There is no one better than François Dosse to take on such a challenge: to write a panoramic and systematic narrative of the historical and creative adventure of French intellectuals in their moment of world hegemony.

The first volume – from 1944 to 1968 – covers the years of Sartre and Beauvoir and their refutations, the contrasting relationships with communism, the commotion of 1956, the Algerian War, the beginnings of Third Worldism, the emergence of the Gaullist moment and its contestation. : an era dominated by the trial of history, the influence of communism, and the gradual disillusionment that followed. The second volume – from 1968 to 1989 – covers from left-wing utopianism, Solzhenitsyn and the fight against totalitarianism, to the "new philosophers", the advent of ecological consciousness and the disorientation of the 1980s: an era marked by crisis of the future and which saw the hegemony of the human sciences consolidate. These are some of the milestones of this saga, which covers one of the most effervescent and creative periods in French and global intellectual history, from Sartre to Lévi-Strauss, from Foucault to Lacan.

"A fascinating overview of forty-five years of the battles fought by French intellectuals, from the Liberation to the fall of the Berlin Wall." Robert Maggiori, Liberation

"They are all here: Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, François Mauriac, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss and many others... heroes of a true saga." Gilles Heuré, Télérama

"What we have here is a monument that from now on will serve as a reference for anyone who wants to know the intellectual environment of our post-war period, until the fall of communism in 1989." Jacques Julliard, Le Figaro