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He contended that for the colonized to kill Europeans was an essential act of political selfaffirmation. Yet, by virtue of his refusal to distinguish between civilians 44 chapter 2 and combatants, Sartre’s preface tacitly underwrote FLN terrorism. He failed to appreciate the fact that FLN violence had become the raison d’être for the systematic excesses perpetrated by the French army. Camus, who had been born and educated in Algeria, seemed trapped in an ethical and political no-man’s-land. Initially, he cautioned restraint on both sides, a message that few were prepared to accept.

One miner’s daughter told of being taken into custody while distributing leaflets and detained for two hours at a local police station. “They threatened to send us to the District Court in Béthune [a neighboring town],” she explained. ”3 The Maoists had already planted several militants in the area, who jockeyed with the pro-Communist trade union, the CGT (Confédération générale du travail), to win over working-class loyalties. In the Maoists’ view, manifestations of working-class rage were an unequivocally positive development.

The group scorned the Maoist student organizations with which Sartre and Foucault had cast their lot. Instead, it wanted its Maoist commitment to remain as pure and uncompromising as its earlier alliance with Soviet communism had been. Tel Quel began publishing special issues on the Cultural Revolution. Sollers and Julia Kristeva learned enough Chinese to translate Chairman Mao’s poetry into French. In 1974, accompanied by Roland Barthes, the group made a pilgrimage to Communist China, although by then it had become clear that China’s experiment in political utopianism had soured.