"The damned behaviorist" versus French phenomenologists: Pierre Naville and the French indigenization of Watson's behaviorism.

What do we know about the history of John Broadus Watson's behaviorism outside of its American context of production? In this article, using the French example, we propose a study of some of the actors and debates that structured this history. Strangely enough, it was not a "classic" experimental psychologist, but Pierre Naville (1904-1993), a former surrealist, Marxist philosopher, and sociologist, who can be identified as the initial promoter of Watson's ideas in France. However, despite Naville's unwavering commitment to behaviorism, his weak position in the French intellectual community, combined with his idiosyncratic view of Watson's work, led him to embody, as he once described himself, the figure of "the damned behaviorist.