French male essayists

Joseph Malègue (8 December 1876 – 30 December 1940), was a French catholic novelist, principally author of Augustin ou le Maître est là (1933) and Pierres noires. Les classes moyennes du Salut. He was also a theologian and published some theological surveys, as Pénombres about Faith and against Fideism. His first novel is, following the French historian of spirituality Émile Goichot, the most accurately linked to Modernism. Pope Francis quoted in several circumstances, among them in El Jesuita this Malègue's view about Incarnation : ‘’ It is not Christ who is incomprehensible for me if He is God, it is God who is strange for me if He is not Christ.‘’

Brice Parain (10 March 1897 – 20 March 1971) was a French philosopher and essayist.
He appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's 1962 film Vivre sa vie. In Éric Rohmer's film My Night at Maud's (1969), conversations about Pascal's Wager are directly inspired by a similar debate between Parain and Dominique Dubarle in an episode of the television series En profil dans le texte called l'Entretien sur Pascal ("The Interview on Pascal") in 1965, also produced by Rohmer.

Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule; 30 October 1992) is a French writer.

Patrice de Plunkett (born 9 January 1947 in Paris) is a French journalist and essayist who specializes in analyzing social issues. He was the editor of Le Figaro Magazine, one of the major French weekly magazines. After leaving this magazine in 1997, he has written a number of books.
In 1983, he received the Renaissance Award for Letters from the Le Cercle Renaissance. [1] He also received the Award of History of Institutions and of Social Events from the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris.

Pierre Hadot (; French: [ado]; 21 February 1922 – 24 April 2010) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy specializing in ancient philosophy, particularly Epicureanism and Stoicism.

Guillaume Dustan (November 28, 1965, Paris – October 3, 2005) was an openly gay French writer. Dustan's 1998 novel, In My Room, brought the author instant notoriety for his masterful use of autofiction and depiction of gay glamour and romance in mid-1990s Paris.

Alain Etchegoyen (6 November 1951 in Lille – 9 April 2007 in Le Mans), was a philosopher and novelist. He was the last Plan Commissionner before that Commission was abrogated. He wrote some twenty books, essays and novels.
A former student of l'École Normale Supérieure, he was a professor in classes prépas at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and in a professional lycée in Hauts-de-Seine.

Paul-Marie Coûteaux (born 31 July 1956, in Paris) is a French politician and author. He served as a Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2009 for the Movement for France, and since 2022 has been a member of Reconquête.

Bernard Lazare (14 June 1865, Nîmes – 1 September 1903, Paris) was a French literary critic, political journalist, polemicist, and anarchist. He is known as the first Dreyfusard.

Jean-Marie Domenach (French: [dɔmənak]; 13 February 1922 – 5 July 1997) was a French writer and intellectual. He was noted as a left-wing and Catholic thinker.Domenach was born in Lyon, where he studied at the Lycée du Parc. In 1949 he became an editor of Esprit, the literary and political journal of personalism and non-conformism founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier. In 1956, Domenach became chief editor. He voluntarily retired from Esprit in 1977, at age 54, and began writing and teaching at the university level. Opposed to torture during the Algerian War, he also held a meeting denouncing the 1961 Paris massacre. He died in Paris in 1997, aged 75.