Everything about Hippolyte Taine totally explained
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (
April 21,
1828 -
March 5,
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 Encyclopedia 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."
Early life and education
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
Academie Francaise.
Politics
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're 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."
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's 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, 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 didn't 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.
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're 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 also influenced a number of
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."
Criticism
The chief criticism of race, milieu, and moment at the time the idea was created was that it didn't 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 couldn't among themselves account for
genius; Taine, he felt, explained mediocrity better than he explained greatness.
A distinct criticism concerns the possibile 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's possible to argue that moment is an unnecessary addition implied by the other two.
Taine's major works
Taine's principal works, in chronological order:
- 1853 De personis Platonicis. Essai sur les fables de La Fontaine
- 1854 Essai sur Tite-Live
- 1855 Voyage aux eaux des Pyrénées
- 1856 Les philosophes français du XIXe siècle
- 1857 Essais de critique et d'histoire
- 1860 La Fontaine et ses fables
- 1864 Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 4 vol. L'idéalisme anglais, étude sur Carlyle. Le positivisme anglais, étude sur Stuart Mill
- 1865 Les écrivains anglais contemporains. Nouveaux essais de critique et d'histoire. *Philosophie de l'art
- 1866 Philosophie de l'art en Italie. Voyage en Italie
- 1867 Notes sur Paris. L'idéal dans l'art
- 1868 Philosophie de l'art dans les Pays-Bas
- 1869 Philosophie de l'art en Grèce
- 1870 De l'intelligence, 2 vol.
- 1871 Du suffrage universel et de la manière de voter. Un séjour en France de 1792 à 1795. Notes sur l'Angleterre
- 1876-1894 Origines de la France contemporaine:
- Vol. I: L'ancien régime
- Vols. II through IV: La Révolution
- Vols. V and VI: Le Régime moderne
- 1894 Derniers essais de critique et d'histoire
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