in the university of Mendoza; afterwards, he taught in Buenos Aires, at the Institut Français (co-founded by Roger Caillois). While in the Argentine capital he participated in literary circles and met Jorge Luis Borges, whom he and his daughter, Sylvia Roubaud, would later translate; he also developed a scholarly interest in medieval Spanish literature and published groundbreaking work on the Spanish romancero. The publication and critical success of Morales du grand siècle (1948; Eng. trans. 1971 [Man and Ethics]) established his scholarly reputation; the volume has never gone out of print and has sold more than 100,000 copies. But it had been refused as a doctoral work and Paul Bénichou could therefore not become a University teacher in France. Returned to Paris in 1949, he got a position at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet, where Marcel Proust studied in the 1880s; he continued to teach there until 1958. "The Consecration of the Writer" It was in the early 1950s that Bénichou undertook his most ambitious and important scholarly project. He had always been struck by the pessimism of the great French writers of the mid-nineteenth century—that of Charles Baudelaire in particular. What could account for Baudelaire’s radical pessimism, shared by writers like Gustave Flaubert, in an era of general confidence, progress, and hope? For twenty years, Bénichou researched the history of ideas about creative writers’ relation to society. This research culminated in a series of major works that purport to solve this problem. (Ironically, Bénichou never wrote a major work on Baudelaire, though he published a number of significant essays on the author of Les Fleurs du mal.) Taken together, these works constitute a coherent study of French literature and thought from 1750 to 1898, analyzing the spiritual predicament of modern France and shedding light on the literature of other Western nations as well as on contemporary problems of global civilization. These interrelated works, which Bénichou began to publish only at the age of 65, are: Le Sacre de l'écrivain (1973; English translation 1999 [’’The Consecration of the Writer’’]) Le Temps des prophètes (1977) Les Mages romantiques (1988) L'École du désenchantement (1992) Selon Mallarmé (1995) The first four works were republished posthumously by Gallimard in a two-volume set under the title Romantismes français (2004). In the middle of this gargantuan intellectual undertaking, Bénichou was invited to teach at Harvard University, where he taught one semester a year from 1959 until his