PARIS: France’s favourite intellectual Edgar Morin, a World War II Resistance member who dedicated his life to promoting critical thinking and combatting intolerance, has died at the age of 104, his wife said on Saturday.

“He is the grandfather of all French people and the memory of the last (20th) century,” the left-wing Liberation newspaper wrote in a 2021 profile of the dapper philosopher who had a fondness for hats and silk cravats.

The son of secular Jewish immigrants, he trained as a sociologist but preferred to think of himself as a “humanologist” who fused elements of philosophy, psychology, ethnography and biology to try to understand the nature of humanity.

Outside of France he was best known as the inventor of “cinema verite” for his 1961 documentary with film-maker Jean Rouch Chronicle of a Summer about the lives of ordinary young Parisians.

The unscripted discussions about class, race, colonialism and other weighty topics elicited by the simple question “Are you happy?” revolutionised documentary-making.

“It’s one of the greatest, most audacious, most original documentaries ever made,” a rapt New Yorker magazine declared in 2013. For the French, Morin was above all an intellectual guide, who developed a holistic approach to the big questions of our time. “What does it mean to be human? What is globalisation? What is life? These questions require us to connect knowledge that is currently scattered across fields of research,” he told TV5 Monde.

Published in Dawn, May 31st, 2026