Paul Bénichou

Paul Bénichou (French: [beniʃu]; 19 September 1908 – 14 May 2001) was a French writer, intellectual, critic, and literary historian.

Bénichou first achieved prominence in 1948 with Morales du grand siècle, his work on the social context of the French seventeenth-century classics. Later Bénichou undertook a prodigious research program, seeking to understand the radical pessimism and disappointment expressed by mid-nineteenth writers. This project resulted in a series of major works, beginning with Le Sacre de l’écrivain, 1750-1830 (1973; Eng. trans. 1999 [The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830]). A 1995 volume, Selon Mallarmé, may be considered an extension of this series. Together, these works amount to an important reinterpretation of French romanticism. Critic Tzvetan Todorov described Bénichou’s special interest as “the thought of poets.” More generally, though, Paul Bénichou’s work contributed to the understanding of the creative writer's place in modernity, and illuminated the role of writers in legitimating the institutions and values of modern society.

Bénichou was born in Tlemcen, French Algeria (now Tlemcen, Algeria), to an Algerian Jewish family. His intellectual brilliance soon called him to Paris. He had won the annual concours général des lycées for best thème latin in his final year of secondary school at the lycée d'Oran. After the baccalauréat (1924), he came to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris to prepare the École Normale Supérieure; he was successful in 1926 and studied there, where Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Paul Nizan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were among his fellow students. He obtained his license in 1927 and his agrégation in 1930, then becoming a secondary teacher.

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