Julien Benda
Julien Benda (French: [ʒyljɛ̃ bɛ̃da]; 26 December 1867 – 7 June 1956) was a French philosopher and novelist, known as an essayist and cultural critic. He is best known for his short book La Trahison des clercs, from 1927 (The Treason of the Intellectuals or The Betrayal by the Intellectuals).
Julien Benda

Dornac · Invaluable · Public domain
- Born
- 1867. · Paris.
- Died
- 1956. · Fontenay-aux-Roses.
- Nationality
- France.
- Occupation
- philosopher, writer and critic.
- Fields
- essay.
- Education
- École Centrale Paris, Faculty of Arts of Paris and Lycée Charlemagne.
- Known for
- The Treason of the Intellectuals.
- Honours
- Commander of the Legion of Honour.
- Languages
- French.
VALÉORINE Encyclopedia
VALÉORINE documentary reading
Documentary summary
Julien Benda (French: [ʒyljɛ̃ bɛ̃da]; 26 December 1867 – 7 June 1956) was a French philosopher and novelist, known as an essayist and cultural critic. He is best known for his short book La Trahison des clercs, from 1927 (The Treason of the Intellectuals or The Betrayal by the Intellectuals).
Admitted source layer · organised and presented by VALÉORINE
Note VALÉORINE
Julien Benda (1867–1956) was a French critic, philosopher and writer. Born in Paris, the critic died in Fontenay-aux-Roses. Julien Benda studied at École Centrale Paris, Faculty of Arts of Paris and Lycée Charlemagne.
Works include The Treason of the Intellectuals. Genres include essay. Languages used include French. The critic received Commander of the Legion of Honour.
Composed from admitted, traceable facts · 27 September 2026
VALÉORINE
Reference Check
Propose documentary evidence for Julien Benda. A contribution is never written directly as fact: identity, source, rights and evidence gates still decide.
Sign in to contribute
World of VALÉORINE
Documentary connections
Only confirmed graph relationships appear here. Images are shown only when their identity and reuse rights both pass the documentary gate.
Documentary evidence
Evidence Panel
not yet certified
- Identity
- resolved
- Independent source families
- 0
- Admitted assertions
- 0
- Open conflicts
- 0
Authority files
gnd · 1212207149 · wikidata · Q155270 · wikipedia · Julien Benda
In this article
Life
Life
Julien Benda studied at École Centrale Paris, Faculty of Arts of Paris and Lycée Charlemagne. The recorded working language is French. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are essay. Works named in the authority record are The Treason of the Intellectuals. Distinctions recorded are Commander of the Legion of Honour.
Born into a Jewish family in Paris, Benda had a secular upbringing. He was educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. After a period at the École Centrale Paris, he turned to history, and graduated at the Sorbonne in 1894. His father's death in 1889 left Benda independently wealthy. He wrote for La Revue Blanche from 1891 to 1903. His articles on the Dreyfus affair were collected and published as Dialogues. He disagreed strongly with Henri Bergson, the leading light of French philosophy of his day, and launched an attack on him in 1911, when Bergson's reputation was at its height. In July 1937 he attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war in Spain, held in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid and attended by many writers including André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Spender and Pablo Neruda. Benda survived the German occupation of France and the Vichy regime 1940–1944, in Carcassonne. The journal of Jean Guéhenno described his life there, and his character: "Unbearable, yet likeable." He died in Fontenay-aux-Roses, on 7 June 1956.
Works
Works
Benda is considered to be primarily an essayist. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. His single nomination for the Goncourt Prize was in 1912 for L'Ordination. He lost out to André Savignon's novel Les filles de la pluie. Voting was tied, and the casting vote went to Léon Hennique, in a tumultuous election that caused Hennique to give up the presidency of the Académie Goncourt.
La Trahison des Clercs
La Trahison des Clercs
Benda is now best remembered for his short 1927 book La Trahison des Clercs, a work of considerable influence. It was translated into English in 1928 by Richard Aldington; the U.S. edition was titled The Treason of the Intellectuals, while the British edition was titled The Great Betrayal. Aldington's translation was republished in 2006 as The Treason of the Intellectuals, with a new introduction by Roger Kimball. This polemical essay argued that European intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries had often lost the ability to reason dispassionately about political and military matters, instead becoming apologists for crass nationalism, warmongering, and racism. Benda reserved his harshest criticisms for his fellow Frenchmen Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès. Benda defended the measured and dispassionate outlook of classical civilization and the internationalism of traditional Christianity. Closing this work, Benda darkly predicts that the augmentation of the "realistic" impulse to domination of the material world, justified by intellectuals into an "integral realism," risked producing an all-encompassing species-wide civilization that would completely cease "to situate the good outside the real world." Human aspirations, specifically after power, would become the sole end of society. In closing, he concludes bitterly, "And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died." Benda's word "clercs" was borrowed by Anne Appelbaum in her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
Other works
Other works
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. In his 1933 publication Discours à la nation européenne, Benda responded to Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation.
Life and career
Dated record
Life and career
Explore 1867–1956
The full dated record · 3 entries
1867
Julien Benda was born in 1867 at Paris.
1948
The living thoughts of Kant / presented by Julien Benda. is dated [1948] and held by Wellcome Collection.
1956
Julien Benda died in 1956 at Fontenay-aux-Roses.
Places
Named by the record
Places
Only places the record itself states, plotted where the house gazetteer settles their coordinates. Nothing is inferred from a name or a nationality.
Paris.
Birth place
Fontenay-aux-Roses.
Death place
Primary material
Documents and archives
scholarly publication
- Benda, Julien (1867–1956), Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism
Scholarly · Crossref registry
authority file
- Gemeinsame Normdatei 1212207149, Über Julien Benda.
Unverified · Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
reference work
- “Julien Benda”, English Wikipedia, consulted as further reading
Reputable secondary · Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Benda, Julien. The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs). The Beacon Press. 1955.
- 2.Kritzman, Lawrence D. The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought. Columbia University Press. 270. 2006. 978-0-231-10790-7.
- 3.Murray, Christopher John. Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought. Routledge. 77. 2013. 978-1-135-45564-4.
- 4.Robert C. Grogin, Rationalists and Anti-Rationalists in pre-World War I France: The Bergson-Benda Affair, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter/Hiver 1978), pp. 223–231, at p. 224. Published by: Berghahn Books
- 5.Thomas, Hugh. The Spanish Civil War. Penguin Books. 678. 2012. 978-0-141-01161-5.
- 6.Guéhenno, Jean. Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris. Oxford University Press, USA. 14. 2014. 978-0-19-997086-5.
- 7.Chevalier, Tracy. Encyclopedia of the Essay. Routledge. 302. 2012. 978-1-135-31410-1.
- 8.Nobel Foundation. Nomination Database.
- 9.Kent, Allen. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 24 - Printers and Printing: Arabic Printing to Public Policy: Copyright, and Information Technology. CRC Press. 208. 1978. 978-0-8247-2024-7.
- 10.Benda, Julien (1956). The Treason of the Intellectuals, W. W. Norton and Co., pp. 202–203.
- 11.Laczo, Ferenc. A Dreyfusard from the Right – Twilight of Democracy. Visegrad Insight. 13 July 2020.
- 12.Cadeddu, Davide. Julien Benda's political Europe and the treason of intellectuals. History of European Ideas. 49. 4. 708–721. 2023. 0191-6599.
Bibliography printed in the source article · 35
- L'ordination – 1911
- English translation, The yoke of pity, by Gilbert Cannan – 1913
- Les sentiments de Critias – 1917
- Belphégor : essai sur l'esthétique de la présente société française – 1918
- Les amorandes – 1922
- La croix de roses; précédé d'un dialogue d'Eleuthère avec l'auteur – 1923
- Lettres à Mélisande – 1926
- La trahison des clercs – 1927
- English translation,The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, by Richard Aldington:
- 1955 (1928). Beacon Press. Introduction by Herbert Read.
- The Treason of the Intellectuals
- 2006. Transaction Publishers. Introduction by Roger Kimball.
- Cléanthis ou du Beau et de l'actuel – 1928
- Properce, ou, Les amants de Tibur – 1928
- La Fin de l’Éternel – 1929
- Appositions – 1930
- Esquisse d'une histoire des Français dans leur volonté d'être une nation – 1932
- Discours à la nation européenne – 1933
- La jeunesse d'un clerc – 1936
- Précision (1930–1937) – 1937
- Un régulier dans le siècle – 1937
- Un Régulier dans le siècle (Paris, Gallimard) 1938
- La grande épreuve des démocraties : essai sur les principes démocratiques : leur nature, leur histoire, leur valeur philosophique. – 1942
- Exercice d'un enterré vif, juin 1940-août 1944 – 1945
- La France Byzantine, ou, Le triomphe de la littérature pure : Mallarmé, Gide, Proust, Valéry, Alain Giraudoux, Suarès, les Surréalistes : essai d'une psychologie originelle du littérateur – 1945
- Du poétique. Selon l'humanité, non-selon les poètes – 1946
- Non possumus. À propos d'une certaine poésie moderne – 1946
- Le rapport d'Uriel – 1946
- Tradition de l'existentialisme, ou, Les philosophies de la vie – 1947
- Du style d'idées : réflexions sur la pensée, sa nature, ses réalisations, sa valeur morale – 1948
- Trois idoles romantiques : le dynamisme, l'existentialisme, la dialectique matérialiste – 1948
- Les cahiers d'un clerc, 1936–1949 – 1949
- La crise du rationalisme – 1949
- Nichols, Ray L., 1979. Treason, Tradition and the Intellectual: Julien Benda and Political Discourse. Univ. Press of Kansas.
- Niess, Robert J., 1956. Julien Benda. Univ. of Michigan Press.
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
scholarly publication
Benda, Julien (1867–1956), Routledge Encyclopedia of ModernismCrossref registry
Verifiedauthority file
Gemeinsame Normdatei 1212207149, Über Julien Benda.Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Partially resolvedreference work
Partially resolvedauthority record
Unverified
People, houses and institutions
Knowledge graph
People, houses and institutions
Teachers, collaborators, publishers and institutions recorded against this person, each on a stated basis.
Born at
1- ParisPlace
Established from a fact already recorded on a verified source.
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 14 August 2026.
Elsewhere in Books
38,661 published records in this field, each with its sources named.
- Julie KaneAuthor
- Julie Nixon EisenhowerAuthor
- Julie ReisserováAuthor
- Julie SukAuthor
- Julien Davies CornellAuthor
- Julien de Lallande PoydrasAuthor
- Julien GracqAuthor
- Julien GreenAuthor
Best supported in this field
For owners
Own a work by Julien Benda?
A specialist will read what you send and tell you what the house can establish, what it cannot, and whether the object is suited to sale. There is no charge and no obligation. The object stays with you throughout; nothing is shipped to us unless it is arranged in writing beforehand.