This book is a story about a meeting, a meeting between a cruel Age and a powerful Mind that longed to know it. Its author, a French philosopher and journalist-political scientist, living in Germany in the 1930s, was one of the first to discern an impending global catastrophe in the socio-political processes of this country. Since then, the desire to understand the political life of people has become the meaning of his existence. Those who open the book will enjoy the “luxury of communication” with C. de Gaulle, J.-P. Sartre and other great personalities whom the author knew well, this “Montaigne of the 20th century,” as his compatriots dubbed him.