Anatole France was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie Française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament".
Photograph by Wilhelm Benque
France's home, 5 villa Saïd, 1894–1924
France c. 1921
France pictured by Jean Baptiste Guth for Vanity Fair, 1909
An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for its normative problems. Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by either rejecting, producing or extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values.
Erasmus of Rotterdam was one of the foremost intellectuals of his time.
Foreign Policy magazine named the lawyer Shirin Ebadi a leading intellectual for her work protecting human rights in Iran.
The front page of L'Aurore (13 January 1898) featured Émile Zola's open letter J'Accuse…! asking the French President Félix Faure to resolve the Dreyfus affair.
The Congregational theologian Edwards Amasa Park proposed segregating the intellectuals from the public sphere of society in the United States.
