THE author Jean-François Revel was one of France’s leading intellectuals and political commentators. He wrote many bestselling works about the nature of democracy and the threats to it, from within and without, but he was also the author of memoirs, cookery books and a series of conversations about Buddhism.

He was a fierce upholder of factual inquiry and intellectual independence. This, however, he knew to be a Sisyphean task, as he wrote in La Connaissance inutile: “Contrary to what Pascal says, the libido sciendi is not the main motor of human intelligence. It is merely a secondary inspiration, and then only among a small minority. Normal man only looks for truth when he was been through all the other possibilities.”

According to Revel, mankind being by nature ideological, it was the duty of the intellectual to appeal to reason and to seek clarity. That was his duty to human freedom, which, politically, Revel always argued was best served by individuals and private initiative rather than the State. Not surprisingly, given such opinions, which were often forthrightly expressed, he became one of the bugbears of the French Left, much in the way Orwell was in England in his day.

Jean-François Ricard was born in Marseilles in 1924, to a family from the Franche-Comté region. Given free access to his father’s library, he soon acquired a taste for books and intellectual investigation, along with a growing mistrust of commentary and intellectual middlemen.

This stood him in good stead for the examinations to enter the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, which he passed first time round in 1943. In the meantime he had joined the Resistance — and adopted the nom de guerre Revel — while studying for the exams in Lyons. After graduating in philosophy, he embarked on a teaching career, albeit with a rather exotic twist: he taught in Tlemcen, Algeria, then in Mexico and Florence, returning to France in 1956. After a stint in the offices of the arts ministry, and six more years teaching in Lille and Paris, he decided to leave the education system.

By then he had already published his first book, Pourquoi les philosophes? (1957). It was, among other things, an attack on the obscurity of the university caste; on the work of Marx and Heidegger, and of Lacan, whose style Revel described as “suburban sub-Mallarmé” and “hermeticism of tired society women”.

Revel thus began his continuing attack on what, more than three decades later, would be known as “the thought of ’68”. From a short and edifying infatuation with the ideas of Gurdjieff, Revel knew from personal experience that men are capable of “building in their heads a structure that will justify any system, even the most extravagant, and intelligence and culture can do nothing to break this ideological intoxication”.

Having directed the literary pages of France-Observateur from 1960 to 1963, he worked as an editor for various publishers, including Julliard and Robert Laffont, and created “Libertés”, a collection of pamphlets, for Jacques Pauvert. He wrote for and edited the weekly magazine L’Express from 1966 until 1981, when he resigned in solidarity with Olivier Todd, who was sacked by Sir James Goldsmith. He continued his career as a commentator for Le Point, as well as on radio (Europe 1, RTL).

After several collections of essays and a book about Proust, Revel’s first bestseller was Ni Marx ni Jésus (1970, Without Marx or Jesus, 1972), a book that analysed American counterculture in relation to the country’s democratic tradition, which he contrasted with those in Europe and, above all, France. He would return to the American theme at the end of his life, in a book published soon after 9/11, L’Obsession anti-américaine (2002, Anti-Americanism, 2003).

At a time that French anti-Americanism was running at a high, Revel took it upon himself to debunk a few Gallic myths and hold up to the American obsession as a mirror to European flaws.

The obverse of Revel’s sympathy for America was his impatience with leftism and its influence in France. He spared no one, from Jean-Paul Sartre, who “understood nothing about his times” and professed “a morality of authenticity” while practising an “ideology of falsification”, to Michel Foucault, who epitomised “one of the most intriguing manias of intellectuals, (which) consists in projecting onto liberal societies the flaws that they refuse to discern in totalitarian societies”. In his memoirs he attacked François Mitterrand as an “irresponsible autocrat”.

Revel, of course, was a liberal, in the traditional sense, and was at pains to point out that liberals such as Guizot were the first to be concerned with social issues, before Marx. He believed in the mutually reinforcing virtues of economic freedom and political democracy, both underpinned by a culture of responsibility — which, as he argued, was the opposite of what French étatisme produced. He was constantly fighting the “ideological lie”, the persistence in developed countries of “old diatribes against capitalism, while knowing quite well that nothing has been invented to replace it”. Not a popular view in France.

In another bestselling work, Comment les démocraties finissent (1983), Revel went so far as to envision the triumph of this ideology: “It may be that democracy was merely an accident of history, a parenthesis whose end we are now witnessing.”

He was also conscious earlier than most of the threat posed by terrorism, as he explained in Le Terrorisme contre la démocratie, 1987).

Revel’s tireless dissection of ideological thinking did not prevent him from being a bon vivant and lover of literature, who edited anthologies of French poetry and wrote about cooking. He also published a book-length dialogue with his son, Matthieu Ricard, who had gone from being a scientist to a Buddhist monk (Le Moine et le philosophe, 1997: The Monk and the Philosopher, 1999), in which the atheist philosophe sought a better understanding of the appeal of Buddhism in the West.

Revel was elected to the Académie Française in 1997. He is survived by his second wife, Claude (daughter of the writer Nathalie Sarraute), and his children.

Jean-François Revel, writer and political commentator, was born on January 19, 1924. He died on April 30, 2006, aged 82.