Popular Justice

In February of 1972, Michel Foucault sat down with a group of young Maoist militants to discuss the subject of “popular justice.” The occasion for the dialogue was an ongoing effort by some on the radical French left to convene “popular tribunals” that would put the ruling class and its representatives on trial for crimes against the people that went unprosecuted. In 1970, Jean-Paul Sartre himself had presided over one such tribunal in the town of Lens, where the owners of a mine were symbolically tried in absentia for the death of sixteen workers.