Background
Julien Benda was born on December 26, 1867 into a Jewish family in Paris, Ile-de-France, France.
Julien Benda was born on December 26, 1867 into a Jewish family in Paris, Ile-de-France, France.
Julien attended the Lycee Condorcet. Then he attended the University of Paris, Sorbonne.
Bendawrote his short book La Trahison des Clercs, a work of considerable influence, in 1927. Julien Benda attacked and criticized many of his fellow academicians (in 1927), published in translation in 1928 as The Treason of the Intellectuals. He also wrote other philosophical essays, three volumes of autobiography, and a 1912 novel, L’Ordination. Other works by Benda include Belphégor (1918), Uriel's Report (1926), and Exercises of a Man Buried Alive (1947), an attack on the contemporary French celebrities of his time. Most of the titles in the bibliography below were published during the last three decades of Benda's long life; he is emphatically a 20th-century author. He was also a contributor of articles to periodicals, including Revue Blanche and Cahiers de la Quinzaine.
Benda defended the measured and dispassionate outlook of classical civilization, and the internationalism of traditional Christianity.