| 1926 | 15 October Paul-Michel Foucault is born in Poitiers, France. |
| 1945 | Attends the lycée Henri-IV in Paris. End of World War II. Existentialist thought and the Communist Party ‘the Party of the Resistance’ are held in much esteem by intellectuals. |
| 1946 | Enrols in the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. |
| 1949 | Simone de Beauvoir, the founder of post-World War II feminism, publishes The Second Sex. |
| 1950–3 | Foucault briefly joins the French Communist Party. His decision to join is influenced by the war in Indo-china. Leaves when a number of Jewish doctors are arrested in the USSR for alleged treason. |
| 1948–53 | Obtains qualifications in philosophy, psychology, psycho pathology and experimental psychology. |
| 1952–4 | Teaches psychology at the University of Lille and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. |
| 1954 | Publication of Maladie Mentale et Personnalité and introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence. Beginning of the Algerian uprising. This war polarises French intellectuals and militants, particularly in the existentialist, Marxist and Gaullist camps. |
| 1955 | Foucault takes up a post as the Director of the Maison de France in Uppsala Sweden. |
| 1956 | The Khrushchev Report is released in the USSR condemning the ‘personality cult of Stalin’. An uprising in Hungary is violently suppressed by Soviet troops. The centre-left government in France, including the Communist deputies, votes for special powers to aid in the ‘pacification’ of Algeria. These events provoke a mass exodus of intellectuals from the ranks of the Communist Party whom they perceive as changing tune to suit its own purposes rather than supporting the just causes of the oppressed. A general disillusion amongst intellectuals concerning party politics sets in. |
| 1957 | Publication of the collection of essays Mythologies by Roland Barthes, one of the key figures of the newly developing structuralist movement of thought. |
| 1958 | Foucault takes up a post in Poland as head of a new Centre for French Civilisation at the University of Warsaw. De Gaulle’s right-wing government comes to power in France further alienating intellectuals from party politics and humanist and literary philosophy. Many young researchers turn their attention instead to apparently less ideological domains such as the human sciences and areas such as epistemology, ethnology and linguistics. The so-called ‘father of structuralism’, Claude Lévi-Strauss publishes Structural Anthropology. |
| 1959 | Foucault appointed director of the French Institute of Hamburg in Germany. |
| 1960 | Takes up a post at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France. |
| 1961 | Foucault obtains his doctorate and his major thesis for this degree, Madness and Civilization, is published. |
| 1962 | Revised and retitled edition of Mental Illness and Psychology is published. The Algerian War ends. Publication of Nietzsche and Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze. Thomas Kuhn publishes The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which introduces the famous notion of paradigm to which Foucault’s idea of the episteme is often compared. |
| 1963 | Publication of The Birth of the Clinic and Raymond Roussel. |
| 1964 | Claude Lévi-Strauss publishes The Raw and the Cooked. |
| 1965 | Foucault lectures in Brazil. Publication of one of the classic texts of anti-humanist structuralist Marxism, Louis Althusser’s For Marx. |
| 1966 | Publication of The Order of Things, which provokes controversy in the press because of its anti-Marxist and anti-humanist stance and also its perceived affiliation with a new structuralist movement of thought which was beginning to pose a serious threat to the previously reigning philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology. The book is an instant best seller. Foucault also lectures in Hungary and moves to Tunisia to take up a Chair in Philosophy. Publication of Ecrits by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who employs structuralist methods in his analysis of the unconscious. Publication of Reading Capital another classic of structuralist Marxism by Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and Rancière. |
| 1967 | Publication of On the Normal and the Pathological by historian and philosopher of science, Georges Canguilhem. Foucault was to write an introduction for the English translation of this book published in 1978. Publication of Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology by the instigator of ‘deconstructionism’ Jacques Derrida. |
| 1968 | The ‘events of May’ take place with student and worker uprisings and a general strike in France. Student unrest also occurs in other countries: Japan, the USA, Poland, Germany and Mexico. In Tunisia Foucault puts himself at some personal and physical risk to support the cause of Tunisian student activists. Publication of sociologist/philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects. Baudrillard was to become well known for his ‘postmodern’ ideas on the contemporary breakdown of the divisions between ‘reality’ and ‘representation’ as well as a short book provocatively titled Forget Foucault, published in 1977. |
| 1969 | Foucault is appointed to the Chair in Philosophy at the new experimental University in the Parisian suburb of Vincennes, the University of Paris VIII. Publishes The Archaeology of Knowledge and lectures in England for the first and last time. |
| 1970–3 | Foucault makes regular trips to the USA, Canada, Japan and Brazil and two trips to Germany to deliver lectures, seminars and set up networks with intellectuals and others. |
| 1970 | Appointed Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious research institution of the Collège de France in Paris where he gives a course of public lectures and seminars almost every year until his death. Roland Barthes publishes S/Z which develops and applies methods of linguistic structuralism to literature. In December Foucault launches his inaugural series of lectures titled ‘The will to knowledge’. |
| 1971 | Publication of Foucault’s inaugural speech at the Collège de France, ‘The order of discourse’. Foucault announces the creation of the Groupe d’informations sur les prisons (GIP), a collective of intellectuals, prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families, aimed at providing prisoners themselves with a public forum to help them activate to improve conditions in prisons. Foucault gives a lecture in Tunisia on the painting of Manet which was finally published in complete form in 2004. In November, Foucault begins his second series of lectures at the Collège de France titled ‘Penal theories and institutions’. |
| 1972 | Continues activities with the GIP and participates in other groups organised along the same lines, namely the Groupe d’information – santé aimed at assisting health workers, and the Groupe d’information et de soutien des travailleurs immigrés, a support group for immigrant workers. A second edition of Madness and Civilization is published with a new preface. A discussion between Foucault and Deleuze titled ‘Intellectuals and Power’ is also published. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari publish their celebrated work Anti-Oedipus. The course at the Collège de France is titled ‘The punitive society’. |
| 1973 | Publication of I, Pierre Rivière … In November Foucault starts his course for the year. These lectures were eventually published in 2003 under the title Le pouvoir psychiatrique. |
| 1975 | Publication of Discipline and Punish. Travels to Spain with six other intellectuals, film-makers and journalists to protest unsuccessfully against the execution of eleven Spanish activists opposed to the Franco regime. Foucault’s course for this year was published in 1999 and translated into English under the title of Abnormal in 2003. |
| 1976 | Publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Course titled ‘Society Must Be Defended’, subsequently published in 1997, and in English translation in 2003. |
| 1977 | Reviews a book by André Glucksmann, The Master Thinkers. Glucksmann is one of a group of young ex-Maoists dubbed the ‘New Philosophers’, who appeared on the scene in the late 1970s and created a media furore both in France and in the USA with their strong critiques of Marxism and the repressive regimes in Communist countries as embodied and symbolised by the gulag. |
| 1978 | Publication of the influential article ‘Governmentality’ in Italian. Foucault travels to Iran and writes a highly controversial series of articles on the political situation there. His annual course was subsequently published under the title of Sécurité, Territoire, Population in 2004. A book titled La nouvelle histoire (The New History) (LeGoff, 1978) is published. This book which provides a key to work by the famous school of ‘Annales historians’ makes a number of references to Foucault’s work. |
| 1979 | Continuing attacks on Foucault’s writings on Iran. His course for this year was published under the title of Naissance de la biopolitique in 2004. Jean-François Lyotard publishes The Postmodern Condition, which introduces the term ‘postmodernism’ into the humanities and social sciences. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu publishes Distinction. |
| 1980 | The annual course is titled ‘The government of the living’ with a seminar series on Liberalism. Noted existentialist philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre dies. Foucault joins the huge funeral procession. |
| 1981 | Foucault’s course is titled ‘Subjectivity and truth’. A state of emergency is declared in Poland. Foucault is active on a committee of support for Poland working alongside exiled members of the dissident trade union Solidarity. |
| 1982 | The title of the course this year is The Hermeneutics of the Subject subsequently published in 2001 and appear... |
