Jean Baudrillard, who died yesterday in Paris at 77, was an author and philosopher whose postmodern books, in the best café tradition, questioned objective reality and suggested that consumer culture was replacing it with what he labeled “hyperreality” and “simulation.”

Hyperreality, far from representing a better reality, was worse and illusory. The profusion of consumer choice in market economies was, for Baudrillard, actually the replacement of real choice by artful simulations. His theories were said to be the philosophical underpinning for the film “The Matrix” (1999), starring the philosophically impassive Keanu Reaves.

In 2005, while in New York for a reading from his book “The Conspiracy of Art,” he told the New Yorker, “All America is Disneyland.” Fond of touring the heartland, for many years he had seen himself as something of a modernday de Tocqueville and had published the book “America” in 1986.

Not everyone was convinced. “Every time he sees a silo he starts going into some French theory,” Andrei Codrescu, another foreign-born writer with some pretensions to seeing America with an outsider’s eye, once complained.

Baudrillard was born in 1929 and grew up in Reims, in northwest France, where he began his academic career as a teacher of German in secondary schools. In 1966, he obtained a doctorate in sociology at the University of Paris. He began publishing poetry translations and essays of left-leaning social criticism, although he eventually broke with doctrinaire Marxism.

Several books Baudrillard wrote on semiotics in the 1970s established his reputation as a leading intellectual. In “Oublier Foucault” (“Forget Foucault,” 1977), he threw down the symbolic gauntlet to France’s leading leftist theorist.

In America, Baudrillard received notoriety for his writings on the attacks of September 11, 2001, and on the Gulf War, which, his 1991 book claimed, did not take place. His point was not that bombs were not dropped nor troops not deployed, but that these things were done not so much to fight war as to signify war. The argument was perhaps too subtle for either side in the conflict to appreciate fully.

The events of September 11, on the other hand, were an “absolute event,” Baudrillard said, and blamed it on a reaction against globalized trade — a term that for him had a far wider meaning than the mere distribution of commodities. “Terrorism is immoral,” he wrote. “It responds to a globalization that is itself immoral.”

Thus, Baudrillard was perhaps the father of an argument of immoral equivalence between terrorists and their victims.