5 - Solidarity, Human Rights, and Anti-Totalitarianism in France

Summary

This chapter is about the broad wave of support which the repression of Poland’s Solidarity trade union in December 1981 triggeredin France. It explains this outpouring of sympathy and political support by focusing on an alliance of intellectuals, including philosophers Michel Foucault and Claude Lefort, and the trade union CFDT and reconstructs the human rights language of these groups. This chapter demonstrates that French solidarité avec Solidarnosc was the culmination of almost a decade of French fascination with dissident activism in the Soviet bloc, a development in the course of which French intellectuals came to endorse the dissidents' focus on human rights. This chapter also shows that what seemed like a fascination with events in Eastern Europe was, in fact, enmeshed in intellectual and political debates on the French Left. Endorsing the dissidents' struggle allowed members of France's non-Communist and anti-etatist French Left to set themselves off from the two dominant forces in French Left-wing politics: the Communist party and the Socialists. In analyzing these debates, this chapter reconstructs the French Left's specific human rights language which did not focus on individual liberty but aimed at empowering people to join forces and shape their collective affairs through social self-organization.