Jean-Paul Sartre's monthly review Les Temps Modernes is an immediately attractive object of study. From 1945 to the present day it has promoted far-reaching debate in the fields of philosophy and political theory, in the arts and in those disciplines that the French know as the sciences humaines. Formerly, it was the vehicle chosen by some of the most prestigious intellectual authorities of post-war France; latterly, it has become much more the mouthpiece of those whom Régis Debray calls the basse intelligentsia – those, in other words, who offer radical critiques of contemporary French society from the ‘coal-faces’ of its various institutions rather than from the vantage points of the university mandarin or of the self-employed littérateur.

Fundamentally, however, this change in ethos, which dates from the aftermath of the upheavals of May 1968, came about in order to allow TM to stay the same: it remains a journal clearly committed to a left-wing political programme. To regard any publication as a mere historical record of the years in which it appears is to misapprehend systematically the relationship of ‘comment’ to ‘event’. TM has never allowed its readers to fall into this error; throughout forty turbulent years of French history it has striven, often turbulently, to render comment as eventful as it could possibly be and thus to usher in a socialist revolution.