Intending to embody the universal figure of this model, the French intellectuals imposed themselves, from the end of the nineteenth century, as a conceptual and moral reference. Beginning at the moment when the noun "intellectual" became a part of the French language on the occasion of the Dreyfus case, this article attempts to recover the genealogy of this concept, showing its intrinsic relation to the current history and ideology. As will be seen, the notion of the intellectual, of essentially French origin, has a polymorphjc character. The concept changes meaning according to the evolution of French society and of History, so that different periods forged distinct models of representation of the intellectual. Directly related to the idea of a mission - defense of the truth and of justice - French intellectuals, up to the end of the 1970s, confronted the dilemmas inherent in the ambiguity of their function: critical and utopian. The historical and epistemological inflections of these last three decades, including ways of acting and thinking, break definitively with the representation of the intellectual as "maître à penser" and "political prophet". Abandoning politics and the public space, intellectuals, reconverted into their new function of "specialist", are confined to the institutions that produce knowledge.
History; Cultural History; Dreyfus affair