at dawn. Les Halles will be demolished in 1971 and replaced by a subterranean shopping mall that nobody will love. In 1966, they still pulse — a smell of cold earth, fish, blood, and strong coffee mixed in the November air.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés is the intellectual neighbourhood of the world. Not metaphorically — literally. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir still work at the Café de Flore. Les Deux Magots receives publishers, philosophers, directors of the Nouvelle Vague. Godard, Truffaut, Agnès Varda shoot in the streets with lightweight cameras. Jacques Brel, Barbara, Brassens perform in cabarets where people smoke, drink, argue until 2am.
The Boulevard Périphérique isn't finished yet — it won't be completed until 1973. Paris is still a porous city, without a sharp boundary between centre and suburb. Poor people and wealthy people still live in the same arrondissements, sometimes the same building — the well-off on the noble floors, the others in the attic rooms.
Marseille in 1966 is working-class, port-facing, loud, and deeply mixed — by Italians, Spaniards, Armenians, and since 1962 by the pieds-noirs returning from Algeria. Around 300,000 of them have flooded into France since independence, and Marseille has absorbed a considerable share. The city digests this shock in tension — but it digests it.
And then there's what everyone knows without saying out loud: the French Connection. Marseille is the world's principal processing and transit hub for heroin heading to the United States. The Guérini brothers have controlled the city's underworld since the Liberation. Heroin arrives from Turkey as morphine base, is refined in clandestine labs across the region, and departs for New York via couriers crossing the Atlantic in first class. The CIA knows. French intelligence knows. Nobody acts — because the same networks that run the traffic also served certain political interests in the post-war years.
This organised crime doesn't descend to street level. It doesn't mug pedestrians. It has its codes, its territories, its scores settled out of sight. The ordinary Marseillais lives in a poor but vibrant city, where the food is good, where doors are open, where the street still belongs to the people who live on it.
Nice in 1966 is a city of wealthy retirees, British tourists — hence the Promenade des Anglais — and grand old palace hotels that have seen all of European aristocracy pass through since the 19th century. The writer Graham Greene lives in Antibes and will write several novels there. The Côte d'Azur is a place where things happen slowly, where terrace afternoons last, where sunshine is sufficient reason to rush nothing.
Jacques Médecin succeeds his father Jean as mayor in 1966. He will hold the post until 1990, when he flees to Uruguay to escape French justice. Under his tenure, Nice is prosperous, conservative, and singular — the carnival is the annual event, the socca sellers crowd the old town, and a few old-timers still speak Niçard between themselves. A city that knows what it is.
The street at night — an ordinary scene
The metal shutters of the shops have been down since seven. The lit windows of the butcher's, the cobbler's, the news-stand cast orange patches of light onto the wet street.
Two men come out of the corner bistrot calling each other by name. Their voices carry far in the cold — no other noise to swallow them. No double-parked cars. No delivery scooters. The city sounds different: deeper, more human, less mechanical.
A group of teenagers turns the corner. They wear leather jackets — the "blousons noirs" the press is slightly afraid of. They're not doing anything in particular. They exist in the street. It belongs to them as much as it belongs to anyone.
On the floor above, through a lit window, a radio plays Brassens. Someone sings along. Someone else bangs on the wall for it to stop. Life is there, thick, audible, across all its floors at once.
In two years, this street may burn in May 1968. For now, it simply lives.
Encounters — before the algorithms
People met in the street. In the corner café. At the Bastille Day dance. On the train. This sentence sounds banal. It isn't. It means that chance still existed — that social life wasn't filtered, sorted, optimised by a system that decides for you who is worth letting into your life.
The July 14th dance isn't a postcard cliché. It's a living institution. In hundreds of villages and urban neighbourhoods, it's the social event of the summer. You dance with strangers. You talk to people you haven't chosen. Social and generational mixing isn't a political objective — it's simply the reality of a world where people still share the same spaces.
You didn't choose your encounters. They arrived. And that is precisely why they mattered.
The corner café plays a role that nothing has replaced. It isn't a consumption space — it's a social regulation space. The owner knows the regulars. The regulars know each other. News circulates. Tensions sometimes dissolve over a glass. The zinc counter is an institution as old as the city itself — and it is slowly dying.
Values — your word, debt, and shame
Your word was worth a contract. In hundreds of thousands of commercial transactions, agreements between artisans and clients, a verbal commitment was enough. Reputation was a real currency in communities small enough for everyone to remember who hadn't kept their word.
Debt was a shame. Not a light shame — a deep, transmitted, social one. And since credit rates were prohibitive, the financial constraint and the moral constraint reinforced each other. Most people only bought what they already had. If you didn't have the money, you didn't buy. You waited.
Today you can go into debt in three clicks. In 1966, a single debt could define you socially for a decade.
De Gaulle — the man who believed in something
Charles de Gaulle is 76 in 1966. He has survived two world wars, the Resistance, the founding of the Fifth Republic, the Algerian war. In March, he takes the decision everyone has advised against: France withdraws from NATO's integrated military command. The Americans are furious. He doesn't care. In August, he delivers a landmark speech in Phnom Penh against the Vietnam War to 100,000 Cambodians who cheer him. Lyndon Johnson stops speaking to him for months.
It isn't nostalgia to acknowledge that de Gaulle embodies something French politics has lost: the conviction that France has something to say to the world that isn't simply a rephrasing of the American position.
"France cannot be France without greatness."— Charles de Gaulle, 1966
Meanwhile, elsewhere — USA, England, Argentina in 1966
LBJ is president. 400,000 soldiers in Vietnam. The civil rights movement has just won the Voting Rights Act but cities are burning. Average salary around $6,000 a year — higher than France. But racial inequality is abyssal. The American dream is real for some and completely out of reach for others.
Harold Wilson is Prime Minister. On 30 July, England wins the World Cup at Wembley — 4-2 against West Germany. The country is euphoric. The Beatles are at their peak. Carnaby Street is inventing global fashion. But wages are lower than in France, and deindustrialisation is already beginning to show.
June 1966 brings a military coup. General Onganía overthrows the elected president. It's the country's third coup in ten years. The "Night of the Long Batons" drives professors and students from universities with truncheons. Thousands of intellectuals flee. Argentina — once a top-ten world economy at the start of the century — begins its long decline.
The France of 1966 is a rare combination: political stability, strong growth, near-full employment, a developed social safety net, vibrant culture, and an assumed national identity. This cocktail won't last — May 1968 is two years away. But right now, few countries in the world can say the same.
What changed — and why no one announced the closing
There was no date. No ceremony.
Nothing collapsed.
Everything was replaced.
Slowly. Silently. Definitively.
The bakery closed when the supermarket opened three kilometres away. The corner café pulled its shutters when the taxes went up and the clientele aged. The Bastille Day dance shrank when people began watching television at night. Boredom was killed by the smartphone. Handshake agreements were replaced by contracts and lawyers. André no longer eats lunch with his colleagues — he eats a sandwich in front of a screen while catching up on his emails.
Each change was rational. Each form of progress was real. But something was lost in the exchange — something difficult to name precisely, but which the body recognises when it finds it again.
This world still exists — here's where
It isn't a vanished utopia. It's a geography.
The slowness. The living neighbourhood commerce. The meal as a social institution. Credit as an exception rather than a rule. An anchor in a specific place. Human density in everyday exchanges. These things exist today in other countries — not as historical reconstruction, but as contemporary reality.
You sit down at a terrace. The waiter recognises you — you've been in twice this week.
You stay for an hour. You don't look at your phone.
The coffee costs 90 cents. The people around you are talking to each other.
And you understand, without quite being able to explain it, that this is what you were looking for.
Not Portugal. The way of living.
You don't leave a country. You leave a way of living.
Sixty years from now
It is 2026. Artificial intelligence is doing to the world what the industrial revolution did between 1880 and 1930 — but ten times faster. The gap between what we know today and what our grandchildren will live in 2086 will likely be as great as the gap between 1966 and now.
André, the printing worker from the 11th, had something you may be searching for without knowing it. Not the poverty. Not the social rigidity. Not the inequalities of the era. But the rhythm. The density. The feeling that the day genuinely belonged to someone.
What your grandchildren will be searching for in 2086 — that human connection, that time with texture, that neighbourhood life — may be what you still have a chance to find today, in certain parts of the world.
What your grandparents called ordinary life has become, elsewhere, a sought-after luxury.
Frequently asked questions
Was purchasing power really better in 1966?
On everyday consumer goods, hard to compare directly — nominal wages were much lower but so were prices. On two key dimensions, however, the difference is documented and stark: housing (a worker spent 25-30% of their salary on Parisian rent, versus 60-80% of a minimum wage today) and job security (unemployment at 1.8% vs 7.3% today). On these two fundamental measures, the 1966 worker was structurally better off.
Was credit really that expensive in 1966?
Yes. Consumer credit rates ran around 15 to 20% per year in the 1960s, and mortgages negotiated at roughly 7 to 9%. The Banque de France's discount rate was around 3.5%, but the intermediary margin was considerable. On top of that, a strong cultural norm existed: taking on debt to consume was socially frowned upon in working-class and middle-class circles.
What exactly was the French Connection?
The French Connection was the heroin trafficking network that, from the 1950s through the 1970s, processed Turkish morphine base into heroin in clandestine laboratories across the Marseille region before shipping it to the United States. Connected to political circles and intelligence services of the era, the network was progressively dismantled in the early 1970s under American pressure. It remains one of the most murky chapters in Marseille's — and France's — modern history.
Has crime really increased since 1966?
It's nuanced. The homicide rate hasn't exploded — it has remained relatively stable over sixty years. What has changed is the nature and distribution of crime. The organised crime of 1966 was concentrated in specific circles and invisible to most ordinary citizens. Today's diffuse delinquency touches spaces that were previously safe, making it feel more threatening even if its absolute level isn't dramatically higher.
What comes next in the "1966" series?
Episode 2 covers England — a country that underwent an even faster transformation after the Thatcher years. The following episodes will cover Japan (sixty years of vertiginous cultural mutation), Italy, and Brazil.
Keep exploring
Sources: INSEE — French demographic and wage data 1960–2026 · DARES — labour market trends · France-inflation.com — prices since 1900 · Trésor public — SMIG/SMIC report · Cairn/CESDIP — measuring crime in France since 1970 · Le Monde archives — political context 1966 · INSEE franc-to-euro converter.