The Wind From the East
The Wind From the East

Author: Richard Wolin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-11-14

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0691178232

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How Maoism captured the imagination of French intellectuals during the 1960s Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who’s who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China’s Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life. Wolin’s riveting narrative reveals that Maoism’s allure among France’s best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.

Three French Writers and the Great War
Three French Writers and the Great War

Author: Frank Field

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-10-14

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0521082781

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The impact of the First World War on European society and the rise of Communism and Fascism are important subjects that concern all students of recent history. The object of this book is to study these themes through the careers of three French writers: Henri Barbusse, Drieu la Rochelle and Georges Bernanos. Each of these writers served in the war and was subsequently attracted towards Communism or Fascism. Barbusse first achieved fame through his anti-war novel Le Feu, but in the years after 1918 he made a new career for himself as a rallying point for Communist sympathizers amongst the French intellectuals. After becoming one of the most intelligent and sophisticated advocates of Fascism in the 1930s, Drieu la Rochelle opted for a policy of collaboration with the Germans in 1940 and committed suicide in 1945. Bernanos moved to a position very close to Fascism in the 1930s, but his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, experiences that he so memorably described in Les grands cimeliires sous la lune, made him devote the remaining years of his life to an attack on all forms of totalitarianism.

Intellectuals and the French Communist Party
Intellectuals and the French Communist Party

Author: Sudhir Hazareesingh

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780198278702

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This work examines the emergence and subsequent demise of intellectual identification with the French Communist Party, arguing that after 1978, political conflicts between the Communist leadership and party intellectuals led to an erosion of support.