Awkward and brilliant essayist and historian, Shlomo Sand studies, in this new and controversial work, the history and actuality of the figure of the French intellectual, drawing a cultural analysis that illuminates 20th-century France.
During his studies in Paris and throughout his life, Shlomo Sand has frequented the "great French thinkers," whose milieu - the intellectual world of Paris and its secrets - knows intimately. With all this baggage, the author examines and clears part of the myths related to the figure of the "intellectual" that France is proud to have given the world. Mixing personal memories with analytical rigor, he revisits a story that, from the Dreyfus case until after the dramatic assault on Charlie Hebdo's writing, is presented as a long-term decline. In this way, Sand, who in his youth was a great admirer of figures of universal stature such as Sartre or Camus, is surprised today to see how the Parisian intellectual is embodied in the media personalities of a Michel Houellebecq, an Eric Zemmour, a Alain Finkielkraut ... At the end of a hard and uncompromising work, the author is questioned in particular by the judeophobia and Islamophobia of the "elites" who dominate the French scene, which he contemplates with an ironic and disillusioned look.