Abstract

Over the past thirty years, the disappearance, if not the death, of the intellectual in France has been the focus of significant conversation and debate. Yet a good bit earlier, two writers who epitomized that very figure of the intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in works written after their bitter break, seemed to have already sensed this decline. The present essay explores what Camus's novel La Chute [The fall] and Sartre's autobiography Les Mots [The words] share thematically and, in particular, how both works anticipate the fall of the French intellectual