France has produced a large number of leading philosophers in the European humanist tradition. One of the first was Montaigne, in the 16th century, an inspired moralist who established the essay as an art form. Then came Descartes, the master of logic, and the philosopher Pascal.
The 18th century produced two great figures -Voltaire, the supreme liberal, and Rousseau, who preached the harmonizing influence of living close to nature. In the 20th century, an element of philosophy entered the French novel in the work of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus.
Sartre led the existentialist movement in Paris in the early 1940s with his novel Nausea and his treatise Being and Nothingness. Camus' novel about alienation, The Outsider was equally influential. Barthes and Foucault were among the structuralists who followed. Their radical ideas dominated the Paris intellectual scene in the 1970s and 1980s.