Hippolyte Taine

"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 are framing laws by stringing together a lot of phrases. The Origins of Contemporary France (1875/1893). 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 publiHippolyte Tained a number of objections were made on scientific grounds.

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". He was the chief theoretical influence of French naturalism a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. 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.