From the Wretched of the Earth to the Defe ce of the West: An Essay on Left Disenchantment in France

Abstract

Just over a decade ago, the French Left was full of enthusiasm about the Third World. Progressive intellectuals believed that the Third World's struggle against imperialism and neo-colonialism was a world-wide struggle and that its liberation would signal the world revolution. The 'proletarian nations' which had for so long been excluded from a history that went against them, had now entered history in spectacular fashion and taken the torch from the 'bourgeoisified' working classes of the industrialized world, from classes which had been seduced by the delights of 'consumer society' and betrayed their mission of emancipation. According to the self-styled Marxist theoreticians of the Latin Quarter, the epicentre of political revolution had shifted from Europe to the 'storm zone' and it would not be long before a tidal wave would flood the Old World and sweep away a system of exploitation which had had its day. Major feats of arms appeared to justify this prophetic messianism: Dien Bien Phu, the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, the triumphal entry of the barbudos of the Sierra Maestra into Havana. An incandescently lyrical and militant literature set alight the imagination of French academics and journalists and artists of the French Left. The writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara and Mao Tse Tung were sparks starting prairie fires in the small world of Parisian publishing and journalism; Sartre's preface to The Wretched of the Earth is a typical example.