ABSTRACT
Addressing the love affair that French thinkers sustained with China in the midtwentieth century, 1 Jean Chesneaux remarks that the People’s Republic ‘met a basic aspiration amongst French left-wing intellectuals’. He describes this, further, as a ‘political exoticism, that is, the tendency to look for a political homeland and model of reference in distant, exotic countries’. 2 The best-known manifestation of the phenomenon that Chesneaux invokes is the infatuation with Maoism displayed in the 1970s by groupings such as the Tel Quel theorists, who were invited to the PRC after the Cultural Revolution, when selected foreign delegations were received once more by the Maoist authorities. 3 As Chesneaux affirms, however, Maoist China was also chic in the French cultural life of the 1950s and 1960s, 4 at a point when communist China was emerging from diplomatic isolation and opening a window to the West, and France was moving towards political recognition of the PRC. 5 Those earlier decades likewise witnessed a number of voyages en Chine by French luminaries, prompted in part by the Bandung conference of May 1955. 6 That conference spawned the invitation famously proffered to the international community by Zhou Enlai and ventriloquized by the French journalist Robert Guillain, who took it up, in the following terms: ‘La Chine est ouverte aux visiteurs. Venez voir!’ 7 It contributed to a climate of debate that saw French intellectuals and journalists, concerned with the question of France’s relation to China, vying to cast themselves as the most enlightened ‘seers’ of — experts on — the new China put in place by the founding in 1949 of the PRC. 8 And it engendered travel narratives by individuals who embarked on ‘political pilgrimages’ to the PRC and sought to remedy Western misconceptions about its regime. 9 Such accounts included Simone de Beauvoir’s La Longue Marche (1957), a narrative whose manifest faith in the future of Maoism 10 amply illustrates its author’s determination to look upon newly communist China and find it good.
