Marxism was developed as a theory of history and society by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels during the mid-19th-c. It has usually been associated with radical movements, especially Communist, but exists also as an intellectual framework distinct from them.
Marx lived in Paris during the formative years 1843-5. He and Engels saw France as a model of modern political development and wrote influential analyses of French history, especially the periods 1848-51 and 1870-1. Their political theory drew on Rousseau and 19th-c. French socialists, though in a famous polemic, Misère de la philosophie (1847), Marx criticized Proudhon for underestimating the importance of economic issues and workers' organizations.
Marx's daughters, Laura and Jenny, and their French husbands, respectively Paul Lafargue and Charles Longuet, helped to spread his ideas in France, where they were little known before the 1880s. With Jules Guesde, Benoît Malon, and others, they coined the term ‘Marxism’ and propagated a simple economic determinism, which prompted Marx's irritated comment that, in this sense, he was not himself a ‘Marxist’. Other socialists, notably Jean Jaurès, were attracted to Marx's dialectical method, adapted from Hegel. Georges Sorel also aroused interest in Marx's philosophy. But with the unification of the French Socialist movement in 1905, theoretical discussions were largely abandoned as divisive. After World War I the movement split into the Proudhonist Socialists under Léon Blum, and the Communists, who affiliated to the Moscow-based Third International [see Socialism And Communism]. During the 1920s the Socialists promoted translations of Marx's philosophical writings, while the Communists promoted Lenin, Engels, and Marx's political works.
After a sporadic and often marginal existence in France, Marxism emerged in the 1930s as a dynamic movement which had a formative influence on almost all the major writers of the second half of the century. The prestige of the Soviet Union and the role of the French Communist Party (PCF) were contributing factors, but Marxism also appealed as a more attractive philosophy than the main alternatives. During the Popular Front period many intellectuals welcomed the combination of theory with practical action, confirming a notion of the committed intellectual which went back to the Dreyfus Affair. Henri Lefebvre's dialectical humanism, Paul Nizan's caustic materialism, Auguste Cornu's careful Marxian scholarship, and Georges Politzer's polemical rationalism were all strands of a flourishing pre-war Marxist intellectual culture.
Several Marxist intellectuals were killed during World War II. However, the role of the Soviet Union and the PCF ensured a ready audience for Marxist ideas at the Liberation. Among their proponents were established figures in literature (Aragon, Éluard), art (Picasso, Léger), science (Joliot-Curie, Langevin, Wallon), history (Georges Lefebvre, Soboul), and other intellectual spheres. A flood of young intellectuals joined the PCF, eager to learn. Catholics and Existentialists incorporated Marxist insights into their own thinking, and initiated promising dialogues with young Marxist thinkers like Pierre Hervé, Roger Garaudy, Henri Lefebvre, and Jean-Toussaint Desanti. However, with the hardening polarizations of the Cold War, the PCF retrenched behind a dogmatic Stalinism, imposed from Moscow by Andrey Zhdanov and from Paris by Laurent Casanova. There followed a flow of self-criticisms, and several departures among browbeaten intellectuals.
By the end of 1956 international and domestic crises had helped to divide French Marxism into many divergent currents. The PCF slowly abandoned attempts to impose an orthodox Marxism-Leninism on its members, and within the party conflicting new interpretations flourished. One grouping, led by Garaudy and Aragon, looked towards Italian conceptions and proposed a neo-Hegelian Marxism as a broadly inclusive humanist perspective, open to dialogue with other philosophical and religious doctrines and potentially converging with them. Another grouping, led by Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure, looked towards Mao Tse-tung's China and argued for a radical break with Hegelian and humanist ideological illusions, to produce a rigorous scientific Marxist-Leninist theory. This aggressively original approach was influential with many young philosophers and social scientists, including Nicos Poulantzas, Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, and Georges Labica. Not all Althusserians were Communists, and, of those who were, most either left or were excluded from the party during the 1970s, as was Garaudy. Between these hostile camps, Lucien Sève led the attempt to construct a non-dogmatic dialectical Marxism, supported by Solange Mercier-Josa, who reappropriated Hegelian concepts, and André Tosel, who looked rather to Gramsci.
Outside the PCF many forms of Marxism sprang up from the 1950s onwards, often animated by ex-Communists or by the small but active Trotskyist groups. Many Marxists were grouped round reviews like Socialisme ou barbarie (1949-65) and Arguments (1956-63), including Pierre Naville, Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, Pierre Fougeyrollas, Cornélius Castoriadis, Alain Touraine, Serge Mallet, Kostas Axelos, and François Chatelet. They developed critiques of Stalinist Communism and, within a broadly humanist framework, explored the limits of notions such as history, philosophy, social class, and the state. They also examined the possibilities of combining Marxism with other disciplines, including psychoanalysis, linguistic theory, or structural anthropology, and with such conceptions as the End of History and the End of Philosophy.
Jean-Paul Sartre moved towards Marxism in the mid-1950s, declaring that it was the conceptual horizon of the age and attempting to reconcile his earlier Existentialism with it in his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960). Joined by Simone de Beauvoir, he gravitated towards the vociferous Maoist groups, though other Existentialists, like Merleau-Ponty and Gorz, found different accommodations with Marxism. Leading Structuralists, including Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, absorbed elements of Marxism. Many of the Post-Structuralists and Postmodernists were marked by it, though they often chose subsequently to reject it. And it formed a major, if at times uncomfortable, part of feminist and environmental theory.
In the decade after May 1968 Marxism achieved something close to a hegemonic position in French intellectual life. However, in the late 1970s and 1980s the political and philosophical tide turned against it. The crisis of Soviet-style Communism and the critique of overarching world-views or Master Narratives have reversed the conditions which first projected Marxism to popularity in the 1930s and now pose the question of how far and in what forms it will survive.
[Michael Kelly]
Bibliography
- M. Poster, Existential Marxism (1975)
- M. Kelly, Modern French Marxism (1982)
- T. Judt, Marxism and the French Left (1986)
