Disillusionment and the Role of the Intellectual in France

Abstract

Those who expected May 1981 to be a ‘second coming’ of May 1968 were bound to be disappointed. The worldwide recession had led to a much harsher economic climate (and French intellectuals, however much the Marxists among them profess the determination of the economic in the last instance, have never as a group been particularly strong on economics); the heterogeneity of the social and political groupings that had combined to bring Mitterrand to power, unlike that of the movements active in May, was conducive to realpolitik rather than revolution; and all manner of problems to do with the complexity of French institutional structures presented themselves to the new regime in a way that could not simply be ignored. These factors affected the manner in which all sections of society judged the Socialist government, but there were others more specifically relevant to the French intelligentsia.