Louis Althusser

In L'Avenir dure longtemps, written after the case was dismissed (non-lieu) and published in 1992, Althusser attempted to explain his psychological history and the killing of Hélène Rytmann, explicitly presenting the book as the account he would have given at trial. Publication renewed debate about responsibility, criminal non-responsibility and the attention given to the victim's voice.

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Directly implicated

On 16 November 1980, Louis Althusser strangled his wife Hélène Rytmann at their École normale supérieure residence. The autopsy confirmed death by strangulation. A murder investigation was opened, but three experts concluded that Althusser had been in a state of insanity at the time. On 23 January 1981, the judge dismissed the case (non-lieu) under Article 64 of the Penal Code, and Althusser remained hospitalised.

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After the Union of the Left's defeat, Althusser published four articles in Le Monde, later collected as What Must Change in the Party. He criticised PCF leadership, its apparatus and centralist methods, calling for genuinely democratic debate and organisational overhaul.

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Althusser was among eighty signatories calling for reform and relaxation of criminal provisions governing certain adult–minor relationships. The text particularly challenged the criminalisation of certain acts and explicitly raised the age of free sexual consent.

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Absent from most events for health reasons, Althusser subsequently wrote to Maria Antonietta Macciocchi that students did not constitute an objectively revolutionary class, describing them as middle strata marked by petty-bourgeois ideology, while recognising the exceptional significance of the uprising and general strike.

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Directly implicated

An anonymous article in the November–December 1966 Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, subsequently attributed to Louis Althusser, presented the Chinese Cultural Revolution as an unprecedented historical event potentially decisive in resolving contradictions within socialist societies. It is now read as strongly pro-Maoist intellectual involvement at a time when the Cultural Revolution was producing mass persecution.