His father, Henri Maspero, a sinologist and professor at the Collège de France, died at Buchenwald, but his mother survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Their first two collections, "Cahiers libres" and "Textes à l'appui", focused on the Algerian War from an anti-colonialist perspective, and on contestation of the French Communist Party's unreformed Stalinism.

Many important writers first came to public attention through the "Cahiers libres" collection, such as Régis Debray, published in 1967 or Bernard-Henri Lévy in 1973.

In 2001, for example, he produced a long narrative about a summer passed on the Algerian coast with the title "Deux ou trois choses que j’ai vues de l’Algérie".

The title of the book was "François Maspero et les paysages humains" and it was edited by Bruno Guichard, Julien Hage and Alain Leger.

[6] Maspero was criticized by Situationists such as Guy Debord, who used the term "masperize" to describe the falsification or corruption of a text, for instance by deleting segments from a quote without marking them.