Jean-Paul Aron


Jean-Paul Aron was a French writer, philosopher and journalist. His most notable work is Les Modernes, which was published in 1984.

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 Grasset, 1962Point mort Grasset, 1964Le Bureau, 1970Fleurets mouchetés, 1970Les Voisines, 1980

Non-fiction

  • Essai sur la sensibilité alimentaire à Paris au XIXe siècle, Armand Colin, 1967
  • Philosophie zoologique, by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, 10/18, 1968
  • Essai d'épistémologie biologique, Christian Bourgois, 1969
  • Anthropologie du conscrit français, 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, Grasset, 1978
  • Misérable et glorieuse, la femme du XIXe siècle, Fayard, 1980
  • Les Modernes, Gallimard, 1984