Hippolyte Taine

Hippolyte Taine
Portrait of Hippolyte Taine by Léon Bonnat
Born	Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828-04-21)April 21, 1828 Vouziers, France
Died	Paris, France
Nationality	French
Alma mater	École Normale Supérieure
Signature

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (21 April 1828 – 5 March 1893) was a French critic and historian. He was the chief theoretical influence of French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him. Taine is particularly remembered for his three-pronged approach to the contextual study of a work of art, based on the aspects of what he called "race, milieu, and moment".

Taine had a profound effect on French literature; the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica asserted that "the tone which pervades the works of Zola, Bourget and Maupassant can be immediately attributed to the influence we call Taine's."

Through his work on the French Revolution, Taine has been credited as having "forged the architectural structure of modern French right-wing historiography".

He was elected a member of the Académie française in 1878, being received by Jean-Baptiste Dumas.

The tomb of Hippolyte Taine is in Roc de Chère National Nature Reserve, in Talloires, near the Lake Annecy.

Early years

Taine was born in Vouziers, but entered a boarding school, the Institution Mathé, whose classes were conducted at the Collège Bourbon, at the age of 13 in 1841, after the death of his father. He excelled as a student, receiving a number of prizes in both scientific and humanistic subjects, and taking two Baccalauréat degrees at the École Normale before he was 20. Taine's contrarian politics led to difficulties keeping teaching posts, and his early academic career was decidedly mixed; he failed the exam for the national Concours d'Agrégation in 1851. After his dissertation on sensation was rejected, he abandoned his studies in the social sciences, feeling that literature was safer. He completed a doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1853, with considerably more success in his new field; his dissertation, Essai sur les fables de La Fontaine, won him a prize from the Académie française.

Politics

Title page of the first American edition of Taine's The Origins of Contemporary France, published in 1876

Taine was criticized, in his own time and after, by both conservatives and liberals; his politics were idiosyncratic, but had a consistent streak of skepticism toward the left; at the age of 20, he wrote that "the right of property is absolute." Peter Gay describes Taine's reaction to the Jacobins as stigmatization, drawing on The French Revolution, in which Taine argues:

Some of the workmen are shrewd Politicians whose sole object is to furnish the public with words instead of things; others, ordinary scribblers of abstractions, or even ignoramuses, and unable to distinguish words from things, imagine that they are framing laws by stringing together a lot of phrases.

This reaction led Taine to reject the French Constitution of 1793 as a Jacobin document, dishonestly presented to the French people. Taine rejected the principles of the Revolution in favor of the individualism of his concepts of regionalism and race, to the point that one writer calls him one of "the most articulate exponents of both French nationalism and conservatism."

Title page of the 1872 edition of History of English Literature

Other writers, however, have argued that, though Taine displayed increasing conservatism throughout his career, he also formulated an alternative to rationalist liberalism that was influential for the social policies of the Third Republic. Taine's complex politics have remained hard to read; though admired by liberals like Anatole France, he has been the object of considerable disdain in the twentieth century, with a few historians working to revive his reputation.

Race, milieu and moment

Taine is best known now for his attempt at a scientific account of literature, based on the categories of race, milieu, and moment. Taine used these words in French (race, milieu et moment); the terms have become widespread in literary criticism in English, but are used in this context in senses closer to the French meanings of the words than the English meanings, which are, roughly, "nation", "environment" or "situation", and "time".

Taine argued that literature was largely the product of the author's environment, and that an analysis of that environment could yield a perfect understanding of the work of literature. In this sense he was a sociological positivist (see Auguste Comte), though with important differences. Taine did not mean race in the specific sense now common, but rather the collective cultural dispositions that govern everyone without their knowledge or consent. What differentiates individuals within this collective "race", for Taine, was milieu: the particular circumstances that distorted or developed the dispositions of a particular person. The "moment" is the accumulated experiences of that person, which Taine often expressed as momentum; to some later critics, however, Taine's conception of moment seemed to have more in common with Zeitgeist.

Taine

Though Taine coined and popularized the phrase "race, milieu, et moment," the theory itself has roots in earlier attempts to understand the aesthetic object as a social product rather than a spontaneous creation of genius. Taine seems to have drawn heavily on the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder's ideas of volk (people) and nation in his own concept of race; the Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazán has suggested that a crucial predecessor to Taine's idea was the work of Germaine de Staël on the relationship between art and society.

Influence

Taine's influence on French intellectual culture and literature was enormous. He had a special relationship, in particular, with Émile Zola. As critic Philip Walker says of Zola, "In page after page, including many of his most memorable writings, we are presented with what amounts to a mimesis of the interplay between sensation and imagination which Taine studied at great length and out of which, he believed, emerges the world of the mind." Zola's reliance on Taine, however, was occasionally seen as a fault; Miguel de Unamuno, after an early fascination with both Zola and Taine, eventually concluded that Taine's influence on literature was, all in all, negative.

Taine's writings have also impacted a large number of notable novelists and critics in the lusophone world, including Eça de Queirós, Araripe Júnior, Sílvio Romero and Lima Barreto.

His influence on linguistics is not generally recognized, but, according to Hans Aarsleff, emeritus professor of English at Princeton University, Ferdinand de Saussure derived his basic linguistic notions from Taine.

Taine also greatly influenced several nationalist literary movements throughout the world, who used his ideas to argue that their particular countries had a distinct literature and thus a distinct place in literary history. In addition, post-modern literary critics concerned with the relationship between literature and social history (including the New Historicists) continue to cite Taine's work, and to make use of the idea of race, milieu, and moment. The critic John Chapple, for example, has used the term as an illustration of his own concept of "composite history."

Portrait of Taine, by Félix Vallotton, 1897

Taine shared a correspondence with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who later referred to him in Beyond Good and Evil as "the first of living historians". He was also the subject of Stefan Zweig's doctoral thesis, "The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine."

Criticism

The chief criticism of race, milieu, and moment at the time the idea was created was that it did not sufficiently take into account the individuality of the artist, central to the creative genius of Romanticism. Even Zola, who owed so much to Taine, made this objection, arguing that an artist's temperament could lead him to make unique artistic choices distinct from the environment that shaped his general viewpoint; Zola's principal example was the painter Édouard Manet. Similarly, Gustave Lanson argued that race, milieu, and moment could not among themselves account for genius; Taine, he felt, explained mediocrity better than he explained greatness.

A distinct criticism concerns the possible sloppiness of the logic and scientific basis of the three concepts. As Leo Spitzer has written, the actual science of the idea, which is vaguely Darwinian, is rather tenuous, and shortly after Taine's work was published a number of objections were made on scientific grounds. Spitzer also points out, again citing period sources, that the relationship between the three terms themselves was never well understood, and that it is possible to argue that moment is an unnecessary addition implied by the other two.

Works

• De Personis Platonicis (1853).
• La Fontaine et ses Fables (1853–1861, Taine's doctoral thesis).
• Voyage aux Pyrénées (1855–1860).
• Essai sur Tite-Live (1856).
• Les Philosophes Classiques du XIXe Siècle en France (1857–1868).
• Essais de Critique et d’Histoire (1858–1882).
• Vie et Opinions Politiques d'un Chat (1858).
• Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (1864).
• Philosophie de l’Art (1865–1882).
• Nouveaux Essais de Critique et d’Histoire (1865–1901).
• Voyage en Italie (1866).
• Notes sur Paris. Vie et Opinions de M. Frédéric-Thomas Graindorge (1867).
• De l’Intelligence (1870).
• Un Séjour en France de 1792 à 1795 (1872).
• Notes sur l’Angleterre (1872).
• Les Origines de la France Contemporaine:
  • L’Ancien Régime (1875).
  • La Révolution: I – l’Anarchie (1878).
  • La Révolution: II – La Conquête Jacobine (1881).
  • La Révolution: III – Le Gouvernement Révolutionnaire (1885).
  • Le Régime Moderne (1890–1893).
• Derniers Essais de Critique et d’Histoire (1894).
• Carnets de Voyage: Notes sur la Province (1863–1897).
• Étienne Mayran (1910).
• H. Taine, sa Vie et sa Correspondance (1903–1907).

Works in English translation

• The Philosophy of Art (1865, translated by John Durand).
• Italy, Rome and Naples (1868, translated by John Durand).
• Italy, Florence and Venice (1869, translated by John Durand).
• English Positivism: A Study on John Stuart Mill (1870, translated by T.D. Haye).
• The Philosophy of Art: Art in Greece (1871, translated by John Durand).
• The Philosophy of Art: Art in the Netherlands (1871, translated by John Durand).
• On Intelligence (1871, translated by T. D. Haye).
• History of English Literature (1871, translated by Henri van Laun).
• Notes on England (1872, translated by William Fraser Rae; Edward Hyams, 1957).
• The Ideal in Art (1874, translated by John Durand).
• A Tour Through the Pyrenees (1874, translated by J. Safford Fiske).
• Notes on Paris (1875, translated by John Austin Stevens).
• The Origins of Contemporary France (1876–1894, translated by John Durand):
  • The Ancient Régime (1876).
  • The French Revolution, I (1878).
  • The French Revolution, II (1881).
  • The French Revolution, III (1885).
  • The Modern Régime, I (1890).
  • The Modern Régime, II (1894).
• Journeys Through France (1897).
• Life and Letters of H. Taine (1902, translated by R.L. Devonshire).
• Balzac: A Critical Study (1906, translated by Lorenzo O'Rourke).

Selected articles

• “Lingual Development in Babyhood,” Popular Science Monthly. IX (1876).
• "Cerebral Vibrations and Thought," The Journal of Mental Science. XXIII (1877).
• "France Before the Outbreak of the Revolution, I." The Contemporary Review. XXXI (1878).
• "France Before the Outbreak of the Revolution, II." The Contemporary Review. XXXII (1878).
• "Socialism as Government," The Contemporary Review. XLVI (1884).
• "Napoleon's Views of Religion," The North American Review. CLII (1891).
• "On Style," Scribner’s Magazine. CCCXXXIV (1928).

See also

• Bolesław Prus
• Piotr Chmielowski
• Thomas Blackwell

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External links

• Works by Hippolyte Taine at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Hippolyte Taine at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by Hippolyte Taine at Hathi Trust
• Works by Hippolyte Taine at Gallica
• Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory (Article on Taine)
• Obituary (from The Times)