Michel Foucault and the 1979 revolution: a French intellectual's praise for Khomeini

The renowned French philosopher Michel Foucault travelled to Iran in the autumn of 1978 and, in articles for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, described the movement that had formed under Ruhollah Khomeini's leadership with fascination. Forty-seven years later, the record of that same revolution shows how far this praise was from the reality of Iran; and in the assessment of DIAR's analysts, the roots of part of that error lie in an intellectual tradition whose centre in the twentieth century was Paris.

"Political spirituality": Foucault's picture of the 1979 revolution

Foucault saw the Iranian revolution not as a Marxist revolution or a Western model, but as a new phenomenon, which he called "political spirituality". In his view, Iranians were seeking something beyond a change of government: a new way of living that would transform politics from within. He described Khomeini not as an ordinary politician but as the focal point of a "collective will", and wrote in one article that there would be no "Khomeini party" or "Khomeini government".

A few months later this prediction met reality. Khomeini, who had lived in Neauphle-le-Château, near Paris, since October 1978 and spoke from there to the world's media, founded after his return to Iran a government that concentrated all power in the hands of the clerics. The executions on the roof of the Refah school, the revolutionary courts that lasted a few minutes, and the pursuit of opponents began in the very first weeks after February 1979.

Foucault's reaction to the executions

In an open letter to Mehdi Bazargan, prime minister of the provisional government, in March–April 1979, Foucault demanded fair trials for the accused. But he never clearly renounced his initial praise of the movement led by Khomeini, and against his critics, including Iranians who had warned of the danger of religious rule, he defended the correctness of his view of the "uprising". In the assessment of DIAR's analysts, he set the new government's executions beside its record before the revolution and thereby eased the weight of responsibility for his own praise.

Paris, the centre of revolutionary intellectual life

Foucault's error was not an isolated one. In modern history France has been the birthplace of many political concepts and models that began with attractive slogans but led in practice to violence. The 1789 revolution began with the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity", but in the period known as the "Reign of Terror" about 17,000 people were officially guillotined and thousands of others died in prisons without trial. The export of revolutionary ideas to Europe also led to successive wars that left millions dead.

In the twentieth century, too, Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous French intellectual, justified revolutionary violence and wrote admiringly about the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro. The leaders of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, including Pol Pot, had studied in Paris in the 1950s and been shaped by that city's radical left milieu; a regime that later sent about two million Cambodians to their deaths.

The link between this tradition and the opponents of the Pahlavis

Some of the intellectual and political figures who were active against the Pahlavi government in the 1960s and 1970s had studied in France or been shaped by Paris's intellectual climate. Ali Shariati, who studied in Paris and was influenced by the revolutionary ideas of that era, became one of the main theorists of the union of religion and revolution for the young generation of those years; and Abolhassan Banisadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, had also lived in Paris for years. In the assessment of DIAR's analysts, some of the Pahlavi opponents still operate within that same outlook, ignoring the achievements of Iran's modernisation under the Pahlavis and sympathising with any revolutionary slogan regardless of its consequences.

Today's lesson for Iran's national revolution

What Foucault called "political spirituality" in 1979 brought Iranians four decades of repression, executions, war and isolation; a record that reached its peak in the bloody crackdown on the January uprising. The same government is now trying to use the unrest in France for its own propaganda, while it has itself shot Iranian protesters.

The main lesson of this experience is that beautiful slogans do not replace a clear programme, accountable institutions and respect for individual freedoms. Iran's national revolution, led by Prince Reza Pahlavi, relies, unlike the 1979 revolution, on a secular and democratic transition, on Iran's territorial integrity and on the free decision of the people at the ballot box; and this time Iranians, with an experience for which they have paid a heavy price, will not be fooled by intellectual praise for "saintly leaders".

Michel Foucault's praise for Khomeini in 1979 showed that intellectual infatuation with revolution, heedless of reality, can end in praise for a new despotism.