Western intellectuals and artists would have felt much less sympathy for the Devil had they heard about the ordeals of their counterparts in China, as described in “ The World Turned Upside Down” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a thick catalogue of gruesome atrocities, blunders, bedlam, and ideological dissimulation, by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng. There was a standing ovation, and then Mick Jagger launched into “Sympathy for the Devil.” July, who, with Sartre, later co-founded the newspaper Libération, asked the throng to support French fellow-Maoists facing imprisonment for their beliefs.
In 1971, John Lennon said that he now wore a Mao badge and distanced himself from the 1968 Beatles song “Revolution,” which claimed, “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.” But the Rolling Stones’ Paris concert was Maoism’s biggest popular outing. Newton and Bobby Seale financed the purchase of guns by selling copies of Mao’s Little Red Book. Women’s-liberation movements in the West embraced Mao’s slogan “Women hold up half the sky.” In 1967, the Black Panther leaders Huey P. One of them was the feminist critic Julia Kristeva, who later travelled to China with Roland Barthes. Jean-Paul Sartre hawked copies of a banned Maoist newspaper in Paris, and Michel Foucault was among those who turned to China for political inspiration, in what Sartre called “new forms of class struggle in a period of organized capitalism.”Įditors at the influential French periodical Tel Quel learned Chinese in order to translate Mao’s poetry. Information was scarce, but many writers and activists in the West who were opposed to the United States and its war in Vietnam were becoming fascinated with Mao Zedong, their earlier infatuation with Soviet-style Marxism having soured. News of an earthshaking event called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had been trickling out of China since 1966.
On September 24, 1970, the Rolling Stones interrupted their concert at the Palais des Sports in Paris to invite a French Maoist called Serge July onstage. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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