When he was reacting to the ideological debates of the Paris Commune in the Spring of 1871, Karl Marx complained that the French revolutionaries wasted their time rehearsing the issues of the previous revolutions instead of facing the revolutionary tasks of the present. Marx's insights are confirmed by a glance backward at the 1848 revolutions, and forward from him to 1968. French historiography has long wondered whether the Paris Commune was like the dawn of something new, or like the dusk of the ancien régime of working-class movements. In August 1944, when the Paris Resistance took control of the Hôtel de Ville, they were repeating what their forebears had done in all the previous Paris revolutions. In May 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bendit prevented the most radical part of the student movement from marching on the presidency at the Palais de l'Élysée. This choice reveals that the mental patterns which structured the political imagination of the student movement were moments like the storming of the Winter Palace in the Soviet revolution, not the French revolutionary traditions. It also betrayed the shift in political realities undergone by France in a century: the symbolical seat of power directly addressed by the protesters was national, not local. Radicalism and revolutions are traditionalist phenomena in many ways, and their symbolic choices reflect the values and representations that are widespread in the societies from which they emerge.