MAO, Zedong.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Le peuple, le peuple seul, est la force motrice, le créature de l'histoire universelle ("The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history"). An engaging example of Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda in French, printed in comparatively small quantities. The quote, one of the most well-known of all of Mao's sayings, demonstrates the Cultural Revolution era's supreme and unwavering commitment to the masses as the driving force of history.This quote, featured in chapter eleven of the "Little Red Book" under the theme of "The Mass Line", originally comes from Mao's political report to the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1945. It is quintessential Maoism: the revolution and the course of world events stem from, and revolve inextricably around, the energy and power of the masses. Twenty years later, Mao put this in principle into practice with devastating effect in the Cultural Revolution, exhorting Chinese to overcome what he perceived as a gradual stagnation of the revolution in the hands of cautious technocrats. Unhinged from many of the regulating structures of Chinese society, factions of students and workers took political governance and ideological bloodletting into their own hands and, for a time, presided over completely novel forms of political organisation with the Chinese Communist Party stripped of its vanguard role.The French Left was unabashedly smitten with heavily glossed accounts of the Cultural

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