This chapter is about French philosophy on Hegel from the early twentieth century, and the way certain questions it raised were later reapproached by Lacan. The chapter begins by discussing the reception of Hegel in France, to emphasise the difficulties Hegel’s earliest French readers had approaching his philosophy as a coherent whole. The chapter then makes a detailed study of one particularly popular theme from French writing on Hegel of the early twentieth century: the conflict first articulated by Kierkegaard, between existence and concept, which centred in France on discussions about the figure of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Work on this topic was fundamental, the chapter argues, for Lacan’s own approach to Hegel, and in particular for his understanding of the concept of absolute knowledge. The chapter ends by summarising the use Lacan made of this concept, which, as subsequent chapters show, would also inform his later approach to Marx.