It is difficult to underestimate the enthusiasm of French intellectuals for Marxist theory in the 1950s and 60s. If Sartre was the most important living philosopher, Marx was the most important dead philosopher. And the École Normale, an institution full of youth “overeducated in the art of interpretation”, as Derrida put it, was a central incubator of Marxist fervor. Newspapers, literary magazines, and bookstore shelves were filled with works common man Taking positions on Marx, Stalin, the working class, and revolution, and attacking anyone who opposed them.
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Much of this work is now almost unreadable, the painstaking efforts of young Anders entangling themselves in rhetorical knots over the moral puzzles posed by real-world applications of Marxist principles. It was impossible to deny that the Soviet Union’s attempt to turn its country into a workers’ paradise had failed. The French knew about some of Stalin’s excesses – show trials, labor camps, bloody purges of those who strayed from the party line. But for staunch believers, this did not mean that the philosophy behind the Soviet experiment was wrong. Certainly Soviet communism was better than the imperialist capitalism of the United States. (Word anti-Americanism First appeared in France in 1948 and rapidly reached a peak during the Vietnam War.) “Whatever the nature of Soviet society today, the Soviet Union, on the whole, and the balance of power are in favor of those who are struggling against the forms of exploitation with which we are familiar,” declared. Les Temps Modernes In an editorial in 1950. “The fact that Russian communism is decadent does not mean that class struggle is a myth, that ‘free enterprise’ is either possible or desirable, or, more generally, that the Marxist critique is outdated.”
The Marxism he adopted was largely his own creation and, as a pure theory untainted by practice, it endured longer in France than elsewhere in the West.
Yet by the time Derrida arrived at the École Normale in the fall of 1952, many of Sartre’s close friends had either abandoned their commitment to communism or spoke out vehemently against it, and Sartre was publicly feuding with both Camus and Merleau-Ponty on the issue. These differences were reflected in the École, where students debated about politics and divided into groups according to their leftist views. Nevertheless, a generally militant atmosphere persisted, and few dared to admit to holding more conservative views. “Every morning, immediately after breakfast, the members of the ‘cell’ of the École gathered inaquarium‘to read L’Humanite“Party newspapers—” and turn the best pages here and there,” writes Derrida’s biographer Benoît Peeters, adding that on the day Stalin died in March 1953, “communists—many of whom could not dry their tears—forced the École to observe a minute of silence while they tried to figure out to whom in the USSR they could send a message of condolence.” Militants Disappointed by the Communist Party of India, Derrida chose to join a non-communist leftist group.
Historian Tony Judt has noted an “overall tension in French styles of thought”, noting the attraction of French intellectuals towards theories that emphasize “‘wholeness’ or the absolute” over partial or truncated interpretations, a tendency he saw as a legacy of Descartes and his “distaste for intellectual skepticism”. Marxism was a prime example of this. “Because Marxism offered a way to overcome the ‘illusion of perfect knowledge’,” Judd wrote, “modern French intellectuals were always likely to be sensitive to its appeal, appropriately packaged.”
The same can be said about the appeal of French theory to intellectually insecure American students (like me) decades later. With its grand explanatory ambitions, the theory removed doubt, and in its place offered the certainty of an all-embracing system. In the case of Judt’s Paris thinkers, the Marxism they adopted was largely of their own making and, as pure theory untainted by practice, it persisted longer in France than elsewhere in the West. Paraphrasing Hegel, one historian said, “In France, the owl of Minerva spreads its wings not in the evening but in the early morning of the next day.” “Despite all the stylishness of France, intellectual and political news comes late.”
Philosopher Raymond Aron, who was Sartre’s classmate at the École Normale (ranked first) aggregation (the year it failed) Sartre became so concerned by the French left’s cult-like embrace of Marx and the Soviet Union – as proof of the former’s apocalyptic vision – that he devoted a book to the subject. As a young professor at the University of Cologne in the 1930s, he had witnessed Germany’s transition to totalitarianism, and he was as astonished by the reverence French intellectuals had for Stalin as he had been the reverence the Germans had for Hitler. As for the title of his 1955 bestseller, opium of intellectualsHe took inspiration from a serious criticism of Simon Weil: “Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of religious life, it has been constantly used as an opium for the people, to borrow Marx’s apt phrase.”
Refusing to be intimidated, Sartre responded to Aron with his nine hundred page book on Marx. criticism of dialectical logicIn 1960. By then, Sartre had also lost his enthusiasm for the USSR and broke with principled French communists. (In his view, in their violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Soviets had finally crossed the inevitable line.) His aim was to rescue Marxist theory from its corrupt application behind the Iron Curtain, and he began the book with the inspiring words: “I consider Marxism to be the unsurpassed philosophy of our time.” Still, he was unwilling to abandon existentialism, and so the book became an uneasy attempt at reconciliation: a highly ambitious but often distorted attempt to link the curiously free human actor of existential thought with Marx’s fatalistic view of class-based conflict and history. As Sartre posed the problem: “How are we to understand that man makes history, while at the same time history itself makes him?”
Even as Sartre’s intellectual star began to dim, and existentialism fell into disrepute, this focus on lived experience persisted, although it was reorganized in ways that Sartre would not have recognized or approved.
For Sartre, the greatest limitation of orthodox Marxism was that it had nothing to say about individuals. He cites Engels’ description of people as being formed entirely by their class and its relationship to production at a particular moment – people are products of history, not agents. “Short of Napoleon,” Engels insisted, “someone else could fill his place.” Not true! Sartre protested. As evidence he presented the case of Flaubert. (The book is full of allusions to Flaubert, a writer with whom Sartre was so enamored that he devoted a four-thousand-page autobiography to the novelist – after his death in 1980, he still had a volume to write.) A traditional Marxist framework can explain why Flaubert, the conflicted son of a successful provincial surgeon, wrote naturalist novels mocking the grandiose aspirations of Sartre, a rural capitalist. Agreed. But it fails to explain “why Flaubert gave literature priority over everything else, nor why he lived like an anchorite, nor why he wrote in Rather than the books of Duranty or the Goncourt brothers.” To answer such questions, Sartre argued, we need to consider Flaubert’s childhood and the psychodynamics of his family life. Only then were we likely to know why Flaubert negotiated the tensions of his social class in precisely the right way and chose literature as his vocation – his “project”, to use Sartre’s term.
In this way, criticism of dialectical logic Attempts an impossible balancing act, pushing us to accept Marx’s mechanistic model – dialectical materialism – that makes us who we are, while emphasizing the nuanced details of lived experience that come to inspire and constrain us in our pursuit of freedom, our chosen “projects.” This book meant a lot to Sartre – he said it was the philosophical work for which he wanted to be remembered. He wrote it hastily, at the height of the Algerian War, fueled by irritation with Aron, hostility towards the French Communist Party, and up to twenty tablets of Coridren, an amphetamine, per day. Unfortunately, the effects of this high-pressure, heady performance show. At one point, Sartre left his massive manuscript – hundreds of handwritten pages – on a windowsill, where it was caught by the wind and scattered across the room. As Fredric Jameson, who wrote his dissertation on Sartre and became a leading Marxist cultural critic at Duke, tells the story, it took Sartre’s friends about a week to reassemble the pages into the proper order. The book is equally challenging – sharp, repetitive and full of technical jargon.
This is a shame, and not only because the book’s style obscures its significance as the most high-profile attempt to marry the two most important streams of French philosophy at the time. This is a shame because beyond existentialism, Sartre’s lasting contribution to the field was stylistic. Moving effortlessly between genres – from novels and plays to essays and even some screenplays – he showed that philosophy could be literary and literature could be philosophical. His works focused on the everyday lives of ordinary people, which he insisted should be at the center of philosophical endeavor. Even as Sartre’s intellectual star began to dim, and existentialism fell into disrepute, this focus on lived experience persisted, although it was reorganized in ways that Sartre would not have recognized or approved.
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From The Frenchman: Or, My Life in Theory By Emily Akin. Copyright © 2026. Available from Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
