Paul Bénichou (; 19 September 1908 – 14 May 2001) was a French/Algerian writer, intellectual, critic, and literary historian. Bénichou first achieved prominence in 1948 with Morales du grand siècle, his work on the social context of the French seventeenth-century classics. Later Bénichou undertook a prodigious research program, seeking to understand the radical pessimism and disappointment expressed by mid-nineteenth writers. This project resulted in a series of major works, beginning with Le Sacre de l’écrivain, 1750-1830 (1973; Eng. trans. 1999 [The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830]). A 1995 volume, Selon Mallarmé, may be considered an extension of this series. Together, these works amount to an important reinterpretation of French romanticism. Critic Tzvetan Todorov described Bénichou’s special interest as “the thought of poets.” More generally, though, Paul Bénichou’s work contributed to the understanding of the creative writer's place in modernity, and illuminated the role of writers in legitimating the institutions and values of modern society. Early years Bénichou was born in Tlemcen, French Algeria (now Tlemcen, Algeria), to an Algerian Jewish family. His intellectual brilliance soon called him to Paris. He had won the annual concours général des lycées for best thème latin in his final year of secondary school at the lycée d'Oran. After the baccalauréat (1924), he came to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris to prepare the École Normale Supérieure at the time a school of the University of Paris; he was successful in 1926 and studied there, where Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Paul Nizan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were among his fellow students. He obtained his license in 1927 and his agrégation in 1930, then becoming a secondary teacher. During his student years Bénichou was active in radical politics and literary surrealism, writing poetry; his name is mentioned in Maurice Nadeau’s Histoire du surréalisme. But it was as a scholar and a teacher that Bénichou made his mark. While teaching in French secondary schools he had all but completed his first major work, Morales du grand siècle, when Hitler unleashed his blitzkrieg. After the disaster of 1940 and the installation of the virulently anti-Semitic Vichy regime, Bénichou, as a Jew, was denied the right to earn his livelihood by teaching in French schools, and as an Algerian Jew, found himself stripped of French nationality. After living in the French unoccupied zone, Bénichou could leave in 1942 with his family to Argentina, where he had been offered a teaching position