Jean-Francois Revel, who died yesterday at 82, was a philosopher and journalist whose trenchant support of America’s role in the world stood in stark contrast to the attitudes of most of his intellectual compatriots.

In 1970, at a time when affection for all things left, from Mao to Marx, were at their height in France, and American prestige, thanks to Vietnam, was as low as it is today, Revel published “Without Marx or Jesus,” in which he argued that the America model represented the lone viable way forward for freedom and peace in the world.

Revel already had a reputation as an intellectual, thanks to a monumental history of Western philosophy – and as an amusingly contrarian journalist for books denouncing the French and Italians for decadence and indolence.

In “The Totalitarian Temptation” (1977), Revel continued his critique on European communism as inevitably Stalinist, a point reinforced in “How Democracies Perish” (1984), a more pessimistic view of the future of democracy, which he maintained to some degree despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout his career, Revel defended America as a redoubt of freedom, and one of his last books was titled, “The Anti-American Obsession” (2002).

Revel’s oeuvre was hardly limited to oracular pronouncements on politics and the human condition; he also dabbled in gastronomy and poetry, and wrote “On Proust” (1960, English translation 1972), a critique of “A La Recherche du temps perdu.” In 1997, together with his son, Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk and intimate of the Dalai Lama, he published “The Monk and the Philosopher,” a set of conversations on the meaning of life.

Revel published more than 30 books in all, in addition to working extensively as a journalist and radio commentator. He was among 40 “immortals,” the elite of the Academie Francaise.

Revel was born in Marseille in 1924, the son of Joseph Ricard, an importer exporter; Revel later had his name legally changed. After obtaining a degree in philosophy in 1945, he went abroad, and taught French at high schools in Algeria, Mexico, and Italy. In 1956, he returned to France to teach philosophy, and began writing for Parisian journals. In 1966, Revel became literary critic for L’Express, and it was from this perch and his later post as political columnist that he became most visible.

The cause of his death was not immediately known. Prime Minister de Villepin hailed Revel as “a free spirit [whose] works trace a singular, fertile, indispensable path.”