ABSTRACT
The doyen of left-wing publishing in France, who made available the work of figures as divergent as Mao Ze Dong and Régis Debray in affordable editions. He left the Communist Party in 1956 and thereafter was associated with the ‘new Lefts’ that flourished in and after May 1968. His bookshop La Joie de Lire, just off the Boulevard St-Michel, was long renowned as the intellectual epicentre of the revolutionary movements of the time, stocking material often difficult or impossible to obtain elsewhere. His 1989 text Roissy Express (Les Passagers du Roissy Express) is an itinerary through the working-class suburbs (banlieues) that were to prove so inflammable in the following decade.
