Obituaries : Jean-Paul Aron; French Writer and Philosopher Suffered From AIDS

Jean-Paul Aron, a writer, philosopher and self-proclaimed dandy who last year created a sensation in France when he announced that he had AIDS, has died in a Paris hospital at age 61.

The nephew of the conservative philosopher Raymond Aron, Aron taught philosophy at the universities of Tourcoing and Lille, wrote books on the sociology of the 19th Century, published novels, produced plays and wrote for the newspapers Le Matin and Le Monde. He once said that dandyism was the perfect word to describe his approach to life.

Officials at the Claude Bernard hospital, which specializes in AIDS cases, would not disclose what caused his death Saturday morning.

Aron was the first public personality in France to openly discuss his battle with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. In an interview on French television, he said he wanted to break what he called the taboo surrounding the disease. Had he not suffered from AIDS, he said recently, he never would have acknowledged his homosexuality.

“The silence about this illness must be broken,” Aron said. “The intellectual, whose duty is to truth, can recount better than others the great stakes for society that surround this illness.”