Word.ws English Dictionary

trahison des clercs

trahison des clercs noun: a compromise of intellectual integrity by members of an intelligentsia.

Noun

trahison des clercs (plural trahisons des clercs)

  1. A compromise of intellectual integrity by members of an intelligentsia.
    • The age of the ‘experimental’ and the highbrow has helped to relegate poetry to a condition of irrelevance and triviality, and our collective self-commitment to cleverness and self-consciousness may ultimately (but by whom?) be seen as the profoundest of the twentieth century’s much-discussed...2003, Colin Falck, American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century: The Poetry that Matters, Ashgate Publishing, →ISBN, page 3

Forms of trahison des clercs

pluraltrahisons des clercs

Origin of trahison des clercs

Borrowed from French trahison des clercs (literally “treason of the clerks”); originally adopted from the title of the French philosopher and novelist Julien Benda’s 1927 book, La Trahison des Clercs (whose first English translation bore the title The Betrayal of the Intellectuals). See too: "In 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison des Clercs. [He used] “clerc” in “the medieval sense,” i.e., to mean “scribe,” someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs. The “treason” in question was the betrayal by the “clerks” of their vocation as intellectuals."

Questions about trahison des clercs

What does trahison des clercs mean?
Trahison des clercs means a compromise of intellectual integrity by members of an intelligentsia.
What part of speech is trahison des clercs?
Trahison des clercs is a noun.
What is the plural of trahison des clercs?
The plural of trahison des clercs is trahisons des clercs.

Words near trahison des clercs in the dictionary

  1. traheens
  2. Traherne
  3. trahira
  4. trahiras
  5. trahison
  6. trahison des clercs
  7. trahisons des clercs
  8. Traian
  9. Traian Vuia
  10. traif
  11. traife

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: trahison des clercs (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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