{"id":1043,"date":"2026-07-23T11:37:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T11:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1043"},"modified":"2026-07-23T11:37:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T11:37:09","slug":"the-men-who-made-theory-french","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1043","title":{"rendered":"The Men Who Made Theory French"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Picture an innocent: a corn-fed girl from a landlocked American suburb who loves more than anything to read. She heads east for college, eager to slough off her upbringing, and on arrival she drifts toward the literature department, or maybe art history. She signs up for a 200-level course with a promising but bewildering name\u2014something with \u201cand\/as\u201d in the title, perhaps\u2014and welcomes the difficulty it suggests, difficulty being what she came for. But still she\u2019s unprepared for what\u2019s coming, because it is the nineteen-eighties, or the nineties, or the two-thousands, and, as one supercilious male classmate is all too eager to tell her, everything she\u2019s ever thought about art and reading is wrong. The author is dead, at best an author function. Meaning is contingent, words not to be trusted. A book is not a book but a text, and every text is at bottom a proof of the inefficacy of language. Enlightenment rationality was a fiction; only deconstruction remains. Our poor, befuddled heroine! She is not in Indiana anymore.<\/p>\n

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This scene\u2014of a young American woman\u2019s first encounter with French theory, the body of thought otherwise known as structuralism and post-structuralism\u2014has by now been fictionalized several times over. In realist novels by members of what the critic Nicholas Dames called the \u201ctheory generation,\u201d our heroine rarely takes kindly to theory. She may be distraught by it, like Katie Armstrong in Zadie Smith\u2019s \u201cOn Beauty,\u201d who listens mutely as her classmates \u201cinterrogate\u201d a Rembrandt etching so moving it made her cry. She may be stunned by it, like Tassie Keltjin in Lorrie Moore\u2019s \u201cA Gate at the Stairs,\u201d who blinks like a cave dweller blinded by sunlight when her professor speaks \u201cthrillingly of Henry James\u2019s masturbation of the comma.\u201d Or she may follow along but object to theory\u2019s obscurities, like Madeleine Hanna in Jeffrey Eugenides\u2019s \u201cThe Marriage Plot.\u201d What she never does, though, is fall for theory. Full immersion is reserved for less sympathetic characters. Rich kids in Doc Martens, nihilists with shaved eyebrows, the know-it-all daughters of East Coast academics: these are the types who pledge their fidelity to theory by spouting its abstruse terminology, often to comic effect. \u201cConsidering how Thurston\u2019s always going on about how much he worships<\/em> language, you\u2019d think he wouldn\u2019t parrot so much jargon,\u201d Madeleine quips in \u201cThe Marriage Plot.\u201d \u201cHe used the word phallus<\/em> three times today.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The cross-examination of an art work as if it were a political enemy; the hauteur of the student who \u201cgets\u201d the reading and the bafflement of the one who does not; the jargon, the outfits, the aura of cultishness\u2014it\u2019s all familiar to former students of theory. And if these novelists seem suspicious toward theory, it\u2019s hard to begrudge them too much, given the way that theory was taught in American classrooms. As the sociologist Mich\u00e8le Lamont wrote in 1987, \u201cAmerican undergraduate students in literary criticism currently discuss the logocentrism of the philosophical tradition without having read a single classic of philosophy.\u201d By the late two-thousands, when I was in college, it was worse: literature students hardly knew what those classics of philosophy were. That did not stop us from reading the way theory trained us to, reaching beyond the surface meaning of a text to \u201cunmask\u201d its repressed Other. Nor did it stop us from feeling as if we were not merely reading but doing<\/em> something\u2014maybe even something political.<\/p>\n

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It was an exciting illusion. We were writing term papers, not upsetting the world order with our Althusserian readings of Jane Austen. But theory itself\u2014was that an illusion? Were those of us who felt changed by it, who used the word \u201cphallus\u201d three times in seminar to the annoyance of our classmates, deluding ourselves when we saw in Lacan\u2019s tortured syntax and Foucault\u2019s forceful style a new way of comprehending the world? Was theory\u2014as critics on the right and the left contended\u2014kind of bullshit?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Emily Eakin\u2019s \u201cThe Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory\u201d (Penguin Press) argues persuasively that it wasn\u2019t. Eakin is a senior editor at the Times Book Review<\/em> (and previously an editor at this magazine) who, like her fictional counterparts, hails from the Midwest. Unlike them, she fell hard for theory. As a sophomore at Harvard\u2014not the hottest hotbed of deconstruction in the Ivy League (that would be Yale) but close\u2014she became a literature concentrator, as theory students were known. Soon, she was copying passages from Derrida into her journal. \u201cTheory was cool,\u201d Eakin recalls. \u201cTheory was\u00a0French. Theory was also, strange though it might sound, sexy.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. There was a libidinal rush at seeing reality, language, the human psyche, pried open and ripped apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

At last, representation for the theory-pilled girl! Part memoir, part biography, part philosophy primer, \u201cThe Frenchmen\u201d interleaves Eakin\u2019s bildungsroman with careful close readings and details of her subjects\u2019 lives. Lacan, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, and de Man are all present as mononymic embodiments of their thought. But they are also present as themselves\u2014as Jacques, Louis, Roland, Michel, Gilles, F\u00e9lix, Jacques, and Paul. (This last one is not technically a Frenchman, Eakin concedes, \u201cbut a French-speaking Belgian who taught in the French department at Yale.\u201d) Along the way, Eakin introduces their intellectual forefathers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss, and, at the edges, even some women: Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Luce Irigaray. For those of us who learned to see French theorists as stars in a void, as discrete but brilliant points of light, reading \u201cThe Frenchmen\u201d feels like being handed a map of the constellations. All sorts of hitherto obscured connections are illuminated.<\/p>\n

Theory emerged from the hothouse intellectual climate of postwar Paris. In the fifties, the dominant philosophical movement in France was existentialism, which, with its humanist ethos and its emphasis on the freely choosing individual, offered a generation shattered by the Second World War a way to talk about meaning in a world rendered meaningless by its horrors. But, to a nascent cohort of French philosophers, existentialism was increasingly pass\u00e9\u2014a na\u00efve relic of \u201cDescartes and the Enlightenment, of an obsolete, romantic past,\u201d Eakin writes. (In L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s 1955 memoir, \u201cTristes Tropiques,\u201d he called existentialism \u201ca sort of shop-girl metaphysics.\u201d) By the media-saturated, technologically advancing sixties, it seemed that systems, not individuals, were the forces governing reality.<\/p>\n

Where existentialists saw man condemned to freedom, the so-called structuralists saw man constrained by an \u201cimpersonal regime of the system and the subject,\u201d Eakin writes. Some of these systems were political and social, like the state and the family. Some were conceptual, like \u201cmadness\u201d and \u201creason.\u201d The elemental structure that determined all the others was language. Knowledge was not possible without language, the structuralists argued; everything we knew about the world was filtered through language\u2019s scrim and shaped by its architecture. A precise understanding of structure required a scientific understanding of language, and for that structuralist philosophers turned to linguistics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Eakin writes that her aim in \u201cThe Frenchmen\u201d was to \u201cre-embody\u201d the theorists, \u201cto recover the hidden human element beneath their often stringent antihumanism.\u201d The human element proves useful to her reconstruction of how theory came to be. Former theory students may recall learning the basics of structural linguistics as first proposed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure: that every sign\u2014a word that points to an object in the world\u2014is made up of two components, the sound-image of the word as spoken or written (the signifier) and the mental concept to which it refers (the signified). They may recall that there is no inherent bond between signifier and signified, that their linkage is a matter of convention, and that signifier and signified are meaningful only in relation to each other and to the system as a whole. But they may not recall why<\/em> they learned this, or know how linguistics became essential to theory to begin with.<\/p>\n

As Eakin\u2019s biographical narrative reveals, it came down to chance encounters. The first was in 1942, when L\u00e9vi-Strauss was living in New York. He was searching for a method that would help him systematize the vast corpus of ethnographic literature he\u2019d found in the New York Public Library when he was introduced to the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson gave the anthropologist a crash course in linguistics, and L\u00e9vi-Strauss, Eakin writes, was \u201cdazzled.\u201d Saussure\u2019s argument that language was not a referential system but a relational one rhymed with his hunch that human social organization was determined not by biological imperatives but by unconscious relational structures. \u201cAlthough they belong to another order of reality<\/em>,\u201d he went on to say, \u201ckinship phenomena are of the same type<\/em> as linguistic phenomena.\u201d They, too, operated according to a universal logic that could be decoded and mapped.<\/p>\n

In 1949, L\u00e9vi-Strauss met the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan at a dinner party and soon introduced him to Jakobson. Saussure\u2019s theories were a revelation for Lacan, too; he would later work a \u201clexicon of grids, rules, signifiers, and signs\u201d into his popular lectures at Sainte-Anne Hospital, in Paris. Freud had grounded his theories of sexuality and the psyche in biology. Lacan revised psychoanalysis by rooting it in linguistics, claiming that \u201cthe unconscious is structured like a language.\u201d The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who attended Lacan\u2019s lectures, saw what Lacan was doing for Freud\u2014boiling his writings down to their first principles\u2014and hoped to do the same for Marx.<\/p>\n

Althusser\u2019s embrace of Lacan partly inspired his reading of Marx as the first scientist of history. As the philosophy ca\u00efman<\/em> (essentially an undergraduate adviser) at the \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure\u2014arguably France\u2019s most prestigious institution of higher education\u2014Althusser also exposed generations of students to Lacan\u2019s thought by inviting him to move his lectures from Sainte-Anne to the \u00c9cole Normale in 1964. Traces of psychoanalysis can be detected in Althusser\u2019s arguments that \u201cideology is acting on us and through us all the time,\u201d as Eakin puts it, \u201ceven inside our heads, within our unconscious.\u201d Michel Foucault, who was Althusser\u2019s student at the \u00c9cole Normale, also linked repression within to repression without, turning his attention to the normalizing forces of the state: faceless institutions such as asylums and prisons.<\/p>\n

Post-structuralism\u2014theory\u2019s second wave\u2014alternately challenged and deepened the structuralist tendency. Roland Barthes\u2019s early work was modelled on L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s, but by the sixties Barthes had abandoned the taxonomies of structuralism for the pleasures of open-ended interpretive possibility. F\u00e9lix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze\u2019s \u201cAnti-Oedipus,\u201d from 1972, rejected the static \u201cdaddy-mommy-me\u201d triangle of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and argued that the unconscious was a site of exuberant creativity. Jacques Derrida, a student of Althusser and Foucault, developed deconstruction, a technique of \u201ctextual unravelment\u201d which he used to reveal inconsistencies and gaps in the structuralists\u2019 work. In 1966, Derrida attended a Johns Hopkins conference often cited as theory\u2019s American d\u00e9but. There, he met and befriended Paul de Man, who would become deconstruction\u2019s second most influential practitioner.<\/p>\n

Though Eakin\u2019s account of this intellectual lineage is impressively lucid, it is not always chronological, and its episodes can be hard to situate in time. The book\u2019s short chapters have the feeling of notecards shuffled in search of an optimal sequence. Readers will find themselves introduced to the publication of Derrida\u2019s \u201cOf Grammatology\u201d on three separate occasions. Yet one would be hard pressed to identify an order, or a structure, better suited to Eakin\u2019s project, which tasks itself with explaining the work of no fewer than eight famously difficult thinkers while maintaining narrative cohesion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Besides, for the gift of biographical detail, all is forgiven. Some readers will be familiar with the headlines of the Frenchmen\u2019s life stories, which are often depressing. De Man was a bigamist, a con man, and a Nazi collaborator. Althusser strangled his wife, in what appears to have been a dissociative psychotic episode. Barthes died after being hit by a laundry van. Foucault, who frequented San Francisco\u2019s leather bars, was rumored to have knowingly caught or transmitted H.I.V. at a bathhouse.<\/p>\n

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But Eakin\u2019s re\u00ebmbodiment project also yields lesser-known facts, prosaic delights that Barthes might call \u201cpunctums.\u201d Lacan was a \u201cdandy and a seducer,\u201d a lavish dresser scared of aging who held a \u201cspecial interest\u201d in mirrors all his life. Describing his wardrobe, Eakin writes, \u201cHe wore a shirt the color of cotton candy, a velvet-and-silk striped jacket, a black mink coat.\u201d (Together or separately? Alas, Eakin doesn\u2019t specify.) Deleuze also dressed sharp\u2014his wife worked for Balmain\u2014and he kept his fingernails unusually long. Foucault had a white Jaguar that he loved to drive fast. Lacan\u2014another speed demon\u2014once terrified the German philosopher Martin Heidegger\u2019s wife with his driving. In 1958, Sartre wrote \u201cthe initial script (ultimately abandoned) for a John Huston biopic about Freud.\u201d While in grad school, de Man was the private French tutor to a young Henry Kissinger.<\/p>\n

Eakin\u2019s biographical approach allows her to draw connections that a more straightforward intellectual history might not. Take the influence of Lacan, which she maps across the lives of at least ten of his contemporaries. Five of his fellow-Frenchmen attended Lacan\u2019s lectures at Sainte-Anne or at the \u00c9cole Normale, and two saw him for analysis\u2014Barthes briefly and Guattari for years. (\u201cFor an additional fee,\u201d Eakin writes, \u201cLacan sometimes allowed Guattari to drive him home, explaining that the experience was \u2018part of the analysis.\u2019\u00a0\u201d) After an injection of mescaline in 1935 left him with persistent visions of crabs, Sartre sought treatment with Lacan, then an unknown thirty-four-year-old in his first year of private practice. They concluded that his problem was a \u201cfear of becoming alone,\u201d Sartre later remembered, and the crabs went away on their own.<\/p>\n

This approach also calls attention to the centrality of institutions in the Frenchmen\u2019s personal lives\u2014the prisons, asylums, hospitals, and schools that shaped them. Both Sartre and Althusser were prisoners of war in the forties, and both found their time in confinement salutary. The anxiety Sartre felt upon his return to Paris after his imprisonment provided the existential insight that freedom is in fact terrifying. Althusser likewise seemed to prefer the regimented life of the camp. It was there that he was introduced to Marxism, by another P.O.W., and the revelation of it changed him forever.<\/p>\n

In less happy times, Althusser, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was institutionalized at Sainte-Anne. After one bout of depression, he received an alarming twenty-four electroshock treatments. Foucault was taken to Sainte-Anne by his father for an evaluation after a suicide attempt during his second year at the \u00c9cole Normale. Later, he brought his psychology students there to observe patients.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Guattari spent time in hospitals as a student and an analyst. Barthes had tuberculosis and \u201cspent most of World War II in sanatoriums,\u201d where, Eakin writes, \u201che was subjected to therapies that sound nearly as terrible as his illness.\u201d Quoting Barthes\u2019s biographer Tiphaine Samoyault, Eakin describes a three-month \u201creclining cure\u201d that required Barthes to \u201clie at an angle to the horizontal for eighteen hours out of twenty-four, his lower limbs raised above the level of his thorax and his head, which made it difficult even to read.\u201d Deleuze, another TB patient, had a lung removed in 1968.<\/p>\n

But perhaps no institution loomed larger for the Frenchmen than school, where they spent much of their lives. Nearly all of them recalled their admissions and certification exams, known as the concours<\/em> and the agr\u00e9gation<\/em>, as formative and terrifying ordeals. Derrida failed the concours<\/em> twice before getting into the \u00c9cole Normale; Deleuze never passed, attending the Sorbonne instead. L\u00e9vi-Strauss spent hours before his agr\u00e9gation<\/em> violently ill from a drug a family friend gave him for his nerves. (\u201cMorphine? Cocaine?\u201d Eakin writes. \u201cHe never knew what, exactly.\u201d) It\u2019s a suggestive fact that Barthes, the most buoyant of the bunch, was functionally barred from attending the \u00c9cole Normale, owing to his TB. Perhaps the reclining cure, however unpleasant, was still less punishing than the \u00c9cole.<\/p>\n

Eakin describes Derrida\u2019s two years as a boarding student in a preparatory class for the concours<\/em> as a nightmarish blend of prison, school, and sanitarium, replete with gray uniforms, barracks-like dorms, cold showers, and small, disgusting rations. According to his biographer Beno\u00eet Peeters, Derrida was \u201con the verge of succumbing\u201d to madness there. But by then his most traumatic memory of school had already occurred: in 1942, at twelve years old, Derrida, who grew up in Algeria, was expelled from his school for being Jewish, and wasn\u2019t allowed to return until after Algiers was liberated by the Allies. \u201cThe wound was of another order,\u201d Derrida said, \u201cand it never healed.\u201d<\/p>\n

These institutional experiences left their mark on the Frenchmen\u2019s work. Eakin finds traces of them in Althusser\u2019s repeated insistence that, as she puts it, \u201chuman subjects are not in charge of their actions or even their thoughts.\u201d They\u2019re visible in Foucault\u2019s writing on the normalizing function of institutions, and in Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s on schizophrenia. And they\u2019re visible, she suggests, in Derrida\u2019s preoccupation with binary pairs, such as inside\/outside or center\/margin, and in the attention he paid to their non-privileged terms.<\/p>\n

They also suggest one reason for theory\u2019s enduring appeal to college students: like many of the Frenchmen, most of them have never not been in school. The forces of normalization, containment, repression, and evaluation are constants in their lives. As far as they are aware\u2014as far as they\u2019ve experienced\u2014there really is no outside. The picture presented by theory reflects the world that they know.<\/p>\n

After college, Eakin got a master\u2019s in comparative literature at the \u00c9cole Normale and started a Ph.D. program in English, but she dropped out partway through. She had \u201coverdosed on theory,\u201d she writes, and fled academia for journalism. In May, 1996, shortly after she joined the staff of Lingua Franca<\/em>, a little magazine about academic life, it published a bombshell story by a physics professor at N.Y.U. named Alan Sokal. Sokal had submitted a satirical paper larded with jargon to the philosophy journal Social Text<\/em>, which it accepted. When he revealed the prank, which became known as the Sokal hoax, critics of theory were giddy. The episode seemed to crystallize a broader turn away from theory, a growing consensus that it was pure chicanery.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Derrida, the last of the surviving Frenchmen, died, of pancreatic cancer, in 2004. Eakin was working at the Times<\/em>, and an editor at the foreign desk asked her to look over Derrida\u2019s obituary before it went to press. It struck her as a caricature of deconstruction, but \u201cit seemed pointless, maybe even pretentious, to object,\u201d Eakin recalls. She told the editor the obit was fine, and the paper ran it as it was, under the headline \u201cJACQUES DERRIDA, ABSTRUSE THEORIST, DIES IN PARIS AT 74<\/em>.\u201d The resulting public outrage\u2014more than three hundred prominent scholars and artists signed a letter in protest\u2014felt like a sign that she had tipped too far in the direction of anti-intellectualism.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tempting to read \u201cThe Frenchmen\u201d as atonement for her betrayal\u2014as penance for letting \u201cABSTRUSE THEORIST DIES<\/em>\u201d be Derrida\u2019s epitaph in the paper of record. But the book is also a reconciliation longer in the making, an attempt by Eakin to broker peace between the theory of her youth and her adult profession. Inevitably, her efforts to translate theory into the language of journalism have their weak points. (\u201cIt\u2019s the nature of simplification to be simple,\u201d says the eyebrowless Thurston, in \u201cThe Marriage Plot.\u201d) But her fidelity to the ideas is admirable, and the effort behind her patient explanations of, say, Derrida\u2019s diff\u00e9rance<\/em> is moving. Theory may not have taught Eakin to live with ease, but it did teach her \u201ca new way to think,\u201d and its critical lessons have endured: \u201cBe skeptical. Be alert. Pay very close attention. Beware political claims posing as timeless truths. Notice arguments that seem to boil down to this versus that, us versus them\u2014neat binaries in which one term is championed at the expense of the other.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, because all bildungsromans must culminate in adulthood, Eakin\u2019s move away from the specialized jargon of theory and toward journalistic plainspokenness is framed as a sign of her maturity. The clich\u00e9 grates a bit. Must we think and write more like children in order to become adults? The book\u2019s appeals to reader-friendliness can feel pandering: the bite-size chapters with their punchy titles (\u201cAt the Bathhouse,\u201d \u201cSartre Gets a Drubbing\u201d); the moral-of-the-story insertions about theory\u2019s relevance to the Trump era; the high-level explanation of \u201cde Man\u2019s reading of Derrida\u2019s reading of Rousseau\u201d that ends with \u201cWhew!\u201d<\/p>\n

Then again, a little hand-holding isn\u2019t unwelcome. Even the Frenchmen didn\u2019t always understand one another\u2019s work. \u201cI always had the impression\u201d that, to followers of Lacan, \u201c\u00a0\u2018understand\u2019 meant something different from what it meant to me,\u201d L\u00e9vi-Strauss admitted. \u201cI\u2019d have had to read everything five or six times.\u201d After receiving one of Derrida\u2019s student papers, Althusser, his professor, said, \u201cI can\u2019t grade this, it\u2019s too difficult, too obscure for the agr\u00e9gation<\/em>.\u201d He gave it to Foucault, who was then an assistant professor teaching courses at the \u00c9cole. \u201cWell,\u201d Foucault said. \u201cIt\u2019s either an F or an A+.\u201d The final grade is lost to history.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more How a Chinese Immigrant Driver Got Entangled in a Drug Bust<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dayna Tortorici writes on Emily Eakin\u2019s new book, a group biography of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, F\u00e9lix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Paul de Man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Men Who Made Theory French - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1043\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Men Who Made Theory French - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dayna Tortorici writes on Emily Eakin\u2019s new book, a group biography of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, F\u00e9lix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Paul de Man.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1043\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-23T11:37:09+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/698119ed6a56722b07c239d6\/1:1\/w_200%2Cc_limit\/bestbooks2026_headermobile_animation_callout1.gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"18 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1043#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1043\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"The Men Who Made Theory French\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-23T11:37:09+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1043\"},\"wordCount\":3663,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1043#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/e8640879e2b23afdeef9bc43c3bc7078.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Books\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1043#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1043\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1043\",\"name\":\"The Men Who Made Theory French - 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