Jean-Paul Aron (27 May 1925 – 20 August 1988) was a French writer, philosopher and journalist. His most notable work is Les Modernes, which was published in 1984.
Contents
Life
Aron was born in Strasbourg. He was a close friend of Michel Foucault in the early 1950s, before a falling out over a lover. He was, like Foucault, an early person of renown in France to die of AIDS, and is widely credited for giving the disease a human face and challenging the public perception of the disease. During his lifetime, he published several historical works that examined middle-class social practices. He is buried at 6, rue du Repos in Paris.
Selected publications
Novels and plays
La Retenue (novel) Grasset, 1962
Point mort (novel) Grasset, 1964
Le Bureau (play), 1970
Fleurets mouchetés (play), 1970
Les Voisines (play), 1980
Non-fiction
Essai sur la sensibilité alimentaire à Paris au XIXe siècle, Armand Colin, 1967
Philosophie zoologique, by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (presentation by Jean-Paul Aron), 10/18, 1968
Essai d'épistémologie biologique, Christian Bourgois, 1969
Anthropologie du conscrit français (with Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Paul Dumont), Mouton, 1972
Le Mangeur du XIXe siècle, Laffont, 1973
translated into English as The Art of Eating in France: Manners and Menus in the Nineteenth Century. London: Peter Davies, 1975; New York: Harper & Row, 1976
Qu’est-ce que la culture française?, Denoël-Gonthier, 1975
Le Pénis et la démoralisation de l’Occident (with Roger Kempf), Grasset, 1978
Misérable et glorieuse, la femme du XIXe siècle (animated and presented by Jean-Paul Aron), Fayard, 1980
Les Modernes, Gallimard, 1984