There is no uniquely right way to mark out the terrain of modern French thought. It might be described as a succession of great or controversial thinkers (Bergson, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida), as a history of competing movements (vitalism, existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism), as the rise and fall of key influences (the three Hs, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, giving way to the masters of suspicion, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud), or as a series of reflections on central issues (freedom, history, justice). There is also no single, stable viewpoint from which to assess what and who mattered most. The philosophical stock of some thinkers has risen and fallen dramatically. In their day Léon Brunschvicg, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and André Lalande, for example, were all important figures who are now barely remembered outside the most specialist circles. Even Henri Bergson, probably the most important French philosopher of the first decades of the twentieth century, has declined in influence, despite being championed much later in the century by Gilles Deleuze and others. Louis Althusser, who had a claim to be the world's most prominent Marxist thinker in the 1960s and 1970s, is now better remembered for his private life than for his philosophical work. The best-known French intellectual of the twentieth century was undoubtedly Jean-Paul Sartre; but for most of his life he worked outside academic institutions, and therefore he did not have the direct impact on future generations of professional philosophers that comes from lecturing and supervising doctorates.