When French Youth Romanticizes Red Dictators
By Louis Perez y Cid
From Lenin to Mao, from Che Guevara to Hamas, a segment of French students continues to identify with revolutionary figures whose legacy is tragic.
This fascination speaks volumes about the political and moral disarray of a generation searching for an ideal. In lecture halls and on protest placards, the faces of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, and Che Guevara are still proudly displayed. More recently, the Hamas flag has even appeared in student marches.
A glaring paradox: these young people, who demand freedom, justice, and the dignity of nations, turn to those who, throughout history, have silenced their own people.
The Revolution as a Romantic Myth
In the activist imagination, the “great revolutionaries” embody resistance to oppression, the emancipation of the masses, and the struggle against imperialism. Lenin and Stalin become the architects of a more just world, Mao the liberator of the Chinese people, and Che the romantic hero who fell with arms in hand.
But behind the posters and stylized T-shirts, historical reality fades: camps, famines, repression. Millions of deaths, erased with a stroke in the name of the “cause.”
Here, ideology triumphs over truth. It is not history that is venerated, but the myth, that of pure struggle, of the ideal against the brutality of reality.
The Selective Memory of a French Tradition
It must be said that French academic culture maintains a long-standing familiarity with the radical left. In classrooms and in some textbooks, communism is still presented as a noble idea, simply “perverted” by its excesses.
The crimes of Nazism are unanimously condemned; those of Stalinism or Maoism, however, are often downplayed. As if “generous” intentions excused mass graves.
This selective memory perpetuates a persistent moral bias: the revolutionary left is supposedly on the side of good, even when it has created numerous gulags.
A Quest for an Ideal in a Disillusioned World
The enduring success of these red icons is also explained by the void they fill.
Today’s youth are growing up in a world saturated with crises—ecological, social, and political—where the horizon seems blocked. Traditional politics no longer inspires, and grand collective narratives have collapsed.
So, Lenin or Che Guevara reappear, not as political role models, but as symbols of the absolute. A way of saying no, of rebelling, of belonging to something greater than themselves.
From Che to Hamas: the confusion of symbols
This same reflex is found today in the pro-Hamas slogans that are flourishing in some universities.
Many young people are demonstrating out of compassion for the Palestinian people, a just cause, of course. But in the marches, we also see those who wave the green flag without understanding what it represents: an authoritarian, homophobic Islamist movement that oppresses its own people as much as it fights Israel.
The pattern is the same as yesterday: the “resistance fighter” is sanctified, even when they become a perpetrator. Ideology simplifies everything: it is enough to be “against” something to be on the right side of history.
Between naivety and collective responsibility
Should we therefore condemn these young people? No. Their indignation is sincere, their thirst for justice real. But their judgment falters.
The problem isn't commitment, it's blindness. And this blindness is rooted in an intellectual environment where people have long preferred to turn a blind eye to "friendly" crimes.
The university, a place of knowledge and debate, should be a place where one learns to think critically, to confront myths with reality, and not to confuse freedom with revolution.
It's not the thirst for ideals that should be blamed, but the political romanticism that distorts it.
Because by constantly fantasizing about dictators as heroes, we end up forgetting what freedom owes them: the truth.
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