Mao à la Française

By David Gress

France 1968: The time and the place have attained iconic status as symbols of a grand turning point in contemporary history. To admirers, the student strike in May of that year—a strike soon joined by millions of French workers, essentially shutting down an entire country for two weeks—still stands for liberation, peace, anti-imperialism and the freeing of intellectual life from subservience to the interests of the military-industrial complex. But for critics, those fine thoughts are a sham, camouflaging a disastrous collapse of standards, culture, civility and reason at every level of society. Instead of promoting free inquiry, the short-lived revolt was stained by Marxist intolerance and censorship. Instead of fostering incisive political debate, the protesters spewed paranoid rhetoric and threats of violence. To such critics, France 1968 marked not a new dawn but a descent of darkness.

Bruno Barbey / Magnum Photos

Existentialist writer-philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir meet the press in Paris after the Maoist newspaper Sartre edited was banned by the French government in 1970.

Given the countless books written about the tumultuous events of the late 1960s and early 1970s in France—and about similar eruptions elsewhere in the West—it would seem that there are no new angles to discover or interpretations to propound about the era. Yet the intellectual historian Richard Wolin has found one—and it is both startling and compelling.

"The Wind From the East" is a vivid and detailed chronicle of French culture and politics during, roughly, the decade 1962-72, but Mr. Wolin's primary focus is on the influential French thinkers who adopted Maoism, or what they thought was Maoism, in the late '60s. The group included the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, historian-provocateur Michel Foucault, novelist Philippe Sollers, feminist Julia Kristeva and a handful of others. In true French style, they formed a mutually supporting, self-consciously elitist clique, using their typewriters and media appearances to set the terms of public debate with surprising power and efficiency.

Mr. Wolin tries to show, with considerable success, that these intellectuals discovered Maoism as a consequence not of studying China in any depth but of needing to find a way out of their own cultural impasse—that is, for indigenous French reasons. This is only the first of the two paradoxes to which his researches have led Mr. Wolin. The French cultural leaders he writes about really thought they were learning from China. Mr. Wolin quotes the film director Jean-Luc Godard saying in 1967 that "everywhere people are speaking about China" and in the next breath demonstrating his utter ignorance of China and Maoism by saying that "emblematic of the Cultural Revolution is Youth: the moral and scientific quest, free from prejudices."

The Chinese Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 and lasted until Mao's death in 1976 was, as Mr. Wolin discreetly points out, very far from honoring "the moral and scientific quest, free from prejudices." The "revolution" was actually Mao's bid to bolster his own dictatorial power by mobilizing hordes of ignorant and barbarous youth against all that he designated as evil and reactionary. Anyone with the faintest intellectual disposition—teachers, writers, artists, even party officials—was vulnerable to being denounced as a bourgeois threat to China's glorious communist future. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps more, were killed, and millions more deprived of work. Cultural life was desolated, uncounted works of art destroyed. Mao used his Red Guard units of killers and torturers to reduce the country to chaos; only his iron fist, with the help of those same Red Guards, could quell the anarchy.

The Wind From the East

By Richard Wolin
Princeton, 391 pages, $35

Click to read an excerpt from the book.

The horrors of the Cultural Revolution were not a secret in the West. But newly minted French Maoists in the late 1960s regarded criticism of China as imperialist slander. Mr. Wolin argues that the French Maoists' invincible ignorance about real Maoism is what allowed them to develop a genuinely libertarian philosophy. "Ultimately, what began as an exercise in revolutionary dogmatism was transformed into a Dionysian celebration of cultural pluralism and the right to difference."

This is the second paradox that Mr. Wolin sees. Because these intellectual rebels invented a Maoism to suit their own romantic vision, a Maoism very much in the mold of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, their statements and actions did not lead to brutal violence but rather to a revival of civil society that, Mr. Wolin thinks, has had beneficial repercussions. "One of the May movement's enduring legacies," he writes, "has been the regeneration of French associational life, spurring a reversal of France's long-standing heritage of political centralization."

But Mr. Wolin, to his credit, does not gloss over the French Maoists' flirtation with violence, which might have taken social unrest in a decidedly non-Dionysian direction. Jean-Paul Sartre comes off looking especially disgraceful in this respect. The aim of the Maoist newspaper he edited, La Cause du Peuple, Sartre said, was "to show that the violence inflicted on the people in the name of alleged economic imperatives" and the "total violence" that workers "endure in factories," is "in reality a form of slavery." The only way to counter such violence, Sartre insisted, was with "popular violence." Mr. Wolin adds: "In Sartre's eyes, revolutionary violence was a case of défense légitime, or justifiable homicide."

In Sartre's arguments for justifiable homicide as a political act Mr. Wolin sees "Robespierre's ghost." Blessedly, the French Maoists—Sartre's posturing aside—settled for erecting a citadel of Rousseauian romanticism on the supposed foundation of Maoism; they didn't repeat the historical tragedy that saw Rousseau's thinking about natural equality perverted by the French Revolution and the Terror.

As for the influence of Maoism on these latter-day French revolutionaries, the pensées of Mao Zedong—pored over by educated Frenchmen for hours on end—were little more than a concatenation of slogans and grandiose claims often stunning in their banality. "The wind from the East has triumphed over the wind from the West"—the Mao morsel that gives the book its title—sounds ridiculous until you remember that it was just this sort of shibboleth that inspired mass murder.

To Mr. Wolin, the era of French Maoism is a story with a happy result—in the proliferation of feminism, gay liberation, anti-globalization protests and a general resistance to state authority. Beloved though these movements may be by leftists around the world, it has never been clear how, precisely, they serve democracy or liberty in any serious sense. One longs for Alexis de Tocqueville to have been among those who encountered Sartre on a Parisian sidewalk handing out copies of La Cause du Peuple so that we might have an interpretation of French Maoism from this sage of democracy.

Movements inspired by sentimental and seemingly harmless emotionalism are double-edged swords. Their adherents see themselves as justified and as true representatives of widespread interests. But these adherents frequently end up self-righteous, angry and resentful of a world that refuses to bend to their will. Rousseau posited a divide between a true, good human nature and a human nature deformed by society. But since men make society, the good human nature outside society is an illusion, as are all the various "liberations" propounded by the French Maoists and by their political heirs.

But even if you don't share Mr. Wolin's rosy view of France in 1968 and its legacy, "The Wind From the East" must be regarded as a monument of committed scholarship. It is also a fascinating chronicle of people who, however ludicrous they may seem at times, did on occasion think and act with profound seriousness. For that reason the book is a valuable addition to the literature of the era.