Where have the great French thinkers gone? France has lost its intellectual side, but not alone in the old thinking Europe.

France has lost its intellectual side. Postmodernism and political decline have demoralized the nation’s former avant-garde.

Where have the great French thinkers gone?
From Voltaire and Rousseau to Sartre and De Beauvoir, France has long produced world-leading thinkers. It even invented the word ‘intellectual’. But progressives around the globe no longer look to Paris for their ideas. What went wrong?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/13/from-left-bank-to-left-behind-where-have-the-great-french-thinkers-gone