“When the proletariat takes power,” said Foucault, it may “exert toward the classes over which it has triumphed a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this.”37 The problems created by the new nihilism weren’t academic. “We had the means of terrorism,” recalled another French radical left leader. “Some of us were on the way to that kind of action.
