«L’histoire ne pourra jamais marcher contre l’histoire». Roland Barthes et l’antistalinisme, 1946-1953 ("History cannot go against History.” Roland Barthes and anti-Stalinism, 1946-1953)

Given that Roland Barthes’s initiation into the Marxism of his sanatorium friend Georges Fournié in 1946 took place only one year before he became a French Lecturer in Bucharest, it is important to consider the young intellectual’s attitude towards Stalinism during this pivotal period in world Communism. From his rejection of ‘socialist realism’ in Writing Degree Zero, to his critique of science in Soviet countries such as Romania, Barthes’s political ideas after the War bore witness to the influence of Fournié. Inflected by his friendship with Maurice Nadeau, Barthes’s (mildly) Trotskyist Marxism, clearly different from Jean-Paul Sartre’s thought, reflected the weakness of the ‘Left Opposition’ during the Cold War.