Intellectuals against the Left: The Case of France

Abstract

The French intellectual Left has undergone a startling conversion experience. Socialism, Marxism and virtually all other post-enlightenment visions of human liberation through political struggle remained prominent in French intellectual life until very recently, far longer, in fact, than in almost any other advanced capitalist society. Yet by the time of the 1989 Bicentenaire of the French Revolution, concepts like class conflict and revolution had completely vanished from Left political and intellectual discourses. In Part I we will review the actual story of the changing ideas of the French Left intelligentsia. In Part II we will try to connect these trajectories to underlying social and political trends. Here we will touch the heart of the story. Economic modernization brought substantial change to France's class structure, including, most importantly, a vast expansion in new middle strata. France's official Left, alas, proved quite incapable of adapting its own visions in ways which would have attracted critical Left-leaning intellectual segments of these strata. What happened was that the intelligentsia declared its theoretical independence from the official Left, with disastrous consequences for the Left itself.