20th-century French essayists

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.

Daniel Giraud (10 January 1946 – 6 October 2023) was a French essayist, translator, and poet. He was also a blues musician under the stage name Dan Giraud.
Giraud translated the poems of Oriental writers such as Li Bai, Hanshan, Ryōkan, and Sengcan. He also wrote works on Chan Buddhism, alchemy, and astrology.

Philippe Delerm (born November 27, 1950, in Auvers-sur-Oise, Val-d'Oise, France) is a French writer whose collection of essays La Première gorgée de bière et autres plaisirs minuscules sold more than one million copies in France.

Claude Klotz (6 October 1932 – 13 August 2010), better known by his pen name Patrick Cauvin, was a French writer. He was born in Marseille and died in Paris.

Marie-Thérèse Blanc, better known by the pseudonym Thérèse Bentzon (21 September 1840 – 1907), was a French journalist, essayist and novelist, for many years on the staff of the Revue des Deux Mondes. She was born at Seine-Port, Seine-et-Marne, a small village near Paris, traveled widely in the United States, and wrote of American literature and social conditions.

Philippe Daudy (17 June 1925 – 12 March 1994) was a member of the French Resistance, a journalist, a novelist, a publisher and a businessman. An Anglophile Frenchman, he moved to England and wrote a book about the English.

Gaëtan Picon (19 September 1915 – 6 August 1976) was a French author: essayist, art and literature critic, and art and literature historian. He was director of the Mercure de France and Director-General of Arts and Letters under André Malraux. He wrote an entry for the Encyclopaedia Universalis on Swiss publisher Albert Skira.

Michel de Certeau (French: [sɛʁto]; 17 May 1925 – 9 January 1986) was a French Jesuit priest and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences as well as hermeneutics, semiotics, ethnology, and religion. He was known as a philosopher of everyday life and widely regarded as a historian who had interests ranging from travelogues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to contemporary urban life.A multidisciplinarian, he wrote ground-breaking studies in fields as diverse as mysticism, the act of faith, cultural dynamics in contemporary society, and historiography as an intellectual practice. His impact continues unabated, with new volumes appearing regularly, and perhaps surprisingly his reputation is growing even more rapidly in English and German-speaking countries and the Mediterranean than in his native France. This strong and growing interest in academia is not matched in the public sphere; however, partly due to his being considered a "difficult" author because of his highly personal style which makes translation difficult, and partly due to the declining status of French in the world generally. Nevertheless, portions of his prolific output have been translated into a dozen languages.

Hervé Edwy Plenel (French pronunciation: [ɛʁve edwi plenɛl]; born 31 August 1952) is a French political journalist.

Jacques Rivière (15 July 1886 – 14 February 1925) was a French "man of letters" — a writer, critic and editor who was "a major force in the intellectual life of France in the period immediately following World War I". He edited the magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) from 1919 until his death. He was influential in winning a general public acceptance of Marcel Proust as an important writer. His friend and brother-in-law was Alain-Fournier (Henri Alban-Fournier), with whom he exchanged an abundant correspondence.