The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s - Second Edition

By Richard Wolin

How Maoism captured the imagination of French intellectuals during the 1960s

Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who’s who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China’s Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life.

Wolin’s riveting narrative reveals that Maoism’s allure among France’s best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781400888443

Richard Wolin

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (1990) and The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1992).

Book preview

The Wind from the East

OTHER BOOKS BY RICHARD WOLIN

Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption

The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger

The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader

The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism

Labyrinths: Critical Explorations in the History of Ideas

Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (editor)

Heidegger’s Children: Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse

The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism

Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism (coeditor)

The Frankfurt School Revisited and Other Essays on Politics and Society

The Wind from the East

Second Edition

French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution,

and the Legacy of the 1960s

With a new preface by the author

Richard Wolin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton & Oxford

Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press

New preface, copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

Cover illustration: Image of Mao from a Cultural Revolution poster from China, c. 1970s, courtesy of Shutterstock

All Rights Reserved

Second edition, with a new preface by the author, 2018

Paper ISBN 978-0-691-17823-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953137

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

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Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

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Printed in the United States of America

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

FOR MY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS

AND THE UNIVERSITY OF NANTES, 2005–2008

There are now two winds blowing in the world: the

Wind from the East and the Wind from the West.

According to a Chinese saying: either the Wind from

the East will triumph over the Wind from the West,

or the Wind from the West will triumph over the

Wind from the East. In my opinion, the nature of the

present situation is that the Wind from the East has

triumphed over the Wind from the West.

—Mao Tse-tung

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Prologue

Introduction: The Maoist Temptation

PART I — THE HOUR OF REBELLION

1. Showdown at Bruay-en-Artois

2. France during the 1960s

3. May 1968: The Triumph of Libidinal Politics

4. Who Were the Maoists?

Excursus: On the Sectarian Maoism of Alain Badiou

PART II — THE HOUR OF THE INTELLECTUALS

5. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Perfect Maoist Moment

6. Tel Quel in Cultural-Political Hell

7. Foucault and the Maoists: Biopolitics and Engagement

8. The Impossible Heritage: From Cultural Revolution to Associational Democracy

Bibliography

Index

Preface to the Second Edition

MAY 1968: THE SPRINGTIME OF NATIONS REDUX

As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of 1968—a storied year in the history of the left and of the postwar period in general—it is important to be clear about the historiographical and political stakes. As with the previous four anniversaries of the events, the goal is to rescue–as Marx once put it–the rational kernel of 1968 from its numerous, ill-willed detractors. Increasingly, the naysayers have sought to put the genie of participatory democracy back in the bottle in order to make the world safe for plutocracy: for the moneyed elites who, in most Western democracies, act as the guardians of the status quo.

This situation helps to explain the fundamental paradox of modern politics: we are willing to countenance democratic governance as long as it is not too democratic, as long as control does not slip from the grasp of the technocrats and experts who are accustomed to running the show. The much-ballyhooed third wave of democratization (S. Huntington), widely discussed during the 1980s, largely resulted in kabuki democracies: regimes that were for the most part democracies in name only.

In this respect, the commemoration of the May ‘68 helps to preserve the notion that life and politics can be approached autrement: beyond the straightjacket of convention and constrictions of routine.

This is the dimension of politics that Hannah Arendt had in mind when, following the lead of Edmund Burke, she exalted the idea of people acting in concert as the basis of political authenticity. Having witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Arendt had experienced the iron heel of totalitarianism first hand. Hence, her appreciation of direct democracy was not merely intellectual, but existential and lived. In her late essay on Civil Disobedience, Arendt was able to discern those aspects of the student protest movement that, in the spirit of the Port Huron Statement, aimed to recapture the animating principles of the early American Republic.

For all of these reasons, Arendt viewed 1968 as the twentieth-century equivalent of the Revolutions of 1848: the Springtime of Nations. Thus in telling passage from a June 1968 letter to her mentor and intellectual confessor, Karl Jaspers, Arendt conjectured that, in the twenty-first century, youth would be taught about 1968 the way her generation had learned about 1848.¹

Arendt understood both of these revolts—1848 and 1968—as way stations or exemplars of liberty in Alexis de Tocqueville’s sense. By the same token, by redefining freedom as action, she consciously shunned the inherited, Lockean-bourgeois conception of liberty qua negative freedom. Instead, as Arendt specified in On Revolution, freedom qua action derived its bearings and inspiration from the precepts of Jeffersonian democracy. Appositely, she cited Jefferson’s enthusiastic reaction to Shay’s Rebellion (1787) in support of her views: ‘God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.’ The very fact that the people had taken it upon themselves to rise and act was enough for him [i.e., Jefferson], regardless of the rights or wrongs of their case. For ‘the tree of liberty must be refreshed, from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’²

Among Arendt’s papers in the Library of Congress, one finds a copy of the following note that, in June 1968, she sent to a young French anarchist and University of Nanterre sociology student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. As a German émigré living in Paris during the 1930s, Arendt had befriended Cohn-Bendit’s parents:

I want to say only two things: first, that I am quite sure that your parents, and especially your father, would be very pleased with you if they were alive now; second, that should you run into trouble and perhaps need money, then we and Chanan Klenbort will always be ready to help as far as it lies in our power to do so.³

In honor of the fortieth anniversary of May ‘68, Cohn-Bendit participated in a symposium of ex-‘68ers that had been organized by Libération’s founding editor, the former Maoist Serge July. Cohn-Bendit’s self-characterization consciously relied on Arendt’s celebrated typology of modern Jewish identity, the parvenu versus the pariah (Arendt disparaged those Jews who chose the parvenu route; conversely, she praised the principled conduct of the Jewish pariah): Cohn-Bendit: that is a child of freedom, he begins, alluding to the fact that he was conceived in the aftermath of the June 6, 1944 Allied landing in Normandy. He continues: "Secondly, Cohn-Bendit is by definition a pariah: someone who stands on the outside and thereby acquires the capacity to intervene in society."

Nous sommes tous les juifs allemands—these were the impassioned words of support that Cohn-Bendit received from his fellow sixty-eighters once he had been banned by the Pompidou government from reentering France toward the end of May following a brief sojourn in Germany. May 1968 was by no means an exclusively Jewish affair. Nevertheless, anyone who seeks to fathom its meaning and import must address the preponderance of assimilated Jews among the student leaders and front line activists. Thus in addition to Cohn-Bendit, there were also SNES-UP (the assistant professors union) president Alain Geismar, the Trotskyist Alain Krivine, as well as a vast array of lesser Maoists.⁴

Although at this point in French cultural life, the scars of the German occupation and French collaboration were rarely discussed in public, among French Jews, these wounds were widely sensed. (The fitful process of France’s coming to terms with the past is well recounted in Henry Rousso’s superb 1986 monograph, The Vichy Syndrome.) During the Algerian war, torture had been a state-sanctioned policy, and this caused political boundaries to blur. Among postwar French youth, there seemed to be little difference between the way that the Nazi conquerors had conducted themselves and the way that the French paras had behaved during the Battle of Algiers.⁵ Hence, the popular slogan that, during May, was spray-painted throughout Paris: CRS = SS.⁶

Owing to the strictures of republican citizenship, which mandate that the particularistic attachments of confession and ethnicity be denied public significance, the Jewish specificity of the Nazi deportations—approximately, 200,000 in all—was never openly acknowledged. (This is also true for the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, which faces the Notre Dame Cathedral on Ile-de-la-Cité. Nowhere is it mentioned that, in the majority of cases, those who were deported were Jews.) Under the circumstances, French-Jewish pariahs such as Cohn-Bendit were acutely sensitive to the authoritarian excesses of the Gaullist regime, especially in light of the continuity of personnel between the Vichy’s État Français and France’s postwar republican governments.⁷

MAY 1968 AS THE RECL AMATION OF POPUL AR SOVEREIGNTY

In 1968, fundamentally at stake were qualitatively new parameters and constituents of the idea of emancipation. In the Preface to An Essay on Liberation, which was penned just prior to the events of May, New Left prophet Herbert Marcuse perspicuously noted the uncanny resemblances between his conception of libertarian socialism and the ideals of cultural revolution espoused by the soixante-huitards:

The radical utopian character of [the students’] demands far surpasses the hypotheses of my essay . . . . No matter whether their action was a revolt or an abortive revolution, it is a turning point. In proclaiming the permanent challenge (la contestation permanente) [and] the Great Refusal, they recognize the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture, even in the most spectacular manifestations of technical progress. They have raised . . . . the specter of revolution which subordinates the development of productive forces and higher standards of living to the requirements of creating solidarity for the human species, for abolishing poverty and misery, beyond all national frontiers . . . . In a word: they have taken the idea of Revolution out of the continuum of repression and placed it into its authentic dimension: that of liberation.⁸

As Marcuse’s remarks suggest, during the 1960s, among advanced industrial societies the semantics of emancipation shifted radically and qualitatively. In the era of full employment that coincided with the so-called trente glorieuses (1945-1975), emancipation was no longer synonymous with the social question, as it had been defined by the left over the course of the long nineteenth century. Nor was its meaning adequately captured by Engels’ proto-cybernetic, anti-political declaration in Anti-Dühring that socialism meant the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things—an avowal that readily betrayed Marxism’s entanglement in the technical-administrative understanding of politics characteristic of nineteenth-century scientism.⁹ Instead, at issue was an expansion of what Max Horkheimer called the bourgeois freedom movements: enhanced participation at every level of society, thereby laying the groundwork for greater democratization.¹⁰ >On these grounds, the political battle cry of the 1960s revolved around the principle of self-management or autogestion.

In West Germany, the emergence of an anti-authoritarian left exposed the myths and deceptions of socialism qua planning. West German activists insisted that there was nothing emancipatory about the Soviet-inspired command economies that predominated in Eastern Europe. Instead, these states represented a new, inflexible and unyielding form of Herrschaft or domination. Consequently, in these lands, state socialism had become, in the words of East German dissident Rudolf Bahro, little more than an ideology of legitimation: the ideational window-dressing underlying a new, pernicious and thorough-going forms of social control.

For these reasons, the sixty-eighters assiduously advocated: (1) direct democracy in all spheres of life; (2) the elimination—or mitigation of—mind-numbing, alienated labor; (3) self-determination both in and outside of the workplace; (4) the cultivation of non-administered and non-commercialized forms of leisure time, as a direct riposte to the société de consommation;¹¹ and, finally, (5) a world in which the repression of both external and internal nature ceased, thereby establishing a crucial precedent for post-1960s environmentalism. In 1968: Youth Revolt and Social Protest, the German historian Norbert Frei aptly summarized these developments, observing that, if during subsequent decades life in the West became more self-reflexive and more open, more in tune with its own implicit emancipatory ideals and aspirations, this transformation came to pass largely owing to the efforts of the sixty-eighters.¹²

The May activists’ commitment to the values of direct democracy (in German: Basisdemokratie) established a template for a wide variety of citizens’ initiatives and grassroots protest movements that, during ensuing decades, would course though Western societies. Equally important: the May movement also engendered a sustained wave of transnational activism. In the post-May era, NGOs and civil society movements have >functioned as an indispensable counterweight vis-à-vis dictatorships and authoritarian regimes worldwide. In this respect, the advent of what might be described as a global public sphere and a global civil society has been one of the May revolt’s most valuable political legacies. By virtue of their principled commitment to the values of participatory democracy, the sixty-eighters succeeded in transforming our understanding of democratic legitimacy by highlighting one of the fundamental tensions besetting modern democracy: the gap between the claims of popularity sovereignty and constraints of representation.

In modern nation states, the democratic paradox derives from the impracticability of direct democracy and the ambiguities of popular sovereignty. In order to be instantiated or actualized, the volonté générale must unavoidably pass through the mediating filters of majority rule and representation. In the nineteenth century, Tocqueville was acutely aware of this problem. Hence, his concern that the tyranny of the majority might, in the end, undermine democracy’s normative claim to generality. In sum, an endemic potential for slippage and infelicity arises insofar as the electoral majorities that anoint our political representatives are not covalent with the people, who, from a constitutional standpoint, are sovereign.¹³

At times, representation acts as it supposed to: as a filter or screen vis-à-vis a diffuse and amorphous volonté générale. However, at other times it functions as a Pandora’s box, as its shortcomings incite public skepticism concerning representation’s efficacy and genuineness. Is the people’s will being authentically voiced, or, conversely, has it been subverted by groups or factions that possess ulterior motives and hidden agendas? Political theorists have denominated attempts to offset contemporary democracy’s plutocratic and managerial biases through heightened political participation counter-democracy: multifarious grassroots efforts to offset the usurpation of popular sovereignty by political elites who have comandeered the general will.¹⁴

In Democratic Legitimacy, Pierre Rosanvallon has described the inherently fragile nature of modern democracy as follows:

The primary characteristic of a democratic regime is the anointment by the people of those who govern. The idea that the people are the sole legitimate source of power has come to be taken for granted. No one would dream of contesting or questioning it. . . . . Yet the assertion blurs an important distinction: as a practical matter it is assumed of the general will that it coincides with the will of the majority.¹⁵

Viewed in these terms, the May movement responded to a fundamental and deep-seated crisis of democratic legitimacy that had beset republican France. After all, the Fifth Republic’s birth in 1958 was the result of a palace revolution, provoked by the Algerian War, marking de Gaulle’s return to power. When all is said and done, the student activists saved republican France by transforming it. Both then and now, the problem is that the more democracy relies on a technocratic or elitist self-understanding, the more it risks forfeiting the public confidence without which, in an age of democratic legitimacy, republican rule cannot endure.

The contradictory character of democratic legitimacy was anticipated by Rousseau in The Social Contract. At stake is his pivotal distinction between the volonté générale and the volonté de tous. According to Rousseau, it is not the case that just any articulation of popular will will suffice. Rousseau foresaw that, owing to the impure state of the body politic, the volonté générale is eminently susceptible to manipulation by corrupt leaders. He expresses this basic democratic ambiguity as follows: The people are always good, but they can be misled.¹⁶ For Rousseau the Platonist, interests, which are by definition non-generalizable, constitute the original sin of democratic politics. On the other hand, as we know from the work of the Scottish moralists such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, in modern times, the raison d’être of modern civil society is to allow interest—the centrifugal force of bourgeois self-seeking—free rein. It was in reaction to these trends that Rousseau contended that democracy was a form of rule better suited to angels than to a fallen humanity.

One of the May activists’ most important political bequests pertained to their reinvigoration of the ideal of popular sovereignty, which, since the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, subsisted as democracy’s normative core, despite the fact that, in most cases, it had been honored in the breach rather than in the observance. As a result of this neglect, representative democracy had been allowed to degenerate into rule by a caste of professional politicians: la classe politique. Thus one might aptly refer to this aspect of the 1968 revolt as its Rousseauian dimension. The sixty-eighters’ irrepressible longing for emancipation seemed to reprise directly the Social Contract’s stirring opening words: Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.

Following the general strike of May 13, the image of French youth and French workers assiduously experimenting with the multifarious forms of direct democracy—sit-ins, occupations, strikes, sequestrations, demonstrations, action committees, communes, and so forth had international ramifications. It acted as an inspirational summons, a cri de coeur, for global youth to stand up to injustice and oppression, to seize the reigns of historicity from political elites who had become inflexible guardians of the status quo.

The mobilizations that rattled the hexagon during May-June 1968 far transcended the psychodrama epithet that Raymond Aron had employed to belittle the protagonists’ actions and aspirations. Instead, what transpired during May was a conscious and intentional appropriation of alternative—i.e., anti-Leninist and anti-authoritarian—forms of democratic self-organization: political approaches that had been marginalized or suppressed by the structures of authoritarian state socialism. The exemplars of participatory democracy that French youth sought to emulate had been furnished by the Revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, the workers’ councils (Räte and soviets) of the post-World War I period, and the Spanish anarchist collectives.¹⁷

Ultimately, these historical precedents formed the template for what came to be known as gauchisme: individuals and groups that embraced positions to the left of the PCF. By reinterpreting the failures and miscues of the socialist tradition, these latter day enragés were able to reinvent the meaning of the political, infusing a new, participatory élan into what the political philosopher Claude Lefort has called the democratic invention.¹⁸

By the same token, the sixty-eighters did not seek to slavishly imitate the aforementioned historical models. Instead, they sought to refashion them for contemporary political use. In recent years, analogous direct democratic aspirations have suffused anti-globalization and horizontal democracy movements worldwide: experiments in transnational activism that have sought to compel international financial and political elites to adhere to democratic standards of accountability.

In retrospect, one thing that stands out about the May movement is that, unlike previous revolutionary currents, it aimed not to supersede or to negate parliamentary democracy but instead, to tame it by forcing it to live up to its implicit democratic norms and premises. Despite their rhetorical obéisances to the revolutionary tradition, in the eyes of student activists the excesses of that legacy had become a negative totem: a political deformation that they consciously sought to escape. (It is in this spirit that one contemporary critic has cautioned against the seductions of the Great Marxist Fallacy: the idea that the contemporary bourgeois order subsists in a state of advanced decay, and that the regenerative moment of Proletarian Revolution—the proverbial Grand Soir of socialist lore—is just around the corner, waiting to remedy all injustices and to right all wrongs.)¹⁹

In this respect, the student activists had fully assimilated the lessons of the October 1956 Hungarian uprising, which had sought to revive the precepts of direct democracy as embodied in the council communist tradition, but which, two weeks later, had been brutally suppressed by Warsaw Pact troops. That during the first week of the May uprising, the French Communist Party did everything within its power to discourage worker-student fraternization merely confirmed the sixty-eighters’ suspicion that Stalin’s ghost remained lurking behind the scenes.²⁰

The participatory democratic reading of May revolt helps us to avoid the pitfalls of one of the main competing interpretive approaches: the attempt to understand the May events in predominantly cultural rather than political terms.

As Arthur Marwick argues in The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, 1958-74, were one to query the average citizen about the legacy of the 1960s, the most likely responses would list among the decade’s lasting achievements: the triumph of youth culture and pop music, a new spirit of sexual permissiveness, gay liberation, tolerance for hallucinogens and kindred mind-altering substances, and, finally, a new frankness about human relationships at every level: husband and wife, parent and child, teachers and students, manager and employee.

Among less tolerant and more closed-minded observers, such encomiums to the 1960s’ spirit of openness and cultural experimentation can readily boomerang. As Margaret Thatcher remarked disapprovingly during the early 1980s: [Today], we are reaping what was sown in the 1960s . . . . fashionable theories and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which old values of discipline and restraint were denigrated. In the post-May period, a plethora of hyper-skeptical historical studies—works bearing titles such as The Unraveling of America, Coming Apart, and Years of Discord – have codified Thatcher’s dyspeptic understanding of the 1960s’ import and significance.²¹

Here, it is worth recalling that the soixante-huitards’ efforts to reanimate the ideals of democratic citizenship did not remain a purely theoretical affair. In the post-May years, their efforts attained institutional expression by way of the deuxième gauche or second left, as championed by former PSU (Parti Socialiste Unifié) president, Michel Rocard (1930-2016). Prior to his accession to the prime ministership (1989–1991) under Francois Mitterrand’s presidency (1981–1995), Rocard led the autogestionnaire or self-management wing of the Socialist Party (PS). It was, above all, Rocard and his supporters who kept afloat the sixty-eighters’ anti-authoritarian, emancipatory longings, thereby lending credence to the idea that démocratie de base, or grassroots democracy, had a meaningful role to play in advanced industrial societies: that representative democracy could be practiced autrement.²²

Thanks to the Rocardiens, the French Socialist Party itself became much less of a traditional, hierarchical political formation, opening both its ranks as well as its political program to grassroots input. During the 1980s, it was Rocard and his supporters who pushed for a series of important democratic reforms that marked a significant departure from the more customary étatiste model of French political rule. Thus during the early years of Mitterrand’s presidency, it was the Rocardiens who encouraged the regionalist reforms that facilitated the expansion of cultural and political autonomy at the provincial and municipal levels, thereby transforming the landscape of French politics. French socialism’s ecological turn is also largely attributable to Rocard’s input and influence.

La Pensée Anti-68

In the voluminous secondary literature on 1968, the May revolt has been variously described as (1) a foreign plot; (2) the false harbinger of a radiant utopian future; (3) a generational conflict; (4) a crisis provoked by the rapid overexpansion of the French University system; (5) an Oedipal revolt; (6) a crisis of civilization; (7) a class conflict of a new type; (8) an institutional crisis driven by excessive centralization; (9) or, simply, a random and meaningless concatenation of events.

From this cursory list, it is easy to see that the May movement has attracted a wide range of critics and detractors, but few friends. Thus as a rule, the May uprising has been treated as a negative caesura: it has been held responsible for nearly everything that has gone wrong with the Fifth Republic. Conversely, the 1960s’ beneficent aspects have been brusquely discounted as transitory and insubstantial. In this respect, Michel Houllebecq’s novels such as Extension de la domaine de lutte and Les Particules élémentaires, in which the 1968 generation is pointedly blamed for a rampant and irreversible loss of social cohesion, are emblematic.²³

Whereas at the time of the events, the sixty-eighters’ anti-authoritarian ethos was widely praised for having successfully challenged the atavisms and anachronisms of the ancien régime, at a later point, this same disposition was faulted for having unleashed an era of implacable decline—a preoccupation that, since the millennium, has become something of a national obsession.²⁴ As one critic has observed appositely: "the current mood in France . . . . has been described as one of déclinisme or sinstrose: pessimism about the future and a sinister sense of an irreversible decline unfolding in the present."²⁵ As an editorialist writing in Les Echos in 2013 has phrased it: an obsession with decline is about the last thing the French have to hold on to.²⁶

Thus since the 2000s, le déclinisme has become an omnipresent trope in the discourse of French Kulturkritik. In the minds of Republican critics, both left and right, contemporary France suffers from a profound crisis of authority, a debility that stems from a longstanding institutional crisis. According to this view, following the turbulence of May, the crisis escalated out of control and soon reached a point of no return.

According to this narrative, one of the major consequences of the May revolt has been that the social institutions that traditionally functioned as the backbone of French Republicanism—the army, the public school system, trade unions, and the Catholic Church—have lost their prestige and become dysfunctional. The culprit most often blamed for this trajectory of irreversible loss has been the social leveling tendencies that were so thoughtlessly and irresponsibly embraced by the soixante-huitards. Corresponding to the demise of these traditional pillars of French Republicanism, critics have also detected an inexorable and regrettable slackening of moeurs: traditional mores and habits of the heart (Tocqueville).

According to this argument, from a generational standpoint, the sixty-eighters’ aversion to limits and their proclivities to hedonism abetted the triumph of a new variety of lax individualism: a situation that confirmed Tocqueville’s deepest fears about the moral corruptions endemic to democracy qua social condition. With the dissolution of those intermediary bodies that Tocqueville, following Montesquieu, praised emphatically, an indispensable fount of social meaning and purpose simultaneously unraveled. When all is said and done, democratic man is mass man: a man without qualities (R. Musil) whose mores have gone soft.

To cite merely two examples of this tendency: in Henri Guaino’s La Sottise des modernes (Idiocy of the Moderns), the sixty-eighters are denounced for having created a cultural climate conducive to nihilism, narcissism, postmodernism, individualism, the loss of hierarchy, patriotism, the work ethic, and excellence.²⁷ And in Génération 69: les trentenaires qui ne vous disent pas merci (Generation ’69: the Thirty-somethings who never bother to say thank you), the sixty-eighters are brusquely—and, unjustly—excoriated for having exchanged the Little Red Book for a place of honor in Who’s Who. In sum: they are faulted both for having failed as revolutionists and for having succeeded as bourgeois.²⁸

When it comes to the multifarious condemnations of May 1968 as a negative cultural watershed, les extrêmes se touchent. Hence, critics on both the left and on the right sides of the political spectrum find themselves remarkably in agreement. As Francois Furet noted, by the 1990s, as a signifier May had been reduced to the status of a negative political totem, in a manner that paralleled perceptions of the corrosive influence of the French Revolution on the part of nineteenth-century cultural reactionaries, such as Hyppolite Taine and Ernst Renan, who blamed 1789 for France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71). Those critics of May 1968 whom, in Rappel à l’ordre (Call to order), the historian Daniel Lindenberg denominated les nouvelles réactionnaires (the new reactionaries) are in point of fact the heirs to a counterrevolutionary critique of the ideas of 1789—a critique that, with the Dreyfus Affair, metamorphosed into the proto-fascist doctrine of integral nationalism espoused by Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès.²⁹

In the second volume of Democracy in America, a pessimistic Tocqueville formulated what one might term the negative catechism of democratic individualism:

Egoism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self which leads a man to think of all things in terms of himself and to prefer himself to all . . . . Individualism is a . . . . feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself . . . . Individualism at first only dams the spring of public virtues, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all the others too and finally merges into egoism.

According to Tocqueville, the end result is that, Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone . . . . shut up in the solitude of his own heart.³⁰ With the atrophy of the common weal, self-interested, punctual selves (C. Taylor) have stifled the civic ethos of classical republicanism.

It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Tocqueville’s melancholy diagnosis of the times on French cultural criticism during the post-May period. With Marxism’s eclipse following the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s landmark study of the Soviet Gulag (1973), and the concomitant triumph of the anti-totalitarian moment, French intellectuals seemed ready to grant liberalism another look.³¹ Democracy in America, which, earlier in the twentieth century, had been relegated to the margins (with a few notable exceptions, such as Raymond Aron), triumphantly reemerged from the shadows. It was enthusiastically received and seemed to possess an uncanny timeliness.³²

With the political disappointments of l’après-mai fresh in mind, among French intellectuals, Tocqueville’s excoriation of democracy qua social condition assumed the status of received wisdom. At a later point, once communism’s promises of a radiant utopian future had turned to dust, left-wing intellectuals succumbed to a resignation that often bordered on despondency.³³ In this way, la pensée anti-68 (Anti-’68 Thought) was born.³⁴

Tocqueville’s champions sought to update his conclusions by supplementing his critique of democratic individualism with findings borrowed from studies in postwar American social psychology that probed the fault lines of modern character structure: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), and, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979). By reinforcing an image of French decline, these neo-Tocquevillian jeremiads abetted the rise of a type of Left Bank Spenglerianism.

Here, the essential work of synthesis was Gilles Lipovetsky’s L’Ere du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain (Era of the Void: Essays on Contemporary Individualism;1981). Lipovetsky’s crucial advance beyond Tocqueville’s analysis of democratic individualism’s foibles was the notion of personalization, which he based on Christopher Lasch’s critique of the culture of narcissism. In Lipovetsky’s view, in the post-1968 era all obligations and commitments that transcended the standpoint of the self-absorbed, monadic individual had been extinguished. The values of engaged citizenship and public man (R. Sennett) had unraveled in the face of the solipsistic preoccupations of narcissistic Selfhood. In Lipovetsky’s words:

The modern ideal of the subordination of the individual to a set of rational collective rules has been pulverized; the process of personalization has exaggeratedly promoted personal achievement as a unique and fundamental value: that is, respect for subjective singularity or the unique and incomparable personality, apart from whatever new forms of homogenization and social control are realized in society as a whole.³⁵

Over the next few years, Lipovetsky’s analyses were supplemented by kindred studies written by neorepublican political philosophers Marcel Gauchet, Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Luc Ferry, and Alain Renaut. The neorepublican critics blamed the heritage of ‘68 for abetting the triumph of a type of decentered, flaccid individualism, one that had relinquished any and every commitment to a higher sense of meaning and purpose. In the eyes of these critics, the era of the individual³⁶ was merely the social-psychological corollary of neo-liberalism. Hence, the irony that a spirit of contestation that had sought to question and undermine the tenets of bourgeois society ended up abetting and reinforcing it.

In the debate that followed, Marcel Gauchet’s essay, Les Droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique (Human Rights is Not a Politics; 1980), which appeared in the inaugural issue of Le Débat, emerged as a touchstone.

Gauchet’s article took aim at the vogue of droit de l’hommisme, whose prominence in the post-May period coincided with New Philosophy’s ascendancy. According to Gauchet, the main problem with human rights was that it had jettisoned the republican ideal of active citizenship in favor a self-enclosed, atomistic liberalism. Appealing to Tocqueville’s critique of democratic individualism, Gauchet argued that, following May, French society had undergone a process of democratic pacification. This archly negative characterization of democracy betrayed a concern that underlay many neorepublican criticisms of May 1968’s legacy: a fear of Americanization and its attendant evils, either real or imagined.

In retrospect, Gauchet’s fears about democracy were exaggerated and excessively polemical. Gauchet regarded democracy as the flawed antipode of republican virtue (virtus, virtú, vertue). According to Gauchet’s reading, the defining traits of republicanism had been institutional fortitude, civic participation, hypertrophic patriotism, and, last but not least, the citizen’s willingness to sacrifice self-interest for the sake of the common good. In Gauchet’s scheme, democracy, conversely, was synonymous with social disequilibrium and anomie. In Rousseauian terms, it signaled the triumph of la volonté de tous over la volonté générale. At base, it underwrote a social order in which ruthless competition had supplanted solidarity. Ultimately, the centrifugal tendencies of unchecked individualism eroded the last vestiges of social and cultural substance.

According to Gauchet, May 1968’s cultural legacy could best be described as "anti-authoritarian and anti-institutional, as well as egotistical, psychological, and hedonistic. Gauchet agreed with Raymond Aron’s disparaging verdict that the May revolt had been little more than an elaborate instance of revolutionary pantomime or political farce: a pseudo-revolution or a psycho-drama. With the passing of time, the logic of contestation" that had been espoused by these faux rebels metamorphosed into a nihilistic, generational refusal to accommodate the constraints of marriage, the authority of education, the hierarchy of the firm, or the sacrificial obligations of the public good.³⁷

Gauchet’s critics felt that his judgments were rhetorically exaggerated and couched in generalities, to the point where their underlying hollowness became difficult to conceal. As Serge Audier observes in La Pensée Anti-68: the litany, repeated ad nauseum, that the veneration of human rights has succeeded at the expense of civic engagement seems so self-evident to Gauchet that he does not even bother to substantiate it.³⁸ The late 1990s witnessed the revival of logics of social protest as the so-called sans movements—sans papiers, sans logement, and sans emploi – rocked the French political establishment. These developments seemed to matter very little to Gauchet, who refused to alter or correct his prior, despairing political prognoses.

In the end, to mock the idea of human rights as droit de l’hommisme risks backfiring. After all, in France where the delusions of revolutionary romanticism have remained keen, the affirmation of human rights helped to counter the seductions of left-wing dictatorship in its Jacobin, Leninist, Trotskyist, Castroist, and Maoist variants and guises. Gauchet’s skepticism notwithstanding, historically speaking, the provisions for civic freedom guaranteed by human rights have formed an indispensable component of emancipatory political movements. To dismiss them simplistically as a stalking horse for neoliberalism, as Gauchet and his fellow republicans do, is overwrought: emblematic of a widespread, self-canceling political cynicism.

A convincing rejoinder to Gauchet’s stance on human rights was provided by Claude Lefort in Human Rights and Politics. According to Lefort, human rights constitute the the generative principle of [modern] democracy. The legal guarantees that human rights provide help to safeguard the existence of civic spaces in which social activism can take root and flourish. Thus when all is said and done, human rights furnish a normative framework that is indispensable to realizing the participatory democratic ends that Gauchet and others venerate. To dismiss them, as Gauchet does, as anti-political and, hence, opposed to the ends of civic engagement, is both misleading and worrisomely shortsighted.

Moreover, Gauchet and his allies downplay the negative side of republicanism’s political legacy. Historically, republicanism relied on the fiction of a homogeneous political community. However, in an era of multiculturalism, a respect for the ideal of value pluralism has superseded homogeneity as a cultural-political desideratum.³⁹ In France, the costs of attempting to maintain the illusion of a homogeneous peuple became painfully apparent during the suburban uprising of fall 2005. In retrospect, these protests signified a point of no return for the Fifth Republic’s stark refusal to recognize the legitimacy of cultural difference - an orientation that proved especially short-sighted and self-defeating in a nation comprising five million Arab citizens.⁴⁰

Finally, Gauchet’s accusations of depoliticization in the post-May era seem particularly bizarre in light of the proliferation of new social movements during the 1970s and 1980s, movements of civic emancipation that embraced the causes of feminism, gay liberation, and immigrants’ rights.⁴¹ Ultimately, these developments confirmed Tocqueville’s insight that a robust associational life is the surest way to offset the evils of democratic despotism and majoritarian tyranny. One of the central lessons of the post-May era was that the locus of political struggle had shifted away from questions of state power and toward society. In many respects, Foucault’s analysis of the micro-physics of power in Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality faithfully tracked these developments.

Gauchet’s failure to register this transformation is symptomatic of the limitations of the neorepublican model, which, generally speaking, remained tone deaf to the new forms of political struggle that emerged in the post May ’68 era. The locus of contestation had shifted from logics of class and questions of economic redistribution to so-called quality of life issues.

Ultimately, the new social movements that emerged in the post-‘68 period were significant insofar as they represented an expansion of the inherited ideal of democratic citizenship. With the struggle for civic and political emancipation largely achieved, the new stakes often revolved around the politics of recognition: acknowledging the cultural and political legitimacy of previously marginalized social groups. The republican model, which is predicated on an ideal of civic equality that is constitutionally averse to difference, is endemically unsuited to address these concerns. In an era of globalization marked by extensive population migrations, in which the challenges of multicultural citizenship have become the norm, to neglect such considerations can prove highly destructive, if not fatal.⁴²

THE PRISON HOUSE OF LANGUAGE

The Maoists’ post-May trajectory was filled with unexpected and, at times, rather disheartening twists and turns. In 2008, Virginie Linhart, daughter of Gauche Prolétarienne leader Robert Linhart, published a memoir, Le Jour où mon père s’est tu (The Day When My Father Stopped Speaking). There, she narrates the strange odyssey of her father: co-founder of the pro-Chinese UJC-ML (Union des Jeunesses Communiste-Marxiste-Léniniste) and, by all accounts, the most gifted and charismatic of Louis Althusser’s École Normale disciples.

Born in 1966, the year the UJC-ML was founded, Virginie Linhart’s childhood was that of a pro-Chinese red diaper baby. Instead of posters of Marx and Lenin, an oversized portrait of the Great Helmsman adorned her bedroom wall.

In 1981, following a failed suicide attempt, Robert Linhart relinquished language; hence, the title of Virginie Linhart’s memoir.

For an Althusser-Lacan protégé to renounce language is an especially fraught event, more akin to a divine curse than a profane occurrence. During the age of structuralism, the paradigm of language was lauded as the universal passkey capable of unlocking the mysteries of culture, politics, and society. The sovereignty of language, or what Lacan referred to as the symbolic realm, is suggested by celebrated book titles of the era: Sartre’s Les Mots (The Words; 1964), Julia Kristeva’s Révolution du langage poétique (Revolution in Poetic Language; 1974), and, lastly, Foucault’s College de France inaugural lecture, L’Ordre du Discours (The Order of Discourse; 1970).

In his seminal Rome Discourse (1953), The Structure and Role of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, Lacan had proclaimed that the unconscious is structured like a language. However, in almost the same breath, he asserted that language was structurally incapable of acceding to the Real. Among structuralists and poststructuralists alike, language, as a paradigm or episteme, functioned essentially as a mechanism of entrapment: try as we might to transcend its strictures, we are unable to surmount the prison house of language as a cultural code that dictates the limits of what can be said and thought.⁴³

According to Gauche Proletarian stalwart (and Lacan’s son-in-law) Jacques-Alain Miller, the idea that reality is essentially a social construct underwrote the Maoists’ delusional political voluntarism. As Miller explains:

All you need to do is have a look at our newspaper, La Cause du Peuple, to see that we had an unhinged relation to the Real. Our slogans had no connection with what was happening ‘on the ground’. When our ‘investigations’ [enquêtes] demonstrated that revolution was not imminent, [Gauche Proletarian leader] Benny Lévy condemned them as ‘defeatist.’ . . . . With the GP, 2 + 2 did not make 4, but 100. There were those among us who believed that we could upend the entire