It’s hard to overstate the enthusiasm of French intellectuals for Marxist mentation successful the 1950s and ’60s. If Sartre was the astir important surviving philosopher, Marx was the astir important dormant one. And the École Normale, an instauration filled with young men “overeducated successful the creation of interpretation,” arsenic Derrida enactment it, was a cardinal incubator of Marxist zeal. Newspapers, literate journals, and bookstore shelves teemed with enactment by normaliens staking retired their positions connected Marx, Stalin, the moving class, and the revolution—and attacking anyone who opposed them.
A batch of this enactment is astir unreadable now, the pained efforts of young eggheads twisting themselves into rhetorical knots implicit the motivation conundrums posed by real-world applications of Marxist principles. It was intolerable to contradict that the Soviets’ effort to crook their state into a workers’ paradise had fallen short. The French knew astir immoderate of Stalin’s excesses—the amusement trials, the labour camps, the bloody purges of those who strayed from the enactment line. But for hardcore believers, this didn’t mean that the doctrine undergirding the Soviet experimentation was wrong. Certainly Soviet communism was preferable to the imperialistic capitalism of the United States. (The word antiaméricanisme archetypal appeared successful France successful 1948 and rapidly caught on, reaching a crescendo during the Vietnam War.) “Whatever the quality of today’s Soviet society, the Soviet Union is, by and large, and fixed the equilibrium of power, connected the broadside of those who are struggling against the forms of exploitation we are truthful acquainted with,” declared Les Temps Modernes successful an editorial successful 1950. “The information that Russian communism is decadent does not mean that the people conflict is simply a myth, that ‘free enterprise’ is either imaginable oregon desirable, or, much generally, that the Marxist critique is dated.”
The Marxism they embraced was 1 mostly of their ain making and, arsenic axenic mentation uncontaminated by practice, it endured longer successful France than elsewhere successful the West.
Yet by the clip Derrida arrived astatine the École Normale successful the autumn of 1952, respective of Sartre’s closest friends had either renounced their committedness to communism oregon spoken retired forcefully against it, and Sartre was publically feuding with some Camus and Merleau-Ponty implicit the issue. These rifts were mirrored astatine the École, wherever students argued astir authorities and divided into groups according to their leftist persuasions. Even so, a mostly militant ambiance prevailed, and fewer dared admit to harboring much blimpish views. “Every morning, consecutive aft breakfast, the members of the École’s ‘cell’ would stitchery successful the ‘aquarium’ to work L’Humanité”—the Party newspaper—“and question the champion pages around,” Derrida’s biographer Benoît Peeters writes, adding that connected the time successful March 1953 that Stalin died, “the Communists—many of whom could not adust their tears—forced the École to observe a minute’s silence, portion trying to find retired to whom successful the USSR they could code a telegram of condolence.” Put disconnected by the militants, Derrida opted to articulation a noncommunist leftist group.
The historiographer Tony Judt refers to the “holistic strain successful French styles of thought,” noting the attraction of French intellectuals to theories that emphasized “‘totality’ oregon the absolute” implicit partial oregon small-bore explanations, a inclination helium traced to Descartes and his bequest of “distaste for intelligence doubt.” Marxism was a premier example. “Because Marxism offered a mode of recovering ‘the illusion of full knowledge,’” Judt wrote, “modern French intellectuals were ever apt to beryllium susceptible to its appeal, appropriately packaged.”
The aforesaid could beryllium said astir the entreaty of French mentation decades aboriginal to intellectually insecure American students (like me). With its expansive explanatory ambitions, mentation swept distant doubt, offering successful its spot the certitudes of an all-encompassing system. In the lawsuit of Judt’s Parisian thinkers, the Marxism they embraced was 1 mostly of their ain making and, arsenic axenic mentation uncontaminated by practice, it endured longer successful France than elsewhere successful the West. “In France, the owl of Minerva does not dispersed its wings astatine dusk but astatine mid-morning the adjacent day,” observed 1 historian, paraphrasing Hegel. “For each of France’s stylishness, intelligence and governmental quality arrives late.”
The philosopher Raymond Aron, who had been Sartre’s classmate astatine the École Normale (placing archetypal successful the agrégation the twelvemonth Sartre failed it) was truthful alarmed by the French left’s cultlike clasp of Marx and the Soviet Union—the second arsenic impervious of the former’s prophetic vision—that helium devoted a publication to the subject. As a young prof astatine the University of Cologne successful the 1930s, helium had witnessed Germany’s modulation to totalitarianism, and helium was arsenic appalled by the French intellectuals’ reverence for Stalin arsenic helium was by the Germans for Hitler. For the rubric of his 1955 bestseller, The Opium of the Intellectuals, helium took inspiration from a damning critique by Simone Weil: “Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, successful the lowest consciousness of the word. Like each inferior signifier of the spiritual beingness it has been continually used, to get the apt operation of Marx himself, arsenic the opiate for the people.”
Refusing to beryllium cowed, Sartre responded to Aron with his ain publication connected Marx, the nine-hundred-page Critique of Dialectical Reason, successful 1960. By then, adjacent Sartre had mislaid his enthusiasm for the USSR and had breached with the doctrinaire French communists. (In his view, the Soviets, successful their convulsive suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, had yet crossed the enactment to indefensible.) His purpose was to salvage Marxist mentation from its corrupt exertion down the Iron Curtain, and helium opened the publication with crusading words: “I see Marxism to beryllium the unsurpassable doctrine of our time.” Even so, helium was unwilling to wantonness existentialism, and truthful the publication became an uneasy effort astatine reconciliation: a hugely ambitious but often contorted endeavor to articulation the anxiously escaped quality histrion of existentialist thought with Marx’s determinist presumption of class-based struggle and of past itself. As Sartre poses the problem: “How are we to recognize that Man makes past if astatine the aforesaid clip it is past which makes Him?”
Even arsenic Sartre’s intelligence prima began to dim, and existentialism fell into disrepute, this absorption connected lived acquisition endured, though recast successful ways Sartre mightiness not person recognized oregon approved.
For Sartre, the large regulation of orthodox Marxism was that it had thing to accidental astir individuals. He cited Engels’s statement of radical arsenic wholly formed by their people and its relations to accumulation astatine a peculiar moment—people arsenic products, not agents, of history. “Lacking Napoleon,” Engels insisted, “another antheral would person filled his place.” Not true! Sartre protested. By mode of proof, helium offered the lawsuit of Flaubert. (The publication is peppered with allusions to Flaubert, a writer with whom Sartre was truthful obsessed that helium went connected to give a four-thousand-page psychobiography to the novelist—at his decease successful 1980, helium inactive had 1 measurement to write.) The accepted Marxist model whitethorn explicate wherefore Flaubert, the conflicted lad of a palmy provincial surgeon, wrote naturalistic novels mocking the grandiose aspirations of the agrarian bourgeoisie, Sartre conceded. But it failed to explicate “why Flaubert preferred lit to everything else, nor wherefore helium lived similar an anchorite, nor wherefore helium wrote these books alternatively than those of Duranty oregon the Goncourt brothers.” To reply specified questions, Sartre argued, we needed to see Flaubert’s puerility and the psychodynamics of his household life. Only past were we apt to larn wherefore Flaubert negotiated the tensions of his societal people successful the precise mode that helium did and chose lit arsenic his vocation—his “project,” to usage Sartre’s term.
In this way, Critique of Dialectical Reason attempts an intolerable balancing act, straining to admit Marx’s mechanistic model—dialectical materialism—on making america who we are portion insisting connected the fine-grained particulars of lived experience, each commingling to motivate and constrain america successful our pursuit of freedom, our chosen “projects.” The publication meant a large woody to Sartre—he said it was the philosophical enactment for which helium wanted to beryllium remembered. He wrote it successful haste, astatine the tallness of the Algerian War, propelled by irritation with Aron, animus toward the French Communist Party, and up to 20 pills of Corydrane, an amphetamine, per day. Unfortunately, the effects of this high-pressure, drugged show show. At 1 point, Sartre near his voluminous manuscript— hundreds of handwritten pages—on a windowsill, wherever it was caught by the upwind and scattered astir the room. As Fredric Jameson, who wrote his dissertation connected Sartre and became a starring Marxist taste professional astatine Duke, tells the story, it took Sartre’s friends astir a week to reassemble the pages successful the due order. The publication is that challenging—turgid, repetitious, and laced with method jargon.
This is simply a shame, and not lone due to the fact that the book’s benignant obscures its value arsenic the astir high-profile effort by that day to wed what were past the 2 astir important currents of French philosophy. It’s a shame due to the fact that Sartre’s lasting publication to the field, beyond existentialism itself, was stylistic. Moving fluidly among genres—from novels and plays to essays, and adjacent a fistful of screenplays—he showed that doctrine could beryllium literate and lit philosophical. What his works shared was an attraction to the mundane beingness of mean people, which helium insisted should beryllium astatine the halfway of philosophical endeavor. Even arsenic Sartre’s intelligence prima began to dim, and existentialism fell into disrepute, this absorption connected lived acquisition endured, though recast successful ways Sartre mightiness not person recognized oregon approved.
____________________________
From The Frenchmen: Or, My Life successful Theory by Emily Eakin. Copyright © 2026. Available from Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a part of Penguin Random House, LLC.
English (US) ·