Alain 1868 – 1951

Emile-Auguste Chartier, who wrote under the pen name Alain, was a French philosopher, essayist, and one of the most influential lycee teachers of his generation. After studies at the Ecole Normale Superieure, he taught philosophy at lycees in Pontivy, Lorient, Rouen, and finally Paris, where his courses at the Lycee Henri-IV trained a remarkable group of pupils including Simone Weil, Maurice Schumann, Jean Hyppolite, and Andre Maurois. His daily Propos, short philosophical essays first written for newspapers and gathered into many volumes, articulated a humane philosophical Cartesianism, a politics of careful civic vigilance, and a celebrated discipline of willed cheerfulness.

Émile-Auguste Chartier, who wrote under the name Alain, was born at Mortagne-au-Perche in Normandy in March 1868. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1889, took the agrégation in philosophy in 1892, and spent his entire career as a teacher of philosophy in French lycées — at Pontivy, Lorient, Rouen, and from 1909 the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, where he taught the khâgne until his retirement in 1933. Already forty-seven at the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered as a private artilleryman and served three years at the front.

From 1906 he wrote the daily column called the Propos for the Dépêche de Rouen — over 5,000 short essays in his lifetime — which provided the material for collections such as Propos sur le bonheur (1928) and Propos d'un Normand. His longer books include Système des beaux-arts (1920), Mars ou la guerre jugée (1921), Idées (1932), Les Dieux (1934), and Histoire de mes pensées (1936). His pupils included Simone Weil, Raymond Aron, Jean Prévost, and André Maurois.

Alain combined a Cartesian and Spinozist metaphysics with a Kantian liberal politics in defence of the citizen against all forms of power, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, and against the seductions of pessimism and obedience. He shaped twentieth-century French radical political culture and the philosophical formation of the khâgnes. He died at Le Vésinet in June 1951.