Intellectuals: A French History

3.0 credits · Undergraduate

The concept of intellectual - the writer or scholar who takes a political commitment - was born in France at the end of the nineteenth century. From the Dreyfus Affaire to the recent polemics on French identity, passing through Vichy, the Algerian War and May 68, intellectuals established a symbiotic relationship between culture and politics, becoming a sort of national brand, object of both admiration and contempt outside of the country. The aim of this course is to revisit some crucial moments of this history, focusing on different attempts to define the nature and function of the intellectual, from Emile Zola to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Simone de Beavoir to Michel Foucault.