Foucault News

Jean Daniel, preeminent French journalist and intellectual, dies at 99. Washington Post, By
Emily Langer, Feb. 22, 2020

See also Bernard-Henri Lévy’s memoir and obituary at Tablet Magazine

Jean Daniel, a leading intellectual of the French left whose cameos in history included a trip to Cuba in 1963, where he extended to Fidel Castro a tentative overture from President John F. Kennedy and learned while dining with the Communist leader that Kennedy had been fatally shot, died Feb. 19 at 99.

His death was announced by L’Obs, the weekly news magazine that he helped found in 1964 as Le Nouvel Observateur, and where he served as editorial director until 2008. Other details of his death were not immediately available.

[…]
He resided at the “center of the French intellectual political life,” said Alain Minc, a former director of Le Nouvel Observateur, with a social circle that included the philosophers Albert Camus (“For 50 years, I couldn’t think without him,” Mr. Daniel commented), Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, as well as political leaders including Pierre Mendès-France and François Mitterrand of France, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria and David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres of Israel.

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