This essay is not about contemporary French philosophy, strictly speaking, but something which concerns it—an important episode in its modern history. Its intention is to deal, in very schematic terms, with the nature and evolution of French Marxism from the mid-1950s to the end of the 70s, focusing on two of its best-known and most influential representatives, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, and relating the internal history of their ambitious reconstructions of Marxism to the wider, non-theoretical history of which they were a part—and for whose comprehension they sought to supply the conceptual instruments. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's balance-sheet of a century of Marxism, Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955, provides my starting point and explains my title.

By what token is Marxism relevant to this series? After all, as early as 1979 Vincent Descombes was writing of its ‘disappearance’ from the French scene. Therein precisely lies my justification. Since 1975 the whole intellectual landscape in France has undergone alteration. Under the impact of its own undoubted theoretical weaknesses, an inclement political history, strong philosophical challenges and a concerted ideological campaign, a paradigm which had enjoyed great prestige for thirty years since the Liberation, has been reduced to marginal status. The crisis of Gallic Marxism has been profound and enduring—only the latest, certainly the gravest.