El francés: From Marxist Paris to conservative Mexico City

Jean Meyer was born to a middle-class Alsatian family in the southern French city of Nice in 1942 and raised in Provence, where his parents moved to escape the Nazi occupation of Alsace. Both of his parents were teachers who influenced him to follow the same path.Footnote ²⁰ In his teens he moved to Paris and enrolled at the École Normale Supérieure, where he established a relationship with a group of friends who had a profound impact on the shaping of the French New Left and who eventually emerged as influential Marxist philosophers and key students of Louis Althusser that included, among others, Régis Debray (1940–). With them, Meyer condemned the French occupation of Algeria and frequented the famous Cinémathèque Française, which housed rare films from across the world, including innovative Brazilian movies that had a profound impact on their generation. These and other films of the era shaped Meyer’s “enduring love” for cinema, and as “the early writings by Julio Cortázar” did, many of them served as his first introduction to what many Europeans romantically saw at the time as the “sensibility” of Latin America. Unlike many others of his generation, he was drawn by the religiosity of its people as depicted in the arts. He remembered that his friends often “mocked his Catholicism,” dismissed the possibility of engaging in a discussion of religion as “an aberration,” and saw Christianity as “detrimental to the masses.”Footnote ²¹

At the Cinémathèque, Meyer also met the Marxist filmmaker Chris Marker, who at the time was presenting ¡Cuba sí! Banned by the French censors, this was a 1961 experimental picture widely celebrated among French university students that included a powerful criticism of the Bay of Pigs invasion as well as fiery speeches by Fidel Castro and Joris Bialin, a Cuban priest who came out in support of the revolution, against the official stance of the Catholic Church in Rome.Footnote ²² By then, Meyer was already enrolled at the University of Paris Nanterre, where he intended to write a research paper on the diplomatic history of the United States during First World War. He also continued his relationship with Debray, who was enrolled in a series of workshops on Das Kapital with Althusser, the influential pious thinker who once proclaimed that he “became a Marxist because of the Catholicism in it.”Footnote ²³

Chris Marker encouraged Meyer and his Marxist friends to go to Cuba to help him gather additional footage of the revolution and possibly interview Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who emerged, shortly after, as a folk hero of the New Left. Marker promised to give them an 8 mm camera and a letter of invitation signed by Fidel Castro. The young intellectuals were thrilled and made separate plans to go to Cuba. Meyer arrived in New York in May of 1962 with his friend and student of philosophy Michel Fennetaux. They bought a used car and initiated a trip across the US South. They arrived in Mexico in the summer of that year, naively hoping to travel to Havana. But they soon realized that the government authorities kept track of those who traveled to Cuba, meaning that Meyer would likely not be able to return to the United States, where he hoped to do research for his master’s thesis.

Mexico instantly seduced the then 20-year-old Meyer and made him reconsider his “romantic interpretation” of the Cuban Revolution. With his friend, he traveled across the nation for a total of three months “with [only] a bag on their back,” from Guadalajara to Yucatán. For them, Mexico appeared “like a communist country.” Meyer remembered that it was impossible to ignore “the excessive and flashy propaganda of the PRI,” present in every little town as well as the endless “cult-like images of President [Adolfo] López Mateos” pasted everywhere. Yet, what appeared to him odd at the time was that Revolutionary Mexico was also “a very conservative” and unequivocally Catholic country. He added that “many young people” of their same age did not entirely share the admiration French youth readily expressed for Fidel Castro. Instead, a significant sector of Mexican youth pointed with apprehension to the time the bearded leader of the revolution “gave a cynical speech” in which he defined himself as a Marxist Leninist, which many saw as proof that he was, if not an agent of the Soviets, then a deceiver of his people whose revolution could not be trusted. But in addition to the countless propaganda posters of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and its presidential figure, Meyer was also taken aback by the flashing banners that were present everywhere with the insignia “Christianity Yes, Communism No!” (a nationwide campaign that ecclesiastical authorities organized during the early 1960 largely in response to the Cuban Revolution). To his surprise, ordinary people were eager to openly express their view of politics from their religious perspective and viewed communism with distrust. On first impression, it seemed to Meyer that Mexico had already experienced a revolution. Although change had come slowly, it was improving the lives of the people.Footnote ²⁴

Upon his return to Paris, Meyer was convinced that he was no longer interested in writing a thesis on US diplomatic history. Instead, he proposed a project to his committee on the Mexican Revolution with a particular focus on Emiliano Zapata. This was a topic that he initially selected, with vague interest, likely after having watched Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952) at the Cinémathèque. By contrast, his friend Michel remained enamored with the idea of Fidel, and after his trip to Mexico, he travelled to Prague, where he finally made his way to Havana. There, Michel reconnected with Debray, who first visited Cuba in 1960, returned to the island a year later, and stayed for a longer visit with the support of the Castro government from 1963 to 1964. During these years Debray studied guerrilla tactics and established contacts with armed movements from Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, and Peru in Chile and Bolivia. He also published his first articles on Latin America in Les Temes Modernes, Partisans, and Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes and taught philosophy at the University of Havana, where, in conversations with Fidel Castro, he wrote the initial draft of Révolution dans la revolution? in which he argued that US imperialism would only come to an end when clandestine communist groups were united across Latin America.Footnote ²⁵ A year later he agreed to join Guevara in his Bolivian Revolution, only to be captured in April of 1967 and sentenced to 30 years behind bars but released from prison in 1970 following pressure from the former French president Charles De Gaulle and a broad range of leftist intellectuals and religious figures that included Jean-Paul Sartre, François Maspero, and Pope Paul VI.Footnote ²⁶

In Paris, Meyer enrolled in the only Latin American seminar offered at the French university with Pierre Chaunu, who was a leading figure of the Annales school of historians, an expert in quantitative methodology, and author of L’Amerique y Les Ameriques (1964). For the most part, Meyer’s peers were wealthy students from Latin America interested in writing colonial history. He presented his project on Zapata, but a Mexican Jesuit priest who was also enrolled in Chaunu’s seminar encouraged him to reconsider the topic. He told him, “So much has already been written on the revolution. Why not write on the virgin topic of the Cristero Rebellion?” Meyer had barely heard of the rebellion and had little knowledge of how the State had engaged in a violent anticlerical conflict with militant Catholics. A doctoral dissertation that filled up an evident gap in the historiography made this topic particularly appealing to the French academy. Because of the observations he had made on the anti-communist campaigns during his travels in Mexico, Meyer also understood the important role ordinary Catholics had played in the popular politics of the nation. But the Jesuit warned him that, if he wanted to pursue the project, he had to be ready to face “censored archives” and deal with a polarizing topic that not many people dared to touch. Moreover, “like the anthropologist Oscar Lewis,” whose famous book Les enfants de Sánchez (1963) preceded the Spanish translation, Meyer would have to rely on oral history. This was a methodology still in its infancy at the time that lacked scholarly rigor and was mostly dismissed by an older generation of historians as problematic and unscientific.Footnote ²⁷ He became fascinated with the Cristero Rebellion, as vaguely described in the few references that he was able to find on the topic in French libraries, namely at the Musée de l’Homme, where the anthropologist and expert on Papantla Guy Stresser-Péan had donated his rich collection on Mexico.Footnote ²⁸

Determined to write a dissertation on the Cristero Rebellion, Meyer met Silvio Zavala, the founder of the Center for Historical Studies at El Colegio de México in 1941 and president of that same university from 1963 to 1966. He invited Meyer to teach as a visiting guest, and although Meyer was flattered, he worried that his “rudimentary Spanish” would prevent him from taking the offer. At the time, he had only studied English (the default academic language) and German (the language of the occupiers of Alsace), to which Zavala replied, “that would not be a problem.” After all, Zavala wanted Meyer to teach his courses in French and introduce Mexican students to the latest methodologies in Europe, which a number of leaders of El Colegio saw as superior to the new scholarly trends that were emerging from the US academy.Footnote ²⁹

As a visiting member of the history faculty at El Colegio de México in 1965, Meyer initiated the research for his doctoral dissertation. Similar to Zavala, the co-founder of the university, Cosío Villegas, did not initially approve of the topic. For both, history ended with the Porfiriato (1876–1910). Luis González, who had been an active member of the Center for Historical Studies since the 1940s, proved to be more sympathetic. At the time, González was writing Pueblo en Vilo (1968). This foundational book of microhistory, which the Italian historian Carlo Ginsburg listed as an inspiration for the making of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), focused on a small Cristero town in the central region of the country and relied on an eclectic mix of innovative methodologies. It provided a voice to those who had been condemned to historical amnesia, situated forgotten pueblos on the map, and documented the everyday life of ordinary figures, all the while prioritizing regional and marginalized narratives. These perspectives “democratized” the writing of national history, in the words of Enrique Florescano (also an enthusiastic supporter of Meyer’s project), and influenced what Alan Knight once called the “baby-boomers of Mexican historiography.”Footnote ³⁰ As examined later in this article, this was a new generation of professional historians, trained in Mexico, Europe, and the United States, who came of intellectual age in the Global Sixties.

Jean Meyer was only 23 years of age when he first taught with a diplomatic passport in Mexico in 1965, not much older than his students and much younger than most of his colleagues. At the request of Zavala, his first courses were presented entirely in French, mostly to aspiring doctoral candidates who were introduced to the foundational texts of the Annales school, including those of Pierre Chaunu, who had accepted to be the leading director of his dissertation. Zavala and Cosío Villegas grew fond of Meyer and respected him as an effective teacher. Yet, his elders frowned upon his style, and so did many of his colleagues, who were often shocked to see him teaching in front of the classroom “dressed like a hippie,” with long hair and wearing jeans, sandals, and manta shirts or attending to his toddler, who was often sleeping and playing by his desk during his lectures or “urinating in a piss pot” that he kept in his office. More importantly, most of his colleagues disapproved of his research and often tried to persuade him to find a different topic. Digging into the State–Church conflict of the recent past was a thorny topic for a research project. The methods that Meyer employed, which largely relied on oral history, were also not considered rigorous. He was repeatedly told that he was doing journalism and was often accused of becoming sympathetic to his subjects and, in the worst of all cases, even “fabricating their stories.” Yet, Meyer remained committed to his project. With the help from Luis González and surviving leader of the war Aurelio Robles Acevedo, he developed a large network of Cristero survivors who shared their stories with him. Having less success, he was told by Archbishop Miguel Darío Miranda that all archives of the church were closed, unless he was interested in the colonial period. He received similar letters of rejection from government archives. Instead, Meyer first consulted private, local, and Church archives in Mexico, including key parochial and Jesuit archives in Jalisco, and then others from the United States and France. In addition, every weekend he traveled to different parts of the country to interview Cristeros. When he returned back to work on Mondays, he was often teasingly asked, “Juanito, how many Cristeros did you make up this weekend?”Footnote ³¹

Within a couple of years Jean Meyer started teaching courses in Spanish that included seminars on international relations, and he taught a new generation of talented historians. It was also during this period when he wrote short articles in Esprit that revealed the voice of an assertive interdisciplinary historian interested in the broader region of Latin America, invested in understanding the diversity of the continent from a conservative perspective, and aware of the revisionist scholarship on peasant movements that emerged during the early 1960s. He was well-versed in the Marxist language of the era and familiar with the long history of the Left, but concerned with its violent militancy. For example, in his damning 1967 article on the question of armed struggle, Meyer pointed to what he saw as the contradiction and shortcoming of “the socialist camp.” In addition to “the continued subversion of the USA” that Fidel Castro so often stressed in his long and fiery speeches, these included “clumsy” and largely “ineffective” agricultural projects of collectivization to transform the sugar industry into an “ambitious industrialization plan” that concluded in neo-dependency on the Soviet Union. In addition, Meyer pointed to an unwillingness to incorporate a “middle class” that had difficulties relating to the radical language of the revolution, “the restriction of internal discussion,” the “subordination of society to the party,” and the “reduction” of the nation to its leader. Of particular concern to him was what he saw as the emergence of a police state, which “though initially defensive,” had initiated “political repression that was not always judicious due to the obsession [of the Castro regime] with espionage and sabotage.” What ordinary Cubans experienced was an “atmosphere of malaise and suspicion.” Equally troubling was what Meyer referred to as the “puritan” language that the revolutionary leaders used to universally condemn “gambling, drunkenness, sexual irregularities, luxury, [and] idleness” with a broad brush. Similar to “puritans,” he noted with disapproval of the Cuban leaders, “they know that the weakness and vices of man are condemnable and that the appearance of the new man is not possible before their elimination.” The “average man,” he argued in response to Guevara’s famous “Socialism and Man” 1965 essay,

Finally, in his contentious article on Cuba, Meyer strongly condemned Ernesto Guevara’s goal “to Vietnamize the hemisphere,” an ill-fated “adventurist” tactic romantically welcomed by young leftists across Latin America. Guevara failed to see that the continent was far from homogeneous. In providing an example, he wrote, “Mexico is closer to Paris than [it is to] Lima.” Worse yet, if continental unity existed in the immediate aftermath of the Castro victory in 1959, “after the Tricontinental [Conference of 1966], Latin America had returned to the anomie of twenty nations, to ‘Che’s’ despair.”Footnote ³²

Meyer’s 1966 article on Camilo Torres also displayed his disapproval of armed struggle in Latin America. He wrote, “Let us recount that he died with his M-1 rifle in his hand.” He added, “this Colombian priest had committed the error of taking the lessons of the Gospel seriously and, sensitive to the misfortunes and needs of his people, had wanted to take part in their suffering.” Yet, his radicalism did not emerge in a vacuum, and the conservatism of the Colombian Church was largely to be blamed for it. He noted, “This Church is so mired in dishonorable economic, social and political activity, and the structures of the country do not permit the least reform; the evangelical message, the ‘breath of God’ has not shaken oppression, and the poor still hunger and thirst for justice.” Unfortunately, as with Guevara, Torres had failed to see the full power of the enemy. His was a noble, but mostly delusional and largely irresponsible, approach.Footnote ³³

Meyer was equally critical of the Christian Democratic movement in Chile, which originally presented itself to Latin America “as a possible third way,” a “revolution without violence” based on the implementation of a three-pronged program of “communitarianism, Chilenization, and decentralization.” Yet, by 1966, it was evident that Frei’s “Revolution in Liberty” had failed to improve the lives of the people and break its dependency with the United States, mostly because of the government’s unwillingness to expel the most reactionary figures of the party.Footnote ³⁴

Meyer’s condemnation of the Far-right was also evident in his 1966 article on Argentina, where he expressed concern that the rise of “Francoism” seemed inevitable. Lamenting, he predicted, in response to the Juan Carlos Ongonía’s military dictatorship (1966–70), “clandestinity [and] repression would unite with justicialismo.”Footnote ³⁵

Unlike many of his contemporaries in Paris, Meyer “cured himself of his vulgar Marxism” and once “romantic fascination” with Castrismo while teaching in Mexico City. At the same time, he familiarized with the writings of progressive leaders of the Church, especially with those of the Belgian priest and one of the key founders of Liberation Theology in Latin America, José Comblin, whose Théologie de la Révolution (1970) was widely read across Europe. Meyer became a regular subscriber of Les Informations Catholiques Internacionales, whose columns were translated to Spanish in Mexico from 1963 to 1972, and pointed to this time as the years when he realized that Mexico was not the communist nation that he prematurely envisioned during his trip with Michel Fennetaux in 1962. In fact, he recognized that most Mexicans were subjugated to an authoritarian system, but one that was far less repressive in comparison to other Latin American countries. Yet, this was an argument that some of his students did not necessarily share.

In September of 1967, Meyer received a letter from an old friend in Paris expressing her anger at him for having criticized the publication of their mutual friend Régis Debray, Revolution dans la revolution? As noted earlier, this was the militant handbook widely read by young activists of the era and published that same year that provided a raw and thorough description of the precarious economic situation in Latin America and presented guerrilla warfare as the only path toward a genuine revolution. In his writings and teachings at El Colegio, Meyer specifically criticized armed struggle and described foquismo as suicidal madness. But he responded to his friend in Paris “with regret,” unaware that Debray had been tortured and imprisoned. “A month later, we received the news that Guevara had been killed in Bolivia,” Meyer recalled, the moment when the Argentine radical was immediately transformed into a mythical hero in nearly all of European and Latin American universities. To his students Meyer reiterated that the Mexican government was authoritarian, but “not Fascist,” as some of his most radical students insisted, and “it was best not to provoke it,” and much less to see the martyred example of Guevara as a viable option in Mexico.Footnote ³⁶

In 1968, Meyer expressed sympathy with the democratic ideas of the student movement, but he was critical of some of its radical methods and did not see the need for the students to engage in massive and often aggressive protests that only agitated the police authorities. During a strike assembly, he allegedly warned students that, “if the bourgeoisie cannot be defeated, it is best not to make it feel threatened.” If they were genuinely interested in transforming the nation, the best thing they could do was to study, get professional degrees, and “transform the system from within.” After all, his written criticism of Mexico paled in comparison to those published on the much more authoritarian regime of Argentina, referenced earlier, where Fascist forces occupied important sectors of the government. Yet, despite his unwillingness to openly support the student movement, the critical lines included in the Esprit column, hinting at the culpability of the Mexican government, proved to be too much for the intolerant administration of Díaz Ordaz. In his government file, an agent erroneously wrote that Meyer had told students, “If the bourgeoisie cannot be defeated, it is best to stab it in the back.”Footnote ³⁷

Following his meeting with the French authorities in the summer of 1969 in response to his Esprit article, Meyer understood that his teaching in Mexico had come to an end, but he was reassured by the ambassador that he would have a safe return to Paris. Following the advice of the ambassador, he attended the annual dinner hosted by the European embassy to commemorate the achievements of French intellectuals, artists, and politicians residing in Mexico—all indicating that, although he had been labeled a “pernicious foreigner,” he still enjoyed a privileged opportunity to leave the country diplomatically. At the dinner Meyer sat next to the ambassador, who introduced him to the Mexican authorities attending the event, including, to his surprise, the Defense Secretary General Marcelino García Barragán, one of the central figures involved in the Tlatelolco massacre, and the Secretary of Interior Mario Moya Palencia, later involved in the June 10, 1971, Corpus Christi massacre. The following day, Cosío Villegas hosted a farewell dinner for Meyer and invited Ignacio Chávez with them. Chávez was a vocal critic of Díaz Ordaz who was violently removed from the rectorship of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 1966 by goon squads sympathetic to the president and who likely welcomed the lines that Meyer included in his article.

With the support that Jean Meyer received from Cosío Villegas, he managed to return safely to Paris in July of 1969, where his wife waited for him. The 27-year-old historian took his two children with him, including his youngest boy who had been born in Mexico City. Leaving Mexico proved to be difficult, but possible, with the diplomatic backing Meyer received thanks to the intervention from Enrique Florescano, whose father-in-law worked in the government.

Meyer feared that, in addition to the possibility of not ever returning to his adopted nation, the government would also confiscate all the research he had done for his doctoral dissertation since he started teaching in Mexico in 1965, which then included rare documents hitherto unexamined by historians, dozens of photographs and corridos that he collected from various parts of Mexico, hundreds of videocassettes of recorded interviews with former Cristeros conducted by Meyer and others, and dozens of questionnaires that he developed with the help of the veteran of the war Aurelio Robles Acevedo. His mentor and principal supporter of his thesis, Luis González, placed all the research in a safe place at his home, and within a few months, he sent it with a French diplomat to Paris, where Meyer completed his dissertation. Following an invitation from François Chevalier, he also authored his first historical monograph, La révolution mexicaine, 1910–1940. This was a revisionist and synthetic account published in 1973 that highlighted the continuities of the postrevolutionary state with the Porfiriato.Footnote ³⁸

Meyer found Paris “a mess.” He saw himself as “a foreigner” and had difficulties adapting to the radicalism that he found in the universities. “The Sorbonne,” where he started teaching a course on the Mexican Revolution, had been transformed into “a big dumpster.” To his disdain, anarchists, leftists, and a wide range of provocateurs had occupied halls, buildings, classrooms, and libraries. The environment was “often toxic” and violent, with little room for dialogue. The New Left of the late 1960s appeared to be tearing itself apart, and the enthusiasm that French intellectuals had expressed for the Third World during the early 1960s in Les Temps Modernes, and the more radical journal Partisans had diminished significantly in favor of new questions that leftist intellectuals expressed in relation to the rising feminist movement, the counterculture, psychoanalysis, and pedagogy.Footnote ³⁹ A similar schism seemed to be present within the Catholic circles that experienced a sharp polarization during this period, ranging from the ultraconservatives, who grew angry and disappointed with the outcome of the Algerian War, to the leftists, who instead found inspiration in the radical writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Yet, for Meyer, this also brought about an exciting point in his life in which he was “lucky to receive a generous scholarship” that the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) gave to political exiles, which for a total of three years, he shared with two other exiled dissidents, including the famous sociologist and future president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso—first expelled in 1964 from his native country to Chile and then exiled to France in 1969.Footnote ⁴⁰

In Paris, Meyer used the scholarship to complete his dissertation and delve further into his readings of Catholicism. No longer entirely satisfied with the writings of Comblin and other progressive thinkers, he instead found greater relevance in the latest and most controversial work of Jacques Maritain and specifically pointed to his polemic Le Paysan de la Garonne (1968) as one of several books that transformed the understanding of his faith. “It was in Paris,” Meyer remembered, “when I became an orthodox,” partly meaning that, similar to Maritain, he grew concerned about the “excessive secularization” that emerged in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. Moreover, similar to the Thomist philosopher, Meyer disapproved of what he saw as an attempt of neo-modernists, particularly those who welcomed a dialogue with Marxists, to bring about a complete temporalization of Christianity. Finally, as with Maritain, Meyer recognized the need for Catholics to fight against social and political injustices, but argued that this was not the only reality to which Christians must commit themselves to. Only grace and prayer rendered the energy of Christian spirituality effective. In this sense, similar to the elder Maritain, Meyer was less idealistic than many of his contemporaries, who instead enthusiastically embraced the political uprisings in France. He seemed less hopeful in a natural world removed from God.Footnote ⁴¹

Among others, Meyer also found relevance in the salient and less controversial work of the Jesuit Henri de Lubac. His early writings had contributed to the progressive ideas of Gaudium et Spes (1965), one of the most influential documents on social justice published during the Second Vatican Council, but whose post-conciliar publications warned against a false equivalence between social liberation and the supernatural. In search of the latter, Meyer found spiritual gratification in the Orthodox Church of St. Irene, where Russian exiles introduced him to a more ecumenical understanding of his faith and one that saw no need to engage in dialogue with Marxism or psychoanalysis.Footnote ⁴²

For three years Jean Meyer remained intellectually active in Paris. He continued to teach and used this time to review several books on Latin American history. He also kept in touch with his Mexican colleagues and often hosted some of them during their academic and leisure visits in Europe. Despite bright moments, he remained mostly unhappy in the “colder city of Paris,” largely disconnected from the French academic life and the radicalism of its universities. “I felt like a person who had lost his homeland,” Meyer remembered.Footnote ⁴³

In December of 1971 Meyer defended his 2,200-page doctoral dissertation, “La Christiade: sociéte et ideologie dans le Mexique contemporaine, 1926–1929.” In addition to Pierre Chaunu, his committee was also composed of François Chevalier and Pierre Vilar. A student of Marc Bloch, Chevalier was the most important French historian of Latin American during the 1950s, and his publications sparked great scholarly interest in the agrarian history of Mexico and the hacienda estates. During the 1960s, Chevalier taught courses on the Mexican Revolution and kept a close relationship with prominent Mexican intellectuals. By contrast, Vilar had little interest in Mexico and instead specialized in the economic history of Catalonia and Hispanism. During the day of the defense, Vilar allegedly “broke the protocol of the French academy” by interrupting Meyer numerous times during his presentation, questioning his use of oral history as a legitimate methodology and thus undermining the relevance of his sources. Fed up, Chevalier and Chaunu stepped in and defended Meyer. Shortly after, Meyer got a teaching job at the University of Perpignan, where he collaborated with other Latin American historians and founded the Institute of Mexican Studies. He successfully replaced Chevalier as the most influential scholar of Mexico working in the French academy.Footnote ⁴⁴

The redemption of “primitive rebels” and divergent responses to state repression

A few weeks before his expulsion from Mexico, Jean Meyer went to a movie theater to go see Spartacus (1960), the epic film by Stanley Kubrick featuring the slave revolt in antiquity. In one of its most memorable scenes, a group of enslaved men refused to betray the identity of their leaders as they all individually shouted, “I am Spartacus. I am Spartacus. I am Spartacus.”Footnote ⁶⁴ At the exact moment, a young man in the theater who had participated in the 1968 student movement allegedly stood up on one of the seats and loudly decried that he was a “survivor” of the October 2, 1968, massacre, adding, “Tlatelolco would never be forgotten.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Similar statements were voiced across the nation that year to condemn the role of the Mexican government in the repression of students.

Publications from across the world made similar statements to condemn the Tlatelolco massacre, including the May 1969 Esprit article that had Meyer expelled. Written on the topic of student movements in Latin America to commemorate the first anniversary of the student uprisings in France, Meyer stated that it remained unclear who had committed the massacre but argued that it was evident that the Mexican State was likely responsible for the crime. He blamed an irrational government unwilling to engage in a productive dialogue with a movement that, although legitimate in its demands, lacked the support of the working class. It was a massive protest that did not have the maturity of the Parisian student movement, but one that faced a more authoritarian regime.Footnote ⁶⁶

Most foreign historians of Mexico likely agreed with Meyer and perhaps also disapproved (in private) of the repressive measures employed by President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz throughout his administration. But only a few of them felt compelled to write in protest of the Tlatelolco massacre. An exception was John Womack, the Harvard professor of Mexican history and author of one of the most influential historical monographs published in the aftermath of the ’68 movement, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (1969). In comparison to Meyer’s article in Esprit, the one published by Womack in The New Republic a year earlier was far more condemning in its tone and sharper in its analysis of the political system in Mexico.

Womack published his article on October 10, 1968, two days before the inauguration of the Olympic Games and eight days after the massacre. He provided one of the most perceptive narratives ever written on the movement to date that included a well-informed account of the legal and extra-legal mechanisms of control employed by the Mexican government to discredit and ultimately repress the students. Womack meticulously debunked the conspiracy theories given at the time to dismiss the legitimacy of the uprising and instead provided a clear explanation of the political and social reasons that compelled thousands of young people to organize a massive heterogeneous movement that demanded a more democratic nation. As Meyer did, Womack successfully placed the importance of the civil protest in the international context of the era, but more assertively insisted that the particularities of the movement rested almost entirely on its national character.Footnote ⁶⁷

Two years later Womack published an equally insightful article with Foreign Affairs providing a longer history of State repression, rooted in the corruption and institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution. As Meyer did in his Esprit article, Womack viewed the PRI and the co-optation of its revolutionary rhetoric with apprehension, but unlike other scholars at the time, he seemed less enthusiastic about the presidential administration of Luis Echeverría. While many applauded the new president for his willingness to accept criticism and celebrated his populist policies with enthusiasm, Womack instead reminded his readers of Echeverría’s long trajectory in the history of State repression in Cold War Mexico. He expressed little hope in his willingness to provide a greater “democratic opening” and described the political situation as dire, suggesting that State violence did not come to an end with the Tlatelolco massacre. Official harassment continued, rallies were “violently dispersed,” and political activists were “suspiciously murdered,” he accurately wrote. Furthermore, while others demanded support for the incumbent president, Womack instead argued that the authoritarianism that had characterized the administrations of Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría did not rest on one single individual; it also involved key members of their respective cabinets, whose anticommunist policies were largely to blame for the overt repression that characterized the Global Sixties in Mexico. “Echeverría is a perfect paladin of the established régime,” Womack astutely explained, “with a long rap sheet of state repression that dated back to 1946, when he was recruited to the PRI.” “Of the various presidential hopefuls” of 1969, he added with precision, Echeverría “was certainly the toughest… the canniest.”Footnote ⁶⁸

The pessimistic (and accurate) description given of Echeverría by Womack differed from the one Meyer found at El Colegio on his return to Mexico in 1972. By then, a significant number of key Mexican scholars and intellectuals had sided with the ruling elite. In agreement with the incumbent president, they too argued that “echeverrismo” represented the best path to prevent the rise of “Fascism” in Mexico. While Meyer had found it necessary to condemn the authoritarianism of Díaz Ordaz, he nonetheless found himself restricted to Article 33 and therefore stayed away from making any public statements to criticize Echeverría in Mexican outlets and instead dedicated his energy and time to his numerous publications, which made him one of the most prolific historians of his generation. Prominent intellectuals weighed in. Most threw their support behind the new president, while only a small minority took more critical positions.Footnote ⁶⁹ By and large, they refrained from criticizing the repressive politics of Echeverría, and in their silence, many of them saw little value in echoing the concerns that Womack voiced in his Foreign Affairs article.

Despite the ideological differences that polarized Mexican academia, however, the benefits that came with tacitly approving of the Echeverría administration were real. Intellectuals and scholars welcomed the greater academic freedom and substantial growth of government investment in higher education that marked the 1970s. Many of them also took advantage of the creation of new publishing houses that characterized these latter years of the Global Sixties, which simultaneously saw an unprecedented growth in the production of historical books on modern Mexico. Among others, these included the Marxist press Siglo XXI, the counter-cultural friendly presses Joaquin Mortiz and Diógenes, and the government-sponsored SepSetentas, a prominent but mostly understudied press, which provided young foreign scholars who specialized in Mexico with an unprecedented opportunity to publish their work in Spanish.

The Echeverría administration created SepSetentas with funds from the Ministry of Education in 1971. Under the direction of María del Carmen Millán, it translated and published the scholarly work of foreign scholars writing on the modern history of the nation with particular emphasis on affordable “libros de bolsillo,” or “pocket books,” that often touched on the topic of the Mexican Revolution. These featured doctoral dissertations and often included unpublished primary documents. Nearly all of these studies were written in response to the revisionist scholarship that emerged during the Global Sixties, including, among many others, the influential work of Stanley Ross (¿Ha muerto la revolución mexicana?), John Hart (Los anarquistas mexicanos), David Raby (Educación y revolución social en México), James Hamon and Stephen Niblo (Precursores de la revolución agrarian en México), and Barry Carr (El movimiento obrero y la política en México). In 1973, Meyer also published one of his earliest books with the press, Problemas campesinos y revueltas agrarias, and the work of other foreign scholars interested in the history of Mexican Catholicism and the Right soon followed, including those of Anne Staples (La iglesia en la primera república federal mexicana), Silvia M. Arrom (La mujer mexicana ante el divorcio eclesiástico), and Hugh Campbell (La derecha radical en México).Footnote ⁷⁰

Clearly, a new generation of historians of Mexico were not immune to the tumultuous changes that took place during the Global Sixties and partly responded to the State violence that peaked with the Tlatelolco massacre by reinterpreting the nation’s history “from the bottom up.” In the words of the British historian Alan Knight, who first visited Mexico in 1969, “it was time for los de abajo [or “the underdogs” of national history, as the famous novelist Mariano Azuela once called them] to get their deserved attention.”Footnote ⁷¹ Prior to the establishment of SepSetentas, new archives were explored and became more accessible, while regional studies took priority. Oral, quantitative, and regional histories laid out the methodological work for alternative and more nuanced interpretations of the past. European and US historians also became more interested in Latin America. Graduate programs grew exponentially, and the “vogue” of the era sparked a new historical interest in revolutions and popular uprisings.Footnote ⁷² Many graduate students who travelled to Mexico from Europe and the United States to do historical research sympathized with the Cuban Revolution and the student uprisings of 1968. Two telling examples were Barry Carr and John Hart, who were politically involved as graduate students. The terrifying events that took place during the Tlatelolco massacre and the repression that followed reinforced their academic interest in labor politics, anarchism, and Marxism. But these were not isolated examples.Footnote ⁷³

The most influential monograph published in the immediate aftermath of the student movement was Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. As others have argued, this was an “emblematic book of the New Left” that aimed to recover the collective experience of the militant peasants that Meyer described in a 1971 review as “remarkable” and a “beautiful example of the inextricable synthesis between event history and social history.” Meyer added in his review that it is a book that “possesses the great merit [of its author] in liking his protagonists, the humble, those who are valued by the number, those whose habitual silence and immobility [have] mislead [others] to believe that their minds were empty.” Womack “did not mention the role of religion in the Zapatista uprising,” Meyer lamented, but unlike other historians of the revolution, “he recognized its full importance.” But it is the detailed explanation that Womack presented in his book to explain how ordinary people “became sentimentally conscious of themselves and their situation vis-a-vis others” that made this a great book and an influential study that encouraged historians to revise their description of the masses, not as dupes manipulated by strong caudillos, but as active agents of their own history.Footnote ⁷⁴

Meyer first met Womack in the summer of 1970, a few months before the publication of his review of Zapata. Five years younger, Meyer introduced his American colleague to a set of original documents available in the Parisian archives on Zapata. He also gave him a copy of his five-volume doctoral dissertation. “We clicked right away,” noted Womack, as they talked for hours sharing their mutual love for Mexico and its history. Similar to Meyer, Womack had first arrived in Mexico to do archival research for his doctoral dissertation in 1962. He had little knowledge of Latin America, and similar to Meyer, Womack had minimal knowledge of Mexico, and his Spanish was rudimentary. Both found the country fascinating, but unlike Meyer, Womack would remain committed to Marxism and sympathetic to the principles and accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution. Womack remarked in an interview, “when intellectuals and liberal historians voiced their support for Echeverría, Cuba remained my North Star.”Footnote ⁷⁵

For Meyer, Womack was among a host of historians doing work that excited him. Meyer was equally enthusiastic about the books published by Enrique Florescano, William Taylor, and especially Luis González. In his review of Pueblo en vilo, Meyer wrote, “through his language, [the author] obliges us to respond to a number of more general problems, such as that of change and the role of the individual in history.” It is “an exemplary” book. “If the title had not already been taken by a novelist, Gonzalez would have been able to call his book ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ […]. Almost everything is there, the absence, reticence, and feint have confessional value.” He explained, “It is up to the reader to look, to search; the reader is offered treasures that we have the vanity to not highlight; in this false jumble, everything that does not shine is oftentimes gold […]. We learn what [the people of San José de Gracia] ate, the music they enjoyed, their joys and fears, their health and illness […]. Everything is there, including their undergarments […], their obsession with interior peace, with the ‘communion’ and their worry for the future.”Footnote ⁷⁶ To some extent, this is what Meyer hoped to achieve with La Cristiada, a book, paralleled by Womack’s Zapata, as I argued earlier, that not only aimed to tell the story of those who lost a war to an immoral enemy but, in the language of the era, also hoped to present its common protagonists with dignity. Similar to the Zapatistas, the Cristeros appeared as epic subjects of the past, and in the context of the Global Sixties, also as “primitive rebels,” in the words of Hobsbawm, who had been erased from the official historiography and who fought against a totalitarian “status quo.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Following the publication of Zapata, and other foundational books of the decade (including González Casanova’s 1965 Democracy in Mexico), new revisionist studies were soon published on labor unions, the economics of the hacienda system during the Porfiriato, caudillismo, caciquismo, agrarian politics, regional interpretations of the many Mexican Revolutions, and the Church–State conflict that followed in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ⁷⁸ Many of these revisionist interpretations, including the bulk of monographs later published with SepSetentas, were written from neo-Marxist perspectives. They were directly influenced by the political repression of the time and nearly all of them were published in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco massacre. Emblematic of this scholarship is Adolfo Gilly’s reinterpretation of the revolution as an “interrupted” and thus still relevant process, written by the Argentine while imprisoned in Lecumberri as well as the ethnographic work on the persistence of caciquismo in the postrevolutionary period by the American anthropologist Paul Friedrich. Other key interpretations of the era included James Cockcroft’s emphasis on the “co-optation” of the revolution, and especially Arnaldo Cordova’s earlier and much more influential sociological interpretation of the conflict as a political revolution that brought about an authoritarian, nationalist, and populist state that successfully created a “mass politics,” based in the mobilization, cooptation, and repression of workers and peasants.Footnote ⁷⁹

But not all revisionist studies were neo-Marxist interpretations. Meyer, for example, in expressing no interest in reviewing leftist interpretations of Mexican history, argued that the revolution had failed to improve the lives of the marginalized. In contrast, he seemed far more intellectually invested with scholars who expressed critical views of celebratory accounts of radical revolutions. Meyer delighted in the fact that many of his French colleagues, in contrast to many American scholars, “at last sounded the death knell for the romantic dreams of the Left in Europe.” Specifically, Meyer pointed to René Dumont, author of Cuba est-il socialiste? (1970), and to K.S. Karol’s Les guérilleros au pouvoir: l’itinéraire politique de la révolution cubaine (1970). Despite these authors’ initial sympathy for the “caudillo Fidel,” Meyer argued, they finally recognized that “the Cuban celebration was finished.”Footnote ⁸⁰

The need for revisionist interpretations of Mexican history reached an unprecedented audience during the Third Congress of Mexican and North American historians, held in Oaxtepec, Morelos, in November of 1969. Presided over by Cosío Villegas, the Congress gave priority to young scholars and included the participation of dozens of representative historians from Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Europe. The primary goals were to gather historiographical summaries of the work produced since the second Congress held in Austin, Texas, in 1959; explore the benefits of engaging in interdisciplinary research; and collectively identify topics in need of historical attention.Footnote ⁸¹ The two papers that stood out because of their boldness, assertiveness, and meticulous engagement with the scholarship were those written by Womack, “Mexican political historiography, 1959–1969,” and Meyer, “Historia de la vida social” (“Social History”).

In his presentation, Womack was the only participant to directly mention the Tlatelolco massacre and the only historian to place his paper in the broader political context of the 1960s.Footnote ⁸² He wrote, “In Mexico, the present still seeps back into the past, and the past up into the present, like blood through a bandage.” Why shy away from our respective ideologies in the writing of the past? He added:

The presentation written by the then 27-year-old Meyer refrained from providing comments on politics.Footnote ⁸⁴ Composed of a paper 32 single-spaced pages long, it instead laid out a long list of questions that had been ignored by an older generation of scholars related to agrarian issues, labor topics, the military, and religion. Of these, those pertaining to Catholicism were the most ambitious and assertive in tone. Meyer wrote, “It is truly a shame to witness our ignorance when it comes to the social history of Mexico.” Following the exemplary work of Luis González, “we must make a better effort” to understand “the psychology of the common people and their diverse pueblos,” their needs, hopes, aspirations, and diverse understandings of their world. “A lot has been said of Zapata and Villa, but who were the Zapatistas and Villistas, really?” Historians should no longer be concerned with “heroic personalities,” he added, but rather with the socioeconomic, political, and religious contexts that surrounded such heroes and transformed them into mythical figures. Experts in the field should not be exclusively interested in revolutions and class conflict, moreover, but also in the religious and conservative motives that pushed so many ordinary people to resist multiple forms of authoritarianism, including those that emerged with the Revolution, an event with mythical proportions, he argued, “that broke with the agrarian system of the past, but introduced new forms of exploitation.” He then asked: To what extent has religion shaped resistance? “What has been the historical relationship between religion and social tensions?” To answer these and many other questions raised in his presentation, Meyer then added, “we must acknowledge the diversity that exists in the various manifestations of Catholicism.” The notion that there is “a ‘Catholic Mexico’ is a cliché, a verbal illusion.” There are multiple geographical regions and sectors within the Church that have competing understandings of religion. A further complexity will also be noticed when historians take into consideration class and generational differences. But in addition to greater attention to local differences, historians must not fail to place Catholicism in the larger world context. Just as with the State, the Church was a heterogeneous institution composed of competing forces that have negotiated power with grassroots actors and ecclesiastical authorities. Unfortunately, historians have not examined this complexity. Meyer concluded, “Our modern world [and] our history will not be intelligible unless we explore the role that religion has played in the life of the masses. [We can no longer ignore] their beliefs, dogmas, revelations, and rituals.” Religious archives will likely continue to be closed, and considering the anticlerical environment that persisted in Mexico and the lack of interest in academia, “many of them will probably be destroyed.” Thus, “the historian must take full advantage from other disciplines. [She/he] must be willing to play the role of the pollster and the interviewer.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Meyer was not alone in calling greater attention to historical research on Catholicism. Similar to the revisionist interpretations of the Revolution, a new interest also emerged on the topics of religion, the Church, conservative movements, and the Cristero Rebellion, largely written in direct response to the once official narratives prioritized by the State. In 1971, for example, Francisco Miranda published an essay in Historia mexicana that further drew attention to the “urgency” of revising national history and called on scholars to “consider the ecclesiastical church not as an eternal rival of the state” but rather as an influential institution that has “shaped our social, cultural, economic, and political reality.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Two years later, the American historian Donald Mabry also published his pioneer study of the chronology and political history of the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), for which he had unprecedented access to party files.Footnote ⁸⁷ It was also in 1973 that Meyer published one of the first books on the Hispanic origins, nationalist politics, and social dimensions of the Sinarquistas, and as referenced earlier, it was also in the context of the 1960s when Olivera Sedano, Quirk, and Bailey joined Meyer in bringing revisionist attention to the study of Catholicism. Finally, it was also during these years when the American historian James Wilkie and his Guatemalan wife Edna Monzón conducted their groundbreaking interviews with the leader of the Sinarquista movement Salvador Abascal, the founder of the PAN Manuel Gómez Morín, the key ideologue of the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty Miguel Palomar Vizcarra, and the leading figure of the Cristero Rebellion Aurelio Robles Acevedo.Footnote ⁸⁸

In short, it was during the Global Sixties when a new and more sophisticated scholarly interest in Catholicism and conservative movements emerged, not simply as reactionary forces but as influential in the shaping of the nation. Meyer, who distinguished himself from other foreign experts on Mexico, placed himself at the vanguard of this rising academic interest. In the words of Mabry, “The Frenchman had no special affection for the United States or obligation to fit the story a predetermined ideological mold; instead, he had the desire and the time to uncover all of the story.” Unlike his colleagues from the United States, moreover, “he had an historical consciousness of a truly revolutionary revolution and was not seduced by the charms of the Mexican experience.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Conclusion: Presentism in the past?

Today, many historians of Latin America find themselves polarized debating how to “do” history in a politically charged environment. As some have taken a position “against presentism,” others have not shied away from the temptation of reinterpreting the past through a contemporary lens.Footnote ⁹⁰ Public discussions of this polemic issue were mostly absent in academia during the 1960s, but as I have argued in this article, “In Mexico, the present [always seeped] back into the past, and the past up into the present,” as John Womack put it during the 1969 conference in Oaxtepec.Footnote ⁹¹

The scholarly work of Jean Meyer and those of his contemporaries provide us with great insight into the Global Sixties. This was a polarizing period of utopian expectations and an increasing sense of disillusionment that brought the study of Catholicism and the celebration of militant Christians to the forefront of the revisionist scholarship of Mexican history. As with their Marxist counterparts, these historians of religion prioritized the voices of the marginalized and welcomed new methodological tools. In the case of Meyer, these ranged from oral history, as Olivera Sedano and Wilkie pioneered in their respective work, to the less successful use of the mail questionnaire. The political questions of colonialism, imperialism, and armed struggle that surrounded the multicausal influences of the Cuban Revolution shaped these methodologies across Latin America and encouraged a new generation of French intellectuals to give greater attention to the Third World; however, in the case of Mexico, so did the divergent interpretations of Catholicism that simultaneously welcomed a renewed interest in the Cristero Rebellion in Mexican academia. The monographs published on the subject successfully revised the once official interpretations of the Mexican Revolution. This renewed academic interest on the topic thrived in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco massacre, which Echeverría saw as opportunity to provide a fruitful space for criticism and intellectual production that benefitted an influential group of liberal and conservative scholars who saw little need in exposing the repression that the government unleashed on those who continued to protest against the system, including workers and campesinos who tried to create independent unions from the government and young activists who saw no other option but to embrace armed struggle.

Jean Meyer never aspired to be a politician, and unlike some historians of his generation, he did not express interest in becoming an intermediate of the State. As an intellectual with a sense of “moral authority” who often published outside academic journals, however, the French scholar ceased to be a “pernicious” threat to national academia and instead emerged as one of the most important and hegemonic voices among historians of Mexican Catholicism.Footnote ⁹² As the essayist Jorge Volpi once argued:

In a country built on the notion that a single party—or a single individual—should dominate the entirety of the social sphere, not many options remain for intellectuals. They can either exercise a no-holds-barred critique and thereby risk imprisonment (or worse), or they can moderate their criticism in order to curry the favor and recognition that allows them to carry out their work with a certain freedom, under the condition that they not exceed the limits that have been imposed on them.Footnote ⁹³

Like most of his colleagues at El Colegio de México, and other foreign historians of Mexico, Meyer’s career benefitted by choosing the latter position when he returned to his adopted nation in 1972, and while he expressed a position of condemnation in describing the administration of Díaz Ordaz, the chilling effects of Article 33 forced him to be less critical of future presidents.Footnote ⁹⁴

In my interviews with Jean Meyer, he repeatedly emphasized that luck always seemed to be on his side as a key explanation to a highly successful career. In reality, the Francophile character that continued to dominate Mexican academia during the 1960s, combined with a prolific scholarly production that a few historians of his generation matched, contributed to the predominance that Meyer achieved among many of his contemporaries, and so did a privileged status in academic spaces that favored the voices of male (and white) figures.Footnote ⁹⁵

To conclude, the history of Jean Meyer provides us with an intriguing, yet mostly unexplored aspect of the Global Sixties, one that prioritizes a European perspective on Latin America and one that draws attention to a conservative view of the era. His story, moreover, is one that has a parallel story to the French New Left, which initially fell in love with the utopian ideas of the Cuban Revolution but which, at the end of the era, established a more critical view of its limitations and contradictions. For Meyer, this took place very early on, during his first visit in Mexico in 1962. But for most of his contemporaries in Paris, this happened in the late 1960s, when Fidel Castro failed to condemn the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968, and three years later, imprisoned the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla for criticizing the revolutionary government.Footnote ⁹⁶ Régis Debray said little to condemn the Castro regime, but as many of contemporaries in Paris did, he distanced himself from the radicalism that made him such an influential figure in Latin America. In 1970, he wrote, “Nothing assures that socialism will one day appear as the momentary fad of a century, a laughable illusion with no memorable consequences.” Five years later he then referenced the study of revolutions by other European intellectuals of the era as “entertainment for obsessives.”Footnote ⁹⁷