14 - French Marxism – existentialism to structuralism

Summary

Introduction

In its nineteenth-century heyday, Marxism was an avowedly internationalist doctrine promising universal human emancipation; its twentieth-century fate, though, was to splinter under the pressure of more local concerns, and to be forced into restrictive national boundaries. In the East, Marxism became an ideology of the state; in the West, it remained outside the portals of state power, in some countries relegated to the margins of public life, in others achieving a certain cultural centrality. In France, the latter was emphatically the case.

Of all these national forms taken by Marxism in the West, the French species developed comparatively late. It came to prominence after 1945 – almost three decades after the wave of revolutionary upheaval had swept other parts of Europe. Yet after the end of the Second World War, France – or more precisely, Paris – almost overnight established itself as the most important forging house for Western ideas of revolution. The theories and ideas that emanated from the French capital gained a spectacular eminence in Marxist thought across the globe, and provoked developments that took Marxism into areas quite remote from its founding preoccupations. The history of this intellectual episode is, therefore, a vital and vivid fragment of the history of twentieth-century radical thought.