A pupil at Lycée Condorcet in Paris, he was the only khâgneux received at the École Normale Supérieure in 1939,[1] but his name is not on the directories.
He was received in the first place at the December special session of the Aggregation of Philosophy Competition of 1945.
[2] For some time he followed the seminars of Pierre-Maxime Schuhl [fr] at the Sorbonne, and then worked in Geneva with Jean Piaget.
Suffering from myasthenia gravis since 1978, which had caused him to lose the use of speech, he died on 18 December 1994.
A laureate of the Prix Sainte-Beuve in 1968 for his study les Contes de Perrault, culture savante et tradition populaire, the Académie française also bestowed him its Prix d'Académie in 1991 for all his work.