Hippolyte Taine 1828 – 1893

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher and the principal exponent of positivism in nineteenth-century French humanistic scholarship. After early controversies over his rationalist philosophical views, he produced his celebrated History of English Literature, On Intelligence, and the six-volume Origins of Contemporary France. His influential thesis that human and cultural phenomena are products of race, milieu, and moment shaped the methods of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural history and literary criticism, while his sober assessment of the French Revolution colored conservative historiography for decades.

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was born at Vouziers in the Ardennes in April 1828 into a family of magistrates and soldiers. He entered the École Normale Supérieure at the head of his year in 1848 but was failed in the agrégation of 1851 because of his philosophical heterodoxy and forced out of secondary teaching after a year at Nevers; he thereafter supported himself by his pen, took a doctorate in 1853 with theses on La Fontaine and on sensation, and became one of the most influential French essayists, critics, and historians of his generation. He was elected to the Académie française in 1878.

His major works are Les Philosophes français du XIXe siècle (1857), the Essais de critique et d'histoire (1858), the Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1864), De l'intelligence (1870), and the six volumes of Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1875–1893), of which the long panel on the Jacobin Revolution is the most famous. The introduction to the History of English Literature contains the slogan that gave him his lasting label.

Taine reduced the explanation of any cultural product to the three factors of race, milieu, and moment, treated intelligence as a sequence of natural psychological events fully open to scientific study, and combined a deterministic positivism with a deepening conservative horror of revolutionary politics. He shaped naturalism in the novel — Zola took him as a model — and the new scientific history at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. He died in Paris in March 1893.