François Ewald

Teaching philosophy at a Bruay-en-Artois lycée in the early 1970s, he was at the centre of the political drama which unfolded when a middle-class lawyer was arrested for the mutilation and murder of a local miner's daughter: La Cause du Peuple, the GP's paper, publicized the case with the headline 'Bruay: And Now They Are Massacring Our Children!

Invited by Daniel Defert to contribute to a government report on workplace accidents,[3] Ewald came to view the 1898 Law on Accidents at Work — with an actuarial concept of risk replacing juridical concepts of responsibility — as crucial to the modern welfare state.

Ewald interpreted Foucault's analysis of power as showing the need for political struggle without any "reference to the Revolution",[4] and moved closer to the New Philosophers in a call "to marry the points of view of Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn".

[5] By the early 1990s Ewald "had become the house intellectual of the French insurance industry and ideological standard-bearer of the Medef, France's primary employers' organization.

"[1] François Ewald was part of the "Coppens commission" who prepared the French Charter for the Environment of 2004.