retirement from teaching in 1979. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. In his later years, Bénichou remained active and in good health, working in his apartment on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in the Montparnasse district of Paris. He continued to write and publish; when he died in Paris, at the age of 92, he was writing a commentary on the haunting, enigmatic poems by Gérard de Nerval known as The Chimeras. He is interred in Paris’s Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, not far from the tomb of Frédéric Chopin. Bénichou’s ideas Bénichou considered modernity the product of a religiously grounded society faced with a decline in the credibility of its ideological and religious foundations. This decline occurred at the same time as, and to a large extent as the result of, the rise of a belief in the essential self-sufficiency of human beings, belief in human autonomy being a hallmark of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was accompanied by a widespread hope for a regenerating elite that would help usher in a new, more just social order. The “consecration of the writer” emerged from these two complementary though divergent tendencies in the period from 1760 to 1789, during which the writer’s mission was widely believed to be that of guiding humanity to the promised land of the new order. The traumatic experience of the French Revolution modified this program, bringing about a convergence of two tendencies that had, till then, been divergent. On the one hand, the secular, anti-religious tendencies of the Enlightenment were modified, becoming more accommodating of religious notions, as seen in different ways in the work of Germaine de Staël, Benjamin Constant, and Victor Cousin, among others. On the other hand, the experience of the Revolution and the failure of its initial hopes contributed to a religious revival, seen in the works of Chateaubriand, Balanche, and Lamartine. It is to this "deep convergence," as Bénichou put it, that the consecration of the poet-thinker is due, in the heyday of French romanticism in the years after 1820. The changes Bénichou describes were brought about by "the rise of an intellectual corps possessing new prestige and a new social make-up," a "corps" that emerged transfigured after the Revolution to lay claim to "spiritual authority" (The Consecration of the Writer, p. 339). In Bénichou's work, "spiritual authority" is a key concept, though he never defines