20 Facts About Hippolyte Taine

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French historian, critic and philosopher.

Hippolyte Taine was the chief theoretical influence on French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism.

Hippolyte Taine was born in Vouziers into a fairly prosperous Ardennes family.

Hippolyte Taine excelled in his studies and in 1847 obtained two Baccalaureat degrees and received the honorary prize of the concours.

Hippolyte Taine was awarded a first in the entrance examination of the letters section of the Ecole Normale Superieure, to which he was admitted in November 1848.

Hippolyte Taine adopted the positivist and scientist ideas that emerged around this time.

Hippolyte Taine settled first in Paris, where he enrolled in the medical school.

Hippolyte Taine then took leave and travelled to England, where he spent six weeks.

Hippolyte Taine taught at Oxford, where he was a Doctor in Law.

Hippolyte Taine was interested in many subjects, including art, literature, but especially history.

Deeply shaken by the defeat of 1870, as well as by the insurrection of the Paris Commune, Hippolyte Taine became fully devoted to his major historical work, The Origins of Contemporary France, on which he worked until his death, and which had a significant impact.

In particular, Hippolyte Taine denounced the artificiality of the revolution's political constructions, which, in his mind, violently contradicted the natural and slow growth of the institutions of a State.

Hippolyte Taine was buried in the Roc de Chere National Natural Reserve, Talloires, on the shores of Lake Annecy.

Hippolyte Taine had bought the Boringes property in Menthon-Saint-Bernard, in order to work there every summer, and had served as councillor of the commune.

Hippolyte Taine's writing on the Revolution has remained popular in France.

Hippolyte Taine argued that the Jacobins had responded to the centralisation of the ancien regime with even greater centralisation and favoured the individualism of his concepts of regionalism and nation.

Armin Koller has written that in this Hippolyte Taine drew heavily from the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, although this has been insufficiently recognised, while the Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazan has suggested that a crucial predecessor to Hippolyte Taine's idea was Germaine de Stael's work on the relationship between art and society.

Hippolyte Taine was criticised, including by Emile Zola who owed a great deal to him, for not taking sufficiently into account the individuality of the artist.

Hippolyte Taine had a special relationship, in particular, with Emile Zola.

Hippolyte 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".