TAINE, HIPPOLYTE (1828–93)

Hippolyte Taine was a French philosopher of materialist and determinist tendencies who turned his attention successively to literary criticism, art history and finally to political history. He was the author notably of Les Philosophes français du XIX siècle (The French Philosophers of the Nineteenth Century, 1857), of a History of English Literature (Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 1863–4), and of On Intelligence (De l’intelligence, 1870), but he won his lasting renown as the author of a six-volume and incomplete history of the French Revolution, Origins of Contemporary France (Origines de la France contemporaine, 1875–94) which took issue with the revolutionary mythology that underpinned the emergent Third Republic.

Taine was born in 1828, the son of a country lawyer in the Ardennes, and received an elite Parisian education at the Collège Bourbon and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His heterodox religious opinions hampered the development of his academic career, and after

a spell as a provincial secondary school teacher he settled in Paris and made his living chiefly from his pen. He was Professor of Aesthetics and the History of Art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1864 to 1883, with one brief interruption. In 1863 he was denounced as an enemy of religion by the Bishop of Orléans, Mgr Dupanloup, who subsequently on four occasions helped block his election to the Académie Française. He was finally elected in 1878, shortly after Dupanloup’s death and when the early volumes of the Origins of Contemporary France had helped win over conservative opinion to his cause.

Entries A-Z 643 As a philosopher Taine is difficult to classify, except negatively: he never ceased to

proclaim his opposition to the spiritualist school descended from Victor Cousin. He is sometimes identified as a Positivist, but he was unhappy with the Positivists’ limitation of science to the search for laws governing the observable relations of phenomena: he never abandoned the quest for ultimate causes. He was something of an empiricist, devoted to the collection of ‘facts’, and for this reason was attracted by English thought; yet he was also a rationalist, who sought to derive phenomena from some ultimate cause. He remained a determinist, but one who was convinced—as he told LOMBROSO in 1887— that determinism did not deny but underpinned the idea of moral responsibility.

Taine had a solid grounding in English culture from his boyhood, and both at the Collège Bourbon and at the École Normale he read widely in English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. England was one of the case studies he used for his interest in the relationship between national character and literature, and he articulated this interest in a series of articles he published on CARLYLE, Tennyson and MILL in 1860–1, which subsequently formed the basis of his History of English Literature. He also published an influential volume of Notes on England (Notes sur l’Angleterre) (1872). This continues to be widely cited by historians of Victorian England, especially those interested in the history of the family, of education and of religion. What is less often realized is just how slender a first-hand knowledge his observations rested on: when they were published Taine had visited England only three times, for a total of about 11 weeks, and his impressions were clearly influenced by the predominantly Liberal Anglican circles in which he moved in England. While he had a strong sense of the philistinism that pervaded Victorian culture, he focused on those aspects of British society that gave it a stability that post-revolutionary France lacked: a habit of voluntary association that acted as a counterweight to state power; a system of political representation that worked with the grain of social hierarchy; an educational system that emphasized moral as well as intellectual instruction; and a national Church that eschewed dogma, exercised moral leadership and was in tune with the intellectual currents of the day.

It was France’s defeat at the hands of Prussia, combined with the experience of the Paris Commune, that prompted Taine to publish his observations on Britain. They were also the chief cause of the redirection of his interests after 1871 towards the political history of contemporary France, and in particular to the origins and course of the French Revolution. He told a friend in 1878 that his book would be a ‘medical consultation’: it would diagnose the sicknesses in the French body politic that had let to defeat and civil war. But the idea that Taine’s turning to political history was a radical break with his previous career is a half-truth. In fact it would be appropriate to read the Origins of Contemporary France alongside his History of English Literature and his Notes on England: all three works aimed to identify a ‘national spirit’ that gave their peculiar character to the literary and political lives of France and Britain. Whereas the English national spirit, shaped by Protestantism and a tradition of civic activity, was practical, empirical and reformist, the French suffered from a ‘classical spirit’, born of the ancien régime, which was abstract, rationalistic and in the end revolutionary. Following BURKE, he depicted the French revolutionaries as addicted to the application of a’geometrical’ mode of reasoning to politics.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 644 The appeal to the influence of ‘race’, or national character, gave Taine’s history an

unmistakeably deterministic character: indeed, he explicitly declared that from the moment of the calling of the Estates-General the course of the revolution was set. The volumes had an inexorable character that did not, however, get in the way of a resounding public success. Curiously, this success was achieved in spite of the lack of an obvious partisan readership. The book was certainly not written to appeal to republicans, for it launched a frontal assault on the principles of 1789, which Jules Ferry declared to

be ‘the gospel of the republic’. On the other hand it offered only limited comfort to Catholic and royalist opponents of the Third Republic, for far from lamenting the demise of the ancien régime he saw it as bearing chief responsibility for the birth of the classical spirit and hence for the out-break and course of the revolution.

TAINE, HIPPOLYTE (1828–93)