Maoism and the French sixties
| Author | Michael Scott Christofferson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885113477051 |
| Published date | 01 April 2013 |
| Date | 01 April 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Review articles |
Review article
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
12(2) 195–204
! The Author(s) 2013
Maoism and the French
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sixties
DOI: 10.1177/1474885113477051
ept.sagepub.com
Michael Scott Christofferson
Adelphi University, USA
Richard Wolin The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural
Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2010.
Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East seeks to explain how the French 1960s,
which saw an upsurge in revolutionary politics in 1968, ended up democratizing
France by regenerating its civil society and liberating the country from the dom-
ination of technocracy in the early Fifth Republic. Focusing on Maoism – mainly
that of the Gauche prole´tarienne (henceforth GP) – and intellectuals, Wolin argues
that the Maoist notion of cultural revolution gradually shifted, via a ‘constructive
political learning process’ (p. 4), from an emphasis on a revolutionary seizure of
power to a focus on democratic change in the course of the late 1960s and early
1970s. It thereby offered a generation ‘an exit strategy to escape from the strait-
jacket of orthodox Marxism’ (p. 20). Although Wolin admits that Maoism ‘cannot
take sole credit’ (p. xii) for this change, he clearly gives it the lion’s share.
Unfortunately, The Wind from the East offers little that is new. Although its
author attributes more importance to Maoism than previous scholars, its thesis is
old hat. It echoes the narrative of Ge´ne´ration, the journalistic account by Herve´
Hamon and Patrick Rotman published over twenty years ago.1 More recently,
Julian Bourg’s From Revolution to Ethics examined many of the same actors and
events in a history that exceeds The Wind from the East in its subtlety, depth of
research, and sophistication, while concluding similarly that 1968 and its aftermath
democratized France.2 The Wind from the East also disappoints with the relative
shallowness of its research. Scholars of the period will find little new information in
it because it relies largely on the existing secondary literature, is based on little or
no archival research, and does not delve deeply into the published primary sources
on most issues. There is, as can be seen by comparing Wolin’s footnotes and
bibliography to that of Bourg’s book or to a readily available bibliography on
Corresponding author:
Michael Scott Christofferson, Department of History, Adelphi University, 1 South Ave., Garden City, NY
11530, USA.
Email: mchristofferson@adelphi.edu
196
European Journal of Political Theory 12(2)
the subject,3 much more that could have been done with the topic. Most notably,
the archives of the GP and of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (henceforth
GIP) are available for researchers, but neither was used by Wolin, despite the fact
that these two groups are central to his argument.
The Wind from the East is divided into two parts. The first section narrates, in
parallel, the history of 1968 – from its origins thought its and aftermath – on the
one hand, and French Maoism on the other. The second section focuses on intel-
lectuals, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and those (notably Philippe
Sollers and Julia Kristeva) associated with the journal Tel quel, and concludes with
an analysis of the legacy of 1968 and French Maoism. Between the two sections is a
brief chapter ‘On the Sectarian Maoism of Alain Badiou’.
Wolin’s account of the French sixties is a breezy rehash of the period’s classic
social and political commentary that fails to take most recent scholarship into
account. The result is Michel Crozier’s ‘blocked society’ spiced up with the revi-
sionist Marxist and marxisant analyses of Alain Touraine, Serge Mallet, Henri
Lefebvre, the Situationists, and Socialisme ou Barbarie. In this view, before 1968
French society had been transformed into a consumer society in which the ‘epicen-
ter of alienation’ had shifted from the workplace to the ‘sphere of circulation,’ such
that ‘enhanced material satisfaction translated into a diffuse yet undeniable exist-
ential queasiness’ (pp. 49, 55). The French ran up against the paternalistic Gaullist
technocratic political system incapable of reforming itself to accommodate the era’s
rapid socio-cultural change. This analysis is so broad and sweeping, so dependent
on the lieux communs of the era’s social criticism, that it hard to know where to
begin addressing it. Perhaps it suffices to say that for many among the menu peuple
‘enhanced material satisfaction’ was more a dream than a reality and that ‘exist-
ential queasiness’ was largely reserved for the consumers of Beauvoir, Perec, and
Godard. The principal problem of the Gaullist state was not that it was tradition-
alistic (p. 50) or atavistic (pp. 45, 52) as Wolin suggests. It was capable of reform
such as the Loi Neuwirth of 1967, which liberalized contraception. Rather, it suf-
fered from the fact that key reforms, such as the Fouchet reform of higher educa-
tion, were ill-conceived and that it was of two minds when it came to liberalization.
Thus, for example, Dean Grappin tolerated the flaunting of dorm visitation rules at
Nanterre, but the Minister of Education refused to bring the written regulations in
line with practice – effectively a policy of half-way measures that only fueled stu-
dent discontent.4 Likewise, during May 1968 the regime’s vacillation between
repression and concessions to the students only fanned the flames of protest.
May was, for Wolin, both a ‘libidinal’ and a ‘self-limiting’ revolution, a seeming
contradiction of which Wolin might have made better sense by borrowing from
Bourg’s analysis of May’s antinomianism.5 Unfortunately, here too Wolin eschews
the most recent scholarship in favor of old standbys. Thus, his discussion of work-
ers’ motivations during the strike wave of May–June 1968 is based largely on Serge
Mallet’s essays (p. 98) while his analysis of the French Communist Party’s motives
in the Grenelle Accords negotiations rehashes the Cohn-Bendit brothers’ Obsolete
Communism (p. 266).6 Ignoring the extensive scholarship on workers in 1968,
Wolin suggests, citing a Situationist analysis from the period,7 that worker–student
Christofferson
197
action committees played a key role in sparking the strike wave and asserts that
workers abandoned ‘ineffectual union representation’ during the strikes (p. 98).
Both claims are vast simplifications that are more wrong than...
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