A decade after the events in Paris, Régis Debray passed a withering verdict on the Maoism that had colored much of France’s far left in May ’68. In his mockingly titled “Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary,” Debray derided the ’68er radicals who had looked to Chairman Mao for an anti-bureaucratic, emancipatory socialism. “The Great Helmsman” was certainly an unusual guide for these militants’ rebellion against French conservatism.

The “pro-Chinese” ’68ers had torn down the old France and the old left, only for many to arrive at liberalism. For Debray, this contorted route to capitalist modernity resembled a past voyager whose maps to India had taken him to the Americas: these modern Columbuses thought “they were discovering China in Paris, when in fact they were landing in California. Their sails were filled by the West wind, but they were steering by the Little Red Book which said the opposite.”

During the movements of 1968 that book of Mao Zedong quotations had indeed enjoyed a curious prominence in the Western far left, and in anti-imperialist and resistance movements more generally. With over a billion copies printed, its 427 quotations and aphorisms were both a political compass for a fresh layer of militants and, in their sheer ubiquity, a symbolic point of reference that seemed to harbor a new world.