Yet I have no regrets whatsoever for the basic motivations which led so many French radical intellectuals to side with Mao-ism in the turbulent 1970s. Some of the trendy Maoists may have been concerned most of all with the image of China they were propagating for their own satisfaction and prestige. Yet others, as I can testify, had more sincere and far-reaching motivations. We took seriously the 'mass line', in contrast to politics set at the top. People's communes appealed all the more to us, since uncontrolled urban growth had become a cornerstone of the French Fifth Republic's overall economic strategies. "To rely on one's own strength,' zili gengsheng, made sense to us, against the prevailing trends towards cultural banalisation of French daily life on the American model. 'Bombard the headquarters' was a slogan well-received among those who, after the failure of the May '68 movement, had experienced the backlash of the established political parties regaining their monopoly over French political life. We were certainly wrong in our simplified approach to the complex realities of Chinese politics and Chinese society. But looking at it from a distance, we were not necessarily wrong in advocating Maoist analyses and Maoist thinking so as to approach critically what we probably knew better than China, namely France itself.
The major intellectual encounter between China and France in the eighteenth century belongs to the past; the solitary French sinophiles of the nineteenth century have remained marginal in French literary history, and the Maoist love affair of the 1960s and early 1970s has ended pathetically, as most love affairs do. What next? One should perhaps consider, by way of conclusion, the relevance China may still have, in relation to the French intellectual crisis of the 1980s.
To describe present-day France in terms of an intellectual crisis may just be too easy, for genuine intellectual life is by nature a crisis in itself, a clash between the world of ideas and the real world, a clash between the old and the new. Every generation is involved in such crises. But the problems French intellectuals are facing in the 1980s go much deeper and much further, they encompass our very model of development all over the world, namely modernity. The present-day French intellectual crisis accordingly develops at two distinct levels. It still concerns French intellectuals and their role in their own society. But our French crisis is also,
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Yet I have no regrets whatsoever for the basic motivations which led so many French radical intellectuals to side with Mao- ism in the turbulent 1970s. Some of the trendy Maoists may have been concerned most of all with the image of China they were propagating for their own satisfaction and prestige. Yet others, as I can testify, had more sincere and far-reaching motivations. We took seriously the 'mass line', in contrast to politics set at the top. People's communes appealed all the more to us, since uncon- trolled urban growth had become a cornerstone of the French Fifth Republic's overall economic strategies. "To rely on one's own strength,' zili gengsheng, made sense to us, against the pre- vailing trends towards cultural banalisation of French daily life on the American model. 'Bombard the headquarters' was a slogan well-received among those who, after the failure of the May '68 movement, had experienced the backlash of the established politi- cal parties regaining their monopoly over French political life. We were certainly wrong in our simplified approach to the complex realities of Chinese politics and Chinese society. But looking at it from a distance, we were not necessarily wrong in advocating Maoist analyses and Maoist thinking so as to approach critically what we probably knew better than China, namely France itself.
The major intellectual encounter between China and France in the eighteenth century belongs to the past; the solitary French sinophiles of the nineteenth century have remained marginal in French literary history, and the Maoist love affair of the 1960s and early 1970s has ended pathetically, as most love affairs do. What next? One should perhaps consider, by way of conclusion, the relevance China may still have, in relation to the French intellec- tual crisis of the 1980s.
To describe present-day France in terms of an intellectual crisis may just be too easy, for genuine intellectual life is by nature a crisis in itself, a clash between the world of ideas and the real world, a clash between the old and the new. Every generation is involved in such crises. But the problems French intellectuals are facing in the 1980s go much deeper and much further, they encom- pass our very model of development all over the world, namely modernity. The present-day French intellectual crisis accordingly develops at two distinct levels. It still concerns French intellectu- als and their role in their own society. But our French crisis is also,
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