| |
| 1970 |
| |
| Beginnings of the French civilian nuclear energy program, which expanded rapidly with surprisingly little opposition. | 1 |
| Implementation of the CGP's sixth national economic plan, covering the years 1971–75. | 2 |
| |
| Oct. 13 |
| |
| President Pompidou visited the Soviet Union and concluded an agreement “to extend and deepen political consultations on major international problems of mutual interest,” though without prejudice to the commitments of either party to other nations. | 3 |
| |
| Nov. 3 |
| |
| Administrative reform in the direction of further decentralization: local authorities were thenceforth able to decide on local projects without reference to Paris ministries. | 4 |
| Cultural developments: existentialist philosophy, which held that individuals, in the absence of any absolute moral law, create their own moral values and therefore should be held responsible for their actions, dominated the French intellectual community in the first postwar decades. Beginning in the 1960s, structuralism emerged as a reaction to existentialism. Major figures in the structuralist movement included anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and literary critic Roland Barthes, who grounded their theory on the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and the science of signs. Structuralism drew on linguistic theory for a mathematical rationalism and asserted that human consciousness was dependent on objective structures implied in the laws of language syntax. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, other intellectuals, such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, challenged the linguistic stability and systematic functions of structuralism. Their emphasis on textual analysis and relativist positions was instrumental in the movement of poststructuralism and deconstruction in the post-1968 intellectual community. | 5 |
| |
| |
