Quelle est la muraille vraiment indestructible? ("What is a true bastion of iron?") Ce sont les masses, les millions et les millions d'hommes qui, de tout leur coeur, de toutes leurs pensées, soutiennent la révolution. ("It is the masses, the millions upon millions of people who genuinely and sincerely support the revolution").

MAO, Zedong.

Edité par Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, [c.1968]

A propos de cet article

A compelling example of Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda in French, printed in comparatively small numbers. The quote captures the Cultural Revolution's emphasis on the innate energy and power of the masses, an ethos that chimed with the mass protests happening contemporaneously across France. This quote, featured in chapter eight of the "Little Red Book" under the theme of "People's War", originally comes from a concluding speech given by Mao to the Second National Congress of Workers' and Peasants' Representatives held in Jiangxi province in January 1934. At the time, the Chinese Communist Party could only boast control of a few scattered and predominantly rural pockets of China, and it relied on mass mobilization in its base areas, combined with underground insurgencies in the cities, to grow its revolutionary movement. Fast forward three decades, and Mao had once again unleashed the power of the masses through the framework of the Cultural Revolution in order to overcome what he perceived as a gradual stagnation of the revolution in the hands of cautious technocrats. Blind to many of the horrors of the Maoist mass movement, French left wing activists and intellectuals were a prime audience for Maoist talk of the people and their revolutionary potential. The Chinese Communist Party had always been closely linked to France - after all, several members of its first generation leadership cut their Marxist teeth in France in the early 20th century. Furthermore, the mass politics of the Cultural Revolution, encapsulated in the words on the present poster, also resonated with anti-de Gaulle protests and fed into the events of May 1968. As a result, soon after the Cultural Revolution broke out, the French Left became much taken with developments in China and, in Paris, "signs of Maoism's popularity abounded" (Wolin, p. 114). Clothing boutiques sold copious Mao suits - "les cols Maos" - and booksellers experienced runs on copies of the "Little Red Book" translated into French. In elite intellectual circles, Louis Althusser's students at the Ecole normale supérieure "were planning trips to China, copiously citing the Little Red Book, and praising the virtues of a "war of position" against the bourgeois enemy" (ibid., p. 118). In such a climate, posters such as this example were always going to sell well. By distributing posters such as the present item, the Foreign Languages Press also deepened the ideological tussle between Maoist mass politics and the more bureaucratised socialism of the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1950s, private and then public cracks appeared in the socialist world, with Mao's China becoming increasing opposed to the policy direction of the Soviet Union. At a time when China was carrying out a series of audacious voluntarist socio-economic transformations, Beijing saw Moscow as having betrayed key tenets of Marxism-Leninism in favour of a highly regimented, stodgy and top-heavy "revisionist" form of socialist governance. Additional geopolitical tensions between Moscow and Beijing, combined with China's increasing military strength, eventually overflowed into public exchanges of vitriolic criticism and diplomatic ruptures, with Soviet diplomats expelled from China after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In this climate, Chinese propaganda focused as much on attacking the Soviet Union as it did on lambasting the United States. Having already disseminated the "Little Red Book" widely, more ephemeral items such as posters could take their place at French rallies, in schools, and on the walls of other organisations. Posters such as this example therefore aimed to win over converts to China's ideological side of the communist world and simultaneously weaken what Mao called Moscow's "revisionist" and "imperialist" distortion of Marxism-Leninism. Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, Princeton University Press, 2010. Poste.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Quelle est la muraille vraiment indestructible? ("What is a true bastion of iron?") Ce sont les masses, les millions et les millions d'hommes qui, de tout leur coeur, de toutes leurs pensées, soutiennent la révolution. ("It is the masses, the millions upon millions of people who genuinely and sincerely support the revolution").
• Éditeur: Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, [c.1968]