Brice Parain (10 March 1897 – 20 March 1971) was a French philosopher and essayist.
He appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's 1962 film Vivre sa vie. In Éric Rohmer's film My Night at Maud's (1969), conversations about Pascal's Wager are directly inspired by a similar debate between Parain and Dominique Dubarle in an episode of the television series En profil dans le texte called l'Entretien sur Pascal ("The Interview on Pascal") in 1965, also produced by Rohmer.
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Biography
Brice Parain was born in 1897 in Courcelles-sous-Jouarre, Seine-et-Marne, Île-de-France. He studied at the ENS and graduated from the École des Langues Orientales. He also served as an agrégé of philosophy in 1922.
After graduating from Langues Orientales, Parain became a cultural attaché and visited the USSR for the first time in 1925. Two years later, he returned to France, where he met Jean Paulhan and began working as a secretary for Gaston Gallimard.
Parain was primarily interested in the great intellectual and political movements of his time; his work focused in particular on Communism, Surrealism, and Existentialism, the failures of which he anticipated in part in some of his earlier works, such as Essai sur la misère humaine (1934) and Retour à la France (1936). Parain supported the newspaper Le Nouveau Détective ("The New Detective"), founded by Joseph and Georges Kessel in 1928 and specialising in the evocation of miscellaneous facts. Parain was also fascinated by linguistics. Critic Charles Blanchard dubbed him "le Sherlock Holmes du langage" ("the Sherlock Holmes of language"). Parain was particularly interested in the questions of the origin and evolution of words, expounded upon in essays such as Essay sur le Logos platonicien (1942), Recherches sur la nature et la fonction du langage (1942), and Sur la dialectique (1953).
