In 1966, Barthes was director of studies at the 6th section of the École pratique des Hautes Études (chair of "Sociologie des signes et des représentations"). In this Fernand Braudel stronghold, the Centre d'études des communications de masse (CECMAS) was created in 1961 (with Georges Friedmann, Edgar and Violette Morin, Christian Metz, Claude Bremond). For Barthes, since Mythologies (1957), literary research has been less central. His 1962-1964 seminar focused on non-literary and even non-linguistic semiotic systems (image, sound, gesture, fashion). He had become a man of the media: his analyses of advertising can be found in Pierrot le fou, Les Choses (Jérôme and Sylvie come out of Mythologies), or Les Belles images (the novel is set in the advertising world). Barthes was more sociologist than literary.
The Barthes-Picard affair occurred at the start of the 1965 academic year; it erupted out of the blue two years after the publication of Sur Racine (which was already old, the texts dating from 1958 to 1960). It has been said that Raymond Picard reacted just as Barthes touched the heart of French literature with Racine, but it was probably less Sur Racine than the Essais critiques (1964), whose final texts set structuralism against academic criticism, that provoked Picard's attack. Picard, who published his thesis on Racine with Gallimard, in the "Bibliothèque des idées", is not a typical "Sorbonnard", a Brichot. He is the author of a novel, Les Prestiges, published in 1947 by Gallimard. Close to Jean Paulhan, he is familiar with Sarraute and Simon. In Barthes, Picard attacks the incoherence of the method, the jargon and the impossibility of verifying interpretations. He proposes a new literary history, a renewed Lansonism, also demanding a return to the text.
The publication of Picard's pamphlet, Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture, created two clear-cut camps: on the one hand, the students and the intellectual avant-garde; on the other, the press - Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur - where Picard was welcomed as a defender of common sense. Barthes was affected by these polemics, and felt Picard's attack to be terrorism: "I speak of Racine in the language of our time; I am the true guardian of the national heritage; it is delirious to say that the new critics don't like literature." Barthes takes the side of young people and students.
Critique et vérité, published in February 1966 with the banner "Faut-il brûler Roland Barthes?" (Should Roland Barthes be burned?), is in two parts: a violent, political refutation of Picard's arguments, followed by a scientistic program. Barthes claimed to be a member of the Resistance, of the avant-garde that had been suppressed since the 19th century; his aim was to push his adversary to the right, or even the extreme right, and to follow in a line that began with Proust, Freud, Lacan, Queneau, Chomsky, Mallarmé, Jakobson and Blanchot, and continued through to Le Clézio, Bataille, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Lukacs, Goldmann and Benveniste: there is no longer any poet or novelist, only writing. Barthes proposes to develop a science of literature; criticism must be a "discourse that openly assumes, at its own risk, the intention of giving a particular meaning to the work", that imposes meaning rather than analyzing how it is produced.
