# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/hippolyte-taine
# Generated: 2026-08-31T16:43:24.756Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/hippolyte-taine"
name: "Hippolyte Taine"
slug: "hippolyte-taine"
description: "He gave French literature its scientific method. Taine built the theory that turned novels into laboratories — race, milieu, moment — and the writers who followed him, from Zola to Maupassant, wrote as if human beings could be dissected like specimens."
tagline: "French literary critic and historian (1828-1893)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Hippolyte_taine.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "France"
  isoCode: "FR"
category:
  name: "Writers"
  slug: "writers"
profileType:
  name: "Writer / Author"
  slug: "writer"
birthDate: "1828-04-21"
deathDate: "1893-03-05"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           59.52
  momentum:             0.3464673913043478
  historical:           24.03526
  currentAttention:     1.92481884057971
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  null
  category: null
tags:
  - name: "Academics"
    slug: "academics"
  - name: "Academic"
    slug: "academic"
  - name: "Philosophy"
    slug: "philosophy"
  - name: "History"
    slug: "history"
  - name: "Literature"
    slug: "literature"
  - name: "France"
    slug: "france"
  - name: "Europe"
    slug: "europe"
  - name: "19th Century"
    slug: "19th-century"
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    title: "Hippolyte Taine"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was born on 21 April 1828 and trained as a philosopher, but his real subject became the mechanics of culture: why societies produce the art and ideas they do. He championed sociological positivism and pioneered historicist criticism, arguing that literature could be explained through the forces that shaped it. That framework — clinical, deterministic — became the backbone of French naturalism, and writers like Zola, Bourget, and Maupassant absorbed his tone wholesale. After the trauma of 1871, Taine's thinking hardened into something else: he forged what one scholar calls "the architectural structure of modern French right-wing historiography." He died on 5 March 1893, having left French letters with a method it never fully shook.