Richard Wolin

French intellectuals, the cultural revolution, and the legacy of the 1960s

The wind from the east

Ultimately, what began as an exercise in revolutionary dogmatism was transformed into a Dionysian celebration of cultural pluralism and the right to difference.

The less the normaliens knew about contemporary China, the better it suited their purposes. Cultural Revolutionary China became a projection screen, a Rorschach test, for their innermost radical political hopes and fantasies, which in de Gaulle' s France had been deprived of a real-world outlet. China became the embodiment of a "radiant utopian future." By becoming “Chinese," by assuming new identities as French incarnations of China’s Red Guards, these dissident Althusserians sought to reinvent themselves wholesale. Thereby, they would rid themselves of their guilt both as the progeny of colonialists and more generally, as bourgeois. 

It has often been said, perhaps only half in jest, that May 1968 in France is an "interpretation" in search of an "event," so concertedly have historians, pundits, and politicians struggled to impose intellectual sense on a sequence of events that at every turn seemed to defy tidy conceptual coherence. 

In a celebrated bon mot, de Gaulle, when confronted with Sartre's open defiance, was alleged to have remarked: "On n'arrete pas Voltaire!" (One doesn't arrest Voltaire!). The French president could hardly have paid Sartre a higher compliment.

In the student revolutionaries' febrile political imagination, Cultural Revolutionary China became inseparably fused with the American idyll of the Woodstock Nation. 

It has become fashionable to bemoan the decline of French intellectuals since Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Sartre. Critics often invoke structural changes in the French educational system—which has been democratized and is no longer a training ground for privileged elites—as well as the rise of the mass media. But it is also the case that in France the intellectual vocation has been irreparably tarnished as a result of misalliances with “power,”the phenomenon against which Julien Benda prophetically warned in The Treason of the Intellectuals.

The wind from the east quotes

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