When young radicals gathered in the streets of Paris in May 1968, Régis Debray was nowhere to be seen. As his friends playacted at revolution, he sat in a jail cell in Bolivia. He had been arrested in 1967 and sentenced to a 30-year term for his involvement in a guerrilla group led by Che Guevara, with whom Debray had written a handbook for revolution.
No member of the French intellectual scene had gone as far as Debray in living out radical rhetoric. For him the “Third-Worldism” so popular in Paris was more than a pose. He not only praised foreign militants but also joined in their bloody labours.
