Charles Bettelheim - Biography

Biography

Henri Bettelheim, the father of Charles Bettelheim, was a Viennese Austrian of Jewish origin, and a representative of a Swiss bank in Paris. The family had to leave France after the beginning of the First World War in 1914. The Bettelheims lived in Switzerland then in Egypt. In 1922, Charles Bettelheim returned to Paris with his French mother, during which time his father, who was living in Egypt, committed suicide.

After Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Charles Bettelheim broke away from his familiar environment, first joining the "Young Communists" (Jeunesses communistes), and subsequently the French Communist Party. In addition to his studies in philosophy, sociology, law and psychology, he also learned Russian. In July 1936, he arrived in Moscow with a tourist visa. Thanks to his mastery of the language, he was able to get a resident permit for five months, during which time he worked as a tourist guide, and later on with the French edition of the Moscow Journal, and finally at Mosfilm, where he directed film dubbing. His experiences during his Moscow stay, in the anxious atmosphere at the beginning of the "purges" and the trials of the Bolshevik leaders who opposed Joseph Stalin, made him keep a critical distance from the Soviet Union, without actually abandoning his Communist convictions. He was excluded from the Communist Party for his "slanderous" remarks. In 1937, he married a young militant Communist, Lucette Beauvallet. During the German occupation, he cooperated with the French Trotskyites (the International Workers Party).

His decision to choose economics as a profession was not an easy one, since at that time economics was considered a minor science; however, inasmuch as he had become so knowledgeable about the Soviet Union and about economic planning, Bettelheim was able to fill a gap. After the War, he became an official in the Ministry of Labor. In 1948 he entered the "Sixth Section" of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE).

In the Fifties, Bettelheim began his international activities as an advisor to the governments of Third World countries; he was the spokesperson for Nasser in Egypt, for Nehru in India, and for Ben Bella in Algeria. In 1958, he created an institutional base for his research by founding the CEMI. In 1963, Che Guevara invited him to Cuba, where he participated in a "grand debate" on socialist economics.

In 1966, Bettelheim was particularly interested in China. He helped the Union of Young Communists (Marxist-Leninist) with theoretical planning, without being directly affiliated with the organization. In his capacity as President of the Franco-Chinese Friendship Association (Association des amitiés Franco-Chinoises), he visited the People's Republic of China several times, in order to study new methods of industrial development created by the "Cultural Revolution." After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Bettelheim was very critical of the new leaders (Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping) who began to abandon Maoist principles, and replacing them with a politics of modernization which Bettelheim considered reactionary and authoritarian.

From 1980 onward, Bettelheim fell more and more by the wayside—a result of the profound political changes in the Third World—and, in Europe, of the decline (and eventual failure) of "hard-line socialism", which rendered "obsolete" any debate over the paradigms of development in the Southern countries, in an atmosphere of planned economy independent of the world market—an economy to which Bettelheim had contributed so much. Bettelheim has written a book of memoirs which, as yet, has remained unfinished.

Until his death, Bettelheim lived in Paris. He did not publish anything in his later years. His student and long-time colleague Bernard Chavance is among the leading exponents of "Regulation" theory.