Conclusion: The ‘Silence of the Left-Wing Intellectuals’

Abstract

Baudrillard was not the only French intellectual to express scepticism about the Socialist electoral triumph. Émile Malet, in Socrate et la rose, goes so far as to assert that the intellectual world from the start manifested remarkably little enthusiasm for Mitterrand’s victory:

On the evening of 10 May, for the Bastille fête… the crowd of militants is a dense one, the firecrackers are joyous, the intellectuals are somewhere else. Before the presidential election, and during the months of the electoral campaign, the reticence of the intellectuals is remarkable… The Socialist Party ‘apparatchiks’ will wait in vain for intellectuals to be reconverted to socialism. The gap between the intrigues of the government and the reflections of the intelligentsia is so wide that it is becoming impossible to work together to manufacture ‘ready-made’ ideas for the masses.¹