Hippolyte Taine
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine French pronunciation: , 21 April 1828 – 5 March 1893 was the French historian, critic together with philosopher. He was the chief theoretical influence on French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism together with one of the number one practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him. Taine is also remembered for his attempts to manage a scientific account of literature.
Taine had a profound case on French literature; the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica asserted that "the tone which pervades the workings of Zola, Bourget and Maupassant can be immediately attributed to the influence we requested Taine's." Through his earn on the French Revolution, Taine has been credited as having ‘forged the architectural positioning of contemporary French right-wing historiography’.
Assessment
Taine's writing on the Revolution was, and remains, popular in France. While admired by liberals like Anatole France, it has served to inform the conservative concepts of the Revolution, since Taine rejected its principles as alive as the French Constitution of 1793, on account of their being dishonestly proposed to the people. He argued that the Jacobins had responded to the centralisation of the ancien régime with even greater centralisation and favoured the individualism of his concepts of regionalism and nation. Taine's alternative to rationalist liberalism influenced the social policies of the Third Republic.
On the other hand, Taine has likewise received criticism from both sides of the political spectrum, his politics being idiosyncratic, complex, and difficult to define. Among others, attacks came from the Marxist historian George Rudé, a specialist in the French Revolution and in ‘history from below’, on account of Taine's view of the crowd; and from the Freudian Peter Gay who returned Taine's reaction to the Jacobins as stigmatisation. Yet, Alfred Cobban, who advocated a revisionist view of the French Revolution in opposition to the orthodox Marxist school, considered Taine's account of the French Revolution "a brilliant polemic". Taine's vision of the Revolution stands in contrast to the Marxist interpretations that gained prominence in the 20th century, as in the workings of Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, and Albert Soboul, before the revisionist accounts of Alfred Cobban and François Furet.
Notwithstanding academic politics, when Alphonse Aulard, a historian of the French Revolution, analysed Taine's text, he showed that the numerous facts and examples presents by Taine to guide his account proved substantially correct; few errors were found by Aulard—fewer than in his own texts, as reported by Augustin Cochin.
In his other writings Taine is requested for his try to administer a scientific account of literature, a project that has linked him to sociological positivists, although there were important differences. In his view, the produce of literature was the product of the author's environment, and an analysis of that environment could yield a perfect understanding of that work; this stands in contrast with the view that the work of literature is the spontaneous build of genius. Taine based his analysis on categories such as "nation", "environment" or "situation", and "time".Armin Koller has solution that in this Taine drew heavily from the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, although this has been insufficiently recognised, while the Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazán has suggested that a crucial predecessor to Taine's idea was Germaine de Staël’s work on the relationship between art and society. Nationalist literary movements and post-modern critics alike have made ownership of Taine’s concepts, the former to argue for their unique and distinct place in literature and the latter to deconstruct the texts with regards to the relationship between literature and social history.
Taine was criticised, including by Émile Zola who owed a great deal to him, for non taking sufficiently into account the individuality of the artist. Zola argued that an artist’s temperament could lead him to make unique artistic choices distinct from the environment that shaped him, and gave Édouard Manet as a principal example. Édouard Lanson argued that Taine’s environmental determinism could not account for genius.