Jean-Paul Aron (27 May 1925 â 20 August 1988) was a French writer, philosopher and journalist. His most notable work is Les Modernes, which was published in 1984. Aron was born in Strasbourg. He was a close friend of Michel Foucault in the early 1950s, before a falling out over a lover. He was, like Foucault, an early person of renown in France to die of AIDS, and is widely credited