Russia had its intelligentsia, the U.S. its cultural elite (a pejorative term), but "intellectuals" emerged in France with the Dreyfus affair. When 30,000 people reverently accompanied Jean-Paul Sartre’s funeral cortège in 1980, the event marked the demise of the breed of intellectuals. This documentary series by Bernard-Henri Lévy retraces the concepts and ideals that motivated France’s intellectuals, and shows the power they wielded and the effects they had on the history of the 20th century.

Part 1: Great Expectations: The birth of the intellectual: Zola and Proust; the Great War: pacifism and surrealism; the Bolshevik Revolution, the new religion of Communism, André Malraux; the growing signals of terror from Moscow, which go unheeded.

Part 2: Days of Contempt: The rise of Fascism, which at first seemed like a logical outgrowth of the October Revolution; the Nazi occupation of France and French collaboration; the Spanish Civil War; resistance to Fascism.

Part 3: Lost Illusions: The French Communist Party and anti-Stalinism; the Algerian War; Jean Genet, Franz Fanon, Sartre, and the cause of Third World revolution.

Part 4: The Demise of the Prophets: Intellectuals and the new models like Communist Cuba; birth of the Maoist intellectual, with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir distributing Maoist tracts in the street; the revolutions in Iran and Cambodia, whose excesses lead the intellectuals to a new cause—human rights; the death of Sartre—and the death of Chinese support for Communism, as seen at Tiananmen Square.

(4 parts, 52 minutes each)