Jean-François Revel

Jean-François Revel (born Jean-François Ricard; 19 January 1924 – 30 April 2006) was a French philosopher, journalist, and author. A prominent public intellectual, Revel was a socialist in his youth but later became a prominent European proponent of classical liberalism and free market economics. He was a member of the Académie française after June 1998. He is best known for his book Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun, published in French in 1970.

Jean-François Ricard was born in Marseille in 1924 into a prosperous middle-class family. During the German occupation of France in World War II, the adolescent Ricard participated in the French Resistance. He would later note that his reaction against the disgraceful, officious manner of French collaborators had an impact on his approach to writing. Ricard began to use "Revel" as a literary pseudonym, eventually adopting it as his legal surname.