I wonder if the author didn’t start going wrong in his declaration about Sartre. Yes, he was probably the peak of French intellectualism, if we must use and – ism, but that is perhaps also where the phenomenon lost its prestige. Sartre’s prestige declined after his death and the failure of soviet Communism.

But has French culture really become barren because it doesn’t have an official “school” (Existentialism, Structuralism, le Nouveau Roman, les Nouveaux philosophes) anymore?