Hippolyte Taine

Educated at the elite École Normale Supérieure, Taine introduced rigorous scientific determinism into literary criticism in his 1864 Histoire de la littérature anglaise, famously declaring: 'Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar'.

In his monumental Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1875–1893), shaken by the Paris Commune of 1871, he analyzed the French Revolution through psychology and crowd sociology, fiercely criticizing Jacobin abstract dogmatism. Elected to the Académie Française in 1878, he dominated late nineteenth-century French intellectual thought.