Henri Maler

Henri Maler was born on 26 November 1946 in Toulouse, Haute-Garonne, France. Details of his parents and childhood have not been made public. He described himself in later life as a former philosophy teacher turned political science lecturer, and his friend Ugo Palheta wrote that he shared with Daniel Bensaïd the identity of the "non-Jewish Jew" described by Isaac Deutscher.

Maler studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1966 to 1968. He earned a licence in philosophy, was admitted to the Institut de préparation aux enseignements de second degré (IPES) and obtained the CAPES secondary teaching certificate. In 1992 he defended a doctoral thesis in social history at Université Paris 8, supervised by the philosopher Jean-Marie Vincent, titled Convoiter l'impossible : critique marxienne de l'utopie et critique de l'utopie marxienne.

Maler joined UNEF in 1966 and the Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire in 1967, and took part in May 1968. After the Ligue communiste was founded in 1969, he and Isaac Johsua (known as "Isy") led its Révolution! tendency, using the party names "Rivière" and "Créach". They opposed affiliation with the Fourth International and argued for a broader party of revolutionaries radicalised by the student and worker movements. In 1971 the tendency became the independent Organisation communiste Révolution!, with up to around a thousand members. In December 1976 it merged with the Gauche ouvrière et paysanne to form the Organisation communiste des travailleurs (OCT), which soon fell into crisis. Maler left in 1978, and the OCT dissolved in 1979. According to Palheta he did not join another political organisation afterwards.

Maler taught philosophy in French lycées from 1971 to 1995. His doctoral thesis on Marx and utopia was published as Congédier l'utopie ? L'utopie selon Karl Marx (L'Harmattan, 1994) and Convoiter l'impossible : l'utopie avec Marx, malgré Marx (Albin Michel, 1995). In them he argued for recovering utopian thought while freeing it from doctrinaire blueprints, contrasting "chimerical" utopias with "strategic" ones. In 1996 he became a maître de conférences in political science at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, teaching there until 2012. From 1993 to 1997 he sat on the editorial board of the journal Futur antérieur, and from 2001 to 2003 on that of Variations.

During the strikes of winter 1995 Maler helped draft and promote an appeal supporting the strikers, published in Le Monde on 15 December 1995. In February 1996 he became, with Jacques Kergoat, one of the organisers of the "États généraux du mouvement social" launched around Pierre Bourdieu. In April 1996 he founded Action-Critique-Médias (Acrimed) with others including Yvan Jossen and Patrick Champagne. Its first manifesto denounced "the appropriation of most of the major media by financial powers".

Maler was Acrimed's principal organiser until January 2015. Acrimed recalled that his home long served as its office and headquarters, that he wrote close to 700 articles for its website, and that he handled almost everything: writing, editing, layout, putting articles online several times a week, organising board meetings, debates and public events, and staffing stalls at demonstrations. He mentored many new writers and insisted that Acrimed act as a political collective inside the social movement, working with journalists' unions, Attac and left parties. In 2016 he took part in programme discussions on media policy with La France insoumise. In 2024 he set out Acrimed's proposals for a democratic transformation of the media in Attac's Lignes d'Attac.

Maler kept his private life largely out of public view, and the names of his family members have not been made public. Friends described a brilliant, cultured and funny man who phoned at length every day, sent emails frantically, and enjoyed being blocked on X by the commentators he criticised. He kept a personal blog about his intellectual, political and personal life. Health problems led him to step back gradually from Acrimed in his final decade. His friendship with Isaac Johsua spanned decades, and the economist Jacques Sapir wrote of fifty years of friendship.

Maler held that a radical critique of the media is necessarily an anticapitalist one: as Palheta summarised his view, one does not understand everything about the media by analysing their capitalist ownership, but one understands nothing without taking it seriously. He championed the right to information, pluralism, a public information service and support for independent media. Attac recalled his favourite formula: if another world is possible, other media are possible too, and for another world to be possible, other media are necessary. He remained a revolutionary Marxist who, in Palheta's words, never repented or mellowed, and he opposed what he saw as the instrumentalisation of Jewish identity to defend Israeli state policy.

Congédier l'utopie ? L'utopie selon Karl Marx (L'Harmattan, 1994) Hegel passé, Hegel à venir (editor, L'Harmattan, 1995) Convoiter l'impossible : l'utopie avec Marx, malgré Marx (Albin Michel, 1995) Une certaine idée du communisme : répliques à François Furet (with Denis Berger, Éditions du Félin, 1996) Émancipation. Petits essais de marxologie tatillonne (Critique communiste supplement, 2002) Marx et l'appropriation sociale (with Jacques Texier and Antoine Artous, Syllepse, 2003) Médias en campagne : retours sur le référendum de 2005 (with Antoine Schwartz, Syllepse, 2005) L'opinion, ça se travaille : les médias et les guerres justes (with Serge Halimi and Dominique Vidal, Agone, 2006; sixth edition with Mathias Reymond, 2014) Médias et mobilisations sociales : la morgue et le mépris (with Mathias Reymond, Syllepse, 2007)

Acrimed marked its thirtieth anniversary in 2026, shortly before his death, and remains active through its website, magazine and a programme on the online outlet Blast. Palheta and others credit Maler with building, at a time when media criticism faced strong opposition even on the left, a tradition of radical media criticism that now runs through Le Monde diplomatique, Arrêt sur images and many independent outlets and social media accounts. Acrimed wrote that his work lives on not as a frozen inheritance but as a living practice of criticism and struggle passed to new generations.

Acrimed announced on Saturday 3 October 2026 that Henri Maler had died, saying it had learned the news with immense sadness. He was 79. Le Monde, with AFP, reported his death the same evening. The cause and place of death have not been made public. Tributes were published by Attac, Le Monde diplomatique, Ugo Palheta (in Contretemps and on Mediapart), Jacques Sapir (in Fréquence Populaire), Olivier Besancenot and Edwy Plenel.