No one was as well armed as François Dosse to meet the challenge: a panoramic and systematic history of the historical and creative adventure of the French intellectuals, of the Liberation at the bicentenary of the Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. His history of structuralism in two volumes, his attention to the march of ideas, his many biographies (Michel de Certeau, Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Nora, Cornelius Castoriadis) have given him, for twenty or thirty years, a fairly intimate knowledge of the intellectual life of the second half of the XX th century to enable him to crown his work by an attempt of this magnitude. The first volume, 1944-1968, covers the years Sartre and Beauvoir and their disputes, the contrasting relations with communism, the shock of 1956, the war of Algeria, the beginnings of third-worldism, the irruption of the Gaullist moment and his challenge: a time dominated by the trial of history, the influence of communism and the progressive disillusionment that followed. The second volume, 1968-1989, goes from leftist utopia, Solzhenitsyn and the fight against totalitarianism, to the "new philosophy", the advent of an ecological conscience, the disorientation of the 80s: a time marked by the crisis of the future and the hegemony of the human sciences. These are just some of the landmarks of this saga, which embraces one of the most effervescent and creative periods of the French intelligentsia, from Sartre to Levi-Strauss, from Foucault to Lacan. The subject has already generated a huge bibliography, but a fresco of this magnitude is bound to make history--Gallimard.