This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series' Representation of the Intellectual,

given by Edward Said, was originally broadcast in 1993.

Some years ago, the versatile and ingenious French intellectual, Regis de Bray,

wrote a penetrating account of French cultural life entitled

Teachers, Writers, Celebrities, the Intellectuals of Modern France.

Debray himself had once been a seriously committed left-wing activist

who were taught at the University of Havana shortly after the Cuban Revolution of

1958. Some years later, he was given a 30-year prison term by the Bolivian authorities because of his association with Che Guevara.

Yet he only served three years of his sentence, and after his return to France, Debray became a semi-academic political analyst,

and later still an advisor to President Mitein.

Debray's thesis in his book is that between 1880 and 1930,

Parisian intellectuals were principally connected to the Sobos. They were secular refugees

from both church and Bonapartism, wherein laboratories, libraries and classrooms, the intellectual,

protected as a professor, could make important advances in knowledge.

After 1930, the Sobán slowly lost its authority to new publishing houses, like the Nouvelle

Revins-Francée, where, according to Debray, the spiritual family, comprising the intelligentsia

and their editors, was given a more hospitable roof over its head.

Until roughly 1960, such writers as Sartre de Beauvoir, Camus, Moriak, Jide, and Malro,

were in effect the intelligentsia who had superseded the professerate,

superseded them because of their free-ranging work, their credo of freedom,

and their discourse that was midway between the ecclesiastical solemnity that went before it,

...