Jean-Paul Aron

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.

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