French philosophy developed independently in its own right from German idealist philosophy and British empiricism during the nineteenth century, taking advantage of the rich literary culture in Paris and the growing popularity of analytic philosophy among academics. Influenced by the literary style of novelists like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Flaubert, the new school stressed intuition and imagination and rejected rationalism and positivism. This led to a break with tradition and to a questioning of many previously taken-for-granted assumptions about truth and reality. The philosopher Henri Bergson helped to introduce this “new” philosophy to the wider public with his 1907 book Creative Evolution. After World War Two (WW2), the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre began to write novels and plays, while the novelist Albert Camus wrote essays on politics and morality. Their ideas were influential in post-war Europe.
The term literary criticism arose during the early 20th century. Literary critics analyzed literature, particularly poetry. Structuralist thought sees philosophical discourse as nothing more than a structure in language. The thinkers – Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida – believed that all knowledge is socially constructed and dependent upon power relations. Structuralism also gave rise to post-structuralism, which emphasized the linguistic nature of social reality. Existentialism and structuralism were very different philosophies, but both influenced each other greatly.
