 For multiple, overlapping, and complicated reasons of which the most relevant may be the discrediting of Stalin’s personage, policies, and version of Marxist philosophy that followed Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” Europe in the late 1950s saw a blossoming of political and philosophical alternatives to the version of Marxism-Leninism promulgated by the Soviet Union. This version of Marxist philosophy had dominated European leftist thought and action since the dawn of the Cold War in 1947 and, in France, was widely disseminated via Communist Party schools and literature. While political and philosophical change were slow to occur in the French Communist Party, by the late 1950s, many intellectuals associated with the Party began to ask questions about what constitutes the core of Marx’s philosophy and about how this philosophy guides, relates to, or allows for political action.