" Peter Gay describes Taine's reaction to the Jacobins as stigmatization, drawing on The French Revolution, in which Taine argues:

In the nineteenth century, positivist French historian Hippolyte Taine repeated the Englishman's arguments in Origins of Contemporary France ( 1876 – 1885 ): that centralisation of power is the essential fault of the Revolutionary French government system ; that it does not promote democratic control ; and that the Revolution transferred power from the divinely chosen aristocracy to an " enlightened " heartless elite more incompetent and tyrannical than the aristocrats.

It is certain that he did not deny the existence or possibility of these concepts, and he was therefore not a nominalist in the fashion of Taine or in the sense in which nominalism is now understood.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

New historicism also has something in common with the historical criticism of Hippolyte Taine, who argued that a literary work is less the product of its author's imaginations than the social circumstances of its creation, the three main aspects of which Taine called race, milieu, and moment.

Taine identifies it not just with Destutt De Tracy, but also with his milieu, and includes Condillac as one of its precursors.

Jouffroy and Hippolyte Taine agree in describing him as one of the great thinkers of the 19th century.

Taine shared a correspondence with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who later referred to him in Beyond Good and Evil as " the greatest living historian ".

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.

They lambasted him for not commenting more on the characters ' degenerate behavior – the same stylistic choice later celebrated by naturalist writers Émile Zola and Hippolyte Taine.

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.

Making an audacious change in its direction, Buloz took to the magazine to the pinnacle of French publishing by bringing in some of France's most celebrated literary talent: Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, George Sand, Balzac, Dumas père and eventually Octave Feuillet, Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan.

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.

" 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.

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine ( 21 April 1828 – 5 March 1893 ) was a French critic and historian.

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.

This reaction led Taine to reject the French Constitution of 1793 as a Jacobin document, dishonestly presented to the French people.

In 1870 he published several important volumes, The French Aesthetics of the Present Day, dealing chiefly with Hippolyte Taine, Criticisms and Portraits, and a translation of The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill, whom he had met that year during a visit to England.

Key signings included Fijian Simon Raiwalui, former French captain Raphaël Ibañez, Springbok Cobus Visagie and All Black Taine Randell.

Sciences Po was established in February 1872 as the École Libre des Sciences Politiques by a group of French intellectuals, politicians and businessmen led by Émile Boutmy, and including Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Albert Sorel, Paul Leroy Beaulieu, and François Guizot.

* Hippolyte Taine ( 1828-1893 ), French critic and historian

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.

Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: " There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries.

The revised view of the 1789 crowd events by psychologist and historian Hippolyte Taine was major source of inspiration.

Influenced by Edmund Burke, Frédéric Le Play and Hippolyte Taine, he developed an organicist conception of the Nation which contrasted with the universalism of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

* H. Taine, Les Philosophes classiques du XIX siècle

* H. Taine, in Les Philosophes ( Paris, 1868 ), pp. 79-202.

He was elected a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques ( December 18, 1889 ) on the death of Fustel de Coulanges, and of the Académie française ( 1894 ) on the death of Hippolyte Taine.

The work was in fact the first attempt to substitute for the popular representations of Thiers and Lamartine a critical investigation which was carried on with such brilliance by Taine and Sorel.

In a volume entitled Taine, historien de la Révolution française ( 1908 ), Aulard attacked the method of the eminent philosopher in criticism that was severe, perhaps unjust, but certainly well-informed.

Portrait of Hippolyte Taine.

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.

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.

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.